Sideswipe: March 22: Advice for life

Advice for life. Photos / Supplied

Wrong thing, right time

Ricky Gervais on why Twitter has been good for his comedy: "I can see a cross section of society a thousand times faster than I could've otherwise. I've got 13 million followers.

That's the world, really. I'll tweet, 'What's a subject you should never joke about?' Some people fall for the trap and say something like 'Psoriasis'. Then I can come up with 10 minutes on that."

Onstage I'll read out responses to 'These are the things you should never joke about', and whatever I say is quite funny because in your head you think of this one person being angry about the joke.

People think someone joking about their issue is the worst thing in the world. I did a joke on Fallon about peanut allergies, and someone said I should never talk about food allergies.

I joke about AIDS, famine, cancer, the Holocaust and you're telling me I shouldn't joke about allergies? The audience has got to be clever enough to know when I'm playing the idiot and saying the wrong thing for comic effect. That's one of the things of comedy: laughing at the wrong thing because you know what the right thing is." (Via New York Times)

Clock that

Phil Breytenbach ran his first half marathon in the Bombays on Sunday. "My aim was to finish under 2 hours 30 minutes. When I got home and checked my finishing time on STRAVA it was 2h 29m 59s. Didn't leave much room for error eh?"

Elbow drop wipers, for wrestling fans.

Lost in translation

Jane McLaren, of Cambridge, writes: "In response to Alan's query about warning signs on kettles, the middle-aged American couple staying in our cottage last week wandered over to tell me they'd been using the coffee maker and all the lights had gone out. As we don't have a coffee maker I was very confused, until they pointed to the kettle they'd tipped the ground coffee into."

Storm in a kettle

"I am on my coffee break at 4.13am (I work the graveyard shift at a popular Rotorua Hotel)," writes a reader. "Some of our guests like to use the kettle for more than water. The two most common substances are instant noodles and milk ... As you can imagine this does indeed damage the appliance and we can go through them very quickly."