Reporter's Diary

Press, 8 November 1980, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

Exporting passports WHEN Mr John Holden, of ! Quickset Platemakers, Ltd, . in . Christchurch, printed' fiis first' batch ’of South island ■ passports seyeral weeks ago, just for fun,'he never imagined he would sell them to anyone outside the South Island, let alone beyond New Zealand. -But this week he had an inquiry from the United States, asking him if he would consider exporting several hundred copies for expatriate New Zealanders living there. The inquiry came from the Australia and New Zealand American Club, based in San Diego. Someone in the club had been sent a clipping from the "Diary” about the .'initial printing < the novelty passports, ' which look.,very similar tb-/ „ official -passports, amf bnd' ; thought that ; club mem-J bars, "who; included a lot. of Mainlaaders.” wOUld like to crder copies. ,

Not impressed THE ‘ RAILWAYS’ campaign to cut a dash in the public eye came to an abrupt halt in Cathedral Square yesterday. A scale model of a locomotive was being driven round the Square, in front of the Cathedral when — crunch — it struck a concrete rubbish bin cemented to the pavement. Both rubbish bin and locomotive suffered minor damage. The locomotive driver was most embarrassed. From his lofty perch in the cabin he had not been able to see the rubbish bin in his path. One cynical bystander was unsympathetic. "If they can’t drive the equivalent of a Noddy train round the Square how do they expect us to believe they can drive a proper train?’.’ he said.

A shortfall IN SUPPORT . of the proposition that the law is an ass, the ’Xa pi tai 'Letter,” a

weekly review of administration and legislation in New Zealand, describes a most interesting aspect of a case before the High Court in Christchurch recently involving a fisheries firm and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. The Rock Lobster Regulations, 1969, define rock lobster to include cooked rock lobster, the article explains; and rock lobsters, cooked or otherwise, are illegal property if they have tails less than 152 mm long. "As it is undoubted that rock lobster tails shrink by up to 10mm on cooking,” it concludes, “it would be possible for a citizen lawfully to put a rock lobster in a pot and then be unlawfully in possession of a smaller rock lobster after it has cooked.” Imperial rule YET another complaint has been received about the Post Office being slow. But this time, thankfully, it, has nothing to do with mail deliveries, or the lack thereof. In spite of the fact that New Zea- . land officially converted to . metric measurements by the endjof 1977, At <

latest, the Post Office’s Yellow Pages department is still trying to Catch up with everybody else. An inquiry of the Yellow Pages people yesterday as to the cost per column centimetre of display advertisements in that section of the telephone directory brought the reply that they “only worked in inches.” Vanished IF YOU want to have anything on display in Cathedral Square. you have to nail it down or keep a constant eye on it. That was the conclusion reached by a member of the Kidney Dialysis Transplant Society who was manning a display caravan in the Square yesterday. Part of the display was a big placard showing a picture of a woman lying in bed using a kidney dialysis machine. “One minute it was there, the next it was gone;” he said. “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to take it. You can’t leave anything lying about the Square.”