My Sunday exploration has revealed that Karori has two supermarkets and not much else.
2:01 PM Jul 26th

I love that Color Me Badd’s Wikipedia entry has a subsection titled “Downhill Slide“.
1:38 PM Jul 27th

A #nzff poster taunts me with its image of the good-times train while instead I wait for the crap-times bus.
5:39 PM Jul 27th

I made a Mad Men cartoon likeness of myself: http://bit.ly/ojc28
12:13 AM Jul 29th

In lieu of sitting down and actually properly writing something (which would take a bit of effort), I redesigned my blog.

Well, I switched WordPress themes from K2 to Atahualpa. K2 was OK, but I got a bit sick of how the text was justified and, well, I felt like a change. Atahualpa is nice. It does what I want it to do, and now I can finally start mucking around with WP widgets. It takes a bit of self-restraint to not fill up all the sidebars with stuff. Oh hey, stop looking over there – keep your eyes in the middle!

In lieu of putting some time aside and actually properly writing something, I took some photos:

I take lots of photos but I don’t get around to uploading them much due to my iBook being almost ready to donate to a technology museum as an example of how computers were in the olden days.

But eventually I get motivated enough to set aside an hour or so and get the photos off my camera, tagged and uploaded.

See the last photo – the one of the train? That’s a drawing of one of the new Matangi trains that’ll be replacing Wellington’s urban trains next year.

As previously mentioned, Matangi was also the name of the little village I grew up in, south-east of Hamilton. But now seeing this train with Matangi in its destination board makes me feel a little bit ill.

It’s as if one day I could get on the train, expecting it to take me to the Hutt, but actually its destination would be Matangi, and I’d end up getting off at the siding by the old dairy factory:

View Larger Map

Also, see how it’s quite a nice sunny day in the Google Streetview pic but yet it looks really bleak and desolate? That was my childhood. I hope this helps explain my my issue with the trains being called Matangi.

In lieu of actually properly writing something, I renamed my website. Sort of.

My site has been called Robyn’s Secret Passage since I bought secret-passage.com in 1998 (You can read more on that history here.)

I thought it was a perfectly nice name, but I eventually got sick of the “Hur hur hur O RLY” response when I’d first tell someone what it was.

I’d switched to robyngallagher.com but my site was still titled Robyn’s Secret Passage. Then a couple of weeks ago, I decided to ditch that name and just name the site after myself.

Even though it just required changing text in a box in WordPress, I found it a strangely emotional experience. It took a while before I could click the “Save Changes” button.

I also ditched the tagline “The coolness that is Robyn”. That one originates from something that OG journal girl Olivia wrote in her online journal about a party she’d held and how “the coolness that is Dean and Robyn” came. (Jesus, that was too long ago.)

From memory, I originally used it ironically, but 10 years later it’s tired and faded and what it says doesn’t match me any more. Like a pair of those bumster jeans from the late ’90s.

In lieu of actually properly writing something, I’ve sort of tricked myself into actually properly writing something.

My top three things:

1. Revisting the Tjibaou Centre.
2. The coconut yoghurt I found at the supermarche.
3. Discovering the ruins of the old Club Med.

I’ll write more later, but until then, please entertain yourself with a selection of photos:

(Or if you’re feeling a bit masochistic, you could look at all 184 photos I took there.)

A few days ago I was listening to my iPod on shuffle on the way home from work when Stevie Wonder’s “Master Blaster (Jammin’)” came on. It’s a cool song. It was released in 1980 and is a feel-good tribute to Bob Marley, with the classic forget-your-worries-and-have-a-good-time theme.

But then the second verse came along and Stevie sang of one of his reasons to be jammin’:

Peace has come to Zimbabwe
Third World’s right on the one
Now’s the time for celebration
‘Cause we’ve only just begun

Oh no.

It’s hard to hear that lyric now without feeling sad. Back when that song was written, Zimbabwe had just won independence from the British and Mugabe was going to usher in a new era of strength, hope and, uh, peace.

Things weren’t supposed to go in totally the opposite direction.

Plastic Fan-frickin’-tastic

I was in at Salvation Army shop in Naenae, when I found a tape called “We Carry The Cup” – the official EP soundtrack for the 1986 America’s Cup campaign. It features the #1 smash hit song “Sailing Away”, which is probably the worst song ever in the history of anything ever. Ever.

I realised that someone born after, say, 1983, would have no memory of the magical time prior to 1986 when New Zealanders did not generally care about boat racing. They probably have no memory of cassette tapes either.

I showed various people the tape and one of the first things a lot of them said was, “Do you have tape player?” Yeah, I have a double cassette deck in my stereo (high-speed dubbing!). As totally obvious as it is, I didn’t realise that ordinary stereos don’t have tape players any more. They’re about as archaic now as a cathode-ray television. My stereo seems so old I feel like it should have doily on top of it.

Photos? Oh, why not!

Jesus of Naenae was such a staunch Housemartins fan, he shaved a cross into the side of his head.

“It’s a giant moth – a moth as big as Godzilla. If only there was some word we could use that would evoke both the scary sci-fi of a Godzilla-like creature and general mothiness. Oh, I know – Mothzilla!!!!”

What, you mean your local copy shop doesn’t do laminating? Get with it!

Wellington stuff:

Wellington graffiti:

The park was full of people and entertainment, but in a way there was nothing special. A lot of it is the same sort of stuff that is found at other festivals and market days.

My favourite thing was finding a stall that had a number of people I’d seen at the last Craftwerk I went to, including the DIY badge-making lady. Among the badge-making materials was a copy of the Alphabetical Spelling List book, a classic New Zealand primary school textbook. In that, next to the entry for “no” was a bracketed example that provided me with an ideal badge material:

I had a nice time. It was a lovely sunny day, and the park was full of happy people, from Grey Lynn teen gangs to young mothers to dudes with Movember moustaches to little kids running around.

More photos can be found by clicking on this lady: