Complete and Utter Zebu

With money tight, we’re all looking to save money. But those who buy cheap perfume or after-shave at markets, online or when abroad, believing they’re conserving cash, may not realise they are actually putting some deeply unpleasant substances on their skin.

Harper’s Bazaar in the United States investigated a range of counterfeit perfumes and found ingredients such as urine, antifreeze and bacteria.

Valerie Salembier, publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, said: “You’re putting something on your face, on your neck, on your wrists. Those are sensitive parts of the body, so, to have active ingredients that could endanger your life is a very serious health risk.”

Dermatologist Jeannette Graf told ABC News, on which Salembier appeared, that while she had never seen a skin reaction from perfume, fake fragrances could cause contact dermatitis or inflammation of the skin in some people.

“They felt burning. They saw redness. It felt uncomfortable, it didn’t smell right. And that’s almost immediate” – Dematologist Jeannette Graf

Although, perhaps surprisingly, the story wasn’t reported in the British press, the findings chime with previous reports in the UK. A while back, for instance, Trading Standards Officers discovered that bottles of Chanel No. 5 eau de toilette on sale in an Oxfordshire market had rather more of the “toilette” about them than usual. In Australia, as well as urine, perfumes have been found which contain a mix of fragrance and pond water.

As the fakes can look so much like the originals, apart from the fact that you seem to be getting a bargain, how do you tell if what’s on offer is counterfeit?

• Look for dodgy spelling, and dodgy people selling it in dodgy places
• If the smell doesn’t last much longer than an hour, it may be a fake. Try spraying some on a piece of cardboard and leaving it for a while.
• If the cellophane around the box isn’t snug, that could be a tipoff.
• And, as with everything, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

According to the Netmums website, over 100,000 women a year are being conned into paying money for useless fertility treatments.

A survey of 2,000 women found that one in three of those trying to have a child were so desperate that they spent over £500 on bizarre treatments. As well as acupuncture and aromatherapy, many turned to clairvoyants and mediums. Some bought fertility statues to be placed in the bedroom and a quarter bought fertility spells. Perhaps not surprisingly, 85% of those would paid for spells did not succeed in becoming pregnant.

Siobhan Freegard of netmums said: “Our team was shocked by how many women are using spells and statues.”

MORE ZEBU
A new book out claims that the responsibility for Britain’s obesity epidemic lies with the Government, which is giving disastrously wrong dietary advice to the public. It isn’t fat in foods that is the problem, claims Hannah Sutter, but starch which, we are constanty told, is good for us, despite our increasingly sedentary lifestyles. She also points out that the Government vendetta against fats is based on highly debatable research, something we covered in Complete and Utter Zebu. The Daily Mail carries an interesting piece on her book, Big Fat Lies: Is Your Government Making You Fat?

Over the past few weeks, rumours have been growing that the gold which forms a large part of the reserves of many major countries may not be all it seems. The Chinese government, it is said, took delivery of some 400-ounce gold bars last October and decided to do a random test.

To their surprise, the bars were not solid but were made of tungsten, much the same density as gold, and surrounded by an outer coating of bullion. The tale has it that the bars – nigh on 6,000 of them – came from America and had previously been stored in Fort Knox. Some time during the Clinton administration, so it is said, 640,000 tungsten blanks were coated with gold and placed in the depository at Fort Knox.

This story has all the hallmarks (sorry!) of a great conspiracy, particularly as the wilder variants suggest that this is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg. As with all the best conspiracy theories, it is hard to disprove, given that the guardians of Fort Knox and the Bank of England aren’t likely to throw their doors open to visitors. With gold at a 10-year-high of well over $1,000 an ounce, imagine the consequences if there was even the slightest grain of truth (sorry again!). It would make the recent financial crisis resemble a flea bite on an elephant.

But how to find out? We could, of course, have mounted a full-scale raid on Fort Knox as in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But we reckoned some of the people there must have seen the movie, so the element of surprise would probably not be on our side. We could have bought ourselves a few bars and had them tested but as they currently cost over $400,000 a bar, that seemed a little extravagant.

