Consciousness – Page 8

Back, to the future…

Ahh. Melbourne. Coffee. Home. Essays. Sermons. That’s the story of my life this week. We left Melbourne yesterday, and that was the last real holiday I think we’ll have before our family gets a new addition.

So, in the next few days blogging will be a little sporadic. I’ve got three sermons to write before this weekend. One on Psalm 122 for my trials for license (complete with a 3,500 word exegesis paper), one on social networking and what it teaches us about the human desire for relationship (for another church’s youth group on Saturday), and one on Paul’s method of connecting the gospel to culture (based on Acts 17) for church on Sunday.

Plus, I’ve got a tutorial presentation paper and essay on the Psalms to prepare for the first week back from holidays (next week). So that’s an ouch.

Anyway. Here’s some photos from Melbourne to tide you over.

This dessert was the best thing I’ve ever eaten.

And this was the best pork belly ever… both were from Axil Coffee.

Reviews of our caffeinated long weekend in Melbourne are up on thebeanstalker.com (I’ve got a couple more to go)

September 28, 2011

Fun times in Batmania

I can’t be the only person in the world who thinks that while Melbourne is a cool city, it would be cooler if the name Batmania had stuck…

We’ve been here since Friday. It has been cold. We’re staying with my friend Mika, which has been fun. We’ve been to a bunch of cafes (stay tuned for reviews on thebeanstalker.com). We’ve been to a wedding (the real reason we came down here), a wedding that featured a surprise opera performance during the toasts. We’ve caught trams. We’ve been to City on a Hill (the church run by Guy Mason, the guy who did that Sunrise interview)… and despite all that fun stuff, and the amazing coffees, probably my favourite part was meeting Arthur and Tamie of Cyberpunk + Blue Twin fame. First off, Tamie makes possibly the most amazing Baklava I’ve ever tasted (and I spend two weeks in Greece and Turkey trying to find amazing Baklava), secondly, the meeting of the minds and the warm and engaging conversations we shared yesterday are a reminder of the beauty of being part of the kingdom of God, and one of the tangible benefits of doing this blogging thing. People who read and participate in conversations online are real people, and it was nice to be reminded of that – it’s also nice when you meet people and the real life version of the person is pretty much what they display online only in three dimensions. So that was fun.

The League of Honest Coffee – our first Cafe stop

City on a Hill was interesting. I’ve never seen a church with such amazing branding and design, they meet in a cinema which offers the most comfortable church seats I’ve ever been in, they had a video Bible reading featuring cool shots from around the city with key parts of the text written in chalk. It was a really hip and happening deal. The two criticisms I have, and I’m not really in the business of taking shots at other people’s models of ministries (unless they don’t talk about Jesus) were that the cinema setting made conversation difficult – nobody really said hello to us until the end of the service, even though we were about five minutes early, and the music, while tight and enjoyable, featured the occasional repetition of line/verse that wasn’t indicated by the powerpoint, which made singing a long a little bit disjointed.

I loved how “on message” people were in up front stuff, it was clear that if you were new at the church your next step is to become part of a “connect group” (via a newcomers information evening), and it was clear that this is a church where the expectation is that you role up your sleeves and be on mission. So that was pretty cool too, in that it seemed to recognise the limitations of doing welcoming/connecting with new people in the venue that they’re in, while conveying the church’s desire to incorporate new people into the flock, and move people into the process of serving one another.

The sermon was on 1 Corinthians 14, on Spiritual gifts, tongues and prophecy – so there was plenty of interesting mental fodder. Guy managed to hold and nicely articulate the tension between skeptical cessassionists and tongues-loving reformed charismatics nicely, while pointing out that spiritual gifts are only spiritual gifts if they point people towards Jesus. So that was nice.

September 25, 2011

Four Years

I have been married to my wonderful and talented wife for four years today.

That makes me happy, the prospect of seventy odd more years, and the impending birth of our first baby (in December, this is the first time I’ve mentioned it here) makes me even more happy.

Here she is showing off her talents with firearms at the Townsville army base.

Our jet setting lifestyle means blogging will be a little irregular here until next week some time. We came back from mission in Townsville, spent a week at college, hit the road to Byron Bay for our anniversary, and tomorrow we’re in Melbourne for a wedding – stay tuned for some cafe reviews on thebeanstalker.com.

I’d like to point out that I resisted the urge to refer to Robyn as “my smokin’ hot wife”… I do still think we’re cut out for church planting.

September 22, 2011

Some handy fashion tips from Put This On

I’m pretty horrible when it comes to fashion, unless I’m really dressing up for something. The other day I spent about an hour and a half trying to tie a full Windsor knot while driving to a wedding (and while stopped at a beach near the venue – see Mitch’s photo blog for proof), without a mirror. I kept retying it because dammit. My tie will be equilateral not isosceles.

