Reporter’s diary

Press, 25 July 1984, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Serpentine splendour CORPORAL Tony Gibson, a Royal New Zealand Air Force chef now stationed at Woodbourne, recently won the gold medal in the Salon Culinaire’s margarine carving class for his version of mythological intertwining of sea serpent and sea god. The sculpture shows Laocoon, one of the priests of Neptune, who rose from the waters to warn the Trojans about the wooden horse being used as a ruse by attacking Greeks. Laocoon turned back when he saw his sons being attacked by serpents, and he perished with them in the attempted rescue, so Troy was not warned. Corporal i Gibson, who comes from Hokitika and went to school in Dun-

troon, received his cookery training at Wigram. He also won a bronze medal in Auckland for his fish terrine dish. Earlier circles BARLEY field circles found in Hampshire recently, which have baffled the experts and delighted flying saucer enthusiasts, had counterparts in South Otago early this century. A Grey-, mouth reader recalls that an uncle talked about similar rings found on his farm at Waiwera South, near Clinton, before 1914. The grass was “all swirled round and flattened, as though a large circular object had rested there,” he says. There was no radio or* television to publicise such phenomena in those days, and word of the circles

never spread much. Then again, the locals might have thought it best to keep news of the puzzling circles to themselves so others did not brand them as the lunatic fringe. Bunkers GRANDMA would never have approved, being the sort who said: the pot had to be turned a few times to put the final touch on the tea inside, but a new survey in Britain showed that more than 70 per cent of all tea drunk there is now made from tea bags. Only the most traditional households, many of them containing older people, were sticking by the traditional method of one teaspoonful for each drinker and one for the pot Goty suds NEW ZEALAND’S Leopard

beer has won a regular lager gold medal in California in the “Los Angeles Times” newspaper’s eighth annual contest. It. beat 40 other lagers, and here is how it was described by the newspaper’s beverage critic: “Beautiful lofty colour, creamy mousse, silky taste, luxurious delicacy.” Over all, 81 beers in six different classes were tasted. Leopard scored 27.7 on a scale of 35, higher than all but three beers in other classes. Orbiting worker THE FIRST factory worker in space will be working hard on the next shuttle flight to prove a theory about the production of drugs under zero gravity. If all goes according to plan, an unmanned space factory producing medicines in commercial quantities, could be circling the earth by the late 1980 s. The factory satellite would be visited by a shuttle about four times a year, so that raw materials could be delivered and drug products collected. McDonnell Douglas, the company that developed the project, says that equipment tested on four previous shuttle flights has shown that 700 times more materials can be separated under zero gravity than in earthbound conditions, and the drugs are four times more pure. The shuttle worker, who is a test engineer for the company, will look after a self-contained production plant The company is keeping quiet about what drugs might' be produced, but has hinted that diabetics and haemophiliacs could be among those who benefit from a natural body hormone not available on earth today. Some cells, enzymes, hormones or proteins produced by the body could provide cures or improved treatment for diseases, but they must be separated from thei& surrounding biological mixtures.