Sideswipe

Simon the Atari video game (see story below).

Remember Simon? In the mid-'70s, video game giant Atari came up with the original concept but managed not to make it fly. Calling the game Touch Me probably didn't help. A couple of years later, Milton Bradley games made a tabletop version, called it Simon and made a fortune out of Christmas 1978. Just four lights, a tune, and a disapproving low farty beep when you stuffed up. (Source: Cream TV's Top 100 Games)

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Amateur volcano watchers monitoring the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences website were alarmed last week to see an enormous amount of activity on a seismometer on the lower slopes of Mt Taranaki. Research published earlier in the week had suggested that the dormant volcano was overdue for an eruption. But the Taranaki Regional Council assured residents that the jumpy seismometer, located in the Pukeiti rhododendron garden, was so sensitive it was recording the vibrations of hundreds of visitors walking through the reserve during the annual garden festival. (Source: NZPA)

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Staff at The Warehouse's massive new "laboratory" store in Te Rapa, Hamilton, had a young mother shrieking with delight at being challenged to produce identification proving she was over 14 and old enough to buy fireworks. The young woman had passed through the checkout with her baby and toddler in tow, but left them waiting in the store's foyer with her own mother while she went back for their Guy Fawkes' treat. "Mum, they want to see my ID," she hooted back at the children's grandmother. "Shall I show them my stretchmarks?"

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So zealous were fire police enforcing a cordon around an Auckland office block, that they delayed a courier driver trying to deliver a decontamination package for removing suspicious white powder during a mass evacuation. "Tell him to come back at 5pm," the official barked into his radio, when told of the driver's insistence that he had an urgent delivery to make during the lunchtime evacuation of several hundred workers from Quay Tower on Friday. It seems the driver was initially less than explicit about his delivery, which turned out to be "bio-bottles" for firefighters in decontamination suits waiting to remove the substance and whisk it off to a Government testing laboratory.

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In a September rape trial in New York City, witness Roberto Suarez testified that he saw two men in the room with a waitress just before she told him that she had been raped. When asked by the prosecutor to identify the two men, Suarez looked past the defendants and pointed to, respectively, Juror No 8 and Alternate Juror No 3. The New York Daily News reported that some jurors laughed so hard that they cried. (Source: News of the Weird)

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Hans Schramm writes: "You asked for eco-friendly alternatives to drinking straws in NZ ... Try lips."