Sideswipe

Trading places: Comfy cat, squashed dog - the natural order of things for multiple-species households?

The pulling stool: You may have heard of Table for Six, where groups of six single people get together at a restaurant and exchange conversation while looking for love, but lovelorn West Aucklanders may have better luck with Bricklane Restaurant and Bar's dating miracle Seat for One. The superstitious stool has consistently proved to be a pick-up magnet for Bricklane regulars - but only for females and only on Wednesday nights. Bricklane manager Adele Marshall explains, "We know that if a single woman comes into the Bricklane bar on a Wednesday night and sits at the stool beside the table directly in front of the bar, she won't be going home alone. We've seen it happen at least eight or nine times. It's got to the stage where women who have been lucky with the stool have told their female friends about it. Then these other women come in and shyly ask our female bar staff which is the love stool and sure enough, if they're here on a Wednesday night they won't be going home alone. It doesn't happen at any other stool or on any other night."

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Ross Winter writes: "With all the hype around the Lions tour, I thought the following might be of interest: You have to wonder just how much importance is placed on tickets to the Lions' games. I recently got a note in the letterbox from a courier company to let me know that a package was at the depot and that it was not their policy to drop packages off when no one was home. I made my way across town to their depot to pick up my tickets to the Bay of Plenty v Lions game. The tickets were in a standard envelope that would have fitted easily into the letterbox. After this, it came as some surprise when the same courier company left a package containing a pharmaceutical prescription on the front doorstep about three days later, when no one was home."

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Murray Hunter has another foggy story. "On Wednesday I flew from Auckland to Christchurch during which time both cities plus Wellington were closed due to fog. After circling the garden city for an hour, they said we were under instructions to divert to Queenstown to refuel. Likely story as it was obviously just to pick up Sam Neill, who boarded last and sat in seat 1D."

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Bizarre wine descriptions: While scanning a wine list in Bondi last week, a Sydney Morning Herald reader came across a sauvignon blanc with "aromas of freshly cut grass" and "traces of gunpowder".

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The May issue of the Massey News reports on the new PhD graduates from Palmerston North, including Matthew Low, who was awarded a doctorate of philosophy in zoology. The story goes on to say: "Dr Low studied the sexual behaviour of the stitch bird - an endangered species with very large testicles and the only bird in the world that has sex in the 'missionary position'. He showed that male stitch birds use force to control sexual access, contrary to current thinking that female birds determine mating patterns."