RAINING CATS AND DOGS AND HAILING TAXICABS

Northern Advocate, 30 July 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

RAINING CATS AND DOGS AND HAILING TAXICABS

The Inside Story

N° wind blows but that someone profits by it. If you lose your money someone picks it up. If your car runs over a bank someone makes his week’s wages pulling you out. So great, indeed, has become this universal habit of profiting by what harms others that we have in modern business worlds a plethora of motor salvaging companies, surgeons who keep the home fires burning by stitching the wounds of unfortunate accident victims, matrimonial agencies to mend broken romances (and so provide a fee for the organiser), estate agents

fry The Private D.

with property to sell to flooded lowlying settlers, detectives to assist the robbed rich, and even brewery managers who make a tidy sum from Derby betters drowning the sorrows of misplaced placings. * * * * IS the dentist says, it is in the filling ** of a need that greatest business success comes. And thdre is no single factor which brings need as does misfortune. Bloated profiteers still swank around this whirling globe fat on the proceeds of a 20-year old war. Swanking off-spring, unversed in the weals of common toils, drink champagne on pleasure * cruises and recount - how father tied the sugar supply or bottled the beer market or stampeded the stock exchange by selling rice to buy pigtails * # ♦ ♦ |\OES not the draper drape bodies ** whose former drapings are no longer presentable? Does the grocer not provide for people seeking to fill empty stomachs? Even the film magnate 'knows how absent is romance from most people’s lives, and thereupon makes a tidy fortune giving them imaginative dramas and manufactured heart-throbs. On the misfortunes of hollow hearts he packs his bag and travels the world in aristocratic pleasure.

FURTHER inquiry along these chan- * nels reveals only too vividly that more money has been made out of people’s hardships and wants than out of anything else. It is an ill wind, they say, that blows no one good. Likewise Whangarei’s endless potentialities for rain costs most of us a great deal of temper control and exhausted lung power coughing at our next door neighbour. But while it rains cats and dogs for nights -on end, this creates a universal hailing of taxicabs, much to the motorman’s delight. « m ♦ ■« EVEN Pop-Eye, man of muscle and raucous voice, born of half-starved fulcrum, has been known to sicken of a malady. The first and greatest, of course, was when he was transformed from a hoary batchelor to a love-sick crooner; the second when a spot on the liver made him a sworn enemy of big, bad, bold Rudolph or whatever the black shirted twenfy-stoner rival calls himself; the third was the common malady called flatulence, caused by eating too much quickly, or much too quickly, and drinking outside the apportioned half-hour-before and two-hours-afterward-limit.

HOP-EYE isn’t the only one who’s * ■ sworn never to eat and driifk again. Most of us, big and little, lean or fat, lithe or cumbersome, have at some time or other felt the ire of indigestion seething into the teeth, and mouthed expression of bloodthirsty lust from usually docile lips. If Pop-Eye the tough guy, could conceive indigestion (as he did in recent cartoon) from a four course dinner with the usual accompaniments, how can we mere humans expect to escape like torment?

IIJE go out. We have a cocktail, or, " what the older folk say, a pick-me,-up. We dash into entree, soup, a piled high plate of vegetables, secreting juicy chops or roasted joint swithming in saucy gravy, and, while stuffing this inside us to the tune of jazz music, we find a spare corner to ram home an oddment of bread and butter. Having mixed the entree, soup, meat, vegetables, gravy, bread, and done some fast chewing to make up for too much talking, we proceed to pour into the cement bucket a round cf fruit salads, steamed puddings, and jellies

AND we wonder why Pop-Eye got indigestion. Less wonder that we who wander round like miniature chemical works, harbouring the most amazing collection of elements, compounds, vitamins, liquids and solids that ever graced the capacity of prehistoric mammal, should likewise suffer. Even Pop-Eye knew before he started his elephantine Christmas what the consequences would be; but he didn’t think whatj an amazing event might result. From the first heave of the rebellious digestive organs he rushed to the nearest chemist, upsetting a small boy on a bicycle, who had to be attended by a doctor, who sent for an ambulance, which took him to hospital, which set two nurses to look after him, which meant a clerk to keep tally on their hours, which meant someone to bring their wages, which meant in turn a bank and more men, still more men, men making money, distributing money, and , . let’s get back to Pop-Eye. He’s at the chemist’s shop. « ♦ ♦ • . ;■ THE chemist calls his assistant, who rings a bell, which makes a lot of men jump up and start working, and other men supervise them, and run an office and pay clerks and banks, and, so back to the story of a few inches ago on top hereof. • • • • AS with Pop-Eye so with us when we eat. We don’t realise —thank goodness—that our very eating sets in motion a whirling mass of industrial machinery, from which every man and not a few women receive their due allocation of pounds, shilling and pence ... the farmer who owned-the corn, the men who worked the mill, the sailors who manned the ship, the men who baked the bread, -the carters who delivered it, the cook who baked it, the waitress who put it on the table. In like manner could be analysed an infinitum of every ingredient the greedy consume but time flies and, like Pop-Eye, let us sleep off the repast with a dose of medicine, upon which our chemist probably receives a‘ handsome profit because of our indulgence.