Sideswipe: July 10: News of the future

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The outfit worn by 3 News presenter Carolyn Robinson on Sunday night reminded Catherine of the uniforms from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Cashing in his chips

A robber who broke into a Washington City Subway left police a convenient "trail of potato chips" leading to his location. Unable to break into the cash register, the man grabbed nine bags of chips and fled. When police arrived, "a trail of chips led to the suspect, who was on the steps of his old high school a couple of blocks away", according to a police report.

Pennies from heaven

Thomas Daigle delivered a pair of boxes to the steps of his Massachusetts bank containing more than 62,000 pennies (US$620, or $778), which he had collected over 35 years. He began collecting an average of 2.5 pennies each day and stored them in a wooden box. But after a few years, the box began to break apart due to the weight. So he bought a pair of steel military rocket launcher ammo boxes to hold the pennies. At the time he delivered them to the bank he reckoned each box weighed 181kg. To explain his life-long collection, he said he just wanted to make his last mortgage payment "memorable". (Source: Time.com)

Scrambling for an explanation

Vicki Davey, of Waihi, boiled up some eggs from her local egg farm and found a perfectly hard-boiled mini egg, complete with solid shell, inside the bigger egg. Maybe some eggspert (sorry, had to) knows how this happens.

Book fair works charm

When Bridget was 8 years old she started reading the Harry Potter series. "Another eight years and literally 100 reads later, my Harry Potter books are quite truthfully falling apart and in need of replacement," she declares. "Having contacted all the major book sellers, surfed the net, and asked everyone I know, I came up with nothing. As a last-ditch attempt, I went to the Northcote Rotary book fair. I was gutted to see a man leaving with the exact books I had come to get! To prove a mother will do anything for her child, mine pursued this man and asked if he would sell them to us. He did - at a super-low price! I didn't catch his name but would like to say thank you so much to the wonderful man ... I wish you a magical year."