Not a typo, but the MV Doulos, currently berthed at Queen’s Wharf. It’s an interesting ship — built in 1914 as a steam cargo ship in Providence, RI, its first run was carrying onions from New York to Galveston, TX. After shipping along the east coast for a while, it did some time ferrying pilgrims to Rome, and then immigrants from Italy to Australia. Then came a stint as a luxury passenger liner. Currently, it’s a traveling missionary bookshop, with volunteers from all over the world.

I normally avoid Christian missionaries (or any other flavor, for that matter) like a plague of boils, but I couldn’t resist the lure of a book shop.

It has, as you might expect, racks upon racks of what I suppose I would describe as modern vanilla Protestant fiction and non-fiction. Lots of self-help-ish life affirmingness. Plenty of bibles, mostly the New International Version, in various sizes, bindings, translations (they must shift their stock around by port, because I saw a Tongan bible, but not, say, a German one), and spins (bibles “for men”, bibles “for women”, lots of bibles and bible excerpts for kids, daily message bibles, gardening bibles, whatever). I admit I was tempted by the Manga Bible. (On the cover, Manga Jesus: “Does he come to save the world — or destroy it?“)

Half the shop is childrens books, and not just churchy ones — all kinds, including some “name brands” like Disney, Dora the Explorer, etc. Lots of Narnia stuff, as you might imagine, and classics like Winnie the Pooh (all the Milne stuff, not just the Disney version). There were fairy tale collections, the Hardy Boys books… I spotted two copies of the Hildebrandt illustrated Robin Hood on special (the dust jackets were badly munged) for NZ$8.

They also have educational stuff — the NCEA standard textbooks, atlases, dictionaries, some language learning books and CDs, Hawking’s On the Shoulders of Giants (illustrated !). There were books on, say, dinosaurs (including childrens books) that did NOT insist they were put in the rock by God as a test of faith. (The “defense of Creationism” books were over in the “Bible Reference” section, with the concordances and the interpretive stuff). I went ahead and picked up a concordance, because I didn’t actually have one (Cruden’s, because it was cheap. I may have to get me a Young’s Analytical at some point…).

The balance is quite a lot of the inoffensive subset of the sort books you’d see on the sales tables at Whitcouls or Borders — heaps of cookbooks, gardening books, books on trains, horses, pets, quote-a-day, Sudoku, blank books, notecards, etc.

The prices are actually quite reasonable. All the books are tagged in “Dolous units”, so that when they reach a port, they can just post up charts showing how to convert Dolous units to whatever the local currency is — and since the prices are all rounded to the nearest 100, it’s pretty straightforward. 100 units = NZ$4.00. Most of the books looked to be under $20, and there were quite a lot that were 100 or 200 units.

I took my book over to the checkout, which was being run by a young Mongolian woman named Oogi (pronouned roughly “Oggie”). I correctly guessed from her name (most of which showed on the register screen) that she was Mongolian, and asked her to pronounce it for me. It was, alas, a tangle of consonants and not-quite-schwas that would have taken me a bit more time to get right than I had in the checkout line. She smiled at me a little wistfully and said that since no one can say it, she just goes by Oogi.

Ah well. I may go back today for another look at a coffee table book on the Sahara, and to see if they dredged up anything interesting in the nightly restock from the hold.

While Stephen was in Auckland, I was tasked with managing our very first public appearance as Alpacas Rampant, at the Lifestyle Farmers Field Days in Otaki: lots of stalls aimed at people with small rural blocks, not unlike ourselves. People who might just be interested in buying some of our lovely young boys (and doesn’t that sound dodgy?).

We’d spent the previous week getting stuff ready: me wrangling printers for business cards, stud info sheets, and banners; Stephen painting and assembling the khana for the alpaca pen (”khana” being sort of collapsible trellis, a smaller version of the walls for our ger/yurt).

Kerry and Jenny volunteered to help me out on the day. Friday night, I scrambled to get a barebones version of the website up an running (looks bad to hand out business cards with an address that doesn’t go anywhere) while they and Beth & Geoff played Robo Rally. K&J stayed overnight, so we could all be ready to go at stupid-o’clock Saturday morning.

