If, as Dr. Einstein asserts, our planet has been receiving crooked light-rays all this time, it is a very serious matter and there is no knowing what may come of it; certainly the Cosmic Light Company ought to be investigated. But don’t be down-hearted, dear Reader, some day the Einstein Amendment to the Law of Gravitation may be repealed, and made retroactive into the bargain; it is all a matter of Relativity and it may turn out that the Relativity-shoe is on the other foot and that it is the Earth’s orbit that is on the blink and not the light rays at all.
Perhaps Mr. G. B. Shaw will enlighten us—as a projector of crooked light-rays, he ought to know something about it.
PITY THE POOR GUEST OF HONOR
Once when marooned on a small island in the midst of a turbulent sea of traffic, latitude Fifth Avenue, longitude Forty-second Street, I asked the governor of the island, a man of great stature and kingly mien, what he thought was the origin of the institution known as the Complimentary Banquet. Checking with an imperious gesture a monstrous traffic wave that seemed like to engulf us both the next moment, his voice came to me calm and reassuring above the tumult that surged and roared about us. “If it’s a wake you do be meaning, sorr, sure it’s as old as Ireland itself, it is!”
And the Traffic Cop was right.
Nearly two thousand years ago Strabo, the Greek geographer, describing the natives of Ivernia, wrote: “They are more savage than the English, and enormous eaters, deeming it commendable to devour their deceased relatives.”