Sideswipe

Gary Clifford of Titirangi took heed of this warning at Adelaide Airport and refrained from drinking the toilet water.

A job ad for a secretary at Massey University asks applicants to be able to perform "critical analysis and interpretation of the Pro Vice-Chancellor's schedule" ... A pretension-ectomy reveals this is "keeping a diary." (Source: thebigidea)

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Unhinged celebrity quotes: "My God is a God who wants me to have things," Mary J Bilge told Blender magazine. "He wants me to bling. He wants me to be the hottest thing on the block. I don't know what kind of God the rest of y'all are serving, but the God I serve says, 'Mary, you need to be the hottest thing this year, and I'm gonna make sure you're doing that'."

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A man from Colorado was fined $50 when the cops caught him using a gadget that changes traffic lights from red to green. Jason Niccum says that he paid $100 on eBay for it and had been using it for two years and that it had paid for itself by getting him to work faster. The device, called an Opticon, is similar to what firefighters use to change lights when they respond to emergencies. It emits an infrared pulse that receivers on the traffic lights pick up. Niccum was caught out after city traffic engineers noticed repeated traffic light disruptions at certain intersections and spotted a white Ford pickup passing by whenever the patterns were disrupted.

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As a cost-cutting exercise the Star Tribune in Minneapolis announced that free copies of the paper would no longer be available for newsroom staff. Instead, staff were offered the online edition. If staff wanted the tactile version they would have to pay half the retail cost, from boxes around the office. Later in the week, the paper's senior vice president for circulation issued a memo: "During the first week that the additional on-site racks were in service, 43 per cent of the Star Tribunes removed from those racks were not paid for. For the second week the rate was 41 per cent. This is called 'pilferage' in our business; but put more plainly, it is theft, pure and simple." (Source: David Carr in the New York Times)