Reporter's Diary

Press, 18 April 1980, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Blindfolded MR HARRY Wilson, the storekeeper at Coalgate, has agreed to play a round of the Hororata golf course at Glentunnel on Saturday, blindfolded. The golf course needs five fairway lawn mowers, and Mr Wilson hopes to raise about $240 towards the cost of the mowers by his sponsored effort. If he manages to complete the 18-hole course in 155 or less, his sponsors have pomised to double their money. The only help Mr Wilson will have will be somebody to line up the ball for him, point him in the right direction, and tell him the distance he should aim at. Mr Wilson’s handicap is eight, which they say, is “pretty good.” “Some of us feel we could play better blindfolded anyway,” one of the club members said yesterday. Nothing new THE Post Office’s test windmill, pictured in “The Press” earlier this week, has evidently been the cause of considerable interest in Christchurch. One reader has a brother-in-law in the Chatham Islands who uses a similar device to pick up ■ television reception there. Mr Alf Weisner had the first television in the Chathams, he says, and he achieved this by running his set off a windmill' generator, which gives him two clear channels on his set. He believes that the windmillpowered television- receives the clearest reception in the Chathams.

Good spot? ANOTHER reader who was interested to read about the test windmill suggested that one of the best places for the Post Office to try it out would be virtually on its front doorstep. “Since the new Post Office building was put up in Hereford Street, opposite the high-rise Central Police Station, that part of town has turned into a terrific wind tunnel," he said. “If the Post Office is looking for a windy spot to run its windmill generator from, it could not do better than to stick it up on the front of its own building." Cure-alls? STRYCHNINE to cure alcoholism? Sounds like the cure-all to end all. But, according to Dr James Neil, who wrote “The New Zealand Family Herb Doctor” in 1889, strychnine can cure alcoholism. He suggests a daily injection of diluted strychnine for eight to 10 days, until the patient will have “a perfect loathing for spirits.” It is one of hundreds of herbal remedies to be found in the book, which has just been republished by Capper Press in Christchurch. Dr Neil lists concoctions of herbs, spices, acids, and plant extracts to cure all sorts of afflictions, including headaches, gout, “breastpang,”, arid “falling bowels,” whatever they might be. He also suggests several rules for healthy living. Rule one says you should begin and continue the practice of early rising, and lists a scale of houre of sleep needed. “For infants and young children,

as much as they can,’’ it says. “For a man, six or seven hours; for a woman, eight hours, or one less may do; while for a fool, nine or more will identify him.” Collisions WHILE Christchurch’s budding pavement artists decorate .the asphalt out-; side the McDougall Art Gallery, on Sunday afternoon, something artistic and creative will be going on inside the gallery. Explosions, a new theatrical .troupe to join in the gal-* lery’s Outreach pro-, gramme, will perform “Samting Nating,” the pidgin English name for its new programme. Its sub-title is “Collision on Culture Street,” and it is part of the gallery’s current “Street” exhibitionThe multi-media performance, which will begin at 3 p.m., describes the “cultural impact of the Western urban street scene on the innocence and unsophistication of a visitor from a primitive farming culture.” In memoriam IN RESPONSE to the call earlier this week for for amusing and unusual epitaphs on gravestones, for use in the McDougall Art Gallery’s Outreach programme, a reader telephoned to tell us of this one. After his wife died, a sorrowing widower had the epitaph inscribed upon her gravestone: “The light of my life has gone out” Some years later, she said, he married another woman. But after a short time, she, too, died. On her tombstone, the twicewidowed man had inscribed: "I struck another match.”