Sideswipe: July 15: Take a bite out of a billionaire

This week in New York and Los Angeles the roaming "Eat the Rich" ice cream truck is hawking ice creams in the shape of the heads of Elon Musk (ice cream name: "Munch Musk"), Jeff Bezos ("Bite Bezos"), Bill Gates ("Gobble Gates"), Mark Zuckerberg ("Suck Zuck"), and Jack Ma ("Snack on Jack"). The treats are being sold by the MSCHF artists collective. The initiative was inspired by a phrase by French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau who once said: "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich." So far, Munch Musk, in the shape of the Tesla founder, has been the best-selling.

This column has hit rock bottom

Punish thyself

During the days of the Byzantine Empire, monks gave up a normal life for their Christian faith, often competing over who could sacrifice the most. Simeon Stylites the Elder was a winner in self-deprivation. Born around 390 AD in Syria, he entered monastic life as a teenager. He became an ascetic, going weeks without eating to purify himself. He was so extreme that he was asked to leave the monastery, and went to live a hermit's life alone atop a series of pillars. The first one was three meters tall, but he found taller places to sit and stay. Simeon settled on a pillar that was 15 metres tall and stayed there 37 years! His living space was a platform of about a square metre with a railing.

Hangry is real

"So a new study finds a clear link between hunger and anger," writes Barbara Brewis. "I could have saved the researchers the bother. At school in the 1960s we were taught that the French Revolution started in part because the people were starving, "and when you're hungry you get angry".