Two events I’ve been privy to this week, David Sington’s 2007 film “In the Shadow of the Moon,” and the arrival of a quiet and dignified letter in the “eye-of-the-fish” post, have surprisingly eery resonances. Sington’s film presents both an intimate and public view of the astronauts who have landed on the moon. Its cosmic scale blasts so many of our earthly concerns into insignificance or smaller.
The epistle, despairing of a seemingly trival matter of re-arranging furniture, at first glance presents its concerns at a microcosmic scale. Yet its modus operandi is equally complex. It raises wider issues of sustainability with…
read the full entryAn interesting link to our site today, and a classification I didn’t know we had – it seems that Eye of the Fish has been ranked at 51st in the latest nz political blogosphere rankings on the tumeke! website. Initially I was excited: and then confused, and then: moderately proud. Isn’t that a sort of back-handed compliment like “fourth most popular folk comedy duo“? Of course, if we had the kind of cult following that Bret and Jemaine do, we’d be well stoked. Still, while we’re a fair bit away from position #1 : David Farrar’s rightwing Kiwiblog with 7000 daily visitors (never…
read the full entryIts that time again – time for another round in the turtle-paced tennis match that is the public consultation process. This time the ball is back in our court, taking the form of a new draft plan for the Ngauranga-Airport transport corridor.
The plan is quick to address what is perhaps the most topical of the proposed options: light rail. To summarise, the report concludes that light rail is “exciting” and “potentially a very effective public transport solution,” but that none of the tested options were found to be feasible within the next deacde. However a “detailed scheme assesment” is to…
read the full entryWellington is a windy place, we’ll accept that. Except this year, when it has been unusually calm, but we’re not complaining! And New Zealand is a green, clean, and (almost) energy sustainable country. For years we have got by on nothing but hydro-electric and geo-thermal power – we’re the envy of the world, in many ways.
Lately however we’ve ben profligate in our energy use, and have been burning coal, oil, and gas. The mighty Maui oil and gas field has been depleted in an amazingly short 15 years or so – if we had used it carefully we could have…
read the full entryWellington’s apartment / property market continues on at (almost) full pace. Perhaps there is no reason for Kiwis to be so pessimistic in their outlook after all – there may be a global credit crunch, but evidently Wellington is doing just fine. OK, so we all have heard that the Auckland apartment market has tanked in a big way, but then again: if you allow hectares of bland unexciting crap to be built, you should expect to reap what you sow. However, Wellington seems to have better architects, better control over what the end result looks like, better planned developments –…
read the full entry