THE PASSING SHOW.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 206, 1 September 1938, Page 10

THE PASSING SHOW.

(By THE MEN ABOUT TOWN.)

Some queer stories come from Hollywood at tiniee. Hollywood is the city of bunk, boloney and make-believe. Here is the latest I snipped out of a Xew HARD LUCK. York newspaper, and you can believe it or not. A .Chicago resident became discouraged after [failing to die from natural ailments, of which [he had experienced many, so, to make sure of doing away with himself, he procured a rope, a revolver and some poison. He mounted the ra'ilingTbtf a bridge over the Chicago Canal, tied we end of the rope to a beam and the other found his neck. He drank the poisorii raiisei the revolver to his head, and jumped aet-he fired. His aim was poor, and the'.bullet."'fevered the rope; as he hit, the water lie and took in enough of the canal sewage] to make him throw up the poison, arid a policeman who just happened to be recovering from a nap strolled along in v time to pull the fellow out of the water —and eave hie lift!— Johnny.

This intoxication business eeeme to be growing in popularity. Now we have the novel honour of recording the case of a gentle- •' man drunk in charge of FARE GO. a dinghy. He is not the first Aucklander to enjoy a rollicking day at sea. At the same time, motorists' are becoming more discreet in their alcoholic activities. In fact some of them are possibly growing too careful. I of a eaee involving a taxi driver who was conveying his passenger (a man from Aberdeen) up Qtteen Street. The incident might easily raise a most interesting legal point. A pedestrian crossing loomed' ahead, and the driver, being a good driver, stopped to allow the foot-eioggers to pass. Last on the list came a man on crutches. He took a long time to drag himself across, but in Hie middle of hie efforts the taxi man's fare nyittered, "Ye'll no be chargin' me for waitin' time, mon?"—B.C.H. A friend to whom yesterday's note on the dropping of certain verbs in simple "sentences was submitted before publication was kind enough to draw attention ELLIPSIS. to a very interesting instance of ellipsis in the Lord's Prayer. "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" omits the second "done." This sentence from Matthew is unusual but perfect; yet the translation of Luke phrased it differently—"Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth." Students of English will never find a clause out of place in the Authorised (Version of the Bible, I>ut they will find unsuspected variants. "Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not." provides another instance of ellipsis, or the omission of words that are obviously understood. In another book of the Xew Testament the i passage reads, "Suffer little children, and forbid them not. to come unto me; for of such is the kingdom of heaven." In the first passage the words "to come unto me" are dropped at the end of the sentence, and in the second pai=«ajze the same words are omitted, but understood, after "Suffer little children." ! —Touchstone.

Can one ever memorise the la we of Xew Zealand? We ourselves offered odds of one million pounds to a monkey nut (at Kempton Park. yeare ago) on WATCH Pretty-Polly, but the YOUR STEP, punters in 'England do

not carry monkev mite in their racecourse outfit, eo ' there were no takers. Even at Hastings (Xew Zealand), we offered to bet ten to one on Gloaming beating The Hawk, a« we rushed to the rails to eee the finish. Within the Wt few days' -yfc excitedly offered to bet a fiver that Blomfieia gained a fall, little dreaming that we.■%«*£ infringing the I<aw. In many homes lovely framed texts adorn the walk headed '"A Friend," "Mother," "Conscience, ,, and so r-i.hnt we now recommend a bigjrer one, *"Watch Your Step in Xew Zealand." Lees than one hundred yeare ago we found a shortage of tea on a Sunday afternooa. A dear little lady in a dear little dairy cheerfully obliged us; we were grateful. There's a dairy near here, the proprietress of which sold to onr boy (Archibald) a penn'orth of blackballs last Sunday. We heard to-night that she has been hiding in her coal cellar ever since she read of a woman being fined for kind-heartedly obliging a customer with a little tea and eiKrar on a Saturday afternoon! The wretched criminal should have been instantaneously beheaded. If we sent Home an article portraying the petty tyranny that email, honest, struggling shopkeepers are subjected to we should be designated ae ridiculous liars!— A.A.P.

For centuries it was accepted that no human intelligence could •, predict whether a spinning coin would fall head up or tail up. _~ The toss-up in the 193S HEADS OR TAILS. Test matches hae been eo consistently pro-England that Australians may be wondering if there ie some new law of physics which operate* to turn chance into certainty. Research men at (Cavendish Laboratory, Cairihridge, might be able to throw soma light on thie matter. Two years ago they claimed that they were on the trail of the law which determines heads or taile. At the 26th annual exhibition of the Physical Society they showed a mechanism through which a penny might be spun to land heads or tails as required. It sounds more psychical than physical to me. and I ehould be the last to suggest that the English Test team has been equipped with this mechanism. All the same, it might be worth while for Bradman to pay a visit to the Cavendish Laboratory some wet afternoon and eee what they know about turning chances into certainties.—Johnnv.

The years roll round, the elders grow old and the young grow mature; and eoon the eldere are moving in ai world where they no longer know the voungTEMPTJS P. stere they used to "know. Time cha'nges the youngsters. The boy you knew only yesterday (or so it eeems) is a husky man now. If he had just stayed a boy you would have continued to recognise him on sight, but when, during a few yeare of absence, he i* transformed, he presents you with so vastly changed a personage that you do not know him. You, of course, have not changed, so he knows you quite well and i« amused that you do not recognise him. He puts the lapse down to the ravages of old a*re, which is an annoyin" j habit tSet the young have. Bill, who is* not eo very old—in hie fifties merely—hae recently moved back into j suburb where he lived some ten years ago. The faces of some of the people are faintly familiar, but he can't place , them. They nod to him cheerily and give him 'a word—they are youngsters who are ten . yeare older. . They know him quite well, and he does hie best to hide the fact that he , doesn't know who they are. The other night i the tram started off while people were still ! piling down the aisle. The effect of th» sudden jolt wa* to place a very attractive young woman with . considerable force on Bill's knee. She apologised. Not at all said Bill, who is still gallant. In fact (for h= is a wag, too) there was not the slightest objection to her sitting there for the whole trip. Well, she said, as she found a place I beside him, it wouldn't be the first time he (had nursed her in the tram. She was the I kid who used to live next door—ten years a S° — to whom he was a boon companion and always Uncle Bill. Time, he reflected, ie not always- kind to a man,—B.O'N.