Other Scenes

CHANGES: Hundreds of empty cans were dumped on the doorstep of Continental Can company in San Francisco by a group calling itself the Canyon League of Re-Cyclists. If the company makes money out of creating garbage it should do something about disposing of it, spokesmen explained. Continental Can officials disclaimed responsibility and had one of the protesters arrested for “littering”...

There’ll never be decent living conditions for most of the population—of any country—until landlords are barred from owning property in which they don’t live themselves...

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Gardening on Sundays “sets a bad example to youth” says the mayor of the South African town of Krugersdrop, where it’s hoped to stop Africans from doing part-time work instead of going to church...

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Dallas Notes suggests that if you get any of that chemical-treated grass-the kind that makes you vomit-that you take a little of it to your neighborhood restaurant and drop it into the pepper shaker—“share with your fellow citizens the fruits of their hysteria’...

SF Chronicle reports that almost 90 per cent of Berkeley law students (U of Cal) have broken the law by either smoking grass or being with others who did. As the Chron points out, these alumni “have a habit of becoming judges, district attorneys and lawmakers.”

“Probably the most revolutionary thing in the U.S. right now is hedonism. By that I don’t mean wasting your life away, but doing something that you enjoy. That really puts them uptight.” —Country Joe MacDonald

THE WAR: Pentagon investigators are trying to track down an organization that will get Vietnam GI’s emergency leaves by sending fake telegrams saying a relative is dying. Cost of the bogus message is around $300...

.Nixon says he’d rather we stayed in Vietnam and kept on killing people by all our sophisticated methods than get out and have a “massacre”. Americans think they can always do things better than anybody else-especially murder...

.A goodly percentage of the requests played over the Army’s AFVN-AM are anti-war numbers according to Overseas Weekly which quotes one of the disc jockeys as saying, “Most guys over here are against the war and we give them what they want.”

The Guardian carried a story from Hugo Hill in Vietnam which certainly seemed to suggest that the International Red Cross representative in Saigon is racist...

As long as American servicemen are fighting in Vietnam, says a Pasadena group, consumers should refrain from spending money on Christmas shopping. Christmas Buying Boycott for Peace (P.O. Box 3206, Pasadena, Calif. 91103) has stickers, buttons and info to send out to inquirers.. It may be understandable why servicemen put up with so much shit and sadism from their officers when they’re in the army (or marines or navy) but why do they forget it all and not seek vengeance when they come out? Isn’t it surprising that nobody’s started a league to pay off these old scores?

Robert Nichols, a G.I. killed in Vietnam last summer, made an anti-Army underground newspaper the recipient of his insurance policy which means, as Hard Times points out, that the Army is now financing its publication. Off-duty GI’s already have an alternative to the sterile USO’s to visit in many parts of the country. Now a New York City G.I. Coffeehouse Project is starting up. For info contact Jerry Wingate, 339 Lafayette St., NYC 10012.

Troublemaker William J. Lederer documented the truth about the corruption in South Vietnam a couple of years ago in a paperback called Our Own Worst Enemy, (Fawcett, 95 cents). All about how U.S. officers get rich by selling PX supplies in the Black Market; all about how our Vietnamese “allies” are making out of us the biggest suckers in history.

MEDIAMIX: Football players in France will soon start carrying advertising on their shirts. In Japan, the government’s Hi Lite cigarettes carry advertising for other products on their packages. Why doesn’t some firm give away cheap, well-designed suits carrying advertising slogans? From a reverse snobbery point of view it would be chic to be seen wearing them...

Next development in the mass production of TV sets (once the color market is saturated) will be the manufacture of compact cases containing three or five (or a dozen) miniature screens so that viewers can do what many are already doing-watch several programs simultaneously

IDEAS: Radio Free Vancouver, a pirate transmitter with 250 watts, has been zeroing in on Western Canada’s late-evening audience at 8:30 P.M. on Friday nights. Underground operators plan to install their broadcasting equipment in a truck and keep moving so that they can’t be detected by government sleuths who need an hour of continuous “triangulation” beaming to track them down...

If the United Nations devised an all-purpose airmail stamp (about 25 cents) it could be sold at one major post office in every country in the world-the proceeds going to finance the UN-and enable travelers always to have stamps with them...

“A signal injector powered by two dry cells can be left in a public phone booth and without interfering with normal operation of the phone (thus delaying detection) will cause up to 250 random calls per hour over the area served by the local exchange” (pp. 404–407 of Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, Ballantine).