I realize that this isn’t much punishment to subject a man to for talking forty minutes overtime, but, as I figure it out, both sides get only what is coming to them. The speaker knows what he is in for when he agrees to make a speech. And if the banqueteers, after all the experience they have had, don’t know what they are in for when they attend a banquet, then they deserve what they are getting. This thing has been going on for years. It has always been the same, and it probably always will be. Very young boys may be excused and pitied for attending their first banquet, but after that, they have nobody but themselves to blame.
Look at me. I stopped going, and see how happy I am!
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Yarns of an
Insurance Man
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I was talking with an old friend of mine, an insurance man, the other day (oh, well, maybe it wasn’t quite the other day just before America entered the war, it was) and trying to convince him that it would be bad business for his company to write me one of those twenty-payment-life policies (with time-and-a-half for overtime), when he suddenly turned to me and said: “Old man, did I ever tell you some of the strange accidents that insurance men run up against?”
I told him that he had, and tried to change the subject. But he was in a mood to be entertaining, whether he entertained or not, so I drew his chair up to the fire (hoping he would fall in) and he began: “You would hardly believe some of the unusual accidents which an insurance company is called upon to settle for,” he said jogging me slightly to awaken me, for I had traveled all day on horseback and was dog-tired.
“Whazzat?” I asked, starting up.
“I say you would hardly believe some of the unusual accidents that an insurance company is called upon to settle for,” he repeated. “But, whether you will hardly believe them or not, I have a good mind to tell you. It will do you no harm to know how the other half lives.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I am the other half?” I countered, falling asleep.
He ignored my sally. (By the way, I wonder what’s become of Sally.) “I remember once being called out in the dead of night to go and investigate a case where a client claimed to have thrown his collar bone out by trying to pull a Pullman blanket up around his shoulders during a cold night on the ride from Bagdad, California, to Los Angeles. He was—”
“But I thought that it was never cold in California,” I said in my inimitable way.
“That is why we were suspicious. Our California man said that this would be impossible unless the man had caught cold somewhere in the East and brought it with him to California. ‘An ordinary chill, incident to an attack of grippe contracted in the East’ was the way his report read. But the fact remained that the man had thrown his shoulder out and was in a hospital.
“So I hopped aboard a west-bound covered wagon, and, after various exciting adventures with the Indians in the Santa Fe station of Albuquerque (from which I emerged with a dozen bows and arrows and three Indian blankets at the unbelievable price of $150), I arrived at the hospital where our man was presenting his claim.”
“And did the queen’s archers win the tournament, daddy?” I asked, awakening from my doze.
“There was yet another case,” he continued, “which involved the claim of a man who was run over by a glacier. He was a botanist, traveling in Switzerland, and had found a very rare species of edelweiss growing in a cranny near the Mer de Glacé. It was impossible to pull it up by the roots, so he lay down on his stomach, with his back to the glacier, to examine its structure. As he lay there he got to daydreaming of what would have happened if he had married that girl and stayed in Utica when he was young, and from there got to reminiscing about the different sorts of candy he used to buy when a kid, the licorice sticks, hore-hound, wine cups, and all the rest, and, although his ribs got a little lame from lying on them, he got so wrapped up in his reveries that he didn’t notice the glacier creeping up on him. He felt something crowding him slightly, but thought nothing of it at the time, attributing it to nervousness on his part. It was in this way that the river of ice finally ran over him and jammed one hip quite badly, to say nothing of giving him chilblains and quite a fright.”
“I should think that an affair like that would come under the head of occupational disease,” I said, nodding my head sagely. “Wouldn’t his employers be responsible?”
“He had no employers. He was a botanist in for himself,” said my friend. (I call him my friend, although I would gladly have been rid of him.)
“I understood you to say that he was a man trying to pull his blanket up around his shoulders on a Pullman,” I said, in some (but not much) surprise.
“That, my friend, is another story which I will tell you sometime. Right now I want to cap the climax of my last yarn with the rather comical one about a certain Elwood M. Rovish, age 42, who asked reimbursement for damages suffered from ostrich-bane.”
“Ostrich-bane?” I could hardly keep myself from asking but I did.
“Mr. Rovish had been attending a class dinner and had started home about four A.M. on a steam roller which happened to be standing for the night in a near-by roadway. At nine o’clock the next morning he was awakened by a ring at his doorbell, and, on opening the door, he was confronted by a man who said:
“‘Here is your ostrich.’
“Mr. Rovish said, as nicely as he could for the aspirin which was in his mouth, that he thought there must be some mistake, as he owned no ostrich, being a bachelor and living alone in a two-room apartment.
“‘Oh yes you do own an ostrich,’ replied the man. ‘You bought him last night.’
