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.

Bon Joviver

When I flick over to iTunes these days it takes huge self control not to just play Bon Iver over and over again.

Check this out if you’re not already a fan.

So finally I can appreciate this Bon Jovi song Bon Iver style, which has been sitting in my bookmarks for millenia.

Five reasons you should read Grantland…

Grantland is firmly established as my favourite blog. Even if 90% of its content covers American sport, it’s just filled with the kind of writing I aspire to.

Here are some recent samples of Grantland writing that you should most definitely flick through. This seems as good an opportunity as any to put a new tweet-a-pull-quote plugin I’m trying.

1. Chuck Klosterman – he recently went to a Creed concert and a Nickelback concert on the same night to figure out why it’s ok to hate both bands (also this piece on indie music, well, one particular indie band).

“Over the past 20 years, there have been five bands totally acceptable to hate reflexively (and by “totally acceptable,” I mean that the casual hater wouldn’t even have to provide a justification — he or she could just openly hate them and no one would question why). The first of these five acts was Bush (who, bizarrely and predictably, was opening for Nickelback that very night). The second was Hootie and the Blowfish, perhaps the only group ever marginalized by an episode of Friends. The third was Limp Bizkit, who kind of got off on it. Obviously, the last two were Creed and Nickelback. The collective animosity toward these five artists far outweighs their multiplatinum success; if you anthologized the three best songs from each of these respective groups, you’d have an outstanding 15-track album that people would bury in their backyards.”

“The day before the New York show, Kroeger appeared on a Philadelphia radio station and was asked (of course) why people hate Nickelback so vehemently. “Because we’re not hipsters,” he replied. It’s a reasonable answer, but not really accurate — the only thing hipsters unilaterally loathe is other hipsters, so Nickelback’s shorthaired unhipness should theoretically play to their advantage.[pq]A better answer as to why people dislike Nickelback is tautological: They hate them because they hate them[/pq]. Sometimes it’s fun to hate things arbitrarily “

2. This piece on horse racing, and the murky world of gambling.

“I boarded the Jockey Club elevator with a group of filthy-shoed men I assumed were from California; they headed to the Winner’s Circle, I headed back to the proletariat. They were staid and dignified. One of them shot his cuffs and adjusted his tie, ready for his picture. Just another day at the office.

The elevator opened and dumped us out into the throng. People were lining up at the windows to cash their tickets and collect the $1.20 in winnings that Secret Circle paid on a $2 bet. It was nowhere near the six figures that Secret Circle’s connections had won, but these fans were high-fiving and back-slapping like their ship had come in. Perhaps my dad was right. Having a winner was fun, even if everyone else in the track had it, too. I pulled my tip sheet from my jacket pocket and unfolded it. Disgusted, I read the words Secret Circle — BEST BET!”

3. This review of the Avengers.

“The insane advertising and development costs of the Harry Potter–style franchises we consistently reward at the box office have turned studio heads into marketers trying to find audiences big enough — i.e., young enough and male enough — to justify the cost of movies whose budgets routinely exceed $200 million. At that kind of rarified airspace, in which the marketing budget amounts to as much as half or more of whatever is spent on the actual film, you need a sure thing,like a toy, or a preexisting brand; [pq]auteur types and people with new, unproven ideas are dangerous and threaten the bottom line.[/pq] Better to just make a movie called Candy Land starring Adam Sandler and pray that people remember that a board game of the same name once existed.”

4. This tribute to Pep Guardiola (and pretty much everything they write about football, like this piece about Pele, and this one about Messi)…

“Throughout his early life he’d been consumed, Valdés had, by the fear of failure and compulsive perfectionism that tend to haunt top goalkeepers.”The mere thought of next Sunday’s game horrified me,” he has said. And: “[pq]Playing in goal was, to put it mildly, a special kind of suffering…[/pq]

For Guardiola, joy was also instrumental. He had realized that, in order to play the game the way he wanted, his players would need to be tuned in a certain way, that it would require a kind of psychic generosity for them to read one another well enough to move in the perfect tandem he envisioned, and that even the goalkeeper had to be part of that, which, odds were, would be impossible if the goalkeeper were sealed in a self-created hell. “Have fun,” the way Guardiola said it, was a cliché, and a profound statement about the nature of the game, and a tactical manipulation as fussily meticulous as the kind that used to torment Victor Valdés.”

