Sideswipe: 1 December: Pants design for a handbag

NZ Herald

30 Nov, 2015 04:00 PM3 mins to read

Bad design: Brain sees handbag, yet thinks pants.

Opinion

Tangled web of misunderstanding

When Sydney police questioned a man suspected of a domestic dispute, they were told he was actually in a fight with a spider. Neighbours called police about a woman screaming and a man yelling: "I'm going to kill you, you're dead." They also reported sounds of furniture being thrown. Authorities rushed to the scene and were greeted by a man with a can of bug spray in hand. The following is the transcript of the conversation between the police and the misunderstood guy.

Police: "Where's your wife?"

Male: "Umm I don't have one."

Police: "Where your girlfriend?"

Male: "Umm I don't have one."

Police: "We had a report of a domestic and a women screaming, where is she?"

Male: "I don't know what you're talking about, I live alone."

Police: "Come on mate, people clearly heard you yelling you were going to kill her and furniture getting thrown around the unit."

Police: "Come on mate, what have you done to her?"

Male: "It was a spider."

Police "Sorry?"

Male: "It was a spider, a really big one!"

Police: "What about the woman screaming?"

Male: "Yeah sorry, that was me. I really, really hate spiders."

Horrors under the seat

Picking up a friend who had just recently returned from Singapore, Ian was moving the front passenger seat forward to allow Patrick into the back seat. "After pushing the seat back into position there came an almighty 'SSSSSSsssssssssssssss'," he writes. "My brain went: 'snake'. Apparently I hovered about 3 feet in the air before distancing myself from the car faster than Usain Bolt. The seat had activated my underarm spraycan underneath."

"The council road marking crew recently touched up the paintwork on our street," writes a reader. "Clearly they didn't read the signage before they started painting!"

Scary trifecta

"When I was a teenager in the 1980s, my dad was a prison officer for Mt Eden Prison and he lived in the last prison house before the women's prison," writes Donna. "I would go see him in the school holidays and he would video tape the Sunday night horrors for me on TV. Sometimes when he had to go work there were prisoners doing the gardening round the house. So being a young girl with a vivid imagination, on my own, this all freaked me out a bit. Still, I decided to watch the movies, but first I locked all the windows and doors. This particular day, dad decided to creep into the house and hide behind the couch while I was watching one of the movies and jumped up at the crucial point. I can't watch any type of horror day or night now."