Sideswipe: A culture thing?

Inappropriate cake decoration via CakeWrecks.com.

'Lazy and shameless'

A reader writes: "Over the past three days, I have seen three people wandering around supermarkets in pyjamas [one in Te Atatu on Sunday morning, and two in Oamaru at midday]. Is this a new trend that I'm not privy to? Have these people escaped from a hospital? Has the recession meant that they can't afford clothes? Or are they all simply lacking in dignity and etiquette? Cut it out: you look lazy and shameless!"

Drink-driving 'way of life'

The Montana House of Representatives passed a tough drink-driving bill in March to combat the state's high drink-driving rate, but it came over the objection of Representative Alan Hale, who owns a bar. He complained that such tough laws "are destroying small businesses" and "destroying a way of life that has been in Montana for years and years". Until 2005, drinking while driving was common and legal outside of towns as long as the driver wasn't drunk. (Source: News of the Weird)

To the moon and back twice

Getting a handle on the size of the US national debt: "President Ronald Reagan once famously said that a stack of $1000 bills equivalent to the US Government's debt would be about 84km high. That was 1981. Since then, the national debt has climbed to $14.3 trillion. In $1000 bills, it would now be more than 1130km tall. In $1 bills, the pile would reach to the moon and back twice. "The net worth of Bill Gates, roughly around US$56 billion ($70 billion), could only cover the deficit for 15 days," said Jason Peuquet, a policy analyst with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. (Source: Reuters)

Down-to-Earth abilities

According to Smithsonian, one of the biggest myths about the brain is that men are from Mars, women are from Venus. "Some of the sloppiest, shoddiest, most-biased, research in the history of science purports to provide biological explanations for differences between men and women," it reads. "Across countries - and across time - the more prevalent the belief is that men are better than women in math, the greater the difference in girls' and boys' math scores ... Certain sex differences are enormously important to us when we're looking for a mate, but when it comes to most of what our brains do most of the time - perceive the world, direct attention, learn new skills, encode memories, communicate (no, women don't speak more than men do), judge other people's emotions (no, men aren't inept at this) - men and women have almost entirely overlapping and fully Earth-bound abilities."