Sideswipe: October 1: Enough to give you lockjaw

Vanilla Ice may be parodying himself

Reduce Your Ice, Ice Baby! 90s rap superstar Vanilla Ice has teamed up with Samsung to rerelease his hit single Ice, Ice Baby, delivering a powerful message "with a sustainable edge". The brand-new single and music video sees the rapper encourage viewers to make a small change with a big difference, calling on us all to increase the temperature of our freezers and lower the collective global carbon footprint. (Go here to watch the ad https://www.air.tv/watch?v=VPxGk4IGTyCaGv3miBEMZw)

The Best Interview Comebacks

Joe Pyne interviewing Frank Zappa;
Pyne: "I guess your long hair makes you a woman."
Zappa: "I guess your wooden leg makes you a table."

Context: John Oliver from HBO interviews Stephen Hawking;
Oliver: And there may be a universe where I am more intelligent than you?
Hawking: There may even be a universe where you are funny.

David Letterman: I'm not as dumb as I look.
Tina Fey: How could you be?

Zach Galifianakis: "It must kinda stink that you can't run three times."
Barack Obama: "No, actually I think it's a good idea. If I ran a third time would be kinda like doing a third hangover movie. Didn't really work out very well, didn't it."

Now that's what I call off-street parking

Old school teachers

1. A reader writes: "When attending Waimea College, we had a French teacher and if we did or said something wrong or butchered the language she would come up to us and say, 'I'll shake you until your teeth rattle.' With a second mistake you'd be threatened to be 'Shot at dawn', and the third mistake 'Shot at dawn without any breakfast', which was my punishment many times. My limited French was understood in New Calendonia, Tahiti and France - and my most used phrase? 'Can you speak English as I cannot speak French', and I was told, 'You say that very well'."

2. "My report from the early 60s private college included the following comments from three separate teachers," writes John Worrall of Kerikeri. "An inveterate loafer, Consistently slothfull, and Fancies himself as a buffoon, rather than a worker."

3. Ron Murray recalls from his time as a teacher in the early 80s, where a particular boy was referred to in a report as "a model student - a smaller, non-working version of the real thing".

Classic faux pas

A Guardian reader writes: "In a music shop, I asked for the score of Beethoven's Second Symphony. Assistant: "Have you got the name? It's not a lot to go on."