5. The Masked Man – overthinking the WWE. This piece on a recent Pay Per View, which travels back to the 1920s to resolve a modern wrestling dilemma, is really something.

“Back in the 1920s, there was a wrestling stable called the Gold Dust Trio. They were the most powerful group in pro wrestling’s fist heyday, and they helped mold the sport into its modern form. The Trio’s members were Ed “Strangler” Lewis, the champion; Billy Sandow, the businessman; and Toots Mondt, the enforcer and, more important, the wrestling visionary.

Prior to the Trio’s ascendance, wrestling mostly took place on fairgrounds and in vaudeville halls. It was, more or less, real. According to legend, grapplers would travel from territory to territory, taking on local tough guys, and if the wrestler began to feel overmatched, he would wrangle his opponent back against the curtain at the rear of the stage, where an accomplice would clock the local with a blackjack, unbeknownst to the audience.

The subsequent era of higher-profile, “championship” matches had its share of fixed bouts, but they contributed to a more fascinating reality. The Gold Dust Trio would change everything. Sandow hired Mondt to be Lewis’s sparring partner and enforcer; Mondt would take on opponents before they got in the ring with Lewis to make sure they were “worthy” foes, but in reality, he would soften them up for his colleague. Then, when wrestling audiences started to dwindle, Mondt conceived of a new style that combined Greco-Roman and freestyle wrestling with brawling and boxing.”

There you go. If you’re not persuaded now, you never will be…

Storytime with Christopher Walken

Christopher Walken does Where the Wild Things Are, with descriptions of the pictures that are somewhat macabre.

And then the Three Little Pigs…

Delusional toast meets naive raccoon

I haven’t finished watching this because vimeo is laggy. But I laughed at the bits I’ve seen and I don’t want to lose it.

Peak Condition from Laura Jane Favela on Vimeo.

How bike wheels are made

I love this sort of thing.

Building a wheel from Scott Meleskie on Vimeo.

The title of this video gives the punchline away…

But watch it anyway. For the laughs.

A how to guide to “Obliterating Animal Carcasses With Explosives”

I hope this is real. Allegedly this is a guide produced for a forest service in the US.

“The following examples illustrate partial obliteration (dispersion) for a horse that weighs about 1,100 pounds (453.6 kilograms). In the first example, urgency is not a factor. Perhaps a few days are expected before the public is to visit the area, or perhaps bears will not be attracted to the carcass. In any case, in this example, dispersion is acceptable.

Place 3 pounds (1.36 kilograms) of explosives under the carcass in four locations (Figure 1). The carcass can then be rolled onto the explosives if necessary.

Place 1 pound (.45 kilograms) of explosives in two locations on each leg.

Use detonator cord to tie the explosives charges together.

Use water bags to hold the explosives close to the carcass if it is impractical to place charges under the carcass, for example when the carcass is laying in water.

Horseshoes should be removed to minimize dangerous flying debris.”

Via Metafilter.

At this point one wishes these instructions (except the horseshoe bit) were adhered to in this case.

Super super hero super group via super mashup

This gets style points for so closely matching the soundtrack. But if The Avengers wasn’t supergroup enough for you, imagine all these guys teaming up…

Just how rich was Scrooge McDuck?

Turns out Scrooge McDuck isn’t just the world’s richest bird. His money piles have been mathematically examined by thebillfold.com to show that he’s about three times richer than the world’s richest man.

