RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31080, 8 June 1966, Page 32

RANDOM REMINDER

MISCELLANY

A Hamburg pharmocologist taught 10 rats to cut off sounds unpleasant to them by depressing a lever, and then bashed away at them with marches, beat music, jazz, the lot And he assessed them as musical snobs because they liked only French songs, sung with feeling. It was a bit of a break for the rats, having such freedom of choice; the average f mily man today has to suffer sounds from dawn to dawn, and he hasn’t any levers. The traffic cacophony, the radios in shops and pockets and homes and offices, the television sets, motor-mowers. There is no end to it. No, the rats never had it so good.

But it seems to have been a good month for animals, for in London a police dog had the immense satisfac-

tion of biting a policeman on a leg. The policeman went to hospital, the suspect he and the dog were chasing escaped, and the Alsatian, no doubt, went back to the dog house. On a lower level. New Zealanders have been told they are mirthless and tuneless by the Secretary of Maori Affairs and Island Territories (Mr J. M. McEwen). He was speaking to the eighteenth convention of the New Zealand Institute of Public Administration, and he told it that the uninhibited Polynesians living in New Zealand were apt to become unpopular with pakeha neighbours because they had not lost their capacity to enjoy themselves and did not really adapt their ways to staid suburbia. It is to be hoped the convention took due note of this stricture. It would be

refreshing to find for instance, some of the Government departments abandoning their funeral parlour atmosphere. Going in to pay the income tax to a clerk with a false nose and a tin whistle might at least lessen the subservience of the taxpayer. One last thing. We would be interested to know what sort of response the University Grants Committee had to a recent advertisement which read: The University Grants Committee wishes to appoint to its staff a university graduate who will assist with the administration of the University Building Programme. The position calls for a person of administrative ability and a good educational background. As well as being a university 'graduate?