THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 237, 6 October 1932, Page 6

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

THE PORTMANTEAU. The portrait in the' "Star" of a thoughtful pelican looking down his nose reminds one of an ornitihologiet who was also a poet. To him the bird with, his own fish portmanteau was a constant tmystery, and one day die broke out into verse about it: A wonderful bird is the pelican. His bill will hold more than his belican, He takes in his beak Enough fish for a week, And I'm dashed if I know how the hellcan.

" M.J." in a letter to M.A.T. from London says that one of the (signs of an approaching moustache renaissance is the frequent occur-

rence in the fashionable A RENAISSANCE. Press of advertisements

leading the intending moustache grower to the proper fertiliser. These advertisements, as he points out, -were common enough in the 'eighties and 'nineties, when Oieart-broken youths of eighteen often committed suicide at being upable to grow this mark and eynfrbol of (manhood. He says that iby 1935 the male face without its natural furze will be unknown and con&iders the matter is iii the hands of the newspapers. One London 'beauty specialist is turning out tons of moustache raiser, guaranteed to produce a luxuriant effect in a short time. He epeaks of a friend of Ms who bought a tube of this stimulant, leaving it on the dressing table. By some mischance his wife .mistook it for face cream and applied it each day. She is now searching the ipapers for advertisements of a dependable depilatory.

Dear M.A.T., —Are you as good as your boy? If he (or your girl) is in tlie sixth standard of one of the Auckland citv schools

•lie has recently had to A NOTE do an arithmetic test. He TO FATHER, had to answer twenty

questions in ten minutes. Here are the first five: (1) What is f of 19/? (2) Divide .1 by .08. (3) What is the square root of 20J? (4) What part of lewt is 701b? (5) Multiply £1 3/6 by 1000. The other fifteen are juet a® easy, and you should be able to do the five in, 2J minutes. Have you figured them out? Of course you have. But your hoy had to do them in his head. And he did. His teacher will tell you that in a class of .fifty seven or eight answered the twenty correctly, and the average number of correct answers was fourteen. There was one boy (no, not yours) who answered the correctly with .ahou.t two minutes to spare. Anyway, are you as good as your toy?

Gleaned from the "Melbourne Herald" that Captain Bates of the Westralia was lately given a farewell meal aboard his ship. He's off to Blighty ,to bring out SALT YARNS, a &hip for the Melb.-Syd.-

N.Z. run. He told them a yarn or two of windjammer days. Said that it was the custom on some ships for the first mate to stand at the gangway as a new crew was coming aboard and .to knock each man dawn as ihe came by to show who -was the bosis. Several people at ihe lunch believed him. In his early daye the veteran was master of a sailer which sprang a leak one day out from New Zealand. All hands manned the pumps, worked themselves to a standstill and dried the ship. She stayed dry, which seemed funny. The first mate was sent to measure the supply in the freeh-water .tanks. He returned with the report that instead of an expected eighteen feet of water there was Only eighteen inches. The tanks and not the ship •had sprung the leak and the crew had valiantly stuck to the pumps until most of their precious fresh water had be£n pumped overside.

Even the man in cotton pants and nearsilk Sunday socks ought to be interested in the shining outlook for wool. The Continental

expert, Maurice Bubrulle, BALE OF WOOI/. mentions (and it is

cabled) that much of the depression has been caused by the use of shoddy and synthetic substitutes for the genuine fleece. Before the days of double dumping, when four: hundredweight of .packed fleeces made a bale about eight feet long, the art of adulteration was known in every woolshed from tar boy to dumper and from dumper to carter. Shearers (and even managers) were •the victims, and many a man who looked for his coat at tucker time was unaware that some saucy adulterant inserted it into an outgoing bale and that maybe it was by then half way to Woolgongbadgery. Once on Gring' Gring—the station where the new-drum jackeroo hanged himself with a stockwhip to a bluegum tree —when dinner time knock-off blew a tarboy was missing. Jimmy was a great favourite, for Jie could play tunes on a comb and bit of paper beautifully. The man at the woolpress reported that he ihad seen Jimmy fooling round the opened 'bales and that he might have (been sewn up while he — the woolpress man—had gone up the shed for a pannikin of tea. In sihort, the whole of the bales pressed, dumped and sewn that morning were all opened up again. No Jimmy! When Jimmy, who had eneaked away and climbed a gumtree to find out where 'possums lived in the day time, turned up in the mess room the shearers were eo glad to Bee him iihat they delegated the cook to give him a dashed good hammering for scaring the life out of them.

Relief workers and Government superannuitants will be interested to read that the diamond trade is about to take a turn and

that there is a revived A SHINING .demand for these bite of EXAMPLE, ancient carbon reflecting

the sunshine of a million years ago, wihicli have caused ae much trouble in the world as any pebbles can possibly do. 'There- is a threat in the cablegrams that South African mines (closed during Mr. Forbes' Premiership) may open again, reenacting those scenes familiar to Kimberley people and providing work for tall, dark, naked gentlemen with crinkly hair. Anciently the mine boys who searched the blue clay for pebbles were either bond or free, the majority being too simple to become millionaires. Still, the white man's civilising ways have inculcated newer methods, and there is no doubt that many of the dark converts are as expert in wolfing a diamond as their whiter brethren. In time, when the trade booms again, those who search dark gentlemen coming off shift will resume operations. Formerly there used to ibe some slight difficulty in recovering stones that had 'been swallowed by the workers, although those inserted in a slit of the skin were easy work for the trained white gentleman with the sjambok and the revolver. Even when the thief got clear of the guard and found himself in the living compound concealing a hidden diamond, his troubles were not over. He had to get rid of it. One perilous way of doing it was to embed a stone in clay, put the blob of diamond and dirt on the end o£ a stick, and propel it over the fence into the vicinity of a waiting friend. If my lady could follow the history of every &tone in her tiara she would value it ever so much more. On the whole, one dare not be really frank about diamonds.

THOUGHTS FOR TO-DAY. Encourage such innocent amusements as may disenrbiCter the minds of men, and make them mutually rejoice in the same agreeable satisfactions.—Addison. Xever anything can be anniss When siniplene&s and duty tender it. —Shakespeare.