FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1021, 11 July 1930, Page 10

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By “THE LOOK-OUT MAN BLAME THE RAIN

Rugby football, as played at Paeroa, is not merely a game—it is a vendetta. According to a Sun correspondent a recent senior match between Paeroa East and Suburbs reached a stage whereat a player offered to fight the referee. The game then got out of hand, bad language and fists were used freely, and, in the words of the chronicler, “it became merely a question of who could stand the hardest knocks.” Finally a spectator stripped for action and prepared to fight a player. So it went. To cap all it was suggested that the disgraceful scene was caused by the continuous rain which “frayed the tempers of players and spectators.’* When players in Paeroa are gathered together ’Tis well to consider the state of the weather, For, during the game, if it steadily rains They are sure to be battered about for their pains. The townsfolk are goaded by dampish conditions, To lay out their foes in recumbent positions— One shudders to think of the lengths they would go If the climate grew worse, and it started to snow! A IREMINDED “la this an airplane?” An astonished salesman at the Winter Exhibition yesterday gazed at the inquirer speechlessly. She repeated her question. "Please excuse me.” she said, "but where are Us wings, and just how’ would it really fly?” The salesman gasped and found his voice. “My dear lady, no; this Is not an airplane," he said. “It has no wings, and it does not fly. It is a car cruiser caravan/* Obviously disappointed the dear lady passed on leaving the salesman to wonder how in the world anyone could mistake his neatly-designed little caravan, looking no more fit for flight than a ferry boat, for an airplane. He stood back and looked at it in the hope of finding some vague point of similarity. Then he solved the mystery. Seated in the caravan and admiring its fittings was the well-known Hamilton air pilot, Major G. A. C. Cowper. The visitor had put two and two together. Here was an airman seated in a strange contraption; there fore the contraption must be some sort of flying machine. CHEERY OUTLOOK One of the queer anomalies of life is that optimism frequently becomes the product of pessimism. In Australia, for example, the Federal Government is facing a deficit of £12,000,000, and the New South Wales Government a deficit of £4,000,000, the aggregate result making it necessary to pull a relief tax of 3d in the £ out of every worker’s wages. Nevertheless we find a King’s Counsel from Sydney—w’hich, by the way, is facing serious depression for the first time xn its gay history—informing an interviewer that New South Wales is facing the position with "cheerful optimism.” An excellent thing if it be true. Unfortunately the full tally of deficits has yet to be taken. When ail seven of the Australian Governments pi’oduce their Budgets and a few rapid calculations are made, the King’s Counsel and his friends mav need to be more cheerfully optimistic than ever.

AN INDUSTRY

So bookmaking has reached the status or organised business. In fact if the allegations made by Mr. JohD Rowe, president of the Auckland Trot ting Club, are founded on fact (and nobody seems to be bursting forward to disprove them), bookmaking has become a sort of local industry as sisted by an obliging Government that supplies it with telegraphic and telephonic communication. We learn that one bookmaking firm has a staff of 10l> men conducting a house-to-house can yass; that there are 150 bookmakers in Auckland alone. These figures being correct, bookmakers may soon become powerful enough to come out into the open and battle for their rights. Perhaps at the annual meet ing of the Turf Investment Association in 1932, reporters will gather this son of paragraph: “The president, Mr Odzon, made a trenchant attack on the continued existence of a surreptitious police organisation in Auckland, Were members aware that a certain estab lishment in the heart of the city had fully SO policemen on its pay-roll l ’ These men conducted street patrols quite openly, and even interfered oc easionally with bookmakers. Whai was the Government going to do about it?” CABBAGE LOVE During the hearing of a separation case a few days ago in the Magistrate’s Court of a country centre not a thousand miles from Auckland, the following extract was quoted from a letter produced:— “My heart is like a cabbage Which really breaks in two— The leaves I give to others. The heart I keep for you.” This pretty rural sentiment is somewhat marred by the fact that, after delivering it, the hero would have to stalk away.