PASSING NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24783, 6 December 1941, Page 6

PASSING NOTES

The surprise of the week is the impressive importance attached to the driving of the final spike on the Buller Gorge railway. Never has a New Zealand railway spike been driven home with such elaborate and laborious ceremony. The order went forth that every YA station should suspend its scheduled programme in order to broadcast from North Cape to Paterson's Inlet a complete, verbatim, minute-to-minute report of it, ""down to the smallest detail. Through our ears we saw the Minister of Railways instructing the crowd how to hold a mallet: we saw the spike driven by Ministerial hands; we heard the puffing of the engine moving slowly forward to smash the extended ribbon, and even the name of the engine driver. And all this came after a score of political and other speeches, and presentations to all and sundry. Forgivable might be all this over-dramatisation of Cabinet activities if the mid-day 8.8. C. broadcast of critical war news had not been relegated to second place, and suspended till the great ceremony closed —however long it might have lasted. Justified, therefore, are the complaints of parents and relatives of New Zealanders fighting a momentous conflict in the Eighth Army. In tense expectancy they hurried home in their short lunch-hour to hear the latest news. Instead they heard the Minister of Railways eulogising the Minister of Labour on a top note, and the Minister of Labour responding in kind. Could not the whole proceedings have been recorded and rebroadcast later? Or, better still, could not the broadcast have been made through the commercial stations, at the usual advertisement rates?

For a man whose proud boast it is to have graduated from the school of hard knocks, Mr Semple is surprisingly unable to "take it." An attacker he has been all his life. But to him the counter-attack is the last word in depravity, the acme of idiocy; the ne plus ultra of villainy. With the French he seems to say, "A vicious creature is this animal: when it is attacked it defends itself." From this kink of nature arise the brightest spots in the " Sempliana " that may one day be written. The volume is steadily growing. A woman objector at a public meeting at Westport on Sunday night was bludgeoned by Mr Semple with "I don't want to hear that cackling voice, and the jarring of that squeaky sub-human noise. I've heard it too often in the zoo." " Why did you not fight in the last war? asked a man at the same meeting. Retorted Mr Semple: "You are a contemptible liar and a white-livered coward." To another interjector: " This is nothing but an exhibition of compound stupidity. He opens his mouth to cackle and the wind blows his tongue around." To a query concerning the conscription of wealth he replied: "If we taxed you 17s 6d in the £ you would squeal like a rabbit with its tail jammed. . . . O you poor mutt. You should go home and read. If you are as light below your shoulders as you are above you could fly home." A pity it is that a man with many excellent qualities should be a male shrew!

Everyone will agree with Mr Parry in his eulogy of walking. " One Of the best branches of physical welfare is" walking," he said, speaking the other day to members of the Otago section of the New Zealand Alpine Club. Which was carrying coals to Newcastle. Significantly he added, " The time is coming when people who want to see New Zealand will have to walk to see it." Which foretells that the petrol restrictions and the saving in car upkeep will set many a man on his Further, "I know of no country that offers a greater reward to walkers th n this beautiful Dominion of ours.T Which expresses the sentiments of Thoreau when he said'"Every walk is a sort of Crusade; preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels." Like Crusaders we should therefore walk, with eyes fixed upon distant horizons. But. alas, not along city streets or country roads can such a Crusader walk. Gaze bh distant horizons, and you will soon be run down, and your late note will resemble that of a run-down gramophone. And on a country road every walker is a jaywalker to the joy-rider; But Mi ParryV thesis might have gone further. How much has mankind lost in , mental arid bodily vigour from.the m6ment it was carried off its feet by horse or vehicle? •'.■

An increase of 600 brings the total number of entrants to the University Entrance Examination to 5830—close to the prodigious total of 6300. Poets and landscape painters may call this month of December what they will To . schoolboys and schoolgirls throughout this land, to quivering teachers too, arid'to-quaking parents, it will always be known as the examination month, when the whole world seems to come up to be examined. In the crucible, this month, are placed all these four classes of suffering humanity, to be assayed and tested and tried in the balance "A modern, tyranny," some have called it, "comparable in kind and degree to ancient tyranny under Western Emperor or Eastern Satrap:" For this examination of teachers and of parents, helpless children are the corpus vile But think not that this modern Moloch opens its gapirfg maw to children only.' Accountants are examined, and actuaries, and surveyors, and bankers and oculists and plumbers Every licensed individual acquires his licence by examination—except perhaps hotelkeepers, hawkers, old gold buyers and the like. Said Sir Michael Sadler at Sheffield a few years ago: "We shall have to find some better way of selecting our elite than by competitive examination." But neither Sir Michael nor his namesake St.- Michael can tell us how.

A serious menace is this increase in "Matriculation" candidates towards 6000. The very weight of the examination is threatening to break it down. In the hands of the public lies the remedy. Some years ago the University authorities, hearkening to public objections that the examination was divorced from common life, devised with infinite care another examination —the School Certificate—which met every objection and answered every need. Having got vhat it wanted, the public no longer wants it. Commerce and industry continue to demand the old examination, as if to say "With all thy faults we love thee still." Again, the University authorities, close pressed by parents and teachers, moved with slow steps and infinite delibeiation towards school-accrediting. " The teacher knows best," it was said. "Accrediting" is now about to win the day. It is on the eve of adoption. But already parents and

teachers are starting back affrighted, are nervous about it, see dangers in it. They are asking themselves, "What if parents should insist that the accrediting teacher should regard their geese as swans? " The parents, on their side, prefer the devil they know to the devil they do not know. Distrust prevails all round. Meanwhile the old examination grows in bulk, with a standard notoriously too low. Those who fail at this low standard are certain failures, those who pass are uncertain passes.

Of examination howlers the number is legion. Some may be quoted: The first book in the Bible is Guinessis. Acrimony, sometimes called holy, is another name for marriage. Question: Distinguish between Evolution, Revolution, Devolution. Answer: Evolution is what Darwin did, Revolution is a kind of government abroad, Devolution has something to do with Satan. The Pharisees were people who liked to show off their goodness by praying in synonyms. Esau was a man who wrote fables and sold his copyright for a mess of potash. What do you know of Solomon? —He was ifond of animals, because he had three hundred porcupines. Charles I was going to marry the Infanta of Spain. He went to see her, and Shakespeare says he never smiled again. Bruce was a brave general and fought like a spider. Edward 111 would have been King of France if his mother had been a man. The chief clause in Magna Charta was that no man should be put to death or imprisoned without his own consent. Henry had an abbess on his knee, which made walking difficult. * On one side of a penny is the King's head, on the other a young lady riding a bicycle; they call her Ruby Tanyer. Civis.