FROM THE WATCH TOWER

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1034, 26 July 1930, Page 8

FROM THE WATCH TOWER

By

“THE LOOK-OUT MAN.”

TINTS IN TYRES Overseas manufacturers are putting on the market motor-car tyres of various tints, including green, blue, maroon, and yellow. —News item. Staid owner of a motor-car with tyres of sombre, grey, You’re far behind the fashion of this most aesthetic day! Your colour scheme is rotten, sir— The body-work is blue. Yet down below you choose to show a dull and muddy hue. Just set to work and rid yourself of antiquated stock — Our brightly-tinted substitutes will give a pleasant shock — We’ve tyres In sporty yellow and In red, or else in green . . . Some striking shades for city blades who hanker to be seen. You pay the price, select the tyre that suits your present whim. And gloat’ at other autos less harmoniously trim. Yet pick with care your every spare. And have the colours checked. Or punctures may produce a gay but circus-like effect! M.E. • * * DIFFICULTIES 0 VERCOM K An art that calls for the fullest use of every faculty and limb is that of piloting an airplane, yet Wolf Hirtb, a German airman who lost a leg In a crash, has set out to fly from Europe to America. There can be no better example of the growing ease of flying than this for, a few years ago, such a feat would have presented great difficulties. Probably Hirth has so designed his machine that the necessity for foot-control is obviated. A certain New Zealander who lost both legs from the knee down in a shell-burst on the Western Front drives a motor-car with the best of them. He uses a throttle on tho steering column, and his footpedals are connected by rods to levers close to his hands. Another example of a motor-driver overcoming physical disability is that of a young man who, though completely deaf and quite dumb, has driven his car for years without accident. A sort of sixth sense warns him of approaching vehicles. Incidentally the L.O.M. is going to say here and now that if traffic inspectors demand from him this man's name he is going to claim privilege.

HIS MASTER’S VOICE There are modernists even among the witch-doctors of Africa, to judge by the story told recently by a missionary on furlough about a native who was treated with powdered gramophone record mixed with water from a locomotive—the engine water to make him move and the record dust to make him talk. In its own way the treatment is not unlogical. It is water that makes the engine move and the record which makes the gramophone talk —the only flaw in the argument is that the patient was neither a phonograph nor a locomotive. However, he recovered the use of his limbs and tongue—so simple faith must have once more proved its superiority to that nasty, know-all spirit- by failing to perceive the fallacy on which the treatment was based, remarks “Lucio” in the “Manchester Guardian.” One would like to know that witch-doctor’s recipe for deafness. , Probably he gives his patients a strong infusion of the Telephone Directory.

NAVY ON HORSEBACK

“Aussie”: I was reminded while reading the report of H.M.S. Dunedin’s visit to Nukualofa, Tonga, where a special race meeting was held in honour of the ship's company, that such events are not new to men of the Navy. On one occasion when the Australian Division visited a little place called Port Lincoln, an exciting meeting was organised and each race was named after one of the visiting sjiips. Toward the close of the day two races were arranged for the officers and men themselves, and a weird variety of mounts appeared for the use of the amateur jockeys. I bagged a likely-looking hack, but found it had been promised to the padre. - The ensuing delay uarrowed my choice and I finished up with an ancient cab-horse whose declining years had been devoted to intensive feeding. However, he rose to the occasion and “galumped” in a good second. The race cost every man his dignity, while one rating “hit the deck” and was treated for concussion. Sailors are triers, but the movement of a horse is so unlike that of a warship.