Monday 2 May 2016

Every so often, our apartment neighbours have discards of their furniture or belongings. Usually they place them down outside the main foyer with an eager note: “Free to a good home!” Sometimes, the object is snapped up – sometimes it languishes for a week or more!

Today, I was walking from Mt Cook to Adelaide Road down a set of steep steps. Right in the middle, there was a fridge. There was a post-it note attached: ‘Free Fridge – Please Take’. Hmmm – I not sure whether this person has the right idea….

 

Sunday 1 May 2016

A random blog in a whole set of random blogs …..

A starfish family at Oriental Bay, Wellington.

Apparently, marine scientists have undertaken the difficult task of replacing the beloved starfish’s common name with ‘sea star’ because, well, the starfish is not a fish. It’s an echinoderm, closely related to sea urchins and sand dollars.

Nah – it not the same!

There are some 2,000 species of ‘sea star’ (starfish) living in all the world. I have no idea of this starfish’s family name – any ideas? Certainly the black-backed seagulls were enjoying the feast. They didn’t have the grace of a gannet or even a shag. They ducked their heads below the water, wings flapping awkwardly and seized a starfish, protecting it from the birds closest to them.

When a starfish loses a limb they can regenerate. Hopefully, the bits that the seagulls dropped could be a future feast when fully-re-limbed!

Saturday 30 April 2016

Another item of extraordinary creativity ….

I love the chairs in the Wellington Central Public Library. They are quite funky. There is a lot of them too – about 50 or 60?  No plastic, stackable chairs for the clients of the library!

They are molded wooden chairs with leather seats and back-rest pillows. They are jointed at their spine – a graceful curve with three metal vertebra as joints. Each of the wings has a metal koru design. And they are comfortable to sit in – unless you have a very big book!

It reminds of the conflicting ideas of Plato and Aristole.

One of Plato’s most important ideas was the theory of archetypes, and that what we experience in our world is just an approximation. The most common example used is that of a chair. Plato said that when we call something a chair, we do so because it has “chairness”; that is, it calls to mind the ideal, archetypal form of a chair. We will never experience a true chair, only our own earthly approximations of a chair.

Aristotle thought differently. He said that if something is made of wood (or something else suitable for making a chair) and is in a shape such that it can be sat on, then it’s a chair. There are no archetypal forms; the particular is the thing of itself.

I not sure which one ‘wins’, but the Library’s chairs are satisfying – comfortwise and aesthetically.

Friday 29 April 2016

An aphorismic comment from one of the great thinkers in human society: Aristotle.

“We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle

Should I say more? I think not!

But, when we WANT to change, that is another matter.
Some people cut their hair when they have a radical change of their circumstances / environment / situation. Unfortunately, in my case, that is not possible! Maybe I have to ‘cut my hair’ figuratively, not literally – another physical dramatic change. Maybe a tattoo? Or shave my beard? Or wear a beret ALL the time.

Thankfully, my excellence is exemplary, and I don’t have to change anything (…ahem…)

Thursday 28 April 2016

I have avoided placing my blogs at strategic dates in the calendar – public or private dates, eg. Christmas, or Easter or familial birthdays…
But I cannot ignore the momentous occasion of the ANZAC 100th anniversary, and the events of the the wars that New Zealander’s have faced.

For example, I never realised that a memorial existed on the pavement on Whitmore Street, between the Rydges Hotel and the New Zealand Post. It is nestled between a carpark entrance and a pōhutukawa tree, just under a road sign. The road sign seemed to have more precedence. It was demanding  attention  – I guess it should? That what a road sign is for after all. But I was devastated about the story the memorial told.

I came across the memorial only because a ANZAC wreath was on the pavement. The memorial is a plain affair – basically a rusty wall with a narrative on the left hand side and a list of names on the right. In the centre, a elongated cross has four locatities inscribed with their longitude and latitude coordinates: London (51°30’31” N 0°09’49” W), Canberra (35°17’10” S 149°8’38” E), Wellington (41°19′ S 174°46′ E) and Betio (1°22’47” N 173°09’06” E).

(By the way, the wall is straight – the image is from a fish-eye, panorama shot.)
The narrative, presumably on the auspices of New Zealand Post, tells the tale more eloquently than I:

During the Second World War, New Zealand sent coastwatchers to many islands in the Pacific to watch for and report enemy ships and aircraft.

The men who staffed the 10 stations in the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati) were volunteers – young Post and Telegraph Department telegraphists with radio training. They were accompanied by unarmed soldiers from the Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force, sent to keep the coastwatchers company on what were very isolated islands.

