Pruning With The Stars! Sunday 17 June

Norm Hewitt?This weekend sees the Annual Rose Pruning Demonstration at the Lady Norwood Rose Garden in the Botanic Gardens.

Want to bone up on proper garden maintenance? This is your chance! The Wellington City Council has laid on the roses, and the experts. There will be tips on both pruning AND growing your roses. Dancing with the Stars contestants may or may not be there. The same goes for the surviving Beatles & Nastassja Kinski, but I remain hopeful.

I usually make wise with the Rose puns at this point, but she emailed this year & asked me to kindly stop.

There are two sessions:

1.30 – 2.30pm: pruning modern roses in the Lady Norwood Rose Garden. Meet at the Begonia House.

2.30 – 3.30pm: pruning rambling and heritage roses at the Bolton Street Memorial Park. Meet at the Seddon Memorial.

Grab your blades & go to it!

Addendum – Glow Worms:

While I’m on the subject of the Gardens, I happened upon an official person taking a bunch of schoolkids on a glow worm tour last week & feel I should pass on the intelligence I gleaned on my way past them. The poor lady was stretched thin by 10 or so bored & restless boys. It didn’t help that there were no worms glowing at all.

I’d wondered for a while, from personal experience, but as the lady snapped at the boys she confirmed my theory that glow worms put on their best display after rain or a heavy dew (I do not know why this is).

So should you be planning a visit, do so soon after rain & while the worms can be found in most places in the Gardens, the easiest to find & arguably best are on the main track between Glen Road & the Duckpond.

Webstock Mini

The handy pocket-sized version of Webstock returns to Wellington on Tuesday next week. You might think it’s all for uber nerds and super geeks, but you would be wrong.

In fact, research just in has shown that attending Webstock Minis has been scientifically proven to make you more interesting, better-looking and all round more desirable. And, honestly, that’s regardless of how much you drink!

For your ticket price you can learn about some cool things like Second Life, the upcoming version of Firefox and all you can eat and drink.

The whole thing winds up with a debate entitled “Web 2.0 is all fizz and no substance”. Mike Brown, Sandy Mamoli and
Mark Cubey will uphold the proposition against Philip Fierlinger, Brenda Leeuwenberg and Che Tibby.

We are fully in the negative camp, because the team features one of our newest Wellingtonistas, Che Tibby.

Register for Webstock Mini:
http://www.webstock.org.nz

Ukes at lunch

Two events at the libraryWe love the library. We do. And many of us are in there at least once a week, and not just to admire the architecture. (For some of us it has something to do with those kid’s pacifiers DVDs having just a seven day loan period. But we digress.)

Like the Wellingtonista, the library too is celebrating NZ Music month – they’re hosting a quiz that always ends with the chance to win a well known brand of MP3 player. Nice.

But even better, there’s a performance by local Super Group The Wellington International Ukelele Orchestra this Thursday 12:30pm at the library.

If you are feeling brave enough to visit MySpace, check out some videos here. And should your immersion in the Wellington music scene be as pitifully shallow as this sad individual‘s, then you should consider your attendance on Thursday to be compulsory.

Pop Levi

Hey I’m excited. Liverpudlian nu-glam and ex-Ladytron bassist Pop Levi is bringing his hyperactive T. Rex-isms to the Bathhouse.

More info after the jump.

Food! Show!

Hurray, it’s finally here. You know how we feel about the Food Show, so really, nothing more needs to be said except for what better way to drink off your hangover from Country Club: England?

Charity Dinner & Dance, June 16

Olay!Get your glad rags ready, and pay a bit more attention to Dancing With the Stars over the next few weeks.

The Asia & Pacific Ladies Association are hosting an authentic Indian & Continental food evening with live entertainment!

  • Enjoy the music & excellent company
  • Win great door prizes (win a door?)
  • Bring friends & reserve a table for 10

Saturday 16 June

(I know this is early, but you need time to find that perfect outfit right?)

From 6pm
Indian Association Hall
48 Kemp Street
Kilbirnie

Drinks BYO or available for purchase at venue.

Tickets $50

Contact (021) 855 789 or (04) 477 0628

And the charity? You’ll be helping keep the “FREE” in Wellington Free Ambulance.

WBL: Results Round Four

So tonight I messed up with giving people their lane assignments, which probably means that it’s possible that ClickSuite might have thought that they’d won their round, and Clemenger might have thought that they’d lost theirs (oh who are we kidding, Clemenger would never think that, and that’s why we love them), but as it turns out, it was Bowltron who were the winners on the night. The random point was awarded to the slowest bowler, who happened to be me, on 2.34km. If Silverstripe’s ball had actually made it to the end instead of getting stuck in the gutter, it might have been them, but it wasn’t, and so I totally got myself a happy ending, complete with two strikes after that. But I’m sure if you wanted to read only about me, you’d head straight to Hubris, so the scores are after the jump.

WBL: Results round three

Oooh! Things are really getting exciting now.

Former league champions Xero took on Clemenger last night and didn’t come out victorious.

Meanwhile the random point awarded for most gutter balls (chosen by Silverstripe as last week’s random point winners) allowed the Bowlingtonista to give up last place to ClickSuite – although if I could repeat my hilarious joke about there being no ‘I’ in ‘Wellngtonsta Bowlng League’, ClickSuite did once again have the highest scoring individual player. Ryan managed to beat Clemenger’s Dr. Broad for that title even though Dr Broad got four strikes in a row, and ClickSuite are no doubt weighed down by their ridiculous facial hair that they’re growing for Maystache.

And while Bowltron had promised to form into one mighty lion if their score went over 500, unfortunately that just didn’t come to pass. They still creamed us though, even despite our attempts at distraction with clever rhyming chants. League table and individual points after the jump.

“Just like a Star Trek convention…

The Rules of the Game…except with better-looking chicks and binge drinking”.

Here’s a challenge for you. In an unidentified pub, somewhere in town tonight, the local heats for the New Zealand Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) championship will take place.

At stake is a trip to the national finals (at an unidentified location) in July. The winner of that will attend the world championships in Toronto at some unspecified time later in the year.

The highly (un)informative article (not) detailing all of this is here.

Rock, Paper, Scissors is an ancient game played across the globe from very early in humankind’s history. Yet, it seems to me that in some strange way, RPS is also a sport of the future, indeed, I would not be surprised to see Wii RPS on the market, paving the way for the game to be included in future olympics (we start lobbying next week, depending on how the Kiwi RPS competitors look).

I mean, I’m guessing that this is a beguiling spectator sport (if anyone can find them tonight feel free to confirm that). Particularly if there are going to be hot chicks & binge drinking. It’s darts for the modern age! (Although I’d need someone who knows to confirm whether darts attracts a superior breed of groupies.) But I bet the whole thing is more reminiscent of a darts match say, than a Star Trek convention.

Unless they’re dressing up as Klingons or something, in which case I’ll concede that point.

A sharp intake of breath

A new photography group, “gasp!”, has an exhibition entitled “a sharp intake of breath” at Finc Café from now until 10 June.

[Photo © Geraldine Downey, 2007]

The group (Geraldine Downey, Andrew Ecclestone, Stella Ramage, Paul Holley and Jordyn O’Keeffe) gave themselves the wide brief for the exhibition of creating images inspired by the word ‘enigma’. The brief exhibition catalogue explains that they were “Aiming to make space for a slower, deeper vision amongst the torrent of visual information that swamps us everyday. We wanted to produce images which asked more questions than they answered, to arouse a flicker of intrigue, a shiver of unease, or create a pause for thought.”