Sideswipe: February 23: Bainting the revenue trap

Whangarei park. Photo / Supplied

Now that's revenue gathering! A reader writes: "Here is a parking space, which the Whangarei District Council has created right beside a fire hydrant; meaning that any vehicle that parks in this spot receives a $40 ticket for parking too close to a fire hydrant. Many unsuspecting drivers have parked their vehicles in this space, paid for the allotted parking time allowed (two hours), but when they return to their cars they find they have been slapped with a $40 ticket!"

Going feral over wheelie bins

This reader sympathises with the woman who was harassed for depositing her bag of doggie do in a nearby wheelie bin: "I'm amazed at how territorial people are with their wheelie bins. I was walking down a street in Mt Eden once and dropped an iceblock stick in a kerbside wheelie bin. Cue banging on windows. Really people, get a grip. And if you ever want to add a small amount of rubbish to mine, feel free."

Pick up your own, er, rubbish

"I am with the owner of the bin on this," writes a reader not from Mt Eden. "If you have a dog you take your dog s*** home to YOUR bin. How disgusting to put s*** into another person's bin. She obviously couldn't face lugging her bag of poo back to her house. We had this happen just after the bin had been emptied and had to put up with a bag of poo festering for a week. Not our dog so why should we deal with the toilet habits of someone else's pet (or baby for that matter!) I guess we should be grateful the woman picked it up!"

What we believed as children

1. I believed a yam was a kind of insect related to the huhu grub and refused to eat them. It wasn't until I was a teenager and saw them in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket that I learned the truth.

2. On a farm my younger daughter and I watched a cow give birth, then the mother cow eat the afterbirth ... looking worried [my daughter] asked what happened to a human's afterbirth ... I replied, 'it's okay - in the hospital they give you a knife and fork'.

3. My poppa has brown hair, but one brown eyebrow and one white eyebrow. As a kid he told me his eyebrow was white [because] when he was off exploring he slept out in the snow. It was so cold so he was all wrapped up in a blanket, and during the night his blanket slipped off one eyebrow and it froze. When he woke up it was white.

4. When I was young we lived up a long driveway. My mum and elder sister told me that "mailbox" meant that only a male could collect the letters. So every day I had to make the trek.