RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 87, 7 January 1935, Page 6

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current

Events

(By

Kickshaws.)

A critic says that actors and actresses have the temperament of children. Unlike children, however, their job is to be both seen and heard. * * * A magistrate in England complains that wives spend too much time going for their husband’s beer. No doubt the husbands consider it better for their wives to be going for their beer than for them. » * • Tlie following hair-raising story comes from “Peterstewed”: —“Looking through ‘The Dominion’ recently, I noticed that some person has seen fit to slate our barbers. Now, I will give you my experience. I have had my hair cut and dressed by the one firm for the last 35 years. Result: lam over 60 years of age; and have a good crop, jet black and curly. I found a good barber and kept to him, first the father and then the son.” » » » It will be interesting to see if the setting of eggs that has travelled by air from England to Australia will hatch out. Previous experiments have shown that the chief danger is vibration, which seems to have a sterilising effect. But eggs are by no means the only unusual cargoes that have taken to the air. The other day an elephant went by air, and a year ago a hippo went for a fly. Aeroplanes have even transported a complete herd of dairy cows. In New Guinea, a whole town was transported by air, houses, people, aud all. Snails, long, long ago, took to the air. To-day 2,000,000 snails fly the Channel every year for the benefit of the gourmet. Lions and tigers have flown, as also hate racehorses, grand pianos and snakes.. Gold is, perhaps of all commodities, the favourite for aerial travel. When one transports a million in gold, thousands of pounds may be lost in transit owing to interest losses. This leak is diminished when gold takes to the air. The interest at five per cent, per year on a million of gold works out at nearly £l5O a day.

At present the two factors that are a disadvantage in the case of air travel are vibration and noise. The vibration is not great. For the most part it is of a high frequency type. It does, however, have ill effects on certain forms of life. In the ease of small fishes, and the like, sent by air for the London Zoo the vibration is damped out by special systems for the containers made of rubber. The time is coming when aerial tramps will be accepted as the commonplace of the sky. Moreover experiments that have been made with gliders seem to indicate that aerial trains will soon be in use. When that has been perfected the noise and the vibration problem will have been solved. Instead, so to speak, of riding with tlie engine one will travel in a carriage behind. Meanwhile it is a fact that chickens hatched on many an English farm take their first meal at Moscow. Taken on board an air liner at Croydon they are just about ready for their first meal 38 hours later when they arrive at Moscow.

Some expert has discovered that shirts, collars and ties cost the men of Britain £10,000,009 a year. Life is made up of little things which jf added up seem a lot. If the men of Britain spend this huge sum on shirtings it is little comfort to point out that the women of Britain spend £1,000,000 ever year breaking crockery. This includes those cups and saucers which so mysteriously “came ’alf in two in me ’ands.” A curious fact is that more saucers get broken than anything else. But«broken china is nothing compared with the money wasted on noise. The current wasted every year on blowing motor horns, it has been estimated, would be sufficient to light a fair-sized town for a month. The coal used for blowing whistles is sufficient to keep us comfortable in the winter for years on end. All told 2J million tons of coal are used to blow whistles every year. It seems an awful waste. A ton of coal at the pit heads costs just under a pound in money. Noise, all told, costs the world about £200,000,060 a year.

The truth is that the world’s biggest bills are made up of little things. Smoke costs the world every penny of £200,000,000. This does not include the loss due to ill-health. Rust costs over twice at much as smoke. The effects of rust on iron aud steel are costing the world £500,000,000 a year. It is a sum of money, however, considerably less than the cost of the world’s rats. The 10,000,000,000 rats in the world are estimated to cost in food something like £2,000,000,000 a year. In contrast to all this, there are other even more elusive ways in which good money is wasted. Traffic hold-ups, for example, account for the burning of purposeless petrol which totals up every year to £120,000,000. It seems as impossible to stop this waste as it is to stop people wearing out money in their pockets. The last form of wastefulness costs the public of the world no less than a quarter of a million a year. Indeed, when gold was in use in Britain, 40,000 i golden sovereigns were ground to impalpable gold dust in the pockets of the . public every year.

Efforts are being made to deal with waste in order that the totals may not mount up any higher. Most cities have some method of conserving the dustbin waste. In AA’ellington it is used'' to pump sewage. New ways of dealing with worn-out things'are being invented. Tons of woollen rags are worked up afresh into material. Felt hats are converted into inferior felt, and billiard tables, in their turn, become felt hats. Safety razor blades become ocean liners, and ocean liners become safety razor blades. .In the interest of economy, there is a continual circulation of material from on e thing to another, Nevertheless, there is, iu the economy circuit, a grinding process by which material eventually is lost to mankind, for good. Something like £9,000,000 worth of shoe leather disappears every year in England. It is never recovered, but blows about as dust, eventually to be chased out of doors by a housewife and her broom. In the same way hundreds of tons of road surface are ground away and blown away by the winds, never to be used again, There is a jewel which no Indian mine can buy, No chemic art can counterfeit; It makes men rich in greatest poverty, Makes water wine, turns wooden cups to gold, The homely whistle to sweet musics strain; Seldom it comes, to few from heaven sent. That much in little—all in nought—Content. —Elizabethan Song.