For those parents who want to foster their children’s imagination on the cheap, who simultaneously don’t have any issues with children playing with violent toys, will join me in appreciating the simplicity of this invention which turns any stick into a sword.
From a designer named Naama Agassi.
Well, more like what a week. Blogging has taken a back seat. Sorry dear readers. Let me explain. And then you can leave words of comfort and encouragement in the comments…
Here’s a snapshot of my week…
On Monday I had what was possibly my only day of holidays this semester. That was nice. I don’t remember what we did, so it must have been good.
On Tuesday the future of the Queensland Theological College, my educational home, became clear with the announcement that Gary Millar was going to take over as principal. I also took some photos for a story that was going in the local paper about a Hymns afternoon we had at church today. The story was based on a media release that I wrote last week, and was good (but small) except for a pretty minor factual error.
On Wednesday I gave a “devotion” (I hate that word) at the Presbyterian Church of Queensland State Assembly. I spoke on Romans 14. I wrote the talk on Tuesday, I’d done a sermon and an essay on the passage already so I thought it would be ok, but it seemed like a dangerous passage to choose to preach on as a student to a room full of old and experienced ministers. Then Robyn and I met up with somebody to discuss where we might end up as student ministers next year.
On Thursday I woke up having had a pretty restless night’s sleep to write my sermon for church, I’m preaching tomorrow on Revelation 19-20. Two exciting chapters. You should read them. I also had a few deadlines to meet for a PR consulting contract I’ve got on the boil, which is all coming to a head in a couple of weekends. The stress I was already feeling was compounded by an email from our landlord wanting to conduct an inspection we’d been trying to line up for about two months this Saturday (today). Given that we’re not going to be around much in mutually agreeable times in coming days, I said yes.
Yesterday I woke up and jumped in a car with a few college friends for a tour of some breweries and cafes on the north coast of New South Wales and on the Gold Coast. It was a terrific day. I really enjoyed it. And I’ll review a couple of the cafes on thebeanstalker.com tonight. Check them out. I got home late because peak hour is horrible and it hates me. And got stuck into tidying up a few rooms that we never use that have essentially become store rooms, and a house that had been a little neglected due to endofsemesteritis. I had a long conversation with the boss about some problems with my sermon, and when I went to bed after midnight, the house wasn’t finished.
We got up before 8 this morning to finish off the tidying ahead of an 11am inspection. The inspection came, the landlord and his wife are chatty, the inspection went. My parents turned up for a visit, right when we were due to leave for my 1pm soccer game. A 1pm soccer game which was the first of the season to be scheduled an hour away on the other side of the city. And I had the team kit. So I had to be on time. I also had to leave at half time, and our team was already short of players (and I’m the manager). We had to go to the hymn day, because I was making coffee (coffee I’d roasted during an already busy week). I’d promised to be there at quarter past 2. But because I was late to our soccer game with the shirts, the kick off was late, half time was late, so I was already running late when we got in the car. And then. We took two wrong turns (or missed two turn offs and had to do a u-turn) because google maps and street signs didn’t really agree. So I was late. The hymn day program was thrown into disarray. Fifty plus oldies who were visiting our church had to wait until the end of the program to get their coffees. And I smashed out 40+ coffees in 30 minutes.
Then I came home to finish/fix my sermon. Which I’ve now done, though it’s too long. Like this post. You’re probably tired just reading it. You probably didn’t make it to the end. Mostly because it was boring. But I hope it explains why I haven’t blogged much this week.
Now I’m sitting in front of the TV and I’m too tired to complain about the Bondi Vet and his stupidly trite cliches, his overly good looking face and his all too pleasant demeanour.
Why am I more stressed on holidays than during semester?
I love Serious Eats. Especially the work of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who has single-handedly brought the secrets of McDonalds into the hands of the masses. Here he turns his attention to the Big Mac.
Here’s the story. He even figured out the perfect number of sesame seeds.
And cracks the recipe for the Big Mac’s special sauce.
Essentially, it’s a mix of mayonnaise, relish, and mustard with sugar, onion, turmeric colorings, and a bit of hydrolyzed vegetable protein thrown in. It’s this last bit that might throw you for a bit of a loop.
Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is made by breaking down proteins into their constituent amino acids, resulting in a product with a distinctly savory flavor. Indeed, it’s very similar to bottled yeast extracts (which are made by autolyzing yeast) such as Marmite, Vegemite, or Maggi seasoning. Any of those will do.
Yum.
There’s a robot for that. In the day an age of every intangible calculation being performed by an iPhone app, it seems fitting that there are also robots for almost all tangible activities. I for one welcome our technological overlords.
Radiohead has just released a new track. Called Staircase. In an interestingly Justin Bieberesque fashion. It’s available as a video before it’s available anywhere else. I love the way they’ve continued to play around with distribution.
