random photos

points of light. pointy pointy light.

construction on the bypass business. not actually the bypass, but they're switching bunch of traffic patterns around (one way streets will switch direction) and also too the highway is getting a new exit ramp on this street pictured right hurrrrrr.

view from the terrace of the san francisco bath house (hipster central)
i was not drunk, but my it looks like my camera had imbibed

la casa es muy caliente. brendan's housewarming party.
latin american style.

it's a posting frenzy! i just made a handful of short posts about different stuff. life continues on earth's ozoneless underbelly. i discovered twice-weekly life-drawing sessions held at a community art space. it's relatively inexpensive. there's no critique it's just roughly an hour and a half of drawing. i haven't sketched a live model since drawing class my sophomore year. so i'm a bit out of practice, though in better shape than i expected. if you're very well behaved, i'll post a couple scans (assuming the scanners at oblong actually work... the jury's out on that).

also, i'm participating now in weekly spanish skill-share sessions and may try and take a class or two. tendinitis in my knee persists, which i discovered while clumsily hopping a fence today. i've been waking up early to do some jogging and strengthening excersizes. i thought i'd solved it, but apparently not. soccer may have to wait another week (it's been two now). luckily there are other things to keep me busy.

Had some pizza at the previously mentioned Mediterranean Warehouse. Not impressed. They won an award a few years ago. However, i found the crust to be much too soft. It was kind of like eating pizza bread. Bummer.

I got a hot tip about a place downtown. It looks kind of fancy though. I'll have to save my pennies... or ten cent pieces. Whatever.

more pizza.

made more pizza on sunday. Used uncooked tomatoes for the sauce. I rinsed them before mashing them up with, mixed with some salt and oregano. Definitely an improvement. I think my next step will be to try a twice-baked approach. Baking the crust and sauce for 5 minutes, then adding the cheese. I think the cheese is getting overcooked. It might just be that I'm using dry mozz instead of fresh wet mozz... etc., etc. It just means I'll have to try it again this weekend.

I hit up the Mediterranean Warehouse the other day and picked up a couple packs of "00" flour (finely ground) imported from Italia. Might make a difference...

Went to a protest yesterday. There are three police officers on trial for rape. Two are currently in jail, one is suspended with pay from his job. The situation is probably better described by Radio New Zealand:

Trial verdicts verdict

On 1 March, Suspended Assistant Police Commissioner Clint Rickards and two former officers were acquitted on charges of kidnapping and indecently assaulting a woman in Rotorua between November 1983 - August 1984. The complainant was aged 16 at the time.

Following the verdicts by a jury of eight men and four women in the High Court at Auckland, it was revealed the two former policemen were convicted rapists who are still serving jail terms for the abduction and rape of a woman in Mt Maunganui in 1989.

Last year, a jury cleared the trio of 20 charges of sexual violation and indecent assault against Rotorua woman Louise Nicholas in 1986.

The jury of seven women and five men delivered its verdict on 31 March 2006 after three days of deliberations following a 2½-week trial at the High Court in Auckland.

read the dominion posts' take on the protests here and indymedia's here.

the bypass

It's where I live--a four-lane strip of asphalt that swings around two sides of the apartment I live in, which is pretty much right on the edge of downtown Wellington, an increasingly popular neighbor called Te Aro. It's been in the works since approximately 4000 B.C. and it has finally been more-or-less completed. Homes that once stood where the highway now sits were moved to nearby sites on Willis and Cuba Streets, or now are planted next to the bypass. It was supposed to knock off approximately 9 seconds off the travel time for commuters. Due to bottlenecking and generally poor traffic patterns, the changes have actually created a 20 minute delay for some commuters. Complaints have come pouring in that buses have been running late or not showing up at all.

My theory? That when they planned the highway extension way back when, there weren't nearly as many cars on the road--after all, the wheel had yet to be invented. Te Aro, Aro Valley, and Brooklyn (that's Brooklyn, Wellington and not New York) were sparsely populated by cuddly native trees and hobbits. and then did they revise their plans after the trees were replaced with roads, houses, and automobiles and the hobbits with hipsters? No, they did not. While their plan for a bypass might've worked back in the stone age, when there were no people here, it does not work now.

The problem with the bypass is that it does not in fact bypass anything. It passes through everything. That's being generous. Many would tell you that it does not allow you to pass anything at all. Let's as Mervbert here:

"Hi, Mervbert. What do you think of the new bypass?"

"I've been waiting at this light since last Thursday. I've run out of food, my boss called to fire me for not showing up this week. I've been eating cigarettes and lint for the past three days. Please help me."

"Here's a shiny nickel. It will do you no good in this godforsaken roadwork."

"God bless you, sir."

