A CHALLENGE

For many months now, our flat Spaghetti Junction and our friends' flat Toulouse Crew have been casually battling for a broken kitchen bowl called The Prize. Our flats are very close to each other so each flat tries to take The Prize from the other and hold it for as long as possible. There are a few rules however:

1. The Prize must always be on display by the flat that is in possession of it (you can't hide it)

2. If you take The Prize but are caught with it whilst still on the property of the current host flat, you must return it.

(For the origins and history of The Prize, see here.)

as you can see spaghetti junction currently has The Prize

\

I say casually battling above because for the last few months there has been no incentive to steal The Prize other than for bragging rights and general flat pride. However, I have devised a new plan which will turn the game from a light-hearted romp to a frenetic high stakes competition. From the 1st of August (which is tomorrow), a tally will be kept of what flat holds The Prize at the strike of midnight each night. At the end of each month, the losing flat will have to provide a shared kai (dinner) for both flats at their own expense. Therefore there is a slight consequence to losing The Prize for a long period of time, yet the consequence isn't all that bad and actually fun for both flats.

Not all members of Toulouse Crew have accepted the terms of the arrangement (they are still open to editing if necessary) so this post is a great challenge to every inhabitant of Toulouse Crew. If Toulouse Crew don't accept then we can claim some sort of symbolic victory and feel happy/kinda disappointed.

Last week Ronan tried to steal The Prize from us. He parked his car in our driveway and put The Prize on his car's roof so that he could grab it as he left. But he hadn't anticipated that the vigilante Myself was on cooking/cleanup duty that night so I saw The Prize when I went outside to put the organics and recycling out and reclaimed it. Ronan is certainly going to have to up his game if he wants any chance of ultimate mana.

Ronan (pictured left) was here again tonight so spag junx was on high alert.
He has safely left now (without The Prize) so provided we can hold it for another 24 hours and 20 minutes WE WILL HAVE OUR FIRST POINT!!

Haiku Wharepaku #8 - 14

There have been many new haiku recently, so here's an update! Unfortunately I don't know who contributed all of the lines but I will update as I find out!

by Harvey

Scott
Regan
Regan

Regan
Scott
Woodham

the ever expanding circle

Pigeon Bay Comics

On Saturday eleven of us went for an overnight trip to a bach in Pigeon Bay owned by Sophie's family.  

amazing carving by one of Sophie's relatives!

preparing for circus

 Rosa Hughes Currie conceived a game that she named "Comic Souvlaki". It involves splitting a page into six comic panels, drawing the first panel yourself and then passing the page on so that a different person draws each subsequent panel, having seen the panels before it. We got some great results for our first attempt at the game; here are the best:

Dedicated to James Williams

Mid-Comic Souvlaki. Patrick is finally back from America!

 We also wrote many Poem Sandwiches but I haven't taken photos of them yet!

The view on the way back home

An army of SUVs followed us down the hill

programming is my art

One thing I am really good in is programming.
Painting isn't really the art I have special skills in. So I tried to combine these both.

I wrote a program that reads an image and convert it brightness into characters. That is the result so far:

the card i recently posted

when you zoom in, you see this picture only contains characters

There are still much more possibilities out there how I can make art with programs. I'm looking forward to create a application that paints a image with random stuff (e.g. look at a media player when you listen to a song -> visualizer).

painting like a child

I haven't had much time recently, because I have a lot of work to do. Today, I figured out, that I have free Internet in my hotel I'm staying at (what the hell did I do the last 3 days without it?). Now I have the possibilities to start something new. Well at least the ambition is there.
Does anyone have ideas for a short time project that is possible to do with a far far distance?
What about a drawing session? Each person that is involed is allowed to draw for half an hour till he send it to the next person. It's going in a circle till the picture is finished.

Here a recent picture I drew when I was a bit bored.

Just playing arround

Back in Ōtautahi

Ronan and I are back in Ōtautahi Christchurch after 5 days in Melbourne and 3 days in Sydney. Our Australia trip was exponentially awesome and we plan to write a few blog posts detailing this over the next few days/weeks!

