THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 230, 28 September 1935, Page 8

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MAN ABOUT TOWN.)

There is a constant desire among progressive culturists to change our place names, and very often a liquid old Maori word that has stood the test of time WHERE WERE will be replaced by someYOU BORN? tiling as stodgy as possible. Names that are suggestive of an emotion or an event are always the most inspiring, and we, of course, have "Drunken Bay" and "Massacre Bay and "Poverty Bay" and other nasty reminders. A correspondent who came from Hampshire says that he also came from "Tadley God Help Us," which is ten miles from Reading, where the biscuits live. Pie says he has a Welsh pal who comes from "We Three Loggerheads" in Flintshire. He thinks these place names are far kinder than "Hangman's Gap," "Bushrangers' Gully" or "Boggy .Glen," and wonders if any addict of this column remembers any place names that are net commonplace.

A man who rarely attends picture shows and who therefore gets immense pleasure out of them when he does go says that he sat in an audience the other HAIR APPARENT, day in the dim glow and

was astounded to see several luminous globes scattered in the scats in front of him. He was unable to ascertain what these objects were until the lights went up and lie discovered that each was the bald head of a mature gentleman. The fashion or misfortune of baldness is causing an immense correspondence in English papers aggregating many millions of circulation. One writer says that lie .lias recently visited France, Germany, Italy and U.S.A. and that ajl these countries have fewer bald-headed men than Britain. What one wants to know about these rash tourist statisticians is how do they know? For instance, in the above countries there are very likely three hundred million people, of which total perhaps a third or less are men who may or may not be bald. Now unless the man who made the rash statement went from door to door and took a look at the men's heads, or, alternatively, induced the men in the streets of those countries to lift their hats, he couldn't possibly know what proportion of bald-headed men there were—hence his dictum . might be unreliable. By this method of computation the man who saw four 'bald heads glowing in an Auckland picture show could instantly arrbe at the conclusion that New Zealand has a larger proportion of arid scalps than Australia. Let's all be statisticians.

The revived interest in precious .antiques (of which there are astounding quantities in New Zealand) infers that the people who sell their heirlooms to colANTIQUES. lectors either know nothing of values or—want the money. It is the chief business of collectors to obtain the greatest value at the smallest price, and expert novelists (who include that versatile person, IT. A. Vachell) always have collectors who make five or six hundred per cent on the deal. One knew an exceedingly clever collector of old ivory ininiatures who saw a nice old bit in a dreary old shop in Surrey. He bought it (lie told the tale himself to present collector of sixpenny cups and saucers) for four pounds ten, hoping to sell it for ton pounds fourteen, and took it home to his daughter, who was an antique fan herself. "How much did you give for it?" asked she. He told her. "Heavens!" she cried. "I sold it to Mosscnstein for thirty shillings. I won't paint any more miniatures for the mean old blig'hter"—and didn't. Same man' said that when a young fellow he used to take long hikes among' the Cotswolds and often dropped in to little wayside farms for a meal. He and a friend had boiled eggs in one poor little place. They were served in handsome silver filigree cups which were flanked by the rest of a beautiful, little antique silver set. Varnier Clodd did zay as they was a old lot as had bin in the vamly vor a long time. The walker told a collector. Collector called at Varmer Clodd's cottage. Would he sell the old things for two hundred and fifty pounds? "Noa!" said the old innocent. "I'd a bin offered four hundred, but I be a waitin' vor vive."

j The anguished moan of a oitnw citizen J emerges from a letter written on another subijeet. Says he: "You can't give lemons away." Tlie very reasonable sob BUSINESS. from a lemon grower aids one to visualise a large portion of the real workaday world scratching its fingernails off to grow something that you either can't give away or that you ca 11 give away. The grower of coffee or cotton or wheat or anything eatable or wearable spends his life in massaging plants and massacring pests to find that when lie seems to be 011 the world's finest wicket there is so much cotton or hemp, cabbage or oranges about that nobody wants them. People pour excess potatoes over cliffs, dump excess fish back into Old Ocean and burn piles of hand-picked super-cured lemons. In these times of excesses and of great furnaces using wheat and coffee for fuel, myriads of people pine for these products and can't get them because they have to be burnt to keep the prices up so that we may all be rich (or something). Lemons, of course, are always most plentiful and unsaleable when there 'is not too much influenza about and when there is influenza to spare up goes the price of the lemons just to show how mankind loves mankind Human beings arc so much like people, aren t they ? ]f y OIJ could got, say, one and fourpence a pound for butter in London, you'd naturally expect to charge your next-door neighbour one and five-pence—and he'd naturally go without if he hadn't got the price. And of course if Denmark found that butter was being over-produced, what could be more business-like than to use it for mixing concrete or for fuel f„ r locomotives 01 tor cart grease—just like they do eveess busiiiessHke!" a " d Whoa " W ° *

There remained up to but a few years ago men in Australia who proudly exhibited the scars made by the leg irons of authority * n the ' m( l convict BLUDGEONS days. There still exist AND BRAINS, unnumbered thousands of respectable men in all countries who delight in telling what voun<r devils they were as boys, and how they were lambasted by schoolmasters for the * same, j 1 eople in the most pious organisations are glad to testify that as young men they were terrible scamps—but now, etc., ote., ad infinitum. Men, no longer wanted in the firiitin" ; ' lno > but who fought like forty bushels of ! snakes 1111 til they found they were old enough , to hate fighting, preach peace and pursue it. Old fellows, pained beyond endurance at modern 'softness" (which is only modern common sense), tell how, long before they were millionaires and leaders of thought, meetings and parties, they started life as apprentices at eighteen pence a week and "lived in" and slept under the counter; and whose indentures always said that they were not to marry while they were earning eighteenpence a week and all that sort of thing. The men who believe that to "spare the rod" is to "spoil the child are merely admitting the colossal ignorance of the wielders of the old school Knout. Jhe gents who were thoroughly beaten on the official supposition that 'you could knock the Three K's into the coming generation with strajis or sticks often climr to the quaint old superstition that leather is brains and supplejacks educational training The sweet old supposition is as nearly dead as need be, but the boast of the ancients who were lambasted into eminience dies hard.