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?).