Reporter’s diary

Press, 27 July 1989, Page 2

Reporter’s diary

Snufflenose FROM the Curiosities and Titillations Department comes a discovery made by a small boy. Sailors who mess about in boats round Banks Peninsula will be familiar with the point called Snufflenose, but Braden wasn’t. When he found it on the map he was ecstatic about the name — probably something to do with sensing that nature had some sympathy for his cold-in-da-dose state. Snufflenose is a corruption of the Danish Snefellness (meaning a promontory surrounded by a snowfield). According to A. W. Reed’s “Place Names of New Zealand,” a Danish whaler, the Concordia, was in Peraki Bay in August 1840, and it could have been named then, leaving the British whalers to corrupt it to its present charming form.

Having their cake AFTER the ball is over and Paris is filled with people who actually speak French, the food bills are starting to come in. There is no word yet on how much the world leaders scoffed, but the “Daily Telegraph” estimates that the 7000 visiting news media folk put away 20 tonnes of food and 10,000 bottles of wine in four days. The final bill came to about $1,800,000 — which at $255 a head is apparently a bargain, by Paris standards. Moon struck IT had to come — the legal battle for colonisation of the Moon. For a piffling $35 you can get the deed to a 4ha parcel on the moon. “The Apollo astronauts claimed the Moon for all mankind,” said Shaman Summers, of B.F.M. Products, a company in San Jose, California, that has laid claim to a 250 square

kilometre area on the moon. But the B.F.M. may be stepping into a legal black hole. The owners staked their claim on what they see as a loophole in the 1967 International Treaty on Principles governing the activity of States in the exploration and use of outer space. It forbids nations to claim celestial territory, among other things. B.F.M. interprets that as an invitation for colonisation by private individuals. Not so, says N.A.S.A. If the United States can’t colonise the moon, its citizens can’t either.

Getting closer ANOTHER instance of resourceful Australians has come to light A reader sent a copy of a map of Australia and New Zealand as shown inside an airmail envelope received from a publisher in Australia. New Zealand snuggled a few hundred kilometres off New South Wales. The reader remarks that “the problems of trans-Tasman communication pall into insignificance when viewed from this perspective.” Fiji is given a closer than normal alliance with Papua New Guinea and

we note with a smidgeon of peevishness that Tasmania is written in bigger letters than New Zealand. Oh well, with the fashion for amalgamation we may be moving in the right direction as the seventh state of the kingdom of Oz. Red winos? EUPHEMISM with style, found in, of ail places, the Soviet Union: in the language of the Communist Party, a drunk is not a drunk. A drunk is said to “have indulged in negative leisure.” . —Jenny Setchell