Sideswipe

City folk may be confused by this one from the Franklin County News - rams in ballet costume, perhaps? Apparently it's a misprint for "two tooths", which is how you measure a sheep's age

Opinion

The power of advertising: A 2 1/2-year-old watching television with his nana looks up, sees the Evers-Swindell twins and says: "That's Beef and Lamb!"

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As Sue Crawshay was flying Air New Zealand to Brisbane, she saw a promotional video, which included scenes from a Gondwana rainforest exhibition at Southbank. Worth a visit, she thought, and turned up on her last day to find the exhibition had been closed for nine years. "Not Gondwanaland but Gone dwanaland," she writes. "I rang Air NZ when I arrived home to be told it should have been withdrawn some time ago. They got that bit right!"

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Bookseller magazine has given its Oddest Book Title of the Year award to a self-help book on being haunted, entitled People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It. In a close fight, the runner-up was Rhino Horn Stockpile Management: Minimum Standards and Best Practices from East and Southern Africa.

Previous winners have been Bombproof Your Horse and Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers.

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Is this a rip-off? John Sumner had to fork out $4 for a cup of hot chips at the NZ vs. Windies game on Saturday. He thinks that's a bit steep and wants to know if it's typical of other venues.

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We know the people delivering Census forms are getting desperate to make tonight's deadline, but this surely goes a step too far. Received in an Auckland letterbox this weekend, a note reading: "Hello, I need to deliver your Census forms prior to Tuesday. Please call Julie on 810 **** for a good time."

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A not-so-sympathetic response to the angry reader from Grey Lynn, who struggled to find a copy of the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack: "Perhaps you should mark this moment as the time when you truly became old and irrelevant? I'm sure Sounds exists to make money, and as such it would much rather sell the far more popular 'foul and revolting imported hip-hop' than waste its time getting you and the other two people who want one a copy of the soundtrack. But of course it's hard for you, given that Sounds is the only music store in the country ... "