When the area under the curve is calculated (from x=-3 to x=5), it yields roughly 46 square inches. The assumption will be made here that one cubic inch is roughly one ounce of gold. To convert that into a dome shape the value is simply cubed, which becomes 97,366 ounces. Given that 1 ounce of gold is roughly $5.00, it can extrapolated that each large pile of gold in the vault is worth $486,830.

However, Scrooge McDuck was first drawn in 1947, therefore inflation must be adjusted for which totals a whopping 5.2 billion dollars per pile. In the picture, there are two smaller piles which roughly equal the larger doubling the total to 10.4 billion. However, the shadows in the corner suggest that the room is a least three times as large as it is. Therefore, Scrooge was privy to a cool 31.2 billion dollars…

Calculating his velocity (roughly 5 m/s2) suggests that this mountain (of which we cannot see the summit) has a slope of 35 degrees, putting a rough estimate of the entire hill at 73.5 billion. Is it possible that McDuck pushed together his wealth to make this monstrosity? In theory, yes, but the eye line of McDuck (fixed at 8 degrees above the horizon relative to the slope) suggests that there are at least two other such mounds, putting his total wealth at over 210 billion, and well beyond the meager 70 billion of richest man in the world Carlos Slim Helu.

Via the Twitters.

Big day for my biggest little sister

I’m looking forward to watching my biggest little sister get married tomorrow.

I’m thankful that I’m the oldest child in my family because I can watch all my sisters blossom, and appreciate their gifts, with pride rather than envy.

It’s a privilege to have grown up with such quality women, who became something of a yardstick for me when it came to looking for my own spouse.

Anyway. Big congrats to Jo, and to Shayne. I think the comment a status I posted asking for one word descriptions of both of them pretty much sums this up:

“Jo is incredible in every way. Shayne is a very lucky guy”

I’ll be MCing the wedding. I’ve done a few of these now. I’m finding it harder and harder to try to be funny rather than functional. I’ve seen so many bad MCs and I dread being one of them.

Review: The Avengers

There are very few movies that lure me into the cinema these days. But I braved the crowds to see The Avengers on Anzac Day, such was my excitement. And I wasn’t disappointed. The action was punchy. Joss Whedon kept all the big name players in focus, and injected a little touch of human pizzazz on top of the bright, sparkly, CGI stuff.

It’s not going to win any awards. But from me it gets 4 Stars. A ninja or two, and an alien robot, would have bumped this up to 4.5.

Shortening the odds

Ahh Bill. Once upon a time I thought you were cut from the cloth of media and political greatness. Sadly. The party machine kills any individuality. And now you’re a meme.

Why can’t our pollies do classy things like this…

Very useful “how to” videos

I watched these and I laughed till I cried and my chest hurt and I couldn’t breathe properly. I was up until 3am this morning though.

Why old books smell delicious

I love libraries and second hand bookshops. Especially old ones with creaky shelves. I love the smell of old books, and am delighted to have a new vocabulary to describe their smell thanks to this nice little video.

Via everywhere else, starting with Neatorama.

Comical disappointment: how the ads from old comics stack up to reality

Comic book ads always promised so much. But given my collection (other than my Phantom comics) came from second hand shops, I was never really in a position to partake of the goodness they offered.

Allegedly the ads didn’t really deliver on the promise. So says Kirk Demarais who has made tracking down the products sold in the back pages of his favourite comic books his life’s work. That’s a link to a thoroughly interesting link where you’ll learn more than you ever thought necessary about the products sold in the back of a comic.

He exposes the secret of X-ray specs below (Spoiler alert)…

“The lens is made up of two pieces of thin cardboard, more like cardstock, with a hole in the center, and in between those cardboard pieces is an actual feather. It’s hard to explain how it works. I have the book here. Let me read. I said, “In the original Spex, the X-ray illusion occurs as the viewer looks through genuine feathers which are embedded between the cardboard. … The feathers’ veins diffract light, creating the appearance of two offset images. A darker area forms where the images overlap which can be interpreted as bone in your hand or the curves of a lady.”