History is being made here people. History. This is my first post from an iPad. I just turned it on the side to get a bigger keyboard. Amazing. Without wanting to descend to far into the chasm of materialistic fanboyism, I reckon this is the most amazing piece of technology I’ve ever owned. Everything just works. It seamlessly links with other Apple stuff too. It seems that is part of Apple’s plans for world domination.
Category: Consciousness
Fun on the farm
Well blog friends, it has been a quiet old time here the last few days. Hopefully that is all about to change. Part of the reason for the said quietness was the aforementioned essaying. But we also spent the last few days on Robyn’s folk’s farm near Dalby, and despite one of my jobs on the farm being to set up the wireless internet connection, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the computer.
This trip to the farm was fun. We took our Canadian friends Mitch and Steph (check out Mitch’s photo blog) along for the ride. Mitch and Steph have travelled all the way from the mystical Canadaland to study with us at the Queensland Theological College. In Canada, amongst other things, Mitch was a poo farmer. Seriously. I think that is fantastic. And they are good company. So we introduced them to a little bit of Australiana. Dalby style.
Here are some photos from the weekend.
This yellow pole thing is called an “auger” or something. It was made in Mitch and Steph’s tiny home town in Canada. Which amazed them. They couldn’t stop talking about it.
Mitch even had me jumping for joy over it. Until I kicked my heel a little bit too hard. And then I was just jumping because I was told to.
We found a red belly black snake.
And then played with some long exposure photography “light painting”…
On Easter Sunday we had an Easter egg hunt, went wallaby hunting on the Bunya Mountains, and drove home (via Mt Cootha). It was a pretty busy weekend. But lots of fun.
How was your Easter?
Ugh: Can’t blog. Writing an Essay
Someday (or some hour) soon I will crack open my unread Google Reader items and blog to my heart’s content. But for now, I’m writing an essay on Scripture and Tradition in the Catholic and Protestant traditions.
Sorry for the boringness. I think the blogosphere, or at least the corner of it I frequent, is the quietest over Easter. And I’m sorry for my part in that.
That is all.
Make your next Chop Suey a Samurai experience
Yeah. Samurai Chop Sticks. Because you know that food tastes better with Japanese style honour and tradition. These are absolutely the best tool for going to one of those teppanyaki restaurants where they throw the food at you.
Our bright evolutionary future
A shirt I designed a couple of years ago just scored a post on 22 Words. Thanks 22 Words.
You can buy said shirt from CafePress.
C-Cruising for a youtube b-bruising…
Look, stepping in front of a green screen and holding the lid of a rubbish bin pretending it’s a steel drum, and rapping might sound like a good idea for your next church promo video. But it just doesn’t play well. People are sick of white people rapping poorly and the “hey, lets make this announcement into a rap” thing is just a little passe.
Via Scotteriology.
The real McCoy…
My friend, and soccer buddy, Brad McCoy is back on the blogging horse. He’s posted literally a dozen times in the last few days. Maybe work is boring him or something – but it’s good to have life in the bones of that blog. He writes about fun political things and ethical things and other things. His post on a Christian response to gay marriage is right up my alley – I’m glad to find other people out there who have a similar position on the issue to me. It’s reassuring. I like to comment there, though I worry that I’m turning into one of those pedantic argument pickers that nobody likes…
So you should go and throw your two cents in the ring too. Or in his cap. Blogging is a little like busking. Sometimes.
This is not a photo of Brad, it is a photo of a busker in Christchurch.
Sometimes blogging is just about keeping one’s balls in the air… profound.
Fun times in harbour town
Our weekend in Sydney is drawing to a close. We’ve had a great time, though only ticked off six of the seven things on my list of things to do, and only visiting three of the six cafes. Apparently Sydney still closes on a Sunday.
The wedding was fun, it was great to spend time with cousins who we’ve barely met. There’s something to be said for a family heritage that produces so many ministry minded people. I really love being part of the family I’m part of. What was even more fun was seeing people from Maclean (where I grew up), and Dalby (where Robyn grew up), at the wedding and having to explain why we were at this wedding of their friends. Fun times.
We skipped the Manly game, in favour of dinner with good friends. Which was great. I haven’t laughed as much as I have this weekend since I watched Four Lions two weeks ago.
Church By The Bridge on Sunday was a most enjoyable experience. So much singing. Never have I sung so much in an evangelical church service and enjoyed it. It was a refreshing change. And very friendly. Though it helped that I knew a bunch of people, including the guy on welcoming, from various AFES events and other bizarre quirks of Christianity’s two degrees of separation. It was fun meeting Ali in real life too. Meeting blog people is sometimes a little awkward because you know more about somebody than you should on first real life meeting. But this wasn’t.
