Wow. These are part disturbing part, well, disturbing. Zombie themed ten pin bowling balls. Smash some heads with pins. Perfect practice for the Zompocalypse.
More pictures here. Some of them are a little disturbing.
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.
Possible explanation for the slaying of Goliath
Archeologists may or may not have discovered something important about events in pre-Davidic Israel.
Via Ragamuffin Soul
Paranoid Pianoid
Ahh. Another week. Another Paranoid Android cover. This must surely be one of YouTube’s favourite songs.
This time it’s on duelling pianos. My friend Adam shared it on Facebook. And he knows his pianos.
Trojan T-Shirts: Marketing by subterfuge
What do you get the German skinhead who has everything? Especially if you want them to reform form their Skinhead ways? You get them a nice skull and cross bone t-shirt. And you give it to them. For free. But you make it so that after one wash the shirt changes completely.
Brilliant.
“With a skull-and-crossbones logo and the message “Hardcore Rebels – National and Free,” some 250 black T-shirts given away at a recent right-wing extremist rock festival were quickly snapped up. But there was more to the tough-looking image than met the eye.
Once the rightist rockers washed their new shirts, they were dismayed to find an entirely different message: “If your T-shirt can do it, so can you. We’ll help to free you from right-wing extremism.” The offer, complete with contact information, came from a group called Exit Deutschland, which helps people get out of the neo-Nazi scene.”
More here.
Solving drinking water problems one iceberg at a time…
This could be the future.
That’s a mock up of a tugboat towing an iceberg. The plan is to stop letting fresh water melt into the ocean and start shipping it to places where there isn’t much water. Seems clever. Though pretty inefficient.
Here’s how it “might” work.
This is just a concept – but it is, to use the obvious pun/metaphor – the tip of the iceberg. You can read more about the pie in the sky plan here.
“The cost of iceberg transport have not been made public yet, but pilot programs–initially just try to tow a mini-iceberg a short distance, says Simard–are underway. And there is talk, at least, of a real-world trial in 2012 or 2013.”
I’m sure there’s some sort of sermon illustration here. And it’s less ecumenically problematic than talking about bringing the mountain to Mohammad.
Tumblrweed: Stockbrokers looking dejected…
Here’s a sign of the times. Stockbrokers with their hands on their faces. It’s funny when you contrast it to the brash way stock brokers present when they’re giving stock tips or talking about the market when they’re on television.
A worrying trend: Tracking the London riots through Amazon purchases
Now, it may be that playing baseball and dressing up as a police officer has suddenly become popular in England, but this is one particularly alarming little tidbit from an already particularly alarming situation.
CNN is reporting that sales of baseball bats in England rose by 6500% during the riots.
Here’s The Thing: A creepy iPhone cover
We went to a shopping centre on Sunday. A big one. I was shocked by the awesomeness of the Apple Store, the way shopping centres have almost entirely replaced the function of church on a Sunday in Australian culture, and the incredible number of outlets selling sparkly covers for mobile phones. None of them were quite as disturbing as this…
Tuesday Night Music: A bit of Gotye
Pretty excited to be seeing Gotye in Brisbane in October. He’s playing with an orchestra. Should be awesome.
Also, Boy and Bear’s new album Moonfire is the goods. One of the guys in the band is named Killian. I really don’t mind that name, but Robyn has ruled it out for any sons we might have in the future.
Want to see somebody talk about the gospel in the media? Check this out
So. I’ve banged on about how Christians have a responsibility to use a mass media platform, if provided, to talk about Jesus in a winsome and engaging way. I’ve said that there are certain representatives in the political field who don’t do this well, and certain people who do.
And now, I have an example. This is how you go into an essentially hostile environment. Kochie lobs this set-up shot in front of the artist of a controversial piece of art work depicting Jesus as indigenous (which he was, to Palestine), transvestite (which he wasn’t), and as a drag queen. It’s clearly a piece of art designed to shock. He gives the artist free range to slag off Christianity’s record when it comes to these groups. And then he turns to Guy Mason, who’s an Anglican minister from Melbourne. And Guy smashes it out of the park. He talks about how Jesus died for sinners (a bit of substitutionary atonement). And invites people to use this as an opportunity to consider the way Jesus loved sinners and died for all of us. He leaves the shrill artist speechless, and debunks any sense of hostility.
I especially love the little dig about it being a “cliched” piece of art.
But you can also be “on message” for the gospel by not being deliberately on message. Kate Bracks. MasterChef. Is a Christian, this wasn’t a big deal in the series – except when she refused to call the Dalai Lama holy. She’s a Christian. And on Sunday night she won a competition that was watched by bucket loads of people. Perhaps because she didn’t want God being a product placement alongside Handy Ultra Paper Towel, or perhaps because she’s just classy, she didn’t choose to thank God when she won. Publicly, anyway. She thanked her husband and she acted with grace, poise and charm. And then. Today. She got to talk about why she didn’t thank God.
