Capricious Electron

An engaging
stranger named Peter Buchanan came into the office, apologized for
taking my time, handed me a typewritten half-sheet of paper and asked
me to read it and perhaps check it.

It was a theory he had spent 15 years developing, he said, and he felt it was vital for the world to know.

"As
American scientists study the electron," it began, "the electron will
become more capricious, defiant of observation and measurement because
American scientists start with the wrong hypothesis."

That’s as
far as I got because the rest of it was about wave mechanics, quantum
phenomena and mathematical equations, including Einstein’s. He lost me.

I’VE BEEN around when electronics engineers and space
guys get together and tried to understand them, too, but I can’t.
They’re also very polite and considerate but they speak a strange
language.

I’m sure all this is for the best for we want our
boys to do well in outer space or whither we are drifting, but I simply
do not know what they’re talking about.

Why, I wouldn’t know a
capricious electron if it sidled up and handed me a chocolate malted
milk.  I happen to be the fellow who flunked the same high school
course in plane geometry — twice.

ONLY IN Beverly Hills — On arriving home, Maggie, 7, was asked by her mother what she’d done in school.

"We
didn’t have any written tests," was the reply, "but the girls beat the
boys in a moral tests." Ma gasped, then realized that to a 7-year-old
oral sounds a great deal like moral.

THROUGH SHOT AND SHELL IN CUBA
In places of peril
You’ll always find Errol.
Twist his arm — I don’t doubt it.
He’ll tell you about it.
– RICHARD ARMOUR

YOU KNOW that
dispirited look you sometimes see on the faces of policemen? They come
by it the hard way. A lady named Grace who routed a prowler in her
apartment by screaming was later asked by an officer, "Was this man a
Caucasian?" "Oh no," she replied. "I’m sure he was a white man."

ON RETURNING to
L.A. from a trip north, Jess T. Martinez found his wallet missing. He
remembered stopping and getting out of the car on Highway 33, outside Coalinga, so he phoned Coalinga
police and told an officer about where he’d parked. Next day he
received his wallet in the mail. The following day he received the
change from the dollar bill kept to pay the postage. About a 1000-to-1
shot.

MONDAY AT UCLA Anastas I. Mikoyan denied the existence of an Iron Curtain. "This is fiction," he said.

Apparently no one thought of it at the time but Bill Graydon,
a specialist in belated retorts like the rest of us, points out that
another bit of fiction tops the American best seller lists — Boris
Pasternak’s "Dr. Zhivago," which blasts communism.

AT RANDOM —
Add writer Sylvia Tate ("The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown") to the roster of
those convinced a person isn’t safe anywhere. Last July she was stung
by a wasp. Since, she has had 39 antidote shots, has seven more to go.
She has a susceptibility which could be fatal . . . Phone number of the
UCLA Extension Division just opened in Orange County is TRojan 12380 . . . Mr. and Mrs. Jerry T. Meek ask a typographical posy for La Puente
deputy sheriffs and firemen, whose names she does not know, who
responded instantly and probably saved the life of Kali Kathleen Meek,
12 days old, choking from a chest cold . . . Dr. Glen Erwin Bonecutter
of Long Beach has been elected to membership in the County Medical
Assn. . . . One of the three city high school girls in the state cherry
pie contest Friday at the Department of Water and Power Service Center
in Van Nuys is Cherie M. Courtois of Bishop Conaty Memorial High. Yep, she can bake a cherry pie. Wonder if Peaches Browning ever baked a peach pie?