I love the smells of Newtown, and we had two great dinners from the Sultan’s Table and Faheem’s Fast Food (a terrific sub-continental curry place).
You can read about our adventures in coffee on thebeanstalker.com.
Today: Coffee, Zoo, Greek Food, Gould Books
Ahh Sydney.
So, today, we walked down King St, visited Moore College (where we stood in a corner and people watched and my wife was shocked by how young and cool Con Campbell looked, she had pictured him as a 60 year old englishman), walked to Redfern, caught a train going in the wrong direction, so we caught a different train. Then, finally, we arrived at our destination – Mecca Espresso on King St in the CBD (not to be confused with the aforementioned King St).
I’ll be reviewing Mecca on thebeanstalker.com, but I tried my first ever Clover brew. The Clover, when released, was a $15,000 piece of technology. It’s the black box in the middle on this bench:
It was nice. Smelt like fruity tea. Tasted like coffee.
We spent the morning with my friend Paul. Which was tops. Then walked to Circular Quay, caught the ferry to Taronga, and walked around the zoo for the afternoon. Which Robyn loved and I enjoyed.
There were turtles.
And rabbit-eating dragons…
And primates.
And other animals.
Though, some were missing…
Then it was a reversal of the morning, though we added dinner at a cheap Greek place, and about 45 minutes poring through the shelves at Gould Books.
A good day.
Seven Things I’m Looking Forward to in Sydney
In no particular order…
1. Catching up with friends (including Izaac and Sarah whose blogs I can’t be bothered linking to but you all read them anyway. Right.)
2. Taronga Zoo.
3. Manly play the Sharks on Saturday night
4. Church by the Bridge (5pm service on Sunday is my plan)
5. Coffee at AIR, Alchemy, Bean Drinking and Mecca. Those are my plans.
6. Gould Books..
7. The wedding we’re actually coming down for.
A hair razing event
I was craving steak all day. That’s where it started. You could say my trip to the supermarket to buy eggs for breakfast set the ball rolling, because that’s where I saw them. Two succulent pieces of eye fillet. Just the right sizes. One slightly bigger than the other (I am more than slightly bigger than my wife). Perfect. I had to have them. They became mine.
They sat in the fridge all day. Looking at each other, and their neighbours. The Beans. The Beans too, were destined for the fry pan. With a little butter, and some pepper.
Sometime in the early hours of the evening, you could say they were at sixes and sevens, the minute hand and hour hand that is, the steaks made their way to a dish. Where they met Olive Oil (not to be confused with Popeye’s girlfriend) and Rock Salt. Their demise at the hands (or teeth) of mastication was imminent.
Perhaps I was distracted by the thought of chewing on a delicious piece of barbequed steak, perhaps I was pondering the lack of blogworthy material filtering through my “Publish Now” button. Who can say. All I know is that for a moment, a long moment, between turning on the gas bottle, opening up the valves on the barbeque, and lighting a skewer to stick between the fronds of the grill, I thought “I can smell gas, but it’s airy and open out here, so it shouldn’t be a problem”… thoughts can be so misleading. The faggot alight (well, the skewer, unlike commercial radio I’m ok with using a word that has multiple meanings – because that’s what Dire Straits was singing about. Sticks with jewelry and makeup. Millionaire sticks.). My thoughts turned to introducing flame to gas. Which turned out to be a more volatile proposition than I planned – sending a ball of flame into my face. I shut my eyes. I smelled burning hair. I ducked and dived. Coughed and spluttered. And then went into some sort of shock, before making my way inside to confess my adventures to my wife. Who had been asleep. I surveyed the damage in the bathroom mirror – my previously almost invisible eyebrows were now almost more invisible, if that were possible. My eyelashes were but a shadow of their former selves. And my carefully nonchalant attempt at a beard was now half as substantial – which is to say not very substantial at all, though more stinky. My fringe, slightly puffier than the rest of my hair at the best of times, was now puffier, and shorter by half, than the rest of my hair.
So next time somebody, even if its the little voice inside your head, says “don’t turn the gas on 45 seconds before you light the match” – learn from my mistake. Don’t turn the gas on 45 seconds before you light the match.
Coffee at the Corner Store Cafe
I know, most of you are already reading my cafe reviews on thebeanstalker.com, right. But I have to point out that if you’re looking for an incredibly cool cafe to hang out at, or to study at, in the Toowong region – then you should most definitely head along to the Corner Store Cafe on Sylvan road.
Here’s my review of the Corner Store on thebeanstalker.com.
That’s a photo of my double shot flat white from yesterday. Because we spent the morning there. The food is also excellent. Try the Beef Dip – a popular Canadian dish, and the Bacon Cheeseburger – a popular everywhere dish.
