NEWS IN A NUTSHELL

Taranaki Daily News, 10 November 1934, Page 13 (Supplement)

NEWS IN A NUTSHELL

THE WORLD AT A GLANCE

The only book in the world that contains no printers’ errors is said to be the Modem Oxford Bible.

Coal royalties paid annually in Great Britain have amounted to £5,000,000 a year during the last five years. Remorse, fear, love, anger, sorrow, and joy are said to be among the principal causes of sleeplessness.

Motor transport workers on both railways and roads are said to be among the most sober men in the community.

We are all becoming bigger. Europeans are, bn an average, two Incnes taller than were their grandfathers of seventy years ago.

A humming-bird has proportionately more brains than a man. Its brain is a twelfth its body weight; a man's is a thirty-fifth

Mr. James Barnes ordered a baby’s mattress from an Omaha furniture shop. By mistake the shop sent him two. A few days later Mrs. Barnes gave birth to twins.

London’s famous tower, the Monument, built to commemorate the Great Fire, derives an average annual income from sightseers of £lOOO, representing 80,000 visitors.

British industries now find work for nearly 2,000,000 women; they are more numerous than men in the making of clothing and in the textile and pottery manufactures.

Puzzled at the loss of milk yielded by < his goats, a farmer of Vrshatz, Yugoslavia, investigated. He discovered that snakes were milking the animals as they lay on the ground.

A weeping willow that sheds real teals has been discovered at Milton, Massachusetts. Due to a canker in its roots, the leaves of the tree drip continually day and night. ■ A 1638 copy of “The Muses Threnodie,” by Henry Adamson, the Scottish poet, / sold for £3B at Sotheby’s recently, contains the first literary reference to golf in Scotland.

Motorists are said to be most liable to accidents in their second year of driving. In the first year they are cautious; then comes a period of too much confidence and too little experience.

Government maps ’for the use of airmen bear special signs indicating airship stations, overhead electric cables and pylons, airway beacons, and “danger areas.”

Chloroformed pyjamas are now issued to insomnia patients in Polish hospitals. The amount of dope is just sufficient to induce a quiet sleep for the night.

A pink man, formerly a doctor practising in Egypt, is perplexing London specialists. When hot he exudes a pink perspiration, turning all his under-gai-ments the same colour.

A Copenhagen restaurant has 157 different kinds of sandwiches on its menu ranging from birds’ nests to cactus flower honey; and an American company makes ice-cream in 145 different flavours. • - .

To encourage kissing in Western Africa, where it is practically unknown, gramophone records registering the sounds of a couple kissing in the approved European style have been circulated amongst natives.

Eight specimens of “blue sheepamong the rarest of the earth’s larger mammals, have been obtained by the Smithsonian Institution. They live in the high mountains of Szechwan Province, China, and inhabit the crags at elevations of 10,000 feet or more. Our expectation of life has increased greatly. A newr-bom boy baby can now anticipate living 56 years, and a girl baby 60 years. Half a century ago, the figures were 42 and 45 years respectively.

Loud-speakers installed in one Manchester factory have increased the output of the work-girls, and, as they are on piecework, their wages have gone up in proportion. There is music for one hour in the morning and an hour and a half in the afternoon.

Going to the rescue of a high caste Hindu girl, who had fallen into a well near Nagpur, two untouchable youths were held back by the villagers. Better the. girl be drowned, they exclaimed, than that outcasts should polluto the water. The girl was drowned.

Fearing premature burial, an American has made arrangements with his undertaker that his coffin shall be equipped with a microphone connected with loud-speakers in the quarters of the cemetery caretaker. The microphone is to be kept in circuit for a year, and checked periodically by the sounding of a small bell in the coffin.

The magistrate at Myrtleford (Victoria) ordered the confiscation and sale of a bottle of beer found on a man arrested for drunkenness. Regulations compelled the sale to be advertised three timps in the Government Gazette, and in the newspapers of the district. That cost £lO. When the bottle was auctioned it was sold for 9d.

The world’s highest fish are living in a lake 12,000 ft up among the peaks of the Pamir Mountains, a remote region of what the Hindus call the Roof of the World. Previous to their discovery, it was thought that fish were incapable of living at a height above 5000 ft. All the specimens obtained from the lake were trout. .

In 1933, 7202 persons were, killed on the highways of Great Britain.. In addition, 216,328 persons were injured. Of these totals 3504 killed and 80,238 injured were pedestrians. Since the war, over two million men, women and children have been killed or injured in road accidents in Great Britain; 500,000 victims were children under 15 years ot age Fifteen thousand persons are killed or injured in London every three months.