Road safety: ur doing it wrong

Just look at these young galahs hijinksing it along the road. In MY day we did School Patrol purely for a milo in winter, and yet these kids get a parade? Shock­ing. And what kind of mes­sage are we send­ing them that it’s okay to walk on the road. It’s PC GONE MAD, THAT’S WHAT IT IS!

Weta Cave goes all “Narnia” in Miramar

A vis­it to The Chil­dren’s Book­shop in Kil­birnie with Meg this arvo had me star­ing at (and snap­ping on my mobile) a poster advert­ising Weta Cave’s first event – Nar­nia Day, Sunday 15th June, 1pm-4pm

The details* after the break:

It ain’t easy being Green (Cabs)

Our favour­ite cab com­pany has expan­ded to Auck­land and Christ­ch­urch and are doing pretty well in both. But it’s not all expan­sion and increas­ing profits. Recently the eco-friendly cab com­pany has had to defend itself against state­ments from the head of the Taxi Fed­er­a­tion. Then they had to fend off spuri­ous claims from oth­er taxi com­pan­ies (Com­bined in this case) that they were also “green”.

The Com­merce Com­mis­sion began invest­ig­at­ing Wel­ling­ton Com­bined Tax­is in March after receiv­ing com­plaints about claims on its web­site. The web­site sug­gests the com­pany’s LPG tax­is reduce car­bon diox­ide pol­lu­tion by up to 25 per cent, and its Nis­san Max­ima engines are 20 per cent more fuel effi­cient than tra­di­tion­al auto­mat­ic trans­mis­sions.

And then today I heard anoth­er mean story. Green Cabs received a call for a big job: 9pm, 40 people, 10 cars. They nat­ur­ally accep­ted. But 10 cabs is a lot out Green Cabs’ fleet so it was also a gamble. You know what’s com­ing don’t you? That’s right, nobody showed. The cars did­n’t wait around for long but it was long enough at that time to miss out on a large num­ber of jobs. Green Cabs have an idea who was behind the prank but we’ll let our read­ers make up their own mind. Some­thing else that is inter­est­ing to note: the aver­age cab driver spends approx­im­ately $80 a day on pet­rol, the aver­age Green Cab­bie spends approx­im­ately $20 a day on pet­rol.

May Contain Traces of Nuts

Finally Wel­ling­ton gets its own MySpace Secret Show, and what a show it is – NZ’s own world-class, world-fam­ous, worldly-wise elec­tro rap­pers, mas­ters of the mel­low-drama and hip hop­era Coco Sol­id play for free at an as-yet-undis­closed Wel­ling­ton ven­ue (that’s the secret, duh) next Wed­nes­day (18th). They also have a psy­che­del­ic kal­eido­scope of a new video on their MySpace page for their new single ‘Elec­trik Love’; it’s made by Aleks Sakowski who also made the over­whelm­ingly bril­liant ‘Crime­fight­ers’ vid – which I feel com­pelled to include here as it’s my abso­lute fave and it wins people over like noth­ing else:

More Coco love, and details on how to get into the gig, after the jump:

C’mon Untouched World, give me a break

Untouched World on the corner of Brandon and Feath­er­ston streets has a logo which looks unreas­on­ably sim­il­ar to Ant­ony Gorm­ley’s Angel of the North, which is loc­ated out­side Gateshead in the north of Eng­land.

I’ve tried to ignore this for months now, but it finally got the bet­ter of me this morn­ing. C’mon Untouched World, what were you think­ing? How did this come about? How could this have been let to come about? How could your logo-design­er not be aware of one of the most fam­ous and all-per­vad­ing visu­al images of the last 20 years? Sheesh.

And what’s more (keep read­ing after the jump)…

Music in Miramar @ Eva Dixons every Thursday

Eva Dix­ons lives on in Miramar (133 Dar­ling­ton Road – Google Map | Zoom­in Map) – just up the road road from the newly vis­ited Weta Cave which, as Richard Taylor said to me, “It’s a bit dif­fer­ent for Miramar eh?” … such a shame­less name drop­per I am.

Back to Eva Dix­ons … Not only is it a great place to eat (all day menu), drink and be merry but if you hap­pen to pop in on any Thursday eve (menu) this month you’ll be treated to free live music.

