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.