"Now go build a bicycle."

old news new views

The Wellington Ukelele Orchestra plays the hometown crowd like their musical instrument of choice.

if pizza could talk it would say, "turn it up!"

this pizza isn't round, i know. it's harder than it looks.











my largest pizza yet! and possibly my roundest too.
sadly i didn't get it all onto the baking stone and had to sandwich an edge

worked with the sourdough culture this time, though the dough was still pretty bland, next time i'll put more in. overall, the second batch made for an improved pizza. i worked in two sets. the first two pizzas i made the same day i doughized the water and flour. the second set was from the same dough, just aged in the fridge a couple of days. the theory was that it would have (a) more time to rise and (b) more time for the sourdough flavor to permeate the mixture. it did seem to help a little bit to age the dough, both in terms of rise and in terms of flavor (but only marginally). overall though, i think it may have been too wet a mixture for the heat i'm using (roughly 550F). even after a nine minute bake, the crust was still wet and pretty gummy. i think that if i make the dough much drier, it'll be hard to pull without breaking. the sauce this time i think was a bit better. added a ton more oregano and some baking soda as per (erica's recommendation) as well as some diced fresh tomato (supermarket off-the-vine variety... didn't have any roma). definitely an improvement, but still not up to par. next time i might just not cook the sauce beforehand... it could work... i guess only more pizza-making will tell...

smell-o-tron

they're doing some kind of maintenance on the sewage line across the street from the shop i work in. it a faint scent of urine and/or popcorn wafts through every so often. it's not as pleasant as the maple syrup smell that briefly permeated manhattan and not as unpleasant as the garbage odor everywhere in New York in the summer. I could do without the jackhammering though.

Colossal Squid!

It will eat your first born.

At least it would have if we hadn't killed it.

And it's coming to a museum near me.

...baked bads!

I got my first real paycheck yesterday and I celebrated by purchasing a pizza peel. And then further celebrated by making my first ever home baked pizzas. They were edible, but certainly didn't fall under the category of "good." Number one out of four came out more as a calzone than a pizza. the edge got stuck on the baking stone as I was shoving it in the oven and as I tried to push it in it just kind of flipped up on top of itself.

The recipe I used, by the way, was roughly this one posted by Adam Kuban.





















Current problems:
- Bland crust. I'm trying to remedy this. I have two plans. One might call it a two-pronged attack. (1) Use fresh yeast instead of instant dry yeast and (2) cultivate my own sourdough yeast culture. I seem to have succeeded in cultivating a sourdough. I just have no idea if it's going to be any good. It sure looks and smells pretty gross. I may use both of these in my next attempt.

- Too much pull-back when stretching the dough to make the base. Probably due to not enough hydration.

- The sauce is maybe a bit bitter and I think generally needs some more seasoning. Jeff Varasano rinses his tomatoes to rid them of the bitter flavoring that I assume is due partially to the tin the tomatoes are packaged in. At least, that's one theory Mr. Varasano posits.

Things that were alright: basil, cheese, olive oil... basically anything I didn't really have a hand in actually making. Though, even the mozzerella was a bit bland this time around.

The tentative plan is to try making one set of pizzas a week. Making dough is pretty time consuming though.

appalling

According to the BBC, the US has, in the past 4 years since the Iraq war started granted 463 people asylum as refugees. 463 out of an estimated 3.8 million people who have fled Iraq in that time period. Read about it here.

the great unknown

John Smythe says this about the fringe festival show I worked on...

OBJECTIFICATION SUBJECTIVELY REALISED IN EXCEPTIONAL WORK

Following her extraordinary Arctic Antarctic: a bi-polar play in last year's Fringe, Charlotte Simmonds has come up with another astonishing and challenging work about people who live on the edge: on the fringe.

The Story of Nohome Neville and Unwholesome Clare who Worked in the Kitchens and Smelt like a Dish evokes the relationship between a young homeless man (Alex Greig) and a café kitchen hand (Simmonds). They treat each other as objects while simultaneously commenting on their actions ...

continue reading



dark photos from the show...

Happy Batman Sticker Day!

Hello! You're probably wondering what Batman Sticker Day is and what this is all about. Quite simply, Batman Sticker Day is the action-packed alternative to Valentine's Day, where instead of celebrating flowers and hearts and the color pink (oh, okay, and the joy and beauty of love), you celebrate Batman and the fantabulousness that is the Dark Knight. Batman Sticker Day is great to celebrate as an alternative to Valentines Day, or simply in addition to it, if that's your bent. You see, Valentine's Day is great for those in a love situation, but for those who aren't it can range from, well, meaningless to angering and excruciating. Batman Sticker Day works whether you are in a love situation or not. If you are in love, what better way to surprise a significant other or crush than with Batman-y goodness? Batman is sleek, sophisticated, attractively mysterious, and all-in-all just plain cool. The people close to you are sure to realize that if you've sent them a Batman Sticker Day greeting, then you're just as cool as Batman. We guarantee. (I know that Batman is the way to my heart…) But Batman Sticker Day also works quite well if you're not in a love situation as it happens to feature a lot of dark clothing and ass-kicking. So next year, when you're making plans for February 14th, leave some room for Batman Sticker Day.

