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SMAD. An Organ of Student Opinion. 1934. Volume 5. Number 5.

The Cockpit

page 10

The Cockpit

Election of Students' Executive.

'The Editor. "Smad."

Sir,

May I have space in your columns to make a practical suggestion with regard to the election of the Students' Executive?

Numbers of students, both men and women, during the period of voting, complained that they did not know, and were unfamiliar with even the names, of some of those students nominated. Even so, they were required to give them, in order of preference. Most thought they could not omit even the unfamiliar names, because, if they did, their votes would have been out of order.

In the first place, should not those students who make the nominations satisfy themselves that the student they nominate is properly representative? There ought to be some check on nominations when people largely unknown are nominated.

I would suggest that the Executive should provide this check, that they should consider the relative qualifications of each student nominated. For example: has he (she) taken lectures for at least one year previously? Is he (she) at present taking active part in academic activities? Does he (she) intend to take lectures in the year (years) immediately following election to office? These are necessary, and not unreasonable requirements for fair representation.

II It would be of great help to those interested in the affairs of their College if each person nominated had a note indicating his (her) claim to consideration as a candidate. The trouble entailed by such an enquiry is surely more than counterbalanced by the help that such knowledge would be to the students as a whole.

In the case of the election of Life Members this is considered necessary. Is it not quite as necessary that the immediate authority should be as carefully chosen ?

Yours truly,

Nancy Webber.

Dear "Smad,"

I feel that forceful attention should be drawn to the deplorable lack of manners displayed by a section of those attending debates at V.U.C. One is constrained to wonder what some of these go there for. I have always understood it to be the height of rudeness to talk while someone else has the floor, yet I find that a section of the audience do this with impunity. I should like to draw attention to the action, and execration down upon the heads of those who at a recent debate when respectfully asked by the chairman to desist or go outside (even this should not have been necessary) blandly continued their discussion for a time, and then, to add insult to injury, rose in a body and stamped noisily from the room, and this. Sir, when a lady was speaking. The audience, I may say, actually laughed! It would be regrettable to find persons in any audience guilty of this conduct, but coming from University students, allegedly setting the standard of culture and refinement in the community, it can only be described as nauseating. When to this is added the fact that after the debate, when supper is passed round, we find wave upon wave of clamourous masculinity pouring up on to the stage and grabbing the food from the plates like underfed street urchins in a lolly scramble at. a school picnic, regardless of the fact that visitors may be present, and unmindful even of girl students in the audience, the picture becomes so depressing that no words of mine can describe; the more so because, as apparently we live in a community of boors, there is no hope of a reformation.

Yours,

A. McG.

Pherocious Phillips.

235 The Terrace, Wellington, S.I., The Editor, 6-8-34.

"Smad." Dear Sir,

I regard with the utmost indignation your presumptuous request for a contribution to your illiterate publication. Nothing I do or say can fully express the contempt with which I regard this journal. Its painfully self-conscious cleverness, its old-maidenish liberalism, its anaemic tolerance, its weak-kneed criticism, its bad grammar, fill me with horror. Even the distorted reproduction of Mr. Larkin's knees, knees that have sent football fans into ecstacies, that have known the chill kiss of cathedral mosaic, cannot save its cover from vulgarity and mediocrity.

I have a close acquaintance with your paper, Sir, having read it with distaste for over four years, and having served, reluctantly, as its sub-editor for a period of several months. I feel I have done my duty by it and now wish to be left unmolested by its page 11 perpetrators.

As my fifth year of 'Varsity life draws to a close, I can find pleasure only in contemplating the excellences of another generation. I cannot become reconciled to the horde of puling neophytes that spring up around me. Gone are the gods of my youth—the Macduffs, the Reardons, the Riskes, the Rollingses, the Priestleys, and even the great Carrad flits over the scene a pale spectre of his former attenuated magnificence. A. Eaton Hurley is only a name, an archaic fragrance, a dim stained-glass luminary, forgotten by the masses, his memory worshipped in innocent heresy only by those few S.C.M.'ites who remember him. His fate was touching. Returning in a blaze of glory to the scenes of his youth, he looked for veneration, and found only venery. Scott has withdrawn, monastic and silent, from the scenes of his boisterous youth, and finding neither beauty nor wit in his contemporaries, seeks solace in the company of the great minds of antiquity. Some talk of a thesis.

And Plank, who once framed a constitution, and ruled the College with a tennis recquet, makes a dreary shut-out bid and trumps his partner's ace.

Where this decay will end, who knows?

There are new domestic gods, false idols, little argumentative fellows in fustian who blast the firmament with their rhetoric, and tread impatiently on the heels of their ancestors. What can one say of these? Why should the aged cast their pearls before the undergraduate?

Sir, kindly desist in future from penetrating into the Valhalla of the venerable, and leave me to remain

Yours ferociously,

R. B. Phillips.

Chemistry Complains.

The Editor.

Dear Sir,

Our Friday afternoon Chemistry lecture has now twice been violated in a manner that beggars all description Let me whisper in your ear.

Sir, the seat of the trouble is the Biology Laboratory and the Lingering and offensive smells capable of emanating from that chamber of horrors.

As is my wont each Friday afternoon, I arrived at the Chemistry Lecture room at 4 p.m. No sooner Avas I seated than wave upon wave of a nauseous vapour assailed my nostrils. It was that most deadly and excruciatingly malignant horror—D.O. (Even their best friends wont tell them).

You, in your innocence, may not know what I mean by D.O., but I assure you that if you were to sit through a lecture with any of "Biology's Blunders" after they had been at work upstairs, you would soon realise how preposterously we are being treated.

As you have doubtlessly realised by now, D.O. means "Dogfish Odour." Now, not only does the intense odour of decaying dogfish escape from the Biology Lab., and cascade down the stairs to the lower depths which are the Chemistry Lecture room, but also it becomes impregnated in the clothing of all those students, who, through blatant carelessness and lack of thought, have embarked on a course in Biology.

I have a few ideas which may prove of use in the campaign which you will undoubtedly lead against these miserable nitwits and their fish (although one can't blame the fish).

My ideas:—

(1) Each morning and each evening it should be the duty of the Lab. assistant to bathe each and every Dogfish on the premises with "Lifebuoy" soap (also any stray students found wandering about with a fishy look in their eyes).

(2) The Biology Class should be provided with a "Disrobing and Shower Room." They (all Biology students) should enter this room, disrobe, cut up the Dogfish in the nude (students as well as fish), retire to the shower room, ablute very thoroughly, re-robe, and then advance on the Chemistry Lecture room, where they will then undoubtedly be received like human beings and not, as at present, like any outcast pariahs.

I am, Sir,

Algernon Shuffle Bottom.