SIR, The sugary trifles on page 261 of this month’s (December) issue are too bad. I foresee that their influence on your venerable editorial head will ere long occasion you great inconvenience—your hat will not fit and your feet will trip over unseen obstacles. So that in telling an Unpleasant truth or two, I may be doing you a bon turn. Mind you, I do not undertake this task in a spirit of levity ; but rather with fear and trembling in my bones. For I fear the possibility of a huge car, driven by an infuriated editor, hurling itself against my humble mobike and I on one dark night. Might I suggest, when the method of revenge is in contemplation, that the Borgia family had clean, efficient and aesthetic ways and means of
Having arranged for my extermination, I’ll hurry along to the Colonial section—the rough stuff. Grouse I. or adverse criticism the 1st:
Why should our monthly motor sports journal devote 4 precious pages to description of a car ? A colossal advertisement. A superfluity. A wicked waste of our reading-matter space. We are victimized, ad nauseam, with these camouflaged advertisements in the weekly motor papers. For the love of Mike resist the temptation to become a sheep ! Who hasn’t seen the reader flick over these pages of boring battalions of words with a snap, a wet forefinger, a supervising jaundiced eye ? Who reads ‘ern, other than the manufacturer concerned or his publicity agent’s office boy ? Don’t do it, it’s sinful. The ordinary unashamed advertisement we do read—especially if conceived in a humorous vein. Grouse II.: Nine to twenty-three is unfair fighting, a nine to twenty-three gear on a twenty-three in nine gradient
is absurd ; yet we find there are roughly 23 parts of car to 9 parts of motor cycle. In a fifty-fifty journal, should the proportion not be a fair and square fifty-fifty of each car and motor cycle ?
BEMSEE. [We appreciate this correspondent’s views, and thank him for his criticism, with which we deal in Mir Editorial Notes this month. We should be glad to have other reader’s views on these and other matters of interest.—ED.]
