The Passing Show

Waikato Times, Volume 124, Issue 20728, 11 February 1939, Page 15 (Supplement)

The Passing Show

(By “Free Lance”)

THOSE WHO CLAIM to know something about the Waikato state that we shall have a favourable autumn. Favourable to whom—motor campers, punters, gardeners, importers, farmers, dictators, or Garden Place Hill removers ? • • • • As one Garden Place spectator remarked to the other: “Here’s to mud in your eye.” * • • • This social security business certainly seems to be a burning question. * • • • Headline: “Dunedin’s Departed Glories.” Hoots, mon, hae ye no heard o’ th’ kilted regiment? * • • • Speeding is becoming too common, according to a Hamilton magistrate. Well, we must try and make it naice. * * • • A Tokio cable states: “The Navy Office announces that a Japanese submarine sank after colliding with another submarine in the Bungo Channel.”' Bungling in Bungo. • • • • Auckland is establishing a civil organisation in the event of a national emergency, I read. What’s wrong with the Bureau of Importers? ** • • • • When Oscar heard that Conciliation Commissioner Reardon said there was no need to shed tears over the misfortunes of the farmers he was really wild. “What misfortunes?” he demanded. Fortunately there was no farmer within gunshot range. • • • • Golf is such good exercise it should be played by school pupils, states an Australian authority. But then they’ll learn nothing else. School pupils will spend all the time with this sort of jargon: “I laid a stymie at the 12th but Jones Minor was three over fours. 'Then I got a birdie at the 14th but Smith Secundus lost his chewing gum with his approach-shot . . etc., etc.” And what about the Nineteenth Hole? Every school tuckshop will have to be 50 times enlarged.

COMMENT AND CRITICISM

Headline; Toll.” That’s rati er unfair. Most long-distance telephone operators are obliging. • • • • There is, of course, one way of solving this traffic congestion—allow on the road only those cars fully paid for. • n m m You can no longer discover an artist by his beard and flowing hair, says a critic. That is true. It is even difficult, sometimes, to tell an artist by his paintings. Those people worried about the cadets off the German barque giving the Nazi salute should look into an Auckland tram during the five o’clock rush. What do you think of our New Zealand summer, I asked an English visitor the other day. He replied that he had missed it, having been ill both days. • * • • Vegetable famine reported in Australia. Had there been another Rugby tour this year we might have been able to give them beans. e • • • Herr Hitler, it is reported, will shortly undergo another throat operation. And the world’s Communists will probably sigh wistfully. • • • • If matches are banned from the Dominion we can expect the four-year-old to ask: “Daddy, what’s a match?” To which Daddy wjll reply: “A match is a meeting between two football teams.” • • • • Sir Ernest Fisk says wireless has invented no “death ray” but will soon supply heat for home cooking. In the hands of some cooks I have encountered, this means a ray of lingering, instead of instant death. Tn the grounds of the New York World Fair they are burying a “time capsule” containing articles representing 20th Century life. It is intended to be dug up in 5000 years. My own view is that it would be advisable to bury also the instructions indicating th« locality of ti>e capsule.