\Unfortunately I got unwell (sore throat/asthma/aches/cough/temperature) in Sydney and was still overheating on the plane back home so my ears hurt a lot as we came in for landing. They still hadn't popped back to normal by the time I went to bed several hours after returning home so I wondered vaguely if I would ever regain normal hearing or instead remain locked within an underwater audio world.

luckily i did not remain a merman and my ears popped overnight

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my bedroom hadn't been obviously tampered with considering that Jocelyn and Sophie had borrowed my bed for several nights while I was away and I was expecting some sort of trolling from my friends/flatmates (Ronan wasn't quite so lucky however as Woodham and Damien rolled his socks together in mismatched pairs and turned all of his jackets inside out in his wardrobe). In saying this, I have only been back for a day so far so some insidious trick may be biding its time to reveal itself.

this was the biggest change i could notice in my room....i guess i'll be dancing now 

In our lounge there was a much more brilliant/terrifying surprise however:

bringing new meaning to the contemporary "deadline"

Two Saturdays ago myself, Scott, Matt and Tom did a six hour rogaine (think orienteering over hilly farmland) and Matt drove us there and back. Because of this, we all owe Matt $10 in petrol money. I had thought that I had already given Matt my contribution, but it seems that both Scott and I hadn't which led to him creating this threatening chart. Matt practically lives at our flat so had been adding a bullet for each day we default on our payments (each tiny bullet has a tiny piece of blu-tack on the back). As a result of this chart Scott and I now plan to deliberately withhold our payments until after the deadline so that we can experience whatever hell Matt has in store for our insolence. It is going to be great!

Yesterday was my first day back in Christchurch and unfortunately was not very productive because I had two loads of washing to do but stupidly tried to do them as one which broke the washing machine and took hours to fix. I also had to post a letter and spent ages skating around the post boxes around the neighbourhood only to find that they had recently been cleared for the day.

did get a sweet sunset though!

As a last resort I biked to the postshop on Riccarton Road, only to find that it had been gone since June the 19th in preparation for a shift of premises. So I biked back home and posted the letter at the post box 50m from our house (to be cleared tomorrow...) Semi-Success!

There was also a new restaurant open on Riccarton Road which was nice to see...It seems that some buildings are gradually pushing their way through the bureaucratic mess of crumbled city choked in red tape (For a fairly extensive personal write up on the aftermath of the February 2011 earthquake that hit Canterbury, see here)

some movement

Scott and Woodham had been painting since I'd been away as well which is great; our lounge table now has a tablecloth (sheet) to make it look ultra fancy and has a pretty legitimate looking painting setup now as well. 

Woodham finished this awesome political piece yesterday

The traffic light is a recent Woodham addition as well

Scott also did several cool paintings as well, but they're in his room which he will surely reveal on the blog soon enough.

While I was away the spag junx lounge acquired two new chairs and finally a couch too! Before I left for Australia Rosa's brilliant mother contacted me saying that her friend was giving away a couch for free so Woodham picked it up and got two chairs as well. All three items are comfy and have square arms ideal for extra seating/drink balancing, though we may attempt to spraypaint them to add some colour. 

josh demonstrates how easy it is to moe in one of our new chairs whilst damo blisses out on the couch and i sit in the old chair so it still feels appreciated

Last night Josh, Ronan and Damien went to a Ladyhawke gig at uni and came back triumphant. They had jumped a fence after the gig, met Ladyhawke herself, had a good chat and got photos with her. Ronan celebrated by putting on his newly purchased poncho and allowing Scott to persuade him into new and exciting food combinations.

Scott claimed to have a breakthrough in sandwich invention: cream cheese and apricot chutney. Ronan was initially hesitant but quickly ordered a second serving. 

Here is a Ladyhawke song in case you haven't heard her yet (NZ indie pop):

Josh and I both proudly rocked secondhand Swanndris and are planning to start a club/gang based on this concept

We also met Confused Skier Scott last night

Will see you soon with most likely some Australia photos! 

