From The Watch Tower

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 765, 11 September 1929, Page 8

From The Watch Tower

By

“THE LOOK-OUT MAN.”

SOLILOQUY For those who seek financial success, the best time to meditate is ten o’clock on Thursdays.—Dr. C. S. Bone, Ph.D. at the Advertising Club. Come ail who would accumulate Substantial store of treasure, Compose yourself and meditate On Thursday morn at leisure. Consider those Napoleons j Of finance over yonder : ‘ Of them and their simoleons ! Deliberately ponder. ! Success, no longer difficult, | Will vigorously chase you. ! The fortune-in-a-jiffy cult i Will joyously embrace you .... But though I've tried I can’t refer j To Thursday as a high day. The day and hour I still prefer j Is three o’clock on Friday 1 * * i BEHIND THE TIMES According to Mr. T. M. Wilford, New Zealand is not up to date in the matter of poison gas. Even though there are now small capsules of gas for experimental purposes at Devonport, we are still behind the times. Sometimes it is a relief to be backward. * * * BRIDGES So Hobsonville, too, wants a harbour bridge, thus demonstrating that a good idea cannot be kept permanently repressed. The fact is, though, that there is already a harbour bridge —at Riverhead. It may be just a bridge of sorts, spanning the extreme tapering extremity of the Waitemata before it wanders off among the gum lauds, but it is a bridge just tbe same, and at the moderate cost of a 50-mile drive by way of Kumeu and Albany it offers motorists a panacea for the major disaster of missing the last ferry. “See Riverhead and the harbour bridge” might be a good slogan for a community with progressive ideas. But Riverhead does not seem to worry much about progress. Tucked away beside its remote and picturesque arm of the Waitemata, it clings to a tranquillity that the motorcar has not yet dispersed. Quite ; unashamedly it plays tennis in footj hall jerseys-—and on Sundays, too. { Why, even in Auckland you can’t do i that sort of thing with impunity. | THROUGH THE MILL

If a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it is strange to find the 'Waikato County Council objecting to a change in the name of Te Kauwhata. Somebody blundered long ago, so a place that should rightly be called Takauwhata, after a chief who was buried near by, was never given its proper title. The result is something familiar, as “Te Cow-wotter,” with the accent on the “cow,” and though it would be idle to hope that heedless 1929 would treat “Takauwhata” with any greater reverence, yet if it is a case of murdering something, we might as well have the right victim. One of these days a campaign for the proper pronunciation of Maori words may be instituted. But it is probably too late. How futile to persuade people that Mangere should not be mangled! And the Auckland, for ail its sins, is not the worst offender. In Taranaki there is a spot called Tataramaika, and they blithely call it “Tatramak.” TALKING OF TRICKLES! At the rate the imprisoned waters of the Waikato seethed through a three-foot aperture when the diversion tunnel gates at Arapuni were partly raised last Friday, the main Nihotupu dam supplying the Auckland water system would be emptied completely in less than three hours. Since the dam’s capacity is over 500 million gallons, this is saying something more than a jugful. The interesting conclusion is arrived at after an arduous ' pursuit of the elusive cusec. The partly open diversion tunnel emitted water under the terrific pressure of 6,000 cusecs, that is 6,000 cubic feet a second. To reduce to gallons, multiply by 6.2321, and the answer is approximately 193,920,000 gallons an hour. No wonder they had to line the diversion tunnel. Such a pressure could almost wreck a city in ten minutes. AS ONE BARD TO ANOTHER By a dispensation from the highest accessible court, verse published in the Watch Tower will no longer be acknowledged except where it is contributed from outside this eyrie. “T. Toheroa” and his gang of laureates may thus be forced into hibernation for some time; but their spirit will live on even in anonymity. One is reminded of the provincial editor who one day blossomed into verse. He sent the masterpiece to the printer to be set. It duly appeared before the proof reader, who was betrayed by ignorance. He scrawled across the proof: “Absolute blanky piffle.” In due course the editor saw the defaced proof. “How was I to know he'd written it himself,” asked the reader in an injured tone just before he collected his final pay next day.