Reporter's Diary

Press, 28 February 1980, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Work of art A BIG painting that sold for a big price in Christchurch recently is a water-colour of Mount Cook by the artist, C. N. Worsley (pictured). Standing a metre high and measuring almost two metres in length, the painting was sold for $6500 by'the Tasman Gallery. Once it has been restored and reframed, it will hang over a big stone fireplace in the spacious drawing room of a North Canterbury homestead. The work was commissioned by Mr T. S. Moore, of Kekerengu, in 1919 for £5OO — a lot of money in those days. The curator of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery (Mr Neil Roberts) said .yesterday that the price ol $6500 was well above market value. “There is a lot of Worsley’s work in New Zealand, especially his paintings of the moun- . tains and lakes of Southland. He painted several studies of Mount' Cook and also of Mount Sefton.” One of the latter hangs in the McDougall Gallery, and is even bigger than the one sold by die Tasman Gallery.

Revived interest

MENTION IN Monday’s “Diary” of the poster on the ante-natal clinic wall which read “Amo, amas, amama,” has, it seems, caused an upsurge in -the study of Latin — at one school, anyway. A reader, who visits schools from time to time to take textbook orders, said he repeated the graffiti to a Latin teacher at one of the schools he visited. “Oh, yes,” the teacher said. : “Fd better have some of those new Latin books.” Last survivor

THE LAST surviving member of the team accompanying the Norwegian polar explorer, Roald Amundsen, on his 1910-12 expedition to the Antarctic has died in Norway, at the age of 96. He was Jorgen Stubberud, after whom one of the mountain peaks in Queen Maud’s Land was named. He was originally hired by. Amundsen

to repair and restore his private home near Oslo, and was later asked by Amundsen to build a prefabricated wooden lodge, known as a Frambu, which could be -transported to and reassembled on the Ice. Stubberud signed a seven-year agreement to accompany Amundsen. He was a member of the first unsuccessful bid for the South Pole, but was not on the later successful expedition of 1911. Instead, he stayed at the base camp, his own Frambu, and was the first to welcome the successful explorers back to camp.

In duplicate WHEN Miss Jodi Stutz, aged 21, secretary in Illinois, put her backside on the office’s new Xerox copying machine, she had no idea that she was also putting her job on the line. She is now working as a waitress — because she decided one night -after work to “christen” the hew machine by

sneaking into the copying room and making a picture of her posterior. "A lot of people had been taking pictures of their hands and faces and fooling around,” she said. “So I decided to <ake a picture of my bottom, thinking it would be kind of fun to see what it would look like. It borderlined on the crude, maybe, but it was very, very funny.” Her superiors. however, did not agree. When word got out, she was asked to explain, and was fired. lUI MBW Good ladies?

A RECENT comment' in the “Diary” about invitations to functions that ask those attending to bring their wives, even though on many occasions these invitations have been sent out to women, has prompted a reader to send in an even more unfortunate example. Late last year, the North Canterbury Primary Schools’ Principals’ Asso-. ciation sent out invitations to members asking “you and your good lady” to attend a farewell function. “.This wording has been used for many years,” our reader says. “But there are, in fact, many female principals now. Who should they take?” After all, nd-one ever asks you to bring along “your good man.” She adds that the invitation was to something that has always been a very pleasant annual function. “Perhaps,” she says, “this is because of the number of good ladies present.” In tune A GREEK conductor, Yannis Daras, and a Greek pianist, Janis Vakarelis, gave a concert with the Wren Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall in London, recently in aid of the Save the Acropolis Fund. The programme opened with Beethoven’s overture, “The Ruins of Athens.”