Sideswipe: April 13: Let them slide

In the ‘70s, there were slides like this.

Powering up in public

The problem of “juice jacking” at public charging stations for phones and other devices is on the rise. Now, the FBI considers the risk of juice jacking so high that it’s telling Americans to completely avoid using public chargers in airports, hotels and malls. Juice jacking is when hackers install malicious code into public charging stations to read and steal data from mobile devices, as well as track them. It’s more likely to impact Android smartphones than iPhones and iPads.

What’s an insult you’ll never forget?

1. “Someone described my favourite fragrance as ‘the LinkedIn of perfumes’.”
2. “Someone looked at my profile photo and said, ‘Leave some forehead for the rest of us’.
3. “My dad once told me, ‘Son, you’re more useless than a white crayon’.
4. “When I was 15, my classmate Ruth Williams told me my chin ‘looks like the surface of the moon’.”
5. “My aunt to her Greek immigrant husband telling a meandering story: ‘You’re just like the baby - you meet a new person, you want to tell them every word you know.’
6. “I don’t have enough time or crayons to explain this to you right now.”
7. “I told a colleague that she walked like she had second-hand legs. She then told me about her numerous hip operations and rehabs. I apologised, but I dug myself a massive hole that day.”

Short stuff

In Mangawhai, they make sure that shorter drivers know changes to the road layout!

Hysteria: What does it mean?

The frantic symptoms or frenzy of someone suffering from hysteria were once wrongly believed to be unique to women. As a result, they were blamed for disorders or imbalances of the uterus. The word hysteria and all its derivatives, like hysteric and hysterical, come from the Greek word for the womb, ‘hystera’. Incidentally, the use of ‘hysterical’ to describe something that sends you into uncontrollable fits of laughter emerged in the mid-1900s.