Sideswipe: February 11: Why pay when you can get it for free?

Sideswipe 11 February. Photo / Supplied

Strange but true ...

1. The equivalent to "it's raining cats and dogs" in Colombian Spanish, is "raining husbands"; in Welsh, it's "raining old ladies and sticks", while in Greece, it's "raining chair legs".

2. Until 1972, most tennis balls were either black or white. The advent of colour television made them hard to see on the screen, and so yellow ones were introduced.

3. A litre of beer or coffee is as hydrating as a litre of water.

Uneducated vigilantes

In 2000 self-styled vigilantes once attacked the home of a hospital paediatrician after apparently confusing her professional title with the word "paedophile". Dr Yvette Cloete, a specialist registrar in paediatric medicine at the Royal Gwent hospital in Newport, was forced to flee her house after vandals wrote the word "paedo" across the front porch and door of her house in the village of St Brides, South Wales.

Day Tripper bum tribute

In 1967, the Beatles sat on the grass in the English coastal city of Plymouth, on the low limestone cliffs facing the English Channel to enjoy the cool ocean breeze. Half a century later, local metalsmiths unveiled four copper casts of the backsides installed at the exact spot where John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr sat. The artwork is made of a galvanised steel framework, coated in copper and includes prints of the bum, legs as well as palms and means people to sit in exactly the same positions as the Beatles did.

Classic classroom clown

A reader writes: "Okay, so today in chemistry this kid named Roman was walking across the room to get something and he tripped and this one girl immediately shouts, 'The empire has fallen' and I cried laughing."