Sideswipe: October 12: Vegemite Pareidolia

"Fresh jar of Vegemite and look a cutie is waiting to say hello!" delights @andrewr124xx.

Office Party Fails

Remember the office party? Collegial IRL get-togethers for banter, eats and drinks? Ah, that's what we used to do in the old days to keep morale up. Now we've done away with morale completely! On The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon is reminiscing with #OfficePartyFails.
1. "I had never been to a sushi restaurant and I was eating Edamame and realised that I was eating the ones people had already chewed."
2. "At the Christmas party I was voted most likely to leave food in the refrigerator until it got mouldy. I won Tupperware."
3. "Wore a red tie and black shirt to our Christmas party. Turns out so did the waiters. Somebody gave me their drink order."
4. "Co-worker got so drunk she started massaging our boss's bald head like a crystal ball and telling fortunes."

Reach around

Old-school teachers

1. "At my Scottish high school we had a geography teacher who was a bit of a sadist, always armed with a thick Lochgelly belt," writes Von Cassidy. "If you forgot your books, however, he would kindly give you a choice – the belt or lines. The offending pupil invariably chose a whack or two of the strap, painful as it was, because writing his lines was much more painful – 'I must remember never to forget to remember to bring my geography equipment at the appropriate times during this term' - 50 or 100 times, depending on his mood. I still remember those lines 60+ years later."

2. Ian Beattie, of Hikurangi, taught at a rural high school and encountered a "cane" in the tech drawing room. "I picked it up in front of the rowdy class, they froze. I grinned, snapped it into many pieces and said: 'If I needed this thing to beat knowledge into you, you can stay ignorant'.  I was the first technical teacher who had not threatened them and my 12 lovely years in the game, which I shouldn't have left, were delightful."

3. A reader writes: "On the school bus to Gore to learn woodwork my mates a year older told us youngies about the woodwork teacher who was known to throw chisels at errant boys. Sure enough, when I got into the classroom the blackboard had three chisel marks, one a hole right through. Best behaved class I was ever in."

Long eggs

Jill Mandeno writes: "In the Seventies, I had a good friend in the East End of London whose family made these tubular eggs. They were used to make pork and egg pies in a long rectangular shape for the pub and lunch trade. They were designed so that whenever you cut a slice of pie, it had a perfect slice of egg in the middle. They considered their technique to be a trade secret!"