Sideswipe: December 31: Allegedly somewhere in Karemea on the West Coast

Allegedly somewhere in Karemea on the West Coast.

More true confessions

1. I lost my wedding ring riding my bike home from work. I had my wife and kids out looking for it in the pouring rain. I found it in my pocket and pretended to pick it up from the gutter and everyone was relieved and happy for me. Never told them the truth.

2. I was in charge of restructuring at a major company and had to pick between two offices which one would be closed down. I pretended to agonise over the decision but actually I picked the one that was in a town that voted for Brexit. Took me 5 minutes tops.

3. While working for IBM distribution we used to challenge each other to use the most excessive or inappropriate packaging possible. I won by shipping a software licence single A4 sheet on a pallet.

4. My now ex-wife's engagement ring was 5 zircon fake diamonds and cost 50 bucks. She thought they were real diamonds all through our marriage. Bet she knows otherwise now though.

5. I am the chief technology officer of a major household name company, responsible for cybersecurity on multiple critical systems. All my passwords for everything are "Password123".

6. When someone in the doctor's waiting room is called, I look them up on Facebook. It passes the time.

(Via @fesshole)

The danger of gender reveal parties

2019 was the year when gender-reveal parties — where parents-to-be announce the sex of their forthcoming spawn to their loved ones — grew so extravagant that they became dangerous. In July, Australian police released a video taken on the country's Gold Coast, where last year a car emitting blue smoke to indicate the coming birth of a boy burst into flames. In September, in Texas, a crop-duster plane stalled and crashed after dumping hundreds of gallons of pink water to mark the arrival of a girl. In October, in Iowa, a homemade explosive device that was supposed to shoot off coloured powder detonated during the party, and one of its metal components hit a woman on the head, killing her on contact. Amid the wreckage, one began to wonder whether, as our understanding of gender has become more fluid, these completely preventable disasters were the result of increasingly extreme attempts to assert gender's immutability. (Source: The New Yorker)

Enjoy the symmetry of a lifetime

Keiron Trigwell writes: "With the end of 2019 rapidly approaching I was thinking about the symmetry of 2020 in terms of having matching double-digit numbers, and realised this is highly unusual for two reasons:

1) The last time this happened was 1919 and it will not happen again in our lifetime, as there are 101 years between each occurrence so the next is 2121.

2) The last time it happened with two numbers ending in '0' was 1010, and this will not occur again until 3030 as the interval between each is 1010 years!"