NJOY

NJOY

NJOY

Room

Hi there! I'm Rosa Hughes-Currie. I'm twenty one years old and might have gone to school with you. Or maybe not. I am studying for my PhD in physics. I like poetry and music and novels and bush walks and dogs. Actually, I like a lot of things, so I cut the list a bit short. I also really like making pals, especially with amazing people, which is lucky because I seem to meet a lot of them.

Anyway, here are some pictures of my room. Let me tell you about it! I live in a flat in Ilam with my pals Luke and Merryn. One is studying to be a chemistry teacher and one is studying psychology and is involved with a lot of theatre and musical productions at uni.

There is my large Collins dictionary which is used to settle vicious scrabble and boggle disputes. The dictionary is law, but it is so large it has pretty much every word you might think is maaaybe a word in it so if you are ever playing scrabble at my house I suggest you guess at some plausible but obscure words. There is a map of the world in the Mercator projection. this is actually one of my least favourite projections because it makes richer areas of the Earth, like Europe, seem to have much more land mass than it really does in comparison to places like Africa and South America. I prefer the Galls-Peters projection which keeps the land mass the same. I think the different ways you can map spheres onto flat surfaces is pretty interesting but I admit it's not for everyone.

There is the painting my pal James gave me for my birthday. There is a picture of Nick Cave in a very messy room which makes me feel better when my own room is messy. There is my duffel coat which my pal Sophie gave me because she was leaving the country. It is as close as you can get to being in bed wrapped in cosy duvets while being outside in the Christchurch winter. There are pictures of things that are good to think about: renewable energy, fusion reactors, comets, river deltas. There is a beautiful painting by Salvador Dali.

There is the zine I made and distributed to strangers. It is about a relationship I am still a bit cut up about. There is an envelope that held a "sorry you broke up" card from Sophie. There is a letter from Marissa. I really hate people I love being far away but I really like receiving mail!

There are some photos of beautiful parts of New Zealand from an old calendar, and one photo of Shanghai. There is a photograph of my mum when she was young and angry at the American military!

Okay, well, that's my room!

Melbourne in so far...

Hello friends and family, I have decided to do a quick update on our trip to Melbourne to confirm that i have made it here alive. We have only been here two days and it feels like we've already done so much, it's all pretty overwhelming, but in an great way. We have already taken 358 photos... (unfortunately it takes ages to upload these photos to the blog so have just selected a handful)


First off, the city is BIG. Fun wiki fact: The population of melbs is 4,137,432 (The whole of NZ is 4,430,400).

Upon arrival it was incredibly foggy  and it appeared that a lot of the sky scrapers were in the clouds.

This appeared to be a popular place for tourists to take photos... So we did.

The city looks awesome at night.

We have managed to jam-pack some culture into our short trip already including the state art gallery and library. I thoroughly enjoyed the library:

Outside the Victoria library.

The reading room - very cool!

On the 4th floor they had a museum-like exhibition called Mirror of the World: Books & Ideas (Mum you would love this). Upon arrival of the 6th floor you are greeted by Bill Shakespeare:

"All The Worlds A Stage"

The consumption of food has already in so far played a large role in our activities. I have decided I will do a Melbourne food blog on my arrival back to NZ dedicated to my good friend Nick "I love food" Baldwin (I intend to do a burger a day with a detailed review).  Here is a teaser of our first home made dinner here:

That's right - Skippy the Kangaroo in burger format (Tastes great!)

I was stoked when Rosa informed us that the consumption of the national icon of Australia and can be readily purchased at all local supermarkets. Kangaroo meat is great for many reasons including:

1) It's healthy! It has the heart foundation tick.
2) Is high in protein and low in fat.
3) Apparently by law it is illegal to farm roo's (?) so it is all free range/wild by default.
4) It tastes good - essentially a gamey beef (but not like venison, it's hard to describe).


For breakfast I shall be partaking in a fry up of eggs and "Kanga Bangas" - I can't wait.

There's so much things we want to share but must keep it short! We're off to see some nature today so will be heading out of the city and into the wilderness. It will be interesting to see how the landscapes compare to NZ.

Much Love,


Ronan