More preposterous conversation, this time brought to the mind of Tony Moo, of North Sydney, by our continuing discussion of the police suspect's missing T-shirt. Tony's friend recently emailed him from Sydney Airport along these lines: ''I was checking in at the gate when an airport employee asked 'Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?', to which I replied, 'If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?' He smiled knowingly and nodded. 'That's why we ask'.''

''On a door at the Benedictine monks' monastery at New Norcia, 130-odd kilometres north of Perth,'' reports George Jaksic, of Drummoyne, ''a sign reads 'Please shut the door to prevent flies and goannas entering'.'' This is clearly a hazard unknown to the fifth-century patron saint of Europe, where, history tells us, gate-crashing goannas were few and far between.

It all seemed innocent enough on the surface, but is there more than meets the eye - or the laser scanner? Roger Ellis, of Orange, went to his local Woolworths last week, and having collected ''half a dozen items or so'', proceeded to the electronic self-checkout. All went well until he scanned the final purchase, a packet of frozen snow peas. ''The screen flashed up that the product was 'age restricted','' Roger tells us. ''While I was wondering how a packet of peas could be 'adults only', it then asked me to enter my date of birth.'' Roger asked the woman assisting at the checkout, but she had never seen such a thing, and neither had the store manager, who declared that snow peas had never elicited such a response. Theories, please.

''In summer I normally have to fight my way through orb-weavers' webs to reach my front gate,'' writes Barry Riley, of Umina Beach. ''This year there are no spiders to be seen, so shouldn't there be more flies? Or did the flies die off first, causing the poor spiders to die of starvation?'' An interesting point - Column 8 has been awoken by a solitary mosquito since Melbourne Cup Day, while previous summers have seen hand-to-hand jungle warfare with much 3am ear slapping. More theories, please!

''I sympathise with John Grinter re: confusion when ordering,'' nods Stan Wright, of parts unknown (couple, dozen, etc, Column 8, last week). ''Selling spare parts to busy tradesmen years ago, we were often confused when they barked urgent orders over the phone like, 'Gimme a ''couple'' of those,' or a 'few' or 'some' etc. Hoping to avoid confusion, we decided to formalise it thus: one was obviously one, a 'couple' was two, 'some' was three, a 'few' was four while five was 'half a metric dozen', and naturally 'half a dozen' was six. Seven was a 'lot', eight was a 'couple of sets', nine was 'heaps', 10 was a 'metric dozen', 11 was 'Aw, I dunno. Are they on special? Send me some anyway', and yes, 12, a 'dozen'. It worked out fine.''

Several readers have pointed out that, far from the Earth plunging into a terrifying death spiral into the sun (the Mosman Daily's ''reality check'', Column 8, Friday), our planet is actually moving away from our star. It's happening very slowly, as the sun loses mass - at about 1.5 centimetres a year, tops.