Here are a few things to keep your mind off the weath­er this week­end.

The World Press Pho­to ’06 exhi­bi­tion kicks off at Shed 11 today. It’s been inter­est­ing to see that the pub­lic­i­ty around town has tak­en a very polit­i­cal angle this year.

Just along the water­front at the Muse­um of Welling­ton City and Sea (I wish they’d find a short­er name!), they’re already two weeks into the month-long Welling­to­nia LIVE event. The word “eclec­tic” does­n’t even begin to describe the range of things going on there: there’s a per­for­mances from the Tinako­ri Hand­bell Asso­ci­a­tion, a Matari­ki cel­e­bra­tion with Toni Hua­ta, hur­dy-gur­dies, shan­ty singers, ghost tours, kete weav­ing and a debate on the con­tro­ver­sial Marine Edu­ca­tion Cen­tre. My main inter­est will be in the series of talks organ­ised by the Archi­tec­tur­al Cen­tre enti­tled “Why I do archi­tec­ture”. These kick off at 1pm tomor­row with Anna Kem­ble-Walsh and Mar­tin Han­ley of Red Design and John Mills of John Mills Archi­tects.

From eclec­tic to elec­tric: new synth-pop band The Blush Response have their debut gig at Sand­wich­es tomor­row night. The band may be new, but the musi­cians will be very famil­iar to Welling­to­ni­ans: Jerami­ah Ross (aka Mod­ule), Rhi­an Shee­han, Raashi Malik (of Rhom­bus, among oth­ers) and Paul McLaney of Gram­sci.

Final­ly, you could always try to fig­ure out the loca­tion of the cur­rent Mys­tery Bar. If you do, you’d bet­ter get look­ing tonight because it’s closed on Sat­ur­day nights (that’s a clue). It also has some­thing in com­mon with Sand­wich­es.