Ants, wine and cryonics

I love reading weird but useless facts, useless until the right story comes along. A recent example is the Saharan silver ant that can run 108 times its body length in a second or, in human terms, Usain Bolt reaching speeds of 470 mph. Apparently it gallops. Another useless fact. You want more? As it approaches its top speed, none of its legs are touching the ground but are flicking back and forth 40 times a second. It is their way of dealing with the Saharan sun and temperatures of 60 degrees centigrade. This is when lizards, their natural predator, are comatose in shade allowing the ant to emerge and scavenge what’s left to find. Speed rather than shade is their only protection. One imagines if their legs touched the ground overlong, they’d sizzle and crisp.

Evolution is a wonderful thing, which brings me round to the Zos Wine Saver at £49 a pop and cylinders (they come in packs of two, each one reusable 15 times—another useless fact unless you see this as a commercial) at £14.99. 

They can, apparently keep wine fresh for up to eight weeks? Grief, you could buy a case of wine for the price of a Zos Wine Saver + cartridges.

And who, in God’s name, is going to keep a bottle of wine for eight weeks anyway?  What parsimonious, miserable soul would do such a thing? The hospitable Temperance man or woman might feel obliged to keep a bottle of wine for the occasional guest, Okay, I get it. But they’d be a damn sight better off giving it away afterwards  rather than dabbling in vino-cryonics. The grateful guest will remember them. The Zos Wine Saver will not.

Unlike the Saharan silver ant, we keep wine a week, sometimes a tad longer. In such cases a piece of twirled up kitchen paper is more than sufficient. But here is a beautiful illustration of two parallel worlds. The Saharan silver ant has little interest in keeping wine fresh for eight weeks, but the miserable sods who owned such a thing wouldn’t last long in the Saharan sun.