I like how this thrift store thinks… the wetsuits are on the “Men’s Business Attire” rack.

Does it ever get old? I intend to find out.

After swimming the other weekend I decided to explore a beach with the metal detector that we swim past all the time but that I’d never walked on.

The mural behind me used to be a caricature/portrait of Jacinda Ardern, and changed to the Irish flag during the Rugby World Cup last year.

Just around the corner from the mural is this grotto, which looked like some kind of movie set. It’s just a short walk along the rocky shoreline but felt very secluded and secret. I bet a lot of local teenagers have stories to tell about that time they sneaked over there and …

But unfortunately for me, not as many of them dropped coins and earrings as I’d hoped, so the metal detecting was a bust. I’ve tried a few less popular beaches in the hope that other detectorists might have left them untouched, but so far all the good stuff I’ve found has been right out in the open.

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.

More beach sunrise shots, because I can.

These two pictures were taken just a few minutes apart and just a few metres apart. I didn’t do anything other than point and shoot.

The difference in the way the light is captured shows how much software is inside my phone’s camera features.

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.

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.

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!

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!