My victory conditions for the day:
- get the six boys we were planning to take up there loaded safely
- get the ute started
- get up there and set up on time
- not get drenched and miserable and hypothermic in the crap weather
- get packed up and home safely
Bonus: maybe chat to some people and hand out business cards and stuff

All were achieved, with the unexpected plus that the weather turned out to be actually sunny and warm, and the additional bonus of maybe finding an inexpensive carder to send some of our fleeces to. Jenny and Kerry were muy fabulous — Jenny always managed to be the extra pair of hands wherever the extra pair of hands was needed, and Kerry has been doing ‘paca stuff with us for so long that she could run the stand herself if I had to go to the loo. W00t! There was a bit of a glitch when I got the ute stuck going up the driveway when we finally got home, but with Jenny and Kerry telling me which way to steer, we managed to get it unstuck *and* I did a hill-start and got it up into the sideyard instead of having to back all the way down the drive at leave it at the bottom for Stephen to deal with. Go me. Go us!

And the final surprise for the evening: one of the agisted girls had her cria while we were gone. Go her for getting it done without us (not that they usually need us fretting over them, mind).

Note, re: the new website. I’ve tested this out in Firefox and IE6. If you have the time to kick the tires in another browser, let me know how it goes. I had to teach myself CSS to get it going, and I’m still working out some kinks. :^p

Two unrelated things I felt like posting about.

One, as you all probably know, crows are smart. If you read BoingBoing, you’ll probably have heard about the guy that built a vending machine for crows. Here’s a video of the ten minute little talk he gave about it. Some of the anecdotes in the comments below are nifty, too. The part that I find compelling, though, is the on-the-face-of-it quite simple notion that you don’t have to domesticate a species, or even really communicate with it very well, to work with it productively.

Two, I’m looking for more authors to read (preferably ones my local library has. In the process of searching, I stumbled across Gnooks. It’s an adaptive learning widget that shows you authors that other people who like the authors you like also like. (I’ll give you a second or two to parse that). There are similar tools for music and movies. You can either type in a single name, in which case it will spit out a little cloud of “you might also like” names (with the closer ones supposedly being more likely matches to your tastes), or you can type in three names and it will pop up a single suggestion. At this point, you can tell it if you agree, if you think it’s completely off base, or if you’ve never read its suggested author. That’s how it learns.

I typed in “Robin Hobb”, “Bernard Cornwell”, and “Richard Adams” (in part just to be difficult). It suggested Sharon Penman, an author of thick historical fictions. The Central Library had some of her stuff, so I got out The Sunne in Splendour, a War of the Roses era piece featuring Edward the IV, Richard the III, etc. It’s a bit dry so far — I blame Richard Adams — but we’ll see how it goes.

Thursday was fun. In the evening we first attended a regular Science Talk at Te Papa, led by Steve O’Shea to give us his sleep-deprived rambling descriptions of the squid dissection and what they had learned, followed by questions from the audience. The whole squid-team was there, so sometimes questions got answered by different experts. Very fun. I think the organizers were very surprised by the size and enthusiasm of the audience.

Afterwards we headed over to the Paramount theater for the yearly “Heavenly Burlesque” show. There was a variety of entertainments on offer. The MC was a competent stage magician, and his patter throughout the show was quite amusing. There was a fan dance, a couple of spastic modern dances, a weird 50’s-housewife-geek-show which involved nails and screwdrivers in the sinus cavities, and there were the acrobats. The most striking were two very strong men who did a variety of rope and trapeze acts. They were very good, and funny comedians too!

The only down side was that the show started at 9:30, so we were not home until midnight. My biological clock is still playing catch up!

Oh, and in the required alpaca-related-news, one of Bruce’s girls (Cotton) unpacked Friday morning. A little white girl (which makes 3-for3 girls for him, lucky guy!) Friday was a lovely day- until the afternoon when the clouds rolled in, the southerly started to howl, and the temperature plunged. So all of Bruce’s animals spent the night in the shed (so we could sleep, knowing the baby was safe, dry and warm). To prevent Cotton from being remated we are moving her in with our girls tomorrow (as this is a bad time of year to be dropping cria). We will put her back in with Zeus to be mated in the Spring.

Okay, not feeling the Open Source love here. Yes, I know it’s free, and therefore I don’t really have any right to bitch. Yes, I know that 90% of my problem is that I learned graphics manipulation from the Adobe Hegemony, and that my notion of “intuitive interface” is therefore biased by my early training. Yes, there are some things that Inkscape and GIMP actually do much better than their Adobe counterparts.

AND YET. Dammit, when I use a selection tool, like, say, the marquee or the lasso selector, I would expect that it would, oh, select something. As in, whatever tool you use next — like the Move tool, for instance — would operate on the selection, and not the whole freaking layer. Or just the selection frame itself. No, you haven’t made a selection, you’ve made a selection frame. What can you do with it ? Not a damned thing. Is there a point ? Not that I can tell. RARGH.

