There’s nothing all that special about taking a photo of yourself every day for a year as you grow facial hair (unless you’re like me and can’t really grow anything but fuzz). But turning it into a stop motion adventure is something new and exciting.
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.
Would you like beer with that marshmallow?
The other day, over at thebeanstalker.com (my coffee blog, read it, click some ads – I make money), I did a little experiment with coffee and beer. I bought a proper coffee beer and made my own. It was science. Tastebud stretching science. I like beer. Nothing beats it on a hot summer’s afternoon. I also like marshmallow. And chocolate. But I’m wondering if chocolate-coated beer-marshmallows is taking things a bridge too far (though coffee beer probably is too). Why not just enjoy all these things separately…
But they look so good.
And here’s how to make them. To whet your appetite – here are the ingredients from this recipe.
Chocolate-Dipped Beer Marshmallows with Crushed Pretzel Garnish
Makes 18-22 marshmallows, depending on how you cut themFor the Bloom:
1 1/2 tablespoons (just under 1/2 ounce) unflavored gelatin
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/3 cup (2.5 ounces) flat dark beerFor the Sugar Syrup:
1/4 cup (2 ounces) flat dark beer
1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons (5 ounces) corn syrup or sugar cane syrup
3/4 cup (6 ounces) granulated sugar
pinch saltFor Coating and Topping
10-12 ounces milk chocolate
2-3 teaspoons canola oil, optional – for thinning the melted chocolate
1/2 cup stick pretzels
A beginner’s guide to keeping pet turtles
Somebody, somewhere (I think it was a guy named Andrew, who I think, based on his email address, was a leader on the schoolies camp I went on – how random that he would be reading my blog ten years later) suggested I blog about having pet turtles more often. I think that’s a good idea. Pet turtles really are the coolest thing since pet rocks. And pet rocks were cool.
They do funny stuff. Like this:
Why you should get a turtle
- They’re exotic, a little left field, and people (especially kids) love them. They love watching them in the water, and the love watching them run around. Turtles have a funny way of running, with in built comedic value.
- Turtles are relatively low maintenance (eventually).
- Turtles are amphibious. Amphibians are awesome. So are reptiles. Turtles are both.
What you should know before you buy a turtle
A hatchling
Our turtles at a very young age
- There’s really no such thing as a penny turtle. You might remember having one as a child. What you had was a baby turtle that you probably grew out of. Our turtles started off the size of 50c pieces. Now they’re somewhere between the size of a bread plate and a dinner plate. They start small, but grow big.
- There’s a bit of set up cost involved – you need heat lamps, UV lights, docking platforms, and eventually a big tank. If you get two (which we did) there’s a good chance they’ll fight. And you’ll need extra space. Most of our problems have been caused by turtle fights.
- Get lots of Betadine. Betadine fixes everything. If your turtle has a wound, a fungal infection, a spot – Betadine will fix it.
- You can’t tell if young turtles are male or female. It’s a gender lottery.
- In some (many) Australian states you need a reptile license. You get these from the EPA in Queensland (or whatever they’re now called).
- Turtles bite. But only really in the water.
- If in doubt – take them out of the water – they only need to be in the water about an hour a day. They like being in the water. But sometimes their shells need time to dry out. For a long time ours slept in a box, wrapped in towels.
- The internet is your friend. There are heaps of good turtle resources online. I even bought ours on the internet and had them flown up to Townsville from Brisbane. When I was worried about one of them I turned to the internet for help. One of our turtles, Rosie (short for Roosevelt) was a little more sickly than the other, Frankie (short for Franklin) perhaps because Frankie used to bite her around the neck and take her for a death roll.
- Get a bucket to feed your turtle in. Turtle food stinks. And feeding them in their tank is a recipe for an incredibly stinky weekly clean up job.
Steps to getting your pet turtle
- Check licensing requirements where you live. Organise this first.
- Find a breeder – normally there’s enough time between contacting a breeder and getting the turtles to complete the next step.
- Set up the tank – you’ll need a dock of some sort (a rocky platform will do), a UV lamp to keep the shells healthy, and a heat lamp to keep their blood warm. A heater in the water is optional. They’ll get on their docks more if the water is cold (this is good for their shells too). You need to set up a tank a week before you put the turtle in it to get the chemical stuff happening properly. Apparently.
