Judge — April 1938 — page 46: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“HEAVEN HELP YOU IF THAT'S A DISGUISE.” ARE WE PREPARED FOR ANYTHING? By Scott Corbett T'S getting so it is a red-letter day for us pacifists when we can turn papers and magazines all the day through without once seeing a column of pen- and-ink silhouettes of soldiers, one above the other (with the littlest one at the bottom of the heap, as usual) representing the comparative Land. Force Manpower of the great nations. After we have given this chart the once-over, we usually come next to one captioned Naval Tonnage, featuring a column of battleships representing tons of navy for each country. Following this, we generally find a column showing Comparative Self-Suf- ficiency in such necessities as iron, oil, cotton, and machinery—big buckets of iron for Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and ourselves—little buckets for Italy and Japan; big cans of oil for Rus- sia and ourselves, and no can at all for Italy. These charts, to say nothing of their accompanying text, are disturbing, and often depressing. Many of us get more than our fill of them nowadays. As a change, then, I propose to let you rest your eyes on some statistics which, 44 though well worth your serious consid. eration, do not immediately fill your mind with gloomy thoughts concerning The Next World War. First of all, let us take up the apple- coring situation. For the benefit of those who reside in the nation’s less enlight- ened outposts, such as New York, let me explain that an apple-corer is a kitchen-utensil with which one removes the cores from apples. Why? Well, why not? All straight now? Good. A survey of the five great apple-cor- ing nations yielded these figures: Russia *It is rumored that Russia has more apple- corers than she is telling anybody about. I computed our own figure of 50% by an_ if-I-do-say-so-myself-as-shouldn’t clever bit of deduction. Taking ours as an average American household, I found that whenever I got a hankering to core an apple (Why? See above!) half the time I couldn't find our apple-corer.. However, it follows that half the time I could. If we had two apple-corers, then, I could find each half the time, and would thus be self-sufficient in ap. ple-corers. Since we have only one, how. ever, we are only 50% self-sufficient, See? If you don't see, it's just too bad, because I haven't time to stop and ex. plain any further. There's too much to be done, and I don’t want anybody up. setting my apple-chart. . . . Next, I shall present some alarming statistics concerning Manpower Equipped With First-Class Mustaches: Mansized — Incipiest Moustaches Growths France UST | 4.692.153, Italy Germany | Russia Great Britain poner |6.642,114 Japan United States |s220.431 |2so1r29 4.642.147 [uses [pes J *Including Hitler's. **When they have them at all they are dandies. tIncluding the guy who forgot to shave this morning. ~— Here is something which should make any real American pause to think. See where we stand! What if they should suddenly start manufacturing mustache cups! There are no two ways about it— the United States would be caught to. tally unprepared. You may feel inclined to ask, what about our eleven-million-odd scrubs? Well, you've seen them, haven't you? “Odd” is the word for them. They're not only oddities—most of them are downright puny. The great majority will | never amount to anything. An average peach could put nine-tenths of them to shame. It is highly unlikely that more than 2% will ever become first-class mustaches. This is partly due to lack of compul- sory mustache training in our colleges, where many of the punier examples may be found... . In our final chart we take up the equally vital matter of Paper Clip Ton- nages (see Chart III). Here, at least, we find a partially comforting note. In paper clip tonnage, we have a nice margin. However, we comicbooks.com