Three days after the Japanese attacked Hawaii in December 1941, coastwatchers on the northern Gilbert Islands were captured and sent to prison in Japan. They returned to New Zealand after the war ended in 1945. The remaining coastwatchers were captured during September and October 1942 and imprisoned on Betio, Tarawa.

On October 1942, the USS Portland, on a lone raid mission, attacked Japanese ships at Tarawa. In retaliation, the Japanese executed all 22 prisoners – 17 New Zealand coastwatchers and soldiers along with five civilians. Another coastwatcher, the lone New Zealander on Ocean Island (Banaba) met his death there during the Japanese occupation of the island.

I never knew that.
I never heard of Betio and Tarawa and Banaba (they are northeast of the Solomon Islands and Nauru.) What a lonely and pointless death they suffered – I guess.  Maybe, no one death is pointless? Anyway, I want to acknowledge them.

Wednesday 27 April 2016

It’s been a while, so – I think  – a poem ….

West Wind

You are young.

So you know everything.

You leap into the boat and begin rowing.

But listen to me.

Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt,

I talk directly to your soul.

Listen to me.

Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart,

and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me.

There is life without love.

It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe.

It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied.

When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of water

as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks

when you hear that unmistakable pounding

when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement,

the long falls plunging and steaming

then row, row for your life

toward it.

by Mary Oliver

I think this poet is favouring the heart above the head, and I think that OK!

If a life exist without love, that is the saddest thing I can think of. The ‘unmistakable pounding’, the ’embattlement’ is the effort of seeking for love, seeking for the beloved – that is a commendable thing for a young person to do. For EVERYBODY to do.  Row against the tides and currents of adversity and conventional wisdom. Work, study, financial reward  – that is a nonsense without love.

Monday 25 April 2016

This blog has a story behind it.

When my wife and two best friends went to China in 1997, the first place we went to after Hong Kong was Wuzhou, the biggest snake repository in the world. We went out for dinner that night. It was remarkable having no English at all – no sign, ads, directions …  at least Hong Kong had SOME sign in English. (Actually, the only English characters I saw in these few days was a stand of apples in grocery store. They said: ‘Product of New Zealand’!)

The shocked waitress hightailed it, but another patron came over to us saying that he had travelled in the USA and he can translate things for us, if we wanted.
We picked our meals: three entrees from a sideboard, four mains, four desserts and four cans of drinks. The entree I selected was an interesting, gnarled root-like object. I was convinced that it was pickled ginseng roots. I prepared myself to enjoy this vegetable delicacy – but it was actually boiled and preserved chicken feet. Actually interesting – reminiscent of pig trotters! This image has been with us since that time.

So, when we pass the sculptures outside of the New Zealand on Air and the New Zealand Film Commission building on Ghuznee Street, we see them as enormous chicken’s feet!

Sunday 24 April 2016

You never know when wisdom arrives!

On a walk with my wife, we ambled up a suburban street.  At a disused shop I spied a plaque in the window frame. It said:

It is only with the heart that one can see clearly.
What is essential is invisible to the eye.

What a profound comment. I think the ‘heart’ is a euphemism of the ‘spirit’ – the counterpoint of the ‘head’. Certainly, the spiritual is usually invisible to the naked eye or the substance of material forms.

I think that is like music. Music reveals what words can not express, just like the spirit can reveal what is important to us.

Saturday 23 April 2016

Apparently the instigation of the ‘lane improvement’ project was Bond Street.

The Wellington City Council decided to make Bond Street a ‘dead end’ throughfare (that is an oxymoron, I know!)  It was a two lane street between Willis and Victoria Streets, but the turn was tricky and, with Lambton Quay and Manners Street, this stretch of road has more buses than other road in Wellington  – so, not safe.

Because it was a new dead-end street, they decided to ‘funk it up’. They painted the roads a crimson red, but they ‘cut out’ polka-dot circles and placed them on the footpath! Enormous flower pots decorated the pavement, and the ‘patio area’  created by the dead-end (actually a synthetic lawn) is now a sitting place for lunchgoers. There is a mini-container to store the lounging furniture and, in the container, a suspended chair delights those that can manage to climb into it! The container is decorated inside and out with scenes of NZ bush – a marketing ploy for Zealandia.

Excellent and a big plus for the WCC.

Unfortunately, some services -provider has dug up a section of the road and not replaced the paintwork. Maintenance?

Friday 22 April 2016

Another lane that the Wellington City Council have spruced is Masons Lane, a block away from Parliament between Lambton Quay and The Terrace.

The new paving, the vertical garden and the set of contemporary lights above the steps is a vast improvement of what used to be a dark, uninviting alleyway. The Clearly, the pigeon seems to agree.