How long until somebody starts selling this concept properly produced?
All you need to do next is scrawl “ctrl + c” on your photocopier.
From here.
These pencils kill fascists
I don’t want a pickle. I just want to write with these pencil stickles. They come with an inscription based on a statement that musician Woodie Guthrie (also famous for being the father of Arlo Guthrie, the Motorcycle Song writer) inscribed on his guitar.1
1 I do realise that Woodie is much more famous than Arlo. Just as Bob is more famous than Jakob.
Mexican Americans
Well, the Mexican entries seem to have dried up. If you want to enter this amazing competition, in order to win a not so amazing Mexican prize – then please email me your Mexican man by tomorrow. Then I’ll throw open some sort of voting process, and announce a winner next week sometime.
If you haven’t entered the competition because you’re worried that the man, who you don’t know, might not approve, then let me soothe your conscience with these two emails that I received this week. The first is from the guy who asked me to “make him a Mexican” the second is from the Mexican man’s wife.
“This has been the funniest set of events that I have ever experienced! The face behind the burrito and the naked guy laying in the pile of Doritos is priceless. Keep sending me updates. All of my colleagues are getting kicks out of this.”
“Hi
I am the guy’s wife and this is hilarious!!!! A job well done by you and your friends. Thanks for making us laugh.”
Here’s the guy we’re Mexicanising.
If you’ve made a Mexican and don’t know how to submit it – send me an email to the gmail address linked in the header.
Get yourself in the groove. Literally.
You can get a bin full of your ashes in a 45… that’s the best intro I could come up with for this post, and if you remember a Cornershop song from the late 90s (possibly), and know that the 45 refers to the 45rpms a conventional 7 inch record had to be played at to produce music as intended, then you’ll think it’s brilliant.
I’ve posted, in the past, some creative way to ensure your ashes stay on in a really novel way. You can become a set of pencils, or a diamond ring, or an urn shaped like your head, if that’s not your cup of tea (though it might be Keith Richards’), you can get ashes mixed with tattoo ink, and now, thanks to “And Vinyly” you can become a final vinyl. They’ll cast your ashes into the mix, and cut you a bunch of records of your favourite song to be distributed to your friends and loved ones. Or perhaps your enemies.
You can even record a message. Backmasking is a real possibility. I’d get the Beatles Revolution 9 recorded backwards on my album – so that you’d hear “turn me on deadman” in the normal direction, and atonal LSD inspired experimental music (it’s not my favourite Beatles song) in reverse. You can set the record straight on any long running family feuds. You can dig the needle in just one last time… the puns, and possibilities, are endless.
Wired has a story. Here’s a quote about the process.
“How does it work? The process of setting human ashes into vinyl involves a very understanding pressing plant. Basically the ashes must be sprinkled onto the raw piece of vinyl (known as a “biscuit” or “puck”) before it is pressed by the plates. This means that when the plates exert their pressure on the vinyl in order to create the grooves, the ashes are pressed into the record.”
What songs would you pick?
Bieber Ros
Apparently, if you slow Justin Bieber down to 12.5% speed he sounds a lot like ambient avante garde noise act Sigur Ros. Who have considerably more social cachet.
J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis
But it doesn’t work in reverse.
Facebook for ministry…
Tim Challies has this wise advice on how to take a balanced approach to using social media to enhance, rather than replace, your church community.
“So as you use Facebook, be careful to use it in a supplementary way, a way that supplements your real flesh and blood contact with the people you are seeking to serve. Use it to share event information, to get people remembering last week’s sermons and thinking toward next week’s, to get people singing the songs you sing and praying for what needs to be prayed for. Use it to share photographs of great events and to encourage people to make contact with one another. The ways it can supplement ministry are nearly endless. But all the while use it to push yourself toward, not away from, face to face contact.”
Mikey has some practical tips for building a custom landing page for your Facebook presence.
This site, mediaforministry.org, has some good tips for using Facebook, and WordPress. And you should, of course, all be reading Communicate Jesus already if this kind of post excites you.
Would you watch a ninja cooking show?
Over morning tea some of my college compatriots and I were talking. And I pitched this concept for what will doubtless become a YouTube sensation. NinjaChef (there are a couple of people over the interwebs adopting this moniker – but none, in my opinion, doing it properly).
