THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 210, 5 September 1930, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

WHAT ANSWER? 1 correspondent, hoping that Sir Ot-o Xiemeyer may find us a panacea for uneanpoyment, quotes an extract from Blairs Ballad of the Unemployed": Business me.i-gentlemen-men o£ each nation ! i:!iilSESers^ S S,, Food to eat, Boots for our feet. Work for which we implore ; What does it mean? What is between Us and rich Natures store.

4. word or so in this column about the heathen in his blindness who bows down to poisonous meat and decayed fish and thrives 1 (or otherwise) on tlie A BIT' GAMEY. diet induces a reader of travel to quote the experiences of white hunters in Africa. He mentions the caee of hunters who were suddenly deprived of their bearers, guuboys and other indispensable allies in their career of destruction. I lie hunters discovered the whole bunch of blacks ■having the time of their lives feasting on buck that had long- departed this life and whose flesh was abominably putrined, falling from the bones. The white hunters made a long detour to avoid the aroma, but still missing their boys, they moved cautiously up, to find the feast in full progress. The bearers were not olfactorily bearable for several days. M.A.T. suggests that Bimbi the bearer is but the teacher of his occasional white master, who longs, to have his hare'hanging in the larder until it drives everybody out of the house, or who craves for deer within a day or so of absolute , "putrescence. The •human love for what may be termed "pong" is shown in the aristocrat's addiction to cheese of a gorganzolish intensity, and on this basis have jokes innumerable 'been built by successive generations. The best known ie that of tlie grocer and his assistant. "John," says the master grocer, "unleash th" large cheese in the cellar and beg it to sten up here!"

Dear 3I.A.T.,—The clever clouts you liave levelled in the past at our merry speedsters must have badly missed. The motor anarchists continue to 'be most perJUGGERNAUT, sistent in pursuit of their sport. An extensive report in a recent Home journal of a case where a gentleman received eighteen months , imprisonment and was also fined £750 makes one long for a waft of that British justice that we hear eo much about in these parts. Let it be.noted that the 750 of the best was a, fine, not damages. If ever I lie under a chariot I want it to be over there. — T.R.

The film fanatic was found on a spare taction gobbing as if his heart would break. '•'Tlic Guvmint's been and gone and offended Loo Angeles!" he said, A FAN'S ' and gulped out, "Gee! FAREWELL. Been and gone and taxed motor cars and gas (petrol, I mean), oil "' "So they ought!" said M.A.T., secure in his ninepenny bottle of typewriter oil. "But they'll stop our pitchers!'.' he wailed. "How's the kids goin' to learn to tork through their noses? Gee, it's a cow! Who's goin' to teach the school kida how to use a gun in both hands and carry a bowie knifein their teeth, roll a cigarette in two fingers at the gallop, or rope a bull on the prairies? And the guriel How's me dorter to learn how to breathe from her diagram, cry in glycerine and givo twenty-five feet of kiss? They'll be interdoocin' policemen in helmets without revolvers and without badges in their lapels. If the Guvmint ain't careful they'll be teachin' the kids about London and some of them places outside Broadway and them plays will be spoke in torf langwidge. Kotten Guvmint!" and lie wiped his eyes with a piece of a Boot Ribson advertisement showing a cowboy at a gallop trying to rope the earth with a lariat a hundred and forty feet long.

A tall, dark man pushed part of his frame round the rirau of M.A.T.'s boudoir and said: "Write a bit about the firemen!" "Why, what's new about fireLIVERPOOL JACK, men?" "They're heroes!" "Well, what's new about that— they always were!" "But I mea,n the Tahiti firemen!" "Well, they were British firemen, weren't they?" "Yes!" "Well, what about it?" "They worked like the devil up to their waists in water. They'd have worked like Satan if they'd been up to their chins!" "But the;v/ didn't make any fuss! No, they were British firemen, the sort of .chaps who in port never go further than a 'hundred yards up the street. Rarely teetotallers. People complain of them. Various people who, when they go to sea don't give a tinker's damn for the man in the stokehold, complain of them. Rough chaps, you know. Don't bother about 'Vareity degrees for the stokehold. Fight like anything. Reprehensible blokes, blameable coves. Come from Liverpool, I hear, and Limehouse and other places. Talk a, language of their own, no Ponsonby accent. Highly comic, poor chaps, not like us, oh, no! As the engineer on the—what -was the name, oh, the Tahiti—said, "Take your hats off, take your boots off,, take your socks off, take your bally flesh off and sit in your bones to the etoker!" And for heaven's sake when you see him having a British man's pint of beer hava a heart and give him a V.C. Vociferous cheers!

Rudyard Kipling, of whom you may have heard, is a genius. He has been known to bury a cheque under two feet of desk accumulation and to poet a sheet HIS TABLE. of notepaper instead. One day lie wrote the "Recessional." He remembered afterwards writing something and complained to his secretary. The secretary searched unavailingly. "It doesn't matter," said Kipling. "I can do something else." Mrs. Kipling .found the rather natty little thing in the waste basket, and we have sung it ever since, and will continue so to do. The memory was recalled by the appearance of a typical scribe's table, the surrounding linoleum being knee deep with discarded papers, apparently the manufactured product of several small forest trees. The table oozed paper, books, lists, liles, scissors, knives, old razor blades, gum, a card index. Five drawers remained unclosed. Every one was stuffed to the top with the scribe's archives. A typewriting machine occupied a place of honour, but when the scribe found it necessary to write there wae no place on the table, so he opened the least bulging drawer, put a large book on the top and wrote there. One of those efficient persons one morningobserved this chaos—and, ye gods, cleaned it up! The scribe entered in the morning, looked round in dismay, and .said, "Who's been niessmg up my table?" searching feverishly. His stable mate mentioned the efficient person Bellowing incoherently, he dashed out into a corridor and waylaid the officious, person, lhero was a report „of the Amalgamated Association of Fish and Chips Providers on he said. "What have you done with it?" The unhappy man remained dumb. LiiQ search continued. Furiously the scribe took his coat off a peg and obtained his spectacles for a closer search. "Oh, here it Iβ!" he eaid taking the report from among seventeen other documents in' his breast pocfceV ' :, •; ■ - ;