Books, books, books as far as your eye can see

Tomor­row sees the start of Welling­ton’s most favourite book event, the Down­town Com­mu­ni­ty Min­istry Book­fair, which is being held at the TSB Are­na on Sat­ur­day and Sun­day.

Thou­sands of books have been sort­ed by vol­un­teers for months all ready to make book shop­ping eas­i­er on the week­end.

My hot tips…

• Set a buy­ing bud­get
• Get there ear­ly on Sat­ur­day to get the books you real­ly real­ly, REALLY want.
• Pop back on Sun­day and take advange of the hourly spe­cials for books, vinyl and mag­a­zines you most­ly want.
• Don’t hag­gle at an event like this. All the prices are cheap­er than at sec­ond hand book stores and every cent go towards help­ing those most at need in our city.

How good is this event? In the words of one of our favourite Welling­ton blog­gers 

The event itself is so awe­some that even if  they told me that they used the mon­ey to crush kit­tens, I’d still attend. Okay, maybe not … but still — it’s fab­u­lous.

And this year’s book fair is all about Twit­ter. Fol­low the #dcm­book­fair tag for updates over both days of the Book­Fair. Sim­ply Tweet about your Book­Fair expe­ri­ence and include #dcm­book­fair to let oth­ers fol­low the fun.

DCM Events Coor­di­na­tor David Cross says…

The Book­Fair pro­vides an ide­al event for peo­ple on Twit­ter and oth­er social net­works. I’m excit­ed to see how it all unfolds. Per­haps we’ll get peo­ple tweet­ing about find­ing the per­fect book or that long lost vinyl record, who knows

The Book­Fair hours are from 9am – 5pm on Sat­ur­day 4th and 10am – 4pm Sun­day 5th of Sep­tem­ber. Mon­ey raised from the Book­Fair goes towards Down­town Com­mu­ni­ty Ministry’s work amongst peo­ple in need in the city.

Twitterplaces: impromptu tweet-ups ahoy!

At SXSW 2007, the cool new thing that got every­one talk­ing was Twit­ter, and we know how that end­ed up. This year’s cool new thing was foursquare, a loca­tion shar­ing social net­work­ing app with gam­ing ele­ments, and many peo­ple won­dered when it might come to New Zealand.

 

Well, it’s not here yet. But recent­ly, local dev leg­end Ben Nolan dropped us a line to let us know about Twit­ter­places, an open-source vari­ant on the foursquare theme that he’s been work­ing on.

 

(When we last men­tioned Ben he’d just put togeth­er one of the first ever Face­book appli­ca­tions. This was of course many months before we all got col­lec­tive­ly tired of being pirates and throw­ing cows at each oth­er; thank­ful­ly, Ben’s appli­ca­tion con­tained nei­ther.)

 

classy family dining

What to do when one’s par­ents come to town and want to take you out to din­ner? We usu­al­ly quiz our fel­low Welling­ton­istæ around the office water­cool­er: there’s always an opin­ion or three on a sub­ject like this.

Giv­en we had to cope with a not ter­ri­bly adven­tur­ous (in the culi­nary sense) old­er bloke, and two small kids, where could we go that was classy yet sat­is­fy our vary­ing require­ments? There were many good sug­ges­tions:

• Zibib­bo — classy, plus PIZZA for small peo­ple;
• Roxy — qui­et, tasty;
• Joe’s Garage — new­ly opened chain restau­rant in Tory Street;
• Portofi­no — anoth­er new­ly opened chain restau­rant, in the Merid­i­an build­ing;
• Le Met­ro­pol­i­taine — French, and known for a good steak;
• Oste­ria del Toro — Mediter­ranean for every­one;
• Crazy Horse — for a meat fren­zy;
• Gus­to Bistro — Petone’s finest;
• the Lido — an old stand­by, great food for the price.

Wellington is a good place to get shipwrecked

We’ve writ­ten before about the fire at the Maranui Surf Cafe, and how bloody sad that was, but it’s kind of bloody love­ly to see the way that this city can be all small-town-like and good-heart­ed, with yet more events planned to raise mon­ey for the cause.