A reminder about perhaps the most important post I’ve ever written…
I am consistently blown away by the enduring popularity of my post “How to make Sizzler’s Cheese Toast” it’s almost two years old, and it gets constant traffic, accounting for about 3% of traffic to my blog ever. Wow.
If you didn’t know it was there, think of this as a warm wintery present from me to you. And add it to your recipe folder, it’s great with soup.
Have you tried my recipe? Let me know, I’d love to hear how it went.
Job hunting 2.0
Funny because it’s true. Via Joy of Tech.
Things to click (and read)
Sometimes I need to clear the thirty tabs I have open in my browser and I can’t be bothered posting them separately. This is one of those times, and it reflects on me, not on the content of these links that you should read.
There’s a rumour that floats around the Internet every now and then that Facebook is responsible for one in five divorces these days as people rediscover old flames. This rumour is just that. A rumour. The Wall Street Journal kills it.
“The 1-in-5 number originated with an executive at an online divorce-service provider in the U.K. Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online, which allows Britons to file uncontested divorces at low cost, had just launched the company’s Facebook page and wondered what role Facebook has in precipitating divorces. After determining that the word “Facebook” appeared in 989 of the company’s 5,000 or so most recent divorce petitions, he had Divorce-Online issue a news release in December 2009 stating “Facebook is bad for your marriage.”
Mr. Keenan acknowledges that his company’s clients aren’t necessarily representative of all divorces, and he adds that his firm never claimed that Facebook actually causes 20% of divorces. “It was a very unscientific survey,” Mr. Keenan says.
Elsewhere, Clayboy (a newie for me) has two must read posts about the new atheists – the first about the conformity of “free thinker” thinking, as demonstrated by a magazine called The Freethinker, the second about whether Christians can value atheism.
“I might even ponder whether the award for secularist of the year (apparently a “prestigious” one – who knew?) reflects this. The winner is not Salman Taseer, the nominee who was assassinated for opposing the Pakistan blasphemy laws mainly aimed at Christians, but Dutch Euro MP Sophie in ’t Veld who, er …, bravely organised a protest against the Pope.
I am somewhat underwhelmed in my admiration for such a courageous achievement advancing the cause of rational civilisation.”
Slate says the lack of looting in Japan is down to the Yakuza. Which is pretty cool.
“Organized crime. Police aren’t the only ones on patrol since the earthquake hit. Members of the Yakuza, Japan’s organized crime syndicate, have also been enforcing order. All three major crime groups—the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Sumiyoshi-kai, and the Inagawa-kai—have “compiled squads to patrol the streets of their turf and keep an eye out to make sure looting and robbery doesn’t occur,” writes Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, in an e-mail message. “The Sumiyoshi-kai claims to have shipped over 40 tons of [humanitarian aid] supplies nationwide and I believe that’s a conservative estimate.” One group has even opened its Tokyo offices to displaced Japanese and foreigners who were stranded after the first tremors disabled public transportation. “As one Sumiyoshi-kai boss put it to me over the phone,” says Adelstein, ” ‘In times of crisis, there are not Yakuza and civilians or foreigners. There are only human beings and we should help each other.’ ” Even during times of peace, the Yakuza enforce order, says Adelstein. They make their money off extortion, prostitution, and drug trafficking. But they consider theft grounds for expulsion.”
Elsewhere, I’ve been taking part in an increasingly lengthy discussion about gay marriage on the solapanel.
Five Senses Coffee offers a great diagnosis guide for figuring out what is wrong with your espresso. Well worth a read if you think your coffee could be better.
First Things has a good list for engaging with people in the online world. Especially for responding to people you don’t know who disagree with you.
“The manner of your answer will affect your inquirer more than its content. You are often, as far as you can tell, trying only to encourage him to hear the answer, to open a crack in his defenses that might over time open into a door. Hope and pray that you are only one—perhaps the first, but perhaps not—in a series of encounters that will bring him to see the truth. You do not need to win the argument to change his life.”
You should be reading Things Findo Thinks – I haven’t linked to it for a while, but Findo seems much more interested in engaging the nu-atheists than I presently am, so if you want your fix of fallacy busting, head there. Try this post about arguments from authority on for size. It’ll help you avoid bad arguments about your arguments.
It’s iPad 2 week this week. And luckily my wife is going to let me buy one. Unlike this guy in the states, who allegedly had to return his iPad because his wife said no. At least that was the reason he gave on the post-it note that went to the store, that was passed on to Apple Corporate, who may or may not have sent back the iPad with a note reading “Apple says yes”… brilliant if true.