Sideswipe: Extinction of the dinosaurs with beans

Mass extinction meal

Smart-as pets

1. My cat, Tuffy, stole a piece of bread off the stove and put it on the floor next to the cabinet. She then stared at it intensely, and motionlessly for an hour. We thought that was creepy. Then a mouse came out from behind the cabinet to get the bread and she pounced on it! She was using the bread as bait! This is the same cat who routinely burns her tongue licking light bulbs, hisses at them, and keeps licking.

2. I taught my dog to play hide-and-seek. I would hide a rawhide somewhere in the house and he would search the house until he found it and would then bring it back to me. I would then tell him to hide it and he would. One day I was searching for the damn rawhide for like 10 minutes and could not find it. Eventually, I had to give up totally confused. Next morning I open a dresser drawer to get a pair of shorts and there it is. He saw a slightly cracked drawer, dropped it in, closed it, and outsmarted a human. I was very proud.

3. My brother was sitting at the table eating cake when he hears our dog barking at the front door. He gets up to check it out (usually means someone is about to ring the doorbell) and then our dog sprints back to the unsupervised cake and eats it all in one bite.

Sirens bad for business

Mafia members in the Italian city of Naples have reportedly threatened ambulance crews to stop using sirens as the noise is too similar to that of police sirens and interferes with "business". First responders have started asking for police escorts, after numerous reports of armed mafia crews threatening and even assaulting ambulances over their use of sirens and light signals. The noise disturbs drug-pushers and scares away customers. Such cases have been reported for years, but the problems has intensified recently, due to the Covid-19 crisis. One traumatised ambulance driver told Italian media that he was driving an ambulance with its siren on when he found himself flanked by two men on a motorcycle, one of whom banged on the ambulance window and threatened to kill him.

Lighthouse location

"Can any of your readers can tell me where this lighthouse is situated?" asks Kathryn Mansell. "It appears on the TV ONE introductions to the 6pm news every evening."

Viking poo unearthed

The largest fossilised human faeces ever found is known as the Lloyds Bank coprolite - because it was found in 1972 beneath the site of what was to become the York branch of Lloyds Bank. It measured 20cm long and 5cm wide and analysis of the stool has indicated that its producer subsisted largely on meat and bread while the presence of several hundred parasitic eggs suggests they were riddled with intestinal worms. A paleoscatologist said: "This is the most exciting piece of excrement I've ever seen ... In its own way, it's as irreplaceable as the Crown Jewels." In 2003, it was dropped and broke into three pieces.