THE EPOCH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 261, 4 November 1933, Page 3 (Supplement)

THE EPOCH.

DRAWING ROOM TOPICS. OLD AG£ AND WIRELESS. (By BEATRICE M. GKIEKSON.) There is nothing new under the sun, they say; but is it in any annals that white-haired grandmothers ever crowded eagerly close to wireless cabinets to listen in to transmitted sports relays?

Now it is a usual thing on Saturday afternoons for knitting needles to click to a din of barracking and a running record "on the air" of tackles, sacks on the mill scrums, driubling rushes, *lineouts, referee whistles, and free kicks, until in the mind's eye the teams, crowds, goalpos+s, and movie cameras are plainly visible and the healthy smell of turf and leather seems more than a figment of imagination.

Many a gentle listener, who would probably intensely dislike witnessing a wrestling match, thoroughly enjoys a relay of toe-holds, Boston crabs, back loop slams, scissors, and crucifixes, with the noisy evidence of slaps and- bangs of adversaries on the boards. Somehow personality behind the microphone becomes a welcome guest at many a tea party. But is it only personality broadcasting the spoken word, or some potent, particular vibration in the sound waves, that has power to mesmerise tho thought waves of women into a keen interest for something really outside their province? If it is so, perhaps the time will come when a ladylike "thumbs down" verdict at some gladiatorial bout will be ruled by a majority- of positive thought waves of the gentler sex, ensconced in, their drawing rooms, with television screens. For things "on the air" are "in the air" ad infinitum. A generation which in its youth viewed a little of the outside world from coaches, flog carts, brakes, wagonettes, bicycles, or horseback, now accepts motor cars as luxuries produced by man's ingenuity, and therefore to be enjoyed in their marvellous expedition, in spite of the fact that according to economists they are in their superabundance a drawback to the country. Wireless, strictly a degree more superfluous, has been by the "old school," who by the turn of frail wrists can now bring the outside world, to their own firesides. Perhaps one, tuning in to New York, with "statics" rather pronounced, casually remarks, "I can remember when electric light bulbs made almost as much noise as that!" and fatalistically she goes on twisting the controls. But, after all, it may not be a fatalism of serenely accepting the inevitable evolution of the miracles of the times, or of a resigned preparedness for any cataclysm to which man's tampering with the harnessed monster electricity might lead. Could it not be that in the perception of their years old people have acquired an extra sense attuning them to wireless as a stepping stone to the solution of the mystery of the "Music of the Spheres" ?