Losing Battle

Perhaps you’ve noticed that a Data Card for Highway Planning came along with your auto registration renewal.

Well, a Van Nuysian (or should it be a Van Nuyser?), who felt it
was an invasion of his privacy, at first decided not to mail it. It
seemed to him Big Brother was breathing on his neck.

He changed his mind, however, and sent it. But in response to question
No. 6, as to where he went the previous day and what he did when he got
there, he wrote, "From: Home, To: Post Office, Purpose: To mail another
silly darned questionnaire."

Those rebels against bureaucracy may never win but they’re still in there fighting.

GRIPE, GRIPE, gripe. About the smog, the traffic, the distances, whatnot. Some days that’s all a person hears from morning to night.

And yet there’s David Whalen’s experience. He is with the Helen Edwards agency.

In recent weeks he has interviewed a dozen qualified local men, asking
them to consider a $30,000-a-year job elsewhere. They unanimously were
reluctant to leave this horrible place although their earnings averaged
only one-third of that amount.

Whalen, here from the East less than a year, is impressed.

A REAL SQUIRMER
Celebrities on air or channel
Give me acute indigestion
When they answer the man on the panel:
"I’m glad you asked me that question!"
– J.R. MCCARTHY

OH, I TELL YOU the things writers have to put up with are sometimes aggravating to the point of despair.

Gene Couglin let an attorney friend read the manuscript of his
new book, "A Grand Old Man." When he retrieved it a card dropped out —
a notice to appear in court on a burglary charge. Fortunately it was
for one of the attorney’s other clients.

YOU KNOW HOW it is when you read something so unbelievable you read it a second time, shake your head and reach for the relaxing pills?

Well, there it was the other day in, of all places, the National Daily Reporter, the horse players’ scratch sheet.

A
news story stated that a Philadelphia lawyer representing a group he
refused to identify offered to endow an Al Capone Chair in Taxation at
the University of Pennsylvania. The group, he said, wished to correct a
false impression of poor old Al. Penn declined, calling the offer a
hoax. The attorney denied this and said he would now offer the chair to
Princeton. No comment from there.

Anyone else get the feeling
that the bottom has suddenly dropped out of whatever values still
remained in our society? Obviously only one thing remains — to erect a
monument to that heroic battler for human rights, Al Capone.

SECRET IMPULSE No. 27: To own a china shop and put out a sign, "Bulls Welcome."

PUBLIC AT LARGE — To prevent freeway fatigue Al Sisto makes up nonsense rhymes. Sample: Had a lark in Buena Park but nada in La Mirada . . . Someone with a ghoulish sense of humor is sending out cards stating, "To my beloved flock, I shall return. Krishna Venta" . . . If the Russians put a manned rocket in space Joe Sloan knows who’ll be in it — two Hungarians.

AT RANDOM
— A man who spent a few days up there reports that bridge, the card
game, is booming in S.F. Has nothing to do with the Golden Gate and Bay
spans, however . . . An Alhambra schoolboy studying English history
asked his parents seriously, "Are eggheads the descendants of the Roundheads?" . . . Picture postcard from there states the Holiday Inn Motel in Amarillo has "king size gyramatic mattresses." Those Texans!