Sideswipe: July 19: Lookalike faces

This sunhat seems to smile. Photo / Supplied

A blog and a book dedicated to inanimate objects which unintentionally look like faces. (Via Faces In Places)

Checkout chicks

A reader has only just noticed the latest episode of Meet the Colemans - Countdown supermarkets' soap opera-styled ads - where the family are planning a trip to the Gold Coast in the Countdown ads. "Well they're no Anchor Family, that's for sure, but the most recent ad on the box features a dream sequence that made me cringe. The adolescent schoolboy imagines the checkout chick he likes running down the beach in a bikini - to make a meal out of the rise and fall of her breasts in motion it's all in slo-mo. I wasn't offended by it, but I did wonder how appropriate it was to portray a school-aged character in this way? The ads I assume are trying to appeal to women (we do the majority of the grocery shopping) and I wonder if it made any other mother of teenage girls feel a bit icky?"

Owling success

"Owling" is the new "planking" - or is it all about mocking the social media propagated trends and the clamouring media coverage? Planking - you'll remember because our Prime Minister endorsed it - is lying face down somewhere weird or dangerous. It has allegedly been knocked off its perch by Owling, which involves perching on your haunches and staring blankly into the middle distance, presumably while in a strange location, and sharing photos of the result online. Owling is believed to have started in Australia. The original Planking Facebook page has over 560,000 fans. Owling has just a few thousand.

Chamber of lawsuits

* Author Nancy Stouffer caused a stink in 1999 claiming J.K. Rowling had created the Harry Potter series from a couple of her earlier books - The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly. Rowling won with the judgment after it was revealed Stouffer had backdated her manuscript to include the word "muggle".

* In 2002 Bashu Publishing House in China printed thousands of copies of a blatant counterfeit, Harry Potter and Leopard-walk-up-to-Dragon, which was a verbatim translation of Tolkien's The Hobbit. An anonymous "author" changed all the hobbit characters to Harry Potter and his friends. Bashu Publishing managed to sell thousands of copies before it was stopped, and was fined only $3500. (Via: Cracked.com/Legally Easy)

Card sharps

Paul Christoffel bought a birthday card from Whitcoulls and sent it to his niece with $20 for her birthday. Four days later it was returned marked "insufficient postage". "The guy behind the counter said that the envelope was 132mm high and the limit is 130mm. So who is at fault? Is it Whitcoulls for knowingly selling cards it knows are too high to be accepted as standard letters by NZ Post? Or is it NZ Post for being so petty?"