- Get some food – we use pellets and frozen turtle cubes (fish guts). We’ve tried with some cereal based pellets and they hate them. We also occasionally give them fruit and veggies. Which they seem to like. We put feeder fish in their tank, about 100 at a time. And they gradually disappear. But if you want some fun – kill one and hand feed it to the turtles and watch them go nuts trying to catch more.
- Get your turtles. Watch them swim. Enjoy some LOLs.
- Check your turtles regularly (especially when they’re young) for little blotchy spots on their shells and skin. These are bad – and should be treated pretty much straight away. Keeping them out of the water a bit will help.
- Take them for walks outside (but watch for birds). The sun is good for them.
- Wash your hands after touching them when they’re little. Turtles carry salmonella. And trust me. You don’t want that. Buy some of that reptile wash. Trust me. A week of gastro isn’t fun for anybody. They grow out of this after a while – I’m not sure at what point – but I don’t wash my hands anymore.
Some links
- I bought the turtles from a dealer on Aussie Pythons and Snakes (an all purpose reptile forum). I paid $65 a turtle two years ago. You’ll never find prices like that in a pet shop.
- Australian Freshwater Turtles is a forum filled with turtle enthusiasts including some very knowledgable breeders.
- The Australian Freshwater Turtle Conservation and Research Association fact sheet is a great resource for understanding how to keep and care for your little critters. Their website is pretty good too.
Onan the Barbarian: A seedy affair
My sermon from the weekend is up. Have a listen if you want. It’s 27 minutes. I think.
Not my favourite passage in the world, not my favourite sermon, and not my favourite ending to a sermon (I should have just left out the last five minutes).
But people have said nice things, and I’m probably a harsh, but realistic, self-critic.
When I illustrate I don’t really stick to my notes. And I think that’s heaps more listenable and engaging. So that’s something to work on. I’m much better at telling a story when I know how it all hangs together – and I suspect I can do the same thing with the passage after I’ve worked it up. But preaching from notes is good discipline and hopefully prevents rambling.
England is totally gay
UPDATE: Be sure to read this thorough reading of the verdict from Peter Ould.
Wow. It’s a bad time to be a Christian in England.
A couple in England. A Christian couple. Who have fostered a bunch of kids. Have lost the right to do so in the future because the believe homosexuality is wrong and will tell the children they foster that this is the case.
This is like reverse gay-adoption. Now Christians can’t adopt. Essentially. Wow.
“At the High Court, they asked judges to rule that their faith should not be a bar to them becoming carers, and the law should protect their Christian values.
But Lord Justice Munby and Mr Justice Beatson ruled that laws protecting people from discrimination because of their sexual orientation “should take precedence” over the right not to be discriminated against on religious grounds.
They said that if children were placed with carers who objected to homosexuality and same-sex relationships, “there may well be a conflict with the local authority’s duty to ‘safeguard and promote the welfare’ of looked-after children”.”
Here’s the response from the Derby City Council. Bolding mine.
A spokesman said the authority “valued diversity and promoted equality” and “encouraged and supported children in a non judgmental way, regardless of their sexual orientation or preference”.
He added: “The court confirmed that the local authority is properly entitled to consider a prospective foster carer’s views on sexuality when considering their application to become a foster parent and in fact, failure to do so would potentially leave it in breach of its own guidance as well as the National Minimum Standards.”
This is why I think we need to move the goalposts on the debate surrounding homosexual marriage. Here’s a good post (and discussion) from Michael Jensen on SydAng. Here are some thoughts of mine on the homosexual debate from Venn Theology. Here’s a similar story coming out of the UK from a little while ago. And here is a post where Mark Baddeley and I thrashed out the question. This is really an issue we need to get our heads around for the sake of our freedom to proclaim the gospel and call sin “sin”…
Apple Water: What it would look like if Apple produced bottled water
I would buy it. It would make me cooler and I’m part of the Apple Cult. It would be better than Evian. Which is naive spelt backwards. Did I just blow your mind?
From here.
Exploded diagrams of popular 8-Bit game characters
These are pretty cool. Designing a world beating game character now seems surprisingly easy… thanks to Chris Kuma’s exploded schematics of your favourite game character from the 80s and 90s.
Pi plate: Because everybody needs a thousand digits of pi
This. Friends. Is a pi-plate. It has lots of pi. It has almost 1,500 decimal places (1,498 to be exact). So that you can invite a mathlete to dinner.
Via etsy.
