Postcards from Palmengrad

While stumbling about this town today, I saw ...

1. An elderly woman in an electric wheelchair in a giveaway Tui sombrero.
2. 4 middle-eastern gentlemen smoking from an elaborate hookah in their garage.

wellington snaps

A woman taking a break from busking on her guitar picks up a real estate give away and flicks through it. People continue to drop coins in her guitar case.

A child, perhaps four, shouts 'I love you' at people from her carseat.

An Asian family passes me on the corner, where I am smoking. They give me filthy looks as if I am selling myself.

I liked the orchardist though

My eyesight is dimming.
I see only six of the seven sisters.
Tonight I left a party to be alone
to imagine being among a crowd.

names of the Mayans

So Mayans got to have pretty cool names, which is does not really make up for the necessity of perforating your ears, tongue, genitals using a stingray spine (Steve Irwin! Crikey!). Lots of the names seem to combine animals and a number

You get one to three glyphs for your name. Slot one seems to be for qualifiers and adjectival forms of verbs, such as great or a number, 18 for example or smoking. The second seems to be an animal or god slot (possibly the same thing) and ritual/war objects. The third slot appears to be for bodyparts including those of animals or animals. Here are some of the top ten kings' names:
Great Jaguar Paw
Smoking Frog
18 Rabbit
Shield-Jaguar
Smoking Squirrel
Lady Beastie
Lady White-Quetzal
If someone was smart they would make a 'your Mayan name' generator just like your porn name generator and etc

visual ethnography

To

was nice and sunny and the locals got up early to mow their buildings.

Birds in the park gave us a twirl in their new summer finery.

the wow box

So last weekend I stayed down in Pito-One or Petone as it is now called. It used to be the saddest piece of real estate in the Hutt Valley despite having the foreshore. Until the closure of the meatworks in the nineties raw meaty sewerage was dumped straight in the harbour. Now it has been gentrified and feels like a little seaside town right round the corner from the Welly. My friend M with amazing foresight picked up a worker's cottage a (skipping) stone's throw from the beach for about ten bucks in the eighties. He has witness the urban renewal in the village and has participated by adding a modernist extension to the his humble abode.

Mark has an awful lot of stuff though. He is a collector which is something that I admire, but it also makes me a little claustrophobic. It won't be long until the giant modernist space is completely full.

I found love ...

... but it wasn't for me

The balloon and the note are bilingual, with Arabic on the reverse ... I'm guessing the message is the same though.