KEY POINTS:
Sandy snapped this photo from her recent trip to Vietnam, where anything and everything is transported on motorcycles, including oversized vases.
* * *
From the Sydney Morning Herald: "The Kiwis are not only coming, but their dastardly plot to infiltrate local government is documented in family
photographs across the leafy North Shore," writes Peter Attwater of Sydney. During a ceremony at Ku-ring-gai Council recently, his friends - an English family of five - had just received their Australian citizenship documentation and posed with the mayor for a photograph. "A helpful councillor came forward with a flag suggesting it would make a nice prop for the photograph," he writes. The family agreed, but asked whether he had an Australian flag. "Oh my God," said the councillor, "We've been using a New Zealand flag all night."
* * *
On Friday a Herne Bay reader began cooking and noticed the flames on the gas hob were orange - not blue. "Knowing this was not normal, but not being an expert, I called Mercury Energy who reassured me that there was no fault. Still my internal alarm bell was ringing, so I looked it up online, to find to my horror that gas that burns orange instead of blue indicates a potentially harmful or even fatal build-up of carbon monoxide. Shouldn't the Mercury Energy customer representative know this sort of thing?"
* * *
Dave snapped this on Old North Road near Kumeu. "The 'branch' manager of the road painter obviously had a day off ... Guess the contractor gets paid by the metre of road paint, not the quality of the work."
* * *
Strange security (non) threat #3: When Craig Taylor stepped off a plane in Sydney, the air hostess gave him a small bottle of orange juice that was left over. "I then went to the security checkpoint, as I was travelling on to Auckland. As the bag passed through the x-ray, the security officer exclaimed, "he's got a bottle of drink!" I was given the option of "skolling" the item or surrendering it. I surrendered it - then took 12 paces into the secure area and bought another one from the first shop I came to."
* * *
Strange security (non) threat #4: "On two extensive overseas trips my husband has carried a Stanley knife in his camera bag and has never been picked up at any airport including Heathrow, Paris, Copenhagen, Singapore, Auckland, Sydney, Dubai - the list is endless," writes Mia.
* * *
An environmentally conscious reader writes: "To the lady who sat in her BMW X5, at the Mairangi Bay bus stop - you had your high-performance, gas guzzling 4WD on for the full 12 minutes you talked to your girlfriend out of the passenger window."
* * *
Today's Webpick: You Tube actually started in 1985 according to this clip. Watch it here.
These are the very best online videos from Ana's online magazine Spare Room.