So, if you’re bad with fashion, like I am, these (basic) tips from fashion tumblog “Put This On” will set you straight.

A random sampling:

Your tie should reach your belt line – it shouldn’t end above your belt or below it.
Your tie knot should have a dimple.
Only wear a tie if you’re also wearing a suit or sportcoat (or, very casually, a sweater). Shirt, tie and no jacket is the wedding uniform of a nine-year-old.
The only men who should wear black suits during the day are priests, undertakers, secret agents, funerals attendees and yokels.

September 21, 2011

Mario says happy Friday to St. Eutychus readers…

Dear readers,

Here’s a little video from Mario courtesy of Fiverr.

Thanks for reading.

September 16, 2011

Stay Calm…

I’m on holidays for the next couple of days. And on college mission after that. I can’t promise I’ll blog in the next two weeks at all. But I’ll try. It’ll just be sporadic. In the meantime… don’t be alarmed by the absence of new content. I’ll be back.

August 30, 2011

Real Life Super Heroes: The Doco

HBO, makers of wonderful television, has produced a documentary on one of my favourite topics. Real Life Super Heroes. They’ve profiled members of the RLSH community in TV form.

August 24, 2011

Tiger, tiger…

So. We’re going on a holiday. Right. In September. Pretty exciting stuff actually. We’re heading to Melbourne for a wedding and a little bit of a holiday.

Now. The catch is. We’re flying Tiger. Don’t look at me like that. It was really cheap. Even buying checked baggage for both of us.

Let me tell you a little story about last time we flew Tiger. Last time we flew Tiger I only booked checked luggage for one of us, and I thought you had the standard 20kg of baggage. Silly me. I didn’t read that fine print.

When we arrived at the Brisbane airport for our departing flight the staff were really nice. They looked after us, they said it didn’t matter that we only had one bag that was over the weight limit – we could just purchase luggage for our second ticket there and then and not pay the ridiculous price per kilo rate that they impose. That was pretty nice. It was costly. But nice.

No such joy upon our return from Sydney. We got to the airport nice and early (we were fitting our schedule around some friends and airports aren’t that bad…). We tried to check in, but the check-in wasn’t open. So we waited at the cafe. It had bad coffee.

Now, we hadn’t realised that Robyn’s ticket was an online check in ticket (because we’d checked in at the airport without a hitch in Brisbane). And when we got to the counter with our excess luggage hoping to repeat the Brisbane deal we were met with derision and the promise of a $30 at the counter check in fee, and an excess baggage fee of more than $200. So we did what any typical students would do in this situation. Panicked. We left the line and went through our bags offloading some excess weight into our hand luggage (because nobody ever weighs hand luggage) and donning whatever heavy clothes we could muster. Long story short, we got our baggage down to an acceptable weight, and walked through the check-in gate looking like Bernard Black heading off to donate clothes to the second hand store.

So now my questions are – have I thrown money into a drain booking with Tiger? Will they even exist come September? What should we do in Melbourne?

August 22, 2011

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.

August 8, 2011

The Internet is boring this week…

Anybody got anything worth reading. Or watching. Or listening to. Please point me towards some content.

August 4, 2011

In which I write a complaint letter to Pascall for the unfortunate pink/white ratio in a 500gm bag of marshmallows

To whom it may concern,

I love Pascall’s Marshmallows. Seriously. Our two person household probably powers through a 250gm bag of those bad boys a week. They’re almost fat free. They’re delicious. And they’re magical. I love the easy tear corners on the bags. Somebody over your way has obviously put a lot of thought into the optimal packet design.

When I say I’m your biggest fan it’s probably a little bit exaggerated. I don’t live in a house made from, or even decked out with, your product. But I consider myself at least in your top #7, and I would challenge anybody who suggests otherwise.

They are great in hot chocolate, they’re great by the handful, and they’re amazing just slightly toasted and consumed while hot (but not on fire). I can’t get enough of them. Pink or white. To me. It doesn’t matter. I’ll take either…

Which brings me, somewhat dramatically, to my point. Earlier this week I purchased a 500gm bag of your delicious marshmallows. I don’t think I’d ever noticed 500gm bags before, my local supermarket must have just expanded their range, which again shows you’re doing something right. Incidentally, how do you actually make marshmallows? I read on the Internet that marshmallows, in their original form, were some sort of sweet plant growth and what we buy and eat by the handful are artificial replicas of these original products. Amazing. Is that true?

