Reporter’s Diary

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33816, 12 April 1975, Page 3

Reporter’s Diary

Last straw STAFF at TV2 are savouring a story arising from the “opening spectacular” staged by its rival, TVI. The weather segment that night is widely agreed to have been a dismal failure. Most of the map was offcamera, and the whole presentation created a deep impression throughout the viewing area. It was the new weather girl who had to deal with the complaints. She is really the Avalon television centre’s switchboard operator, and was no doubt delighted at her selection for the glamorous task in front of the cameras., But after the opening night’s weather-report debacle, the poor girl had to return to her switchboard to deal with a cold front of com-

plaints pouring in from all over the country. Top nomen “QUEEN BEES” — women who are successes in a male-dominated world — are attacked in the latest newsletter of the National Organisation of Women. A queen bee is usually a woman from a comfortable background, one who has had an easy ride to the top, becoming a doctor, lawyer, business manager, writer, headmistress, city councillor, or member of Parliament. “Queen bees are sometimes more antagonistic towards feminism than male chauvinists,” says the newsletter. They feel more in common with their male colleagues than with other women, they lack feminine consciousness, and they see nothing wrong with the system of male dominance. The queen bee’s attitude, says the newsletter, is “I’m all right, Jill.” Su-iinniing champ TAKEN size for size, the whitebait is to swimming what Vasily Alexeyev is to weight-lifting. Fisheries scientists combing the oceans around New Zealand for the tiny delicacies claim to have found one solitary whitebait —

whose name they give as Galaxias macuiatus — almost exactly half-way between the Bounty and Antipodes islands, about 700 km from New Zea-

land. Little Galaxias was happily swimming around by himself. The nearest whitebait spawning streams are at the Chatham Islands, 600 km away. Galaxias’s stamina showed, said the scientists in their report to the “Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research,” that whitebait could easily have swum to the Chathams from New Zealand and needed no prehistoric land bridge to get there, as had been suggested by one of their colleagues. Theatre open ALTHOUGH many patrons changed their seats for another night, the manager of the Avon Theatre (Mr T. King) said yesterday that the main feature was shown on Thursday night after the gunman hoax in Worcester Street had been resolved. Mr King was grateful to Inspector J. Perrin for keeping him in touch with the search progress and giving the "all clear.” When the film began at 8.25 p.m. only about 150 persons, some of them ticket-holders held back by the police, were present. On the waterfront NEWCOMERS to the Lyttelton waterfront must wonder if they have somehow stepped into the pages of Damon Runyon's "Guys and Dolls.” People don’t go by names down there, they go by titles. There’s the Judge (he’s always sitting on a case), the Umbrella Man (he’s always sheltering from the rain), and Morphine (regarded as something of a

dope). Perhaps the most colourful of all is the Reluctant Fish — he just won't take the hook. Salad days CORRESPONDENTS of “The Times” have been discussing the medicinal properties of lettuce. It began when a book reviewer expressed surprise about an author's statement that dried juice of lettuce was reckoned to be “as strongly narcotic as opium.” One letter writer quoted as evidence Alexander Pope’s lines from “Imitations of Horace” — “Why, if the Nights seem tedious — take a Wife; Or rather truly, if your Point be Rest,

Lettuce and Cowslip Wine; Probatum est.” An authority had suggested that Pope had in mind “the anaphrodisiac as well as the soporific properties of lettuce, I testified to in the herbals I of Gerard and Culpepper.” ' Another correspondent says that her great-great- j grandfather, practising medicine in Tasmania, j sent to the garden for 1 some lettuces when supplies of opium were not available. He crushed the lettuces in a pestle and “extracted an opiate from them.” As a clincher, that correspondent invoked the words of Beatric Potter, who wrote in “The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies" about The “soporific effect of eating too much lettuce.” She may have been right, too. Our medical dictionary describes a European ( variety of lettuce as “a > mild hypnotic and sedative."