Sideswipe: January 21: Op shop scores

Me: "How Much Are These? There's No Price." Lady: "$10 For Both".

Imodium saves the game

Aussie open No. 7 seed Matteo Berrettini won a frequently interrupted first-round match and immediately thanked a popular anti-diarrheal. "Imodium! Grazie!" wrote the Italian hunk after a 4-6, 6-2, 7-6 (7-5), 6-3 win over Brandon Nakashima this week. The big-serving Berrettini had taken a medical timeout in the second set, a bathroom break after the third, and another one during the fourth, but managed to stay solid in the end.

Water quality

A reader writes: "About 70 years ago two small boys (one being me) were commissioned to clean the neighbour's two 600-gallon corrugated iron water tanks. First, we had to remove them from the stand, then scrub them out. We encountered many skeletons in the tanks in the sludge. About three cat or possum skeletons and many small birds and mice or rats. These we removed and said nothing. About 30 skeletons in all. Then we put a few inches of water in the tanks to hold them in place and waited for rain. When the rain came, we hooked it up again. About two months later, the neighbour bailed us up at the local dairy and said: 'I don't know what you boys did to my tanks, but the water just doesn't taste the same'. We said nothing!"

The years really do fly by

Nature imitating life

A dominant male long-tailed manakin – a bird found in South America - acquires a team of subordinate males to help him woo females. "It's the only example of cooperative male-male displays ever discovered in the entire animal kingdom," writes Noah Strycker in The Thing With Feathers. It's common for male animals to cooperate to impress females, but typically each of those males is hoping to mate. Among manakins the eldest male gets this right, and the others defer until they succeed him. Strycker writes, "A pair of male long-tailed manakins may work together like this for five years, building up their jungle reputation as hot dancers, before the alpha male dies and the backup singer takes his place with a new apprentice".