Sideswipe April 21: A nasty shin injury just waiting to happen

Footpath hogs in New Lynn.

Oldest jokes in the world

And you thought gross jokes sexualising teenagers were old! Check out this classic from 1600 BCE Egypt: “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.” Sure, it sounds like a joke - but after 3,700 years the lolz have sort of got lost in translation. For a truly inexplicable punchline, check out the oldest jokes known to humanity from ancient Sumer, in Mesopotamia. Drum roll...

“Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Okay, it doesn’t exactly have us rolling in the aisles, but we can sort of see where the joke is coming from - evidently, young women in ancient Sumer had either a strange way of saying “I do”, or a whole lot of IBS.

Gloriavale’s Secret

Via @StephMatuku

Killer job

Federal prosecutors say they’ve nabbed a would-be hitman after he submitted a job application to a website he believed let people hire assassins for pay. Josiah Ernesto Garcia of Hermitage, Tennessee, was looking for paying jobs to support his family and in mid-February began scouring the internet for work as a contract killer. That was when he found the website www.rentahitman.com. The FBI says the site was created in 2005 to advertise a cyber security start-up, but after the company failed and the site received inquiries about contract killings, its administrator converted it into a parody page.