RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 29, 29 October 1928, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

SIDELIGHTS ON CURRENT EVENTS LOCAL AND GENERAL (By Cosmos.) It is said that radio is in its infancy. Which accounts for its bad behaviour when you have company.. Recent statistics would indkwrte that we have almost reached the stage where marriage is sufficient grounds for divorce. Hearst, the American newspaper magnate, lias secured a castle in Wales. There is no truth in the report that he had acquired a chateau in France.

We hear a number of amusing tales regarding the impressions overseas people harbour regarding New Zealand and its people, but few will credit that an American journalist should be so ill-informed on the customs of the Maori as to tell her readers that “his desire for human flesh is as strong as his desire for opium.” In “The Customs of Mankind,” a work of reference published in 1925, Lillian Eichler reveals a most indifferent knowledge of her subject when she writes “The Maoris are cannibals, but they cannot be accused of deliberate cruelty or conscious torture. To them flesh was food as it still is to-day. They ‘eat their man,’ but they kill him before they cook him. It was recently reported that a trade in human flesh actually existed among these people, now unable to indulge in cannibalism openly. The desire for human flesh in the Maoris is in some instances as strong as the desire for opium.” • w * The amusing misplaced political caption in the Dunedin “Evening Star,” referred to on Saturday, is by no means the only laughable blunder that has occurred as the result of a printer's error. Sometimes, however, the mistake is far too serious for those concerned to see the joke. A stop and a hyphen once cost the United States some • £400,000., Among duty-free goods were “all foreign fruit-plants” (note the hyphen). Unfortunately, the hyphen somehow got left out, and was replaced by a comma, making the sentence read “all foreign fruit, plants.” As a result all foreign fruit had to be admitted free for nearly a year till the wheels of government, in the fullness of time, were in a position to. rectify the error. ' Although not so costly, there was an amusing mistake in connection with .a wellknown singer. It was intended to say “when Mrs. X rose to sing it was observed that she wore nothing that was remarkable.” It was perhaps a little tactless to draw attention to the lady’s drab apparel, but when the sentence got into print a stop had been added after the word “nothing.” “Sermons in books, stones in running brooks” seemed much truer to nature than the original, so some enterprising printer left it at that. What probably is still making a certain parish talk is another example of. one little letter making all the difference. The vicar meant to say in his parish magazine, “the windows of the church need washing badly.” His congregation were somewhat amused to read the vicar’s message when the* magazine was iirinted, minus the “n” in windows. ** • * Mr. Lowell Thomas seems to have abandoned his business of personally conducting popular lecturers on world tours for the lucrative one of writing war narratives in the form of magazine articles and “best-seller” books in attractive “jackets.” His “Sea Devil.” which has had a considerable sale in the Dominion, tells the story of Felix von Luckner, commander of the German raider, Seeadler. It gives us little that is new about the man and his strange adventures, but it contains numerous inaccuracies. Obviously written for American readers, the book gives an exaggerated importance to the com-merce-raiding exploits of von Luckner, whose few successes were scored chiefly against helpless sailing ships, and it contains many thinly-veiled sneers at British naval methods of commerce protection in war time. Those who have studied the story of Britain’s naval effort in the Great War will assess Mr. Lowell Thomas’s writings at their real value as contributions to history.

Apart from the German cruisers stationed overseas when the war started and two or three merchant ships which were armed by them, it is a noteworthy fact that only five commerce raiders succeeded in getting out of German ports during the whole of the war period. The first was the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, which escaped on the night of August 4, 1914, and was sunk three weeks later. The Cape Trafalgar, which left a South American port, was sunk on September 14 before she had time to do any raiding. <The Kronprinz Wilhelm and the Prinz Eitel Friedrich, the only other two armed merchant raiders at large, had to seek internment in an American port in MarchApril, 1915, while the whole of Germany’s cruisers had been disposed of by March, 1915. Never in the long history of our wars had the seas been so quickly and so effectually cleared of commerce destroyers, and in comparison with what had been anticipated the whole campaign had been singularly effective.

During the first eight months of the war, the loss to British commerce in all seas was estimated nt £6,691,009, representing about twothirds of one per cent, of the total value of British shipping and commerce. The only ocean raiders which succeeded in getting out of the North Sea from December. 1915, to the end of the war were the Moewe, • which made two cruises, and the Wolf and Seeadler. The Greif was sunk off the coast of Norway on February 28. 1916, the day after leaving Germany. Lowell Thomas, in his latest book, “Sea Raiders,” mentioned in a New York message to-day, appears to have adopted the German version of the sinking of the Lusitania. Schwieger, commander of the U2O, met his death in USS, which was sunk by the “Q boat” Stonecrop on September 17,1917, and Lowell Thomas has therefore had to fall back on the narrative of the ghastly tragedy supplied by that notorious officer to Kapi-tan-Leutnant Gayer, and printed by the latter in his book, which deals at considerable length and great pride with the operations of the German submarines in the Great War. It will not be surprising to find in the “Sea Raiders” traces of the anti-British bias which is apparent in Lowell Thomas’s story of von Luckner.

Shakespeare, if seldom presented in his entirety, is nevertheless much better treated nowadays than in years gone by. His fame underwent an eclipse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Dryden felt no compunction about rewriting “Antony and Cleopatra.” J Perhaps "Hamlet” in modern dress might be cited as a twentieth-century lapse.