I haven’t yet figured out what this stylish monogram stands for on an older access cover I came across the other day.
The A is almost certainly Auckland. The T is probably Telephone but could be Telegraph. What little history I’ve found so far tells me the telegraph service was a thing long after the actual telegraph had fallen out of use. And the E is probably Electric.
I haven’t tried hard yet, but trying to do this lookup seems like a rare Google failure. Typing in Auckland Telephone and Electric, even in quotes, ONLY returns some current business listings. I have to believe that phrase exists elsewhere on the Internet. I presume Google is trying to help by only showing me what it thinks I want. I also presume I’ll get better results from a desktop browser, but I haven’t gone upstairs to check.
Maybe I can send Alphabet a message in Morse code (which was still possible in some parts of NZ into the 1990s) to to loosen up the mobile filters a little bit.
I played in the big NZ Open pétanque tournament this year with fellow Northcote Pétanque Club members John T and Christophe C. With something like $6,000 in prize money, it’s the biggest event in the pétanque calendar and attracts a number of overseas teams.
Trying to get all artsy with depth of field. Not a huge success.
We played nine games over two days, winning five to finish right in the middle of the pack. That’s a good result for us, as we haven’t played much as a team and there was a lot of really strong competition.
Lunch break. Tahitians broke into song.
It was great to see the international players at this event. The teams from Tahiti and New Caledonia play at an entirely different level… incredibly precise shooting, but also quite aggressive / risky.
On Sunday, the NPC partnership continues at the Auckland Regional Triples tournament… only a dozen or so teams, unfortunately. We should again be in the middle more or less… fingers crossed!
So… metal detecting. I’m hooked. And yes, there’s a fishhook in the picture.
Each session is a little bit different, but they all follow a pattern. I go to the beach and dig a lot of holes: being new I still don’t fully trust the machine to tell me what’s valuable and what isn’t. And even the not valuable stuff might be interesting.
I get plenty of trash, mostly related to drinking from cans and bottles. I get scrappable metal –copper, brass and lead – in the form of screws, nails, wires, fishing gear, etc. That goes into a bucket and eventually maybe I’ll have enough to take to the scrap man. I get recognizable manufactured items, or their carcasses: pocket knives, shell casings and even a .69 caliber musket ball, vape pens, cutlery, and so on. Mostly that’s just trash.
Then there’s coins. I’ve got identifiable coins going back to the early 1900s. NZ has changed its coinage several times, so a lot of what I’ve found isn’t spendable anymore (although as a very precocious young man explained to me after walking up and asking me a bunch of questions, you can still cash it in at the Reserve Bank). But I’ve got about $30 in spending money without really targeting places like playgrounds that are seen as the most lucrative. I was a kid coin collector and it’s still fun. Especially with the older coins… is a shilling worth more or less than a florin? And what year did George VI change from King and Emperor to plain old King?
I also found this guy, who looks very much like a coin from 355 AD minted in Carthage during the reign of Constantius II. Is it real? Who knows. Even if it is, it’s not worth a ton, so I’m unlikely to spend the time or money to have it authenticated. Fun to imagine how it might have gotten here.
And finally there’s the jewelry. I’ve found a dozen plus rings already. A few are gold and a few silver. Wow! And a couple of necklaces and pins… the list grows longer each time I go out.
Digging the stuff up is fun enough, but so is Googling around to try and identify what I’ve got. Today, for instance, I got a little badge, badly corroded but with a partially legible motto. Kids here wear a LOT of such badges on their school blazers. I typed in a couple of guesses at Latin words and hey presto, found a good picture and identification of where it came from.
I saw this nice vice at a garage sale the other week and couldn’t resist. It’s a Record 52 1/2, and was made in Sheffield England between about 1940 and 1960, according to this excellent article.
But I don’t have space for a proper workbench, so I ended up reselling it right away at a nice profit.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that’s a loveseat. That’s what I thought when I first bought it from an online ad.
But it’s actually a really long couch, in fact it’s a queen size sofa bed in between those wide arms.
Too big for the room it’s in, so we decided to sell it. Because it’s so big and heavy, I made really really sure to make the dimensions really really clear in my online listing. But the person who bought it didn’t read, and so decided against it after he got here. So we tried to donate to the Salvation Army, but when they got here, they said nope, too heavy to lift.
I guess I’ll relist it and see if we get another buyer. In the meantime … if you know anybody who wants a really comfy and solidly built white leather couch… send them my way.
Misty occasionally feels a compelling need to open up my dresser drawers and take a few things out.
But this was the first, and so far only, time she’s attacked the hall closet… cats are inscrutable.
When I saw this, the phrase “Fibber McGee’s closet” came immediately to mind. I kind of knew it was a bit from an old show in which the closet overflows, but after watching a clip on YouTube I can’t say I remember ever having seen it myself. Just one of those things that worms its way into your consciousness and into the language.
We had this Red Bull cliff diving competition… a modern incarnation of the traveling circus… come through Auckland a few weeks ago. I happened to be downtown when they were setting it up.
Over the weekend, many spectacular jumps were made. Then it was gone.
The hype around the event dresses it up as a sport rather than a show. There’s a season, and points, and judges, and so on. Certainly the divers are athletic and you can tell they work to perfect their craft. But I think I’m in the curmudgeon camp on this one… that’s not a sport! There was a time during my youth when I could have said something about the Olympics to bolster that argument, but no more… now most of the Olympic events seem to be Freestyle Something. Makes for great TikTok clips, I guess.
My work world is rife with the phrase “user-centred design” … old things don’t have enough of it, and new things probably need expensive tools/consultants to ensure they do it right. In some software development circles, it’s a cudgel every bit as heavy as phonics in education or the 5-4 offense in whatever sport cares about offense systems.