“Well, to turn an anecdote into a long story, it transpired that Mr. Rovish on his way home had alighted from his steam roller at an ostrich farm, climbed over the fence, and mounted one of the fancier animals for a brisk ride about the place. The bird had put up quite a fight, with the result that the bird had been quite badly damaged as to plumage and pride. The owner had rushed out and insisted that, since Mr. Rovish seemed so fond of the ostrich, it would be well if he paid for it, and a sale was effected then and there, with the man agreeing to deliver the animal at Mr. Rovish’s the next day. And here he was.”
“I am fascinated,” I said.
“As the man would, under no conditions, take the damaged bird back, Mr. Rovish was obliged to take it up into his two-room apartment, where, in the course of a week or so, it ate most of his shirts out of his bureau drawer and in general distressed his new owner and made it impossible for him to sleep. He then applied to his local agent for reimbursement on the grounds of ‘ostrich-bane,’ against which, unfortunately for us, he had been foresighted enough to insure himself. But I thought that it was a rather amusing story, and that you would be glad to hear it.”
“You thought,” I said. “Well, it wasn’t. But before you go (and you are going, aren’t you, old chap?) there is one thing I would like to insure myself against.”
“And what is that?” said the agent, all smiles and policy forms.
“Against insurance agents!” I fairly screamed. “And against just such losses of time as I have just suffered.”
And I’ll be darned if he didn’t write me out the policy.
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The Pincus
Wall Paintings
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That human nature has, unfortunately, not changed very much in the last four thousand years is shown by the recently discovered wall drawings in the ruins at Pincus on the little island of Maxl, near Greece. They are just as lousy drawings as a great many people make today.
The island of Maxl, and its promontory Pincus, was, as so few of my readers know, the scene of the ancient mythological battle between Kybos and the Mixthos. The Mixthos, as even fewer of you know, was that unpleasant animal of Greek mythology which had ears but no head, which gave it an aimless appearance but helped it greatly in its rather devilish work of bumping into thing
s. (It is from this vicious bumping into things on the part of the Mixthos that we get our verb “to mixthos” or to bump into things.)
If it had not been for the fact that it had no head, the Mixthos would have been half man, half beaver. With no head, however, it couldn’t really be half much of anything. This made it very self-conscious.
According to the legend, which I am now telling you, Kybos, who was a youth living in Pincus, determined that the Mixthos must go. How he rented a small boat and went out to the rock on which the animal lived, and how he finally, after eight years of splashing about in the water, killed the monster and freed Pincus, is a story which I have little energy and no interest to recount for you. Which is doubtless all right with you, too.
If you will take your map of Greece and turn up the lower left-hand corner so that it touches the upper right-hand corner, and then will tear the whole thing into small bits, you will see where the ancient site of Pincus was. The ancient site was later changed (because, as one of the local wags said, “It was such a site!”) and is now located at a point more inland and away from the trolley line. It is here that the excavations have been going on under the direction of Dr. Lorp of the British Eden Musee, and it was here that the wall drawings were discovered, much to everyone’s disappointment.
The drawings were made on the walls of a house which seems to have been more of a small cart or express wagon. On account of its small size, several members of the expedition expressed doubt that it really was a house, holding the view that a house should be large enough to allow a full-sized man at least to wedge his hip into it.
“I think that we are making a mistake in calling this thing a house,” writes Prof. Enoch to his wife in England, “and many of us are threatening to return home if Dr. Lorp does not give up his madcap idea that it is. How did it come out about the insurance on the sofa? I wrote to the Indemnity and Assurance people and told them—” But I guess that we are getting into the dull part of Prof. Enoch’s letter to his wife.
All that we are interested in are the wall drawings – and we are not so gosh-darned interested in those.
Since, however, the head of the expedition persists in calling the find a “house,” we are justified in calling the boards which inclose it “walls” and the drawings on those boards “wall drawings.” If we begin to question and doubt now, at this late date, we shall have nothing to work on at all. The Pincus Wall Paintings is the subject of our paper, and the Pincus Wall Paintings it is going to be.
The drawings themselves were evidently made with an old chocolate lozenge by one of the smaller and less deft of the children who frequented the neighborhood. The lozenge was probably well wet in the mouth of the artist, and then seized between the thumb and other thumb and worked up and down and forward and back until the drawing was completed. Some sort of fixative, such as a corn muffin, was then spread over the whole thing, and it was allowed to stand for weeks before being looked at. A great many times people forgot to look at it at all.
The fresco on one side of the wall shows one of the old Pincusian games in which only the young men and the girls over fifty took part. It evidently had to do with an ox, and, from the fresco drawing, consisted of dancing round the ox until the creature became so mortified and fidgety that he got to crying. As soon as the ox started to cry the boys and girls threw rather heavy flower bulbs at him, and the game broke up in a riot of color with several people getting sick.
