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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 14, Issue 2 (May 1, 1939)

Prophet and Loss

Prophet and Loss.

As his children multiply, his faith in himself is sorely tried and he is even tempted by an advertisement which demands, “How will you answer your children?” to buy a volume of five thousand answers to a similar number of frightful questions likely to be fired at suffering parents by heartless infants. But he knows that the answers to the brainteasers promulgated by his little hot-spots could not be found even in the Talmud; and, anyway, he isn't going to have his style cramped by mere authenticity.

He is already shocked to his artistic giblets by the drab unimaginativeness of the facts fed to his children by the Educational Authorities with the deliberate intention of discrediting his own authority; so much so that he is driven to reply to questions with, “Look it up in the book! How do you expect to learn if you rely on me to tell you everything?”

But you can't keep a good Knower down. He may take the count for eight but he will beat the ten-spot time and again. His motto is “Hic hoc hocus” which is dog Latin for “give it a pop.” He can tell you, without even thinking about it, that a totalitarian state is how you feel at tea parties, that the Cossacks are what monks wear, that the swastika was originally the laudry mark on certain shirts, that St. Paul's Cathedral was built by Christopher Robin, that the Trappist monks are tree-dwellers who snare
“How will you answer your children?”

“How will you answer your children?”

page 43 furred animals, that Sing Sing is in the Canary Islands, and that the seven wonders of the world are women's hats, six-o-clock closing, the way his wife treats the newspaper, why his boss can't see that he is worth twice his salary, bills, the international situation, and his general lack of luck.

He can tell you that the Colossus of Roads is a bulldozer, that a bigamist is a heavyweight lifter, that the sign of the Zodiac is three gold balls above a doorway, that the Incas came from the Black Sea, and that an igloo is what an eskimo beats his wife with.