Stupid, simple things that take all of a minute and a half to do when one knows what one is doing are taking upwards of an hour, as I stagger my way through the menus like a drunken moose, hoping to accidentally crash into some method of doing whatever it is I need done. (Why, no, the documentation does not help. The documentation consists of: “Need to select something ? Use one of our selection tools !”)

*headdesk*

Also hating the Adobe Hegemony for taking the classic Calvin $60,000.00 glass of lemonade route and pricing themselves out of reach of normal people.

Every now and then, you stumble upon a whole new world. I was in the magazine shop on Midland Park the other day and thumbed through a copy of HauteDoll Magazine. I’m not surprised at the existence of super-expensive boutique dolls — I’ve seen some pretty flash custom Barbies on eBay after all — but some of the hyper-realistic face sculpts/paint jobs, the uber-high-end manga/anime dolls, and the sometimes blatant fetishism in some of the ad copy are just things I’ve never really seen before. This doll has her own MySpace page, and wears outfits more expensive than mine. Ack.

The way some of the photoshoots are done, with lighting, props and backgrounds carefully composed to make the dolls look as much like real models as possible (and considering how plastic some live human models look, it’s not that far to stretch) remind me of some of the “show photos” I’ve seen of Breyer model horses — another world I’ve had glimpses of on eBay.

Anyway, interesting hobbies to visit. No particular desire to live there.

Before the drama on Sunday afternoon became the news, I was planning on posting on the film we matched Saturday night. Black Sheep, a film that could only be made in NZ. And I am surprised it hadn’t been made yet. What is it? Well, it is your standard zombie-apocalypse, except with sheep.

Hordes of flesh-eating, genetically modified, zombie sheep. It was hilarious. You might be able to find it in your video store, as it did get a world-wide release. It does have gore, of the classic spurting bad-zombie film variety. I am also amused that it was shot entirely in the Wellington region. “Miles from nowhere” is actually Terawhiti station behind Makara, about a 20 minute drive from downtown. And we are pretty sure that the house they sheltered in was the same as Peter Jackson used in Bad Taste. But of course, there are only so many houses back in Makara.

So, if you are looking for a uniquely NZ film, add Black Sheep to the queue.

Luck arrived this week in the form of free tickets. Tam won two at work, and then our friend Michail provided two more free comp-tickets he had scored through his work (a transport company that among other things moves around sets for opera companies).

So Saturday afternoon we were off to the radio Tarana-sponsored Bollywood Dance competition, as part of the Diwali (festival of lights) celebrations. That afternoon was 3 hours of dancing from the intermediate and advanced groups. We were entertained b y quality dance routines to seriously adrenaline-pumping Bollywood music (left my ears ringing for an hour afterwards). The hall was large (TSB areana), and quite full. I think we had most of the south-asian community of Wellington in there with us. We disagreed with the judges over the first place and runner up in the advanced section. Having watched (and participated in) plenty of dance performances in the last 6 years, I have strong opinions on the matter now, and the runner-up’s were robbed. They had a high and consistent skill level, a kick-ass choreography, and most importanly- they could all perform.

I also had to respect the group from Upper Hutt college. That group was mainly kiwis, where most of the troups were exclusively south-asian in descent. And when asked about their preparations for the show, they admitted they only took one week for everything- choreography, costumes and practice. I hope they keep at it, as given a bit more time and experience they could be quite good.

After a quick dinner (Indian food, of course!), it was off to the Opera. Turandot, the last opera of Puccini. Executions, insane oriental potentates, a suicide, all you could ever want from the opera. The stage directiion was wacky, with only one person in period costume, but it worked for me. Ping, Pang, and Pong in their color-ccoded fur-trimmed “pimp jackets” were a hoot. The mug-shots of all the people executed (a list that gets added to during the performance) was also very nice.

So after all that culture on Saturday, what do we do Sunday? Clip alpaca toenails. But that was a worthy job, and entertaining in its own right. We also took more photos for the coming web page. Today is a beautiful fine and sunny day, the first in about a month. Hopefully that warm weather will get the grass growing, we have the moisture, now we need the sun.

Welcome to the new blog site! I’ve found a new host (WebBase), installed new, functional blog software (WordPress), and moved all of the old posts, photos and comments over from the old site. Go me ! I’m the man !

