This week Sideswipe turns 15 - that's 3900 columns - which aside from making me feel old, makes me immensely proud. That's a long time in the ever-changing media landscape.
I once asked an avid fan of Sideswipe why he thought it worked. He said he thought it was because the humour wasn't mean. I think he's right.
Kids provide plenty of Sideswipe fodder. One dad wrote in with this sick burn from one of his: "I asked my daughter not to suck her thumb because she's not a baby any more and she replied, 'You're the baby, you still sleep with Mum'."
And teenagers like Trish Winks' son, who won a trip to the Gold Coast with this snippet in 2007: "My husband and I are still laughing about what our 16-year-old son came up with when the anti-smacking bill was getting press.
"He is going through that non-communicative phase so we were pleased when he pulled himself away from his internet game to ask about the bill. He seemed very concerned. We were explaining when he interrupted with, 'Oh, it's only about smacking is it?' He thought it was the anti-snacking bill."
Last year this anonymous reader shared this embracing moment when she was heavily pregnant and maybe in need of a visit to Specsavers. "I reported a scruffy-looking shoplifter to the woman at the till of a newsagent on Lambton Quay during rush hour.
OPEN HOME: Graffiti at its best. Photo / Supplied
"'Everywhere I look he's staring at me. He clearly has no intention of buying anything,' I said. 'Ma'am,' she replied, 'that's Aragorn'. Cardboard Aragorn was an LOTR promotion. Cue sniggers from the queue. The following Monday, a workmate told me about a man she met in a bar who told her the "hilarious" story of a pregnant woman who tried to get Aragorn arrested."
Simple crossed wires and misheard conversations, has also provided plenty of sniggers. "Overheard on Saturday evening at the ZooMusic gig as the crowd awaited iconic Kiwi musician Don McGlashan and the Seven Sisters to take the stage, a young girl asking her father: "Dad, how long till Don Brash and his sisters are on?"
One of my all time favourite contributions, a nice nod to multi-cultural Auckland, was this from Ken. "Kenneth Setiu is a straightforward New Zealand name right? He reckons yes, "but I'm hilariously outnumbered by others who think otherwise. They have good reasons.
"My surname is from my Samoan father but Google is certain it is a province in Malaysia. One Chinese takeaway owner swore I was a descendant of Mao Zedong, but shorter and once a Taiwanese man spoke in his native tongue to me in Melbourne. Neither of these Asian men knew that I was Hawaiian, according to a local surfer on the Gold Coast. Maybe that's because the Mexican woman on Queen St speaking Spanish to me had not yet met them.
"Fair enough, I have an 'exotic' look and 'ethnic' name; yet Kenneth is commonly mistaken as English in origin - it's from Scotland. This may explain my mother's maiden name of Hale even though she is three-quarters Maori. Her granny was a Ngawaka, later the name distilled to Walker for the non-Maori speakers of the time.
"That aside, last Saturday the only Samoan man on a marae in Tuakau mistook me for local Maori simply because I speak fluent te reo. The tangata whenua of the marae happily tossed me a 'talofa' and reminded me of my Samoanness. But as my wise Dutch wife tells it, I should laugh it off. For our son, Tavita Nupere Ngawaka Drissen Vlaanderen Setiu, it should be pretty straightforward."
Sideswipe pioneered "snackable" media - easy to share stuff. It proved to be perfect fodder for morning radio gobs to pluck from and add their two-cents worth. Some days something in Sideswipe would take off on talkback, like the outrage over $10 cauliflowers in March last year.
The column is for everybody. It doesn't discriminate. Young and old, urban and rural, women and men. It's often sentimental, but never too pretentious or too low brow. Perfectly placed, I reckon, to get as many eyeballs as possible. I try to make it funny first, but also give readers a chance to vent, and be heard and possibly be cut down the next day by someone with a different opinion.
When Sideswipe first began, a one-time features boss balked and eye-rolled, (and eye-rolled and balked again) at a picture of an anthropomorphised vegetable in the column; such *parish-pump, he said. Fast forward to 2016 and the headline, "Phallic vegetable attracts bidders on Trade Me" is nothing out of the norm.
Oh how times have changed.
(*A British phrase that means parochial and of little interest to intelligent life forms).
