Reporter's Diary

Press, 11 June 1977, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

1 Hands off PASSERS-BY have found : the flowers in the Gentian : Tearooms’ windowbox in Tuam Street s<_ attractive ; that the proprietors have had to put up a sign saying “These plants are not part of our takeaway business.” Not that the present i foliage in the windowbox ! is anything special, says j Mrs Julie Meier, an Aus- [ tralian who runs the tea- , rooms with the occasional ■ help of her Swiss husband, i Andreas. They are a non- | descript lot of plants at the I moment, with not a gentian among them. But when the I box contained such attrac- | tions as fuchsias in flower, I they were liable to get i stolen. Until next summer. I the Meiers are keeping the ; attractions inside the tea- ! rooms—including such I novelties as carrotcake and a Swiss gingerbread called biber. Folse alarm WHILE Malvern County Council was busy passing a resolution yesterday to i raise the general rate by 22 per cent. Crs D. W. Mulholland and G. E. J. Hut- ; ton were huddled over a i pocket calculator. After the resolution had been passed. Cr Hutton declared that the rate increase was in fact 25 per cent. Considerable panic ensued, and the County Clerk (Mr B. w. Perrin) wasted no time working the sum again on his own calculator.'No. he i said with some relief, rhe ' answer was 21.656 per I cent “In that case.” said I Cr Hutton, “you've got I different batteries in ; yours.” It turned out that ’• the two councillors had I been working out the ■ wrong thing—the total I percentage return to rhe i council, instead of the percentage increase in the I rate on the dollar. Cramped SOMEONE appears to have overlooked the New Zealand love for committees when designing th* counci 1 room for the new Christchurch Teachers' College complex at 11am. The primary and secondarv division have a iomt administration building, and 1 the first full college coun- * <.

cil meeting was held in the new council room this week. But it would barely hold the 22 members of the council. There was no room for a press table, and reporters had to sit on a bench seat along one wall. Shape retained THE QUOTE of the week comes from Mary Batchelor. M.P.. talking on women’s rights: “I’ve never thought of burning my bra. for instance.” she said. "I don’t want to alter the shape of things to that extent.” Still gloomy CAPTAIN Robert Falcon Scott’s hut at Hut Point, McMurdo Sound. was flooded with electric light for the first time recently when Jim Rankin, the leader of the New Zealand Antarctic team at Scott Base, set up a portable generator there for the benefit of photography enthusiasts. The hut. built in 1902. still seemed gloomy. Mr Rankin reports. and “it was hard to picture the hut lit only by seal-blubber torches ’ and acetylene lamps as in Scott’s day.” yautical problems MORE trouble with the 200-mile economic zone with which New Zealand hopes to protect its resources of fish, oil, and anything else out there. It is correct to call the distance 200 nautical miles, but quite wrong to convert that to kilometres, according to Mr Harry Rogers, a fellow of the Australian Institute of Navigation. A sea mile is not a fixed unit of length, and therefore cannot be metricated. The definition of a nautical mile, he says in the magazine “Australian Fisheries.” is the arc of a meridian of longitude subtended by an angle of one minute at the centre of curvature (not at the centre of the earth). Put another way. it is the arc of a meridian of longitude between two places whose geographic latitude differs by one minute. As a result, the length of the

nautical mile varies from about 1844 metres at the equator to about 1863 metres at the geographic poles. The International Nautical Mile, for calibration purposes, is taken as 1852 metres — its value at latitude 45 degrees. From a practical point of view, says Mr Rogers, the nautical mile on a Mercator chart is simply one minute of latitude at the latitude of the observer. Slurred? DAVID Rankin, chairman of tiie Sydenham electorate of the National Party, feels that his integrity was slurred by a recent item which quoted Mrs Kathy Himiona as saying that he had turned down an invitation to speak at the next Housewives’ Boycott meeting. He says he did agree to attend, subject to the date being suitable, but when he learned that it would 1 e on a Sunday he had to decline for family and business reasons. But he would not have gone anyway. says Mr Rankin, because the housewives had chosen to hold the meeting at the Trade Union Centre — headquarters of the trade union movement and the Labour Party. “As an ‘unbiased’ organisation, the Housewives’ Boycott Movement have lost all their credibility,” he writes, “and have now become a tool in the hands of political activists to attack the Government.” Looking back PRESIDENT Jimmy Carter's family has found its roots — in our sister city of Christchurch, Dorset. The President’s son. Chip, visited that city this week, wit., his wife. Caron. The Carters are believed to have set out for North America from Christchurch in the seventeenth century’. The younger Carters visited the ~ twelfth century’ priory. then looked up the records in the town ha!', which showed that three Carters had been mayors of the ancient town in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were given a list of names from the parish register showing 14 possible ancestors dating back to 1578. — Garry Arthur.