How to Spot a Psychopath

From the local fishwrap:

"The New South Wales Police: We Can't Even Get Kerning Right."

("Oh, man... I was sooooo high when I made that ad. Look, it's all screwed up, man! It's hilarious!"

I particularly like the new letter . It should be the logo for a New York rave, or something.

I am also intrigued by the choice of the picture of two adorable little girls.

Are we to presume that little girls are being called upon to stop messing around with dolls and step up to do their part in the War on Some Drugs?

Perhaps dealers are using them as runners. Who'd suspect little girls in school uniform?

(You would, citizen, now that you've seen this ad!)

No, wait! Perhaps there's a way to turn little girls into drugs!

Not Always Right ("Funny & Stupid Customer Quotes") is one of those unaccountable hearsay blogs. Readers of, say, Photoshop Disasters, almost always have a good way to see that the mistake being claimed actually occurred. But there's no way at all for even the operators of Not Always Right to tell whether any of these events actually transpired. Let alone people who only read the blog.

If you just completely invent a terrible tale of customer craziness, then unless you insist that the customer was fifty feet tall and eradicated Cleveland with radioactive fire-breath, there's no way for Not Always Right to tell that you're lying.

Sometimes, though, the tales are so off-kilter that they're either definitely true, or the work of a seriously talented writer. Either way, they're worth reading.

Viz.

The other day I was reading, as you do, the Wikipedia entry for "entomophagy". Which means, of course, the eating of insects, on purpose or... otherwise.

The "unintentional entomophagy" section of that article is all about that schoolyard gross-out favourite: The allowable levels of insects, insect eggs and "insect filth" in common foodstuffs.

As the US FDA says, "it is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects." Like bits of bugs. So certain levels of bug-bits are OK with the FDA.

They have determined, for instance, that no health hazard is presented by fewer than five fruit-or-other-fly eggs per 250 millilitres of canned citrus juice. And they also prohibit, I'm happy to say, any maggots at all in that juice.

You're allowed to have an average of no more than 60 insect fragments per hundred grams of chocolate; no more than 30 per hundred grams of peanut butter.

And on it goes, until the entry for hops - the bitter green flowers used in beer brewing.

The Wikipedia article said that ten grams of hops can have two thousand five hundred aphids, and still be considered acceptable.

This struck me as a clear example of subtle Wikipedia vandalism, so I had a little look around. But I'll be darned if the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Food Defect Action Levels list did not say exactly that.

The hop aphid, Phorodon humuli, is fortunately a tiny little creature that probably weighs about the same as a similarly sized ant - about 0.1 milligrams.

(It may mean something that the question of what an ant weighs has previously commanded my attention.)

So even if there are 2500 such aphids in ten grams of hops, that's still only a quarter of a gram of aphids. Hops outweigh aphids by a factor of forty to one.

But this blogger's estimate of 528 aphids being permitted to go into a single sixteen-fluid-ounce (0.47-litre, 0.83-Imperial-pint) can of not-especially-hoppy beer, however, remains valid.

It's not really that bad, of course. As the Action Levels document also says, typical contamination levels are generally far lower than the maximum permitted level.

I think the "2500 aphids" figure might actually be pretty much picked out of the air, since I think it's likely that even if you just stirred buckets of aphids into your beer-wort instead of buckets of hops, the resultant beverage would probably still present no danger to human health whatsoever.

(And, given some previous evidence, a certain segment of the market would probably demand more aphids.)

But this sort of sensible disclaimer has no place in the schoolyard gross-out arms race, or indeed in similarly themed conversations during the big game's ad breaks. 2500 aphids per ten grams of hops are, indeed, allowed.

Drink up!