Sideswipe

And don’t try for any witty puns - it’ll only lead to tears. But you’ve got to wonder why the Waitakere City school’s sign acquired this home-made addition.

Opinion

Follow-up to the answering machine messages ... some "out of office" e-mail replies ...

* You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn't have received anything at all. Sorry to have missed you, but I am at the doctor's having my brain removed so that I may be promoted to management.

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* The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and try sending again. ("The beauty of it is that when you return, you can see how many in-duh-viduals did this over and over.")

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A reader writes: "Having taken my niece into the Santa parade, I think we should present the No Christmas Spirit award to Wilson Parking. Not only did they charge high rates for everyone to use their carparks, they also caused major delays to get out of their overpriced carparks by insisting on inserting each and every exit ticket that they had handed to everyone before entering. Where is their Christmas spirit - the parking should have been free for the event. It is also interesting to note that we are all happy to sit in traffic for hours for the Santa parade but not for something such as V8 racing that would bring in money into the Auckland economy."

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Maybe there is something in the air at Whangaparaoa, aka pensioners' paradise or God's waiting room. A man who is celebrating his 80th birthday this week was doing his usual run of garage sales at the weekend when he spied a pair of 6kg dumb-bells. His offer of $1 dumbfounded the seller who said they were $60 new. But as he turned away, the seller called out a proposition: If the man could lift the weights out from his side to shoulder height five times, they were his. The seller may have thought he would have a bit of a laugh, but an octogenarian is this week strutting his stuff with a new set of dumb-bells.

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Duh! Yesterday's deliciously overwrought description of the All Blacks facing "a dangerous French cock in Paris after his feathers were ruffled", from Agnew's Angle, was incorrectly attributed to the the East & Bays Courier. The gem appeared in Midweek. Also, the correct title of the East & Bays Courier is the East & Bays Courier, not the significantly different East and Bays Courier, as printed yesterday.