Random Shots

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 66, 19 March 1938, Page 12 (Supplement)

Random Shots

A housetcife wants to know how to keep the housekeeping bills down. The only way I know is by tising a paperweight. • • • • An umbrella that folds up to fit the pocket has been invented. The trouble is that it will fit other people's pockets too. • • • • Considerable surprise wu caused in a suburban street recently by a man who ran}? several front door bells and immediately hurried away. One theory is that lie was a local sufferer getting in some practice for a visit to the dentist. • • • • A girl who worked in a sharebroker's office is one of the leaders of a nudist club. From stocks and shares to shocks and stares. • • • • The latest pastim® is to collect the thumbprints of friends. A good start can be made by pereuading them to return borrowed booke. • • • • A circus trainer says that it is often difficult to induce a horse to follow a particular course without a rider. Yet the steeplechasers we back usually manage to do it after the first jump. • • • • "My little son pricked a bull with a pin and the animal charged into a wall.*' states a writer. We pricked three horses with a pin last week and they also ran. • • • • In a struggle toith a civilian a constable had all the buttons torn from his tunic. The man got awai/, but of course was later arrested at the laundry where he icas employed. • • • • Scenes in a film play were "shot" on a small paclit in a stormy sea. A rather vulgar correspondent wants to know if any of the players threw up their parts, too. ••tt A doctor mentions the case of a man who suffered for years from the delusion that he was an actor. But he did at least refrain from going on the stage, as so many have done who are similarly afflicted.

By Z.

It has been stated that Bing Crosby is to be Tommy Karr's manager. But there is no truth in the story of the pugilist remarking that prosperity was just round the crooner. • • • • A confidence trickster who stole a large sum of money from a banker was traced to the South Sea Islands. He made Hawaii with it, » • • • I read, a paragraph the other day of an American climbing up the outside of a ten-storeyed building. I'll take a shade of odds it happened on Poppy Day. • • • • Technocrats say that in the present machine age everything is made in a fraction of the time it previously took. Everything, of course, except time payments. • • • • A correspondent complains that too many of our members of Parliament are wrapped up in Iheir oun thoughts. / can sec some of them going dotrn tcilh pneumonia when winter comes. • • • • An alarm clock incorporating several devices for rousing the sleeper lias been invented. All that is wanted now i* an automatic arm to fling something at it. • • • • Confectionery, we are told bv a chocolate manufacturer, goes back to the dawn of time. But we doubt if Adam. and Eve ever thought of. tolfee apples. » « • • A correspondent tells us that he took some isnaps at his friend's wedding, but the bridegroom merely came out as a blur. It just shows how the poor fellow must have been trembling. • • • • "The man who finds himself in a seemingly inextricable tangle would do well to sit down with pipe or cigarette and look the facts in the face," advises a psychologist. Another plan is for him to persuade hi*? wife to get someone else to hold the wool while she winds it.

As I started up, the mob surged towards me, with a snarl like an angry beast. Even in that moment of splitsecond peril I could not repri'tss a feeling of admiration for the devilish ingenuity of the Sheen crowd. They had found Rallard, had slTenced him for ever, and were now neatly engaged in rounding oIT the coup by inciting the mob to lynch me and my friends. Protest was useless. As hands reached out to grab me 1 begin to hit out lustily. I saw two men, in the uniform of police ollicers, lighting their way through the swaying mass of people. "We're with you, Lance" I heard .Tack Surface shout. Jfe, with Revel and Dolllnann, had closed in to defend me. "Dollmann!" I panted, elbowing off a shouting man who was trying to get !:is hands on my throat. "Get us out of this, for God's* sake!" If we escaped the mob only to fall into the hands of the police, it would be a case of out of the frying pan into the lire. He were strangers in a strange land. We would be held for questioning, probably for trial on the capital charge; and meanwhile Sheen and his thugs would melt away, to join their chief in carrying out their pre-arranged plans. Any protest we made would-be laughed at by officialdom as eome puny attempt to confuse the law and sidetrack the course of justice. I'light was our only ho[>e. Every one of us realised that, and we struck out desperately. It was a nightmare fracas, a whirling chaos of lists and feet. My coat was ripped down the back, and mv hat was a ruin. Revel and Surface did'their best to protect me and force a path to safety. "This way!" cried Dolliuann. "To me." With a last frenzied effort we broke free of the clutching hands. Our battling had taken lis t(T a corner of the square, where loomed the black gulf of an alleyway. Into the haven went Dollmann, us after him. He rail like a hare, leading us from the danger zone, doubling and twisting through other passages, down murky streets.