Reporter’s diary

Press, 14 October 1985, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

A catch? SOME shoppers are wondering about a suit sale in a Christchurch city centre clothing store. If you buy a suit, says the sign, you can get an imported shoe completely free. An observer asked if you had to buy two suits to get the pair. No, said the store. The sign was referring to two shoes for each suit. Corner site

A DUNEDIN corner may soon be covered by a building that has remained incomplete for many years. In the early 19605, when land was being bought for a new University of Otago library, one elderly man refused to budge. He stood his ground and stayed in the house his father had built. He was a widower whose only companion was a parrot. The library building was built within a metre of his house. He told a newspaper reporter that he was one Canute who could tell the waves to go back. He died in 1967, at the age of 92, but the house continued to stand for several years while new owners used it as a bookshop and lending library. Then the house was demolished, but building did not follow quickly. Trees were planted which now screen the unfinished ends of the library. An extension over; the corner sit will provide; library storage space. Himself

A SMALL bronze sculpture of a dancer will help the Limbs Dance Company raise money to cover the costs it faces in recovering from the fire which wrecked its Ponsonby studios. The statue, valued about $lOOO, will be sold. It

was made by Auckland’s Marshall Watt, who has done other pieces of dancers and has taught dance classes at the studios. The sculpture is a model of himself dancing. Jersey lady NEW YORK City’s Statue of Liberty is getting all gussied up. She is having cosmetic surgery done on her face and having all her regions seen to properly. Now she is facing a threat not from time and the elements, but from a scruffy community on the nearby Jersey shore. Maybe scruffy is too strong a word. All the same Jersey City is far from the glamour of Park Avenue, and any selfrespecting New Yorker would say that the grand lady probably casts a disapproving eye at the shore city near her feet. Well, the city authorities are going after the people who control the statue and her tourist income, the Federal Department of the Interior and New York City. They want them to pay for the $94,000 of water used to wash the statue over the years. If nobody fronts up with the money, Jersey City plans to put a lien over the statue’s island. New Jersey is claiming sovereignty over that island and Ellis Island, the former United States immigration centre. Hot enough

COLIN Moyle, the Minister of Agriculture, who was recently offered the opportunity of a one-way flight to Queensland by Ashburton , area farmers, has explained iwhy he did not take up the ioffer. He did not think it could be any hotter over there than it was in his

portfolio right now. He had declined the ticket, with respect. The possible AN AMERICAN scientist who has become the first occupant Of the Koestler chair of parapsychology at Edinburgh University said he will be a sophisticated observer who will not debunk psychic phenomena, but will point out optional explanations for things that happen. He is the senior research scientist at the School of Computer and Information Science at Syracuse University. He is prepared for the possibility of finding something radically new, but he said that fortune tellers and palm readers were the most common examples of psychic deceivers. He had an open mind on God, ghosts and the unexplained. His only psychic experience so far was during an experiment where a man correctly identified more than 60 per cent of the photographs in a hidden yearbook. Nomad power AUSTRALIA’S outback Aboriginals may soon be able to travel round remote areas and still have a power source wherever they stay. A mobile solar power station has been developed by the Western Australia Solar Energy Research Institute. Built into a former freezer container, the station will be able to survive rough tracks and howling weather, such as cyclones. The portable station provides refrigeration and freezing, lighting, radio, and enough power for a television set or video recorder. —Stan Daring