So instead we contacted the London Bullion Market Association. If anybody knows about gold, it is the LBMA. It sets the “Good Delivery” standards, ensuring that all gold traded around the world meets the same criteria and thus removing the need for gold to be tested every time a transaction occurs. They claimed not to have heard the rumours (a little odd, perhaps) but were quick to say that it was utter tosh. With gold only a little below its peak, it is clear that the market as a whole does not give the yarn much credence. If they did, the price of gold would be in free fall.

And, as one City expert pointed out, given the vociferousness of the Chinese government on so many other matters, if it really had discovered that 6,000 gold bars from America were nothing more than shiny tungsten, would they not be making a very, very, very loud noise about it?

So, a great conspiracy theory, but almost certainly nothing more than that. That does not mean, of course, that there are not other scams involving gold, but we’ll return to that another day.

It wasn’t so long ago that we reported the academic study that found that Ginkgo biloba had no effect whatsoever on memory, despite all the claims made for it.

Now another study finds that people taking placebos which they believe will help their memory see a real improvement. Dr. Sophie Parker of Victoria University in New Zealand said: “I was interested in what would happen when people were given an inert substance that they thought had cognitive enhancing properties. We went to great lengths to create a believable story about this so-called drug.

“We set up a fictional pharmaceutical company, a fake website, a promotional DVD and posters for the sham drug.”

The drug was called R273 and was actually Vitamin C powder mixed with water. Three trials were set up using 300 psychology students as guinea-pigs. “People unwittingly acted in ways that improved their memory, responses, concentration” whereas those who were no given the fake drug “showed no real improvement in either retrospective or prospective memory.”

According to Dr. Parker, “In order to monitor sources of information about the past, at to remember future tasks and actions, people can either use a monitoring process or can rely on automatic memory processes…Typically, the more monitoring people use, the better their memory performance.” The guinea-pigs were better able to resist misleading suggestions and to perform memory tasks because they put more effort into monitoring.

I’m no doctor, but surely this is the opposite result to the tests on ginkgo? There, people believed they were taking a memory-enhancing drug yet no difference was seen at all. I’m confused.

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GOVERNMENT IGNORES THAT THERE ARE MILLIONS MORE NI NUMBERS THAN VOTERS

In yet another instance of right-hand-not-knowing-what-left-hand-is-doing government, The Daily Telegraph reports today that the right to vote is going to be linked to people’s National Insurance numbers in future. After July, everybody wishing to keep their entitlement to vote will be required to give their signature, date of birth and National Insurance number, to be recorded in an Individual Elector Registration.

Although supposedly intended to cut down on fraud, there is concern not only that the information might be sold but that it is “the perfect kit for identity fraud”. We should not forget the government’s form when it comes to safeguarding our records. The Ministry of Justice lost the records, including NI numbers, of 45,000 people in 2007, while the personal data of over four million people was mislaid by assorted government departments in the year to April 2008.

Even more pertinent, though, is the information given in a Parliamentary answer in 2007. The Department for Work and Pensions admitted then that it had nine million National Insurance numbers which it could not connect with real people. That is 20% of the adult population of the UK. And yet it is the connection to National Insurance numbers that the Government thinks will help cut electoral fraud, almost all of which is, in any case, linked to postal voting.

Another triumph for joined-up thinking.

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How your train is official “on time” even when it is late

SILLY POST
Is there a real-life Avatar in Gordon Brown’s cabinet?

COULD AN AVATAR HAVE INFILTRATED GORDON BROWN’S CABINET?

Okay, so this isn’t proper Zebu. However, for various reasons too tedious to recount here, we haven’t be able to update the blog for a couple of days. This is something we made earlier and thought you might enjoy, Zebu or not. As ever, the trick to seeing it properly is to click on it.

YOUR TRAIN IS OFFICIALLY “ON TIME”, EVEN WHEN IT IS LATE

Waiting in the cold for a train that seems to take forever, do you ever look at those “Aren’t We Punctual And Wonderful?” posters from train companies and marvel at their claims of 90%-plus punctuality or whatever. Do you ever feel it doesn’t chime with your own experience?

