Questions to Which the Answer is No! Read online

  Meanwhile a Google search for ‘is this Britain’s worst’ found Daily Mail headlines for GP, drunk driver, sheepdog, holiday home, natural disaster and Christmas tree.

  History Today, 16 September 2011. Some of these more learned journals think that they can escape inclusion in the series by using the word ‘could’. Well, the inability of eurozone countries to adjust their exchange rates ‘could’ contribute to a collapse of confidence in money and the end of all credit and exchange and starving gangs roaming the countryside ... No.

  PC Magazine, 19 September 2011. The summer had seen a ‘spike’ in UFO sightings in America, known in UFO spotter circles as a ‘flap’. PC Magazine suggested two possible explanations: (a) ‘people are outdoors more in the summer’, or (b) ‘an actual alien invasion’. Take your pick.

  BBC News website, 24 September 2011. The BBC, financed by a tax on the sale of consumer goods, asked number 711 in my series.

  BBC News website, 26 September 2011. A diamond, asked by the BBC, which reported that, although football remains the UK’s favourite sport, recent cycling success ‘raises the question of whether cycling could overtake the likes of rugby, cricket and tennis to claim the silver medal in the British public’s affections.’ A special tin medal for ‘the likes of’.

  Daily Mail, 30 September 2011. An Irish coroner had just recorded a verdict of ‘spontaneous human combustion’, so the Mail asked Peter Hough, who had written a book on the subject, for his view:

  While many may scoff at the idea that the human body can catch fire and burn of its own accord, I’m rather more open minded than most when it comes to cases such as this. For, having written a book on the controversial subject and researched the area for 20 years, I have learned of many similar deaths that are very hard to explain away.

  Hough’s argument seemed to be, therefore: Let us assume that one of the least likely explanations is correct.

  New York Times, 7 October 2011. Do I need to explain that a footnote is not a position on a printed page, it is a parenthetical state of mind? Oh. That is another Question to Which the Answer is No.

  Observer, 9 October 2011. Marks were deducted by the judging panel for the rather predictable ‘time’ wordplay. Russell T. Davies, the genius behind the regeneration of the series, had blown himself out, it was true. But the great Steven Moffat had taken over with Matt Smith as the Doctor, and they made it come to life all over again.

  Daily Mail, 11 October 2011. The paper reported that the Abominable Snowman was ‘close to being caught’ – apparently, ‘coarse hair’ had been discovered in a ‘remote Russian cave’. Coarse hair? What else could it be?

  kashmirwatch.com, 22 November 2011. This question was asked by KashmirWatch, the ‘Europe-based news portal of Kashmir International Research Centre’ the aim of which ‘is to provide news, views and opinions with background information on Kashmir’. And the founder of Apple and western civilisation? ‘KashmirWatch also covers world-wide issues that impact on global peace.’

  Daily Mail, 8 December 2011. No, it looks like a big circle that someone has drawn on the picture.

  Andreas Whittam Smith, OurKingdom website, 14 December 2011. Andreas Whittam Smith, founder of the Independent, is a hero of mine. But he has some daft ideas, and this was one of them.

  BBC News website, 19 December 2011. Genius question asked by the BBC, on the front page of its news website, linking to a feature with another headline of sublime comedy: ‘2011: The year when a lot happened’.

  Paul Burgess, Journal of the Society of Psychical Research, Vol. 76.1, No. 906, January 2012. The title of the lead article in the journal by Paul Burgess, of the Dept of Physiology in Utah School of Medicine. Found by Oliver Kamm, who has a recurrent, spontaneous and anomalous ability to spot these things.

  Daily Mail, 2 January 2012. The Daily Mail started the new year as it meant to go on. This product of the auto-Question to Which the Answer is No generator was done so well that the fine detail looked almost hand-made. The ‘just 390 miles from London’, as if all locations mentioned in the Mail are given in this form, was a particularly realistic touch.

  The spread on the Mail website was also marvellous, featuring four images: 1. Idyllic lakeside view (a ‘hidden menace’ – underneath the ‘tranquil’ waters sits ‘a volcano that could devastate Europe’); 2. Higher view of lake, showing that it is in fact nearly circular and looks as if it is in a crater; 3. Photo of a volcano (that is comparable to ‘Mount Pinatubo, which caused a 0.5C drop in global temperatures when it erupted in 1991’); 4. Map. With concentric rings.

  Mail Online, 23 January 2012. Actually, for all we know, we could ask almost any question of this picture. ‘Is this a speck of dust magnified so much that the picture is all blurry?’ ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ ‘Has someone gone and torn the Turin Shroud?’ And the answer would still be no.

