I like Bacon. I like our pet turtles. I can’t say I’ve ever thought of combining the two before. But some turtle fan out there has piqued my interest and whet my appetite. Mmm. Bacon. What a mutation.
How not to cut yourself with sharp knives
I love reading professionals giving tips for everyday living. This interview with a butcher is fascinating. He gives five tips (in detail) that I’ll summarise here on how not to cut yourself.
- Keep the knife in your hand
“You should hold your knife like the butt of a pistol, fingers wrapped tightly around the grip “like someone was trying to take it away from you.” Some people hold a boning knife like a conductor’s baton during a particularly slow part of Pachelbel’s Canon. This is wrong. You will either drop your knife through your fingers, causing you to cut your knife hand with your knife, or, more likely, lose track of it in your brain’s motor control center and cut the hand holding the meat.”
- Don’t cut towards yourself
Putting all your strength into a brazen “take it to the board” type of cut is a sure way to bury a knife in your chest, belly, femoral artery or … genitals. We’re not talking stitches here, we’re talking surgery at best and coffin at worst.
- Keep everything clean.
We take care to avoid fat buildup on our knife handles to prevent what I like to call “the knife handshake,” which consists of having your lubricated fist slip over the grip and onto the length of the blade. Wash your hands. Wash your knives. Thoroughly. Often.
- Do not leave knives on the table, ever.
This applies mainly in a butcher shop. The reason we wear somewhat garish knife scabbards on our hips is to avoid ever setting a knife on the table. Why? Our pieces of meat are large and heavy, and knives can be well hidden. Add force and weight, and you can imagine what might happen to your hand or forearm. Gross.
- Bones can be really sharp.
Bones, particularly the chine and feather bones along the spinal column, become extremely sharp and dangerous when cut by a carcass splitter.
Speaking of knives – I’ve been looking for an opportunity to plug a bunch of knives I bought online recently that have turned out to be incredibly awesome and very sharp. They’re also cheap. They are Thai restaurant style chef’s knives and cleavers and they’re the sharpest knives I’ve ever played with (not that playing with knives is a good idea).
On clichés and stereotypes
I did not know this. Did you?
Etymology is cool.
In printing, a cliché was a printing plate cast from movable type. This is also called a stereotype.When letters were set one at a time, it made sense to cast a phrase used repeatedly as a single slug of metal. “Cliché” came to mean such a ready-made phrase. The French word “cliché” comes from the sound made when the matrix is dropped into molten metal to make a printing plate.
From wikipedia, via Seth Godin
Mad Skillz: Ali on being poetic
Ali writes a poetic blog. Which by default means it’s deep. It’s not necessarily all about poetry but it’s the type of blog where just reading makes you feel more artistic and creative. That’s her milieu (to steal an artistic French word). To my knowledge we’ve never met – but we’ve both lived in Townsville. Ali is a former “Steve Irwin” style animal wrangler (as indicated by her link). This gives her some sort of credibility with those who don’t like poetry…
Here are Ali’s tips on how to be, or appear, poetic.
Let me first just say, I don’t get around calling myself a ‘poet’ so I feel like this is something of a joke, and there are those out there who with more credibility than me, so feel most free to comment/differ/add stuff. (My other option was editing, which might have been more use to some but would have been just as farcical. However, if you would like to know how to catch a koala, read here.
I supplemented this with some material from a course I did with Judith Beveridge, so you get something from a real expert.
- Read poetry. Read lots of it, and read the great poetry so your bar is high, but also read contemporary poetry (they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but a lot of the known greats are actually dead). Having said that, the thing that actually started me writing poetry – even though I’d read it since school – was a friend giving me a poem they wrote for me, and it suddenly came within the realm of possibility, when I had never really thought about it before.
- Find out what sort of poet you are, your sympathies and approach. Then learn by imitation. It is actually the way to learn all art forms.
