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!).