RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 105, 27 January 1933, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events LOCAL AND GENERAL

(By

Kickshaws.)

According to one musician, singing is all, a matter of pitch. According to the Australians, cricket is even more so. ♦ ♦ ♦ A psychologist claims to have proved that if one wishes hard enough for a certain person to come that person inevitably arrives. ■ Unfortunately, the reverse is truer still. A coroner in England asks what you would think of a man who deliberately left another to the mercies of a torrent. One would be suspicious that he had plumber’s blood in him somewhere. * « • My neighbour (the one who borrows my “Dominion” every morning) and I read your column in Saturday’s issue, writes “J. 8.8. Wellington. We agreed that your jest in the third paragraph was commendable, but joined issue on a point connected with it. In the end the little "difference came to a wager, which you alone can settle. He maintains that you have not observed the evident logical absurdity in the opening sentence of the paragraph. I say that you must have seen it. Would you be so good as to state the fact —we will, of course, take your word for it, and direct the destiny of a crown? [Sorry, no logical absurdity can be observed in the sentence in question, which reads, “Complaints have been made that the autobiography of a certain retired general is being sold at a prohibitive price.”]

The Yugoslavian journalist who has dug up and put into a book the history of most of the religious sects of America. has done a service for that country that someone else ought to do for England. While America possesses such sects as the “Church of Numerology.” the “Chureh of Fire,” and the “Temples of Light,” English cousins seem to have indulged their whims in a more practical manner. For example, three sisters have just died in Britain who ran a strong semi-religious campaign against swatting flies. Their leaflet pointed out that as the fly was the work of the Creator it ought to be worshipped rather than killed. It is said that the deaths of these sisters occurred prematurely when the “Swat That Fly” campaign was inaugurated by the medical profession. An old gentleman in Dorset, not to be outdone by an anti-fly-swat sect, started a sect whose objects were to stop people being buried in.coffins. His argument was that the dust of the wood mixing with the dust of the human body would cause a mix-up at the resurrection.

A society flourished in England with an ambition to make parents give their offspring Biblical names. Parents who had five children so named were given a prize. The fact that one meets so few Jehosaphats and Ezras to-day seems to indicate that this society did not meet with success. Nevertheless, it must have met' with more success than the sect started by a resident in Deal, England, who, for some reason, wished to make people drink nothing but sea wateri He is supposed to have died from despair after obtaining only 60 adherents in seven years. Another gentleman sought to introduce onepiece seamless garments because Christ wore them. Like the woman who started a barefoot sect, complete with an alarming list of diseases brought on by wearing boots, there were very few adherents.

The voting barrister who has squandered £30,000 in a matter of five years has certainly done his best to live up to the slogans concerning free spending. All the same he must take a back seat when his little fling is compared with similar efforts made in the socalled good old days. It was considered nothing to lose £5OO an hour at cards. Moreover, a bet as to whether the next person would be a man or a woman to pass a certain lamp post has been kno.wn to relieve at least one individual of £50,000. The record for spending seems to lie with Charles James Fox, who made it a point of honour to play cards tlie whole clock round. Before he was 25 years old he had squandered at cards alone the enormous total of £140,000. He used to bet by the thousand pound on such subjects as whether “X” would be a vice-admiral by the week after next; whether “Y” would be wearing a yellow waistcoat three days hence; anil whether “Z” would be alive in two years. To-day, of course, we leave the last-named uncertainty to the insurance companies.

However wasteful man may be as an individual, it is nothing to the massed waste he tolerates as a community. . At the moment we are using coal and oil a thousand times faster than Nature succeeds in storing them. Reckless cutting of forests must inevitably present our heirs with a first-class scarcity of timber. Indeed, China at the moment in some districts is already feeling the effects of timber scarcity. So densely populated is the land in the great river valleys that trees are unknown. Wood for fuel is therefore unknown, straw and dung having to take its place. Uy taking crop after crop out of the virgin soils of Western America, man has exhausted the riches given him by Nature. Much tlie same has been happening 'O the grasslands of the world. If cheap fertilisers had not been introduced to restore tlie balance the future would indeed have been gloomy. At the rate we are wasting things the time must eiime when population, not supplies, may have to be controlled. Now that the humble cockroach has been adapted to the racecourse by Montparnasse. Paris, as reported, there seems little else in Nature that could be turned to good account. The frog has already been utilised in America. The turtle’ has beteu used for races on the Great Barrier Reef. The flea has been made to compete in the long jump against its own kind. The greyhound, tlie h’6rse, the camel, ’he Hama, and the ostrich long since fell t» tlie competitive racing spirit of man. It is even suggested that shell fish from New Zealand beaches should be put into special training to compete in a toherpa squirting classic. One form of racing that jo far seems to have been overlooked is a spider web-spinning race. Starting from a height the spider that slipped a web to tin finishing post below in the fastest time would be accredited the winner. A slower, but more intricate. race, of course, would be a webspinning championship. But that verges on politics.

Whoe'er lias travelled life’s dull round, Where'er his stages may have been. May sigh to think how oft he found The warmest welcome —at an Inn. —Shenstone.