Sideswipe: July 27: Understated protest sign

Photo / Supplied

Our spare bedrooms get so dusty, and other middle-class problems…

The boat takes up too much room in the garden: It might've seemed like a fun idea to purchase a powerboat, but that fibreglass leviathan has damn near blocked off your side-gate. Ludicrous feats of manoeuvring are now required to park both Range Rovers on the drive.
The racket from the music room: Of course you don't mind paying for the children to continue their oboe lessons over Zoom, but do they have to practice so loudly? We all love listening to Beethoven's 5th but you should be able to read the Financial Times in peace.
Discomfort when interacting with your cleaner: Before the pandemic you had a woman 'who'd come round to help with the cleaning'. You never referred to her as a 'cleaner' as you considered that demeaning. Still, at least now you don't have to go through the awkward pantomime of acting like she's a helpful friend instead of paid staff.
(Via The Daily Mash)

Racial tolerance over a beer

Black Is Beautiful is a Imperial Stout created by Weathered Souls Brewing in San Antonio, Texas and shared with brewers throughout the world to make the recipe in their own way at their own facilities. The idea is to raise awareness about racial inequality and issues faced by people of colour on a daily basis.

Rules of attraction

Psychologist David Perrett's 2010 exploration of human attraction recruited 300 men and 400 women, all of whom had heterosexual partners and had been raised by two parents. They learned that romantic partners tend to look alike — the participants and their partners tended to have similar hair colour and similar eye colour. This might be explained by a self-similar preference or narcissism, but on looking deeper into the data Perrett's team found that the single best predictor of one's partner's eye colour was the eye colour of one's parent of the opposite sex. If a woman's mother had blue eyes and her father had brown eyes, she would most likely be partnered with a brown-eyed man. If a man's mother had blue eyes and his father had brown eyes, his partner most likely had blue eyes. Similarly, the hair colour of a man's mother was the single best predictor of his partner's hair colour. "These results indicate that individuals choose partners who resemble their opposite-sex parent both in eye and hair colour."

Number of heavy metal bands per 1 million people...

7. China (0.1)

6. Jamaica (0.3)

5. Thailand (2)

4. Cuba (6.4)

3. Japan (11)

2. Russia (14)

1. Finland (532)

(Via @AdamCSharpe)