12th: Mojo Mama
Piano based boo­gie and blues with enough sass to light your fire.

19th: Sean & Aman­da O’Con­nor
Inspir­a­tion­al folk/pop song­writers & har­mon­isers, singing their inner and out­er jour­neys with gui­tar, flute, heart and soul!

26th: Eva Prowse Trio
Eva Prowse (vocals, viol­in, man­dolin), Chris Prowse (gui­tar, bva), Dave Cur­rie (bass, ukulele, bva) play­ing a vari­ety of alt-coun­try music. Suit­able for old-timers and new-timers alike.

Baby, you can share my car

Here at the Wel­ling­tonista we like pub­lic trans­port, but there are times when you need a car to do stuff, like pick­ing up that flat­pack cock­tail cab­in­et out in Lower Hutt.

At the moment your options are pretty much lim­ited to bor­row­ing a friend’s car, hir­ing a taxi, or fork­ing out for a rent­al, but there is a more sens­ible option.

It’s called car shar­ing, and is cur­rently up and run­ning in Auck­land through a com­pany called City­hop.

With City­hop, you pay a yearly fee (cur­rently $75), and when you need to use a car, you make a book­ing, then pick up your car from one of the spe­cified city car parks, do your car-related stuff, then return it, pay­ing a $13.50 hourly rate (includ­ing pet­rol!) for its use.

City­hop’s been run­ning in Auck­land since Septem­ber last year, and accord­ing to their web­site they’ll be open­ing soon here in Wel­ling­ton.

Need­less to say, we will be keep­ing a close eye on this. Per­haps now we’ll finally be able to get that cock­tail cab­in­et for Wel­ling­tonista Towers.

Brave New World

I read a great review of the new album by the Bravery , The Sun and the Moon, where the review­er claimed that the band were the Stone Temple Pilots to The Killers’ Pearl Jam. How great is that – grunge bands-as-meta­phors! And a meta­phor that I can cer­tainly relate to (err, not that I’m the Wei­l­and to any­one’s Ved­der, but y’know, I appre­ci­ate the ana­logy). And yeah, the Bravery are one of that bunch of Nu-Wave-New-York bands that seem too fash­ion­able to be true, but unlike the Killers et al, they’re actu­ally really good – less fash­ion magazine, more FASHION (bop bop bop) a la Bowie.
Ok before I get into glam similes and really lose the plot, all I wanted to point out was: The Bravery are play­ing in Wel­ling­ton this week­end – Sat­urday night at San Fran Bath­house to be exact, with sup­port from loc­al synth-core darlings Heat Like Me. Get your party pants on and check them out, tick­ets are avail­able from Tick­et­mas­ter or on the door from 7:30pm Sat 14th.
A wee heads up for Fri­day night too – Liam Finn plays Bodega, fresh from a US tour with … Eddie Ved­der!

books, books, books.…

Col­lec­tions for Down­town Com­munity Min­istry’s annu­al Book Fair Fun­draiser are under­way. I love the book fair, because you name a book and you’ll most prob­ably find it there. Plus you get to go shop­ping and know that all you money is going to a good cause – like address­ing home­less­ness in Wel­ling­ton.

Scattered around town are wheel­ie bins for people to donate their unwanted books. Some of the cur­rent loc­a­tions are:

• St John’s Wil­lis St
• Wes­ley Wel­ling­ton (Tarana­ki St)
• St Paul’s Cathed­ral (Moles­worth St)
• Cent­ral Baptist Church (Boul­cott St)
• Aro Val­ley Com­munity Centre
• New­town Com­munity Centre
• Kil­birnie CAB

If you’ve got a pile of books, DCM come and col­lect from Wel­ling­ton loc­a­tions, so why not have a mini book col­lec­tion in your office?

DCM also col­lect DVDs, CDs and vinyl records as well. I can con­firm their vinyl bins are always treas­ure trove of magic­al dis­cov­er­ies.

The book fair is one of the biggest in the coun­try. It will be held on the 6th and 7th of Septem­ber in the TSB Arena on the water­front.

The Rise and Fall of Western Civilization: Part One

This looks really good:

You can see some more of John Lake’s work on some of those big dis­play units at the new park on the west­ern end of Cour­tenay Place (Cour­tenay West Park?).