Liblets February 1999

What’s On

DISPLAYSDISPLAYSDISPLAYSDISPLAYS

Ground Floor

1 - 13 Volunteer Service Abroad 1 - 5 Lifelink 8 - 28 Design Studio 15 - 21 Rotorua Mountain Bike Club 22 - 28 New Zealand Red Cross

LIBRARY HOURS

The Library will be closed on Saturday 6th February, Waitangi Day. It will re-open

on Monday 8th February at 9.30 a.m.

Please phone 3484177 to ask about renewing

your books etc.

What’s Hot !!

Hot Pick of the Month

Alan Titchmarsh is well-known in gardening circles.

He uses this experience in his first novel to create Rob

MacGregor, who takes over as the replacement

presenter for a stuck-in-a-rut gardening programme on

TV.

But having a gardener who is also a sex symbol may

be a blessing for the TV bosses but it is a curse for

many others.

When his father’s livelihood is threatened, is it time to

leave the glamour behind?

Mr

MacGregor

by Alan

Titchmarsh

Rotorua Public Library Te Whare o te Maatauranga

Private Bag 3029 Library Hours:

Rotorua Mon.-Fri. 9:30am-8pm

New Zealand Sat. 10am-12:30pm

Ph. (07) 3484177 Fax (07) 3489686

What’s Up ?

Kia Ora from the Don Stafford Room

We all know that the Treaty of Waitangi was

signed in 1840 and that Waitangi Day is on

the 6th of February (the national holiday that

gets the best weather) but when did we start

commemorating it? (Disagreeing about it

started right at the beginning, of course, and

has continued ever since.) Until 1960 the

Treaty was regarded by many, especially non-

Maori, as being only of symbolic and historical

interest.

The Waitangi Day Act of 1960 recognised the

importance of February 6th and set it apart as a

national day of thanksgiving in

commemoration of the Treaty. It became a

national holiday in 1973 and was renamed

New Zealand Day but changed back to

Waitangi Day in 1976 (the holiday bit stayed).

There have been many attempts to change it to

the nearest Monday but so far these have been

opposed on the grounds that this would detract

from the significance of the date. Its

importance has been highlighted in recent

years by protests at the official celebrations to

draw attention to past injustices to Maori and

to demand redress.

Kids’ Corner

Hope you all had a great Christmas and a happy holiday and are

enjoying being back at school or pre-school.

We had 30 enthusiastic kids join us for 4 mornings during January

and they worked very hard at tasks such as shelving, stamping,

labelling, dusting and bagging books. The staff and Phyl & Jack

Sturmfels (Friends of the Library volunteers) enjoyed their time

working with this great bunch.

If you would like to be involved in our holiday programmes - we

let you know what’s coming up in Liblets, in the Library , local

newspapers and on radio .

Two new books we recommend:

Granny goes to Bethlehem by Kathy Weston & Amelia Rosato.

- A delightful story with a different perspective on the nativity.

Polar, the Titanic Bear by Daisy Corning Stone Spedden. A sad

true story of a child’s teddy and its owner.

Toddler Time resumes this month.

Thursdays 4th,11th,18th,,25th at 1.30 pm

Tuesdays 9th, 16th,23rd at 10.30 am.

A time of songs, activities and fun for the littlies!

Rotorua Community Toy Library Committee meeting 11th February, 7.30 pm. at Homestead

McDonalds, Fairy Springs Road. All interested persons are

welcome to attend.

Meetings held the 2nd Thursday of each month

COUNTDOWN TO THE NEW MILLENNIUM

You may have noticed the large wall display downstairs in the Library which we using as a sort of

countdown calendar to the end of the year. Each month a summary of events associated with the

Library will be done as we mark the time until this significant date. Further, an item in each month’s “Liblets” this year will treat aspects of the subject in

a more general way.

January’s offering is based on the writing of Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent U.S. writer on science topics who has planned this book “Questioning the

millennium : a rationalist’s guide to a precisely arbitrary countdown” for more than 50 years when as

a child of 8 in 1950, he became conscious of the passing of the half-century and looked forward to the time when he was likely to live through a far more

trumpeted event - the turn of the millennium.

Mr Gould predicts an ‘orgy’ of millennium books and articles and in this he has certainly been right.

His own work focuses on addressing three aspects or questions central to the concept of this finite period –

calendrics, astronomy, and history and examines each one in terms of what, when, and why.

First, what is the millennium after all – and how did the name for a future thousand-year reign of Christ

get transferred to the passage of a secular period of a thousand years in current human history?

Second, when does the millennium begin – January 1 2000 or 2001?; some interesting issues are explored

here, and third why are we so fascinated with “even” transitions such as the upcoming millennium

whenever it occurs?

005.369

WIN

005.369

ACC 006.6869

FUL

005.369

WOR

005.369

EXC

006.6869

DAV