Health charity criticised by Advertising Standards Authority

By Kaye Wiggins, Third Sector Online, 26 April 2011

Maperton Trust’s badge

Regulator tells the Maperton Trust to stop claiming that a £19 badge will repel head lice

The holistic health charity the Maperton Trust has been reprimanded by the Advertising Standards Authority for claiming a badge with a picture of a unicorn on it could repel head lice.

The charity’s website describes the badge, on sale from the site for £19, as “a small device using the latest technology to repel head lice from infesting children and adults”.

“It is in the form of a badge of the unicorn and is pinned to the clothing of the individual,” the website says. “Its effect on head lice is to repel them.”

In response to a complaint about the website, the ASA asked the charity, which is based in Wincanton, Somerset, to provide evidence to support its claim.

The ASA’s report, published today, says the charity was unable to do so and the Maperton Trust has been told to remove from its website all claims that the badge can repel head lice.

Other items for sale on the charity’s website include an “Automatic Universal Remedy Maker”, priced at £3,600, that the charity says can “copy and make energetic remedies” and can “broadcast treatment to a person, animal, plant or soil at a distance”.

A spokeswoman for the Maperton Trust declined to comment.

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We’re all for belief in the healing power of unicorns, but this badge incident takes it too far:

We do not endorse vines strangling balding rainbow unicorns - especially unicorns that are poorly drawn.

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More than four decades ago, children’s author Peter S. Beagle published his novel The Last Unicorn. The title was adapted into an animated film in 1982 and has since been re-released in a blu-ray/DVD combo pack. We caught up with Beagle and learned that there are more unicorn stories in the works for the future. Here are the highlights from our interview.

Q: How did you first get The Last Unicorn published?
A: I wasn’t worried about getting it published — maybe naively — because by then I’d been getting published since I was seventeen, which was most of a decade. I was worried about getting the bloody thing right. Of all the books I’ve ever written, that’s the one I remember as being a trial by fire.

Q: What’s the difference between writing for a fiction title as opposed to a nonfiction title?
A: It varies. In fiction you are at the mercy of your imagination as you try and wrestle it into submission. In nonfiction you have certain facts to go on, and you are shaping them. There you are dealing with decisions about what is important and isn’t, especially if you are dealing with someone else’s life. How do you shape it so that you are honoring the original story while also putting something of your own into it? I’ve recently ordered an out of print biography written by a dear friend of mine, whom I only know as a rather wonderful fiction writer, and I’m quite curious to see with what she did in this different form.

Q: What’s next for you?
A: George Burns used to say ‘I can’t die, I’m booked!’ And I know exactly what he meant. There are so many different things going on with my work that I’m hard-pressed to keep track. On my desk at this very moment is the second draft of a limited edition novella I’m doing for Subterranean Press that’s a kind-of sequel to my story ‘El Regalo.’ Next up after that I’ve got three nonfiction essays to write for a planned collection, then the second draft of a new film treatment, then three Shakespearean-themed stories for a special set, and finally six different original unicorn stories for another standalone set.

I’m shaking my head at that last one because it was supposed to be just three stories, only I got carried away when I started coming up with possible ideas. And in the background, while writing all these things, I’m also polishing the final drafts of two long-simmering novels — Summerlong and I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons — and doing research for a new one, a baseball fantasy called Sweet Lightning that is set in 1950s Pittsburgh. I lived there back then, when I was a college student working on my first novel, and it’s going to be nice to go back…both in real life, to do research, and in the sooty-but-happy realms of memory and imagination.

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In the interview above, Peter S. Beagle, author of “The Last Unicorn”, admits that perhaps that unicorn wasn’t really the last one.

Well, maybe they all went into hiding after they learned about the female bull impersonating unicorn.

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2012 Honda Civic ‘To Each Their Own’ campaign

Honda’s ad agency, RPA, has imagined five extreme types of Civic owners — one for each of the 2012 Civic variants. The types are a spot-on match for the young, hipster target demographic: they include a zombie, a luchador, and, yes, a ninja. (Left on the cutting room floor: a pirate, a unicorn, and the double-rainbow guy.)

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While unicorns were initially disappointed to land on the cutting room floor, they eventually embraced the fact that they weren’t picked for Team Civic. They are rumored to be in talks with Ford regarding upgrading the Mustang logo to include a horn.

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Advice to Young Poets

by Martin Espada

Never pretend
to be a unicorn
by sticking a plunger on your head

“Advice to Young Poets” by Martín Espada, from The Republic of Poetry. © W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. Reprinted with permission

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Some forms of DIY are really bad ideas.
Others are just stupid.

