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.

Why complete disclosure isn’t always the best policy on your online dating profile

I’m a big fan of full disclosure as a PR tool when things go wrong. If you can get on the front foot and air your dirty laundry before other people air it for you, you rob others of the power of outing you, and your honesty and integrity will boost your credibility and reputation, buying yourself a bit of time to deal with any fall out… it’s great for PR crisis management. It’s terrible when you’re a “brony” and you’re putting together an online dating profile. Like patriotpony1986.

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This is perhaps the most honest dating profile ever written. So earnest that it is perhaps a clever parody.

My self-summary

I am a proud conservative American and brony (male My Little Pony fan). I work very hard to enmesh the philosophy of Ayn Rand within the framework of tolerance and love espoused by Pink Pie and friends. I’m something of an intellectual, and would love to discuss politics or cartoons with somepony near me in the future. Please understand that if we were to meet, I AM THE MAN in the relationship.

What I’m doing with my life
Trying to finish the first draft of my e-book entitled Serfdom in Equestria, an expose on the liberal agenda slowly eroding freedom in the My Little Pony universe.

Musical genius: rhyming words with the same words

Why haven’t more people thought of this…

Flight of the Conchords do fun charity song with kids, for kids

Love this. It’s been doing the rounds so you’ve probably seen it… but essay writing duties are killing my ability to post things in a timely manner. It’s also sucked out any ability I have to write a good heading.

Flight of the Conchords teamed up with some other Kiwis, and some kids, to write a charity song to raise money for sick children.

It’s nice. I especially love this confession from a young girl:

“I ate bubble mixture because I wanted to turn into a bubble”

Here’s the song if you want to skip the fun interviews with the kids.

Infographic: Why Asylum Seekers seek asylum

Did you catch that really uncomfortable interview with Tony Abbott and Leigh Sales last week? The really embarrassing thing, as far as I could tell, wasn’t that he flip flopped on whether or not he’d read the BHP statement about why they’re shelving a massive mining project (I think economics is complex enough that he’s probably right)… no. The embarrassing thing was when the conversation moved to “boat people”… here’s the transcript of that part in full

“LEIGH SALES: Why have you referred repeatedly to illegal asylum boats coming to Australia? Do you accept that that’s illegal and that seeking asylum by any means is legal?

TONY ABBOTT: Most of the people who are coming to Australia by boat have passed through several countries on the way and if they simply wanted asylum they could have claimed that in any of the countries through which they’d passed.

LEIGH SALES: But I don’t believe that it’s actually illegal to pass through countries on your way to somewhere where you want to have asylum.

TONY ABBOTT: You try turning up in America without documents, without a visa, without a passport; you’ll be treated as very, very much illegal, Leigh. The other point I make, from recollection at least, is that the very term that the Government has officially used to describe these vessels is “suspected illegal entry vessel”.

LEIGH SALES: Do you – I’m asking you though, not about the Government. I’m asking: do you accept that it’s legal to come to Australia to seek asylum by any means – boat, plane – that it is actually legal to seek asylum?

TONY ABBOTT: I think that people should come to Australia through the front door, not through the back door. If people want a migration outcome, they should go through the migration channels.

LEIGH SALES: That’s an answer to the question if I asked you: how do you think people should seek asylum?, it’s not an answer to the question: is it legal to seek asylum?

TONY ABBOTT: And Leigh, it’s the answer I’m giving you because these people aren’t so much seeking asylum, they’re seeking permanent residency. If they were happy with temporary protection visas, then they might be able to argue better that they were asylum seekers, but obviously the people who are coming to Australia by boat, they want permanent residency; that’s what they want and this government has given the people smugglers a business model by putting permanent residency on the table. And even though the Government has adopted just one of the Howard Government’s successful policies, it won’t adopt temporary protection visas or the willingness to turn boats around where it’s safe to do so.”

That’s just awful. But there’s no backlash, because there’s no political mileage. No votes are going to change hands here because the Labor Party is every bit as culpable on that front (though they are going to increase the refugee intake).

Season 2 of Go Back To Where You Came From kicks off tonight. The first season was pretty powerful stuff. For all their agitation surrounding gay marriage, which probably annoys a lot of Christians, GetUp is doing some good work on the asylum seeker front. They’ve produced this infographic to coincide with the show. And there’s a petition you can sign ahead of this week’s vote on the new refugee legislation, they’ve also got a form where you can email your member of parliament with a personalised message. If you’re a Christian you might also like to email Jim Wallace at the Australian Christian Lobby (their emails are typically firstname.lastname@acl.org.au), and tell him you’d like the ACL to spend more effort speaking out for those who aren’t providing their organisation with financial support – and maybe ask them to do less than just “welcoming” whatever the government does like they do in this Media Release, and this one).

