The Woolshed Pot­ters, who are based at the Gear Homestead in Pori­rua are hav­ing their annu­al Cash’n Carry Sale over the next two week­ends. You should get along and get your hands on some beau­ti­ful hand­craf­ted indi­vidu­al pieces, because they’re great for Xmas presents, and also for your­self.

You might be a little scep­tic­al, think­ing that pot­tery is for hip­pies from the 1970s, but we’ve all seen knit­ting and crochet come back into vogue, so you should jump onto this band­wag­on quickly. Espe­cially if it means you buy pots by Aimée McLeod, which you should, because she is super fant­ast­ic awe­some.

Pot­tery sales are from the Red Barn at the Gear Homestead, Okowai Road, just off Whit­ford Brown Drive in Pori­rua.

Open two week­ends in a row:

• Sat­urday 6th & Sunday 7th Decem­ber
• Sat­urday 13th & Sunday 14th Decem­ber
• 10.00 am – 5.00 pm

Also, while you’re out there, you might want to take the time to explore the Gear Homestead, and pre­tend to blow up some sheep, because that’s where Peter Jack­son filmed much of Bad Taste.

Google Maps has today launched Street View for Auck­land, Wel­ling­ton and Christ­ch­urch all over New Zea­l­and.

A few months ago, on what looks to have been early in the morn­ing in winter, the Googlemo­bile drove around the streets of our fair city, pho­to­graph­ing the streets.

You can now view these streets­capes as the closest zoom-in on Google Maps. They even made it down Cuba Mall!

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Street View in oth­er coun­tries has brought up all sorts of inter­est­ing finds, from “Hey, that’s me!” to get­ting snapped out enter­ing a brothel (though Google say they will blur the faces of any­one who could be iden­ti­fied).

So if you find any­thing inter­est­ing, do share it with us – you might be rewar­ded with a free tick­et to the TAWAs!

Update

Could it be? Is this famil­i­ar look­ing woman at the gate of Premi­er House its former res­id­ent, Helen Clark? 

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For a lim­ited time Wel­ling­ton Arts Centre-based paint­er Elisa­beth Vullings is hav­ing an online sale of her sweet paint­ings here: www.elisabethvullings.co.nz

Small scale and only $100 each they’re on sale from today and will be updated through­out the month. It’s well worth check­ing out her site for a piece of loc­al art – the per­fect gift and a great way to sup­port our cre­at­ive com­munity. You’d bet­ter be quick! 

The Nation­al Lib­rary has joined the Flickr Com­mons pro­ject, whack­ing up many of their pho­tos on Flickr. At the moment, there’s not much from Wel­ling­ton, but we’re hop­ing that will change as more are uploaded.

One par­tic­u­lar Wel­ling­ton delight, how­ever, is a set of pho­tos of a ram­shackle house on Cuba Street called the Old She­bang (she­bang in this instance means dwell­ing).

And as well as that, Google are in the pro­cess of put­ting Life magazine’s archive of 10 mil­lion pho­tos online. So far, search­ing for Wel­ling­ton brings up slim pick­ings, but it’ll be worth check­ing back on as the archive grows.

But until then, you can browse Life’s New Zea­l­and pho­tos. Or, um, check out this photo of Madonna look­ing all cool in 1984.

There’s been a bit of action going on at the old Buck­et Foun­tain, icon of Cuba Street.

First, it mys­ter­i­ously dis­ap­peared:

We ini­tially thought this was a retro ’80s Dav­id Cop­per­field-style magic trick, but it turns out it was just taken down for main­ten­ance.

The foun­tain returned, with a fresh coat of paint, ready to splash the good folk of Cuba Mall once again.

But then a hand-writ­ten sign appeared up the top. It’s not so legible from the street, but zoom­ing in revealed this mes­sage:

“Prove your hunter-gather­er skills by find­ing food in the forest at Te Papa.”

Per­haps, with the Cur­rent Eco­nom­ic Situ­ation, Te Papa is right to put the emphas­is on nat­ur­al his­tory and away from art.

And if you’d like to escape the misery of mod­ern life, you can now jour­ney back in time to when the Buck­et Foun­tain was first installed in 1969, thanks to the WCC’s The Cuba Street Memor­ies Pro­ject.

From this, we learn that the Buck­et Foun­tain was ori­gin­ally nick­named the Sug­ar Shovel Foun­tain and it was painted yel­low and black (so 2000s!).

Just quietly between you and me and every­one we know, there’s some­thing tasty for tast­ing at Cel­lar-Vate on Moles­worth Street this after­noon.

Today is all about hol­i­day drink­ing! We’ve got some fest­ive bubbles and a refresh­ing rose. How could you miss the oppor­tun­ity to sample a quick glass of Cham­pagne on the way home?

See you there 4.30 – 6pm at Cel­lar-Vate.
 

Two of Wel­ling­ton’s lead­ers are back­ing debate on a user-pays water sys­tem to reduce Wel­ling­to­ni­ans’ reck­less con­sump­tion – now more than twice the nation­al aver­age.

Appar­ently we’re using about 400 litres of water per day, per per­son.

The bulk of it gets flushed away.

And one answer, to drive the cor­rect beha­viour of course, rather than make you behave as “they” want you to, is to install water meters on homes & charge for the usage. Just like Auck­land.

Kind of makes that 6 litre per minute shower head that Nanny was going to make us get, attract­ive.

There are pluses & minuses to this plan & we’d love to hear what you think in the com­ments

Full story here.