Twit­ter has informed us that Mojo Old Bank (@mojooldbank) and the Mojo on the Ter­race are hav­ing a cof­fee art throw-down at 6.30pm tonight at the Mojo locat­ed in the PWC Build­ing on the Ter­race (map here).

There is talk of beer and piz­za for those want­i­ng to watch the action.

I think we could be up for some cof­fee porn this evening.….

On Wednes­day night, our next door neigh­bours were bur­gled. On Fri­day night, my house was bur­gled. A cou­ple of weeks ago some­one tried to climb in my win­dow while I was sleep­ing. My flat­mate’s car has been restolen from out­side our house, but ha ha, sucks to be them because the pre­vi­ous thieves had used up all the petrol in it. It’s times like this that I need to be reas­sured of the good things in New­town. Things like:

• The otters at the zoo!
• The halou­mi at Cafe Kialis
• The macad­e­mia & chick­en sal­ad at Baobob

What are your favourite things about New­town right now?

Some­times it takes the eyes of a vis­i­tor to shed a new light on the ordi­nary.

Fer­nan­do Ramierez is a Chilean pho­tog­ra­ph­er who’s been spend­ing a bit of time trav­el­ling around Welling­ton bus­es using the Daytrip­per tick­et.

He start­ed notic­ing the oth­er pas­sen­gers on the bus, and began talk­ing to them and pho­tograph­ing them. This lead to his Daytrip­per pho­to essay series.

[I] soon real­ized that Welling­ton is a beau­ti­ful city not just because of the great archi­tec­ture. It’s a beau­ti­ful city because of its peo­ple. Real­ly kind, they let a com­plete stranger approach, take pho­tos, learn about their lives and hope for the best.

Scoop has some pho­tos online and also the pho­to essay avail­able as a PDF. And there’s also Fer­nan­do’s Flickr group with the pho­tos.

f you’re going to the Mon­tana World of Wear­ableArt and you want to make sure that you eat first, Welling­tonNZ have put togeth­er a handy list of near­by-ish restau­rants that offer express menus to make sure you get to the show on time. We’re par­tic­u­lar­ly fond of Trade Kitchen. Nat­u­ral­ly, even if you’re not going to the show, you can still indulge your­self with these din­ners…

While the Hook of Maui has been scrapped due to cost over­runs and prob­lems with the frickin’ laser, the Welling­ton City Coun­cil is still keen on the idea of a gate­way sculp­ture, and indeed the com­pe­ti­tion will be re-run lat­er his year. The pro­pos­al had some mixed respons­es, but now there’s a chance for a rethink.

So, what do you think? What (if any­thing) would make a suit­able mark­er for the north­ern entrance to Welling­ton?

You’d have to have been liv­ing under a rock (by which I mean “not been in Civic Square for the last cou­ple of weeks”) not to have noticed the out­break of spots all over the City Gallery. It’s an instal­la­tion by Yay­oi Kusama to pub­li­cise her Mir­rored Years exhi­bi­tion, which is a show­piece for the new­ly revamped and extend­ed gallery.

After near­ly a year of clo­sure, the gallery is cel­e­brat­ing its relaunch with the Gallery-a-Go-Go event in Civic Square this Sun­day. While many will be most excit­ed by the return of Nikau café (which reopened a week or so ago) and its famous kedgeree, there are a whole lot of new gallery spaces to explore after the expan­sion. There’s the brand new Rod­er­ick and Gillian Deane Gallery of M?ori and Pacif­ic Art, which will host Ngaahi­na Hoha­ia’s Par­i­ha­ka-themed work; a new Adam Audi­to­ri­um; and a much larg­er Michael Hirschfeld Gallery. The open­ing exhi­bi­tion there will be the huge instal­la­tion Make Way by Regan Gen­try, a Welling­ton artist best known for his large-scale pub­lic sculp­tures explor­ing pub­lic space and urban change.

[more after the jump]

Welling­ton is blessed with many and splen­dif­er­ous forms of avi­fau­na. Between the Sanc­tu­ary; the coun­cil’s efforts in keep­ing pest num­bers low; and the nat­ur­al attrac­tions of our loca­tion, Welling­ton is par­ty cen­tral for birds.

And so it is only fit­ting that the Welling­ton­ista takes at least a pass­ing inter­est in For­est & Bird’s Bird of the Year Poll, giv­en that some of our favourite res­i­dents are top can­di­dates!

In truth though we’ve had some dif­fi­cul­ty decid­ing if we should endorse one par­tic­u­lar bird over anoth­er. One per­son want­ed the Robin; anoth­er the Tomtit; and anoth­er sug­gest­ed a non-res­i­dent left-field con­tender, the now extinct and total­ly not epony­mous of any Welling­ton­ista alive or dead Chatham Island Whak­tard (which is only a half-decent Face­Book cam­paign away from being the poll win­ner that can­not be admit­ted to).

It turns out though, that the per­son that writes the blog post­ing gets to decide, and thus I would urge you all to vote for the Kārearea (New Zealand Fal­con).

Why? After the jump.