ODDS AND ENDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 20, 10 November 1939, Page 55

ODDS

AND

ENDS

O far, "Boomps-a-Daisy" has always been done as a three-four waltz tune, but Jim Davidson, conductor of the ABC Dance Band, has turned it into a march for the troops. "Back Again To Tipperary Days" and "Wings Over The Navy," are two other wartime numbers which the band is featuring regularly. The band is becoming really martial- . minded, with such songs as "There'll Always Be An England," and the first march version in the world of " Boomps-a-Daisy." Success at Sixty For 60-years-old Mrs. Marie McDonald, mother of seven, of Prestbury Road, Liverpool, one Wednesday recently was the greatest day of her life. For 50 years she had been writing songs inspired by her dreams-but not one had been published. On that Wednesday she heard her composition "Whisper Good-bye, Missouri," broadcast from the organ of the Ritz Cinema, Birkenhead, by Henry Croudson. "T have waited all my life for this moment," she told the Sunday Chronicle. " Now just as I am getting too old to appreciate it, people are acknowledging that I can compose dance tunes." Now, at the moment of success, she has given up composing. She cannot read or write or play a note of music. A friend wrote them down for her. But her old friend has died.

Prove this yourself. A listener one mile from a town clock can hear two strokes of the hour on his set before the sound comes to him through the window.

"Telling people something for their own good seldom does any." -Phil Cook, in an American broadcast.

" Civilisation seems long on the calendar of history, short on that of biology; the most rapid changes are the most recent. It is not merely streamlined trains, but jazzed life that travels fast and makes the rhythm to which we swing a dizzy one. The pervasive symptom is emotional restlessness. What we need are safety refuges of calm scattered through the day and occasional curfews at night." -Joseph Jastrow, in an American broadcast Research experts for Amalgamated Wireless, Australasia, use a tuning fork for testing station wavelengths. It is carefully kept at even temperature to give a frequency of 1,000 cycles and checked regularly against astronomical time signals from the world’s observatories. When they are checked against this standard it is claimed that station wavelengths can be placed on their proper frequency within a very small margin of error.