Mostly that’s marketing hooey. People build software that will sell, and you do that either with or without consulting end users. If your software doesn’t sell, either you won’t do it again, or the process was corrupt somehow and so it doesn’t matter.
But there’s a grain of value in the notion of user-centred design. This bathroom door at the hardware store is an example of where a little more design work would have been valuable. If the goal of that metal plate is so people will open the door by pushing it, that’s a FAIL.
I glanced at the ladies room door (but didn’t try to take a picture cause, y’know) and either ladies are better at figuring out what to do, or they’re not as tall.
One of the big ideas they try to give you in a liberal arts education is that there is a relatively small number of common themes that run through a lot —all — of what we as humans think about and write down. Indeed, you can boil your whole first year of Western Lit down to a listicle of universal themes, and many people have. (I guess one of the themes should be “reduction to thematic core”, right up there with “coming of age” and “crime and punishment”.)
When we saw Barbie last year, I thought it was a near-perfect articulation of its core self. Others may have a different name for that theme, but maybe I’ll just call it “Barbie”… maybe it’s an archetype that will last the ages. You could sum it up as “an impossibly perfect woman learns about herself, overcoming obstacles and making the world better, while also managing her hapless Ken who is unable to use his powers wisely.”
The next couple of movies we saw turned out to explore facets of the same theme. First, we saw Taylor Swift’s concert movie, which should really have been titled “Barbie Sings”. Then we saw a silly French movie called (in English) Jack Mimoun and the Secrets of Val Verde. Although focused more on a scruffy French Ken than on Barbie herself, and granted that its notion of “impossibly perfect” is also a bit scruffy compared to Margot Taylor Robbie Swift, it fits the archetype reasonably well anyway.
Then came Poor Things. I thought it was a fantastic movie. It seemed very different at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I think it’s just a Goth retelling of the Barbie story. And in fact, a shockingly close retelling. I’m now not sure if that makes me like it more or less.
I struggled at first to put Dream Scenario in the box. Another really good film, I thought. Barbie herself doesn’t make much of an appearance. But if you think of it as a Ken story, a cautionary tale about what happens when Ken is left to his own devices…
Yesterday we finally saw Oppenheimer. Incredible film. But now that I’ve got this Barbie and Ken thing in my mind… J Robert Oppenheimer is emotionally hapless and can’t manage his own godlike powers. If only he’d listened more to the Barbies in his life!
The scaffolding came down, the painters finished a couple of weeks ago, and now all the little touch-ups are done.
From this distance, the most obvious improvements are the skirting below the front porch, (which hadn’t been done since we installed it last year), the carport area being black instead of “treated lumber green” and the roof, which had a little rust and a fair amount of dirt/mold/lichen.
But up close, the old paint was quite worn and grubby. There were multiple colours on various parts of the house, and lots of cracks and gaps in the board and batten siding. It’s all caulked up now… we should be warmer and drier this winter ( and I don’t mean from climate change).
The paint color we chose is called “swans down”, and we intended it to be enigmatic. So far, that’s working well… in some light it’s almost a minty green, other times it just looks white or even grayish.
Our two workers were fine… one amazing and one less than, so it averaged out. The boss had injured his knee and was absent, and I think if he’d been there the other worker might’ve been a bit more diligent.
Last weekend we were so pleased to attend Richard and Heather’s wedding. The ceremony took place at the pétanque club… where they met and remain stalwarts … and they were surrounded by their families and many club members and players from around Auckland. For people of a certain age, they make an awfully cute couple, just as gaga about each other as any youngsters. The ceremony was followed up by a lovely meal and dancing.
We saw an online ad for a production of Into the Woods to be performed by a visiting Canadian repertory company somewhere across town.
It was great! We’d never seen the show before, and Talk is Free Theatre did a great job. I wasn’t familiar with the Corbin Estate Arts Centre venue, and/or I missed the part about bringing a picnic, so we were pretty hungry by the time it was over. But otherwise, a really fun night out. There were only about 30-40 people in the audience, so hopefully they do all right on their trip… but then again, maybe you don’t need a lot of money to escape the Canadian winter…
So I’m out on the beach the other day hunting for bottle caps and bits of foil with my metal detector when a guy walks up and starts talking to me. This happens, it turns out… people are interested in treasure hunting.
He explains that he lives in the house just over there (points at beachfront property just one or two steps below “mansion”). And he tells me that a lady, apparently visiting from Ireland, lost a ring the other day while getting her sunscreen on, just outside his house on the grass verge. He promised her that he would enlist the next detectorist that came by to try and find it.
[May I just say that one of the attractions of a beachfront house must surely be a cavalcade of comely visitors lathering up with sunscreen in your front garden]
And so, as a complete beginner, I began my first ring recovery mission.
And after only about 15 minutes of searching, I found the ring pictured above. It’s small and delicate. When I got it home I found markings inside “10k” and “Michael Hill”, the name of a big jewelry store chain.
Wow! My first ring ever, my first gold ever. It was very exciting. I went to the man’s door, but no answer, so I left my number and headed home.
He called, texts and WhatsApp messages were exchanged, and I got in touch with the lady who lost her ring.
This wasn’t hers!!
I went back the next day with a more experienced detectorist of my acquaintance, but neither of us found her missing Claddagh ring. I offered the ring I did find to the lady, but she graciously declined.
I’ve found a few more rings already since then, but no more gold (or silver).
What a fun little adventure! And just the kind of intermittent positive reinforcement that will keep me coming back for more!
Brattleboro Adventure – the Auckland Edition 