Sideswipe: December 30: Showdown on walking frames

A collision between two women using walking frames earlier this month has resulted in a felony charge of intimidation and misdemeanour counts of assault and criminal mischief for Joyce Marie Renfroe, 62, of Hamilton, Montana. Photo / Thinkstock

Showdown on walking frames

A collision between two women using walking frames earlier this month has resulted in a felony charge of intimidation and misdemeanour counts of assault and criminal mischief for Joyce Marie Renfroe, 62, of Hamilton, Montana. At the time of the alleged incident, Renfroe's roommate, Jeanne Hatfield, was standing in a hallway with her walking frame when Renfroe exited her bedroom with her own walker. According to court records, Renfroe told Hatfield to get out of the way or she was going to run her over. Renfroe then proceeded down the hallway with her walker and ran into Hatfield, who fell to the ground, breaking her walker and Life Alert necklace. Renfroe told an investigating officer they had been fighting over finances. (Source: Ravalli Republic.)

Smart and stressed

New studies are out that say the tendency to worry is a sign of a certain kind of intelligence. According to a recent paper in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, there's a link between anxiety and intelligence. A team at Ontario's Lakehead University surveyed 126 undergraduate students to measure their intelligence and stress levels and concluded there was a correlation between verbal intelligence and worrying. The team also found an interesting correlation headed in the opposite direction. The more people replay past events, the lower they ranked on non-verbal intelligence. It is possible that more verbally intelligent individuals are able to consider past and future events in greater detail, leading to more intense rumination and worry. Individuals with higher non-verbal intelligence may be stronger at processing the non-verbal signals from individuals they interact with in the moment, leading to a decreased need to re-process past social encounters. To break it down, verbally intelligent people are more tortured by their memory for detail. People who are better at picking up non-verbal cues, however, have less of a need to replay past events. (Source: NY Magazine.)

A reader writes: "Takapuna Beach is blessed by the absence of commercial signage (save the odd real estate and building contractor sign) so seems like a fart in church to come upon the local MP promoting her job retention scheme."

Bet this irked Ponsonby shoppers.