Sideswipe: October 13: Cool as bro...

First magic mushroom incident

The first recorded mushroom trip in Britain was in 1799. It was unintentional. A man was gathering small field mushrooms from the park and cooking them up into a breakfast broth for his wife and young family. But this particular morning, an hour after they had finished it, everything began to turn very strange. He noticed black spots and odd flashes of colour interrupting his vision; he became disorientated and had difficulty in standing and moving around. His family were complaining of stomach cramps and cold, numb extremities. The notion of poisonous toadstools leapt to his mind, and he staggered out into the streets to seek help. By chance a physician was passing and the scene he witnessed was so unusual that he wrote about it in the Medical and Physical Journal a few months later. "The family's symptoms were rising and falling in giddy waves, their pupils dilated, their pulses fluttering, and their breathing laboured, periodically returning to normal before accelerating into another crisis. All were fixated on the fear that they were dying except for the youngest, the 8-year-old son named as "Edward S.", whose symptoms were the strangest of all. He had eaten a large portion of the mushrooms and was "attacked with fits of immoderate laughter" which his parents' threats could not subdue." (Via Strange Company)

Rain worse than Covid…

Strange but true …

1. An Advance NZ candidate for Wairarapa believes the Lake Ōhau fire was caused by a direct energy weapon.
2. Wisdom-tooth prevalence is dropping as humans experience what some scientists are calling a "microevolution".
3. There is a security camera on the election billboard for National's Simeon Brown.
4. A judge in Oklahoma has ruled that forcing someone to listen to "Baby Shark" on repeat is inhumane.
5. There's a set of traffic lights in Dresden, Germany, that has remained red since its installation 30 years ago.

Bodice ripper for 2020

Apparently "Dr Alexa Ashingtonford is a part of a crack team of scientists tasked with finding the cure to the devastating coronavirus. Little did she know she would end up falling in love with it…" Yes, it's a parody.