Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Volume 31, Number 13 June 18, 1968

Letters To The Editor

Letters To The Editor

He's in the Politico pooH

Sir—Shoulder to shoulder stand James Mitchell (that well-known Partaker of Modicums) and I (less so). United against a burble-tongued a-twitter List, creator of grammatical pains.

Whyso? Many a long moon here-aback, this scribeller penned upon the formation of a Pooh Club; penned at length and did scunge thereupon—great muckly heaps.

Quoth I, a merry quoth frothing from twixt my lips, I quote —'alas', I said.

For the First Action of the pooh club was the Taj Mahal Incident. A Political (or Other) Gesture. A gesture of Undergraduates and Policemen, far, O far removed from Hundred Acre Wood. Alas! as afore-said.

For Pooh is a Doubtful And Muddled Bear, and is fit company for those few Doubtful And Muddled Undergraduates, and those many Doubtful And Muddled Graduates. For those of assurance, those lets-have-some-action bower-power bodies, for those in the Real World— for these, alas, not-Pooh.

The Others. Ah. The Others. To quote me (and who better, after all) I called last year.

. . . . to gather to my own oak all those whose ears, like mine, stream in the wind, who sit, like me, on gates beating time with sticks and doing the tiddley-poms and who, like me, while being a little concerned about the jump propensities of paper Tigers in trees nevertheless can occasionally say

"look at Me"

I call them into the Club of Piglet. The Club of Piglet will never meet and will never become officered, its members will remain unknown to each other except by the occasional coup d'oeil (the couping of the Piglets in the Forest, as it were).

Welcome, James Mitchell.

Go ye! Hales and List, go yonder! Let thyselves be consumed by the yonirable flames of political action!

Piglet is bigger than both of you!

Pooh Lives!

John Pettigrew.

Whimsy

Sir—Being of the opinion, as are many others, that students are not given enough information about the various and sundry goings-on of Exec, I was pleased to see in Salient No. 11, an informative looking column entitled "What Exec Did".

However, closer scrutiny revealed that it read more like a cross between Hedda Hopper's page and a naughty schoolboy's report than a seriously meant column in a publication of high standing such as Salient.

While I am aware that this column is not intended to be purely factual, impartial, or even fair, such blatant victimisation and pointlessly catty personal references will, I feel, promote distrust and contempt of Salient's honourable intentions rather than stimulate healthy controversy.

The criticisms levelled against Rhys Harrison were, in this particular context, totally out of place and in extremely bad taste.

Will the column continue in this petty whimsical vein, or will it become a constructive and worthwhile part of the newspaper?

[Denis Phelps replies: Sadly this correspondent will now never be able to judge for herself the Exec performance of the former Pro. However I hope she will come to future meetings. —ed.]

Sin-thetic

Sir—I was disturbed to read the article in Salient on "The Morality of Test-tube ies". The author identified only as the Science Editor hadn't the courage to sign his or her name to it, and was not mentioned in the list of Salient Staff.

The heading to the article was most misleading promising a discussion on the morality of cultivating test tube life. In fact only one paragraph dealt with the morality of test tube babies and this was short and of a scientific nature.

While I do not doubt the accuracy and sincerity of this article, I feel it is wrong to discuss such a subject as though it was a foregone conclusion. We have by no means established that life can be made in test tubes. Too often these predictions are masked in a scientific cloak as an attempt to disguise an argument which is either specious or very weak.

Yours sincerely,

M. S. Lim.

[Andy Easton's name, as Science Editor has been left off the staff list in error. I feel the problem can legitimately be discussed even though its urgency is not dire—ed.]