Wet and Dry Moons

1910

There is an old superstition, which dies hard, that the position of the horns of the new moon tells what the weather will be; if the horns of the crescent are on the same level, it will hold water, and hence it is a dry moon; but if it is tipped up, then the water will run out, and it is a wet moon.

One thing has helped keep this belief alive; the moon is "dry" in the part of the spring that is usually fair, while it is "wet" during the season of autumn rains.

If this were a sure sign of the weather we could have our predictions years in advance, for an astronomer can predict the exact position of the moon at any time in the future.

The cause for the different positions of the crescent is simple: The moon is south of the sun in the autumn and north of it in spring. The crescent is found by the light of the sun falling on the moon, and the horns are naturally in a line perpendicular to the direction of the sun from the moon.

That is all there is to it.

Temperate by Common Consent

1899

Who can name a county which, without making "prohibition" an issue or legally forbidding liquor-selling, has not for thirty years contained a saloon? A correspondent of the Atlanta Constitution, on the track of a gold-mining "boom," professes to have found such an one — Union County, Georgia.

"If you were snake-bitten," said a prominent citizen to me the other day at the county-seat, "I believe you could not get a drop of liquor in the town to save your life."

In this county seventy-five per cent of the people own their homes. In the county-seat, only one family does not own its home. There is not a dollar of bonds on the county, and with the tax rate three times larger this year than usual, the total state and county tax amounts to only one dollar and fifteen cents on one hundred dollars.

Union County lies among the mountains of the Blue Ridge. The court-house is forty miles north of Gainesville, about one hundred miles on an air-line north of Atlanta, and about ten miles south of the Tennessee line. The quickest way to reach Blairsville, the county-seat of Union, from Atlanta is to go to Blueridge on the Atlanta, Knoxville & Northern Railway, and drive across the country twenty-six miles along the beautiful valleys and over the mountains.

I was told by a number of reputable citizens that there are many people in the county who have never seen a railroad. The eastern part of the county is probably forty miles from the nearest station in one direction, and fifty miles in the other. — Youth's Companion.

If They Prohibit Booze in Movies, No More Drunken Bullies to Fight

1919

WILL THE DRY WAVE AFFECT THE MOVIES

Here's Henry Lehrman's Humorous Account of Substituting Tea for Booze

The recent intimation that the depiction of intoxicating liquors and their effect on the consumers thereof will in future be taboo in motion pictures has brought consternation to the hearts of producers, who have already begun to wonder what will happen when the reels are really removed from the films. Henry Lehrman, the noted comedy producer, having duly sworn, deposes and says:

If wet goods must disappear from film comedy, bald-headed theatre patrons may find comfort in the fact that dry goods are following in the same pathway.

Many a film actor will sprain his ankle within the next few months, when he strides up to a coffee counter and reaches for the rail.

It is a sad thing to realize that the kick in comedies must now be registered entirely with the feet.

Picture the hero, disappointed in love, rushing off to a tea room and making a beast of himself on Lipton's Best.

How can he save the heroine from the drunken bully, if there are no drunken bullies?

We will now be confronted with the spectacle of the weak but willing hero going west to fight off an inherited craving for orange phosphate, and clapping on a gas mask every time he approaches a fruit stand.

If a ship captain can't take a schooner over the bar, will they even prevent his making port in a storm? Can we show a horse's neck or a bier? How about the old parlor wood-box, if there happens to be a stick in it?

We are ruined! They're going to take the punch out of the pictures!

—Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Fort Wayne, IN, Aug. 10, 1919, section 4, p. 5.