Reporter’s diary

Press, 12 September 1988, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Expo facts JUST past the half-way mark, World Expo 88 in Brisbane has proved a statistician’s delight, with 7.8 million visitors so far. They’ve guzzled through more than a million hot dogs, 300,000 hamburgers, 27,000 kg of spaghetti, 260,000 kg of chips, 7000 kg of seafood, and 10.8 million litres of beer. We are also reassured to learn that the. computerised Lostots system for reuniting lost children with their parents boasts a “100 per cent return rate.” ... and garbage AMONG Expo’s features are special rubbish-collec-tion trains which continuously ply the monorail from one end of the site to the other, picking up all those hot dog sticks,

chip pottles, beer cans, and people. People? Yes, popular demand and sore feet prompted the addition of four passenger carriages to each rubbish express. Whose gorse? THE British newspaper “The Guardian” recently carried a little item in its equivalent of this column, under the sardonic title, “British Export Triumphs Department.” It tells of the consignment of spider mites sent to New Zealand for biological control of “the native gorse, regarded as a weed.” But of course, the gorse is not a New Zealand native; it is an earlier British Export Triumph which does unpleasantly well in this climate. The least the mother country can do is prosvide the mites to help redress the balance.

From the mouths of babes WALT Disney’s movie version of "Sleeping Beauty” features three good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, whose task it is to watch over Princess Aurora until her sixteenth birthday. We are told of a certain man — a cynic if ever there was one — who was watching the movie with his granddaughter and at that point commented that the good fairies would then be out of a job and made redundant. Anna, aged five, was unconcerned: “It’s 0.K., they can go on the dole!” Faceless? STRICT official secrecy about New Zealand’s elite Special Air Service ensures that the domestic media will virtually never

carry material which could identify personnel, equipment, or operational methods. Imagine our surprise, then, to find a detailed and well-illus-trated article on the Australian and New Zealand Special Air Services, in the latest “Asia-Pacific Defense Forum” magazine. The magazine, published by the United States Pacific Command in Hawaii, is hardly masscirculation, but nor is it restricted. One photograph, several years old judging by the plane’s livery, shows men in black with gas masks and pistols, storming an Air New Zealand Boeing. It is a strangely disquieting scene — perhaps because such pictures are so rare here — but it is perhaps reassuring to know the S.A.S. can do it, if one day it has to be done.