RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 297, 11 September 1937, Page 10

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events

(By

Kickshaws.!

That woman who was recently nonsuited —well, thanks to modern fashions you would hprdly notice any difference.

We deplore the effort to cramp the style of New Zealand prospectuses as being against the best interests of New Zealand fiction writers.

The reduced hours of work for hairdressers make us alarmed lest they won’t have time to say what they have to every day.

We married men take off our hats to the emu at the Zoo which has hatched out a family of chicks for its wife. We note that the patient father is still brooding over the remaining unhatched eggs. Any father would brood under the circumstances, and the patient persistence is more than enough to admit this poor bird to life membership of the Husbands’ Union. Indeed there is no member of the union who can honestly claim to have done as much for his family, his wife, his home, or his love nest. We feel that some token of respect should be made, some diplomatic gesture on the part of the Government which, by some curious coincidence, is also sitting. Perhaps Mr. Savage feels a little diffident about taking any action, possibly because he is a bachelor, and possibly because he is an experienced politician. He knows that when a politician starts to sit it is not always possible to foretell with complete accuracy exactly what he will hatch out.

The harassed husband, overburdened with family cares, whose better half has sent him out with the pram, while she goes off to see her talkie fan, may perhaps have a faint inkling of the heroism of the emu at Auckland. Nevertheless, those husbands to whom it falls to walk up and down the room at night comforting a recent arrival as best may be, must not brood too bitterly upon the comforts of an emu’s marital existence. He should remember that he and the emu are relatively better off than are many other even more-imposed-upon busbands. Mother Marmoset, for example, considers that once she has brought her babies into the world that is as much as can be expected. She presses her offspring into the admittedly unwilling arms of her spouse and goes off for a bit of fun. Then there is the case of Father Baboon at the London Zoo. His wife died, but the good fellow did not think of solving the problem by remarrying. Instead he reared his child entirely without help, despite the fact that even the most insincere of his friends could not call the baby a beauty.

Father Emus are not the only birds that take a motherly interest in the little nest eggs. Some years ago a Japanese crane at the London Zoo presented her husband with two eggs. The good woman sat on them for a month with the result that one hatched and the other didn’t. She became wrapped up in the chick, lost patience with the other egg and kicked it out of the nest. Father Crane evidently considered this a slight upon himself. He was determined to prove that with a little patience the other egg was as good as the first one. He trundled it to a suitable spot and sat on it for a week. The happy result was a chicken for papa as well as one for mamma. The sacred ibis from Africa is another family tjird that takes an interest in his eggs.' In this case father sits on the eggs all day and mother all night. Possibly penguins are the most selfsacrificing fathers of alh Not only do they sit on the eggs but the nest is so cold that they have-to hold the egg on their feet to keep it off the snow. Moreover, any male bird, be he a bachelor or a father, will willingly look after any hens’ chicks and feed them personally while the mothers go off for a frolic. ’ In this respect the penguin beats man. ,

In the lish world there are many faithful fathers who do far more for their offspring in Hie various stages of growth than is done by their extremely faithless wives. Perhaps th e best example of male faithfulness is seen among the sticklebacks. Father certainly does not lay the eggs, but he does everything else, including the building of the nest single-handed from weeds and twigs. That done, be goes and gets himself not one wife, but many. His wives are persuaded to lay their eggs in the nest that father has built. They then clear off and enjoy themselves. Father takes on the task of hatching the youngsters by fanning the eggs violently with his tail and tins. Husbands should note what happens. Father Stickleback does this unceasingly until the eggs are hatched. Then the poor fellow, tired out. collapses and dies of exhaustion. That surely should be a lesson to wives, but in the case of Father Stickleback, his wives are not there to hear his last wrds, or even to adopt their combined children.

In spite of everything, we feel that the human race should tender some mark of honoured respect to Father Emu. who. single-handed, or whatever is the emuesque equivalent, has transformed his eggs into chicks. The human race is noted for.giving honour where honour is due. Even Hitler grudgingly admits that a prolific woman Is as good as a soldier. The very least that the Civic Fathers can do is to give Father Emu the freedom of the City of Auckland. It is not so great an honour as that which awaits the emu in the Wellington ZOo, but then Auckland will always suffer under the disability of not being Wellington. Not even Mr. Semple will be able to rectify that. Meanwhile, the Auckland emu remains unhonoured. Kickshaws would never be so ungracious as to suggest the best way of .honouring an emu which has come gloriously through the incubation period of its fatherhood. A tree, perhaps, might be planted in which it could roost when it grew old, or a pile of sand provided in which it could hide its head when family affairs became strained.

“Regarding your ‘had’ sentence. I have two solutions,” says "C.N.L.” “The fact that. A, while B had, /bad had had had.’ bad ‘had bad’ bad influence with the examiner.” "The fact that A, while B bad bad ‘had had hil-1' had, ’had had.’ had influence witli the examiner.” “Would you also inform me whether in the first Test, South Africa versus New Zealand, forty or thirty-five minute spells we*e played?” [Forty minutes.]

"That’s That” lias kindly sent along a punctuated ‘that that’ for the benefit of readers:—‘That, that is, is; that, that is not, is not: but that, that is not, is not that, that is; nor is that, that is, that, that is not, for that, that is, is not that, that is not, Is not that so’?” Qualte.