Sideswipe: January 18: Fake picture that went viral

Photo / Supplied

"This one really cracked me up," writes Rozalin-Mohanty on Quora.com. "The picture shows a picture of an Angolan witch spider, or a giant Hawaiian cane spider, on the wall of a house in Texas. Rumours were widely circulated about how this spider eat cats and dogs, and that it took several gunshots to kill the creature! In reality, it is just a photo-shopped image created by artist Paulo Santo Maria. He posted the image on his Facebook just for fun, but it went viral in no time. Today, the largest known spider alive is the goliath birdeater tarantula from South America. According to the Guinness World Records, the largest of its kind is 28cm long. Also, spiders could simply never grow that big due to biological constraints. So, don't panic."

Deep thoughts in aisle three

A letter to the editor at the Telegraph: "I was assisting my 16-year-old daughter with her homework when she received a text from mum, which read: 'What do you want from life?'. This was an unexpected and profound question for an exam-sitting teenager. We debated various answers - wealth, fulfilment, love, all three. Five minutes later, she received a second message, blaming predictive text for correcting the word Lidl*." David Lavelle, Coneythorpe, North Yorkshire. *Lidl is a discount supermarket chain.

Little knowledge can be dangerous

A reddit user says: "My colleague's twin sons are about 3 years old. They regularly walk up to the flat screen TV and swipe their hands across the screen in an effort to change the channel. It's incredible how frame of reference can change your experiences." Another user replies: "Thanks, I just figured out why my TV has fingerprints going across it in a swipe pattern. I have a 3-year-old."

When life goes sour: Via Bad Newspaper.

Are you missing a photo album?

A reader writes: "A couple of weeks before Christmas I found a photo album on Richmond Rd in Grey Lynn. It looked as if it had just fallen from a vehicle. The photo album is a complete record of the life of a young lady, from early childhood to early 20s. The only name on the album is Kate. The only other clues are that Kate seemed to be quite proficient at sports and appears in many team photos for St Cuthbert's College in 1993/1994 and was in Form 4A. It seems a shame that this piece of somebody's life has been lost - could you help find the owner?"