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The most surprising thing about the latest round of speculation on the
bugging of private royal conversations is why anyone should be surprised.

All the equipment needed to bug a private room is readily on sale in duty
free shops at airports all over Europe. Londoners need go no farther than
the electronics stores of Tottenham Court Road, where they can find it on
open display.

And just look at recent issues of the in-flight magazines put out by
Richard Branson’s least favourite airline, British Airways. These are given
out free to every passenger flying the flag.

An advert in High Life promises that ‘with the Executive Investigator Kit,
by removing a pen from your pocket you will activate a sensitive miniature
tape recording system that will enable you to record conversations from 30
feet away’.

In Business Life, the section called ‘News you can use from BA and beyond’
tells of a ‘new bugging device . . . which can monitor conversations from
anywhere in the world by phone’. The report continues: ‘other pieces of
listening equipment will fit into briefcases, wall sockets, even pens.’ The
magazine helpfully gives a phone number for interested passengers to call.

Not that anybody at BA would ever encourage people to use underhand methods
of acquiring information that could be commercially useful to them.

* * *

Chemical engineers have proudly declared 1992 their safest year. At a
ceremony held last month to mark this achievement, the Chemical Industries
Association praised ‘the kind of top class total safety management that made
1992 the most accident-free year on record’.

This is heartening news, and congratulations are clearly in order to all
concerned – except that Feedback does have one intsy-wintsy caveat. The
annual survey presented by the CIA at the ceremony happens to mention that
in the same year of 1992, seven people died in chemical industry accidents,
compared with none the year before.

So what exactly does the CIA mean by the words ‘accident-free’? CIA safety
executive Nick Berentzen explains that although there were admittedly far
more fatalities in 1992, there were fewer accidents overall. ‘We made that
claim based on the accident frequency rate, which is the lowest for
twenty-odd years. We simply feel that that is a better guideline.’

Oh well. If you say so . . .

* * *

They say an anxious puppy that has been recently separated from its mother
can be soothed by putting a ticking clock in its bed to remind it of the
mother’s heartbeat. Could a similar tactic work for human babies?

Well, sort of – or so the domestic appliances firm Electrolux believes. The
company has recently made a surprise move into the multimillion-pound
childcare market with a 12-minute ‘lullaby’ tape of – wait for it – the
sounds of a vacuum cleaner. According to Electrolux, vacuum cleaners – or at
least the Electrolux ones – make soothing sounds that are just like the
noises babies experience in the womb.

Which might explain why Feedback always feels like a long sleep after doing
the housework.

* * *

A new group of ‘freedom fighters’ is causing a stir in the US. But the
‘freedom’ they are fighting for is nothing to do with democratic rights or
the advancement of minorities. It’s the US space station Freedom.

Appalled by reports that some members of Congress want to cancel the
station, volunteers calling themselves the Space Station Freedom Fighters
have started to collect signatures across the US for a petition which
demands the completion of NASA’s project by the end of the decade. So far
they have collected 10 000 signatures from 48 states.

‘There has never been a demonstration of public support quite like this for
a spacecraft,’ says Cynthia Griffin, one of the volunteers, while
aerospace engineer Dave Majchrowicz explains: ‘I’m a freedom fighter because
I want my four children to have something to look forward to.’

For Patrick Williams, a student volunteer, the issue is a personal one: ‘The
space programme motivated me in school. I want to see space station Freedom
completed and I would like to be in space one day.’

* * *

Feedback’s post still brings in occasional examples of the wayward ways of
computer spellcheckers, and we can’t resist passing on the alternative
offered by one of them for the computer game Nintendo Cowboy. It came up
with ‘Unintended Gumboil’.

* * *

Bournemouth’s international festival, which starts this week, has as its
theme ‘the spirit of the Renaissance’. How fitting, then, that as well as
the usual arts events, the festival will feature the popular science
demonstration ‘The physics of a black forest gateau’ by Peter Barham of the
University of Bristol.

Barham, who believes ‘the kitchen is a laboratory’, will ‘deal with
everything from the stress problems of the starch molecule to the incredible
properties of the egg’. The proof of the pudding being in the eating, the
audience will be able to consume the results at the end of the lecture.

After which one hopes they will still have some appetite left for the other
science and arts events in the festival.

* * *

Two more interesting brand names have come to Feedback’s attention,
following the items on the subject on 27 February and 27 March.

Reader Brendon Ward reports that that he discovered a pleasant red wine
called Arses in a Spanish supermarket, while John Watson was kind enough to
send us a packet of a French breakfast cereal – presumably a bitter rival of
the one we have already mentioned called Crapsy – with the evocative name of
Plopsies.

* * *

If the recession is really over, why has the Oxfam shop in Islington fitted
anti-theft tags to its stock of old clothes?