- Know the elements and rules of poetry. Read a book like “Rules for the Dance” by Mary Oliver (otherwise this post will never end). Only when you know the rules (rhythm, metre, line, form, sound, image, metaphor etc) can you break them effectively and do the “freefall” (as Mark Tredinnick called it) nicely (same goes for grammar might I add – that’s what MT was actually talking about). As with all creative writing, show and don’t tell. (So mostly don’t use abstractions – eg a word like “beautiful” is an abstraction so describe the elements of the beauty instead – or else interpret the concept/abstraction with an object eg “quiet as a house in which the witch has just stopped dancing” – “quiet” is the concept, the rest is the object (and obviously the whole thing is a metaphor) – I snitched this example from Judith Beveridge.)
- Work hard on language and find the language appropriate to the experience, and the appropriate form. The style and the content are inseparable. With the language you want the reader to feel like they are going through the experience and to be engaged on a sensory level. The vocabulary doesn’t need to be sophisticated necessarily but using ordinary words in different ways is good. (This is a kind of summary of stuff from the Judith Beveridge course.)
- As with all creative writing or creativity or skill, keep practicing and writing and also revising and editing and be prepared to fail along the way. (Seeing some drafts from the masters is enlightening – we tend to think poetry just rolls effortlessly off the tongue of the greats – not so, so be encouraged.)
Mad Skillz: Dave on regional ministry
Dave Walker is the boss of AFES in Townsville. Or the “executive pastor”. Really he’s just the senior staff worker. He has been in North Queensland for nine years. He has, on occasion, blogged here. He is so skilled that he has actually made two submissions to this program.
Dave is, of course, an “expert” in regional ministry and this input is so timely one might assume I asked him to write it.
Here are his tips.
- Keep heaven, hell, the bible and the gospel clearly in focus. Soon, no one’s going to care where they lived here.
- Be content for your gifts to be used less than they could be, or for your reputation to be smaller than it might be — for the sake of loving people. (And if that feels too hard, then think of your wife’s pattern of life raising children. Or Jesus. Either’s fine.)
- If God enables you, have children and grandchildren – spiritually. Most regional places suffer because there are no evangelical grandparents, ministers who have stuck around in the area for a generation or two. They don’t stick around because it’s hard, and often it’s right they move on. I’m guessing, though, (I’m only 9 years in!) that persuading other people to stay and minister with or near you is a key to going long term. (But if it is time to go to the big smoke, then do it!)
- Grow up. It’s lovely having some older, senior leader around to tell you that what you’re doing is great, or where you should go next, or that you’re ‘really needed’ where you are. But it’s a luxury, and God may put you somewhere where you don’t have that kind of leadership around. (And if I can facetiously slip in a corollary: Don’t stay in Sydney just because Phillip says you’re needed there!)
- Live in a nice house, where possible. This is pure pragmatism, and fraught with danger. But it helps.
Don’t stop Mario now
I’m not a big Queen fan – but I am a big Mario fan – so this video is right up my alley. Four levels of Mario have been cleverly overlaid to create Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. It seems Queen is good fodder for musically inclined geeks. This reminds me of that other thing I posted of computer peripherals playing Bohemian Rhapsody.
Finding new friends
According to a comment on Izaac’s blog – if I blog about how Guy Sebastian is a genre crossing fashion tragic I’ll get some new commenters who have google alerts set up to monitor mentions of Guy Sebastian. I’ve never sat near Guy Sebastian – but I don’t like his v-necked jumpers. I hope I’ve spelled his name properly.
Izaac, by the way, recently celebrated 200 posts. If you’re not already reading him you should.
Any monkey can take a photo
I like photography. But my photos are never as good as I thought they were when I look at them a week later. Here’s a little bit of proof that photography actually requires no innate gifting – or that the gift is not limited to humans. This Orangutan called Nonja was a photographer for a recent Samsung campaign.
X-rayted conversation
This is a gif of a head being x-rayed while talking. It is pretty cool.
From here – where there’s another one.
I suspect Hebrew would look very different.
A hand blown cuppa
Robyn is getting into tea a bit. We have a kettle, a teapot and a nice variety of teas. If you come around for a cuppa we won’t be serving your tea using the lost art of teapot blowing.
