DAVID ADAMS looks at the odder side of life…
Music fans? Sections of cheese wheels? PICTURE: Alexander Maasch/Unsplash.
• Exposing cheese to music could improve its flavour, a Swiss study has reportedly found, with hop hop apparently likely to produce more flavour than classical. Conducted by a veterinarian/cheesemaker working in conjunction with Bern University of Arts, the experiment involved nine wheels of Emmental cheese – each weighing some 10 kilograms – being placed in wooden crates. Five were exposed to a single song for 24 hours a day for more than six months as the cheese aged with tracks played including A Tribe Called Quest’s hip hop track Jazz (We’ve Got), Mozart’s Magic Flute opera, Led Zeppelin’s rock classic Stairway to Heaven, techno song UV (by Vril) and Yello’s Monolith. Three others were exposed to soundwaves of various frequencies and one cheese was left in silence. A culinary jury did blind tastings and found that the music has various impacts on cheeses with the cheese exposed to hip hop found to be the strongest in terms of smell and taste. Time to serenade your Wensleydale?
• Authorities in a Californian town are suing the owner of a property dubbed ‘The Flintstone House’ to force the removal of a series of dinosaur statues and, among other landscaping features, a sign reading ‘Yabba Dabba Doo’. The bulbous-looking property in the town of Hillsborough has long attracted interest thanks to its distinctive look but now town authorities – who last year declared many renovations to the home to be a “public nuisance” – have reportedly filed a lawsuit in State Superior Court which alleges the owner did not have appropriate permissions for the changes. In a statement, Sean Fang, the grandson of Florence Fang, a media mogul who purchased the house in 2017, said they would fight to save the property.
• Colourful LED sidewalk lights have reportedly been installed at a crosswalk in Tel Aviv in an effort to protect “smartphone zombies” from stepping out blindly into traffic. The strip lights, designed to meet the eyes of pedestrians when they’re walking with their heads down looking at their phones, turn green when it’s OK to walk and red when not. City authorities say they’ll expand the scheme if the pilot project proves successful. Tel Aviv is one of an increasing number of cities around the world looking to tackle the issue of “smartphone zombies”.
