Sideswipe

Valentine's day cards for serious fans of television crime drama Law and Order and Special Victims Unit. (source: www.brandonbird.com)

A Grey Lynn reader was pleased to see police outside their school this week, as were the kids. She writes: "Very excited to see our local policeman, our young 5-year-old yells out, 'Hello Constable Dean!', to which our 3-year-old echoes (slightly mishearing ) 'Hello Constable Bean.' "

* * *

Kath Kennedy shares a blond moment: "The other day I drove to the local video shop to get a couple of DVDs, then went back to work. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. Later, my boss comes back to the office and asks me where my car is. I tell him it's in the carpark and he says it's not. I go to the window and carefully scan the car park. He's right, my car isn't there. I check the other car park. Still no car. I panic and announce that my car has been stolen from right outside the office. Trying to calm me down, my boss suggests I think back to when I last saw it. I started thinking, then the penny dropped. I'd driven up the road, parked at the video store, got the DVDs, then walked back to work leaving my car there".

* * *

"The reputation of Polynesia is on the line here", said Foreign Minister Winston Peters at a meeting in Suva last week about the tensions between the local Army and Government. Well, it would be except Fiji cannot be described as Polynesian because of its Melanesian links. But the minister isn't the only one getting geographically confused about all those islands. A cover line in the latest Metro magazine referring to film director Toa Fraser came up with the nifty phrase "Polywood", though Fraser himself is of Fijian-Pakeha ancestry and his film No. 2 is about a Fijian matriarch and her clan. Though it is set in Mt Roskill, which, of course, is in Polynesia. And talking of No.2, the positive review of the film at the Sundance Film Festival by the US movie industry bible Variety referred to the film's suburban Auckland setting as "Mt Raskil" - the confusion springing from the personalised number plate "Raskil" of one of the characters.

* * *

One reader shares her previous attempts at Valentine's Day romance: "One year I tried to do something special without spending any money. I made a salad and painstakingly cut all the tomatoes into heart shapes. No comment. So I asked my dearest what he thought of my Valentine efforts. His reply: 'I thought you'd cut out the bad bits'."

* * *

Does entomologist and "Bug Man" Ruud Kleinpaste approve of what his mate "Mr Wet and Forget" Rod Jenden is getting up to on the bug extermination front? Bug-lovin' Kleinpaste lends his smiling face to help flog Jenden's "Hitman" organic weedkiller. But what about two of Jenden's newer products? "Bugga Off" - which apparently lays down an impenetrable carpet of death for any insect. Then there's "Miss Muffet's Revenge" a chemical which keeps killing spiders for up to four months - inside and outside the house. Kleinpaste warned in 2001 of the potentially apocalyptic consequences of this approach: "We need insects. They sure don't need us. They've been here a lot longer than we have, and they'll be here when we're gone. And there is not a hope in hell that we can survive on this Earth without them."