ONLY the marital troubles of Princess Anne stopped The Guardian publishing
an all-environmental front page last Thursday. It nevertheless appeared
with two stories about toxic chemicals and one about saving the rainforests.
It’s the latest symptom of the greening of Fleet Street, in which stories
about environmental issues seem to have replaced bingo in circulation wars.
The Guardian promises readers that it will ‘talk rubbish . . . seriously’
in a new supplement. The rival Independent plans a section of its own, ‘The
Interdependent’. Even as we write, distinguished political hacks are struggling
with terms such as polychlorinated biphynels.
This is all a bit rich for an industry which each year consumes trees
covering an area the size of Wales. (Actually, it’s a little more complicated
than that, but never mind.) Observers with long memories recall the media’s
last love affair with environmentalism, after the 1973 oil crisis. The word
on everyone’s lips in those days was ‘Doomwatch’, after the even older television
series. At the time, Private Eye magazine published a guide to the new craze.
It defined ‘environmentalist’ as ‘a man with a beard on the telly’. An environmental
crisis was ‘a lot of men with beards on the telly’. Maybe the Eye, too,
should consider some recycling.
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AS CHAIRMAN of America’s National Space Council, Vice President Dan
Quayle plays a key role in directing the nation’s space programme. It’s
good to learn that he also has a sense of humour.
Interviewed on American television last month, Quayle was asked why
the US intended to send astronauts to Mars. Because, he replied, Mars has
canals. If it has canals, it must have water, and water means it must have
air. And if it has air, then that means we can breathe there.
As we said, it’s good to learn that he has a sense of humour. What was
particularly impressive was that he managed to keep a straight face.
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SPARE a thought for British Nuclear Fuels, whose Visitors’ Centre at
Sellafield in Cumbria is proving to be one of Britain’s fastest-growing
tourist attractions. To promote the centre, BNF produced a glossy leaflet,
for distribution among hotels, tourist information offices and the like,
saying what a wonderful day can be had at Sellafield and explaining how
to get there. Alas, it seems that, however hard BNF tries to explain what
it is doing, some people just won’t give it a chance. It transpires that
some joker has been going round the tourist information offices in the area
and doctoring the leaflets with an official-looking stamp. The message?
‘Centre closed for decontamination until 1990.’
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THE eight West German scientists at the German research base in Antarctica
have a problem. They have telephone and fax connections with their laboratories
back home that are better than some of the connections within Germany itself.
They cannot, however, vote.
The point was raised by the station’s chief scientist, Eberhard Kohlberg,
during the European elections in June, after a law was passed allowing overseas
Germans to vote. For the scientists in Antarctica, however, the question
of how they should vote remains.
The problem, according to the German authorities, is that telecommunications
do not permit voting secrecy. Flying votes out by helicopter would be unthinkably
expensive. And although Kohlberg suggested a system which would have allowed
the scientists to transmit their votes secretly using an encrypting machine,
that, too, was ruled out, again on grounds of cost.
The next group of scientists due at the base is an all-female team headed
by a geophysicist, Monika Sobiesiak. She intends to try to resolve the issue
before she leaves for Antarctica in December. The election coming up next
year for the German federal government promises to be a close one.
* * *
THE newspaper industry has gone through a well-publicised revolution,
converting from old-fashioned molten metal to new-fangled computer control.
Nowadays, journalists work with a word processor which ‘directly injects’
their text into the computer typesetter.
This, no doubt, explains why a serious leader in the Evening Standard
recently started ‘One of the greatest achievements of Mrs this is a test
this is a test this is a test this is a test Thatcher . . .’
We are indebted to the magazine Personal Computer World for an even
better example of computer miscontrol. It seems that when The Guardian printed
the results of the Euro elections, a certain subeditor had the bright idea
of using the global ‘search and replace’ function on the newspaper’s computer
system. The idea was to search out every reference to ‘poll’ and automatically
replace it with the word ‘turnout’. Unfortunately the subeditor overlooked
the fact that one of the candidates was a Ms A. J. Pollack. The computer
did not overlook it, though. Pollack was thus twice referred to in the text
as Ms A. J. Turnoutack.
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THIS is the last call for entries to a summer competition, in which
readers are invited to elaborate on a comment of Einstein’s. Einstein had
wandered into the changing room at a boys’ school and, having noticed sports
clothes hanging on pegs beneath plates bearing the names of old boys, remarked:
‘Ach, I understand, the spirit of the departed passes into the trousers
of the living.’
We want to know what Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin or Sigmund Freud would
have said if they had encountered the scene instead.
Apart from the example published the other week, the best effort so
far comes from W. G. C. Gleig, of Tring in Hertfordshire, who suggests:
Isaac Newton: ‘I understand the gravity of the situation: they are all for
the high jump.’
Charles Darwin: ‘Sports and evolution are similar: they both depend
on the survival of the fittest.’
Sigmund Freud: ‘They obviously have a hangup about their father figures.’
