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.

Bus-ted: Marathon runner hands back prize after sneaky shortcut

File this under “sermon illustrations” or if you don’t write sermons, under “funny stories”…

Marathon “runner” Rob Sloan was in a race on the weekend, he piked, caught the bus, and found himself ahead of the pack, so he decided to cross the finish line. He appeared to have taken third place. There was some suspicion at the time. But he flatly denied catching the spectator bus.

He lied.

“When I finished the race I was asked by the fourth person in the race: ‘Did you come third, because I don’t remember you passing us.’
“My words to him were ‘Yeah, I passed you at approximately 18 miles on the damp’, I remember because you don’t pass many people being near the front.”

The BBC has more… and another story from Digital Journey…

Funny stuff.

October 12, 2011

Phoenix sinking: Real life super hero arrested, unmasked…

Phoenix Jones has been featured here before. He’s a Real Life Super Hero in Seattle. This bio is fun reading.

He was arrested last night for assault (he claims he was breaking up a fight with pepper spray). Sadly, despite speculation, he is not Mark Driscoll. He is, however, an MMA fighter named Benjamin Fodor.

Here’s one of his four fights, on YouTube (contains mixed martial arts).

I can’t figure out how he gets his hair in the costume…

October 12, 2011

A spineless library: classic books in a poster

Spineless Classics puts a whole book in a poster, makes a little negative space art, and sells them. I likes them a lot…

Alice in Wonderland

The Wizard of Oz

Genesis…

October 12, 2011

The Fictional Food Chain

Feed your imagination, and feast your eyes. Why don’t we call this your dose of inspiration for the day.

October 12, 2011

Mad Muppets: A Sesame Street version of Mad Men…

Pretty brilliant. It’s just how advertising brainstorming sessions work in the real world…

Thanks Clayton for sharing on Facebook.

October 11, 2011

Bike tricks for hipsters

Perhaps inspired by the previous post, perhaps a coincidence – if you’re looking for some tricks to pull on your fixie – here are 50 “no hands” moves you can pull as you do a mainie on your pushie.

October 11, 2011

Four wheels good, two wheels better

It occurred to me today that I didn’t ever post this video, which is amazing. Not that I didn’t post it. The video. It’s amazing. It’s like bike parcour. Or something.

October 11, 2011

The (music) disciples: By dress shall all men know…

Photographer James Mollison came up with a pretty fascinating photographic concept here. He set up a photo booth outside concerts from 62 different artists, and snapped shots of the bands’ fans. Turning them into a coffee table book called The Disciples, and providing a little bit of a surface level analysis of different sub cultures. I like it.

Here are some samples.

George Michael

Oasis

Marylin Manson

Morrisey

Via The Atlantic.

October 11, 2011

Coffee for Change: Put your habit to work for the poor with St. Eutychus

Right. I’ve been thinking a bit about ethical coffee and stuff. And about how to use this online platform for the power of good. So this is what I’ve come up with. It’s what I call a triple bottom line project, it looks after your financial wellbeing – because you get cheap coffee. It looks after your social wellbeing – because you get your caffeine fix, and it looks after other people. It’s environmentally ambivalent. Except it will result in planting more plants, and more pollination…

Huh? You’re no doubt wondering what on earth I’m talking about. I probably should have explained above…

If you purchase coffee through the St. Eutychus coffee roastery between now and Christmas – your purchase is going to do a world of good, on a small scale, for other people. Here are the details:

Coffee for Change


Some “seed” funding at work…

For every 400gm of coffee purchased through St. Eutychus between now and Christmas 2011, you will also be purchasing a batch of seeds for a third world family through Tear Australia. For every 800gm order your purchase will include a bee hive, also via Tear’s Really Useful Gift Catalogue. There is no increase in pricing to accomodate these purchases – so get in during this period to give something back with your coffee.

I’ll mail you the coffee, and the gift card (though they’re a few days off arriving in my hot little hands).

And you’ll be able to enjoy your coffee guilt free – knowing that not only is it ethically purchased, but that you’re making a difference with every sip.

October 11, 2011

Expand your LEGO horizons with Rebrickable

I have no idea what set numbers our family’s lego collection contains. But as I start investing in a Lego collection for my own children (it’s not too early, right?) I’ll be keeping tabs on Rebrickable – which calculates what sets you can form using the sets you own. It’s like getting a whole new spaceship. You can also get schematics for user generated constructions.

You can make stuff like this Lego Gundam (a Japanese transformer type robot). You’ll need 501 pieces, spread across 155 varieties of part. But it looks doable.

October 10, 2011

Ikea meets Escher

Wouldn’t these be fun to put together…

This one’s via Ikea Fans

This is from Rock, Paper, Cynic

October 10, 2011

Boys and their toys… a composite picture of American toy guns since 1800

Here’s what you get if you, or in this case, if a guy named Christopher Baker, collect all the patent pictures labelled “toy gun” since 1800, and you put them in one picture. There’s a video of the picture being generated at the link.

Here are some of the patent images.

Toy Gun Patents

October 10, 2011

Godwin’s Law before Hitler

We had an interesting discussion at college the other day, completely unrelated to college… about who epitomised evil before Hitler. Some said Napoleon, still others Genghis Kahn, while some thought Mary Queen of Scots might get the guernsey.

A Slate article on exactly the same issue, from a couple of days before (that may or may not have prompted my question) reckons the answer is Pharaoh, but also suggests that the use of an extreme historical figure as a rhetorical device is probably a relatively recent invention. Possibly correlating to the rise of the internet.

“The Pharoah. In the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, many Americans and Europeans had a firmer grasp of the bible than of the history of genocidal dictators. Orators in search of a universal symbol for evil typically turned to figures like Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, or, most frequently, the Pharaoh of Exodus, who chose to endure 10 plagues rather than let the Hebrew people go.”

“Generally speaking, hatred was more local and short-lived before World War II. Nineteenth-century polemicists occasionally used Napoleon Bonaparte as shorthand for an evil ruler—they sometimes referred to “the little tyrant” rather than name the diminutive conqueror—but those references were rare. There is little record of oratorical comparisons of political leaders to Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, or Ivan the Terrible.”

So there you go.

October 10, 2011

Build your own Bobblehead

The coolest thing about Hamish and Andy’s New York TV adventure was the traxedo. The second coolest thing was that they had their own bobble heads. Looking around the interwebs this seemed pretty expensive (over $100). But 1minime.com will (depending on postage costs) get you in under that mark.

October 10, 2011

Let’s sing about “reproductive messages” baby

Apparently nine out of ten top ten songs in 2009 featured “reproductive messages” – which means they were about sex.

“Approximately 92% of the 174 songs that made it into the [Billboard] Top 10 in 2009 contained reproductive messages,” says SUNY Albany psychology professor Dawn R. Hobbs in Evolutionary Psychology. That’s right–“reproductive messages,” our newest favorite euphemism.”

Here’s how those songs were distributed across “reproductive” categories.

If its your thing – you can read the study of those songs here (pdf).

Via The Atlantic.

October 10, 2011