Sideswipe: Oct 3: Standing up to a hurricane

Ice-cream shop boarded up in Florida. Photo / Supplied

Opinion

Til death do us part

Are you in the mood for a love story? Here's one from Easdale, Scotland, where a woman named Margaret Stables is offering to give away a coffin that she had originally purchased for her husband. The tabloid Daily Record reports that Stables posted the offer on the Facebook Marketplace. She purchased the coffin in the hope of burying her husband in it, but he hasn't died yet, and the coffin is taking up a lot of space in their house. The coffin is free, but you have to come to the Stables' residence to pick it up. It doesn't come with the pillow, as their dog has taken a liking to it.

In 50 Years, What Will People Be Nostalgic For?

1. Owning something you don't pay a subscription for.

2. Handwritten notes/letters.

3. Being confident that the person they see on-screen is a real person and not AI.

4. Bearable temperatures, forests, bees, biodiversity...

5. Non-lab-created meat. Cars you drive yourself.

6. Story. Narrative. There is no build-up anymore. Nobody has the patience to see a good plot being constructed. Everyone wants a payoff in 10 seconds.

7. Being uncontactable. Like - back in the day, you could just go to your bedroom, and block the rest of the world away for a couple of hours. Now, we've got video calls, phone calls, texts, emails. Urgh.

Night out in Singapore

Photo / Supplied

Alistair Bailey writes: "We saw this place recently in Singapore. We didn't go in!"

YouTube Village

Tulsi, a small village in India's Chhattisgarh state, has become known as 'YouTube Village' because so many residents make videos for a living. Over a third of the 3,000-strong local population is actively making videos and posting them on YouTube for profit. Many of these creators used to be farmers, but after hearing that some of their peers had doubled and even tripled their income making YouTube videos, they decided that it was time for a career change. The 40 or so major channels range in genre from comedy and music to education and DIY, with the most popular having garnered over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube alone.