Pseudemys Scripta

Miniature turtles, long prohibited imports into New Zealand, are proving very popular. Some owners have shown more than usual enterprise, by conducting miniature-turtle races (or is it miniature turtle-races?) for their 3-inch-long friends.

Two such owners (students in fact) found that their respective turtles could travel 5 yards or thereabouts without any perceptible loss of speed. One travelled faster than the other, but both travelled so slowly that they may be considered to have been travelling flat-out as soon as they started.

The two turtles were started simultaneously from opposite ends of a table, each tail-tip being at the table's edge. As soon as the turtle's nose (turtles have a prominent olfactory organ) reached the opposite edge the turtle was turned round and set upon its return journey. It was found that this turning-round procedure took half a second.

Student A's turtle had gone 27½ inches when the noses passed on lap one; the second passing took place when A's turtle had gone 16 inches after being turned around by Student B.

How long was the table?

The Government has made small slips before, of course. It has made minor errors of economic policy. It has occasionally deported the wrong people. It has gambled on the wrong defence system. It invaded the wrong country.

All these peccadilloes could be forgiven—none of them involved anything worse than the loss of a few hundred lives, or the waste of £100 million, or putting half a million men out of work. But now a member of the Government has slept with the wrong woman, and as a consequence severely strained this country's newsprint resources.

—Michael Frayne in the Observer just two years ago.