I purchased a mixed bag. 500gm. Pink and white. Now, you would expect in a bag with only two flavour options, statistically speaking, to find roughly a 50/50 split of pink to white. I would think. Is this the case? Or are you aware that one particular flavour is more popular than another. That would be the kind of market research and knowledge I would expect from a subsidiary of the Cadbury company. So nothing would surprise me more than to learn you hand pack these bags, or at least use trained animals. I’ve seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I know about the squirrels. I bet that put a downer on things for you guys when Hollywood blew the lid on the confectionary industry’s biggest secret. Trained squirrels. Brilliant. You’d think an Australian animal would suffice, but I’ve heard koalas are suckers for marshmallows and kangaroos are rowdy and hard to pin down.

So in my mixed bag, thus far (I probably have 150gm to go), I’d say I’ve had a 90/10 ratio of pink to white marshmallows. I assume this isn’t normal. It’s like the old conundrum about picking out two different coloured socks from a drawer. If you’ve got ten socks that are red, and ten that are blue, after three socks you will definitely have a pair, and after ten socks you’ll definitely have one of each sock (you may have ten red, and one blue, or vice versa – but in this case the next nine socks will all be the same colour). Eventually. Over time. The two colours will become evenly represented in your outside-of-drawer collection. Imagine my surprise when this didn’t happen. I wasn’t expecting socks from my marshmallow bag. I’m not an idiot. No. I was expecting to eventually see a normalising of the ratio of pink:white. But it didn’t happen. That’s a statistical anomaly that I think we’ll all agree you should be made aware of immediately. Hence my writing to you.

Now, I’m not just being a good citizen of the world who passes on feedback to companies simply for their edification. I have a bone to pick. Metaphorically, if I’d found a bone in my marshmallows this would be a very different letter, and would probably involve the police. No. My metaphorical bone is this. My wife does not like pink marshmallows. If marshmallows were people she’d be a racist. She’s not a racist, because they’re not… but she doesn’t like the taste. Which means I’ve eaten lots of pink marshmallows from this packet and she hasn’t eaten many at all.

So, from one marshmallow fan to another, or more correctly, from a marshmallow fan to the creators of delicious marshmallows, I would ask you to lift your game a little bit, or, at the very least, fire the squirrels. They carry all sorts of lice and disease anyway. It might be time to move on.

Yours in confectionary,

Nathan Campbell

August 2, 2011

I had a brilliant idea…

I’m currently working on a little project that may take up some of my discretionary blog related time, but hopefully will produce some blog related fruit. And since I can’t keep a secret. I’ll tell you.

If, like the majority of my current traffic, you’ve only been reading here for a short time, you may have missed all the fun of my scambaiting efforts. Check them out. They’re probably the best bits of original content I’ve ever produced… For the uninitiated – scambaiting is when you deliberately lead on the people who send you scam emails, you know, the ones promising you a marriage with a beautiful African girl, or untold riches from some deceased estate…

I worked pretty hard to get a photo of a scammer holding a sign with a Bible verse on it. It was a long road. A journey. But it paid off.

My new venture is a Scambaiter’s Recipe Book. It will doubtless be a pastiche of hastily googled recipes submitted by scammers upon request. But it will be a recipe book made up of recipes sent to me by scammers, representing the cuisine of their country of choice. I will then, if the ingredients aren’t too outlandish, cook the recipe and take a photograph of it.

I’ve sent off my first batch of requests. I’ll let you know how I go.

August 2, 2011

Blogging and marriage…

There’s some sort of deep and meaningful truth here.

Via Tumblog: Lost in Cheeseland.

July 24, 2011

On a serious note…

A while ago I started a second, or was it a third, blog. It’s called Venn Theology. I promised to post serious stuff there. I’m still figuring out the balance for what goes where. But you’ll find, if you look, that I’ve posted some stuff this week. One of the things I’ve posted, is, I think, of particular value. It’s a social media strategy. Or the framework for one, for promoting Christian events. Perhaps it will be of some use to you, perhaps not. I’m ju

July 22, 2011

Surviving the Zompocalypse in style

You may have missed previous tips for surviving the impending Zombie Apocalypse here at St. Eutychus.

But here’s something to add to your survival kit. Or to add your survival kit to. A customised shotgun containing a survival kit. It’s almost a one-stop-shot. Aha. Ahaha. Lets see how people laugh when you’re saving them by blowing the heads of zombies, or teenagers in hoodies (accidents happen), with this bad boy.

This shotgun customisation comes with built in compartments for all your basic needs, and a mounted torch/compass/knife combo that will keep you mangling zombies in the dark.

And what survivalist shot gun wouldn’t be complete without a Bible verse.

July 20, 2011