Stop taking selfies and enter this photography competition instead

Carter Obser­va­to­ry, that big old bub­ble up on the hill, is run­ning a pho­tog­ra­phy con­test with a but­t­load of prizes, and you should enter it. The title is “Light & Dark” and any­thing under that goes.  Judges include Mark Gee, who you may remem­ber from such moon pho­tos as this. There’s a kids’ cat­e­go­ry too, […]

Drumming up support

In Welling­ton, which con­tin­ues to be the cul­tur­al cap­i­tal, no mat­ter what Auck­land might try to pre­tend, there are prob­a­bly a lot of con­ver­sa­tions to be had about Boost­ed, which was set up by the Arts Foun­da­tion as a rewards-free Pledgeme, or anoth­er tax-deductable Givealit­tle, except that they take a cut. Nat Tork­ing­ton’s thoughts might […]

Help Ivy save the dinosaurs!

It’s school hol­i­days again, and if you’re in charge of young peo­ple, chances are you’ve already heard that “I’m boooooooooooooooooooooooored”. We’d like to help you out with that (not just because it’s also in the best inter­ests of the non-child-havers to keep kids occu­pied, hon­est)! So, we’re giv­ing away a fam­i­ly pass (four peo­ple) to […]

Children on the waterfront — what to do on Anniversary Weekend

Hey, it’s Welling­ton Anniver­sary Week­end this com­ing week­end! That’s pret­ty excit­ing. There’s a great sto­ry in the newest issue of Fish­head all about the games and races they used to have in old­en times to cel­e­brate, but in cur­rent times, we have The Great Scav­enger Hunt. Cap­i­tal E (still very much alive even though they […]

Let us tell your kids where to go these holidays

The ‘ista may occa­sion­al­ly come across as a bunch of child-hat­ing yup­pies, but the truth is about 50% of us have kids, and we need to keep them enter­tained these hol­i­days. So we’re gonna take them to Cap­i­tal E. Why? Because we want to play the old school arcade games our­selves. From build­ing mechan­i­cal mar­vels […]

The Restaurant Website Drinking Game

In our review of Capi­tol, we men­tioned how we go there despite the dread­ful­ness of their web­site (but you prob­a­bly missed that bit and cut straight to talk­ing about negro­nis). What espe­cial­ly is so bad about their site? There’s Flash, con­tact details hid­den, menus embed­ded that don’t even work prop­er­ly (can any­one tell me what […]

The home of the schnapps election

‘Zum­wohl’ does­n’t sound like some­thing that orig­i­nates in Welling­ton, but it turns out that Ulf Fuehrer (appar­ent­ly a real name!) and his Aotearoa Dis­til­leries Ltd com­pa­ny that makes the award-win­n­ing schnapps are based right here. Add that loca­tion to our love of pub­lic ser­vants express­ing opin­ions, our twit­ter addic­tion, our mutu­al admi­ra­tion agree­ment with Pub­lic […]

Candidates: Charles Chauvel for Labour in Ohariu

We invit­ed all can­di­dates in Welling­ton elec­torates to con­tact us with their answers to fif­teen crowd­sourced ques­tions. Answers are restrict­ed to 30 words each, and we pub­lish them exact­ly as we receive them. Who are you and what do you want? I’m Charles Chau­v­el, Labour’s Jus­tice and Envi­ron­ment Spokesper­son, and I want to be the […]

Our movies have gone to the dogs

Remem­ber Footrot Flats? Of course you do. You prob­a­bly did­n’t even need that link, unless you’re a wee lit­tle thing or new to the coun­try. Mur­ray Bal­l’s car­toon strip about farm life and a dog named Dog ran every day in the Evening Post for near­ly 20 years. In fact, in 1987, Footrot Flats: A […]

The semi-naked truth: Strip clubs in Wellington

So, you want to see some breasts. Noth­ing wrong with that. Where in Welling­ton should you go to see them? For the pur­pos­es of sci­en­tif­ic research, we head­ed to Dream Girls and Mer­maids to find out what you can expect. We also had a chat to a girl who’s worked in both places for the […]