Sideswipe: March 21: The Piano in motion

The Royal New Zealand Ballet's season of The Piano: the ballet is on throughout the country until March 28.

Academy Award a while ago

Do you want to feel old? Today 24 years ago Anna Paquin became the first New Zealander to win an Academy Award for acting. The 11-year-old won the best supporting actress award for her role as Flora McGrath in The Piano. According to New Zealand History, she was the second youngest recipient of this award in Oscar history. Writer/director Jane Campion chose the then 9-year-old Paquin out of 5000 NZ hopefuls.

Bunny sequel turns tables

The wife and daughter of US vice-president Mike Pence have written a children's book - Marlon Bundo's Day in the Life of the Vice President - about their family's pet rabbit. In response, John Oliver, host of the HBO late-night show Last Week Tonight, concluded a lengthy diatribe against the vice-president (focused mainly on Pence's views on gay people) with news of a competing book, A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo. It, too, is about the Pence family rabbit - only this book tells the story of how Bundo falls in love with another male bunny, Wesley, while playing in the garden of the grounds of the US Naval Observatory, where the real-life Pences and Bundo live. (Via Quartz Media)

Best opening line of a book ...

1. It's a textbook on statistical mechanics: "Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics. Perhaps it will be wise to approach the subject cautiously." - States of Matter, D.L. Goodstein.

2. "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

Still from The Princess Bride.

3. "The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette. Annette worked in Paris for the Duke and Duchess de Guiche, and it did not escape the Duke's notice that someone extraordinary was polishing the pewter. The Duchess, who was not very beautiful and not very rich, but plenty smart, set about studying Annette and shortly found her adversary's tragic flaw - chocolate. Armed now, the Duchess set to work." - The Princess Bride, William Goldman. (Via Reddit)