RANDOM SHOTS.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 188, 9 August 1924, Page 18

RANDOM SHOTS.

An old-fashioned football enthusiast welcomes the score in the second League test match—l 3to 11—as a freah proof of a return to real football.

A correspondent says that the stopping of the clock at the top of Symonds Street ia not accidental. It is simply an indica- | tion to shoppers that no "tick" is given. | Tho title of a recent address, "The ' Baby—the Raw Material," provided an excellent opportunity for a happy misprint which the conscientious compositor did not take. A retiring Wanganui headmaster says he used the strap for years, but during i the past nix your* ho has rejected it and J adopted more suitable methods. Many teachers <Io prefer the cane. We might have expected it. The very j diiy that really good news comes from . London about "tho settlement with Ger- . many, bad news comes from Ireland. She would not be Ireland if she let John Bull enjoy a spell of real peace. ' Tho fact that a number of workmen on an Auckland road took off their hate ■ when they hoard the National Anthem played is 'deemed worthy of a paragraph. It is to be hoped that all persons who wear collars will follow this admirable example. The censorship of films in New Zea--1 land i* said to be the strictest in the ! world by a Rond deal. A critique of j the screen i n<? of "Alice in Blunderland" j at Home reads: "Dull, very harmless. I and in fact should easily pass the New Zealand censor." H'm! I wonder what picture shows are like in other parts of the world. "All vessels from tho Pacific Coast for tho psist three months have been bringing Canadian rats, and tho steamer Las I Vegas, which is duo hero from San ! Francisco at tho end of next week, has another 2000 tons for Auckland." What for? Is someone proposing to start a ranch on those brilliant American lines by which you breed rats and feed them to cats and kill the cats and use their skins for furs and their bodies for T How the Now Zealand exhibit at Wembley impressed someone in England: "The show of apples certainly struck mc as the jolliest thing I saw that day. The sheep—rows and rows of them, dressed by the butcher and ready for cutting up—distressed mc. I shall not be able to touch a chop for weeks. A lamb on a hillside is a poem. So, too, is a saddle of mutton, adroitly cooked and brought to table. Any of the intervening states is the most hideous of prose. New Zcalandere live apparently upon a diet composed exclusively of mutton and roast apples. I do not think that for this I shall cross that 'disappointing . Pacific Ocean. Or should it be Atlantic Ocean ? I asked an attendant how one gets to New Zealand, but ho didn't know." I have some sympathy for this point of view about dressed meat; it always eeems to mc to be an advertisement of questionable value. But would that New Zealanders did combine, as much as this person supposes, apples with their monotones of mutton! With apples sixpence a pound most of the year what chance have we of eating them every day? I like the last sentence. It is so natural that an attendant in a New Zealand court set up to advertise the country shouldn't know how to get to the country. Where did he como from—Oldham or Peebles?

Joseph Conrad, whose death thie week is so great a loss to English letters, was hardly a humorist, but he had a sense of humour. I cherish a remark of his in "Victory" that it is curious that in financial dissolution the order of physical processes is reversed, and evaporation precedes liquidation. And he had a fine command of irony. This ex-skipper of sailing ships had no liking for the huge modern liner, alleged to be uneinkable, with its swimming baths and staff of gardeners, and in his comments on the loss of the Titanic ho gave rein to his scorn. Some said that if only the Titanic had struck the ice head-on she would been perfectly safe, whereupon Conrad wrote: —

Behold the examination-room of the future. Enter to the grizzled examiner a young man of modest aspect: "Are you well up iv modern seamanship?" "'1 hope so, sir " "U'm, let's see. You are at night on the bridge lv charge of a IjU.UUU tons ship, with a motor truck, orgau loft, etc., etc., with a full cargo of passengers, a full crew of 1300 cafe waiters, two sailors and a boy, throe collapsible bouts us per Hoard of Trade regulations, and golug at your threequarter speed of. say, about forty knots. You perceive suddenly right ahead, and close to, something that looks like a large ice tloe. What would you do?" "Put the helm amidships." 'Very well. Why?" "In order to hit end-on." "On what grounds should you endeavour to hit end-on?" ••Because we are tnlight by our builders and masters thut the heavier the smash, the suinller the damage, and because the requirements of material should be attended to."

Some of us marvel at the American capacity for oratory—active and passive. The thing is in the tolood. Take the recent eulogy of North Carolina that appears in the "Congressional Record": "If all the towels made in one year in North Carolina," said the speaker, "were fastened together fringe to fringe into one groat towel, the. man who dried his foot with one end of it on the rocky

coast of the Straits of Magellan would, with an agitated elbow, overturn a pearl lishor's sampan in the calm, warm waters of the Indian Ocean, ami find himself wiping his surprised and distant face with the other end or it top of the highest peak of Greenland's frosty, famous, and far-flung mountains." Moreover, "if all the cigarettes manufactured in North Carolina in one year were Tolled into

one great, long cigarette, a young sport loaning nonchalantly against the South Pole would light it with the everlasting fire in the of Halley's swift and restless comet, use the starry Dipper as its ash-tray, blow smoke rings which, unbroken by all the hurricanes which blast the Seven Seas, would hide the circles around Saturn for a thousand years, and with the immeasurable inferno of its stub blot out and usurp the glow-

ing fnme and place of the hitherto quenchless morning star." And so it goes on to tables and apple 3. We might copy this method for the entertainment of the galleries in Parliament and the brightening of "Hansard." For example: "If all the butter made in Auckland were placed in lino, while the incomparable youth and beauty of its home town was cutting into it for breakfast, the marvellous creations of Mr. Edgar Rico Burroughs in Mars would be tasting it about half way down the line." Compared mth Cttngiriycay iHaaeo Iβ-* duU place.