Author: Robyn

John Lake — The Candidate

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er John Lake, who we last saw at Toi Poneke with The Rise and Fall of West­ern Civil­i­sa­tion: Part One, is back at the Toi Poneke Gallery with a new exhi­bi­tion, this time look­ing at the Welling­ton Cen­tral can­di­dates in the 2008 gen­er­al elec­tion and their many sup­port­ers.

The exhi­bi­tion con­sists of por­traits of all of last year’s can­di­dates for Welling­ton Cen­tral. These por­traits — stripped of all pos­si­ble con­no­ta­tions by using the same white back­ground and light­ing — will line the gallery walls. Pho­tos doc­u­ment­ing oth­er parts of the cam­paign — such as par­ty sup­port­ers flanked in par­ty flags, vol­un­teers at work, union ral­lies and polit­i­cal debates in big halls or even sit­ting rooms — will also com­ple­ment the por­trait dis­play.

Auckland, Wellington and Madeleine Sami’s awesome biceps

You may have seen the cov­er of March issue of Metro mag­a­zine. Madeleine Sami, hang­ing off the Sky Tow­er, look­ing all glam while hold­ing a minia­ture Peter Jackson/King Kong. “Auck­land rules OK! How Welling­ton’s los­ing the cul­tur­al wars” the head­line reck­ons. 

Review: Turbine

Wind farms seem like a real­ly good idea. They use wind (a good thing) and they’re a farm (anoth­er good thing) so any­one who com­plains about it should just shut up and think of the polar bears, right?

Super Fry

Stephen Fry, actor, author, wit and geek, is on his way to dear sweet Welling­ton and we are rather excit­ed!

He’s com­ing to Aotearoa New Zealand to film some bits for a BBC series he’s pre­sent­ing, Anoth­er Chance To See, where he’s trav­el­ling the world, check­ing up on endan­gered species. While he’s in Welling­ton, he’ll be vis­it­ing the Karori Wildlife Sanc­tu­ary to see how the kakapo tuatara are doing (rather well, thank you).

Oh, but this is no ordi­nary vis­it by a sleb.

Mr Fry, being a glo­ri­ous geek, has been util­is­ing the mod­ern pow­ers of the inter­webs to doc­u­ment the film­ing of the series.

He’s been mak­ing reg­u­lar tweets to his Twit­ter account (and fos­tered a Twit­ter com­mu­ni­ty of Fry fans), upload­ing pho­tos from his iPhone, post­ing video blogs of his African adven­tures, and just gen­er­al­ly keep­ing a full and inter­est­ing web­site, doc­u­ment­ing his trav­els.

This is great news for all! Because it means that instead of get­ting out there and stalk­ing him when he’s in town, you can actu­al­ly spend that time lying around, drink­ing yum­my Mar­gar­i­tas and keep up with Mr Fry’s adven­tures with the lap­top in your tiki shack, instead of hav­ing to go to the effort of get­ting out and stalk­ing him.

(Of course, if you do hap­pen to see him out and about, let us know!)

The COLOSSAL SQUID of Te Papa

Te Papa, the nat­ur­al his­to­ry muse­um of New Zealand, is now hous­ing the Colos­sal Squid.

That’s right, it’s a COLOSSAL SQUID. Squidzil­la! Squid-Ra!

It’s become quite a draw card, so of course the Welling­ton­ista had to check it out.

The Colos­sal Squid

This lady-squid is housed in a pur­pose-built tank. Some may find it awe-inspir­ing, oth­ers may find it revolt­ing. The squid has a sort of pinky out­er lay­er of squid­skin which is peel­ing off.

Did you know that squids have a beak like a par­rot. Uug­gh!

3D AV Squid­tac­u­lar

Off to the side is a the­atrette show­ing a com­put­er ani­ma­tion of how the squid was acci­den­tal­ly caught by a fish­ing boat. I know what you’re think­ing: “Bor­ing, grand­ma! I am gen­er­a­tion Y or even Z! I don’t use vow­els, I have a two sec­ond atten­tion span, car­ry three cell­phones and can’t watch a bor­ing old 5 minute video about a squid!”

Well, for­tu­nate­ly Te Papa have tak­en care of this and made the video in 3D. Yes, so you get to strap on a pair of glass­es and watch the Colos­sal Squid being cap­tured by a fish­ing boat in 3D. In three­eee-deeeee!

Whoa! Trip­py as, man. Etc.

Sorry ma, forgot to take out the trash

There I was tak­ing a leisure­ly stroll along Lambton Quay when I hap­pened to glance down Stout Street and sud­den­ly noticed that the street was com­plete­ly blocked by a giant pile of rub­bish!

Good­ness crikey me! What envi­roter­ror has spewed on Stout? All is explained after the jump.

Google Street View knows where you live

Google Maps has today launched Street View for Auck­land, Welling­ton and Christchurch all over New Zealand.

A few months ago, on what looks to have been ear­ly in the morn­ing in win­ter, the Google­mo­bile drove around the streets of our fair city, pho­tograph­ing the streets.

You can now view these streetscapes as the clos­est zoom-in on Google Maps. They even made it down Cuba Mall!

View Larg­er Map

Street View in oth­er coun­tries has brought up all sorts of inter­est­ing finds, from “Hey, that’s me!” to get­ting snapped out enter­ing a broth­el (though Google say they will blur the faces of any­one who could be iden­ti­fied).

So if you find any­thing inter­est­ing, do share it with us — you might be reward­ed with a free tick­et to the TAWAs!

Update

Could it be? Is this famil­iar look­ing woman at the gate of Pre­mier House its for­mer res­i­dent, Helen Clark? 

View Larg­er Map

The Old Shebang of Cuba Street

The Nation­al Library has joined the Flickr Com­mons project, whack­ing up many of their pho­tos on Flickr. At the moment, there’s not much from Welling­ton, but we’re hop­ing that will change as more are uploaded.

One par­tic­u­lar Welling­ton delight, how­ev­er, is a set of pho­tos of a ram­shackle house on Cuba Street called the Old She­bang (she­bang in this instance means dwelling).

And as well as that, Google are in the process of putting Life mag­a­zine’s archive of 10 mil­lion pho­tos online. So far, search­ing for Welling­ton brings up slim pick­ings, but it’ll be worth check­ing back on as the archive grows.

But until then, you can browse Life’s New Zealand pho­tos. Or, um, check out this pho­to of Madon­na look­ing all cool in 1984.

Splish Splash: Bucket Fountain Update

There’s been a bit of action going on at the old Buck­et Foun­tain, icon of Cuba Street.

First, it mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared:

We ini­tial­ly thought this was a retro ’80s David Cop­per­field-style mag­ic trick, but it turns out it was just tak­en down for main­te­nance.

The foun­tain returned, with a fresh coat of paint, ready to splash the good folk of Cuba Mall once again.

But then a hand-writ­ten sign appeared up the top. It’s not so leg­i­ble from the street, but zoom­ing in revealed this mes­sage:

“Prove your hunter-gath­er­er skills by find­ing food in the for­est at Te Papa.”

Per­haps, with the Cur­rent Eco­nom­ic Sit­u­a­tion, Te Papa is right to put the empha­sis on nat­ur­al his­to­ry and away from art.

And if you’d like to escape the mis­ery of mod­ern life, you can now jour­ney back in time to when the Buck­et Foun­tain was first installed in 1969, thanks to the WCC’s The Cuba Street Mem­o­ries Project.

From this, we learn that the Buck­et Foun­tain was orig­i­nal­ly nick­named the Sug­ar Shov­el Foun­tain and it was paint­ed yel­low and black (so 2000s!).