Schadenfreude

This is very unkind, but I can't resist. For the one-day sculpture event, academic artist Maddie Leach based her project on a long-range weather forecast (which are of course notoriously unreliable). From the one-day sculpture website, we have:

On 28th August 2008, a storm is predicted over the city of Wellington. Using a long-range weather forecasting system developed by mathematician Ken Ring, Maddie Leach has pinpointed a winter’s day in which downpours, hail, wind and rain are expected to descend upon the North Island’s most southerly city. A perigee is the moment at which the moon is at its closest to the earth each month and, according to Ring, it is around this time that significant changes in weather patterns occur.

Anticipation for the storm is built by the artist through a series of newspaper forecasts which appear prior to the notable day of the project. On the day itself we are encouraged to seek out a boatshed at Breaker Bay, set at the mouth of the harbour, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, from which to watch in anticipation over the Cook Strait over a period of 24 hours.

If you open up the front page of today's paper, you get this particularly nice juxtaposition:

The newspaper article next to Maddie Leach's ad reads in part:

In a rotten winter that has seen Wellington drenched in almost twice the average rainfall, sun-starved residents can look to Thursdays for a reprieve.

Niwa statistics confirm the outlook for Thursdays is fine - or at least better, as it has proved to be the least likely day for rain.