  Daily Mail, 6 February 2012. Well, a science-obsessed student could be bitten by a radioactive spider. But he still would not be able to stick to walls or shoot web out of his hands.

  The Week, 6 February 2012. ‘Come out of that Foot Locker now, young man, or this passing toddler will get a slap.’ No. Don’t think that would have worked.

  abovetopsecret.com, 9 February 2012. A question asked, in boisterous defiance of conventional grammar, on a website called abovetopsecret.com (its slogan was ‘Deny Ignorance’). The writer said of a clip of Blair being interviewed by Piers Morgan at CNN: ‘Noticed something strange in the look and the eyes of this man? ... I’m not a believer in “Reptilians”, however, this video is really pretty odd.’ I think this was a reference to David Icke, who believes that the world is ruled by two-legged lizards from the constellation Draco, inhabiting the lower levels of the fourth dimension – that is, the one closest to physical reality. Not odd at all. What is really suspicious, though, is that the Daily Mail failed to follow this up.

  Daily Mail, 18 February 2012. The Daily Mail published evidence in the form of a photograph of M Loret (below) that shows conclusively that he and Hitler had similar moustaches. When you consider that the Daily Telegraph had the day before revealed that their handwriting looked similar, the case was a slam dunk.

  David Herdson, politicalbetting.com, 18 February 2012. David Herdson at Political Betting got a little ahead of himself at the prospect of Boris Johnson’s failing to be re-elected, three months before the election for Mayor of London. His article included the golden line: ‘Six events would need to take place.’ The first, that he would be beaten by Ken Livingstone in May 2012, failed to occur.

  Sun on Sunday, 4 March 2012. The launch of the Sun on Sunday on 26 February 2012 was of great significance in the British media industry, and of no less importance to the Questions to Which the Answer is No cottage industry. In only its second edition, the Sun on Sunday made its debut in the series, with this question asked in the headline on a despatch from San Carlos de Bariloche.

  Daily Mail, 6 March 2012. It was that ‘supermoon’ again, an inexhaustible source of Questions to Which the Answer is No. When the Moon is closer to the Earth, tides are slightly higher than usual, and headlines in the Mail with question marks at the end of them ‘reach epidemic proportions’.

  Alexander Boot, Daily Mail, 13 March 2012. You might have thought that David Cameron had introduced a Church of England Disestablishment Bill with provisions to ban acts of worship in schools. But the article was about bans on employees wearing religious symbols at British Airways and the Royal Devon & Exeter Health Trust, bans that were being contested at the European Court of Human Rights. The connection with the coalition Government was tenuous, therefore, and the notion that it was aggressive ridiculous.

  Channel 4 News, 14 March 2012. Mary Portas, fresh from advising the Government how to turn round high street retailing, made a television series about her reopening an underwear factory in Manchester.

  contactmusic.com, 16 March 2012. One Direction are, apparently, a popular, but not that popular, music combination, which won a
television talent competition. Well, a television competition.

  Guardian, 18 March 2012. The top selling video game in the UK that week was FIFA Street, a football simulation.

  Sun, 26 March 2012. Churchill was President of the Board of Trade, 1908–10, responsible for shipping safety laws in the period that the Titanic, which sank in 1912, was being built. According to Robert Strange, ‘an investigative journalist and former newspaper crime reporter’, in a new book.

  Sunny Hundal, liberalconspiracy.org, 29 March 2012. Sunny Hundal on the Liberal Conspiracy website suggested that, in advising people to stock up on petrol in jerry cans, Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, had a Baldrick-style cunning plan.

  Daily Mail, 31 March 2012. The story came complete with that adornment of the genre, the list of ‘The Unanswered Questions’. We do not need to list them in full, but at least one of them is another Question to Which the Answer is No: ‘Is it significant that an expert brought in to search for evidence of forced entry was hampered because the front door had been taken from its hinges and locks removed?’

  Jewish Book Council, 17 April 2012. This is one of the more unusual examples of the sub-genre of Questions to Which the Answer is No, questions posed by the crank industry of Shakespeare denialists.

  Daily Mail, 21 April 2012. A different death on the front page of the Daily Mail. This one was about Neil Heywood, who died in China, and who had the car number plate 007. Although that might have been a fiendishly clever double bluff.

  Mirror, 23 April 2012. A reader asked Psychic Sally. Fortunately, Sally was able to reassure her: ‘He will always be with you; he has such a huge place in your heart.’

  In the same edition of the Mirror: ‘Is sugar worse for you than smoking?’

  The Atlantic, 26 April 2012. Something to do with high definition pictures.

