Spotted in a Los Angeles supermarket a few days ago by a reader who asked an employee stacking a shelf nearby if it would be all right to take the photo.
"She looks at the label and says 'That's kinda weird ... I don't think I'll be buying any of that cheese'. When I question her as to why she wouldn't she gave me an answer that would have every dairy farmer in the country tearing their hair out. 'Well, you wouldn't normally feed grass to cows would you? Don't they eat grain?"'
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A Kansas man is claiming self-defence in an assault on a rare seagull. Dragan Djuric received a $275 fine for beating a Heermann's Gull when it tried to eat his wife's icecream in Laguna Beach. Police say Djuric beat a Heermann's gull with a stick, breaking its wing. The bird was later euthanised. Djuric claimed that he was acting in self-defence after the bird swooped down and hit his wife's head and tried to grab her icecream. Fish and Wildlife officials say witnesses told authorities the icecream fell on its own and when gulls arrived to eat it, Djuric struck them.
(Source: KTLA TV)
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Tony Baker of Hamilton writes:
"A hallway in my house needed more light so I decided to install one of those lights activated by movement. So off I went to the lighting shop and told the helpful assistant that I needed 'a motion detector for my back passage'. There was a pause and then she cracked up.
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Kim Coleman's 2-year-old daughter, Jess, wouldn't stop whining one day so in jest her mother said, "Stop whining or you'll drive me to drink!"
Says Kim:
"Two days later, we were going to a party and my husband stopped to get some wine on the way. Jess really wanted to come into the shop with me, we ran in and grabbed two bottles of wine. As I was paying, in a loud voice Jess announces to all who will listen 'I drive my mum to drink you know'. I was speechless, standing there nine months pregnant, wine in hand, 7pm at night with a know-it-all 2-year-old."
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Thanks to all the readers (160 of you, as of 3pm yesterday) who sent in answers to Peter Webby's frustration at the gobbledegook code on webpages. Ironically, Peter would have had to contend with one of these to email Sideswipe.
A reader responds:
The thing with the weird letters in a weird font is a captcha (capture) and it's designed to stop spammers filling your website/forum/comments list with spam. It's a picture of a word rather than just a word itself, so it confuses the spammers' software which can't tell whether it's a picture of a word, a dolphin or a cheeseburger.
Unfortunately some of them are hard to read even for a human so that kind of defeats the purpose."
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View today's Herald cartoon
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<i>Sideswipe:</i> Ingrained ignorance
The best sign we saw at the hikoi on Monday, says Helen Geary.
Opinion by Ana SamwaysLearn more
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