KEY POINTS:
While on holiday in Noosa, Queensland, Aucklander Christine Mann came across this sign at a wharf. "I am not a boating person," she says, "so fingers crossed nuclear missiles mean something else, otherwise I think Helen Clark should have a word with our neighbours."
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On a flight from Brisbane to Auckland, Emily Hay watched a couple of classic Simpsons episodes. During an episode in which Krusty the Clown is busted for tax fraud, goes on a bender and flies his plane into a mountain to fake his own death, a strange thing happened. "Air New Zealand decided this would inspire panic among the passengers, so it cut the crash," said a perplexed Hay. Passengers saw Krusty flying his plane erratically then a sudden cut to a funeral.
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Chilean artist Marco Evaristti presented dinner guests in an art gallery with meatballs cooked with fat from his own body, extracted by liposuction. "The question of whether or not to eat human flesh is more important than the result," he said. No stranger to shock-art, Evaristti once invited people to kill fish by pressing the button on a blender the fish were held in.
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On Queen St, John Budd noticed that the guys cutting down the trees outside the Midtown shopping centre were wearing tee-shirts which read: "Living Parks". "Looked more like they were killing trees to me," says Budd.
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A reader went into a prominent New Zealand bookstore to buy street maps for New York City and Los Angeles. He couldn't find any, so he asked at the counter, and was told: "Sorry sir, we only stock the maps of major international cities."
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Another reader writes: "Why do TV and radio folk - particularly sports reporters, and more particularly boxing reporters - pronounce "Las Vegas" as though the first word were the same as in "Los Angeles"? The different spelling is a clue. "Las" rhymes with "glass". "Los" is just like "loss". It's easy. Really."
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A British dentist who pulled out an elderly woman's teeth without anaesthetic "to teach her a lesson" has been expelled from the profession. David Quelch left the 87-year-old with blood pouring from her mouth after she made a complaint about previous treatment at his hands, a disciplinary hearing was told. His patient, a retired nurse, told the hearing: "I told him I had pain, and he told me he was going to extract my teeth. I objected, I didn't think it was necessary. He ignored my remarks and pulled out the tooth. I was bleeding profusely." She added: "I said I didn't want my tooth removed, he pushed me back, pushing me hard across my chest and extracted the second tooth. All I wanted was a filling." (Source: Telegraph.co.uk)
