Sideswipe

Birdflu warning? The latest import from Japan, a Honda sporting numberplate H5N1

You can already get diamonds made from the ashes of dead relatives. Now you can get lab-grown human bone tissue fused with precious metals. It's called bio-blings, and it's being launched by researchers from the Royal College of Art and Kings College London. How very Flintstones. (Source: Times Online)

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This story was a gift for the sensitive Sun headline writers: "Corrupt officials bed attractive girls desperate to avoid being kicked out of the country, in return for granting them visas. Meanwhile, 'ugly' migrants risk having their applications rejected and their pictures pinned on a wall for staff to laugh at." What headline did they come up with? "Lie back and think of England."

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A reader received the following from a friend in Melbourne who is about to move house, leaving the one she has lived in for over 30 years. "I was on the phone for an hour and twenty minutes yesterday to get the phone cancelled. Then they are charging me $72 cancellation fee as I have only been a customer since September. I protested that I had been a customer for many years but apparently when I put the account in my name after Keith died I became a new account." How petty and mean can a company get? But that's progress.

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A profile in the Jamaica Star reported on barber Darain Housen, 40, who is well known in his church as the guy who has shaped his bristly hair in the form of a baseball cap, with the bill extending out a couple of inches over his forehead.

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On Wednesday, Tony Gavigan from St Marys Bay in central Auckland had a laugh in this column at his son's expense about watching footage on Sky News from the heydays of pyjama cricket with players wearing giant-collared mauve outfits. "Our 15-year-old pipes up, 'Isn't it neat how they all wore those retro shirts?'," chortled Dad Tony. Son Nick wrote in: "I may have called the old cricket shirts retro but I would never use the word neat."