CURRENT COMMENT

Taranaki Daily News, 29 December 1934, Page 11 (Supplement)

CURRENT COMMENT

OTHER POINTS OF VIEW

(By

M.O.S.)

Motor Cramps. * *

The Bolivians and Paraguayans in the Gran Chaco celebrated the festive season by the interchange of heavy artillery fire.—Christmas bomb-bombs! « # * * B-low!

In a cricketing team there was one Whose misfortune was due to the sun: He let fall a catch At the end of the match But so might the others have done. • # * * A well-known member of .the New Plymouth detective branch was observed at the Hawke Cup cricket match over the holidays. A suggestion was made on the terraces that he was there |o detect the “wrong ’uns.” * # * *

Punctuation and Parentheses. W(h)ell, New Year is here again, folks! Good (er) old fashioned season of haggis and Auld Lang Syne (grrrh!) Re-united families (pah!) laughing, dancing, noisy . . . children (tcha!!) turkey and plum duff (phew!) Er . . dear Aunt Emily is coming all the (—) way, from Invercargill to stay with us, too, the old . . . dear. And she’s bring her four darling (!) little . . . children for the trip, toe (Psalm 76)—Susie, the little: pet: and Cuthbert and Willie and Johnny the dearest (ssst) highest-spirited most mischievous little monkey (?) you could possibly imagine! We ask you, what would this season be without the children? •*' * ♦ Misplaced Gifts. The' New Plymouth post office reports forwarding about 5000 messages and handling countless parcels during the Christmas rush. No wonder the overworked staff makes a mistake now and then. I was thinking about this when owing to the heat of the day and other things I went off into - a doze. I dreamt that Mr. Nielson was quite annoyed when he was sent a patent device for tickling trout, while Mr. Moyes found no use at all for a map of the Tasman with New Plymouth marked in large letters as the “Logical Terminus.” , The three-foot meat-chopper that an unemployed family had sent to Mr. Stainton arrived mysteriously at Mr. S. G. Smith’s door and his cabin trunk for holding portfolios was delivered to M. 0.5., who, sadly used it for his rejected attempts at humour. As he tossed in sheet, after sheet of crumpled paper he sighed to think of the large bottle of brown beer that he believed Mr. McLeod had gained possession of. And that was that. # * • ♦ Ancestors and Anatomy. We have been shocked by the consideration of our ancestry. The Mount Carmel scientists have discovered the most deflating thing since Darwin postulated the theory about the Missing Link —the great (ad inf.) grandfather of orang-outangs and men. Crocodile bones In the scraps-tin, indeed! But ... Two hundred thousand years ago On Carmel’s rocky heights There lived a hairy race of oafs Whose chief delights were fights. Tn that, of course, they differed much From cultured, folk. to-day, Who merely go to wrestling To while the time away. , They had no politicians nor Hot water in the bath, Nor white lines on the pavement to Define the mammoth’s path. For dramas of the passions they ' Possessed no picture-show They merely peeped with interest in The private cave below. They had no decent modesty Nor moralists to preach, They wore no more at any time Than we wear on the beach. I’m glad I’m civilized—aren’t you? I’m glad such crudities Have given place to culture and Made scarce our nudities. I’m glad I’ve got my politics (Though politics may bore us) For I’d rather meet an H. E. shell Than an angry brontosaurus! Yet here’s one thing those hairy folk Had great advantage in, They may have had no bathtubs but Their females had no chin! *.* * * They Pin-pricked At Him. Once upon a time there was a dear old farmer called Mr. Gump. Mr. Gump was the very politest farmer to cows you ever did see, and it wasn’t no small contract either, because he had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. The way that man did work for those cows you’d never believe, what with putting up fences all over the place for them to lean on and milking them twice a day rather than see the poor brutes suffer. Ah, it was a tragic case! Everybody thought Mr. Gump was trying to make money out of his cows and said the way that man worked he was a fair slave-driver he was, and the way he treated his wife and his daughter Annabelle was fit for the R.S.P.C.A. it was. But it wasn’t true, not a word of it. No, sir. It was a mean slander as was concocted by those lazy neighbours of his just for spite because they wasn’t nearly so great-hearted as Mr. Gump was and kicked their cows in the stummicks and put their butterfat down points just because a heifer put her foot in a bucket of strippins. It only goes for to show you how a man may misjudge his fellow creatures. When them newfangled dairy inspectors came round they ups and tells poor Gump he can’t take his milk to the factory no more if he doesn’t buy a new separator and build a new cowshed on account of his cream putting down New Zealand butter shillings and shillings in London on account of it being second grade now and then. “What,” says Mr. Gump, “What . . . And here’s me a slave no more or less for all these here years, treatin’ me cows as if they were me daughters and some mean, low-down iggerant little whippersnapper is give the power of life an’ death over me by the Gov-mint. You’re pin-prickin’ me,” says Mr. Gump, “You’re pin-prickin’ me an’ doing me petty tyrannies. I’ll do it, like I said I would. I’ll do it” “You’ll do what?” says they. "Commit sooercice, like I told the Union when they asts me what I thought of that there Dairy Commission.” And Mr. Gump did. because they pmpricked at him and drove him to it. But it’s only ’istory how Mr. Gump set ablaze such a fire over the length and breath of this fine country as put the Union on the treasury benches and freed the backbones of the country from the tyranny of the Supreme Council. And <mite right, too.