Reporter’s diary

Press, 13 November 1981, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Check again A CANTERBURY business recently received an undated letter from a metropolitan local body. It said that the charge for health inspections would now be $3O a visit, and the local body would like the business to pay that fee for an inspection of its cafeteria. The letter did not specify the inspection date, so the business asked for more specific information. It wasn’t available off-hand, the local body said, but the inspection might have taken place about a month earlier. Impossible, said the business. The cafeteria had been closed in April and converted into office space. Ignore the account, the local body said. Misuse THE TRIPE and Onion Society had its second annual meeting in Christchurch recently, eating nothing but the aforesaid items and singing to the glory of tripe. They have just one small complaint. They don’t like the way the term ‘'tripe” is used in such an off-hand way just before an election. True tripe is not just something silly, they say. Statistics ECONOMIC GROWTH can be measured in more ways

than one, but the way the Statistics Department does the measuring there has been no growth over the last five years. That calculation is not in line with estimates of the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research, which says there was real growth of about 2.5 per cent in 198081 and should be real Gross Domestic Product growth of 3 per cent this year. G.D.P. is the present value of all goods and services produced annually in the domestic economy. Adjustments are madfe for price changes. According to the Statistics Department, the real G.D.P. was 0.8 per cent lower last year than in the previous year, and the 1980-81 real G.D.P. was no higher than the 1975-76 level. The institute and the department are going over each , other’s measuring methods to see if the gap can be narrowed. No more bikes IF YOU are thinking of doing something really strange and dangerous to get yourself in the “Guinness Book of World Records,” think again. The book’s editors are putting a stop to some life-endangering feats that are listed in the latest edition. For instance, sleeping between beds of nails, eating trees and swallowing razor blades will no

longer be accepted for records. But the screwball categories are still open. Some 20,000 letters a year are received by Guinness editors, and about 200 of them are serious contenders. The letter accompanying a recently-received box promised that the world’s smallest paper aeroplane would be inside. At first, the editors couldn’t find it in the box. A feat described by the editors as “the ultimate act of stupidity” — the eating of a bicycle — is definitely out. The present record-holder is a Frenchman. He ate a bicycle over a 15-day period in 1977. He ate the frame in the form of metal filings, and the tyres were cut into strips and stewed. At your service MCDONALD’S Drainage, a company that cleans septic tanks in the Riverhead area, at the head of Waitemata Harbour, has a distinctive way of helping residents remember where to ring when they need some work done. A sign on the side of its tanker says McDonald’s Takeaways. Say that again? WHEN Spiro Agnew was the American Vice-President, he was known mainly for his contorted word play, such as his put-down of those who

were "nattering nabobs of negativity.” A writer for the “Bulletin,” in Sydney, looking at New Zealand from New York, seems to be trying to go one better. He has a few unkind things to say about us, including a dig at Mr Muldoon for his denouncement of “pious platitudes” coming from international conferences. But the following is the way that Peter Samuels starts: “Robert Muldoon presides over one of the dullest backwaters of enervating egalitarianism. Socialist redistributionism and conservative Bismarkian paternalism have almost completely coalesced in New Zealand to provide legitimacy for some of the most punitive taxes in the world, and its most sweeping Welfare State.” Recognise your country in that description? Versatility AT A recent seminar on forest and rural fires in Nelson, it was emphasised that modern technology has not diminished the importance of the man with a shovel, working hard on the ground, to battle fires. Two Amuri County representatives agreed. They have discovered 29 different ways to handle a shovel in controlling a fire.