That the girls of Pincus behaved very much like the girls of today is seen in the fresco showing the girls of Pincus behaving very much like the girls of today. Here we see that they too had their hair-pullings and face-liftings, for the young ladies depicted on these ancient walls seem to be just about as miserable as their sisters of the twentieth century. The only difference was that in Pincus they wore their lipsticks, powder puffs, and bath sponges on a chain around their necks instead of carrying them and spilling them from a so-called “compact” every eight minutes.
In the drawing in question the artist has shown us several of the young bloods of the day standing on the corner, by what corresponded to the Pincus Pharmacy and Fountain Lunch, giving the keemos (or “one time over”) to the girls as they pass by on their way to nowhere in particular unless they get a break.
Unfortunately, the entire right end of this picture has been broken off by the four thousand years of thumbing it has had, and so we are unable to see the next corner and find out exactly what happened. Even if the missing piece were right in the next room, I doubt if I, for one, would get up to go in and see it.
Close to these wall frescoes, in the same hole, the excavators found a rare old bit of Pincusian belt buckle – or perhaps it is just an amalgam filling for an old Pincusian tooth. At any rate, it shows the skill of the ancient workmen in fashioning things out of metal for which there could be no possible use. Brides of today think they have a tough time trying to figure out what some of their wedding presents are for, but a glance over a collection of objets d’art unearthed in these old Greek towns makes one wonder how the brides of those days ever set up housekeeping at all. Maybe that is why so many of these strange little articles are found buried in the ground. The groom probably took them all out the week after the wedding and slyly dropped them in a hole in the garden.
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What About
Business?
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I have been asked (by a couple of small boys and a wire-haired fox terrier) to summarize briefly my views on the Business and Financial Outlook for 1931. 1 would have done this long ago, together with the other financial and business experts, but I wanted first to wait and see if there really was going to be a 1931 or not.
Just because a year has started off with a January and February is no sign that it is going to continue on indefinitely through the rest of the months.
But, as it looks now, we are in for a year which will be known as 1931. Just what else it will be known as remains to be seen, but 1 have got a good name all worked up for it if it turns out to be like 1930. However, I am not here to talk dirty. I am here to outline the economic forces and currents which have contributed to the present business and financial situation and to predict their course during the year which is now well on its way. In doing this I will stick pretty closely to the formula followed by the 2,300,000 experts who have already preceded me in this prognostication. I haven’t read them all, but I got a fairly close idea of what they were driving at.
As I understand it (which is just about that much – or perhaps even that much), there are several causes which are responsible for the depression of 1930 and which I will list in the order of their legibility on my note pad:
Overproduction, a breakdown in artificial control over commodity prices, maladjustments in gold distribution, overproduction, deflation, subnormal thyroid secretion (or Piatt’s Disease”), too much vermouth, deflation, excess of charts with black lines, excess of charts with red lines, and overproduction. Let us make these up, one by one, and then drop dead.
First, overproduction. In 1925 (which brings us down to 1927) we exported this commodity to the extent of twenty-four billion bushels, obviously too much. In 1929 this had been increased by sixty-eight bushels, or one bushel for each of the sixty-eight states in the Union. This increase, together with a simultaneous decrease in deflation, or consumer resistance, brought about a situation in which the world’s markets found themselves faced with what amounted to, in round numbers, a pretty pickle.
Thus we see that this shortsighted policy of increasing production and, at the same time, decreasing inflation (or Piatt’s Disease) brought on a crisis in distribution (or deflation) which naturally led to speculation in “shorts” (lobsters under six inches in length which are supposed, according to the Law, to be thrown back when caught. “Shorts,” however, have much sweeter meat than the larger lobsters and it is often a great temptation to cheat just a teeny-weeny bit and take them home. They are delicious whe
n served with melted butter).
The fall in silver which accompanied this ridiculous state of affairs naturally cut the purchasing power of the Far East, except in those countries where lozenges are used as legal tender. And with the purchasing power of the Far East diminished, and the importation of old rugs and punk from the Far East increasing, it is little wonder that people got so that they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. Often they were doing both.
I am afraid that I can’t be of much help to this discussion in the matter of gold and silver supply. I never quite caught on to what the hell it was all about.
We hear that there is a shortage of gold or an oversupply of gold; that France has all the gold or that the United States has all the gold. What gold? I don’t mean to insinuate anything, but how did France get all this gold if she shouldn’t have it? Where did she get it from? And what does she do with it when she gets it? And who cares, so long as there are plenty of good, crisp bank notes in circulation?
Give me a bank note any time. Then you aren’t so likely to give it away under the impression that it is a lucky penny. I once gave a neighbor’s little boy a lucky penny which was so lucky that he got five dollars for it at the bank. The whole system is rotten to the core.
But to return to our business forecast. (If you don’t want to return, there are books and magazines on the table in the anteroom, and we will be right out in a few minutes.) I look for the following changes in our economic system which should radically alter conditions for the better:
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