From The Watch Tower

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 704, 2 July 1929, Page 8

From The Watch Tower

By “THE LOOK-OUT MAN.”

HALF-BAKED The discovery of large half-cooked mussels on the coast at Whangamata is attributed to the recent earthquake. On the Quaking earth I’ve looked And I find it most depressing. Still, when ’ quakes serve mussels cooked, Then they’re not an unmixed blessing. Some day fish will not he hooked, But served up by shakes, with dressing. ANANIAS ON THE WIRE To ex-service men the association of rum and barbed wire in Uncle Sam’s latest anti-liquor move, the project to raise a seven-foot barbed-wire fence all the way along the Canadian frontier, has a familiar ring. The difficulty in prohibition enforcement according to the U.S. experience is that ingenious rum-runners manage to keep just one jump ahead of every device employed against them. The wirefence proposal sounds formidable, hut, after all, there are such things as wire cutters, and Uncle Sam is hardly likely to patrol the whole fence. He "has more dollars than enforcement agents, even though there are perhaps plenty of both. * * * NO PARKING Seeing a motorist last evening endeavour in playful fashion to take away a “No parking” disc on his front bumper, the Look-out Man is moved to write critically of these civic ameni ties. If you are driving a motorcar, they always seem to occur in the wrong places. If you are walking, there is always one at the kerb-side when you step off without looking. Still, they have their uses. A series thereof was artistically decorated with King’s College colours after the memorable victory last Saturday. Again, a “No parking” sign has been known to occur strangely in one of those late supper-rooms frequented by youth and beauty. Two strong men bore it back to the outer darkness. In the meantime its solemn injunction had been noted without interest by the assembly.

THE MAORI FOURTH ESTATE Unless they are produced at a school, like “Te Waka o Hato Petera,” issued from St. Peter’s Native School, Northcote, the difficulty with publications in Maori is to get men capable of printing them. Bishop Bennett of Aotearoa found that one of his chief difficulties in the production of “Te Toa Taltitini,” a church magazine published at Hastings. The Maori tongue Is taxed by many Pakeha words, and the name of Archdeacon Simkin, a Hawke’s Bay churchman, became “Atirikona Himikini” when it appeared in print. Sunday is “wiki Pakeha,” a delightful example of native insight. And a horse is “Hoiho”; a pig, “Poaka”; a motorlorry, “te rore”; but apart from such obvious counterfeits as these, the Pakeha printer setting up Maori might just as well be settiag up Greek, and with the same fearful potentiality for typographical errors. Mention has been made of “Te Whetu Marama” — the “Monthly Star” —published by Ratana. The prophet also has what is perhaps a kindred publication, his “Domesday Book,” the great ’roll of the “Morehu,” or remnants, his followers. The book was closed with great ceremony in 192, but perhaps it has since been opened to admit a few more initiates. ALL AWHEEL

Except when the cyclist is held up in a traffic jam, he always seems to be in a favoured position. It is true that when the white-gloved hands goes out, and the line of traffic stops, the man on a push bike cannot put on his fourwheel brakes, like the motorist, or comfortably prop himself up with straddled legs, like the motor-cyclist, but has to get off and remount. But apart from that he is not subjected to the same restrictions. However, there now comes from Onehunga the damning revelation that a man can be in charge of a bicycle just as much as in charge of a motor-car. Indeed, a case before yesterday’s courts, whereat appeared two men who rode tandem and were guilty of caracoling all over the road, resolved itself into a question of who had charge of the machine. These traffic laws threaten to bring endless complications upon the unbowed heads of those who administer them. When will they do something to establish the absolute indifference to traffic laws of that boy who drives his toy cart at breakneck speed down our street? When that great waiting work has been dealt with, and when the inevitable test case involving two on a horse has been argued and decided, and when a workman with a wheelbarrow and a woman with a perambulator have been prosecuted for infringing the parking regulations, then, and not till then, shall we feel that the traffic laws have not been devised in vain.