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Rock-O-Matic, an improvised musical show at Go Comedy theater in Ferndale, MI, took on the complex topic of the Fighting Unicorn school mascot. Whereas other mascots and fight songs can be sung rather passively, the Fighting Unicorns require a great amount of physical participation - and choreography.

We especially appreciate the realistic costuming. From this distance, the finger-horn could be easily mistaken for a stunted alicorn!

So fight on, Fighting Unicorns, because today improv really is the winner!

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While doing research on our story about the city’s vast Civic Art Collection, which includes some 4,000 items, we came across a number of objects that weren’t just your standard paintings and sculptures. Given the limited resources now allocated to the collection, it’s hard to imagine a time when the city was actively accruing its mountain of portable treasures, but between the years of 1946 and 1986, San Francisco threw annual Arts Festivals as a means of supporting local artists. It was from these festivals that the city purchased the bulk of its portable collection. Below we’ve collected some of the more unusual items, from jewlery to a “rocking serpent” that looks like it was plucked from the set of “Beetlejuice.” The descriptions have been pulled directly from the portable collection database provided by the San Francisco Arts Commission.

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4. Unicorn Print

Gentle Unicorn, Richard Graf

Description: Color photo-litho image of a stone unicorn resting in a garden-like setting. Image has several lines of various color and thickness surrounding it and creating borders. Floral pattern on outer border. Set of twenty.

1974, Purchased by the San Francisco Art Commission for the San Francisco General Hospital

(This is not the only unicorn art the city owns. It also purchased a chalk drawing of unicorn called “Unicorn” by artist Charles Ware in 1977.)

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Oh San Fran, how we adore your artistic sensibilities! Your civic art collection features more than one unicorn-centric piece, ensuring both 7-year-old Jenny and cat-embroidered-sweater-vest-clad Aunt Myrtle that they, too, can one day be famous artists.

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Last week, my husband called me at work, reporting there was a dead body in the backyard. When asked to describe it, he said it was sort of like a glob with hair — small, with no discernible features. I shuddered, assuming my dog discovered a baby rabbit, but upon examination of the body when I got home, I understood my husband’s inability to accurately describe the mass –- it truly was a furry glob. Without proper scientific examination, this finding will be eternally up for debate — and there was to be no proper scientific examination because it was simply grossing me out.

This brings up a subject I have always found fascinating: the pseudo-science of crypto-zoology. Literally meaning “the study of hidden animals”, this topic relates to those creatures such as Big Foot or my personal favorite, the Loch Ness Monster, whose existence has not been proved through hard science. This topic also covers animals once thought to be extinct, such as the coelacanth, a big ugly fish thought to have died out millions of years ago, only to be re-discovered in 1938 near South Africa. How cool is that?

Admittedly, the subject of crypto-zoology walks a fine line between coolness and geek-dom, since one may be searching for the Yeti (cool) but also the unicorn (geek). If you ever find yourself searching for a Yeti and then winding up talking about unicorns, simply ask yourself if you want your name on a peer-reviewed journal article describing Yetis or unicorns. Your answer may surprise you.

My work, obviously, does not involve studying “hidden animals,” which is probably a good thing, since there was not a single word said in vet school about how to administer penicillin to a sick chupacabra (a beast reported in Latin America and the southwest U.S.). However, vet school did prepare me to deal with severely parasitized animals, such as the mange-ridden, emaciated coyotes that the University of Michigan deduced as the explanation of the chupacabra sightings. At least I’ll be able to treat the de-bunked “cryptids,” as crypto-zoologists call the animals they study.

On long drives in the middle of the night coming from a remote farm after pulling a calf or stitching up a horse, sometimes I’ll see eyes on the side of the road reflecting back my truck’s high beams and I think: is this the Frederick Fiend, Thurmont Thrasher, or the elusive Emmitsburg Elk? Or am I just making things up to keep myself awake? Probably the latter, which I suppose is a good thing judging by my reaction to the mysterious creature in our backyard. If I ever found a “cryptid”, I’d probably just freak out and vomit. And I definitely would not want that reported in a peer-reviewed journal article.

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The author above is a vet, but not a specialist in cryptids. We’re pretty clear on that, since she has classified Yetis as cool and unicorns as geeky. Anyone who has spent any length of time with a Yeti and its boorish excuse for table manners would not classify it as “cool”, except in reference to its body temperature.

Unicorns as geeky? Geeky-chic is more like it.

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