Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
This is pretty appeeling (sic – pun intended), though I’d like to see it incorporate the inevitable browning that goes on once the skin comes off a banana.
If there’s one truth I’ve learned in my time on the Internet it’s that people will be at least 25% meaner behind a keyboard. Unless they put their real name to what they’re writing, but even then they’re probably 10% meaner because so much of communication occurs outside the words we use.
But this is just hilarious.
David Foster Wallace is considered by many to be one of the written voices of his generation. His essays regularly (and posthumously) appear in lists of the best essays ever written. He wrote some books. Including a book called Infinite Jest.
“This needs some serious work… your writing is not formal… it is written in informal language that imitates the qualities commonly believed to be characteristic of formal language.
I recommend checking out “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk and E.B White… that should help to clear a few things up.”
And another:
“You know your story needs more work, so you don’t need anyone to tell you what you already know.”
And another…
“No discernible voice/tone in this writing. Rambling descriptions. I, frankly, do not care where each and every person is seated. I don’t care what shoe you’re wearing.
If you take out all the unnecessary details, you’d be left with about seven words.”
Something similar happened on Flickr, when a photo by the pioneer of photo-journalism, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was put up in a “Deleteme” thread – where “good photographers” comment on the work of budding photographers by voting to save or delete the photo.
In this case this photo was roundly condemned, and advice was distributed to the photographer (for some reason this photo has been flagged as inappropriate and you have to log in to Flickr to see the thread)…
Here’s the photo.
Some of the comments:
“hard to tell at this size but is everything meant to be moving in this shot, all seems blurred”
“so small
so blurry
to better show a sense of movement SOMETHING has to be in sharp focus”
“This looks contrived, which is not a bad thing. If this is a planned shot, it just didn’t come out right. If you can round up Mario, I would do it again. This time put the camera on a tripod and use the smallest aperture possible to get the best DoF. What I would hope for is that the railings are sharp and that mario on the bike shows a blur. Must have the foreground sharp, though. Without that, the image will never fly.”
There are a couple of things going on in these situations for me – one is the idea that an artist’s name or reputation is enough to turn something substandard into something that people will describe as a “masterpiece,” while the other is that there’s a big difference between being educated and believing you’re educated – all these “experts” on both forums are assessing these works based solely on their own personal preferences developed by their own environment and experience.
Those two examples of this phenomenon at play – Dunning-Kruger meets the internet forum meets modern art – came from Kottke.org, and remind me of this little story, where Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most famous violinists played one of the world’s most expensive violins (with a $3 million plus price tag), at a train station, and nobody noticed. This was an experiment conducted by the Washington Post and covered in this story.
In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.
It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.
The Washington Post piece points out the truth underlying the responses to the written works of David Foster Wallace, and the picture by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Context is king. Art requires a frame. Something to point out why people should sit up and take notice, this is the only truth that keeps the doors of the Gallery of Modern Art open – a frame provides a point of reference.
“When you play for ticket-holders,” Bell explains, “you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence . . .”
He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened — or, more precisely, what didn’t happen — on January 12.”
But, on the whole, he wasn’t a nice chap. Especially so far as bible translator William Tyndale was concerned.
This piece by atheist polemicist Christopher Hitchens on the literary merit of the King James Version is fascinating (on a number of levels). Here’s a snippet:
“Until the early middle years of the 16th century, when King Henry VIII began to quarrel with Rome about the dialectics of divorce and decapitation, a short and swift route to torture and death was the attempt to print the Bible in English. It’s a long and stirring story, and its crux is the head-to-head battle between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale (whose name in early life, I am proud to say, was William Hychyns).
Their combat fully merits the term “fundamental.” Infuriating More, Tyndale whenever possible was loyal to the Protestant spirit by correctly translating the word ecclesia to mean “the congregation” as an autonomous body, rather than “the church” as a sacrosanct institution above human law. In English churches, state-selected priests would merely incant the liturgy. Upon hearing the words “Hoc” and “corpus” (in the “For this is my body” passage), newly literate and impatient artisans in the pews would mockingly whisper, “Hocus-pocus,” finding a tough slang term for the religious obfuscation at which they were beginning to chafe.
The cold and righteous More, backed by his “Big Brother” the Pope and leading an inner party of spies and inquisitors, watched the Channel ports for smugglers risking everything to import sheets produced by Tyndale, who was forced to do his translating and printing from exile. The rack and the rope were not stinted with dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned.”
“Though I am sometimes reluctant to admit it, there really is something “timeless” in the Tyndale/King James synthesis. For generations, it provided a common stock of references and allusions, rivaled only by Shakespeare in this respect. It resounded in the minds and memories of literate people, as well as of those who acquired it only by listening. From the stricken beach of Dunkirk in 1940, faced with a devil’s choice between annihilation and surrender, a British officer sent a cable back home. It contained the three words “but if not … ” All of those who received it were at once aware of what it signified. In the Book of Daniel, the Babylonian tyrant Nebuchadnezzar tells the three Jewish heretics Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that if they refuse to bow to his sacred idol they will be flung into a “burning fiery furnace.” They made him an answer: “If it be so, our god whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thy hand, o King. / But if not, be it known unto thee, o king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,” says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”
A slight language warning in this video. Well. Not slight. It contains an f-bomb. But it also contains somebody singing like Arnie and footage from Predator.
