Taker

In Chicago, Gangster Chester Novak who had boasted he could "take it," took the first 1,900-volt jolt of current in the electric chair, lived; took another, another, still lived; on the fifth jolt was dead. Sheriff Toman apologized for his electric chair: "Novak drank so much coffee, maybe it stimulated his heart."

Ventriloquist

In Hongkong, police raided the sideshow of Tin Tsoi, woman ventriloquist, who charged three cents (Hongkong) to let customers talk with her unborn child. They found Widow Tin Tsoi telling patrons that the child had often, during the ten years of her pregnancy, refused to come into the world, inviting them to ask it questions. She was sentenced to six weeks in jail.

Addict

In Tulsa, Okla., charged with having illegally married a ten-year-old girl, John Button, 40, replied, "She was addicted to tobacco but I've been trying to break her of it."

Excuse

In Montgomery, Ala., stopped by Patrolman William Collins for speeding his banana truck and for reckless driving, Truckdriver R. L. Hathaway gave as his excuse that he had a tarantula in his pants. The policeman slit open the trousers of R. L. Hathaway, flicked out the tarantula, blackjacked it.

Figurer

In St. Paul, Kenneth Makepeace won a car for himself in a department store contest by guessing the number of revolutions made per week by the wheel of a free-running automobile in the store. Then with the same technique he won a car for his friend Julius Janisch, sued for half the profits. Kenneth Makepeace's figuring: "I put a pencil against the wheel and counted the number of times the valve stem hit it. That was the revolutions per minute. I multiplied that figure by the number of minutes per week in an 81-hour day. The next step was to deduct two hours a week for the five-minute stops the car made every hour. Then some coasting revolutions had to be added.

"When you get this grand total, you divide by 1,010--the revolutions per mile. Anybody could learn that just by asking the men at the store. That changes the figure to miles. That was the key to the whole thing.

"But it gave you an uneven number. Speedometers register only in tenths of a mile; so you forget the numbers after the decimal point and multiply again by 1,010 for the key number. From there on it's a cinch. All you have to do is to add or subtract 101 as many times as you want and put in those totals for entries. It had to come out in one of those units, and it did."

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