Boy Stuff

These pics are from an open day at the Christchurch Airport maintenace centre a couple years back. The top one is a Globemaster C17, used by the American Antartic people for mass cargo deliveries. There are so many offensive and disgusting things about this plane. The obsence amount of money to manufacture it that could go to much better causes, its part of the global military industrial complex. I'm pretty sure it's using huge amounts of natural resourses to produce, run and maintain it. Just the name Globemaster is so assertive and macho. Despite all this it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand to attention when the enourmous engines are throttled up full tilt. The whole plane is shuddering, the tarmac is shuddering, your spleen is shuddering. It's terrifyingly, repulsively awesome.
The other pic is the undercarrage of a passenger Boeing 777. The precision, design and materials used fasinates me. How everthing doesn't come flying to bits when the plane slams onto the runway at hundereds of kilometers per hour, leaves me breathless.

Quake sound track

Once the rumbling and smashing sound of a large quake stops, other sounds fill the air. Car alarms, cell phone ring tones, emergency vehicle alarms, helicopters, gurgling liquefaction, burglar alarms beeping- altering you that the power is off and then planes flying over.
This image is of an Airforce Orion that was sweeping over the city within a couple of hours of the Feb 22 quake. It has a very distinitive sound generated by huge propelers, rumoured to be the second largest props on any aircraft.

Loo Views

Portable toilets are now another part of the new landscape. Here are a couple of seldom seen interior pics, one looking up, the other looking down.
My apologies to the squemish.
The blue and white pic was taken with flash, not my usual choice of light. In this case there wasn't much choice, it was very dark down there and getting a tripod setup in there would be a real challenge, and could lead to some spectators.

Quake Protection

This lovely cabbage tree is on Wakefield Ave in Sumner. There are two containers on top of each other, strecting for about a kilometer, keeping the rocks from the cliffs adjacent from doing more destruction. I'm finding more Cabbage Trees are being either exposed or framed by the new landscape.
I'm a sucker for Cabbage Trees, I'm drawn to their wild unkempt appearence, and slightly mad shape.They also have an amazing rejuvinating ability, they can be chopped or burnet to the ground, and within weeks are sprouting new leaves. Many tidy, fussy types hate them because they gift their leaves to the ground very genoursly. Many councils banned the leaves from being put in the organics recycling bin, because the mulchers they use are rotary, and jamb up very easily. I feel this tree represents a lot of the qualities I see in many great New Zealand citizens. If ever there was going to be a national tree, my vote goes to the humble Cabbage Tree.

New Vista

The picture with the Cabbage Tree was taken in 2008 and was part of an exhibition I had at the CoCA gallery entitled 'Still Lives'. As part of the blurb I wrote something along the lines of: trees don't move about much except for swaying in the wind or shaking in an earthquake. Another coincidence, the exhibition closed on Feb 22, two years to the day before the quake that trashed a big chunk of Christchurch. The other photo was taken a few months ago.
Sadly the CoCA Gallery has now closed indefinably, due to no one coming into the central City