Love these. Sadly they’re not real. They were created for a university degree or something.
From Wingfield Brothers.
Bonsai is cool (unless that’s a plural, then Bonsai are cool). But cool enough to warrant a small business dedicated to supplying bonsai lovers with miniature smashed cars to grace their bonsai pots? I’ll let you decide.
Crash Bonsai is seriously committed to authenticity…
“You’ll find a variety of vehicles in crashed cars, their scales and dimensions listed. Each model is unique, and individually disassembled, cut, melted, filed, smashed, then reassembled to replicate a real fender bender. Some models might work perfectly with a bonsai you already have, but generally you should expect to create a new bonsai around the vehicles, often placing the tree more to the side of a pot to make room for the vehicle. No passengers have been injured in CrashBonsai accidents, although some drivers have reported a brief, even euphoric loss of consciousness.”
Part three of the previously featured excellent web series “Everything is a Remix”…
News can be “sensational” enough as it is. Depending on where you get it. But if you’re the type that misses the scent of ink on newspaper paper then bring it back to your lounge room with the New York Times Candle.
There’s something a little compelling about people within a profession, whose focus is the written word, writing words about others within the profession. It’s why I perversely enjoy reading book reviews in peer reviewed journals. You always get the sense that one writer feels like they’re a little better at things than another. Here’s a collection of 30 writer v writer insults.
Mark Twain on Jane Austen is probably my favourite.
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
What an image, and what a shame that Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies wasn’t around in Twain’s day.
I had my first taste of the Presbyterian Assembly line today. Turns out to get ahead in the denomination in Queensland you should be balding and sport a goatee.
I sat in on a day’s worth of policy debate on a bunch of boring stuff, in order to see the appointment of our new principal (pending his acceptance, other bloggers have jumped the gun on that one…). Gary Millar. Who is cool because he knows U2. Sort of.
The coffee at Assembly was awful. I sense a bit of a business opportunity.
Tomorrow morning I’m doing the “devotion” at Assembly. Five minutes on Romans 14. Devotion is such an odd word.
One of the things I’m increasingly realising as I engage in more critical interaction with people’s thoughts (particularly in scholarship, but also on the Internet and in person) is that it is one’s presuppositions, or philosophical framework, that produces one’s conclusions. It’s true in just about all areas and it’s one of the reasons (essentially operating alongside confirmation bias) that trying to change people’s minds online is entirely pointless.
You can take almost every conclusions somebody draws about the world back to that underlying framework. So you’d expect to see this born out in the way articles are linked in wikipedia (the web of interlinked connections between articles in wikipedia is, in my opinion, the most useful thing about it). And you do. According to this new webapp thingo by Xefer. Which illustrates the truth that all articles will eventually link to Philosophy. Which is kind of like my fairly ancient game 6 Degrees of Wikipedia.
“This sounded like a reasonable assertion, one that makes a certain amount of sense in retrospect: any description of something will typically use more general terms. Following that idea will eventually lead… somewhere.”
Like everything good on the Internet,this concept began in the hovertext of an XKCD comic.
Via FlowingData
What happens if you take famous optical illusion artworks and build them. With Lego.
Say you wanted to turn Escher’s Relativity, which looks like this…
Into a lego based photo. Well. I won’t leave you hanging. It would look like this:
Andrew Lipton and his BFF Daniel Shiu have made a batch of these. Worth checking out.
This Letter of Note is fascinating and awesome if you are a fan of James Bond, accuracy in fiction, or the idea that a passionate fan can speak out and influence process. Otherwise it’s a piece of history that might come in handy at your next trivia night.
Some background is important. Ian Fleming wrote the James Bond stories which became the James Bond movies. He received a letter from a bloke named Geoffery Boothroyd who didn’t like the gun Fleming had given Bond. It turned out Boothroyd knew a thing or two about firearms.
“I have, by now, got rather fond of Mr. James Bond. I like most of the things about him, with the exception of his rather deplorable taste in firearms. In particular, I dislike a man who comes into contact with all sorts of formidable people using a .25 Beretta. This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun, and not a really nice lady at that. If Mr. Bond has to use a light gun he would be better off with a .22 rim fire; the lead bullet would cause more shocking effect than the jacketed type of the .25.
May I suggest that Mr. Bond be armed with a revolver?”
Fleming liked this commitment to accuracy so much he named a character after Boothroyd. The character who later became famously known as Q.
The letter Fleming sent Boothroyd is below, and a transcript is available at Letters of Note.
This tumblr is kind of meta. The premise for content featured on Dear Photograph is summed up as: “take a picture of a picture from the past in the present.”
Tumblrweed would have to be one of my favourite blog tags. Some cool stuff there. Let me know if you have a favourite single serving tumblr in the comments.