Sideswipe: January 23: Is it real?

False advertising. Photo / Supplied

What you see and what you get are rather different, says a gobsmacked reader.

What the deuce?

Tony Waring of Mt Albert writes that he and his wife were watching the Australian Open the other night. "Aussie battler Lleyton Hewitt was playing a chap called Stebe from Germany, who had just hit a winner, and the commentator remarked "... Well, that's taken the wind out of the crowd's sails." My wife exclaimed "they can't say that!", thinking he had said "... that's taken the wind out of the kraut's sails".

Magnificent mondegreens

1. As a hormonally charged teenager, I was sure that Peter Sarstedt's Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)? had the line "and you dip your nipples in brandy" rather than the actual (and less interesting) "and you sip your Napoleon brandy".

2. A friend thought the lyrics to Icehouse's Great Southern Land were "great swollen gland"!

3. I thought Lorraine must have been a pretty rotten girlfriend for Jimmy Cliff ... "I can see clearly now Lorraine has gone".

4. I heard Boney M's Rivers of Babylon asking, "Now how can we sing the Lord's song in Australia?" ("In a strange land".)

5. My son's version of Outkast's line "shake it like a Polaroid picture" became "shake it like a polar bear ninja".

Bombshell for the bobby

"It had been several years since we'd gelignited the last tree stump to clear the way for building our pig sties," recalls John Lewis. "The ministry-approved explosives store was hidden by shoulder-high undergrowth which I scythed away one morning. A strong smell of almonds was coming from the sticky ooze under the door - not good. I eased away the disintegrating cardboard boxes and found almost 250 sausages filled with liquid, not the pink marzipan they should have resembled. I carried them very carefully away from buildings then told my stepfather who prepared a fuse and detonator. The traffic on the main road stopped. The mushroom cloud towered. The village bobby arrived half an hour later, red and perspiring. He'd had to cycle 5km from the next village where everything also had stopped. Ooops!"

Unfit for snatch-and-run

Peter Stevens of Cambridge in England was in his car when a thief opened the back door and grabbed his laptop. The 34-year-old runner and IT expert was surprised when he caught up with the thief after just 225m. Realising the game was up, the puffed-out criminal dropped the laptop. Mr Stevens said: "I was appalled by how unfit this guy was. I thought it would take a lot longer to catch up with him. If you go into the snatch-and-run business at least try and get fit or play to your strengths and go for something less energetic."

Vial-dropping chopper

Ken writes: "If the author of 'Chopper jaw-dropper' had looked carefully she may have seen a sample vial lowered from the hovering chopper into the ocean. This little helicopter visits all of Auckland's east coast beaches to gather water samples. It has done so for years."