NEWS IN BRIEF

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22000, 5 January 1935, Page 1 (Supplement)

NEWS IN BRIEF

British film-goers pay admission to cinemas at the rate of £18,500.000 a week.

Fifty-five shades of nail polish are on sale in one New York department store.

Ninety-six thousand ham sandwiches were eaten at the last Motor Show in

London

A sheet of parchment nearly three feet square was required for the Royal wedding certificate. While drunkenness and crime are decreasing in London, civil actions in the law courts are increasing.

London's busiest traffic point is Hydn Park Corner. On one day 81,857 vehicles passed between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.

One out of every eleven workers in the United States is employed directly or indirectly in the automobile industry.

A hawk which caught a squirrel in Schweinitz, Silesia, bore it aloft. The squirrel fought in mid-air and killed the hawk.

The highest ocean waves so far reported by reliable observers were estimated to measure seventy feet from trough to crest. Arrested for calling "Fire!" in a crowded Chicago theatre, a woman explained that she always summoned her children with that cry. When a man lost a diamond ring in a lake at Lenaxa, Kansas, 300,000 gallons of water were drained from the lake. The ring was found. The French hairdresser who has air ways attended upon Princess Marina travelled specially to London to" dress her hair for the wedding.

Motorists and motoring have been the subject of no fewer than three Acts of Parliament and 70 Orders and Regulations in Britain since 1930.

The ingredients required for the 220 tons of Christmas pudding made by a London firm included 200,0001b. of currants, sultanas and raisins.

Overcrowding is bad in various parts of London, including Finsbury, where more than 25 per cent, of the population live more than two in a room

The "Flying Scotsman" expresses between King's Cross and Edinburgh recently completed 58 runs, representing 45,500 miles, without losing a minute. Single-deck buses, operated by one man only, have been tested hear London. The driver acts as conductor, opening the doors by pressing a button.

Out of every 100 victims of fatal road accidents in Britain 49 are pedestrians, three drivers of motor vehicles, and the rest pedal and motor-cyclists or pillion riders.

Wine-growers in the Rhone, Valley have been complaining that, owing to the use of tar on roads adjoining the vineyards, their wines are now tasting of tar. ),

The cyclist messengers of the British Post Office cover 200,000,000 miles everv year. This represents an average of 10,000 miles for each of the 20,000 bicycles.

A pattern of leaf-brown satin was recently sent to Messrs. Lyons, the London caterers, with a request that a wedding cake should be made to match the bride's frock of that material.

" Hail, Mighty Elephant!" was how the natives of Cape Province greeted the Duke of Kent during his South African tour, while in the Transvaal the natives addressed him as " Lord of the White Cliffs."

It is said that every time a ship visits the lonely island of Tristan da Cunha, in the South Atlantic, all. or nearly all, the 167 inhabitants catch cold. Germs left by the ship's passengers produce the epidemic.

A deep-sea camera invented by Professor Shamanov, of Moscow, is fitted with a television set hermetically sealed in a special cabinet. The object is to broadcast pictures of ocean denizens direct from a submarine.

Orsini vipers, specimens of which hava just reached the London Zoo, though provided with fangs and poison glands, are so gentle that they make popular children's pets in various parts of Austria and the Balkan States.

Twelve thousand pats an hour are formed, stamped with a design and packed in a tin by the "butter pat" champion of Cadby Hall, London. » Despite exhaustive inquiries, no machine has yet been found to equal her dexterity.

Four human skeletons, believed to be more than 100,000 years old and described by Professor Albright, director of Oriental research, as " undoubtedly a missing link in the evolution of mankind," have been discovered in a cave near Nazareth.

A Bengali girl named Manu Banerjee lately remained, swimming and floating, in the College Square -Tank, Calcutta, for 16* hours. She is only 5£ years of age and thin and frail-looking,, but appeared to be none the worse for her experience. She learnt to swim only four months previously.

A man who declared that he did not wish to leave his home in a Sheffield slum area produced at a Ministry of Health inquiry photographs of his three daughters. He said the house must be healthy because his daughters were, fine specimens of womanhood. They had won various county swimming championships and had about 52 medals each.

Mr. Richard Espinosa, of New Jersey, called for a blackboard and chalk so that he could explain to the jury just how a motor-car accident happened. He demonstrated so well that the jury awarded him £3O for the damage done to his car. Mr. Espinosa is a Safetv First lectiirer, and makes his living by telling people how to avoid accidents. While ploughing on a ranch near TenMexico State, Enrique Miranda uncovered three sacks containing 1060 fifty-peso gold pieces which are believed to have been buried by revolutionaries in 1916. The hoard is worth £IO.OOO. Miranda vanished with the treasure when the authorities sought to collect half of it as the federal government's share.

Smoke stacks on British railway locomotives are disappearing. Engines are now so large that if they had chimneys they would not get under the bridges. Smoke stacks are now being sunk inside the boiler, flush with the top. A forced draught, caused by the speed of the engine through the air, sweeps the smoke high into the air. so that it does not hide the view of the driver. The Soviet version of Shakespeare's " Hamlet" has been taken off in Mossow and in future the texts of Shakespeare's plays will be followed faithfully —with no distortion. In the Moscow version Hamlet was a matter-of-fact young man who pretended to be mad in order to further his aims. Ophelia was represented as falling into the river and drowning when drunk after a party.

Lord Horder, the King's physician, speaking at a meeting of the AntiNoise League at Portsmouth, said: " This question of noise is a matter in which medicine should concern itself. That noiso is an important factor in causing disease I am personally quite convinced. Noise causes disease by undermining the most essential part of our physical economy, and that is the nervous system. Undermine the nervous system and we become an. easy prey to all sorts of other and disease-producing elements.