Batman Sticker Day Trivia:

- Batman Sticker Day was founded at a small, public high school in 1998. The original founders plastered their school halls with Batman stickers. All were apprehended sent to the office, and forced to remove the stickers, but the holiday lived (and lives) on…

- Batman Sticker Day is actually being celebrated for its tenth consecutive year by a growing minority of people along the east coast.

- Batman Sticker Day has been celebrated at Vassar for seven years now.

- Batman Sticker Day has also been celebrated by students at Brandeis, Cornell, and Ithaca College, and in such far away places as Scotland and New Zealand.

che bizarre

151 Cuba St. (a street apparently named after one
of the original ships that arrived in wellington)


Aptly named X Air competition


a photo from the pre-show set up from nohome neville (the fringe show i'm lighting)


and other scenes from wellington...

quantum leap frog

some yahoo claims to have created the first commercial quantum computer. rather, some yahoo canadians. read all about it.

i am job.

got provisionally hired by design zoo today. i'll be selling be cool-looking things. wednesday is my start date. and, of course, just after i accepted the job at design zoo, i got a call asking if i could start tomorrow at pandoro panetteria, which i no longer can. ideally, i'd work part time at both, but they're both looking for full time employees.

in other news, the superbowl is turning out to be a sloppy, but relatively entertaining game.

go colts!

caked

my apologies mr. blog. i have been neglecting you. i hope social services doesn't haul you off and put you on some dreadful foster server where i'll never find you again and you'll be forced to sit idly in some archive. poor mr. blog. i'll try and make it up to you this week.

i've moved into my new flat. the first night was marred by some kind of drunken cook-off at 5am. i found the kitchen caked in rice and broccoli the next morning. it looked like the culprit(s) were lucky to get out with their lives. since then things have been pretty much hunky-dory. i feel kind of like i've moved back into college dorms with my bedroom being home base and the hallway being tramped through at all hours. the coffee table where people often used to eat was crushed in a going away party for the flatmate i replaced, so there is currently no surface to set a plate on. on the bright side, i did watch the first 1/3 of the deer hunter with a flatmate last night. but it got late, so i skipped the rest of it. also there are showers in this residence, which there are not at 128.

the job search continues. had an interview/tour-of-the-premises at design zoo, a retail shop and gallery that sells design-y things. seemed to go okay, but who the hell knows how it'll turn out. i also received a message earlier today telling me that my magazine publishing experience was not up to snuff and so i was not offered a job as a part-time office manager at the offices of first floor publishing.

i attended my first rehearsal of no home neville, the show i'm lighting for the fringe fest here. it looks promising.

update shmupdate

things i'm doing:

1. writing an article on jewish comic creators for the jewish chronicle. don't know what angle i'm going to take yet. probably a jewish angle.

2. building a bike out of spare parts. kind of a frankenstein's monster right now. photos below.

3. lighting a show for the fringe festival. standard plot will be hung. i'll have to cue and run the board. may also need to hang a special or two. apparently i'll also have to run the sound board. no stage manager, which is bothersome.

4. volunteering at oblong, a non-profit internet cafe.

5. looking for a job. sadly none of the above things pay.

my head was filling with blood

back in wellington. back at 128. searching for a flat and a job. been chilling with an oregonian most of today. went tree climbing in the botanic gardens. ate a bagel. good times. brendan returns this evening.

back in auckland i went to the zealandia sculpture garden, which is actually about 45 minutes outside of town. the bruells were kind enough to drop me off there on their way up north, but i had to hitch a ride back to auckland from some of the other people in the tour group who were actually out on a bit of a day trip and we all ended up heading to a regional park with some lovely beaches and a cool old maori graveyard. from there my new traveling companions, three middle-aged kiwis--two carols and a philip, headed over to puhoi, where there was a nice cafe and cheese shop. eventually made it back to home base in time for dinner. on saturday anton invited me along to do some rock climbing, which turned out to be a bit of a nerve-wracking challenge and yet somehow fun. while attempting to descend after finally accomplishing a climb i managed to somehow flip myself upside down such that my feet were waving above my torso and my head was filling with blood. still managed to get down with the only scar being a bit of rope burn.

and now i'm off to go see heart of the game. sports movies rule.