THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 103, 3 May 1930, Page 8

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.) VALE ET VALE! News Item: The Defence authorities report the sale of one hundred and ten bales of disused military clothing to an English buyer. Never more, old coat, in some offensive Will you so wisely liide my tensive Cloaking its tremors, so disturbingly ®* te n« , Which seemed indeed to rend.it quite apart. Never more, old slacks, shall war's fierce duty Upon your neatness plant its re ekl "£ h weird E'en failing then to hide your strangely-drab, weird To make*your service one degree less real. Never more, old socks, in jaunty hauteur , To "Colonel Bogey" shall you swin ß in tunerui Nor flooded trench in incapacitated sranrieur Shall see you guard a "bolt" fro^ru^t^.silt. People who have hitherto hesitated aboard the train for the North who have arranged family matters with the_ lawyeis and have said long, ALL CHANGE ! lingering farewells on the platform, have Professor Pelterie's assurance that in ten years it is perfectly certain they may travel to the moon and back. The professor contemplates that rockets will be built whieli will proceed on. their- journeys to Helensville, or New York, as the case may be, at four thousand, yards per second. He has not yet the human pellets who will be shot to New Yoik, Helensville or the moon. Candidly, the reactionary M.A.T. is not curious about a near sight of the moon, and the professor does not enlighten one as to the proceedings when one clambers ashore out of the rocket. Advertising sheets are silent as to the lunar hotels. Ix within five years the rocket passenger service between Paris and New York takes only twenty-four minutes there seems to be a possibility of getting shot from Mangere to work in Auckland punctually. The news has decided M.A.T. to be no longer a protagonist of a harbour bridge. He will join the rocketeeis. Aeroplane services will seem almost silly. We shall breakfast in Auckland, lunch at the South Pole, dine at Montreal and sleep at Taumarunui. Poor old Jules Verne, how you did set them going! PERSONALITY OF THE WEEK.

-Mr. Alfred James Murdoch, M.P. ..for Marsden, Chief Parliamentary Whip,- has no enemies. Neither had liis father and who are affectionately re - NO. 153. membered by many Hikiirangi. people, where Mr. Murdoch, senior, was stationmaster. Mr. Murdoch has been known as "Fred" since boyhood. He is . a farmer. He was for years and years a school teacher. He got out. "Always room at the top, lad," was his' slogan. When he was a teacher with the smallest sort of wage his father demanded a pound a month. Fred sorrowfully dubbed it up. But the father surreptitiously banked it and Fred was surprised at the wad he got later in life. In Parliament he is the unraveller of tangled skeins. Loves problems. Unselfish, too! In the country among the cockies he is the unofficial vet. Further than that, MA.T. knows nothing against him. He used to be athletic. Piayed a good game of tennis. Is fifty-three years young. There were relatively few massacres on May Day in the Old World, possibly because the Pink Proletariat gets more conservative and aristocratic as the MAY DAYS. seasons dreep along the years. People whom we remember as Purple rebels have in a few years become the palest of pink, eschewing bloody means for the purposes of peace or bayonets for the making of brothers. In short, one of the few disturbances cabled was made by a bull at Wolkowsk, in Poland, where he charged the red flag and broke up a Communist procession unaided by the police. We have happily never had to introduce buils into New Zealand for May Day discipline. News of May Day happenings in the world outside. Karangahape Road will remind old souls of innocent May Days at Home when motley crowds of beggars with movable maypoles and the ribbons thereunto appertaining banged each other with pigs' bladders on sticks and cavorted wildly, hoping to glean copper from passionately angry householders. Infrequently the presence of stones in the bladders led to conflicts between rival celebrants of the day, leading to . arrest and explanation.

The triumphant sportsman, returning to his home laden. with the. spoils of the gun, said to Mrs. Jones, his wife (names fictitious), "Brown will be GAME BIRDS, glad to get a brace of pheasants, my dear. I'll take a pair to him at his office in the morning." He selected the brace and hung them in the larder. In the morning Jones rose with visions of swanking down Queen Street swinging the gorgeous plumage of a couple of cock birds to the envy and admiration of the crowds who never shoot pheasants and hardly ever buy any. He ate his. breakfast. "Where are the pheasants I'm going to take to Brown?" he asked cheerily.. • His wife brought them in, wrapped in a parcel! You may imagine the horror of the sportsman when Mrs. Jones said, "I thought' it would be hardly kind to send them to Mrs. Brown with the feathers on—so I plucked them!". That's why the sportsman's parade of Queen Street was a mere procession of one carrying a brown-paper parcel instead of a gaudy hero with spectacular tail feathers sweeping the sidewalk. In a near Auckland suburb the little lad and his father were passing a section on which there had recently been a nice house. "That's the place where the fire A GOOD SAVE, was, son." "Yes, I know, dad," said the little fellow. "Weren't they lucky?" "Lucky! What do you mean?" "Well, the man saved the gramophone and all the records—and a jolly good pocket knife." WHO TOLD YOU THAT? "I took the wife to the talkies. She nearly died laughing. I'm going to take her again."