Posted 28 February 2008 // Ross Somerville // 1 comment »
The parting gift (Moon Explorer Cupcake by Sam Broad)
Wailing and gnashing of teeth at Te Ara as another one gets away. We bid farewell to Helene Coulson, our lead designer, who joined us fresh out of Wanganui design school in 2003.
As well as designing leads, Helene’s masterminded the standards we set for maps, graphs and interactives. A large part of what makes the site special is due to her.
There are thousands of imaginatively thumbnailed images created under her eagle eye, and she really has been able to make something quite palatable out of some pretty unpromising raw material.
Shy Helene retiring
Of course she’s surrounded herself with a great team blah blah blah but, hey, this is Helene’s parade, and she is a bit special. And we mean that in the nicest possible way.
She also bakes the best cupcakes. And the macaroons are to die for.
Follow these links for some Helenean highlights:
Now that’s art – and who says she can’t be both beautiful and faithful?
Posted 25 February 2008 // Carl Walrond // No comments »
Eye of the blobfish
How does a blog get readers? Mmm, the trouble with good questions is there are no good answers.
If people land on a blog page through a search, then it must have something to do with the search engine’s ranking of the page. So if I linked to some of our most popular pages I should surge in hit rankings, right? The blobfish is one of the most viewed Te Ara pages. Why? God knows. Perhaps people see themselves or other people they know reflected in its bleary eyes and pallid complexion. I’ve looked worse on a Sunday morning coming down.
Another possible way to whore myself to hits is linking to sites that link to us, such as other (popular) blogs. After the West Coast’s uranium ice cream was picked up by the blog Ink from the squid in November 2007, that particular page’s ratings surged.
I’m not sure what other methods there are – I’ve always thought it’s pretty random what people latch onto. Maybe I could point to some of the least visited pages on Te Ara. I’m not sure which they are, as at the bottom of the pile the base gets pretty wide, but here are a few best guesses:
Funnily, I actually find some of those rather good – that’s probably my taste: somewhere near the end of the web’s long tail.
Posted 20 February 2008 // Basil Keane // No comments »
Wine rack
You may know that Smaug’s Cave can be found in Middle Earth. But did you know that Pooh Corner is just below Smaug’s Cave?
Michael Brewer, a caver rescued from the Middle Earth cave system on Tākaka Hill near Nelson, does. From where he was injured – about 350 metres below the surface – he was taken out through a series of tunnels, including Pooh Corner, The Rift, Smaug’s Hall and Wiggles Passage. This diagram shows the route they took to get him out.
The Tākaka Hill cave system also has the chillingly named Shortie’s Terror, and Starlight Cave, which the tourists who were recently rescued – after rock-climbing mishaps in Harwoods Hole – travelled through on their way back to the outside world.
Unusual names for these passages are the bedrock of Te Ara’s Caving entry. The Hinkle-Horn Honking Holes and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road are in Nettlebed Cave on Mt Arthur. Where the Wild Things Are and Wellington on a Bad Day are found in Bulmer Cavern on Mt Owen, as is Possumboot Shaft.
The Wine Rack, with cavers inserted as ‘bottles’, is shown above. It is in the Xanadu cave system at Bullock Creek, in Paparoa National Park.
Posted 18 February 2008 // Maggy Wassilieff // No comments »
Archey’s froglet
One of our native frogs has just topped a world listing, however, it’s not an achievement to celebrate.
Archey’s frog now has the dubious distinction of being the world’s most endangered amphibian.
Archey’s frog is listed as critically endangered on New Zealand’s threatened species list, but it’s very sobering to realise that the world’s leading frogologists (also known as herpetologists) consider it to be in a more desperate state than any other frog or newt in the world.
Our other three native frogs also make the top 100:
Predators like rats and the chytrid fungus have nearly wiped out these endemic frogs.
What chance have these frogs got? Are they on the slippery slope to extinction, as three other native species of frog were 1000 years or so ago? Well, within the limits of available funding and using the skills of the few frog experts we have in New Zealand, it looks like everything that can be done for these little critters is being tried.
2008 has been designated the Year of the Frog by the Amphibian Ark conservation campaign – let’s hope it’s a great one for our frogs and the folk working to save them.
Posted 13 February 2008 // Jock Phillips // No comments »
The perfumed garden of Ngāti Raukawa
Do Pākehā New Zealanders have any great love stories? That is the question that kept bugging me as I searched Te Ara for stories for Valentine’s Day.
There’s no question that for Māori, love really does make the world go round. The love between Papatūānuku and Ranginui explains the creation of the world itself. The geographical positioning of the North Island mountains are explained by the competing love of Tongariro and Taranaki for the beautiful mountain maiden Pīhanga. Similarly Mauao stands at the entrance to Tauranga Harbour because he lost out in his love for the beautiful Pūwhenua. He asked to be dragged to the ocean to drown his sorrows, but just as he reached the sea the dawn rose and he was caught there transfixed.
Many iwi also mark their origins by a great love story. These include:
- Ngāti Raukawa. The tribe got its name because Māhinaarangi successfully courted Tūrongo by using the attraction of a perfume made from the raukawa plant. So they called their first son, Raukawa.
- Ngāti Kahungunu and Ngāti Rongomaiwahine tell of the epic courting of Rongomaiwahine and Kahungunu. The tale involves champion pāua catching, surreptitious farting, and murder in the surf.
- Te Arawa have long told in oratory and song about the night swim of Hinemoa to her lover Tūtānekai on Mokoia Island, attracted there by the melodious sound of his flute. Without doubt this story became for Pākehā as well as Māori the country’s greatest Valentine tale. There were some eight film versions of the story made in the early 20th century.
So Māori have love stories in abundance. And it did not take me long to find stories about other ethnic groups in Te Ara. We record the wedding of the Lebanese couple Gabriel Farry and Jamelie Coory, and there are no less than four Indian weddings.
Even the natural world has its epic love stories. Take the romance of the paddle crab. Apparently male paddle crabs need to mate with a female who has recently moulted. So when they come across a female they pick her up and carry her around for days until eventually she moults. He then mates with her – for up to four days!
So Māori and Indians and paddle crabs have the Valentine spirit, but what of the Pākehā? Are we too buttoned down by our Anglo-Saxon heritage to get romantic? Where are our great love stories? It took me a long time to find one, and I spied it in the most unlikely of places – in the entry on the Wairarapa, not perhaps a place which most of us would associate with the throbbing of hearts. But the story is a good one.
The store in the story
It concerns Sarah Masters, daughter of the founder of Masterton, Joseph Masters, and the owner of the town’s first store. Sarah’s first husband died, and the widow went travelling to Wellington. On the way back over the Rimutaka track she was spotted by a labourer working on the road, Henry Bannister. For him it was love at first sight. He followed Sarah to Masterton, where he discovered another suitor on the scene. There was a fight, Henry’s leg was broken, and Sarah nursed Henry back to health. She was smitten, they married and eventually had 14 children. ‘Sarah and Henry’ may not quite have the ring of ‘Hinemoa and Tūtānekai’, but it’s the best we can do for a Pākehā Valentine’s tale.
