Author: Stephen J

City-wide liquor ban consultation starts next week

A few weeks ago we wrote about the pro­posed city-wide ban on “drink­ing and car­ry­ing liquor in pub­lic places, 24 hours a day, sev­en days a week.” We don’t like to harp on this issue, but the nexus of booze, urban life and social jus­tice is cat­nip to the hard-drink­ing city-liv­ing car­ing folk here at the Welling­ton­ista.

Mark your cal­en­dars for Tues­day the 30th of March — con­sul­ta­tion will start then.

PS: when did we all adopt the Amer­i­can­ism “liquor?”

One step closer to a city-wide alcohol ban

The coun­cil is going to draft a by-law to ban drink­ing in pub­lic places.

But don’t wor­ry, respectable cit­i­zens! It’s not aimed at you! It’s aimed at pesky booz­ers.

Extend­ing the liquor ban would mean we could deal with prob­lems in the sub­urbs. It would­n’t be about stop­ping peo­ple hav­ing a qui­et beer or a glass of wine on the beach or in the park — and the Police are already on the record as say­ing they would use dis­cre­tion.

Anoth­er “x-ing while brown” offence in the mak­ing.

They break bot­tles, yell and swear, vom­it and cre­ate chaos — but there’s noth­ing the Police can real­ly do at the moment about the drink­ing of alco­hol — which is gen­er­al­ly the cause of the prob­lems.

This is a puz­zler. If peo­ple are behav­ing bad­ly, that’s dis­or­der­ly behav­iour. If they’re not, who cares whether they’re drink­ing?

If only there were some­where for hard­core street drinkers to go. Mean­while, wast­ing police time on herd­ing them around the city is appar­ent­ly the only way out.

There’s a Face­book group in oppo­si­tion. Here’s hop­ing that’s just a start.

First class citizens at last

If you’re a pedes­tri­an, some­times it seems as though you’re the last to be con­sid­ered. Oth­er modes of trans­port get all the big bucks while we get to stum­ble along on our own, catch­ing our heels on the cob­ble­stones and dodg­ing the seem­ing­ly inter­minable earth­works.

So it’s nice to see that there’s a ded­i­cat­ed Cycling and Walk­ing jour­ney plan­ner from the Greater Welling­ton Region­al Coun­cil. I par­tic­u­lar­ly like how it tells you the ele­va­tion of your route so you can see whether an appar­ent short­cut is going to be like scal­ing Ever­est or not. There is also a calo­rie counter, which I guess helps jus­ti­fy your morn­ing tea when you’ve got to work.

I exper­i­ment­ed with the route from my house to work, and the default sug­ges­tion was def­i­nite­ly the most prac­ti­cal for the unath­let­ic, though not the short­est — it knows about the tracks over Mt Vic, but you have to drag the route over the moun­tain your­self.

Def­i­nite­ly worth explor­ing, even if you’re a ded­i­cat­ed walk­er, if only so you can boast about the dis­tance to your lazy mates.

Maranui meeting report from Eye of the Fish

Over at Eye of the Fish, Max­imus has a good report of last night’s pub­lic meet­ing about what should be done about the Maranui surf club.

Mon­ey quote:

… all 4 sce­nar­ios went down like a cup of cold sick in a burnt out shed on a cold wind-swept beach­front. A mem­ber of the crowd put the feel­ing into words and start­ed the ball that we should vote for a Fifth Sce­nario. An imme­di­ate show of hands con­firmed over­whelm­ing sup­port for this pro­pos­al, which was, as anoth­er crowd mem­ber suc­cinct­ly put it into words: “The 5th Sce­nario is that we just want Maranui rebuilt, so why are we debat­ing all this oth­er shit?”

The whole thing.

Live Brazil Festival this weekend

A lot of peo­ple don’t know that Welling­ton has quite a siz­able Brazil­ian expa­tri­ate com­mu­ni­ty. A bunch of them and their Kiwi friends have been work­ing hard to put togeth­er the Live Brazil 2009 Fes­ti­val this week­end.

The fes­ti­val will com­prise music, dance, capoeira, and cook­ing and drink work­shops. It starts on Fri­day night with a per­fo­mance fea­tur­ing Tam­bolelê (from Minas Gerais) at the Memo­r­i­al The­atre on the Vic cam­pus, with most oth­er events tak­ing place at the South­ern Cross.

Full details at this chaot­ic but infor­ma­tion-rich site or in sum­ma­ry form here.

This par­tic­u­lar Welling­ton­ista will be lurk­ing in Car­men Miran­da’s band on Sat­ur­day night — come and demon­strate your fruit-laden cos­tume and we can have a caipir­in­ha.