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My very talented friend Tim, and his very talented brother, have put together these sand art Bible stories. You should get a hold of them if you’re looking for a bit of multimedia for your easter service.
Our weekend in Sydney is drawing to a close. We’ve had a great time, though only ticked off six of the seven things on my list of things to do, and only visiting three of the six cafes. Apparently Sydney still closes on a Sunday.
The wedding was fun, it was great to spend time with cousins who we’ve barely met. There’s something to be said for a family heritage that produces so many ministry minded people. I really love being part of the family I’m part of. What was even more fun was seeing people from Maclean (where I grew up), and Dalby (where Robyn grew up), at the wedding and having to explain why we were at this wedding of their friends. Fun times.
We skipped the Manly game, in favour of dinner with good friends. Which was great. I haven’t laughed as much as I have this weekend since I watched Four Lions two weeks ago.
Church By The Bridge on Sunday was a most enjoyable experience. So much singing. Never have I sung so much in an evangelical church service and enjoyed it. It was a refreshing change. And very friendly. Though it helped that I knew a bunch of people, including the guy on welcoming, from various AFES events and other bizarre quirks of Christianity’s two degrees of separation. It was fun meeting Ali in real life too. Meeting blog people is sometimes a little awkward because you know more about somebody than you should on first real life meeting. But this wasn’t.
I love the smells of Newtown, and we had two great dinners from the Sultan’s Table and Faheem’s Fast Food (a terrific sub-continental curry place).
Freaky. Steve Buscemi has notably freaky eyes. He looks like an ice addict. So sticking his eyes on lady faces is scary. But that’s what this single serving tumblog is all about.
First up we’ve got Pink, and then Angelina Jolie.
Damien recommend this one on Facebook – thanks Damien. I will never sleep again.
So, today, we walked down King St, visited Moore College (where we stood in a corner and people watched and my wife was shocked by how young and cool Con Campbell looked, she had pictured him as a 60 year old englishman), walked to Redfern, caught a train going in the wrong direction, so we caught a different train. Then, finally, we arrived at our destination – Mecca Espresso on King St in the CBD (not to be confused with the aforementioned King St).
I’ll be reviewing Mecca on thebeanstalker.com, but I tried my first ever Clover brew. The Clover, when released, was a $15,000 piece of technology. It’s the black box in the middle on this bench:
It was nice. Smelt like fruity tea. Tasted like coffee.
We spent the morning with my friend Paul. Which was tops. Then walked to Circular Quay, caught the ferry to Taronga, and walked around the zoo for the afternoon. Which Robyn loved and I enjoyed.
There were turtles.
And rabbit-eating dragons…
And primates.
And giraffes.
And other animals.
Though, some were missing…
Then it was a reversal of the morning, though we added dinner at a cheap Greek place, and about 45 minutes poring through the shelves at Gould Books.
Nice idea. Get it as an iPhone app, or a webapp, it doesn’t really matter. If you’re into incremental displays of the changing time then it doesn’t get much smaller than this… The 1 Pixel Clock.
I used to play a really fun game on the ‘puter called Pizza Tycoon (if you believe in abandonware you can download it here (I have no idea if that link is safe). The purpose of the game was to design and build pizzas and pizza restaurants that you then managed. You had to buy shop fronts. Hire staff. Set prices. You could also be a criminal. Where you could join the mafia and rise in the ranks, or just stick to sabotaging your competitor’s shops with bombs and rodents.
An Upper Darby pizza shop owner has been charged with putting mice in the shops of several competitors.
In what Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood called a case of “food terrorism by mice,” the owner of Nina’s Bella Pizza is charged with trying to sabotage his competitors by setting mice loose in their shops.
Nikolas Galiatsatos, 47, now faces charges of disorderly conduct, harassment and animal cruelty.
Chitwood said two of his officers happened to be eating lunch in Verona Pizza on West Chester when Galiatsatos, 47, entered the business carrying a bag and then asked to use the bathroom.
When the owner of the shop inspected the bathroom, he found footprints on the toilet. The owner checked it out and discovered a bag stashed in the ceiling of the bathroom.
Officers suspected a possible drug deal and checked it out. But instead of drugs in the bag they found a bag containing several mice.
1. Catching up with friends (including Izaac and Sarah whose blogs I can’t be bothered linking to but you all read them anyway. Right.)
2. Taronga Zoo.
3. Manly play the Sharks on Saturday night
4. Church by the Bridge (5pm service on Sunday is my plan)
5. Coffee at AIR, Alchemy, Bean Drinking and Mecca. Those are my plans.
6. Gould Books..
7. The wedding we’re actually coming down for.
