This child preacher (skip to a minute into the video) is edited a little bit to make him sound like he’s on speed or something. Which isn’t a nice thing to do to your kid. His dad’s website, (his dad’s name is Michael Pedrin and he also makes videos), says he’s 2 years old.
Author: Nathan Campbell
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.
Flies time: Clock powered by fly blood
This is brilliant. It’s like a venus fly clock. It’s the creation of mad scientists Auger and Loizeau. Eight dead flies equals 12 days of clock power.
“This robot uses flypaper as it’s means of entrapment. This paper is placed on a roller mechanism. At the base of the roller a scraper removes any captured insects. These fall into the microbial fuel cell placed underneath. The electricity generated by the flies is used to power both a motor turning the rollers and a small LCD clock.”
I hate flies. But this is a step closer to robots taking over the world and feeding on humans. Just saying.
If you don’t believe me, here’s proof, these robots need blood…
Carnivorous Domestic Entertainment Robots from Auger-Loizeau on Vimeo.
Real Life Angry Birds
A nice little video from Rooster Teeth.
Churches and the F word – because the sixth letter of the alphabet is “cutting edge”
I know it’s hard to show that you’re a church that isn’t like all the other churches. A church that’s a little bit edgy – like Jesus was. A church that’s down with the sinners – like Jesus was. A church that is prepared to insult the religious establishment – like Jesus was. A church that is prepared to challenge social norms – like Jesus was… But you know what Jesus wasn’t? He wasn’t edgy for the sake of edginess, hanging out with sinners because he was one, insulting the religious establishment for the sake of it, or challenging social norms to get attention.
So while you might think preaching a sermon telling everybody in your congregation to “F off” – where you mean forgiveness is the kind of sermon Jesus would have preached…
It probably isn’t. I can’t claim to speak for Jesus. I can claim to be faithfully reading and teaching God’s word. But I don’t need the spiritual gift of discernment to know that this is excessively stupid. And only moderately more stupid than preaching this sermon series:
“We’ve all said it; sometimes it’s the only words we have to describe our life… all F’d up! God doesn’t intend for our lives to stay that way, instead He turns our life around through His grace and forgiveness. With His strength and the help of true friends we can move forward. Life doesn’t have to stay All F’d Up!”
See, in this case they’re not even bothering to couch the language as some sort of adoption of the letter F. They’re just being contempervant. Where contemporay meets relevant in portmanteau glory.
One step better, but still incredibly stupid and naive, is the attempt to reclaim the letters WTF for the sake of your church community.
Does anybody actually think this is a good idea? This is why branding professionals exist. To stop you doing what you thought in the shower (when you were really tired and recovering from a bout of delirium, before you’d had your coffee) was a good idea. It’s not a good idea. It’s a dumb idea. You don’t want people looking at your church sign and responding with the very thing you’re trying to rebrand. It’s just a dumb idea.
“We are aware of what ‘WTF’ originally stands for, and that is actually why we chose it,” says Rob James, with Copper Pointe Church, the Albuquerque, N.M., church behind the college and young adult ministry, Wake. “It is something that our target audience is very familiar with. We are a progressive college group located in Albuquerque, N.M., and we know that any college-aged person is a phone-weilding, text-sending machine. So why not use what they are familiar with?”
“WTF” was on purpose. In fact, it’s a main cornerstone in their branding. Their url is wakeWTF.com, their Twitter handle is @WTFisWake and their Facebook page is Facebook.com/WTFisWake.
A reminder about perhaps the most important post I’ve ever written…
I am consistently blown away by the enduring popularity of my post “How to make Sizzler’s Cheese Toast” it’s almost two years old, and it gets constant traffic, accounting for about 3% of traffic to my blog ever. Wow.
If you didn’t know it was there, think of this as a warm wintery present from me to you. And add it to your recipe folder, it’s great with soup.
Have you tried my recipe? Let me know, I’d love to hear how it went.
A titled video: Movie titles in a movie
Movie title scenes are generally under-appreciated. Not by the maker of this little movie.
Movie Review: Four Lions
Here’s a five word review: Funniest movie about terrorism ever.
Four Lions is a movie about a group of British Jihadis. Based sort of on a true story – the writer Chris Morris was inspired by the bumbling lunacy he heard and read in the transcript of a trial for some terror suspects in the UK. And this is the result. It is just brilliant. Possibly the funniest movie I’ve ever seen.
This scene was beautiful, and there are plenty just like it.
Check it out.
Plotting the events of world history… in video
If you looked through wikipedia articles on major world events, and plotted them on a map, and then removed the map, you’d get a video looking something like this:
A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.
