Traffic Tantrums

Noel Voge,
professor of Slavic languages at UCLA, believes he has the explanation
of our murderous freeway driving. It's tied in with GeoffreyGorer and his swaddled Russian babies.

British anthropologist Gorer's
thesis, which created quite a fuss when it came out in 1949 (Izvestia
assailed him), was that because Russian babies were swaddled — wrapped
from chin to toe, their arms bound to their sides — they developed an
intense destructive rage which was a key to adult Russian character and
behavior.

"I had always considered this so much twaddle (rhymes with swaddle)," Voge stated, "until the other day. After miles of traffic signals always turning red, leftturners all turning left, laggards lagging and cutterinners
cutting in, my particular phalanx of traffic came to the open freeway.
Suddenly all the pent up destructive rage was released. Down went the
throttles. Out poured the smoke. Every driver seemed to be saying, "I
hate everybody!" I found myself driving along to the refrain, "Gorer was right.'"

What about the swaddling clothes? We don't need them. We get wrapped up in claustrophobic traffic.

::

THE POOR, hard-working bus drivers are always fair game for the hecklers. You hear about their misdeeds, never their good deeds. Thus Virley P. Thompson claims that since the advent of MTA he has detected a new look in public relations by bus drivers.

In
the old days when they saw a person running for a bus, he says, they
sneered, slammed the doors and edged away, leaving the person standing
there, pounding on the doors.

Now, he says, they've been coached to assume a great sadness, pretending to be touched deeply by the plight of the door pounders, whom they still leave standing there.

And all the poor guys are trying to do is keep their schedules.

::

SEA SLIDE SAGA

The situation at Portuguese Bend
Just begs for facetious quips.
At least I can't help declaring
It's going down to the sea in slips.

-JUNE R. DRUMMOND

::

VAGRANT REMARKS,
captured in mid-air. A man at a party, George Watkins reports, sang
this slight paraphrase of "I Get a Kick Out of You": "I feel no pain
from eminent domain." Of course, he lives in SanMarino … And a lady who disapproved of a fresh remark by a man retorted, "I think I'll file you under People I Used to Know."

::

"IF WE
oversleep, how come we never under sleep?" a reader asks, thereby
opening the floodgates on a bit of madness investigated recently in the
Saturday Review and the Rocky Mountain Herald.

Sly promulgators
of this so-called "movement to correct serious deficiencies in the
language" say if we have hardships we should be allowed "softships." If we have handicaps what about "footicaps" or "headicaps?" Outlines may be fine but "inlines" might also be helpful. And who opposes the righteous? Obviously the "lefteous."

What do you say we pretend the matter never came up.

::

ONLY IN L.A. — A Renault Dauphine
in Wilshire Blvd. parking lot had an old style German Maltese cross on
the door and Herbert Goff, curious, asked the driver what it stood for.

"I just shot down a Volkswagen," was the straight-faced reply.

::

MISCELLANY — All
his life Joan Miro, 66, the modern painter whose work will be exhibited
at County Museum June 10, has been plagued by people wondering if he's
a man or a woman. The name,Catalonian for John, is pronounced Zho-AHN … Lee Payne was enchanted by a typo in a news story from Cleveland stating 800 reliefers
had been given surplus food including flour, rice, corn meal, butter
and powered milk. He has been looking for that kind since he was a baby
… Sudden thought: No one the object of more curiosity than a civilian
riding in a police car.