2AWA: Wellingtonian of the year?

What do you love the most about our city, and who has helped cre­ate that? Is it the hos­pit­al­ity scene? Sports? Music and com­edy? The Sil­ic­on Welly scene? These people all have been instru­ment­al in mak­ing our city as fun as it is. Now give them some love in return!

Damn I’m proud you’re from Wel­ling­ton:

Super­her­oes after the jump…

A. Remiro Bresolin

Remiro is no longer with us, and Il Casino has been closed down, but the leg­acy of the res­taur­ant pion­eer lives on in Boulot, and Scopa, and his fant­ast­ic sons who con­tin­ue to deliv­er hos­pit­al­ity of the very highest stand­ard. Without Remiro, din­ing out in Wel­ling­ton would be a very dif­fer­ent thing indeed.

B. Jerry Collins and Tana Umaga

While this was a big and dis­ap­point­ing year for the All Blacks two of Wel­ling­ton’s best shone like large mus­cu­lar dia­monds. Jerry Collins is a per­petu­al motion machine. He needs rugby like a junkie needs their fix. He recently played for an Eng­lish ama­teur club team while he was on hol­i­day (and he was only asked to come and watch). By the way, that means he took his boots on hol­i­day with him. But just to go that extra mile Jerry stuck around and coached the under-14 team!

Then there’s Tana Umaga. The Moth­er Theresa of rugby play­ers. For all the talk of him being a spear-tack­ling dirty play­er no one can say any­thing bad about him off the field. It star­ted a few years ago with a cameo in a fire safety ad and now he’s the face of the Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion’s drive to involve par­ents in their chil­dren’s edu­ca­tion. Tana even used the speech he gave to the crowd after his 100th and final game for Wel­ling­ton to high­light New Zeal­and’s prob­lem with child abuse. Frickin’ Legend!

C. Terry Serepisos for the Phoenix

Des­pite his awful build­ing ideas Mr Serepisos saw an open­ing. The Auck­land-based Knights (formerly the Kingz) were los­ing their fran­chise but New Zea­l­and was still a good enough mar­ket for the Aus­trali­an League (and they needed us to ful­fill their FIFA oblig­a­tions). Up stepped Terry and a bag with a big dol­lar sign on it and we got…the Phoenix!

Not the best name, or logo but I bet you were sur­prised to find out how many soc­cer foot­ball fans there were in Wel­ling­ton. They are the ones you’ll see around wear­ing the Phoenix mer­chand­ise. AND Terry is bring­ing hype-machine Dav­id Beck­ham and the LA Galaxy (sounds like a band) to Wel­ling­ton for an exhib­i­tion match. Talk about good advert­ising for the city. Well done Mr Serepisos! Now about those build­ings…

WINNERS!!!
D. Jemaine and Bret aka. Flight of the Conchords

They’re drily funny, and kind of anti-cool, in a way only we Kiwis thought we could under­stand. But no: now the whole west­ern hemi­sphere is rav­ing about them. Who knew Amer­ic­ans would get jokes about how Aus­trali­ans are dif­fer­ent to New Zeal­anders? And you know that FoTC are big when you spot their quotes and catch­phrases appear­ing ran­domly around the inter­web, even on ESPN! We can haz Jemaine and Bret over gram­mat­ic­ally tor­tured felines any day.

Why, it’s just a mat­ter of time before someone writes some FoTC Bret and Jemaine “slash” fan fic­tion – no wait, that’s already happened! So we love them (but maybe not that way), not least because even though they’re big in Texas, they still come home.

E. Mike Brown

There’s one place in New Zea­l­and where you can find the creme de la creme of the inter­net world, and every per­son work­ing in ICT wants to be there – Web­stock. We did­n’t have it this year, but Feb­ru­ary 11 is already circled in red (meta­phor­ic­ally of course, we’re all using Google Cal­en­dars) on every­one’s diary. Mike and the team at Web­stock have their fin­gers in many pies, from FullCode­Press (build a web­site in 24 hours for char­ity) to big-upping Bar­Camp­Wel­ling­ton, and we salute them for con­trib­ut­ing so much to the NZ inter­net world – all from little old Wel­ling­ton.