RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 121, 15 February 1929, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

SIDELIGHTS ON CURRENT EVENTS LOCAL AND GENERAL

(By

Cosmos.)

The modern child is so up to dat® that she won’t accept a large doll’® house as a present on account of’th* servant problem. , * ’ * A Scotch professional golfer, after ten years of retirement, has resumed the game. The lost ball must hhv® turned up again. • • • “Money,” says a Socialist, "always means trouble.” If that is so, it’s the one kind of trouble which is hard to borrow. Shorter trains are suggested by an engineer as being safer than long ones. The idea being, we presume, that it is easier for a short train to dodge motorists at a level-crossing.

In a suburban district recently a van capsized, causing ten gallons of milk to be spilt on the road. The well-meannig gentleman who attempted to console the driver by quoting an apt proverb is said to be making favourable progress.

“N” writes: “A few days ago you referred to the record for speaking, and no doubt readers of your informative column will be interested in the silence championship of the House of Commons. The record belongs to Mr. J. D. Hope,, who was in the House for twenty years without taking part in a debate. It is even said that the story that he once so far forgot himself as to interject ‘Hear, hear,’ is an exaggeration.”

One of the interesting discoveries we owe to the intrepid explorers of the Arctic and Antarctic regions is that the cure for a cold is more cold. The members af the various South Polar expeditions have frequently stated that they never develop a cold when the temperature is below zero, but the moment they arrive in New Zealand they begin to sneeze. In the near future the treatment for severe colds and influenza may resolve itself into an aeroplane voyage to the South Pole.

It appears that civilisation is moving forward. The first recorded case of suicide in an aeroplane, accompanied also by murder, is claimed by Belgrade news dispatches in a tragic narrative in which the fiery passions of the Balkans, and the picturesque lethal possibilities of air travel were fatally combined. Sergeant-Major Firowica, a daring air pilot of Jugo-Slavia, took his betrothed up aloft for a ride in the sky. They quarrelled, as young people will, and the pilot turned his ’plane to earth in a death-dive. He was killed instantly, but the young woman lived long enough to murmur that they had disagreed;

What is probably one of the strangest filial dilemnas On record is reported from Europe. Miss Mariska Kramaz, of Budapest, Hungary, while mourning at the death-bed of a woman supposed to be her mother, was told that the dying one was not her parent. She had been adopted from the .White Cross League when only a few months old, her mother, a woman of the same name, having disappeared. Not long after, Mariska received a letter from the Hungarian Consulate in Brazil, which informed her that Terez Kramaz was alive, and that after placing her child with the White Cross League, she had emigrated to Brazil. Mariska joined her newly-discovered mother in Brazil, and soon after Mrs. Kramaz died, leaving' the girl a fortune. Mariska then returned to Hungary, Where she received a letter from a solicitor stating that a client of his, Terez Ramaz, claimed to be the'mother of Mariska, and could prove that it was her child that had been placed with the White Cross League twenty years before. .Now Mariska would like to know who she really is,

“Mercury” (Oamaru), writes: “I read in your column that a Mr. Charles Barwell, of Auckland, is contemplating the crossing of Cook Strait in a canoe. This recalls the fact that this feat has already been accomplished. . Sometime in the ’nineties—l am not sure of the year, but I think it was about 1895— Mr. Harold Shearman, eldest son of the late Inspector Shearman, a resident of Oriental Bay, and a member of the Star Boating Club, successfully made the crossing in a 12-foot Rob Roy canoe. He was then employed in the Post and Telegraph Department, and on the occasion under review spent his annual leave at'Porirua (as a free agent, by the way), and waited there with his canoe until a suitable opportunity presented itself, and then he made his “dash.”, He had quite a good passage.

"Mr. Shearman had set himself to catch the ingoing tide at Tory Channel, and per medium of paddle and a pocket-handkerchief sail he very nearly kept to his schedule, but found himself just too late at Wellington Head, with the result that he could not make the entrance, and had to potter about outside for nearly six hours until the tide turned. He then completed his journey to Picton, and wired his safe arrival to Wellington, which was the first intimation to his friends that he had started on his venturesome journey. Mr. Shearman was then a man of splendid physique, six foot four inches in height, and bull: in proportion, and was a powerful oarsman and swimmer. Like most Oriental Bay boys of that time, he was a very expert small-boatman. He was later postmaster in Tauranga, and Is now, I believe, resident in Auckland.

"It has been a wonder to me that this incident has not been recalled, as a result of the interest taken in the crossing of ■ the Strait of late.;- The newspaper files of the day had full accounts of the trip, although, of course, there was not the fierce glare P llcity beating on this kind of thiiig, e. en that short time ago, as seems so inevitable now. For example, some of the older of your readers will remember a big Dutch seaman, Plaacte, by name, whose fistic combat in I®4, I think, with a well-known WeHngton amateur “heavy” in the old Ctokes’s Hall in Thorndon, w’ith its dramatic termination through police intervention, and the prosecution of the principals, caused no small stir ac the time. Well, this same Plaacke swam from the Star Boating Club, round Sonjes’ Island, and back. Whether he stopped at the island I do not remember, but no doubt some of the old of the day will recall the swim. And this was done “just for fan,” with no publicity at all. It was. not considered necessary then. “Tiny” Freyberg knew of this, which is one reason he never thought mucY of his own WellingtonDay’s Bay swim. But then, “Tiny” never did think much of his own achievements, and probably he doesn’t asfuijias. Hft ma lika