Posts by Tom Beard
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and here was me thinking that the opening of Midnight Expresso in the 80's was the start of the coffee wave in Wellington
That's exactly what the Havana boys would have you believe, and there certainly is some truth in it. I remember being introduced to this strange beast called the "latte" in about 1990 there.
Either your assumption is flawed or Wellington had more than other parts of the country. There are plenty of big/influential families of Italian origin around here - the Bresolini, the fishing families of Island Bay, the guys who set up the Medeterranian Food Warehouse, to name a few.
I've read that Wellington did indeed have larger Italian (& Greek) communities than anywhere else in the country, and that this gave it a head start towards culinary and social maturity. I'm not sure whether they helped introduce espresso, though: being a low-density town, we didn't get visible urban ethnic enclaves. Island Bay is hardly Little Italy - it may have a strong Italian community, but that's not represented in the built environment.
Thus, the cafes and restaurants set up by Italian (and especially Greek - see the book "Wellington's Hellenic Mil") immigrants tended to cater to Kiwi tastes, meaning (with a few exceptions) fish & chips & Cona coffee. The post-war cafe scene was also given a huge boost by immigrants from eastern & central Europe (e.g. Harry Seresin), but I don't think that there was much of an espresso scene here before the early 80s.
Here's an interesting article about the evolution of cafe culture in Wellington.
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Hone Harawira has really gone beyond the accepted boundaries of acceptable political discourse: i.e., he spoke the truth.
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Do Lolcats count as "satire, ridicule or denigration"? If so, we're in trouble.
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I read a while back in a book that we are biologically driven to seek intoxication.
I agree entirely, especially if you think of "intoxication" as including other attempts to escape the confines of the conscious self, from religious mysticism to lyric poetry. As is often the case, Baudelaire put it well.
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I wonder if there are any soundbites or clips out there of Holmesy ranting about P-fuelled scum or "I blame the parents"?
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Since when did North & South and the Herald become so stiflingly Politically Correct? They obviously only publish Coddington's writing to maintain some trendy reverse-discrimination system in favour of those with severe mental illness. Just a couple of Debs' columns a year would easily maintain their quota for paranoid delusion, congenital innumeracy, delusions of grandeur and hallucinatory disregard for reality.
It is, quite literally, Political Correctness Gone Mad.
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"Good parallel, It's way more usable to the public. But it kind of looks like an english council estate, without the poor people."
Um, I'm not sure which English council estates you've been visiting, but the ones I saw in Southwark and Tower Hamlets didn't have much in the way of Art Deco or faceted glass façades. Are you referring to the large amount of hard surfaces in Waitangi Park? They can look fairly harsh to some people's eyes, and will do until the trees have matured, but then again skateboarding and basketball were among the key users that the design intended to cater for, and it's (presumably) not much fun to do either of those on grass.
Perhaps the one thing that does remind me of an estate in Hackney is the large sweep of grass that hardly ever gets used except for special events. One of the big mistakes in the planning of those estates was the piling up of all the housing into high-rise flats in order to allow more "open space", which was then hardly ever used and became run-down and menacing. Mid-rise buildings with publicly-accessible ground-floors and well-designed intimate public spaces, as opposed to vast wind-swept paddocks, make for lively public spaces. The Waitangi Precinct was looking damned good and very popular today, and will get even better with the new buildings planned for the surrounding areas.
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"Why did it have to be Moet? Couldn't Dean Barker and his crew have squirted each other with a good New Zealand bubbly? "
Food miles, of course: Reims is a lot closer to Valencia than Marlborough is.
"Pelorus, perhaps? Or even the Deutz."
I think the occasion called for Champagne. In New Zealand we make some very good sparkling wines (such as those you mention), but we do not, and by definition cannot, make Champagne.
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"The next public-spirited architect who proposes a "residential mix" for Auckland's waterfront can piss off. Building swanky apartments for your mates kills public space. Bah."
I can't comment on the Viaduct, but it's not always the case. There are some very swanky apartments that have just opened at Chaffers Dock in Wellington, surrounded by what's becoming some very good public space. It's having residential use or blank walls at ground level that kills public space, not what happens above.
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At high school, I thought that everyone was being rude about a boy's Scottish heritage when they kept calling him "McSporran". But no, that was his real name: Robbie McSporran, no less.
Has anyone read the chapter in Freakonomics about correlations between children's names and the educational levels of their parents?