RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30830, 16 August 1965, Page 24

RANDOM REMINDER

POT POURRI

From the mailbag today, a pot pourri of oddities that might help to quicken your interest in the human condition. First, a New Zealand representative skier took a tumble at Coronet Peak recently and broke a leg. He found sitting in bed for days extremely uncomfortable and finally his wife went shopping for an air ring. The first chemist she approached had none; and at the second she encountered a very young assistant. An air nng? she asked, puzzled. No, they had no rings. Had she tried a jeweller? Item No. 2 concerns an aunt who, with one of those ,

selfless gestures of which some women are capable sometimes, had decided to forgo a new hat for the spring we are all sure is coming. She explained to a young niece on the telephone that instead of getting a hat, she intended to buy a stainless steel saucepan. The young one pondered the information for a second or two. Did aunt think, she finally asked, that it would suit her? And finally, a correspondent complains about the increasing tendency to personification and metaphor in newspaper headlines these days. He says he read the other day that American troops had been

frozen at 122,000, that a woman had just won a bacon competition and that this, taken in conjunction with a headline about obesity in American women, had him worried. He read a lot into an innocent headline about the Caged Birds’ Society and says he had nasty visions of female prisoners clinging forlornly to the bars. This was supplanted, he says, by a vision of birds holding a meeting, with a parrot in the chair. Ah well, toucan play that game. We suppose there was another taking down the minutes—a secretary bird.