Bulletpoints For Saturday 10 July 2010

A three-tonne, 3m.sculpture made from junk has been stolen, possibly for scrap. The Oblivion Xpress' built by Frank Womble (aka Frank Zimmerman), sat in Auckland's Aotea Square in the 1980s, but it went missing from a storage yard last month. While the sculpture has value as an art piece, it's made of pieces of junk, which themselves are not worth much. Personally, I find it extremely difficult to take seriously (1) an artist called "Womble", and (2) a pile of recycled junk being labelled as "art"!
An Herculean effort culminated this week in a new world record. Uawa FM radio announcer Nikora Curtis broadcast non-stop for 176½ hours, breaking the existing record of 175 hours. The amazing and exhausting effort was to raise money for the small radio station in Tolaga Bay, north of Gisborne...
Staying in the Hawkes Bay region, a squabble's broken out over the body of Moko, the friendly bottlenosed dolphin that cavorted with swimmers around Gisborne for several years, before heading north to the Bay of Plenty last summer. His remains were discovered this week – it's thought he may have been struck by a propeller in the busy Tauranga Harbour. Both regions want Moko's burial: the decision will be made by local maori elders...which means it may take years!
And still with news cetacean, a 4m.baby humpback whale believed to be just two days old, has been spotted in our waters for the first time. Department of Conservation (DOC) spotted it during an annual survey of whales migrating from Antarctic waters to the South Pacific. DOC says, for it to be born while the whales are still off NZ's east coast, indicates it was a premature birth. There have never been any reported sightings of humpback calves in NZ, even in the days of commercial whaling, which ended here in 1964.