Thursday, 21 November 2024
THE HIKOI BOLLOCKS
Tuesday, 19 November 2024
DO DRUGS GO WITH THAT BICYCLE?
BACK IN THE 90’S WE WERE A BIT MORE HARDCORE
When a friend said she remembered Cuba Street, Wellington as being “bohemian” in 97, and I laughed and said that by 97 it had already become a safe space for office dwellers to visit and pretend they were living dangerously.
And then I dug out my “Cuba Street 92” calendar from my treasure trove – all of these photos are from that and were taken in 91. When we opened our bike shop “Cycle Services” in 1991, Cuba Street was not just where you went for a grunty coffee or some second hand stuff, it was also the first place to go to for drugs and prostitutes.
Now I’ll go on about drugs a bit here. I was new to all this scene, and to me “drugs” basically meant smoking some pot or maybe spotting some oil.
As a cyclist I was pretty familiar with ephedrine which was actually still legal in NZ in 91 and was very popular, used as a sort of everyday speed. When it was outlawed it just went underground like all the other drugs.
Most people use coffee for the same purpose now. And coffee in Cuba St was said to be some of the strongest in the world.
The first time I walked in on a drug deal my eyes nearly popped out of my head. A respectable looking man in a suit with a large brief case had it open and was discussing bulk pricing with a couple of our bike shop customers on the huge range of drugs that he had samples of.
Apart from pot, the popular one in Wellington in those days was acid. But you could buy anything you wanted really, including heroin. I was told the cocaine was a rip off in NZ, and that was why nobody here was much into it.
What Wellington was infamous for in 91 was glue sniffers. And sometimes Cuba St was like zombie dawn of the dead. Bloody glue sniffers everywhere, staggering about, holding their plastic bags and drooling.
Some of the people on the street were fairly tough, and just up the road was the BP’s (Black Power) who ran a tinny house ($20 foil wrapped servings of pretty average pot). But you didn’t take photos of the BP’s, you casually crossed the road when you saw them coming, so there are no photos of them here!
This was in the days before digital cameras, and mobile phones had only just come out. They cost $3000 and were the size of a brick. This next photo was taken in front of the second hand book shop next door to us (note our Cycles Peloton sign in the top left). And the poor guy in the photo was stabbed to death a few months later…
Our neighbours on the other side were Midnight Espresso, the legendary coffee shop, and this is a young Geoff Marsland (Havana Coffee Works) in our doorway
Although I did have a camera, I didn’t take many photos because buying film and developing it was expensive. Part of why I started taking thousands of photos when I got my first digital camera a decade later is because I knew just what I had missed getting photos of back in the early 90’s. And some of them would have been quite something.
I guess this is all looks like a window back to an old forgotten time now, but as a young and impressionable goober, this was the environment that shaped me. And even now I’m partly still a guy from old time Cuba St, rather than an over the hill computer addict.
When I hear millennials getting offended by lame bullshit I wish I could push a button and transplant them to Cuba Street in 91. It was an amazing place, but some of them might just have gotten their whingeing faggy heads smacked in…
Those were awesome times back in the days before computers.
And getting “offended” wasn’t that viable an option
All photos taken by Barry Thomas
Monday, 18 November 2024
WAS DAVID BOWIE AN INVERT?
Sunday, 17 November 2024
Saturday, 16 November 2024
TIME TRAVEL
If
you could time travel which year would you choose to live in? We can’t
impartially assess this present time (2024), but it all feels like a
massive psyop to me – I wouldn’t rather live in 1914, but I sometimes think I’d
rather live in 1994. Yet we have no benefit of hindsight, & things
may yet turn out OK.
Friday, 15 November 2024
COURTNEY PLACE WELLINGTON
Three historic photos of Courtney Place Wellington NZ
Thursday, 14 November 2024
THE MARTIAN ANAL DIVISION
In times
gone by, we used to read fiction to explore imaginary realities. Now we
live in a reality so bizarre even Philip K Dick probably would have
needed to up his drug intake to deal with it...
“They live in tiny spaceships which they insert into their subjects anal passages. From deep within human anuses they emit their instructions, which their followers hear as a voice in their anus telling them what to do. These people are known as the Martian Anal Division (MAD).
One of the key symptoms of people who are controlled by Martians up their arses is that they not only want to do what the Martians tell them to, but that they also want to force everyone else to do it as well. They often revert to the phrase “for the greater good”, and want to bring in “laws” in the hope that they can force other people to “conform” to the wishes of the voices in their arses.
In an attempt to get a better handle on controlling the non-MAD population, they introduce social engineering such as water fluoridation (make the population sick and obedient), vaccinations (make them sick and infertile), fear of “terrorism” (submit to more laws and surveillance), fear of viruses, fear of various “global apocalypses” (submit to more restrictions and taxes), and wars (the ultimate control system)
They also direct everyone with an anal implant to watch more TV, where they can obsess over misinformation called “news”, listen to angry black men making guttural rhyming noises about hoes, yos, and bros, become jealous over the size of the breast implants of women who sing the things that the voices in their arses are saying, and enjoy watching stocky men in tight shorts battling each other over leather balls.
Luckily, for all their cunning, the Martians have some serious flaws in their evil plan. When they insert their micro spacecraft into their victim’s anal passages, it tends to block their elimination of waste matter. So their victims slowly fill up with shit.
Already pressurized to bursting point, when they are confronted by people who refuse to conform, they start to turn purple and run around in circles making squawking noises like a chicken having an epileptic fit. Sometimes the backed up gasses start to escape from their arse like a loud rumbling fart, while sometimes they just blow up like an American false flag terrorists bomb”
Wednesday, 13 November 2024
I'VE ADDED AN ABOUT PAGE TO THIS BLOG
And it even includes a contact email!
Using the internet while displaying any sort of real identity online is a bit like walking down the street stark naked. I'd rather be completely anon, but I've been online for more than a quarter of a century and have revealed more than I can ever really take back now. But that is not to say I have to make things easy for "them" (the "government", or the deep state, or spammers, or stalkers) to track me down.
Until
last week this blog has never had any sort of contact details on it,
and I was going to leave it that way. But one of the other blogs I
follow had added a link to my old www.frot.co.nz blog,
which didn't work because of a typo. Being a bit of a completionist I
wanted to let them know, but it was difficult to find a contact email on
their blog. Eventually I did find a contact and emailed them.
Engagement used to be a big part of blogging, and back when I was posting on blockchains like Steemit, Hive (PeakD), Blurt, Flote, and Bastyon, I used to sometimes get hundreds of comments and I tried to reply to most of them. These days I have all comments turned off and pretty much just ignore everyone. But the experience of trying to find a contact email on someone elses's blog made me grudgingly admit that it might be a good thing to include a one on this blog.
I've had a lot of problems with spam in the past so don't want to include an actual link, but I figure if I just put an image of an email address that comes to me (but not my daily driver) that should do the job. So here it is - just type out the address in this image:
Tuesday, 12 November 2024
Monday, 11 November 2024
SESSION vs SIGNAL
06b2451d1bc973a57021bf76f353306c7sfc7ec891eb29ef4997bd82473300e00b