NEWS FROM ALL QUARTERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

NEWS FROM ALL QUARTERS.

"BACKWACKWARD NEVER!" A negro schoolboy has sent the following letter to the National Institute for the Blind:—"When I cam across your contents I was strock damp. lam a well of tears. Bravo! What I say was I hope you will in all you undertaken and crow with success. My advice is 'Push on, Backwaekward never. Forward ever.' I shall send a fee the year or time closes or conies." HIS LAST JOKE. Bozha Nikolitch, famous throughout Yugoslavia for his practical jokes, did not let the fact that he was dying deter him from playing a joke on his friends. Just befor* he died Bozha spread a story that he had placed on the top of his tomb a huge cask of old wine. This wine, he said, was to be distributed among his friends after the funeral. Bozha duly died and his funeral was attended by hundreds of mourners who walked for three miles on a cold, rainy day over muddy fields looking forward to enjoying a glass of wine. But when the tomb was opened it was found to be empty! HER FIRST HOLIDAY. After living for nearly 24 years among aborigines, Mrs. L. Ray, tin mine and cattle station owner and one-time butcher, has left Darwin for her first holiday away from Australia's Northern Territory. Since 1912, Mrs. Ray has seldom seen a white woman. She has lived alone on a cattle station for four months at a time, with more than 300 blacks camped nearby. Recently she came back to civilisation again and took up the appointment of hostess of the Quantas Airways' resthouse at Darwin. For the first time since 1012, she left Northern Territory and went by air to Melbourne for a holiday. INQUIRIES BUREAU. A woman who has answered some 200,000 questions in the last two years is not only bearing up under the ordeal, but it actually asking for more. She is. Miss Harriet Root, director of the United States Information Service, a Government agency, which undertakes to answer questions upon any subject entirely without charge—even without benefit of the customary stamped envelope for return. Here are some of the questions Miss Root's bureau gets asked: Is it legal to wash the American flag? Should one wear a white or black tie to a White House dinner? What is the speed of the wind in Tennessee? What is the Eskimo word for long woollen "pants"? UNKNOWN ANIMAL SHOT. * Big game circles in Kenya are excited about a mysterious animal, believed to be of an entirely new species, which has been shot in the Mau forest. Local experts are agreed that they have never seen anything like it previously. The skin and skull are being sent to the British Museum. The Kenya game warden. Captain A. T. A. Ritchie, says the animal resembled a large lynx, but lias significant points of difference. Some believe it to lie a Nandi bear, an almost legendary animal, reported to have been seen at intervals during the past twenty years. MAMMOTH RHINOCEROS. A previously unknown type of prehistoric rhinoceros, five times the size of those jrow living and more than 13 feet in height, has been discovered during excavations on the shore of the (Aral Sea in Western Kazakstan, by an expedition from the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. During the past four months the expedition has been digging ill the region of the dried-up lake As-Kazani-Sor, where a large collection of skeletons, bones and teeth of prehistoric monsters has been gathered. It has now been brought to Moscow for study and restoration. Material gathered this summer is of world-wide scientific interest, it is declared, since it throws new light on prehistoric animal life which originated in Kazakstan and later appeared in Europe and North America. Geological maps of the region will have to be materially altered in the light of these new paleontologieal findings.

TABLECLOTH ARTISTS. A study of marks made on tablecloths by diners is contained in a report to the American Hotel Association convention. 'Table artists," said the report, "left marks of which (181 per cent were statistics; 13 per cent "were drawings of houses, boats, baby carriages and other buildable things; 7 per cent verse, etc; 0} per cent girls' faces and other anatomical studies; 3 per cent 'bawdy humour'; and 3 per cent 'unclassified blobs.' " BABOON SHOOTS BOY. A baboon shot and seriously wounded a boy at Haenertsburg, Transvaal. The boy, 12-year-old Joseph Lombard, was about to go shooting with his air rifle, which he had loaded. The baboon was tied to a- pole near hi 9 house and his mother asked the boy to release the animal before he went on his expedition. When he approached the baboon it grabbed his rifle from his hands, found the trigger and pulled it. The rifle went off, wounding the boy in the eye. An- operation has been performed for the removal of the pellet, which was embedded in the boy's head. SHE CHANGED HER MIND. After travelling more than 6000 miles to marry a man in South Africa with whom she had corresponded for the past eight years, a girl decided that she did not love him and could not go on with the marriage. The man saved hard for the future during those years, stinting himself of all but the barest necessities. He saved enough to have a house built for himself and his bride, who was in Europe. Throughout the eight years they had regularly sent each other love letters, and then, a few weeks ago, they decided that she should come to South Africa to be married. The young man sent her the money to pay her passage. Within a week of her arrival at Capetown the girl discovered that she had made a mistake and did not love him. Bewildered, he turned to his friends for advice, but they could suggest nothing to make her change her mind. NEWS CURIOSITIES. l Four Chinese women aroused the suspicions of a Customs officer at Johore Bahru, capital of Johore, because they seemed unnaturally plump. He ordered them to be searched. Under their dresses were found 108 yards of cloth, tightly wound round them. The women were handed over to the police for attempting to smuggle the material. Thieves broke into a working men's saving organisation known as "SelfHelp" at Helsinki, Finland, and stole a considerable sum of money. A note bearing the words, "We have taken your tip and helped ourselves; best thanks for advice," was found affixed to the open door of the safe. Because the girl he loved refused him, a 17-year-old compositor's apprentice at Kisenstadt, Austria, decided to end his lite. He sot up in large lead type the girl's name and then swallowed its 15 letters —one by one. He was found in a critical state by his employer and was rushed to hospital, where an operation was immediately performed. "All things come home at eventide," sang Miss Margery Maxwell, the opera singer, at Fargo, North Dakota, as she began Del ReigoV, song, "Homing." Then she stopped suddenly, waved frantically to the conductor of the orchestra and gasped, "I've swallowed a fly." She hurried from the stage, and, having got rid of the fly, returned to finish her song amid applause. Nine pancakes for breakfast every morning for the last 50 years is what Mr. J. Bs James (82), of Xelsonville, near Columbus, Ohio, claims to have eaten. He now wants recognition as tli» champion pancake eater in the Western world.