The three/ten/180 second rule is hotly debated. Just how long can food sit on the ground before you eat it? According to the doctors it’s not a long time (if you’re worried about bacteria transfering from surface to surface). But who listens to doctors anyway.
Here’s a handy flow chart that’ll help you know when to hold it, know when to fold it, know when to walk away and know when to run. I found it here.
It’s Australian Open time (which you should know – unless you’ve been living under a rock). I like tennis – and I’m hoping that A-Rod does me proud this year.
I like that tennis players are really gentlemanly (or ladylike) and do the little courtesy wave thing they do when they hit the let cord during the point.
But I don’t get why they feel the need to. If I was a tennis player (which I’m not) I would practice hitting the ball into the let cord with enough topspin that it would trickle over every time. It seems like an awesome strategy.
Also, while I’m on the subject of cool sporting strategies – if I was a Rugby League coach I would tell my team to kick field goals at every opportunity. It works for Rugby Union. You really only need to get to about the forty metre line each set and blast the ball through the posts. Then you get the ball back.
When playing pool with friends I like to wait until they get onto the eight ball, wait for it to be behind the D that you break from, and then sink the white ball. You can’t hit backwards from the D and a foul shot on black is an automatic loss.
When I play indoor soccer I like to defend. I like to stand just inside the person running towards me so that they move towards the side netting – and then I like to step into them so that they run into the net. We played our last game of mixed indoor in Townsville (possibly forever) tonight. I have a bruise.
Have you got any dirty tricks for winning at sport? Share them in the comments.
There are some songs that just don’t need lyrics posted online. This is one of them.
Here’s a sample:
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
Around the world, around the world
In fact, it doesn’t change at all.
It doesn’t change much.
Why do I find these unoriginal prank emails so amusing?
XKCD came up with this brilliant graph. I shared it in my Google Reader items the other day. It deserves its own post.
The alt text reads: “The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters.”
Online dating site OkCupid collects heaps of data about its clients. Which you should expect. That’s what good websites do. For instance I know that you’re currently wearing a daggy shirt and sitting with one foot under your leg. Freaky hey.
The insights provided by the OkCupid blog are just phenomenal. They track just about every interaction between people and produce posts like this one – about the type of profile picture that is likely to get you noticed – debunking some popular myths. And they make cool graphs.
Here are the graphs on the types of photos that get the most responses…
A “MySpace” shot apparently looks like this…
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Luckily it’s the shots that actually involve you doing something interesting that produce long term results.
Can you put the word and in a sentence five times in a row?
I can. The signwriter said there had to be more space between pig and and, and and and whistle. If you like your ands as ampersands – pig & & & & & whistle – then you should check out this tumblog of 300&65 ampersands. Each one in a different typeface. They say you can judge a typeface by its ampersand.
I have no plans to plant a megachurch. Imagine the administration hassles. But I am an armchair megachurch planter. And here are my ten steps based on my observations. I have studied (some might say rigorously) five different megachurches at various stages of the developmental process – form megachurch megastar Joel Osteen to the New Calvinism’s Mark Driscoll. Lest you be concerned, the essential steps to growing your megachurch (based on my observations and my list), don’t seem to require any mention of Jesus.
If you’re not a good looking guy with an equally (or slightly better looking) wife then you should resign yourself to just running an ordinary church. If you are good looking then here are the rest of the steps…
You can gain megachurch style points by having your own personal website too. You get extra points if your own website outranks your church website when searching for your name, but lose points if the .com version of your name belongs to someone else (I’m looking at you Mark Driscoll, and you Brian Houston).
If at first you don’t succeed – Pull up stumps, blame God (or the Devil), reassess your marketing strategy and go back to step 3. Unless you decide that you aren’t actually really, really, ridiculously good looking. But even then there’s hope. You just have to wait until you’re old and austere.
Twitter is abuzz with the news that Johnny Depp is dead (he’s not). I can’t believe how many gullible people get suckered in by a good Twitter hoax. It is, however, a sign of the shifting nature of news. News now breaks on Twitter. Which is a shame. Because Twitter is full of twits.
The blame for this shift rests firmly with the established media. The problem is that the media has completely lost touch with what news is, and often serve up marginally interesting tabloid gossip instead of actual news. Sadly, marginally interesting tabloid gossip is not their forte. The Internet is much better at it. When conventional news covers celebrity gossip they’re about as good as the joke in the next sentence is funny. Tonight’s story it was the Brangelina split – apparently Angelina is enforcing a prenup condition whereby she keeps the “A” from their name – so Brad will now be “Brd”.
Because celebrity news – and deaths – are much more important than normal deaths (by a scale of about 100,000 to 1) journalists are forced to turn a rather minor event into something major (and the Twits follow suit). This is how they do it (from here)…
And here’s Surviving the World’s insight on why this is unacceptable.
If the media reported things as they happened, and with the attention they deserved (which is a big ask – I know) then we wouldn’t be left with the Twits setting the news agenda, and there’d be no chance of a hoax like this resulting in such an outpouring of unnecessary emotion.