We all take the same photos
I’m guilty. Partially. Of taking the same iconic tourism shot as everybody else. Though I also learned this lesson back in my tourism marketing days – so I’m much more interested in taking photos of people, or odd angles, or trying to do something unique, than I am in taking the same picture that features on post cards you can buy for a dollar – though those do have a place if you’re on a study tour (hence their appearance in the albums from the Greece and Turkey trip we went on last year).
When an artist named Corinne Vionnet noticed that everybody in the world seems to take the same photos she put together this exhibition of overlayed photos of some of the wonders of the tourism world.
“Switzerland-based Corinne Vionnet is our guide to the world’s most famous landmarks, monuments millions have visited before. Her art is created not by acrylic, oil, or watercolor, each piece is made by combining hundreds of tourist photos into one. After conducting an online keyword search and sifting through photo sharing sites, this Swiss/French artist carefully layers 200 to 300 photos on top of one another until she gets her desired result.”
Including the Parthenon, on the Acropolis in Athens.
Here’s my shot from that spot.
This composite shot of New York is interesting too, just because it still has the twin towers.
An ode to the Oxford Comma
I love the Oxford Comma. The comma that comes between and, and the word after and, or the comma before that or.
I think it improves clarity. And when I’m proof reading a non-Oxford user’s text I constantly have to resist the urge to plug them in.
The Oxford Dictionary’s entry on the Oxford Comma (linked above) says:
“It’s known as the Oxford comma because it was traditionally used by printers, readers, and editors at Oxford University Press. Not all writers and publishers use it, but it can clarify the meaning of a sentence when the items in a list are not single words…”
I actually think it improves clarity in all circumstances. Not just when you’re writing a sentence about a list of meal options. Like Pizza, fish and chips, and McDonalds. But before all final ands. It just looks nicer.
Preaching and adrenalin
I love public speaking. I’m not one of those people who gets filled with dread standing up in front of a crowd. In fact, the bigger the crowd the better. I guess at that point I’m classically extroverted. It’s a rush. Preaching is the thing that excites me most about vocational ministry. It’s not that I think I’m good at it. I’m not. I’m not bad – this isn’t an exercise in false modesty. You’d hope with a journalism degree I’d be ok at stringing some words together. But there are a few things I struggle with. But this isn’t a post about today’s sermon.1
I’m wondering about the long term effects of the adrenalin rush I get every time I preach. I love it. For me it’s like sky diving or extreme sports. The act of getting up in front of people – regardless of what I’m actually saying. I love MCing stuff as well.
Will I get addicted to it? Is that why preachers sometimes travel the globe preaching? Does this pose long term risks to my health? Most importantly, I’m wondering how sustainable my Sunday afternoons are going to be with the post adrenalin crash. Man. What goes up sure comes down. By about 2pm I can hardly keep my eyes open. I go blank. All that energy that I gain in the morning as I get ready to preach (I reckon the adrenalin kicks in at about 8am when I’m preaching at a 9:30 service) drains out, and takes whatever reserves I have with it. I’m pretty sure the adrenalin is what gives other people preacher’s belly – though for some it’s doubtless channelled as fear rather than exuberance.
I’d love to know how others go on the adrenalin front – is the Sunday arvo crash a common thing? Not having a night service anymore seems like such a good innovation on the days I’ve preached in the morning.
1Today’s sermon was mostly good. The last little application bit felt a little tacked on, and I really wasn’t sure where to go once I’d established that I didn’t think the passage was about sexual ethics, but rather about seeking God’s kingdom. So I said that. I talked about commitment. I tied it to Jesus (which was easy because of Matthew’s genealogy). I compared the righteousness of Tamar with the unrighteousness of Judah. But blah. Blah. Blah. That’s how I felt about the last fifth of my talk.
My other little bit of self critique (and I’ll post the audio for this sermon when I get it) is that I’m much more engaging (in my opinion) when I’m illustrating and telling a story entirely in my own words, as I would naturally. And in most of these cases I leave the script behind. At times I feel like I suppress my personality a little in the writing of my talks and I end up cold and robotic rather than talking how I would normally talk. Actually, I don’t sound robotic, I sound like a journalist, not a real person. On the plus side, all the old ladies tell me I speak clearly and audibly. I don’t write an essay – I try to write the way I talk, but I suspect I haven’t beaten out the writing for TV part of my previos training. There’s something just not quite right. It’s like I’m preaching in black and white rather than colour too. For the most part. Or at least that’s how I feel. Feel free to chime in if you heard me this morning (or once you’ve listened to the audio).
Preaching tomorrow
On Onan the Barbarian.
Here’s a wordle. See if you can figure out what my big idea is.
