Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

In recent weeks there has been much swooning around the New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ
office over the sight of Feedback’s legs. Yes, readers, the shorts have
been taken out of the cupboard, the knees are on show – and it’s time for
the Feedback Summer Competition.

This year, readers are invited to submit ‘backronyms’ for institutions,
processes, machines, materials, etc. connected with science – the BBSRCs,
CSIROs, LHCs and GMOs. A backronym is an acronym turned back into words
of your choice. Examples are: CIA, the Cuban Invasion Agency; Alitalia,
Arrive Late In Turin, All Luggage In Athens (an unfair judgment, we are
sure, but such is the nature of backronyms).

You may submit up to 10 backronyms. Thanks to the generosity of boeder
(sic), the European computer and office supplies company, the five winning
entries will each receive a PC clock which is linked by satellite to the
atomic clock in Darmstadt and which will therefore only lose or gain one
second every million years. The 10 runners-up will each receive a box for
computer discs, also offered by boeder.

All entries should be sent to ‘Feedback Summer Competition’, New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ,
King’s Reach Tower, Stamford Street, London SE1 9LS, and must arrive by
26 August. The editor’s decision is final.

* * *

London Underground is the bane of many Londoners’ lives, with its late
trains, incomprehensible public address systems and signalling failures.
But according to London Underground’s 1994 Customer Charter, it really is
trying to deliver a good service.

Feedback wonders, though, whether it isn’t aiming a little low when
setting itself targets for improvements. The charter proudly declares, for
example, that in 1993/4, no less than 95.5 per cent of its trains achieved
its definition of regularity of service (when the interval between trains
is less than twice the planned one). So surely next year’s target must be
a full house – 100 per cent? Not so. It’s 95.5 per cent again.

In the same vein, train cleanliness was rated by 64 per cent of customers
to be satisfactory. What’s the target this year? All happy passengers?
No chance. The target is. . . wait for it. . . 65 per cent. Similarly static
or nearly static targets are set for all the operations mentioned in the
charter, from the provision of information at stations to staff availability
and helpfulness (targets both up 1 per cent to 65 per cent).

And it seems that London Underground even expects fewer of its escalators
to be working in the future. Next year’s target is actually down on this
year’s achievement, from 90.5 per cent to 90 per cent. There’s playing safe
for you.

* * *

Is the University of Essex the most forward-looking of British universities?
Hard on the heels of a ban on smoking in all university buildings comes
news of an innovative move to counter the inadequacies of government funding.
In future, the university’s employees will receive their pay slips in envelopes
emblazoned with the name of a building society one month and a pensions
organisation the next – a coup which will add £6000 to the university’s
coffers over the next two years.

What next, Feedback wonders. Perhaps the university will now introduce
its own credit card, as others have done – but with advertisements for the
local pawnbrokers on the back.

* * *

The parent company of New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ, IPC Magazines, was recently picketed
by the Campaign Against Angling. The protesters, who were opposed to IPC’s
fishing titles such as Coarse Angling, handed out leaflets explaining that
fish have feelings just like us, and that angling is a cruel sport which
the CAA is determined to bring to an end.

The campaign doesn’t appear to be confident of immediate victory in
its struggle, though. The section of the leaflet inviting people to join
the organisation and take part in its activities included an option of life
membership.

* * *

If you have ever wondered why so many hi-fi units are black, and not
interesting colours such as green or bright blue, there is no need to write
to the page opposite. Feedback has the answer. It is all to do with plastic
lemons and Rolls-Royces.

Plastic lemons were invented in the 1950s by Bill Pugh, a British industrial
designer, to hold lemon juice. Since Pugh (who, sadly, died last month)
knew when he was onto a good idea, he also devised the plastic tomatoes
that used to hold ketchup and decorate the tables of Wimpy bars (remember
Wimpy bars?). At that time, Pugh was a world leader in plastics design,
since the British company he worked for, Cascelloid, had one of only two
machines in the world for blowing plastic bottles. (These were days when
British technology had a leading place in the world.

Knowing of his expertise, Rolls-Royce approached him for help in designing
a noise-free air conditioning unit for its cars. He made the fan blades
for the unit from nylon, but found that during the cooling process hair-sized
black lines would appear. Pugh solved that by incorporating carbon into
the process. The result was you could have the blades in any colour, as
long as it was black.

And so it is, of course, when it comes to moulding the shell for modern
hi-fi units. What appears to be a salute to trendiness is actually nothing
more than an inventive mind’s solution to a natural cooling process.

* * *

You’ve finally got rid of your husband and paid the lawyer. Then, just
when you’re trying to forget you were ever married, you open the family
album, and there’s Joe, standing next to you and the kids in every single
snapshot from the past 12 years. Don’t you wish you could contact the
man in the Kremlin who replaced Trotsky with a ladder and Beria with a
bush?

Wish no more: Keith Guelpa of Western Pro Imaging Labs in Vancouver
is about to launch DivorceX, a service that will make it possible for Canadians
to edit their pasts. Guelpa uses the Macintosh program Photoshop to edit
any photo you ask him to scan in. He then prints a new image, with whatever
(or whoever) you want scanned in to replace Joe’s mug.

When the Wall Street Journal asked Guelpa if this digital deletion wasn’t
a nasty thing to do, he defended DivorceX as ‘fun, not vindictive’.