Reporter's Diary

Press, 17 April 1978, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

AU contingencies NOW THAT Christchurch is a sister city of Kurashiki, Japan, Christchurch city councillors are taking very seriously their duty as hosts to visiting Japanese. The council’s “sister cities committee” has now produced a Japanese phrase card to enable councillors and council officials to make an effort to communicate with Japanese visitors. It has 19 words and phrases, from “Good morning” (Ohayo gozaimas’) to “Shall we have something to drink?” (Nomimasho ka). When none of that works, the card supplies the apologetic admission “I’m sorry I can’t speak Japanese” (Zannen nagara nihongo ga dekimasen). Mail got through MAE COCHRANE, a former Australian journalist now living in retirement in Christchurch, recently heard from a friend that a letter he had written was accidentally left behind on a Melbourne train. But that has proved no barrier to delivery. The letter has now turned up — in a filthy envelope that looks as if it has been kicked from one end of the train to the other before being noticed. The stamp has long gone, but you can see where it has been, and the envelope is stained with what might have been railwaytea. “Received in damaged condition in Beckenham,” says a stamp on the envelope. but in spite of the missing stamp there was

no charge for postage deficiency. Confirmed FOR WHAT it is worth, Moscow Radio has confirmed that the Romanov family “was indeed executed.” In a programme that dealt, with the English best-seller, “The File on the Tsar,” about the last days of the Tsar and his family and their reported massacre in a Yekaterinburg cellar, listeners were told that although it was not a massacre, what happened “certainly was not pleasant and it took a lot of soul-searching before the decision was taken.” According to Moscow Radio, "any living Romanov was a potential flag, a kind of rallying point for the enemies of the Revolution. A very hard and perhaps even tragic decision had to be taken, and it was taken.” Statistics THE MINISTRY of Agriculture and Fisheries seems to be in dispute with the Fishing Industry Board over how much fish New Zealand sold to Australia last year compared with 1976. The Ministry says exports fell by 2.6 per cent in volume, but rose 30 per cent in value, while the board says they rose by 8.8 per cent in volume and rose 23 per cent in value. But the two sets of economists have not declared war on each other. The Ministry says its figures were based on earlier and incomplete data.

Computer criticism ONE of the marvels of modern publishing is setting type by computer. It works like magic, but it has its hazards, as this correction, printed in the book review section of the “New York Times,” illustrates: “The capsule description of Graham Greene’s ‘The Human Factor’ in the best-seller list of March 26 included the comment ‘Normal depth exceeds specified value,’ which represents a com-puter-generated typesetting instruction, not the computer’s critical eval* uation of Mr Greene’s latest novel.”

Second-hand rose THE MAYOR of Welling* ton (Mr Michael Fowler), at a recent meeting of the Wellington City Corporation, was persuaded to accept a second-hand Mercedes to replace the Jaguar as the mayoral car. He was also told by one councillor that if he became known as a “secondhand rose” he would just have to live with it. Whew! A PHOTOGRAPH showing the Martian moon, Phobos, crossing the surface of Mars has been taken by the Viking orbiter spacecraft, showing considerable surface details for the first time. The 30km by 20km irregular shaped moon has been found to be smaller than was previously thought, and scientists are now trying to work out its exact volume. “But we can say for certain that Phobos is not hollow,” says a report in “The Times.” “An early suggestion that Phobos is an abandoned interstellar spacecraft can, with a certain amount of relief, be abandoned.” —Garry Arthur