Eventually, I’ll find a functional theme (the graphics and layout and stuff) that I like, and maybe some time after that I’ll get into PHP and make my own theme, but until then we’re stuck with this sort of boring default. Hey, at least it *works*.

BONUS: if you’re one of the poor schmucks that got caught up in the spam filters at the old place, and haven’t been able to comment, you should be good to go here. It might give you a message “waiting for moderation” or some such the first time you comment, but once Stephen and I tick the box to let you through, you shouldn’t have any troubles with it.

Wheee !

I went to the opera. Does that make me cultured ? Our friend Michail works for a shipping company, & when his company gets hired to pack and move opera sets around the country, they get comp tickets (they also get comp tix for the rugby occasionally, but strangely enough the truckies don’t fight so fiercely over the opera tickets). So we went to see “Lucia di Lammermoor” last night (yes, that would be a 19th C Italian opera based on Sir Walter Scott’s Bride of Lammermuir). I did not wear the $5 silver mink stole that I got at the recycling shop by the southern landfill, although it did cross my mind. I *did*, however, pause in Arty Bee’s while I was waiting for the rest of our party, so I ended up going to the opera toting a tacky plastic shopping back of books. Ah, well.

The St. James is all Baroque inside; every square foot of the auditorium is junked up with carved vines & scrollwork, with Green Men and cherubs and karyatid columns between the boxes. Michail and I reckon that it’s nice to have a lot of stuff to look at and talk about while you’re waiting for the show to start — much nicer than sleek modern venues. People are always fun to look at, too, of course. From the blue-haired old ladies who *did* decide to wear their minks to Goth girls in brightly colored J-Pop dreds. Stephen and I saw the Chinese Acrobats at the St. James a couple years ago, and I am still vaguely appalled that you can buy ice cream at the intermission and take it to your seat.

The opera was properly bloody and tragic, and although individual scenes sometimes seemed to last for days (”Would you two please finish saying goodbye, already ?”), the opera as a whole went remarkably quick. I don’t know much from opera, but the Russian chick playing Lucia was pretty freakin’ impressive. Bonus: not only could she sing really well, she was actually a decent actor as well, AND she’s young and pretty — she actually looked like she *could* be someone’s little sister (er, someone’s tragically mad little sister, in a knee-length poet/night-shirt with one sleeve dipped in blood. The blue gown with the mysteriously water-stained hem was nice, but the disheveled murderess look is pretty memorable). Unfortunately, the guy playing her lover Edgardo was a bit of a goob. He chewed the scenery and kept doing these unattractive things with his face, and I spent a good portion of the scenes he was in sort of mentally holding my thumb over him and imagining someone more charismatic. The manipulative brother was good, and it was fun seeing one of my co-workers from Waiata as one of his retainers. For some reason I really liked the woman who played the maid/nurse. She only had, like, twelve lines to sing, but she was in a lot of the scenes as sort of set dressing, and she told a good bit of the story with just her own body language.

The set was great, and it combined with the lighting really well to get across “moody Scotland”, with something of a hint of rainy urban WWII, if you can picture that at all. Michail informs me that it took two trucks to haul *just* the something-like-a-hundred red stag racks they had decorating the Ravenswood manor hall. The costuming was good, too. Frock coats for Africa. Edgardo totally did not deserve that duster he had on (and didn’t know how to wear it anyway, to judge by the way he kept fiddling with the collar and batting the skirts around). Don’t ask me how you sing opera in a corset — presumably that problem was solved a hundred years ago.

Interestingly, I remember during the scene where Lucia goes birko (as you do in an opera) thinking that all the soprano frills and doo-dads (Wikipedia informs me the technical term is “coloratura”) reminded me of the opera piece in Fifth Element. Apparently it *was* the opera piece in Fifth Element. So it’s not that all opera sounds alike, so much as it’s that the *same* opera sounds alike. Wikipedia says “the mad scene” from Lucia was also used in the first episode of Gankutsuou, so when we re-watch that, I’ll have to listen for it. And for those of you who, like me, have childhood memories of the book (and Chuck Jones cartoon) “A Cricket in Times Square”, it’s supposedly the tenor part to the “Lucia Sextet” that Chester is chirping at the end, when he stops traffic in the Square. I don’t own the book anymore, and I haven’t seen the cartoon since rocks were soft, so I can’t verify that.

Anyway, Stephen’s in Dunedin, and I went to the opera. Woo !

PS: Michail, if you guys want to see Turandot in October, count me in !