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Show Lint From a Blue Serpe Suit: Just before the war, Jan Smeterlin, Smeter-lin, the eminent Polish pianist, was on a world concert tour and at one , point visited Valdemosa on the Is-iland Is-iland of Majorca, which was the place where Chopin lived. Smeter-lin Smeter-lin visited the monastery which was Chopin's home (and has since been turned into a private residence) hoping to see the piano on which Chopin played. He was told that the j piano was now the property of a I private family in Palma. Smeterlin located that family and as he stood I in rapt awe looking at this box, which was the instrument of the great Polish immortal, the man of the house said, "Surely, Mr. Smeterlin, Smet-erlin, you're going to play on it!" . . . Smeterlin replied reverently, "Oh I wouldn't think of touching It." To which his host said, "Oh, nonsensemy non-sensemy children bang on it all ; the time!" Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black is a fiend for lyonnaise pota-J pota-J toes. A new waitress at his favorite favor-ite restaurant brought him french fries in error and told him she couldn't change the order. ... A Washington reporter, seated near by, asked her if she knew the patron was a United States high court judge. Unimpressed, she refused to change the order, explaining: "How often do they change their decisions?" de-cisions?" We've only used R twice before, but every time some contributor offers it we get the giggles and have to print it over again. It's about Mr. Mefoofsky and his four-year-old son, Itzic. . . . They were strolling in the park, and the boy kept ask-i ask-i ing all sorts of questions. It was getting on Mefoof's "noyfs." "Poppa," persisted Itzic, "wot kind flowers is doze?" "How should I know?" exploded Mefoofsky. "Am I in the millinery j bizniz?" James Gordon Bennett (who used to own the N. Y. Herald) had a list of "don'ts" for reporters that was as long as the memory of a radio ra-dio comedian. . . . Every once in a while, though, the boys made him take one back. "Don't use 'patron' or 'guest' in referring to a paying customer at a hotel," one rule went, "because you are using the word incorrectly." The rule was changed when the boys on the rewrite desk (searching for other words) started to refer to persons who registered at hotels as "inmates." New Yorkers' Notebook: The English are giggling over the cook's dog at an RAFlying field. The canine dashed down the runway run-way in pursuit of a plane taking off. . . . "Does your dog always do that?" a new officer asked. . . . The cook said yep. . . . "Why?" the officer wanted to know. "I don't know, sir," replied the dog's owner. "But what worries me is what he's going to do with it when he catches a plane." Ivor Newton, the London pianist, heard a Cockney give this explanation explana-tion of his own courage regarding the robot bombings: "I see it like this. It must take the Germans a lot of trouble to make the bloody things, and then they have to get them into those pits and up in the air, and it is quite a long way from France to London, and if they do get to London, Lon-don, they still have to find Lime-house, Lime-house, and even then, it isn't everyone every-one who can find 37 Bulstrode road where I live, and if they do, it's 10 to ! 1 that I would be down the corner in ! the Pub." At the home of mutual friends, after the funeral of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Winston Churchill, who was touched by the prelate's passing, said: "Once again, the nation na-tion has lost a great churchman and a great Englishman." . . . Then, in an aside, Mr. Churchill, who credits cred-its his 70 years to having a drink now and then, added: "And once again one of my good friends has met the untimely end of a complete teetotaler!" Story of the Week: The newest General Patton legend according to just-returned correspondents. . . . When the Germans cold-bloodedly murdered Gen. Maurice Rose, Pat-ton Pat-ton was strangely silent for a long time. . . . Then he reached slowly into his jacket pocket from which he removed a German-English dictionary. diction-ary. . . . And crossed out the word "mercy." The other night Prof. Leo Rels-man Rels-man relayed the one about the trainee at a naval radio training center in Georgia. His station was the radio tower. ... He became worried when he couldn't account for an incoming fleet of planes. He flashed: "X Radio Tower calling Pilot Jones. Been messaging you but got no answer. If you hear me, wabble wings." Shortly came the reply: "Pilot Jones calling X Radio Tower. I landed two hours ago If you hear me, wabble tower!" |