  Wall Street Journal, 11 May 2012. Everything wrong in just five words (one of which is ‘moms’). Something is the new something else is a tired journalistic formula, but this one also manages to be sexist and trite on the basis of an old statistic, quoting a Census report which claimed that ‘32 per cent of fathers with working wives routinely care for their children under age 15, up from 26 per cent in 2002’.

  NME, 11 May 2012. I am not saying it was bad, but some of us were alive in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Also the 2000s and 2010s.

  David Hockney, Guardian, 14 May 2012. Asked in a letter to the editor. Bruno Michel Iksil, a trader at JP Morgan Chase, had just lost $2bn in ‘poorly monitored’ trades, which might have done more to explain the decline of its profits. It was not reported whether Iksil was a smoker.

  Andrew Sullivan, the Daily Beast, 29 May 2012. Andrew Sullivan asked this in the headline on an article about Mormonism. Possibly not a genuine Question to Which the Answer is No, unless Sullivan believes that the Reformation, the rise of capitalism and the colonisation of the New World were predicted in 1st-century Judaea.

  NPR, 29 May 2012. Those are microbes that rise from under the ground singing ‘Thriller’ in falsetto voices, presumably. Asked by NPR, National Public Radio in the US, for whom ‘zombie’ seems to mean ‘extra-terrestrial’.

  Foreign Policy magazine, 30 May 2012. If it is Daleks, everyone knows that conventional weapons bounce off them, because you have to have that scene where the soldiers from Unit (Unified Intelligence Taskforce) grit their teeth and shoot them with machine guns and say, ‘It’s useless, sir!’

  Daily Mail, 8 June 2012. This was a question about Paul Otlet, a Belgian scientist, who wrote a book, published in 1934, which mentioned the possibility of combining television and the telephone.

  Michael Cohen, Guardian, 9 June 2012. Talk about a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ – which is how Hillary Clinton denounced allegations of financial and sexual impropriety against her husband. Michael Cohen in the Guardian seemed to suggest that the Republican Party engineered the financial crisis in anticipation of the election of Barack Obama in November 2008. (Actually, Cohen suggested that they prolonged the economic difficulties by blocking stimulus measures in Congress. But the answer is still no.)

  Huffington Post, 10 June 2012. The Huffington Post wondered whether Iraq might finally be set on a more hopeful course. You know that thing where you put your feet in a warm bath and tropical fish nibble the dead skin? Yes? No.

  politico.com, 14 June 2012. Asked by Politico about the Presidential Dog. Someone at George Washington University had done a study of political pets. A ‘systematic analysis of voting behavior’ and a ‘voluminous library of compelling insider accounts’ concluded that presidents’ pets can be an asset in good times but add to unpopularity in times of economic hardship; the pets ‘frolicking on the White House lawn’ can enhance perceptions of inequality and make people think that ‘being president is not a full-time job,’ the study concluded.

  Byron Tau, the Politico writer, later updated his report by quoting Forrest Maltzman, professor of Political Science at George Washington University, who led the research: ‘The data and conclusions are real even if there were some tongue-in-cheek references... Every now and then, we like to take our methodological skills and apply them to seemingly goofy, but still interesting, political questions.’

  Wall Street Journal, 20 June 2012. To do with Chinese-style lettering on an advert for Stir Fry Kits and Dumplings.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to John Mullin, the editor of the Independent on Sunday, and my other colleagues for tolerating my interest in some of the foibles of our trade. My thanks to Olivia Bays, my editor at Elliott & Thompson, who saw the chance to turn a second of my blog themes into a book. For this one, as I hope I have already made clear, I am indebted to Oliver Kamm, now a leader-writer at The Times, from whom I borrowed the idea of Questions to Which the Answer is No in the first place. He has continued to contribute to the series, with a remarkable ability to find the most improbable examples. I am grateful to several other cult adherents, including Alan Beattie, International Economy Editor of the Financial Times, and author of the ‘Immutable Law of Headlines’, and all the readers who have contributed to the series over the past three years. If I had not put the word ‘crowdsourced’ on the Banned List, that would be how I would say that this book was put together. As it is, I can only describe it as a collaborative venture in which I am merely the record-keeper. I thank you all.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Rentoul has for three years compiled what has been called ‘the most useless collection of headlines’ consisting of Questions to Which the Answer is No. The series has earned him a cult following on his blog and on Twitter. His book, The Banned List (also published by Elliott & Thompson), takes its title and subject from another blog series, in which he collects over-used, meaningless and offensive words and phrases. He is chief political commentator for the Independent on Sunday, and visiting fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches contemporary history. Previously he has worked for the BBC and New Statesman, and on farms in Canada, where he picked tobacco.

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