Sideswipe: September 20: Highlights from your local body election booklet

Marlow Park, Dunedin.

With too much time on his hands, Peter from Grey Lynn has not only opened the information booklet, but he has also done a deep dive (so you don't have to) into the lesser-known Auckland mayoral candidates:

Lisa Lewis: "The other day, one of my shoes ripped off as I started running on my home treadmill. I could've quit at any time, But instead, I continued to run 5km!" (If running shoeless is not a qualification for being mayor, it should be.) Lisa ends with: "Let's erect Auckland together"

Pete Mazany: "Background: NZ Water-ski champion; finalist Rhodes Scholarship ..." (So water-skiing is better than running shoeless for a mayor ... and so is missing out on a Rhodes Scholarship apparently.)

Ryan Earl Pausina: "Allowing self-employed to display plaques on their home gate will mean people will service customers more locally ..." (More plaques!!!!)

Bonus: Dunedin lesser-known mayoral candidate Pamela Taylor is promising an animal petting area in Woodhaugh gardens, a gondola to the top of Signal Hill, and a "road tunnel network so people can travel quickly and avoid going over hills and mountains but can drive under them instead". Marlow Park whale to blow bubbles out of the top of it.

Ig Noble Prize

The winners of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes, the annual celebration of weird and wonderful scientific research, include the sad state of affairs for male scorpions.

Doorknob efficiency. A Japanese team led by industrial design researcher Gen Matsuzaki won the engineering Ig Nobel for their study of the most efficient way to turn a doorknob. Matsuzaki, whose research found that the bigger the doorknob, the more fingers are needed to turn it, said he had been honoured for "focusing on a problem that no one cares about".

Two hearts beat as one. Eli ska Prochazkova, leader of a team that won the cardiology prize, says the heart rates of people on blind dates synchronised almost immediately if they were attracted to each other. "Within the first two seconds of the date, the participants made a very complex idea about the human sitting in front of them," she said.

Constipated scorpions. Brazilian researchers scored the biology Ig Nobel for their investigation of constipated scorpions. When scorpions detach their tails to avoid predators, they also lose their anuses, causing constipation that becomes fatal months later. They found that while there was no short-term decrease in running speed, male scorpions without tails slowed down over time, making it harder to find mates. "However, because death by constipation takes several months, males have a long time to find mates and reproduce," they wrote in their study.