Sideswipe: November 16: Who says kiwi can't fly - here's one in the sky

By Ana Samways

Sideswipe - ana.samways@nzherald.co.nz·NZ Herald·

15 Nov, 2017 04:00 PM3 mins to read

Who says kiwi can't fly - here's one in the sky. Photo / Supplied

Hammy downs and seizure salads

Best misunderstood words (or autocorrect) on Twitter:

1. I live bicuriously through your tweets.

2. Goodnight y'all. Mind grain headache is coming back.

3. I think my gramma got dis a beaties.

4. I have no clue why people don't like hammy downs. Who doesn't love free clothes?

5. The seizure salad from McDonald's is so good.

Let technology do the dirty work

Now here's a use for robotic technology that could make a world of difference in your life. An automatic toilet-cleaning robot is looking for funding on Kickstarter. The SpinX looks like a slightly oversized toilet, rather than a robot per se, but it has a robotic arm with a rotating brush and soap and water jets that clean your toilet at the touch of a button. SpinX uses compressed air outlets to make things dry and it's easy to use. Just replace the old toilet seat with the SpinX lid, insert your preferred toilet-cleaning liquid and 90 seconds later a sparkling, clean toilet.

Tuatara coins hit the spot

Remember when Westlake Girls High School librarian Megan Davidson collected 5c coins for John Green, author of the hugely successful book The Fault in Our Stars? He had a new book coming out that features the tuatara and he tweeted an unusual request: "... anyone in New Zealand have a large amount of NZ nickels. I'm in the market for some."

Megan made it her mission to find the coins and with the help of Sideswipe readers, she did. She took 8000 coins to America in a suitcase (they weighed 23kg) and mailed them to him (which cost $500). "He paid me back for that," she says.

"Green went on tour for three weeks promoting his new book Turtles All the Way Down. The audience had an option to fill out a question card for John to answer onstage. If they filled out a card, they received a tuatara coin ... His assistant recently contacted me and said John wanted to donate to an organisation of my choice, so I chose Tiritiri Matangi, which has a tuatara colony." And he made a video to say thanks, which you can see online here.

You know you're in the provinces when...

"Classic sign in cafe on the Taupo/Napier road," writes Lynton Diggle. Photo / Supplied

The man behind the art

Pablo Picasso was a great artist, but he was awful to women..."Women are machines for suffering," Picasso told Francoise Gilot, his mistress after they embarked on their affair when he was sixty-one and she was twenty-one, he warned Gilot of his feelings once more: "For me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats." Read more here.