Time to Get Off?

Al
Ball, aircraft plant supervisor and part-time desert wanderer, has been
ruminating about the future of sky travel and he isn’t sure people are
quite ready for it.

Planes now go more than 1,000 mph. Clearly
the time is near when they’ll fly the equivalent of several times
around the earth in 24 hours.

This could be confusing. For one
thing, such speeds would knock the international date line into
smithereens. A baby born, say, March 24 and bundled into a jet could
conceivably land on the other side of the world a day or two before its
birth date. Or a man could commit a murder in Paris and be in San Luis Obispo before it happened, with a formidable alibi.

Perhaps now is the time for all good men to stand up and shout, "Stop the earth! I want to get off!"

ON THE OTHER hand, let’s just figure that we’re lucky to be here. A researcher at the UC
campus at Riverside came upon this headline in Sunset magazine for
February 1917: "Is Los Angeles Worth Defending? Congress, the Navy and
General Staff Say No."

A NOTE FROM
a parent came into an elementary school stating, "Please excuse Johnnie
for being absent this morning — he had a hole in his head."

A
phone call to the home revealed Johnnie had bumped into a clothes dryer
door, cutting his head. The family arrived only recently from Europe
and English is still a foreign language to them.

SUSPECT ETIQUETTE

–EDITH OGUTSCH

THE DESSERT at
a luxurious literary luncheon the other day was Baked Alaska and,
inevitably, John Cornell reports, someone demanded equal time and
inquired, "Hey, how about Baked Hawaii?"

QUOTE & UNQUOTE —
That was a very sly togetherness line in "Maverick" Sunday where Bart
registered at a hotel. As he was handed the key he asked, "Which room?"
"Just any one," the clerk replied. "That key fits them all" … Tony Tichenor
, 6, informed his parents he’d learned how to play Truth or
Consequences at school but didn’t like it very much. "They asked my
name," he said, "and I missed" … A girl named Portia, noted for her
lack of a sense of direction, remarked, "I thought I was driving west
and I knew I should be driving east but I was on Wilton Place and it
runs north and south!"

MOST OF US, as we sit brooding and meditating, failt to realize how fast tempus fugits.

The name "Hoover Junior High School" came up in the KNXT publicity office and a secretary named Toby asked, "J. Edgar?"

"No," Virgil Mitchell replied, "Herbert." He shook his head sadly then realized Toby is only 21.

AT RANDOM
— In checking the archives for material to dramatize its membership
drive, YWCA ladies came upon an incident in 1891 when a man was asked
to speak on the organization’s future. "It’s impossible to tell what
one woman will do tomorrow," he said, "much less an association of
them." Well, phooey on him. The YWCA now has 3,000,000 members … A
Hill Street bon vivant named Chuck was telling friends about taking a
lady friend to dinner and the large check he paid and he remarked, "She
romped through that menu like eating was going out of style at
midnight!" … Another man refused to renew his Dodger season tickets
because last year he asked for four on the first-base line and got them
on the third-base line … Positively no Mother’s Day jokes about
Elizabeth Duncan.