The So-called Human Race. Taylor Bert Leston
knocks you quite flat
With her new line of chat,
And her “What do you think about sex?”
“Are we all to shudder at the name of Rabelais and take to smelling salts?” queries an editorial colleague. “Are we to be a wholly lady-like nation?” Small danger, brother. Human nature changes imperceptibly, or not at all. The objection to most imitations of Rabelais is that they lack the unforced wit and humor of the original.
A picture of Dr. A. Ford Carr testing a baby provokes a frivolous reader to observe that when the babies cry the doctor probably gives them a rattle.
The man who writes a certain column in Chicago can always fill two-thirds of it with quotations and contributions. But that may be called success – when they bring the stuff to you and are almost willing to pay you for printing it.
Sir: “I’ll say she is,” “Don’t take it so hard,” “I’ll tell the world.” These, and other slangy explosives from our nursery, fell upon the sensitive auditory nerves of callers last evening. I am in a quandary, whether to complain to the missus or write a corrective letter to the children’s school teachers, for on the square some guy ought to bawl the kids out for fair about this rough stuff – it gets my goat. J. F. B.
Did you think “I’ll say so” was new slang? Well, it isn’t. You will find it in Sterne’s “Sentimental Journey.”
Formula for accepting a second cigar from a man whose taste in tobacco is poor: “Thank you; the courtesy is not all yours.”
A number of suicides are attributed to the impending conjunction of the planets and the menace of world-end. You can interest anybody in astronomy if you can establish for him a connection between his personal affairs and the movements of the stars.
Where ’Vangie lies strown folios
Like Vallambrosan leaves repose,
The sad, the blithe, the quaint, the queer,
The good, the punk are scattered here —
A pile of poof in verse and prose.
And none would guess, save him who strows,
How much transcendent genius goes
Unwept, unknown, into the smear
Where ’Vangie lies.
With every opening mail it snows
Till ’Vangie’s covered to her nose.
Forgetting that she is so near,
I sometimes kick her in the ear.
Then sundry piteous ba-a-a’s disclose
Where ’Vangie lies.
“This sale,” advertises a candid clothier, “lasts only so long as the goods last, and that won’t be very long.”
Dear Sir: Your letter came. Glad you bought a team of horses. Hilda is sick. She has diphtheria and she will die I think. Clara died this eve. She had it, too. We are quarantined. Five of Fisher’s family have got it. My wife is sick. She hain’t got it. If this thing gets worse we may have to get a doctor. Them trees are budding good. Everything is O. K.
Just as we started to light a pipe preparatory to filling this column, we were reminded of Whistler’s remark to a student who was smoking: “You should be very careful. You know you might get interested in your work and let your pipe go out.”
It is odd, and not uninteresting to students of the so-called human race, that a steamfitter or a manufacturer of suspenders who may not know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – who may not, indeed, know anything at all – is nevertheless a bubbly-fountain of political wisdom; whereas a writer for a newspaper is capable of emitting only drivel. This may be due to the greater opportunity for meditation enjoyed by suspender-makers and steamfitters.
Janesville’s Grand Hotel just blew itself on its Thanksgiving dinner. The menu included “Cheese a la Fromage.”
“It is with ideas we shall conquer the world,” boasts Lenine. If he needs a few more he can get them at the Patent Office in Washington, which is packed with plans and specifications of perpetual motion machines and other contraptions as unworkable as bolshevism.
A woman from the country made a deposit consisting of several items. After ascertaining the amount the receiving teller asked, “Did you foot it up?” “No, I rode in,” said she. H. A. N.
The fact that Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and other great departed whose names are taken in vain every day by small-bore politicians, do not return and whack these persons over the heads with a tambourine, is almost – as Anatole France remarked in an essay on Flaubert – is almost an argument against the immortality of the soul.
Harper’s Weekly refrains from comment on the shipping bill because, says its editor, “we have not been able to accumulate enough knowledge.” Well! If every one refrained from expressing an opinion on a subject until he was well informed the pulp mills would go out of business and a great silence would fall upon the world.
It is pleasant to believe the sun is restoring its expended energy by condensation, and that the so-called human race is in the morning of its existence; and it is necessary that the majority should believe so, for otherwise the business of the world would not get done. The happiest cynic would be depressed by the sight of humanity sitting with folded hands, waiting apathetically for the end.
Perhaps the best way to get acquainted with the self-styled human race is to collect money from it.
I would not seem to slam our valued planet, —
Space, being infinite, may hold a worse;
Nor would I intimate that if I ran it
Its vapors might disperse.
Within our solar system, or without it,
May be a world less rationally run;
There may be such a geoid, but I doubt it —
I can’t conceive of one.
If from the time our sphere began revolving
Until the present writing there had been
A glimmer of a promise of resolving
The muddle we are in:
If we could answer “Whither are we drifting?”
Or hope to wallow out of the morass —
I might continue boosting and uplifting;
But as it is, I pass.
So on your way, old globe, wherever aiming,
Go blundering down the endless slopes of space:
As far away the prospect of reclaiming
The so-called human race.
Gyrate, old Top, and let who will be clever;
The mess we’re in is much too deep to solve.
Me for a quiet life while you, as ever,
Continue to revolve.
“Our editorials,” announces the Tampa Tribune, “are written by members of the staff, and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the paper.” Similarly, the contents of this column are written by its conductor and the straphangers, and have nothing whatever to do with its policy.
“What, indeed?” as Romeo replied to Juliet’s query. And yet Ralph Dilley and Irene Pickle were married in Decatur last week.
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