KEY POINTS:
The secretary of the Royal New Zealand Artillery Old Comrades' Association, Mike Dakin, remembers the Waiouru Mackintosh's Toffee Christmas Lolly Scramble mentioned in Sideswipe: "The Waiouru gun, a 3.7-inch mountain gun (a small howitzer) actually fired lollies on Gunners' Day, 26 May 1958," he says. "Yes, they were Mackintosh's toffees; the problem was not that kids were peppered by lollies, but that the sweets had the paper wrapping stripped from them. One of the ingrate kids gave me a hard time over that. Yes, it was I who fired the gun, the kids well behind the muzzle."
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Greenpeace New Zealand's "name a whale competition" has been sabotaged, with 73 per cent of the votes favouring the name Mr Splashy Pants. The Greenpeace blog claims someone in Arizona found a way around their "one vote per person" rule and set their mouse on an auto-pilot-click-frenzy for "Mr Splashy Pants". The votes from this ISP address have been disallowed but thanks to social bookmarking site Reddit and top international site Boingboing, who have posted the story, the MSP fan base has grown legitimately. The competition is part of Greenpeace's Great Whale Trail, a tagging and tracking exercise for humpback whales in the South Pacific.
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Colorado Springs' Discovery Canyon Campus elementary school has banned tag and any other form of chasing. Assistant Principal Cindy Fesgen says students were complaining about being chased. (Source: Reason.com)
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Auckland City Council may have wasted a whole lot of cash on its new corporate identity, but Scotland has made the same mistake. The Times says Scotland replaced its airport signs proclaiming the country to be "the best small country in the world" with a dynamic new slogan: "Welcome to Scotland." The slogan spent six months in development and cost £120,000 ($325,000).
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A reader from New Windsor writes: "The timing of Nicky Watson's emotional plea for the return of her missing "Chuwawa" could not have been more insensitive, considering it was the same day the body of missing deaf woman Emma Agnew was found. The Watson story was pure parody. What were you thinking, Close Up?"
Today's Webpick: Shortland Street cliffhanger endings - all three of them!
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