s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

Wellington, you know, it’s not that big. Stephen and I ran into Kiran Shah, the Actual Size Frodo in LotR, as he was leaving our apartment building last night. Dunno what he was doing there. The woman he was with mentioned that they’d “just moved back in”, but that Kiran was leaving for London tomorrow. So that’s it for our unexpected brush with celebrity. In his exit interview running in the papers this morning, he says he really likes NZ, because everyone’s friendly, but no one mobs him. Except at that Armageddon con Stephen and I went to. Apparently he’d gone to meet his fellow Star Wars alums (he was, naturally, one of the Ewoks) and the fans got a bit overwhelming.

In a different sort of celebrity news, I found out the reason I haven’t been seeing the Blanket Man in Courtenay Place for a while is that he’d been arrested for… well, pretty much for being the Blanket Man: smoking marijuana, loitering, hanging out naked. He says the naked thing is part of his worship of Ra, but since one of the times he was caught doing it was at 2AM, the judge didn’t buy it.

In other news, Stephen and I (and a passle of my coworkers) are going to see Wellington get pasted by Otago tonight. In a gale force Northerly. At least there is some symmetry, since it was a Southerly last time.

Speaking of which, I’m used to seeing little suns and little rainclouds and dark little clounds with lightning coming out of them on my weathermaps, but this was a new one:

It means, roughly, “For God’s sake ! Strap yourselves down !!” The guy giving the weather report on the news last night described towns “getting hit by the Rain Train”, and as they were panning away from the newsdesk at the end of the show, you could see in the background a blown-out umbrella that some off-camera wit was pulling across the stage by a string. Hee.