CURRENT COMMENT

Taranaki Daily News, 2 September 1933, Page 13 (Supplement)

CURRENT COMMENT

other points of view

(By

M.O.S.)

It could be called the Dairy Division of opinion. »#• ♦ ' Headline: Japanese might at sea.—We ask,, in some trepidation, What 1 * # * ♦ I It seems that although there are mem- i hers of the New Zealand Legion in Hawera, their name isn’t legion. .£ « * * * i i The rise in prices at the recent sales i will doubtless reduce the danger of our I sheepfarmers’ completely losing their 1 wool. ? •#* • ] As the Egmont Box Company showed a , profit on this year’s operations it is presumed that in spite of the slump it will } box on. t < I : # * • * < All the members of the Cuban Supreme Court except Chief Justice Edelman handed their resignations to President 1 de Cespedes on Tuesday night. They « seem resigned to the revolution. 3 # * * * ; A specimen of the fish known as the ( “sea-horse” obtained near the break- j •water at. Moturoa is to be sent to the c New Plymouth Museum— Sea-dogs how- j ever, are still permitted to roam, at large at the port. ’ 1 ♦,•• • * 1 News items from the Hawera this 1 week included paragraphs about a young J lady who fell through, a roof, a. dog-fight in an office, and a cat that was trapped in a chimney.—lt seems to have been i raining cats and dogs as usual. *#. * * j President Roosevelt, says a writer, feels it inadvisable to make the issue of war debts a live or crucial one at the present time. He has other and j more important fish to fry at', the j moment. He frankly states that it is more important to America to put its ( own house in order before concerning ( itself over world problems.—True enough £ no doubt, bikt the debtor nations that attended the Economic Conference have some excuse for thinking that those < “other and more important-fish” are red 1 herrings. ’ * * * * Artichokes and Austria. . The curious thing about Spring is the . suddenness of its arrival. You go to bed ■ one night shivering with a hot water bottle;, at midnight you wake with a feeling that something has happened. It has. The bottle has leaked. And you lie there and think of winter and wedlock and Mr. Forbes and the price of butterfat and a million other dismal , sorts of topics until you eventually freeze into a coma. Awaking in the morning you find a revelation. The first fly of Spring is vacillating and oscillating between the window pane and the end of your nose, and several small birds outside are squeaking and shrieking in the sunlight. Bees, bumble and otherwise, sandflies, mosquitoes and telegraph wires are humming with joy and the neigh- ' ■ hours’ daughter is singing Rule Brittannia. You feel almost irresistibly impelled to leap out of bed and plant artichokes. It is that sort of day. You might do half an hour’s digging before breakfast and hoe into the lettuce-bed after lunch, and water the aspidistra and the fowls in the evening. You might even oil the lawn-mower so that you could cut the lawn one day when you had timf. You decide that perhaps you should work out a plan of gardening operations before you actually start work, and so you lie in bed and meditate. Out in the country you know they are making pleasant noises with milk and buckets and you think how nice it would be to be a farmer; and then you remember that farmers get up early in the morning and you think how nice it is not to be a farmer. It would be good however, you ruminate, to be out in the hills somewhere, and see the young lambs rubbing their hands and the farmers gambolling and bleating in the sunshine. • You decide you must rescue your fishing rod from the coal-bin and inquire if the neighbours’ small boy returned your tennis racquet when he had. killed enough bumblebees to satisfy his em- . bryo sporting instincts. Then somebody brings you the morning paper. Headlines about Ireland catch your eye, and you laugh because the Irish are, always have been, and always will be, mad as rabbits. They take politics as the young man sometimes takes love, as something to be intensely and entirely insincerely excited about. So you don’t worry about Ireland very much. But then you read how Hitler is reviving the militant spirit in Germany, how Austria is inflamed and ripe ,foi trouble, how the Japanese have just conducted most extensive naval manoeuvres, how every nation in the world j s racing for armaments even mors stupidly than in 1914. You could weep. You feel that you ought to do something about it, to get up and make speeches, to organise societies for peace. But you know that it is all o no good and that there is nothing to be done. So you put the paper aside and go on pretending that the world is a pleasant place and that artichokes are more important than Austria. # # * » Robbery and Snobbery. (The days of chivalry are not dead. Mrs. Frederick M. Just was held up by a Chicago bandit, who stole her money and jewellery worth £3OO. Before he fled he presented her with a bouquet of red roses bearing a card with the words, “With respectful sympathy.”) If you’re wakened in the midnight by ’> a wicked gun-and-gore man It’s always a relief to find his ancestry is Norman; Your brain with pleasure whirls If the burglar takes his hat off Ere he carries half your flat off Or if he bows with courtly grace before he bags your pearls. If your office has been robbed and ' all your earnings took But the man who did the burgling was a sympathetic crook You don’t feel half so sad. If the empty safe discloses A bouquet of crimson roses You feel that Sikes was knightly, not intrinsically bad. If a murderer says “Pardon me” and bats you in the eye . Or shoots you in the stomach with a homicidal sigh You feel he’s gently bred, And his suave and pleasant manner Makes you want to wave a banner And shout with triumph that the age of Chivalry’s not dead.