Sideswipe: Seeby uses the common touch

Wealthy entrepreneur and man about town Seeby Woodhouse writes on Facebook:

"Just bought a piece of carrot cake. Then decided I didn't want it as don't want to be fat. Then tried to give it to a homeless person rather than let it go to waste. Then it turned out the person wasn't homeless - just really scruffy - and they were NOT impressed. FML!!"


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Dan sticks his neck out: "What did women talk about before they got pregnant or had babies? Is it just me, or do all conversations post-pregnancy involve only their children? And do they truly believe that I, as someone not related, am interested at all in how long they sleep at night and/or whether they're on solids yet? ... Not trying to offend anyone, but it was a long flight ..."

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Pet peeves (continued)

1. People who forward emails - jokes, stories or whatever that have been forwarded dozens of times - and don't strip off the footers and hotmail advertising that clutters the bottom. I clean up the emails I pass on.

2. Society or media figures who refer to their partners by terms such as as "The Engineer", "The Blonde", "The Irishman" etc ... It grates my nerves.

3. Windscreen washers at intersections. Surely it's time for a referendum like "Should running over a windscreen washer, as part of keeping NZ streets tidy, be a criminal offence?"

4. Loyalty cards. Flybuys, AA Card, Onecard, Country Road, Homestore, Starbucks, Pumpkin Patch ... the list goes on and on and on ... The rewards are minimal, and the amount of spam email, mail and txt messages these loyalty cards generate is criminal.

5. People who wait for the lift by standing right in front of the lift doors. The fact that there might be people inside wanting to get out seems to escape them.

6. Having your kids record the message on the home answer-phone - painful, precocious and tedious, especially when they try to sound like adults.

7. Supermarket trolley-leaners. Seems to sum up their whole attitude to life ... lazy.

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A reader responds to a pet peeve: "To the person who hates 'mouth breathers', some of us cannot help it. I for one have Nasal problems as well as other medical problems that prevent me from breathing from my nose ... I am sure you have your own flaws, but some of us who aren't smokers or have bad breath genuinely cannot breath through our noses."

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An elderly woman has lost her life savings after accidentally throwing away £12,000 ($28,500) into her wheelie bin. It then ended up being buried in landfill in West Sussex.

A team of 14 bin men spent 45 minutes searching through 25 tonnes of rubbish at the waste transfer facility in Lancing in a desperate bid to find the un-named woman's money. But the bundles of £50 notes in a blue shopping bag had been lost days before the alarm was raised and would have been lost under tons of rubbish at a landfill site in Warnham, near Horsham in West Sussex.

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View today's Herald cartoon

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