Out of the Way

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 86, 5 January 1935, Page 6

Out of the Way

CURIOSITIES IN THE NEWS Brides may be bought in Cyprus at prices ranging from £2O to £lOO. The girls are the daughters of Turkish parents, who sell them to the highest bidders. The buyers are mainly Arabs from Palestine, who, attracted by the fame of the girls’ beauty, visit the island to find brides.

The laws of the United States are being broken by a set of stamps issued to advertise the national parks of America.. It is illegal for any living President’s portrait to be shown on the United States’ stamps. Yet if the twocent stamp of this issue is turned sideways, a portrait of President Roosevelt appears.

Houses that can be entirely refurnished two or three times a year, hangings and decorations that are many times interchangeable; lending libraries from which pictures and ornaments can be borrowed and exchanged- these are three of the possibilities likely to become actual fact when a new and revolutionary firm of interior decorators is founded in London early next year. The man behind the scheme is Mr. Edward Anthony Craig, a grandson of the late Ellen Terry.

Two Liverpool (Eng.) girls earn their living by walking 12 miles a day. They test new footwear. With a pedometer attached to the right leg they walk the prescribed distance and return to the factory and hand in their pedometers and their boots and shoes. They can go where they like and do what they like, and that just appeals to a woman. They have tramped 12,000 miles during the seven years they 41a ve been walking for the firm, and the 12 miles a day has kept them very fit.

Thirty-nine years ago Deputy Francis Laur decided that he ought to live to be ninety. He deposited a sealed letter with the Paris Academy of Science. That was in September, 1805. The letter has just been opened. It read; “I declare to-day, September 5. 1805, that I wish to live to September 5, 1034, as a maximum. At that time I shall have attained the ninety years of age which I wish to reach.” M. Laur did not realise his ambition. He died last May, only four months short of his goal.

A tennis-court built at Hampton Court by Cardinal Wolsey in the reign of Henry VIII. is to be repaired fo r the second time. The last time an alteration was made in the reign of Charles 1., yet it is said that the floor, built of stone, is better than the surfaces of the more modern courts. The tennis that is played at Hampton Court is not to be confused with lawn tennis. It is royal tennis, so named because it was played by various kings of England and France. It is reputed to have first come to - England from France in Chaucer’s time.

A colony with no factory, no industrial undertaking, no problem of workers’ accommodation, no public debt, and only 30 motor-car drivers, six violations of the liquor laws a year, and one mile Of railway, is revealed in the Colonial Office’s recently published report on Basutoland. What is more, it is disclosed that Basutoland has a future. “Basutoland is considered to have the best sheep and goat pastureland and climate in South Africa,” the report declares, “and there is no doubt that if the sheepowner was only capable of bringing more effort to bear on their production some of the best fine merino wool and mohair could be grown.”

In addition to France, which prinls on the paper covering of the bits of sugar served at cafes —“I am paper, please do not throw me on the floor,'’ or words to that effect, Poland also sets us a good example in the matter of tidiness. “Every lamp-post in every city I visited (writes a correspondent in the “Observer”) bears a bin for refuse; every public garden and park has similar receptacles at every few yards, and —they are used. No scrap of paper, no cigarette ends, not even spent matches, disfigure the streets and public promenades of Poland. Smokers will walk up to one of these refusecontainers and drop in their ‘fags and matches. The streets of the cities are continuously being swept, mostly by women, with long birch brooms, followed by men trundling hand-barrows in which they carefully deposit the sweepings. I have counted as many as six of the barrows grouped at night under one lamp-post in Warsaw Incidentally,-ash trays are placed on every table in cafes, hotels, and Polish ships, and waste-paper baskets in every bedroom in hotels; there Is no excuse for and there is no litter in Poland ”