This shouldn’t be an issue where a response falls along right/left lines. You can read my last two posts on boat people – the first, in response to Tony Abbott’s claim that boat people are “unChristian”, the second, a follow up to that.

UPDATE: Somebody questioned the legitimacy of this infographic in the Facebook comments below. So I did some digging and found what appears to be the source of this data. The following is from pages 17 and 18 of this DIAC report: Submission to the Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Immigration Detention Network September 2011 Department of Immigration and Citizenship (http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/pdf/2011/diac-jscaidn-submission-sept11.pdf).

“From 1989 to 30 June 1995 a further 41 boats carrying 1893 people arrived in Australia, most of whom came from Cambodia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Vietnam…No Cambodian IMAs arrived after the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) mission was established in 1991. The flow of Vietnamese IMAs effectively stopped in 1995–96, with none arriving in the next three financial years. The last major arrival of IMAs from PRC was in 2000, with 25 arrivals. ”

“The profile and origins of IMAs coming to Australia began to change in 1999. Previously, most IMAs had come from Cambodia, PRC and Vietnam. As the tide of IMAs from east Asia and south-east Asia receded, a new movement of IMAs—predominantly from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka—emerged. In total, 12,272 people arrived in this period. ”

“Boats began arriving again in October 2008. Over the course of 2009–10 the number of asylum seekers increased significantly. As with the preceding wave, the majority of IMAs came from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka. Notably, however, the number of Iranians to arrive since January 2011 has increased significantly.”

UPDATE 2: You can watch episode 1 of season 2 of Go Back To Where You Came From online.

Some clown talks about juggling prayer, bible reading, and evangelism

A day after I watched this video I’m still thinking about it…

I can’t decide if it’s shockingly bad, as in bad enough to post, or just bad. But it’s a ministry clown. There’s something about the second self-satisfied ball toss at the end that drags it towards shockingly bad…

How to go to the toilet properly

Look. This is the type of “science” that tobacco companies roll out to sell more cigarettes. And it contains a bit of an historical error in the first minute – people have been sitting on toilets rather than squatting for much longer than 100 years. One only has to visit Roman ruins, or read about Luther’s toilet seat ruminations, to know that this is the case… but anyway. Lest you live your life uneducated and “doing it wrong” when it comes to your number 2s…

I give you… the Squatty Potty.

Run, Monkey, Run

This is just a brilliant and uplifting story. A wild monkey from a small colony of wild monkeys in America has taken up residency in the city of Tampa, and the authorities are trying to catch him. The citizens of Tampa want the monkey to be free. The New York Times has a massive feature on the monkey


Image Credit: This is actually the monkey, from the NY Times story.

And on it went, with the monkey zigging and zagging around Tampa Bay, dodging the government agencies bent on capturing it. The state considers the animal a potential danger to humans and, like all invasive species, an illegitimate and maybe destructive part of Florida’s ecology. But the public came to see the monkey as an outlaw, a rebel — a nimble mascot for “good, old-fashioned American freedom,” as one local reporter put it…

Sightings were seldom reported now. As a woman on Coquina Key named Rosalie Broten told me: “Nobody wants the monkey to be captured. Everybody wants it to be free.”

The citizenry of Tampa Bay was adamantly pro-monkey. People had long been abetting the animal, leaving fruit plates on their patios. A few people, one F.W.C. officer told me, called the agency’s monkey hot line to report that they’d seen the macaque several hours or even a couple of days earlier — offering totally useless intelligence, in other words, presumably just to stick their thumbs in the government’s eye.

It has been at large for ages… and plays very hard to get…

Since 2009, Yates estimates that he has gone after the animal on roughly 100 different occasions. The monkey was his white whale. He claimed to have darted it at least a dozen times, steadily upping the tranquilizer dosage, to no avail. The animal is too wily — it retreats into the woods and sleeps off the drug. A few times, the monkey stared Yates right in the eye and pulled the dart out.

Go monkey.

Awesome microbrewer says “no” to Nickelback

First off – I had no idea Nickelback were Canadian – or a fleeting unawareness, it doesn’t surprise me as much as make me feel sorry for my Canadian friends.

