Tom

Brand new bars

by Tom June 5, 2016

The last few weeks have seen a rich crop of new bars popping up in Te Aro like hospitable mushrooms. Here’s a quick round-up of the most notable. Wellington’s had no shortage of new beer bars over the last few years, but it’s been a while since we’ve had a proper wine bar. Noble Rot fills […]

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It never rains…

by Tom May 5, 2016

…but it pours, especially in Porirua today, causing sudden flooding and serious disruption. I downloaded the hourly rainfall data from Greater Wellington’s site (a rather painful manual process, but a big improvement from not long ago, when you could only get the charts as static images) and put together a quick graph. Here are cumulative […]

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Escarpment

by Tom April 25, 2016

Abandoned railway stations. Precarious swingbridges over precipitous chasms. Hidden valleys full of lush forest. Remnants of ancient kāinga. Those might not be what you’d expect from the recently-opened Paekakariki Escarpment track. I certainly expected rugged landscapes and magnificent views, and you get those in abundance, but there’s much more here to be discovered than you might imagine […]

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Beggars belief

by Tom April 8, 2016

You may have seen yesterday’s DomPost story on begging, which trumpeted that the Council was “considering banning begging or fining good samaritans.” This generated much justified outrage, even though deeper into the article it became clearer that this was just one extreme option among a wide range of measures that had been considered after complaints from the public, […]

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Awful Orpheus

by Tom March 7, 2016

[Content note for misogynist, racist and homophobic language] It’s not often that I’ll go out of my way to write bad things about a hospitality business, unless it’s a paid reviewing gig and the place is hopelessly dreadful. But I’ll make an exception when the experience is actively repugnant and based upon a fundamentally flawed concept. […]

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Back to REALITi

by Tom September 5, 2015

Jonathan King and Chad Taylor’s micro-budget film REALITi, which debuted at last year’s Film Festival, is now available for paid streaming or download on Vimeo On Demand. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/realiti/137721192 A dark thriller set in the very near future, REALITi was shot in and around Wellington. One striking aspect (at least for me) was the inventive use it made of […]

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Commemoration vs Celebration

by Tom April 27, 2015

Over the last week, Wellington has been the focus of an Anzac Day like no other. The long-awaited Pukeahu National War Memorial Park opened with a “spectacular” light show, and on Friday the city stopped to cheer a “spectacular” Anzac parade (paging Guy Debord!). This was followed by a huge turnout for the dawn service on […]

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Eye opening

by Tom March 13, 2015

While Our Tim got to take a sneak peek at Tuatara’s new Te Aro brewery and bar before it opened, I had the onerous task of drinking free beer representing The Wellingtonista at the official opening function. It was a suitably illustrious crowd, packed with the doyen(ne)s of Wellington’s craft beer community, including the LBQ […]

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Party Together

by Tom October 21, 2014

The election may be done and dusted, and a new Parliament sworn in, but the post mortems will continue in many political circles. We now have detailed voting records from every booth in the country, and while some aspects of booth data are problematic (see the technical notes below for some provisos), it’s the finest level of electoral data we […]

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Zig-zag Texts

by Tom October 2, 2014

Bridget Williams Books publishes a series called BWB Texts, “short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers”, and two new ones will be launched next Thursday at Unity Books. Martin Edmond’s Barefoot Years recounts childhood memories of life near Ohakune, while Thorndon: Wellington and Home, My Katherine Mansfield Project by Kirsty Gunn (Rain, The Big Music) will be of […]

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