Ship­wrecked! Maranui Staff Ben­e­fit Con­cert Par­ty is hap­pen­ing this Sat­ur­day Sep­tem­ber 5 at the Tug Boat, and $20 will get you in to see the Eggs, Lone­some Cow­boy and oth­er bands, as well as chances to win prizes from Madame Fan­cy Pants, Real Surf and Joug Design

And if that’s not quite enough par­ty­ing for you, there’s also the after­par­ty at SFBH where koha on the door will get you a free shot.

Safe Passage

Today deliv­ered a bright and cheer­ful blue-dap­pled day in the city but there were dark forces abroad.  Three grim reapers were seen around town this after­noon com­plete with scythes and flow­ing dark hood­ed robes.  They were spot­ted at the begin­ning of their jaunt in the dank, dark alleys of Left Bank; then again at the library hit­ting the romance and mur­der mys­tery sec­tions; lat­er at New World doing a spot of shop­ping; and tak­ing some air on the water­front at dusk (pho­to cred­it Domini­ka Zielin­s­ka).

They were har­vest­ing more squeals and smiles than souls and seemed to be a hit with the tourists.

To what do we owe this psy­chopomp?

Google Maps

A cou­ple of cool new fea­tures have arrived at Google Maps.

First, the images used in the satel­lite tiles have been updat­ed, and with images of a high­er res­o­lu­tion so you can zoom in right down to the small­est click on the slidey thing.

The old images pre-dat­ed the bypass, so it’s good to see more up-to-date images.

Also, the images appear to have been tak­en on a bright sun­ny day and the city looks absolute­ly gor­geous.

View Larg­er Map

Sec­ond thing is Google Tran­sit, which lets you plan jour­neys using pub­lic trans­port (click on Get Direc­tions in Google Maps).

Welling­ton is the first city in Aus­trala­sia to have Google Tran­sit, as report­ed in this envi­ous arti­cle in the Her­ald.

Alan’s already had a bit of a play with it:

 

Wellington on a plate on the web

We’ve been par­tic­u­lar­ly lax in not cov­er­ing Welling­ton on a Plate, in my case because I am dras­ti­cal­ly short of funds and if I wrote about it I’d just get sad that I can’t eat every sin­gle thing on offer. But luck­i­ly, we can out­source the work to a third-world coun­try instead. My favourite food blog­ger from Syd­ney — Helen at Grab Your Fork — has been in Welling­ton as a guest of Welling­ton Tourism, and she’s been doing some fan­tas­tic posts about what she’s been eat­ing, along with tak­ing some very tasty pho­tos like the one at the right of the bak­ing class at Florid­i­ta’s. You should check her out, and also check out the fes­ti­val itself. If you’re short of a din­ing com­pan­ion, feel free to extend an invi­ta­tion to me…

Review: Whero’s New Net

Whero’s New Net, by Albert Belz, is a play inspired by The New Net Goes Fish­ing, Witi Ihi­maer­a’s 1977 col­lec­tion of short sto­ries look­ing at the expe­ri­ences of rur­al Maori mov­ing to the cities.

This play takes the idea for­ward to the next gen­er­a­tion, look­ing at Whero (played by Bree Peters), a young Maori woman liv­ing in Lon­don and try­ing to make a break as a singer-song­writer. She’s rather good, but a lit­tle ner­vous and some­what over­shad­owed by Red, her con­fi­dent, glam­orous musi­cal part­ner.

Whero is sup­port­ed by her Irish man­ag­er and his boyfriend, also urban Maori. All is going well, when Whero meets a mys­te­ri­ous stranger — an East Coast Maori ful­la who has the diary of her deceased father.

And it’s there that things get inter­est­ing, with Whero hav­ing to deal with aspects of her fam­i­ly’s past, her present and the pres­sures of the future.

Monsters attack!

Remem­ber when Abel Smith Street was full of mon­sters recent­ly? Here’s the ad that was the cause of it all.

[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3O-dMD4-U8]