Sideswipe: May 13: All too hard ...

A reader writes ... "It's just all too hard to spend an extra 60 seconds to mow a square metre of council berm at the entrance to a walkway."

Weird weddings

I've said this before on here but they didn't have any tables or chairs. We had nowhere to sit or to put our plates down. Everyone had to hold their food standing up and put their drinks down on the ground. Since there were no chairs to make an aisle for her to walk down she just kind of strolled through the crowd while people were confused and talking. "Where are the chairs?" was the theme of the wedding. I was a close friend so our group sent me to ask her why there were no tables and chairs and she simply said: "Oh you have to pay extra for that."

How to argue effectively online

Determined to win every argument on social media even when you're clearly wrong? According to The Daily Mash, here's how you do it ...
Quote dubious research: Don't just assume you're outgunned when you find yourself debating economics with a famous economics professor. You can still come out on top by quoting the ill-informed ramblings of some oddball's blog and mocking your opponent for not having read it.
Don't concede valid points: Recognising the value of what your opponent is saying is for losers and centrists. Winners steamroll over any and all interlocutors and paint their attempts to be reasonable as lunatic fringe madness.
Ignore facts: It's hard to be wrong when you pick and choose which facts are true or false depending on your beliefs. By turning a blind eye to a vast body of peer-reviewed research you can still claim that the Earth is flat or that the conclusion of Game of Thrones was brilliant.
Rally a lynch mob: If all else fails, gather together some like-minded knuckleheads and intimidate whoever disagrees with you into submission. You'll still be wrong of course, but at least now nobody will bother to engage with you.
Be the last one standing: Does the person you're arguing with, 144 tweets into the thread, tire of saying the same thing again and again and abandon the argument? That counts as a win. Add a few mocking, dismissive comments then move on triumphant to the next sucker.

Riffing off God creating Adam in the Sistine chapel

This glorious statue of New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford splitting the atom and discovering the nucleus is in the Qingpu Statue Garden, Shanghai, China. "Note that some artistic liberties were taken with Rutherford's appearance!" tweets Paul Halpern (@phalpern).

Did you know ...

1. Gwyneth Paltrow has admitted she was driven to extremes during quarantine. Things got dark. She admitted to drinking as many as two cocktails a night during lockdown (quinoa-based whiskey cocktails, of course); and even sometimes eating bread and pasta.
2. In order to determine if dogs feel jealousy, researchers at the University of Auckland made dogs watch them pet stuffed dogs. The dogs were indeed jealous of the stuffed dogs, pulling three times harder on a leash while their human appeared to be patting a rival.
3. There's an app that allows citizens of San Francisco to take pictures of any poo they spot on the sidewalk and send it to local authorities who dispatch someone to clean it up. It's called Snapcrap.
4. In 2006, American music video channel VH1 Classic held a charity fundraiser to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. One donor gave $35,000 and requested an hour of 99 Red Balloons back-to-back, which the channel honoured.