SIDELINES...

PERSONAL SERVICES

Teenage dog walking entrepreneur Lucy Hignett, 19, got a rather different response than she expected when she placed an ad for her services in the local parish magazine. A typo substituted an “N” for the “L” in “dog walking” and as a result she was inundated with “disgusting messages.” A print worker at the magazine said, “No one did it maliciously.” Sun, 3 Mar 2020.

HEARTLESS HERO

When Argentine football deity Diego Maradona died in 2020, he was apparently buried without his heart according to a book written by a doctor, Nelson Castro. The heart was removed to foil a plot by fans of his final team, Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata, to dig up his grave and steal it. vice.com, 24 Nov 2021.

FACEBOOK OF THE DEAD

In October Facebook revealed that it had rebranded its parent company as “Meta”, causing much hilarity and a flurry of memes in Israel. In Hebrew “Meta” means “dead”. Guardian, 30 Oct 2021.

PIG MAYHEM

Lightcliffe Golf Club near Halifax had to close the course when it was invaded by two escaped Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs. The marauding beasts pushed golf bags and trolleys over after emerging from woods beside the course and attacked a golfer, leaving him with a deep scratch on his leg, before retreating, only to return two days later. This time they bit the greens director and besieged the clubhouse. They were eventually rounded up by police when they moved on to disrupting traffic on a neighbouring road, but officers have been unable to trace the pigs’ owners. BBC News, 25 Nov 2021.