Kate says she thought about it, but then:
“But then I thought, everyone then goes ‘Oh great, it just sounds like the Logies’. It sounds corny and that is not the type of Christian I am,”
But what sort of Christian is she? This seems like a good opportunity to make a statement about her faith, right… well, she does (with a bit of humour when she was asked if she prayed for the win):
“I’m always talking to God but I don’t actually pray that he’ll help me win because I don’t really think he cares too much about that to be honest,” she said.
“I would say that I believe what the Bible says and I try to live that way so that it’s about trying to have a relationship with God and not about the things you do or don’t do.”
That’s how you do it. Classy. Winsome. Gospel centred. I know some churches that are lining up to get Kate along. Lets hope she doesn’t get worn out too quickly by this attention.
Census Day: Why you should answer the religion question truthfully…
There’s a bit of a campaign doing the rounds regarding the answering the controversial religious affiliation question in the 2011 Census. And now there’s a counter campaign. What happened to just telling the truth?
It’s pretty bizarre that the Atheist campaign website is down the night before the census – I can only hope that this isn’t thanks to some misguided Christians thinking it’s a bad thing for people to be honest in their census answers (remember the ninth commandment people…). It was a good website, and a good campaign.
One thing I thought was interesting was their insistence that being able to sign up to the Apostle’s Creed (or maybe the Nicene Creed) was the mark of a Christian, their position was that if you can’t agree with the creed – you’re not a Christian, and you shouldn’t indicate that you are. Which is great. Because now we’ve got a functional definition of Christian and we can do away with the typical internet atheist’s constant resort to the “no True Scotsman fallacy” whenever one suggests that a particular behaviour is not consistent with Christian belief. Because apparently being a Christian does require a particular characteristic, it’s not just good enough to call yourself one…
That’s all well and good. I’d love people to answer the census honestly, because I hate nominalism. It breeds complacency and a bizarre superiority complex when Christians approach social issues. It flies in the face of the human experience. And people should stop feeling like they need to pretend to honour a religious belief they don’t actually live out. The way people live is indicative of their belief system. Anyway.
Here’s the counter campaign, almost the pro-nominalism campaign… from a friend’s Facebook. I quite like the intention here. Because politically correct editing of society is just ridiculous. Take, for example, a school in the US that renamed Easter Eggs “Spring Spheres” – which is pretty bizarre because the word Easter comes from a pagan festival anyway and what Christians are really interested in at Easter is the death and resurrection of Jesus.
“Australia will be holding census tomorrow.
Don’t leave the ‘religion’ part blank.
Be sure to at least tick Christian or (your own faith)
1,000,000 Muslims will tick their box and
10,000,000 Australians will leave theirs blank and wonder why Christmas carols are being banned from schools, not to mention Easter hat parades! It’s not about religion, it’s about keeping our way of life! :)
Repost if u agree!”
I have some major problems with this, because the stats are ridiculously paranoid. 63% of Australians said they were Christians at the last census. The ABS population clock says we currently have 22 million people in our country. Based on figures at the last census people who indicated no religion accounted for around 18% of our population (I’m sure that will increase, that’s the trend. That’s about 3.9 million people. Not 10 million. 13.8 million people said they were Christians last time around. And the real furphy in those figures is the Muslim statistic (again, I suspect this will increase this year). 1.7% of Australians ticked the Muslim box last time around. That’s about 400,000 people. The one million figure quoted above would be a huge increase in proportion of the Australian population – from 1.8% to 4.5%. I just don’t see that happening.
I think we need to look elsewhere for the cause of the removal of Christmas from the calendar, and it’s got much more to do with the decreasing role Jesus plays in the lives of Australians.
So please, atheists, muslim, Christian, whatever your creed – lets get a good picture of the nature of the Australian community, because ultimately it’s going to help the church do its job and think clearly about its mission.
That is all.
5,000
That last post. Yep. The one about Taxidermied animals. That was post number 5,000 on this ‘ere little corner of the Internet. I’m pretty proud of that effort. I’ve been going, according to a date calculator thing, for five years, four months and twenty days (1968 days). And in that time I’ve averaged 2.5 posts a day.
I’ve known my blog for longer than I’ve known my wife.
To celebrate, I got hacked. Good and proper. By the Russian mob. Not just this site, but all the sites I manage. I think I’ve fixed it, possibly temporarily. After an almost all nighter. If you see anything amiss please get in touch with me. But in the meantime, I took those hackers. And I THREW THEM ON THE GROUND.
Really stuffed animals: Terrible Taxidermy Collection made me LLOL
LLOL is internet speak for literally laugh out loud. You probably won’t, because I am twisted. I give you Terrible Taxidermy… this isn’t even my first taxidermy related post.
Some favourites…
A one man cello octet plays the cello song…
This is pretty amazing.
As is this.
