Recently opened at Te Papa is the Our Space exhib­it. It cost $6 mil­lion and is appar­ently aimed at the 15- to 25-year-olds – you know, the sort of people who’d rather be tex­ting or updat­ing their Bebo page or say­ing “woteva” than vis­it­ing a museum, etc.

At its most basic, Our Space is a photo album. More spe­cific­ally, it’s an elec­tron­ic data­base of pho­tos and short video clips of New Zea­l­and places and events. It’s a bit like Flickr, but rather than just rely­ing on media sub­mit­ted by the pub­lic, it also taps into Te Papa’s archives and the TVNZ archives.

The exhib­i­tion is made up of three parts: The Map, The Wall and The Rides, and in the interests of prop­er grown-up blog­ging, I made vis­its to Te Papa to do a thor­ough review of Our Space.

Magic wands, surly teens and motion sick­ness after the jump…

The Crafts­man did­n’t take long to identi­fy: not sur­pris­ing giv­en its prom­in­ent pos­i­tion. Here’s anoth­er quick one, which should also be pretty obvi­ous.

The Watusi pretty much counts as Wel­ling­ton’s first Tiki Bar, but this place has a few touches of tikitude as well. There’s this little guy, of course, and the anim­al print cush­ion helps. It has a smat­ter­ing of tiki masks and ukuleles, an out­door area with lush foliage and torches, and most import­antly, a drinks list titled “Tiki Cock­tails”. Heav­en! Or is it?

As a fly, I obvi­ously have some dis­taste­ful habits, and I am some­times accused of buzz­ing too close to pre­ten­sion or polit­ic­al bias. Well, I’m hardly going to change the habits of a life­time, but just this once here’s a mys­tery bar without a hint of pre­ten­sion.

No bur­lesque dan­cers or pan-Medi­ter­ranean tapas here, mate! It’s beery, blokey and beefy, and if there’s any pre­tence about it, it’s that it’s pre­tend­ing to be some­where else: the South Island backblocks, from the looks of things.

So, what and where is it?

Craft2.0 springs into the shop­ping sea­son by return­ing to The­New­Dowse on Octo­ber 11th with a Craf­tast­ic Craf­tacu­lar

(don’t ask us what that means, but pretty much bey­ond fab­ulous is a good defin­i­tion)

There are over 60 crafters this time round and as always there is a mix of return­ing favour­ite crafters and brand shiny new ones.

We guar­an­tee you’ll find presents for all the fam­ily, and more import­antly some spe­cial treats for your­self. Plus you can feel good about spend­ing money on 100% ori­gin­al NZ made hand craf­ted cre­ations instead of impor­ted mass pro­duced stuff.

Everything sold at Craft2.0 is 100% New Zea­l­and made.
Everything sold at Craft2.0 is made by the per­son selling it.
Most items are unique one-off or lim­ited edi­tion cre­ations.

This time round there are free mak­ing activi­tites. In asso­ci­ation with Hutt Val­ley Com­munity Arts, kids little and small young and old can cre­ate flor­al bou­quets from but­tons, card­board and pipe clean­ers.

everything is sup­plied all you need is your cre­ativ­ity. this is a great activ­ity for all the fam­ily, but we warn you it is addict­ive.

Spe­cial Treats
the most awe­some gift bag ever in the his­tory of craft2.0 , cour­tesy of those amaz­ing folks at Cafe reka are being handed out at 10am.
inside you’ll find, badges, crafty things, fudge and some oth­er treats that we are keep­ing secret for now, but will prob­ably gush about on the web­site www.craft2.org/blog the night before the fair.

Because we know that every­one loves Crafts so much we also have a prize draw, where you can win over $200 of Crafty cre­ations and oth­er spe­cial things.

