RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 265, 5 August 1929, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

SIDELIGHTS ON CURRENT EVENTS

LOCAL AND GENERAL

<By

Cosmos.)

What with fountain pens, compacts, lip-sticks, cigarette-lighters and motorcars, life is just one refill after aoother.

Timp flies. Nowadays a child picks up its geography from the back seat of a motor-car, arithmetic from an automatic telephone and the alphabet from the radio call list.

Minister Szitovsky, voicing the Hungarian Government’s opposition to woman suffrage, says that he feels that women are best fitted for home life and not for participation in parliamentary duties. This is one of history’s most popular ways of repeating itself.

Trotsky takes a sardonic satisfaction in recalling that the French Minister Malvy, who expelled him from France in 1916, was himself exiled by Clemenceau not many months later. The world is full just now of widely scattered exiles, but it would hardly be feasible for Great Britain to provide a home for them, although such a home would make a lively debating club.

A French aeroplane, laden with £lOO,OOO worth of bullion, has recently advertised the costly cargo it was carrying by crashing and scattering some of its gold into a nearby river, but accidents such as this are very rare. Bankers have turned to the aeroplane for the carrying of their gold as the simplest way out of what must be always a worrying job. As far back as 1926 over £10,000,000 of bullion had been safely carried between London and Europe alone, and during the last few years literally millions of pounds’ worth of gold has crossed and recrossed the English Channel in a matter of days, without anyone even realising that those floating eldorados were racing Londonwards. Some of the larger aeroplanes could, at a stretch, transport over a quarter of a million pounds worth of gold at a time, thereby saving very considerable delay, risk of loss, and a hundred and one other overhead charges, not to mention a tremendous saving in interest charges, for a million pounds lying idle, even for a day, represents a sum of money few of us would refuse. - \

But it is not only banks that find the aeroplane a ready means of shooting their surplus wealth from one country to another. From the moment some excited prospector discovers a rich hoard of natural gold to the time it is converted into bullion, wedding rings, and a thousand other goods, it finds itself tossed about the world amongst the clouds. Indeed, but for the aeroplane there are parts of Alaska and Canada which even to-day would not have given up an ounce of their precious metal. ' To-day aeroplanes not only save the prospector an arduous four of five weeks’ journey on foot, but at a fairly low cost they bring back to civilisation the results of his labour. Unless bandits take to the air, the old days when they could make an excellent living by shooting up the gold coach are gone for ever. Even in New Guinea a gold mining syndicate has turned to the faithful aeroplane for the transport of their gold from an inaccessible inland region inhabited by dangerous and cannibalistic tribes. They have bought one of the fastest and most powerful Airways liners. It is capable of carrying two tons of. gold, and it is estimated it will take au hour to do a journey now occupying a week. The saving in time alone will more than pay for the machine in a few months, for expeditions on foot are costly undertakings. But gold is by no means the only queer cargo carried by air. Lions, grand pianos, jewellery, cremated human remains, motor-cars, coffins, tree trunks, and even coal and pig iron have formed the cargo of air liners before now.

Advertisement, in one form or another, has been with us since mankind did anything in this world of which he had reason to be proud or otherwise. In the latter case his friends planned his publicity campaign. It was not, however, until the advent of newspapers that these advertisements crystallised into something more solid. In company with notices regarding sermons, politics and hats, matrimonial advertisements took their place in this new scheme. Matrimonial advertisements, which are creating so much interest in New Zealand to-day, must have started a year or two before 1759, as in that year they had slipped across the Atlantic to Boston. The “Evening News” of that American city, on February 23. 1759. produced a modestlyworded matrimonial advertisement which read as follows: —“To the ladies: Any young lady between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, of a middling stature, brown hair, regular features and a lively, brisk eye: of good morals and not tinctured witli anything that may sully so distinguished a form, possessed of three or four hundred pounds entirely at her own disposal. . . . Such a one, by leaving a line directed for A.W. at the British Coffee House in King Street. . . . will meet a person who flatters himself he shall not be thought disagreeable by any lady answering that description.” Since those early days matrimonial agencies have sprung up ail over the world. Britain alone has four periodicals devoted entirely to the subject, whilst in the United States—well, the States always do things by the gross.

For the first time in history a complete record has been made of the enormous number of valuable gems collected in the treasury of the Shah of Persia. Hitherto no attempt at valuation had been made, but Riga Khan ordered a committee of French and Dutch jewellers to do the work. The committee has valued the whole State jewellery at over £34,000,000, with the exception of the famous diamond “Dara-i-Noor,” or the Seal of Light, which, according to the experts, is beyond estimation. The jewels consist in the most part of emeralds, diamonds, rubies, and pearls. Their weights have been taken and some idea of the Persian Shah’s treasures can be had from the fact that there are ten pounds of the finest pearls, twelve pounds <f rubies and thirteen pounds of emeralds. The largest emerald is valued at over £35.000. The most valuable of all the treasures is the famous peacock throne of the Mogul Emperors of Delhi, removed intact from the throne room of Dewan-i-Khas of Delhi to the Shah’s palace in Teheran. It is valued now at over £10,000,000. The famous string of pearls worn by the Sbali at the Durbars held in the palace is valued at over £50.000. while the wonderful diamond “Dara-l-Noor” stands almost unrivalled among the costly jewels of the world.