I would be thinking five minute vignettes with a ninja, in full costume, cooking ordinary dishes ninja style. And by ninja style I mean with ninja weaponry and incredibly stealthy efficiency. Dicing veggies with a katana, tenderising meat with nun-chucks, moving around the kitchen with deadly grace.
Would you watch? Improve my idea. Go nuts.
Wookie of the year
Winnie the Pooh stories would have been cooler if Winnie was a wookie. Right?
Here’s proof.
From artist James Hance, there are more.
NinjaBread Men
Awesome. Ginger Bread men would be cooler if there was a possibility that just by eating them you’d be getting your stomach a good ninja-ing.
Buy them at Perpetual Kid (that’s an imperative for my wife, and a suggestion for the rest of you).
Underscores for emphasis?
Have I missed a memo?
When did underscores before and after _emphasised words_ become something that was acceptable?
It’s dumb. It’s like underlining but, if possible, less visually appealing and more likely to make me write you off as a writer.
What happened to using vocabulary to express emphasis. Some people are so stupid.
Here’s my order of what’s acceptable when you’re trying to emphasise stuff:
1. An emphatic word.
2. An adverb or adjective.
3. Bolding.
4. All caps.
5. An exclamation mark (just because I hate them).
6. Underlining.
7. Underlining and bolding.
8. Underscores.
Anything after 3 is pushing the envelope.
Grrr…
I (stupidly, and against the wise and regular counsel of my wife) left the car unlocked last night. In our driveway. I won’t be doing that again. We’re clearly not in Townsville anymore… (though I did the same thing there last year with similar results – a stolen pocket knife (luckily not my “I inherited it from my pa so it’s a family heirloom pocket knife”).
Items stolen from the centre console include the case of the new Basement Birds CD I bought on Monday, sadly holding my (favourite of all time) Gomez “How We Operate” CD, and my iPod. They also pinched Robyn’s car survival kit from our glovebox. So they’re the proud owners of a box of mints, some strapping tape, and other miscellaneous items.
If I catch them I’ll bash’em.
Paul House on preaching Isaiah: Part two
Some random points here from the second lecture. I’m fading fast.
There’s nothing worse than a combination of pride and ignorance. “I’m stupid, and proud of it” is dangerous. Isaiah addresses that.
Isaiah is great at digging the needle in. He uses satire and irony and has an unfailing ability to hit the target.
Materialism leads us to think we don’t need God, which leads to bad stuff.
Some of the greatest issues we have with God are to do with timing – we either want him to move slower or faster than he currently is.
It’s easy to see the problems in society. To isolate and identify them. But it’s very hard to remember to pray for those problems.
Many missionary messages stop at about verse eight of chapter six. Here am I. Send me… but when you keep reading – “you will preach, and their hearts will be hardened. Jeremiah seems to have preached for forty years. And only produced two converts. We can’t buy into the theory that numerical success is linked to ministry. Growth is not a sign of your faithfulness or God blessing you. But nor is the antithesis true – it’s not a case of the smaller you are the more holy you are. We need to be Great Commission churches. Church growth fans sound a lot like prosperity preachers – suggesting that the size of your church is somehow linked to your approach. How do we explain Jonah? He didn’t want any converts and converted a city.
Know your congregation. Know their concerns. That will drive how you apply their lives to the text (not the text to their lives).
How do we do ministry without quitting. We’re required to love people even if we don’t see fruit tangibly. We’re to love our enemies, that’s the mark of a Christian, and it’s hard.
Israel are being called (by Isaiah, in chapter 7) to have faith (in God – where all faith in the OT is directed) in the face of tough times. When the superpower nations around them are agitating for conflict. Israel are scared. For good reason. Evil is real, and it may be out to get you. It was for Israel. Paul used chapters 5-12 to address his small group in the midst of the GFC and a bunch of individual examples of turmoil. Isaiah is a reminder that God is faithfully redeeming his people and bringing them into the new creation.
“If you are not firm in faith you will not stand at all…” (Isaiah 7:9a) is like a theme statement of this section of the book.
Isaiah doesn’t let disappointment with earlier results keep him from ministry. Firm faith requires steadfastness and Isaiah has that quality.