No news is good news
When you add up all those awkward television moments when a 24 hour news channel is using the same content as a network’s new program without some of the commercial breaks and other prerecorded bulletins you get some funny video. At least that’s what I think is going on here.
Gang Fight: What Rebecca Black is really singing before the autotune
Bad Lip Reading presents Rebecca Black’s song from the perspective of the deaf, or at least from the perspective of those smart enough to watch it with the sound down.
Weird musical promise: I ain’t going to pee the bed tonight
This kid is determined not to wet the bed tonight. Apparently, this Kelly family, was big in Germany.
Another one from Izaac.
Hamster on a piano, eating popcorn
Today is going to be some sort of video fest I’m afraid.
Job hunting 2.0
Funny because it’s true. Via Joy of Tech.
Things to click (and read)
Sometimes I need to clear the thirty tabs I have open in my browser and I can’t be bothered posting them separately. This is one of those times, and it reflects on me, not on the content of these links that you should read.
There’s a rumour that floats around the Internet every now and then that Facebook is responsible for one in five divorces these days as people rediscover old flames. This rumour is just that. A rumour. The Wall Street Journal kills it.
“The 1-in-5 number originated with an executive at an online divorce-service provider in the U.K. Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, which allows Britons to file uncontested divorces at low cost, had just launched the company’s Facebook page and wondered what role Facebook has in precipitating divorces. After determining that the word “Facebook” appeared in 989 of the company’s 5,000 or so most recent divorce petitions, he had Divorce-Online issue a news release in December 2009 stating “Facebook is bad for your marriage.”
Mr. Keenan acknowledges that his company’s clients aren’t necessarily representative of all divorces, and he adds that his firm never claimed that Facebook actually causes 20% of divorces. “It was a very unscientific survey,” Mr. Keenan says.
Elsewhere, Clayboy (a newie for me) has two must read posts about the new atheists – the first about the conformity of “free thinker” thinking, as demonstrated by a magazine called The Freethinker, the second about whether Christians can value atheism.
“I might even ponder whether the award for secularist of the year (apparently a “prestigious” one – who knew?) reflects this. The winner is not Salman Taseer, the nominee who was assassinated for opposing the Pakistan blasphemy laws mainly aimed at Christians, but Dutch Euro MP Sophie in ’t Veld who, er …, bravely organised a protest against the Pope.
I am somewhat underwhelmed in my admiration for such a courageous achievement advancing the cause of rational civilisation.”
Slate says the lack of looting in Japan is down to the Yakuza. Which is pretty cool.
“Organized crime. Police aren’t the only ones on patrol since the earthquake hit. Members of the Yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicate, have also been enforcing order. All three major crime groups—the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Sumiyoshi-kai, and the Inagawa-kai—have “compiled squads to patrol the streets of their turf and keep an eye out to make sure looting and robbery doesn’t occur,” writes Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, in an e-mail message. “The Sumiyoshi-kai claims to have shipped over 40 tons of [humanitarian aid] supplies nationwide and I believe that’s a conservative estimate.” One group has even opened its Tokyo offices to displaced Japanese and foreigners who were stranded after the first tremors disabled public transportation. “As one Sumiyoshi-kai boss put it to me over the phone,” says Adelstein, ” ‘In times of crisis, there are not Yakuza and civilians or foreigners. There are only human beings and we should help each other.’ ” Even during times of peace, the Yakuza enforce order, says Adelstein. They make their money off extortion, prostitution, and drug trafficking. But they consider theft grounds for expulsion.”
Elsewhere, I’ve been taking part in an increasingly lengthy discussion about gay marriage on the solapanel.
Five Senses Coffee offers a great diagnosis guide for figuring out what is wrong with your espresso. Well worth a read if you think your coffee could be better.
First Things has a good list for engaging with people in the online world. Especially for responding to people you don’t know who disagree with you.
“The manner of your answer will affect your inquirer more than its content. You are often, as far as you can tell, trying only to encourage him to hear the answer, to open a crack in his defenses that might over time open into a door. Hope and pray that you are only one—perhaps the first, but perhaps not—in a series of encounters that will bring him to see the truth. You do not need to win the argument to change his life.”
You should be reading Things Findo Thinks – I haven’t linked to it for a while, but Findo seems much more interested in engaging the nu-atheists than I presently am, so if you want your fix of fallacy busting, head there. Try this post about arguments from authority on for size. It’ll help you avoid bad arguments about your arguments.
It’s iPad 2 week this week. And luckily my wife is going to let me buy one. Unlike this guy in the states, who allegedly had to return his iPad because his wife said no. At least that was the reason he gave on the post-it note that went to the store, that was passed on to Apple Corporate, who may or may not have sent back the iPad with a note reading “Apple says yes”… brilliant if true.