Sideswipe: January 31: Exceptions to the rule

No dogs sign at Flaxmill Bay, Coromandel.

Sign warning of a $300 fine if dogs are on the beach from 9am to 6pm at Flaxmill Bay, Coromandel. Photo / Supplied

Hiding from War

A Russian man who didn’t want to answer Putin’s call to arms and join his country’s war against Ukraine has been living alone deep in the middle of the woods for almost four months. Adam Kalinin (alias) was against the war in Ukraine from the very beginning. He was actually arrested for two weeks and fined for displaying a banner that read “No to war” on the outside of his apartment building. But when Vladimir Putin signed a mobilisation order calling roughly 300,000 Russian men to war against Ukraine, Kalinin knew he needed to find a way to avoid being sent to the front line. Financial issues, his friends, and the general idea of leaving his homeland prevented the young IT specialist from running to another country, so he did the next best thing he could think of – kissed his wife goodbye and hid in the middle of a freezing forest.

It must be an election year

Wearing a pair of very clean gumboots, MP Simeon Brown gets stuck into the flood clean up.

Can chatbots do this?

“Politicians have no need for a chatbot to reply to members of the public, they have staff to do that,” Sue Firth tells the Guardian. “Working at the Department of Trade in the 1980s, part of my job was to draft replies for the minister. The recipient of one letter I had drafted complained later that it was a “masterpiece of non-answer”. When my boss saw this, he congratulated me on having “cracked it”.

True Kiwi dadding

In case you missed it, when Chippy, our new PM, signed on at Government house, his dad, when asked by Newshub if he was proud of his son, responded that he was “quite proud of him but we are also proud of his brother”. Classic parenting trope, right there.