Would it surprise you to know that according to regulations in place since 1997, any local train that turns up five minutes late is still officially “on time” while, for long distance trains, anything up to ten minutes late is still perfectly punctual. You can’t, of course, claim money back on your season ticket if the trains are officially “on time”.

Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, and one of the few ministers who seems to have some grasp of his brief, thinks this ought to be tightened up.

Today, The Daily Telegraph reveals that trains don’t even have to be alongside the station platform before they are recorded to have arrived. The front carriage only has to reach the last trackside sensor before the station, which in some cases can be up to half a mile away! So your train might have “arrived”, even if you can’t see it or get on it.

OTHER ZEBU NEWS
John Sullivan, writer of Only Fools And Horses, reveals that he has to edit repeats shown on the BBC to take out offensive, racist and otherwise politicially incorrect dialogue. As Michael Deacon points out, do we expect publishers to rewrite Oliver Twist, Decline and Fall or other classics to make them less bruising to modern sensitivities? Imagine the uproar if they did.

Power 2010 is a campaign to promote healthier democracy in Britain. They have several petitions you might consider signing, including one to allow MPs caught transgressing to be sacked between elections and another calling for an expansion of the Freedom of Information Act, without which we’d never have learnt the truth about MPs’ Expenses.

MPs GIVEN STAGGERINGLY SIMPLISTIC GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING STATISTICS

According to exam results, Britons get cleverer with each passing year. That may not be true, however, of our politicians. For, at our expense, a guide has just been produced for them called Statistical Literacy: How To Understand And Calculate Percentages.

It poses staggeringly advanced questions like: “What is the % button on a calculator?”. Apparently, “Calculators have a shortcut ‘%’ button. Use this for example to work out 40% of 50, by pressing 50 * 40 ‘%’ to get 20″.

“What are percentages?”, it asks of our lawmakers, explaining that: “Percentages are essentially a way of writing a fraction with 100 on the bottom. For example: 20% is the same as 20/100, 30% is the same as 30/100, 110% is the same as 110/100.” If only that last example stops them offering to give “110% support” in future.

“Percentages are a way of expressing what one number is as a proportion of another – for example, 200 is 20 per cent of 1,000.”

Other gems include: “Percentages are useful because they allow us to compare groups of different sizes. For example, if we want to know how smoking varies between countries, we use percentages. We could compare Belgium, where 20% of all adults smoke, with Greece, where 40% of all adults smoke. This is far more useful than a comparison between the total number of people in Belgium and Greece who smoke.”

Perhaps they should have made it more practical still with questions like: “There are 646 MPs in the House of Commons. What percentage have claimed more on their expenses than permitted?”

Much as we would like to think this is a tongue-in-cheek jape at the expense of MPs (sic), it apears not. If the Commons authorities really think MPs need such a Noddy guide, which at first sight appears aimed at primary schoolchildren, no wonder the country is in such a mess.

Let us hope that somebody makes Harriet Harman read it. Despite repeated tellings-off by the Office for National Statistics, still insists on misrepresenting the pay differential between men and women.

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FOOD NETWORK ADMITS “WHITE HOUSE” PRODUCE WASN’T FROM MICHELLE’S GARDEN

America’s Food Network had a hit on its hands with a special two-hour edition of “Iron Chef America”. Its top chefs met Michelle Obama in her White House garden where she did her bit about how people ought to eat healthily. The chefs then gathered produce to use when they cooked five special dishes.

After a massive build-up, 7.6 million viewers tuned in on January 3rd to watch, a record for the channel. Viewers saw the chefs picking broccoli, fennel, sweet potatoes and tomatillos (a Mexican variant of the tomato) to use in their recipes, which they then cooked on the show.

It turns out, however, that the fruit and veg they claimed came from the White House garden did not do so. They were stunt vegetables, standing in for the real thing.

There was such a gap between filming in Washington and the actual cooking, which took place in New York, that the White House produce would apparently have been rather past its prime. The Food Network admitted the switcheroo but said that their chefs used exactly the same types of fruit and vegetables that they had picked in the garden of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It isn’t only British broadcasters, then, who resort to TV trickery.

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