Sideswipe: Union sausage sizzle

The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union sent very different notices to an employer (top) and a union member (bottom) for exactly the same meeting. I know which do I'd rather attend.

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The millionth word in the English language, according to the Global Language Monitor website, is Web 2.0, meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. The finalists all had a minimum of 25,000 citations with the necessary breadth of geographic distribution. Coming close was the word slumdog (a formerly disparaging, now endearing, comment on those living in the slums of India) and jai ho! - the Hindi phrase signifying the joy of victory, used as an exclamation, sometimes rendered as "It is accomplished", both made popular by the film Slumdog Millionaire. Other finalists included: cloud computing - the "cloud" has been technical jargon for the internet; octomom - media shorthand for the California mother who had octuplets; greenwashing - rebranding an old, often inferior, product as environmentally friendly; sexting - sending email or text messages with sexual content; defriend - social networking term for cutting the connection with a friend; zombie banks - banks that would be dead without government intervention and cash.

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Road signs: Stuart can't believe that on State Highway 2, heading towards the Coromandel, there is a sign nearly every couple of kilometres suggesting that if you're tired you should pull over at a rest stop. "I was very tired on one trip and all I could see were the signs, but there was no rest area to be found for the majority of the trip," he says.

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Final flatmate from hell: "We had a guy living with us who was dead-set on being more efficient. Instead of wasting time drying the knives and forks individually, he decided drying them in the microwave would work better. He only tried this once, as our microwave had to be replaced. He would also leave the house in the morning with a bowl of cereal, get to uni and not know what to do with the empty bowl, so would throw it in the bushes. We were constantly replacing bowls. Another time he thought he would cook a pizza in a hurry, took it out of the cardboard packet and put it straight on the hot stove element. It not only didn't cook, but the plastic melted into the element and don't we all love the smell of burnt plastic? Luckily his wife now looks after the kitchen stuff in his house."

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Allison Dobbie writes in response to the Orewa laboratory testing centre which removed magazines to stop the spread of swine flu. "The Ministry of Health had this advice on a possible bird flu pandemic in 2006. 'Regarding transmission of an influenza virus via books and other loan items - transmission from contaminated objects is unlikely. Influenza viruses may live up to two days on moist surfaces but transmission is difficult and would require object-to-hand-to-face contact. Good hand hygiene practices should certainly be taken into consideration in all planning'."

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See today's Herald cartoon