WITHOUT PREJUDICE

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 112, 9 February 1928, Page 10

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

NOTES AT RANDOM [During the absence on holiday of “T.D.H.,” “Notes at Random.” will be contributed by “Wi.”] Conundrum for Hutt Road motorists: Why does a pier appear ? A leading expert declares that the trams must go. .Well, they do, sometimes. The perfect pessimist:— Certainly he was a tall man, but still I He went to look at the flat which his wife had chosen confidently. “It won’t do,” he reported. “They’d never get my coffin down those stairs.” As a result of the thousandth leap to death from the Reichbruke in Vienna the authorities are being urged to line it with live wires, as is done with the high footbridge spanning the Isar Valley in Germany, from which so many persons used to leap that it became ’ nationally known as “Suicide Bridge.” The first two suicides from it occurred within a few days of its opening, and during the war an antisuicide patrol was continually present. Then an electric rail was installed along each side, in such a position that the parapet could not be climbed over without the rail being grasped; and it was widelv announced that the grasping, though not likely to be harmful except to persons with heart disease, would give the climber a rery nastyshock. Since the installation the suicides have ceased entirely, though there have been a few cases of shock, which may have been due to carelessness or inquisitiveness rather than an attempt at self-destruction. A certain golfer who is so completely absorbed in his pastime that mere domestic matters have long ceased to trouble him, has a small son named William. One evening, upon retiring from the country club, his wife remarked, “William tells me he was caddying for vou all afternoon.”

“Is that so?” exclaimed the astonished man. “Well, now that you mention it, I thought I had seen that boy before.”

Airmen find themselves in queer predicaments at times. Could there be anything more nerve-racking than this experience, related by Sir Alan Cobham recently.

“Flying in very bumpy weather in the Pyrenees, in France, a friend of mine was thrown about in such a violent manner that he could hardly ! tell whether he was flying upside down or not. Suddenly he discovered that he ivas enveloped in a heavy cloud bank, and he did not know what to do. A few seconds later the cloud bank cleared and right in front of him was a wall of rock. He was flying head-on into a mountain, a vertical cliff thousands of feet in height. On either side of him were mountains, and he appeared to be in a kind of cul-de-sac, in which there was no room to turn. The only thing to do, in attempting to stop forward progress, was to loop the bachine on to its back and attempt to flv in the reverse direction upside down. In a second he had pulled his stick back and literally ran vertically up the cliff, came over on his back and then pushed his control lever forward with the object of preventing himself from completing the loop and going back again to the same old danger.

“He was strapped in, but even so it was most difficult to hold the machine in this upside-down position for very long, and he decided that he would endeavour to reel out of this manoeuver and land, anywhere, on the rock beneath. By this time he had lost his equilibrium, so that when, in desperation, he tried to land on what appeared to be more or less level rock surface, he discovered that the machine seemed to turn violently to the left. It was not until the last moment that he found that in reality the machine was in a vertical bank, and, not knowing exactly which end was up, he was trying to land his wheels on the side of a vertical cliff. In other words, he was trying to land like a fly on the wall. Somehow, he fell out of this condition without coming to harm and landed on a small field at the bottom of the valley.”

This conies from an American “Church News”:—

“Baptisms with a spotlight playing upon minister and candidates as they stand in the pool will take place tomorrow evening in the Fifth Baptist Church, Eighteenth and Spring Garden Streets. The Rev. Dr. George W. Swope has introduced the spotlight innovation in connection with extensive improvements, costing 20,000 dollars, made on the church. The baptistry has been enlarged, and when Dr. Swope and a candidate enter the pool a white spotlight will play on them in the darkened church. As the candidate is immersed the colour will change to purple.”

It is recorded that in 1833 a man resigned a good post in the United States Patent Office because he was convinced that everything possible had been invented, that before long the office would be a dead institution, and all the staff seeking new jobs. At that time there had been onlv 576 patents issued since the first was granted. New patents are now being issued at the rate of SOO a day. A list of “freak” patents that have been applied for in the United States shows that, such devices range from an instrument to enable one to raise the hat to a lady without touching it with the hands, to a method of transplanting hair to a bald scalp. No doubt the Patent Office of any civilised country could furnish a similar list of curious ideas that inventors have considered worthy of protection. It is surprising to find Abraham Lincoln among this company, but it is stated that while he was President he took out a patent for an appliance to lift boats over sandbars in a river, because he had noted the need for such a device during a trip down the Alississippi. The invention never proved at all practicable, and was never adopted.

Molly: “Won’t you play something more. Professor ” The Professor: "It’s getting late. I shall disturb the neighbours.” Mollv: ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter about them—they poisoned our cat last week!” AN APPEAL. “Let me die, working. Still tackling plans unfinished, tasks undone 1 Clean to its end, swift may my race be run. . ... No laggard steps, no faltering, no shirking ; Let me die, working! Let me die, thinking. Let me fare forth still with an open mind, Fresh secrets to unfold, new truths to find, Mv soul undimmed, alert, no question blinking; Let me die, thinking! “Let me die, laughing. No sighing o’er past sins; they are forgiven. Spilled on this earth are all the joys of Heaven; Let me die, laughing!” S. Hall Young, in the “Christian Century.”