There's someone worse with numbers than I am

Numbers aren't my strong suit but the prices below don't seem to add up.



Seems smarter to pick up a 400ml bottle of lemon scented Palmolive dishwashing liquid from the left and save $1.75 rather than the same bottle from the right side to save only $1.

 

Perhaps Coles should reconsider stickering their specials during the wee hours of the morning when their staff are perhaps not wide awake?

 

Woof! Woof! AAAARGH.....!!!

The medical term given to the fear of dogs is Cynophobia.

Slugs and centipedes

David Attenborough told me today that slugs are hermaphrodites while centipedes have males and females. Useless information really, but it was something I didn't know before today.

Apparently most hermaphroditic animals are fish (not all of them but a far few species) or invertebrates including snails, worms and echinoderms (a marine invertebrate).

As a small aside, on 8 May this year David Attenborough will turn 89 years old! He was married at 24, and had two children, Robert and Susan. From this I'm assuming he wasn't a hermaphrodite.

Black tie tampons

The first time I needed to purchase sanitary products after giving birth to my son, I grabbed the usual coloured box from the shelf.

It wasn't until I got home that I realised a lot had changed in the 18-odd months since my last purchase. It seemed the tampons now wore dresses. Pretty little white wedding dresses.

I was a little unnerved. They'd been the same design forever, hadn't they? Now all of a sudden they were totally different. I wondered just how long I'd been out of it. Was this some kind of dream? Had I gotten a dodgy batch?

Maybe they were meant to be ghosts. Was it some kind of Halloween promotion? No, it wasn't October.

Lettuce inflation

Today was the first time I've seen the humble iceberg lettuce cost $3.48.

Right after my eyebrows had settled back down into their normal positions, I was filled with a vague sense that our farmers must be going through some tough times.

I guess I figure the price of lettuce is like an unofficial barometer of the farmers' situation.

In an effort to learn more, I found some interviews with growers on the Coles website.

Undoubtedly engineered to generate positive PR for the supermarket giant, I still found them interesting.

I learnt it takes 6-10 weeks for lettuces to be ready for harvesting from the commercial farm, and their ideal growing conditions are cool nights and sunny days.

 

What happened to the recorder?

Today I discovered that whoever lives in the house two doors down from me is not only learning the drums, they've taken up electric guitar. Either that or they're forming a band of beginners.

There's nothing quite like hearing the same rhythmical bang of a drum kit every day for hours at a time. Except perhaps what sounds like jerky chords being plucked repeatedly on an electric guitar.

What's the most annoying instrument your neighbour has been learning to play?

I imagine the bagpipes would make the ears bleed. Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoy the sound of a soulful lone piper or even a band of them.

I've been to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo (both the original in Scotland's capital and the travelling version in Sydney) and my nephew plays the pipes but I imagine the first time he or anyone else nestled it beneath their armpit it sounded pretty brutal.

I don't think I'd like a neighbour to play the harp. You might think it's sound calming but I reckon if it woke you up in the morning you might imagine you'd died in your sleep and start looking about for the pearly gates.

The tuba, trumpet, trombone or pretty much anything in the brass section might be a bit trying too. Remember, we're talking about learner musicians here, not skilled blues saxophonists.

The sax, clarinet and anything that uses a reed would also be risky. I learnt* to the play the clarinet for two years while I was in high school, so I know just how bad the instrument can sound with an old, chipped reed.

*A point of clarification, in this context when I say learnt, I mean I had a clarinet, turned up to lessons once a week and even ended up sitting in the school band for a while but I never practised and therefore never actually learnt to play anything more than Hot Cross Buns.