UKC

I am trying to remember a children's book we used to read to our children in the 2000's. It was a counting book with some strange creatures on rollerskates (?) And one sentence my wife and I remember from the book is 'over the wiggy (or wiggly) bridge'.  We often say the phrase to our kids but they have no recall.of the book. So appealing to the group !

Three Billy Goats Gruff?

"Hop and skip, hop and skip, over the rickety bridge."

Ah, that sounds like a fun one! The book you're likely thinking of is "Ten Wiggly Worms" by Carolyn Beck and illustrated by Carmen Mok.

It features ten adorable, brightly coloured worms on roller skates who go on an adventure. They definitely go "over the wiggly bridge" as they explore!

Does that title or the author/illustrator names ring a bell? It was quite a popular counting book in the early 2000s, so it fits the timeline perfectly. I hope that's the one you were trying to remember!

(That was Google Gemini's response to copying and pasting your query)

Sadly no, but that looks like a fun book our children would have enjoyed. Thanks for trying!

We had a book with that story but this is a different one, definitely for counting from 1 to 10.

Seems like an excellent example of why one should always check the output of an LLM, as the book it confidently describes doesn't even exist as far as I can tell. It's just plausible-sounding nonsense.

Could this be it;

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/Uncle-Wiggily-Roller-Skates-Garis-Howard/3220264...

(for reference I used the paid version of ChatGPT)

I should know better 😅

Did you see the recent case of a judge recommending a report to the bar for a legal team who referenced fictitious previous cases in their submission?

Alarmingly, I've seen quite a few reports of lawyers submitting AI-generated fictional precedents. And I bet there are a bunch more that have got away with it because everybody involved lazily assumed that the references said what they claimed. On a climbing forum it's amusing, but lawyers dealing with serious cases this way need to be struck off as an example.