| by Bel | 2.14pm NZ time |

Hotel room in Auckland. The sign was on some kind of enormous free-standing air conditioning unit hogging up a corner of the room. I was too scared to look at it, let alone do anything with the air intake.

Conference venue in Auckland.

Business card of taxi driver in Auckland.

(It says "Historian, Writer, Gourmet, Cook, Wine Connoisseur, Raconteur and Experienced Traveler at You Service". It does not mention that he is a taxi driver.)

And this, from Ashburton in Canterbury. We saw this woman drive in and "park" her car and I nearly fell over on the footpath laughing.

| Posted by Bel | The time is 4.03pm here in Wellington NZ |

Do you want your drink hot... or cold? Both?

Somebody at my work just couldn't decide. Or their thermos broke.

Or perhaps they don't quite have an understanding of the concept of a thermos. Or a fridge.

| Posted by Bel | The time is 3.01pm here in Wellington NZ |

Looks like Lou has not been the only one thinking about goals and achievements recently:

Sheesh, I hope you didn't have an up-coming post about deciding to become the best rapper of all time, Lou, because someone else has dibs on that!

Posted by Bel. The time is 1.45pm here in Wellington, NZ.

[via kottke]

And there's more!

That '70s Show.. Remington Steele... Desperate Housewives... Six Feet Under... 10 Things I Hate About You... Malcolm In The Middle... Cougar Town... Knight Rider...

Did the same props guy work on ALL these movies and TV shows??

Or. Or! Did each of these scenes take place... on... the same day!! (I would only really buy into this theory if there was a screen grab from Lost to fully complete the mindfuck.)

The time is 4.10pm here in Wellington, NZ.

Bel here. I'm currently tootling around with templates and settings, so apologies if you've stumble across the site and it looks horrid.

If you came here on purpose just to laugh, well that's just mean.

Normal transmission will resume shortly, please return your tray table to an upright position!

Posted by Bel. The time is 8:09am here in Wellington, NZ.

Spotted on our drive back through the central North Island on Sunday. This Sunday. Which was in the month of October, last time I checked. Supposedly springtime on this side of the world?!

Posted by Bel. The time is 9:15pm here in Wellington, NZ.

It has been an awkward week at the office. Literally one person has spoken to me directly about the fact that I've been told my department is being laid off. There has been lots of breezy "Good morning!!"s as people hurried past on seemingly urgent tasks, making not a lot of eye contact.

I don't blame them really, I mean, unemployment's like swine flu: the new plague. Unpleasant to dwell on and infectious by association. We've all heard about people being made redundant - maybe there's even someone in your family, you know, without a job - but who really wants to hang out in the corner of the office that has had the X metaphorically slashed across it?

Posted by Bel. The time is ***:**am/pm here in Wellington, NZ.

Look at this. I was on Twitter and saw that someone appeared to be following (I am going to treat all these social networking jargony terms as if there were real words, just as we eventually got used to talking about 'friendsing' people, despite how moronic that sounded at first. And still does, when you think about it. As I am now. Friendsing. Dear god. This is our gift to the future?).

Where was I?! Oh yeah, it appears all these cats are Twittering. WTF!? I'm finding it annoying enough to keep up with Twitter as it is, since no one really seems to be into it - and yet out there a bunch of people are pretending to be their cats on the internet?? Why? Why oh why.

However in cat-orientated interweb behaviour I completely approve, ROLcats cannily translates the Russian version of LOLcats back into English for us Western capitalist bastards. Thus:

I can see someone’s misplaced Ushanka?
Careless fool, winter’s bitter fury will surely smother their spirit.

And:

Do you mistake us for sincere?
We adorn ourselves thus to mock the capitalist sacrament of annual materials exchange…

And so on. Much other such Soviet hilarity to be had here: http://rolcats.com At least they're not trying to pretend the cats write it themselves.

Posted by Bel. The time is 1:45pm here in Wellington, NZ.
Yes, doofus. I figured we'd put that at the top, so anyone reading would straight away know which of us was ranting. I put some codey stuff in the template so if you write on the next line down it is not so ittybittycommittee styles. CODE BITCHES!! I CAN DOS SUM!

The flat we were going to take fell through. They wanted us to sign the lease and hand over $3000 tomorrow. Um, hello? There's this trendy new thing out - you may have heard of it: the 'recession'? Hmm? Well we have jumped right on the band wagon and ain't no way I'm pulling that much cash out of my ass.
Honestly, real estate people are such scummers.