EVOLUTION BY PHOTOSHOP

Armadillo Rhinoceros

Elephant Lizard

Sloth Eagle

Duck Horse

T-Rex Squirrel

Parrot Dog

Shark Horse

Owl Bull

Parrot Horse

 

DO DRUGS GO WITH THAT BICYCLE?

In Cuba Street, Wellington, back in the 90’s, they probably did

 

When a friend said she remembered Cuba Street as being “bohemian” in 97, 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.

Later I dug out my “Cuba Street 92” calendar from my treasure trove – all of these photos are from that calendar 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. Deranged 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 munter, 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

MY DECEMBER MONTHLY CHALLENGE

The start of a new month is always the best time to try a monthly challenge. And this is the last month of 2024. Next month will be the start of a new year, and I'm really not sure if I'm up for attempting this one as a new years resolution. To tell the truth I think I might be struggling with this after about two days. 

Last year I decided to quit all social media for a month and did actually manage to do that. Afterwards I went back to using Facebook, but permanently quit all the others, so that worked pretty well. 

For the past quarter of a century I've been digging into various rabbit holes online, and doing my best to convince as many people as possible that the narratives are all false. Not just the "mainstream" narratives, almost everything we are told, is fake. From both sides. Yes there are some bits of truth here and there, but they are like bait on a hook.

At this point I have an urge to rattle off a bunch of examples. But for once I won't do that, because this is my monthly challenge. I'm going to stop posting about all the fake narratives this month and leave that stuff for other people to talk about. This is a multi level game, and we are all being played, including me...

I came up with an acronym, PINE: Positive, Inspiring, Necessary, Entertaining - and for the rest of this month I'm going to aim to make all my online posting (and thinking too, as much as possible) PINE. 

Let's see how this goes!

LINUX NEEDS MORE FILE BROWSERS

 Don't panic, I'm only kidding. Linux doesn't really need any more file browsers, it already has at least 32. What it needs are some more that are as good as the one that comes standard on Windows.

 This seems to be an issue that Linux developers have been refusing to address for decades. As a Windows user switching to Linux I think it is probably the biggest issue that sends so many Microsoft refugees straight back to Windows. Most Linux file browsers suck...

This is the process I went through looking for a good file browser when I was trying out some different Linux distros. Articles like this one proudly proclaim "there are 32 options for Linux file browsers" but I actually tried out about half of them (the others were clearly not what I was looking for), and there was only one I really liked - NEMO (Which is the default file browser on both Linux Mint & Linux Zorin). 

 

 

There was only one other file browser I liked (Dolphin, the default file browser on KDE distros), but even that had an issue I would need to sort out before using it (it doesn't show my PCloud drive), and I thought most of the others were hopeless. 

 

 

In fact there were only about half a dozen that I even thought were as good as the default file browser on Windows XP (Yes, XP from 2001!) but as with many things, this elephant in the Linux room seems to go unnoticed by most geeks.

 

The fact that it was Linux Mint that developed the Nemo file browser, thereby fixing the glaring hole that has made Linux all but unusable for non geeks for decades, was the final evidence that convinced me Mint is the best Linux distro.

The Nemo file browser is the main program that enabled me to switch to using Linux. Without this I'd be completely lost.

RANDOM IMAGES #47