On the renewal of Creation (Isaiah 11:6-9)
Sin mars creation – but nothing will mar the new creation. The future is secure, the future is bright. We should always be a forward looking people. Believers appropriate this theology in the New Testament and we must reclaim it today. We have a home, a king, and a society that is flawless. All the temporal things are going to change so our focus needs to be on serving the servant and going to Zion (this future creation). We’ll have a resurrected body. We need to be focused on that future – not our present brokenness.
If we ask “what is your hope as a Christian” and it’s not marching into Zion and bringing people to the service of the faithful servant then you’ve missed the thrust of Isaiah.
Where is your confidence? it needs to be in the suffering servant whom God has sent. In this season we have every reason to say things and sing songs that we will say and sing forever in the new creation.
Paul House on preaching Isaiah
1. Know the context/background. Biblically, historically, literarily.
2. Look for important doctrines.
3. Look for how the New Testament makes use of the book. They are identifying patterns linking books in the Old Testament to Jesus.
These three steps require that we know the whole Bible, and have a framework of Biblical theology.
It’s very difficult to preach Isaiah verse by verse. It’s massive.
Big Picture: Four kings mentioned in Isaiah 1 as being part of the landscape of the book.
Assyria was a pretty nasty empire who used to extort countries through the threat of invasion. Their artwork and historiography shows that they ruled by terror. Impaling heads. Burning people. All that sort of stuff. They ruled Judah, one way or another, for over 100 years.
Then there’s Babylon. Babylon eventually conquered Assyria, but before that happened Babylon was a thorn in Assyria’s side. And Assyria conquered them a bunch of times. So when we see that Assyria conquered Babylon in the text – we have to ask “which time”… the Ancient Near East was a volatile political mix constantly one step away from (or in the midst of) conflict. The kings of these nations jostle for status and make bold proclamations about their greatness.
And Isaiah is focused on promoting Yahweh as the real king of kings and lord of lords. He preaches and predicts Assyria’s arrival for thirty years, and then becomes the comforter and conscience of Israel and Judah.
The message of Isaiah starts with sin and degradation and ends at Zion. It’s creation and new creation – God acting through a redeemer to bring his people to the new creation and he punishes the wicked.
Isaiah 2:1-22 describes the nations are coming to the Lord and invites Israel to do the same. Isaiah, like Jesus and Paul, was to go first to the Jews and then to the Gentiles.
The gospel has always been “accept my king, and you will be at home in Zion (the new creation).” It comes with a downside. The gospel is very good news to those who put their trust in it, and very bad news for those who don’t. That’s one of the most pressing challenges of our time – preaching judgment. But everybody, deep down, wants justice. So we need to figure out how to preach that truth with love.
Chapter 25 describes the gift from the true king (as opposed to the gifts from kings of surrounding nations) as life. Delivery from death. Chapters 21-33 are the hardest to preach in the book of Isaiah. There are some beautiful passages in chapter 19 that promise the Egyptians, the Assyrians and the nations will be part of God’s people.
The prophets never give up on getting Israel back into the fold.
The book speaks to the late eighth century and early seventh, primarily, but it also says something about the future. And about a future that still has not happened today.
Structure – Seven Cycles.
1. The Bloody City and Glorious Zion. 1:1-4-6.
2. The Spoiled Vineyard and the Rejoicing Citizens of Zion. 5:1-12:6.
3. The Wicked Nations and Yahweh’s Resurrected People . 13:1-27:13.
4. Proud Ephraim and the Rejoicing Remnant. 28:1-35:10.
5. Blaspheming Gentiles, the Covenant with David, and Righteous Gentiles. 36:1-56:8.
6. Blind Watchmen and Citizens with a New Name. 56:9-62:12.
7. A Blessed People, New Heavens and Earth, and Burning Sinners. 63:1-66:24
The book ends with the call for missionaries from many nations (Isaiah 66:18-21).
The big issue is “are you a servant of the servant?”
Jesus quotes Isaiah when he starts his ministry. John the Baptist cites Isaiah. Several times in the New Testament the writers use Isaiah to show that they are preaching “THE GOSPEL” the same one that Isaiah had been preaching. Isaiah is a great model for ministering to all sorts of people in all sorts of settings.