The Otago Peninsula has been a favourite for many of the international acts keen to explore Dunedin during their stay here.
The Camut Band was sent packing from Seal Point earlier this week by one large, over-friendly resident.
Michael Simic from Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen has also been down the Peninsula, er, singing to the seals.
"I love to sing to animals. I will croon for anyone, anywhere, anytime," the baritone known as "the Bull of the Balkans" told me in the Ballentine's Festival Club on Wednesday night.
"At one of our concerts this week, there was someone there with a seeing-eye dog. I thought that was really great.
"So I started singing to it. I leaned down and held his face and crooned to him. He just sat there looking at me with those big brown eyes."
Simic lives in Tasmania.
Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen hope to return to Otago to perform in the Wanaka Festival of Colour next April.
I had a coffee yesterday with Geoff Chapple, whose extraordinary play Hatch, or the Plight of the Penguins premiered in the Pioneer Women's Hall last night.
Chapple literally tripped over the story of the Southland entrepreneur who created an international uproar when he started rendering penguins for oil on Macquarie Island in the late 1800s, during a visit to the Southland Museum two years ago.
"When I was researching Hatch, I got a lot of the information for the play at the Hocken Library. They've got a lot of stuff there about Hatch," Chapple said.
"I even went to Hatch's grave in Hobart and told him what I was doing. I'd like to think he approves of the play."
Chapple is planning to get in touch with Hatch's descendants and have a tombstone placed at the grave, which has remained unmarked since the controversial entrepreneur died in 1928.
Curiously, most of the Otago Museum's king penguin specimens and data is believed to have come from Hatch's penguin operation in the Macquarie Island area in the 1880s and 1890s.
There was drama at St Paul's Cathedral yesterday when poet Alison Wong missed her midday start because of a delayed plane flight.
Writer Philip Temple gamely, and very entertainingly, filled in for 15 minutes while Wong was whisked in from the airport.
Festivities marking the 50th anniversary of the University of Otago Burns Fellowship start today.
Writer Kate Duignan will complete the week of Burns Experience talks at Dunedin Public Library at midday, followed by the unveiling of a plaque marking 50 years of the Burns Fellowship at 5.30pm.
A group photograph will also be taken of the 33 fellows who are in Dunedin for the festival.