Sorry Canadians. I can’t think of an Australian equivalent to use for the purpose of empathy – there was that band who sang that “Oh Yeah” song,* if they’d stuck around and recorded the same song fifteen times and gullible people kept buying their music then maybe that’d work…

Anyway, when I was writing that post about Creed yesterday I was trying to find out if there was a Nickelback song where the band actually do ride horses in the film clip, rather than just posing like they’re riding horses as they do in all their other film clips (I’ve seen two or three, and using the starting assumption that as their songs are all the same, their film clips are all the same, I’m extrapolating…).

So I was googling “Nickelback riding horses” and related queries and apart from all the stories about Avril Lavigne… I found out two things. One, Nickelback has an album called Dark Horse. Two, when they were making a film clip for a song from Dark Horse they approached an American brewery called Dark Horse about having their product featured in the film clip. The brewery declined. Because they have taste. This quote was from an initial post on the Dark Horse blog (which is currently under reconstruction or something)…

It’s obvious that this would be a great opportunity for us and maybe get some mainstream youth into craft beer rather than the swill. However, none of us at the brewery really care for the band (or frat parties) so our knee jerk reaction is “no thanks”.

In a follow up post the brewery said after realising that their customers also hated Nickelback, they’d prolonged the decision for the laffs.

“I just wanted to let everyone know that we did not accept the video offer. At one point I was really on the fence. But after about 22 of your posts we knew for sure it wasn’t gonna happen.I just wanted to wait until today for my own selfish reasons of seeing everyone bash that band. We kinda like “flying under the radar” and that would be the wrong way for us keep flying low.thanks for all the input and all the nice things you say about us. Pints up!”

A couple of years later (this was back in 2010), the brewery has become a minor internet phenom for being so awesome. And they stand by the decision, one of the Brewers, a guy named Aaron Morse, says:

“I absolutely hate that band,” Morse said today. “It’s s— rock and roll that doesn’t deserve to be on the radio.”

*I’m pretty sure they were called End of Fashion.

A tale from Fat Tulip’s Garden

One of my friends found this gem on YouTube featuring Baldrick Tony Robinson in the role I have the fondest childhood recollection of…

Guy gets new green screen, does completely rational thing…

So this guy got a green screen. And you know what I’d do if I had a green screen – because it’s what everybody would do.

I’d take this awesome cloud video:

And with a complete sense of nonchalance, I would lip sync to an entire Creed song while falling through said clouds.

Admit it. That’s totally the first thing that popped into your head at the words “green screen”…

On the arbitrariness of bucket list books…

I had no idea what a big deal this was. I still have no idea. I’m not nearly 30 (well, “nearly” is so relative. Isn’t it? I’m 1.5 times my daughter’s life span away from 30, so for her, that’s a long time).

But now I’m convinced.

A grand day for my archives

I’ve occupied this corner of the internet, or one very much like it, for quite a while now. And it’s always surprised me which posts get traffic and which ones don’t. I’ve just had a fun moment looking at my all time stats (well, for as long as I’ve had google analytics installed).

This is fun – to this date my most controversial post “Five things that would make atheists seem nicer” has been my most read post of all time. It got hammered in three days, and took down my server. This week sometime that post will be eclipsed by my “longest tail” post  – “How to make Sizzler’s cheese toast.” This is pretty satisfying to me. You should be part of getting it over the line (especially now that it has just been updated with a slight change to the recipe secured via the Sizzler website).

That is all.

Tumblrweed: Little Face Mitt

I enjoy following the US election cycle. It’s funny. It’s made funnier by this tumblr. Little Face Mitt.

A disproportionate response: the only correct way to react to Facebook “hacking”

I use “hacking” here in the loosest possible sense to describe the not particularly funny thing people do when you leave your computer, phone, or tablet unattended and they take liberties with your Facebook status.

It was probably funny once. And it’s funniest when it involves toilet humour. But now it’s old. And now, better still, this video is circulating and people are becoming aware that the best revenge for this Facebook misdemeanour is a totally disproportionate response.

This guy learned his lesson (there’s some bad language in this video).


 

Curiosity rocks the social media world

Twitter is making this mission to mars extra fun.

First, Curiosity has been tweeting with a great blend of personality and substance. NASA’s social media team are doing a great job. Apologies if this doesn’t show up nicely in the RSS, I’m going to use the new WordPress embed tweet function for the majority of this post…

It has made the Curiosity mission to Mars lots of fun, and shows some of the benefits of doing social media well. And its spawned a few fun spin offs.

Like today. As Curiosity announced it was about to employ its rock zapping laser for the first time on a humble rock named N165. N165 soon had its own Twitter account.

Here’s the science behind the story of this poor rock on Mars.