Going viral
A few of the businesses which chose ‘Corona’ as a brand name and now have a bit of an image problem:
— Corona beer — brand of lager owned by Anheuser Busch InBev.
— Corona Energy — gas and electricity supplier to businesses and the public sector.
— Corona Pine Furniture — range from Mercers Furniture of Rotherham.
— Corona ‘the 2D game engine’ — software for designing video games.
— Corona, the ‘lemon capital of the world’, a city of 160,000 people 45 miles from LA.
— And one which changed its name in time: Corona lemonade — South Wales manufacturer taken over by Britvic in 1987 and rebranded.
Bridge too far
The government was confirmed to be undertaking a scoping study into a possible bridge linking Scotland with Northern Ireland. How great an engineering feat would that be?
— The shortest route would be 12 miles from near Ballycastle to the Mull of Kintyre — but the Mull of Kintyre is on a peninsula 155 miles by road from Glasgow.
— A more convenient route would be from Bangor, on Belfast Lough, to near Stranraer. But that is 22 miles. There is only one bridge over water that is longer than this: the 24-mile Lake Pontchartrain causeway in Louisiana. But that goes over a lake with water no more than five metres deep. Parts of the sea between Northern Ireland and Scotland are more than 200 metres deep.
Overblown
Storm Ciara was described as the ‘storm of the century’ in several headlines. How does the maximum wind gust of 97 mph at the Needles on the Isle of Wight compare with other big weather events over the past 100 years?
— The highest gust measured in the Great Storm of 1987 was 115 mph at Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex.
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