Sideswipe: June 28: 66 per cent is good enough

Meat Loaf. Photo / Supplied

Meat Loaf lost in translation

Two Out of Three Ain't Bad is a love song performed by the American musician Meat Loaf and is a track off his hugely successful 1977 album Bat Out of Hell, which has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide (and almost 40 years after its release still sells an estimated 200,000 copies annually) making it one of the best selling albums in history. Amusingly, the Japanese release changes the title of the song to use a percentage, translating it to 66 per cent is good enough.

Naming rights

Would you let your children name your new baby? A local media outlet asked this probing question and got some very funny answers. Rebecca commented: "My then 4-year-old was adamant her brother was to be called Happy as Larry, there were lots of tears when he wasn't."

Emma asked her boys what to call their pending baby brother: "They came up with Roadpipe and Videodara so we let them name the chickens instead. They are called Potionlab and Pecky."

Shannon said she chose her sister's name. "I was 8 and obsessed with Mariah Carey. She got Mariah and always hated it!"

Jacquie chimed in: "My son wants to call our new baby, due in six weeks, Firetruck Lion Helicoper Hospital," writes Jacquie. "I guess on the plus side it's a name you could spell entirely with emojis."

After yesterday's power warning, David in Vanuatu sent in this, written in pidgin English, which he says translates to ... 'you open power box and touch something inside you belong dead'.

Losing your marbles

How childhood can deal with overweening authority. "All boys liked playing marbles and they were real treasures," writes Shaun Reilly. "The headmaster of our small country school — Whangaehu — had a strong aversion to marble playing. If he saw a group playing he would confiscate any visible marbles.

"However, the solution was in our own hands. We went to the farthest corner of the large playground and played marbles with macrocarpa nuts. This went on for quite some time until he got tired of confiscating macrocarpa nuts of which there was an inexhaustible supply. We eventually got back to playing with real marbles again!"

The good old days

"When I grew up in wartime Berlin, my mother walked me to school on the first day to show me where it was," writes Peter Kammler of Warkworth. "After that I was on my own. Because I had to cross a busy intersection without traffic lights, my mother instructed me to wait at the kerb until an adult came along.

"Then I politely had to ask this person to take me by the hand so that we crossed the street together. Yeah, these were the good old days, whereas now a demented child molester seems to lurk behind every tree."