Perth Amboy evening news., 1923-05-21
THE REFEREE
(By Albert Appie)

CUCKOO
With good luck radio fans this
summer may pick up a strange voice
from the far north. That will be
Donald b. Macmillan, famed polar
explorer, aboard the good ship Bow
dom.
Macmillan is on needles and pins
to learn what effect his radio will
have on Eskimos. when we showed
them a regular wire phone" he says,
81 found n of them at n end of
the wire. He would yell and then
run to the other end of the wire to
try and hear the sound of his W
voice."
This gives you a laugh. But we
can't help wondering what the
Eskimos would think of some of the
equally cuckoo things we do in
politics, business and our everyday
lives.
$3.50
Gasoline to sell for 81 a gallon?
Impossible, don't get Alarmed. a
Standard Oil official said last
spring.
However. gasoline costs $3.50 a
gallon in South Africa.
This brings to prominence a
farmer in the Orange Free State.
He has invented a new motor fuel
made from the juice of prickly pear,
and it's retailing at As cents a gallon
in his country. H blundered on the
process by accident. Necessity has
been called the mother of invention.
So has laziness. Its third parent is
chance. Even old man Roentgen dis
covered X-rays by accident, which is
just another way of saying that ma
ture hands it to us on a platter.
"Oyerhead">
The French government built $500
military airplanes in 1922, England
only 200. The English, however, are
not as fearful of being bombed from
the air by French raiders as some
of us are apt to gather from our
fragmentary reading of European
news.
What worries themsmost is voiced
in the House of Lords by Lord
Birkenhead. He is alarmed chiefly
at France "expending large sums on
these enormous ornaments while
owing us immense sums which there
is no prospect of our receiving
either at present or in the nea
future"
Emmett Dalton, only survivor of
the Dalton gang, says: What
chance has the old-style bandit, who
worked with a gun and a blackjack
decent and out in the open-with
the modern bandit who turks in the
mahogany Office and works with the
stock dividend and bankruptcy pro-
ceedings? We might as we'll be
honest"
The blunder with the Daltons and
the James brothers was partly in
their method. not their results. They
lacked good lawyers.
Sweet
On a farm near Brattleboro is a
tree from which white men tapped
their first Vermont maple sugar.
That was in 1854. This old tree,
still as erect as a steel spike, should
have a monument when it dies. 1t
started a big industry. Some thirty
five million pounds of maple sugar
are produced each year in America,
a third of it in Vermont.
What wonderful friends and bene-
factors the trees have been to usi
Yet we continue destroying our for
ests-killing the goose that lays the
golden eggs. Forest preservation is
the greatest problem of our many
national resources.
Silken
Costs a lot of money to keep the
girls in silk stockings and allied &C
coutrement. Last year, says a gov
eminent report, our country import
ed nearly 366 million dollars worth
of ray silk, or four and a half times
as much as in 1918. However, for
u money we got less than twice as
much silk Tin tons) from abroad in
1922 as in 1918. Which shows how
the price hoax can fool us on foreign
trade, coming in or going out. Also
how prices have gone up.