A gentleman in the United States has taken it upon himself to collate the win loss record for Charlie Brown’s baseball team. If you’ve ever read the comics you’d expect it to be pretty bleak. And it is. But not as bleak as it could be – the statistician is only willing to count games where a result was specifically mentioned.
Apparently it’s not the speed at which your food is served that is bad for you, but the speed at which you consume it. This plate monitors how fast you’re slamming down your dinner and warns you when you’re eating too fast. Kind of like that speedo thing you have in your car that you set to 50km over the speed limit because you get so sick of the beeping.
Toxic warning tape would probably be a more appropriate addition to most bathrooms – but in the case of literal “silent but deadlies” this crime scene toilet paper will do the job.
I finished my “cool stories from the Bible” kid’s talk series at church this morning with the story of Samson. Before I get onto posting the story there were a heap of cool parallels between Jesus and Samson that I didn’t cover in this story – he’s betrayed by someone close and taken to enemy headquarters for the purpose of mockery before dying to save God’s people. I covered the last bit – but not so much the betrayal/public spectacle. Check it out.
Do you want to grow up with big muscles? I do. Have you ever seen those really big strong warrior guys who have arms so muscled that they look like they could lift just about anything? Do you want to be strong? Well, today’s story is about the world’s strongest man.
His name was Samson. We’ll start this story before he was born. Samson’s mum was old and didn’t think she could have babies. But an angel came to visit Samson’s parents to give them some good news.
The angel told them that they would have a special baby. Who would be set apart for God. This baby was not allowed to cut his hair. And he would grow up to save Israel from their enemies. By being big and strong.
Samson grew up to be big and strong. One day a lion attacked him and he ripped it apart with his bare hands.
One day he went out to fight the Philistines. He tied a fiery torch between the tails of 300 jackals – animals a bit like wild dogs – and sent them running, with their tails tied together into the Philistine’s farms – burning all their food. He was very clever. Then he killed lots of them.
Samson was so cool. He was a bit like Batman. He lived in a cave.
The Philistines didn’t like Samson very much. They got an army together to march to Israel to demand they hand Samson over to them. They wanted to kill him.
So the nation of Israel decided to hand Samson over to the Philistines. They tied him up. But do you know what happens when you tie up a really strong person? They flex their muscles. And the ropes break.
So that’s what Samson did. He was surrounded by Philistines. He broke the ropes. He escaped. But he didn’t have a weapon. So he picked up a donkey jawbone from a nearby skeleton.
And he used it to kill 1,000 Philistines.
Samson got into a bit of a pickle. He trusted a lady Philistine – who wanted to kill him…
He loved this lady Delilah – so eventually he told her his secret. And she betrayed him. The Philistines cut his hair while he was asleep.
Then they captured him and poked out his eyes. And they turned him into a slave.
The Philistines were so excited to have caught Samson they decided to have a party.
They brought Samson up to humiliate him.
Fancy buildings in those days were held up by stone pillars. Samson asked the guards to place him between the pillars so that he could stand up. And he prayed to God to give him strength one more time. His hair was growing back.
Samson prayed to God, and then reached out his hands and placed them on the two pillars. He pushed. And pushed.
He pushed with all his strength and the whole building came down. As he pushed he prayed “let me die with the Philistines”. And he did.
And you know what, Samson was very strong, but he actually wasn’t the world’s strongest man.
Do you know who is? Samson stretched out his arms and died so that other people. God’s enemies. Would die.
Jesus died so that God’s enemies would become God’s friends. So they could live. And he came back from the dead. Samson couldn’t do that. Jesus is the world’s strongest man. His strength is enough to save you, and me, and the whole world. Samson couldn’t do that.
Samson might have been really cool because he lived in a cave – but Jesus is heaps cooler because he came back to life in a cave. And he’s heaps stronger because by doing that he saves the whole wide world – including you, and me.
The End.
I like this wedding invitation. I saw it today for the first time and Robyn said she had seen it on TV. I don’t care. It’s my blog and I’ll post what I want to – even if everybody else has seen this already…
As of 5.30pm yesterday I am officially no longer employed in the secular workforce. My employment status in the unsecular workforce is undetermined (I have to fill out some forms and get a medical before the Presbyterian Church will pay me to be a student).
We’re leaving for Brisbane on Thursday, we should arrive on Friday. We still have some packing and cleaning to do, and myriad farewells and goodbyes to say.
I loved my job at Townsville Enterprise. I’ll miss both the work and the people.
I scored a good bit of swag in the leaving process. It’s a strange thing that employers give gifts to people who leave and not to those who stay. I scored a watch, my iPhone and some cufflinks. I was blown away by the generosity of my employers and the nice things they said about me.
I managed to keep my tough guy veneer in check though.
Unemployment does have its benefits though – I can now say whatever I want about people, places and businesses in Townsville – and will be doing so with my own hottest 100 (things to do in Townsville) which I’ll start writing in the car as we drive to Brisbane.