Last week was Bow­l­ing­tonista’s by-week, hence why I was lazy with report­ing. But my spies tell me the scores were:

• Xero 338 to Mighty Boost’s 378
• Furry Fer­als on 438 to the Purple Cobra’s 378

With Jamesh from the Purple Cobras get­ting an extra league point for fast­est bowl, the scores cur­rently look like this:

Bow­l­ing­tonista: 2
Furry Fer­als: 15
Mighty Boost: 8
Purple Cobras: 9
Xero: 2

See you tonight for more excite­ment!

Has any­one noticed that the elec­tion cam­paign has spread to res­taur­ants? Pic­colo is sport­ing a big blue Steph­en Franks poster in their win­dow, and I’m not sure what it says about poten­tial Nation­al voters if Vivi­an St is seen as fer­tile advert­ising ter­rit­ory. La Kas­bah has taken it fur­ther: not only was the pro­pri­et­or wear­ing a Labour badge, with a dona­tions jar on the counter, but Tre­vor Mal­lard was filling up on tagine and couscous tonight! Yes, it seems that Dami­an Christie was right: in Wel­ling­ton, that does count as a celebrity sight­ing.

Do any of the oth­er parties have fan­boy res­taur­ants? Kai in the City seems an obvi­ous Maori Party stal­wart, and per­haps Aunty Men­a’s and Green Land would go for the Greens. But what sort of place would sup­port NZ First or ACT? And does any­one from United Future eat out?

Tonight in the spe­cial Wel­ling­tonista sea­son of NZ fea­ture films, either roughly related to, shot or set in our lovely cap­it­al city (and what a typ­ic­ally bril­liant answer to yes­ter­day’s weath­er bomb than this beau­ti­ful day?) we have the hil­ari­ous fea­ture Mark II, as selec­ted by ourselves.

This film is worth view­ing for the high-waisted jeans alone.…

(click on the image for a lar­ger ver­sion)

And it’s a road movie which fol­lows three unem­ployed Maori teen­agers adven­tur­ing in a two tone Mark II Zephyr!

Tick­ets $8 or $6 con­ces­sion – which includes a com­pli­ment­ary glass of wine (with ID) unless you can tell us which year it was shot and we’ll give you a double pass. Film com­mences 7pm.

More details on The Film Archive’s web­site…

So, Wel­ling­ton is cur­rently the recip­i­ent of a whole lot of bad-ass weath­er and you may have received an email with an alarm­ing list of all the dam­age the storm has done, like this:

Pub­lic access to the Basin Reserve has been closed. Approx­im­ately 15 win­dows in the RA Vance Stand have blown out.
Fulton Hogan work­ing on Air­port roof which is lift­ing Coun­cil Parks staff have closed off the walk­ing tracks on Tinakori Hill due to the danger caused by many fall­ing trees. Power poles are in danger of top­pling on the seafront at Lyall Bay.

Slips! Buses and trains closed! Power out­ages! Pretty bad, huh?

Except it’s not. Find out the truth after the jump!

While today’s gale-force winds and rain isn’t much fun, there was much water-related fun last night on Abel Smith Street.

Late last night a water main on The Ter­race burst, send­ing a tor­rent of water gush­ing down Abel Smith.

Rather than snug­gling up under their duvets, loc­al res­id­ents instead leapt out of bed and turned the infra­struc­ture mal­func­tion into an inpromptu waters­lide, using recyc­ling bins, deck­chairs – any­thing they could get their hands on – to slide down the street. Awe­some!

Even bet­ter – a video was made!

Thanks to _june’s Twit­ter Tweets for the report­age.
Video by MrJudkins.

WOW sea­son is over for anoth­er year (for the 20th year in fact) with the last sold-out show last night. So now it comes time, dear read­ers, for the cold hard assess­ment. Our streets have been fes­tooned with ban­ners, the spon­sors have been fling­ing free bubbles about eager for a photo op, mer­chand­ise has mush­roomed and vari­ous shop fronts have been requisi­tioned for the cause.

So whadda ya think? “World-class”? Fab? Fug? Meh? Find out after the break.