I did try it last night with some success.
Mad Skillz: Simone on supply teaching
Simone is married to Andrew. Together they are my boss. Kind of. In that I am currently a student minister at their church. At the moment I feel like Hebrew is my master.
Simone writes songs of goodness and blogs deeply and often at Another Something. When I first started blogging I had a template that featured white text on black. Simone told me it was too hard to read. I changed it. She stopped reading. She started again a while back.
When Simone is not writing songs, children’s material or soppy poems to her husband she is a supply teacher. Here’s what she has to say about Supply teaching.
I have one of the best jobs in the world. A job that makes me a nice pocketful of money, that is strictly school hours, and gives me the flexibility to work or not to work on any particular day. On top of this, it (often) takes little emotional energy, gives me the chance to contribute something nice to the world, and is (mostly) fun.
I am a supply teacher. I’ve been supplying for over two years now, and I’ve developed some mad skilz in my area. Let me share.
My top 5 tips for being a good supply teacher
- Don’t be a nuisance to the school. Schools are busy places. Get in there and do your job. Take responsibility for your kids and try to have things run as smoothly as they would if the teacher you’re replacing was there. And don’t whinge if you have to do an extra playground duty. You are getting paid more than any other staff member and really have nothing else to do. Leave the classroom tidy.
- Make the kids come into the room well. Have them line up over and over again if you need to. Once they are quiet, move to number 3.
- Bribe the kids with fun and semi-educational activities. At the start of the day, write all your incentive activities on the board. Tell the kids that you’d love this to be a great day and if they get through their work, they’ll get to do some of these fun things. Promise them obstacles courses outside, sport, art, anything – but be positive. With you there, there is the opportunity for an unusually excellent day. (If I have to teach a P-3 class, I take in a piece of ‘lovely lycra’ and a few teddies. There is almost nothing younger kids won’t do for you if you promise them a chance to bounce bears on a trampoline! Make them count in 2s or 3s while you bounce the teddies and it becomes a maths game!)
- If the teacher leaves you no work, be thankful! You have 5 hours to teach the kids whatever you want. Pull out your favourite stories (Roald Dahl is always good), read to them for a very long time, then make up some creative writing or art or maths or SOSE activities around your reading. Play with character transformations (‘If the enormous crocodile was a person, what would he look like? What would he do?) or points of view (re-write parts of ‘the Enormous Crocodile’ in a voice sympathetic to the EC). Turn it into a comic, with or without text. Make up maths word problems based on the story. Research the diet of crocodiles… Endless options, and they all take little or no preparation. If you are not tied to any program, you are free! Make the most of it! (If work is left, do it! And thank the teacher.)
- Show the kids that you like them. This goes a long way. (If they are not very likeable, this one will be hard. But try.)
And finally, don’t stress. Whatever happens, it will all be over at 3 o’clock.
(Almost) YouTube Tuesday: The theodicy of Tetris
Pretty funny. Unless there is an outrageous amount of swearing in the last 20 seconds. In which case this is terrible.
The best dumb questions on Yahoo Answers
PC World has collected 20 dumb questions people have asked on Yahoo Answers – but I’m sure there are worse out there. Got any clangers?
Question: I was bitten by a turtle when i was a young lad, can i still drink orange juice?
Best Answer: No! If you drink orange juice now, it will activate the turtle venom in your veins and send you into a coma. Didn’t anyone ever tell you this before?
This proves once and for all that despite what you’re told in the first week of Bible College there are stupid questions.
How to write to a fan
David Bowie hasn’t always been incredibly famous. His name hasn’t always been David Bowie. When he was just starting out he responded to fan mail personally. Here is a scanned copy of his first response to a fan letter from the US.
Here’s a cool bit…
“I hope one day to get to America. My manager tells me lots about it as he has been there many times with other acts he manages. I was watching an old film on TV the other night called “No Down Payment” a great film, but rather depressing if it is a true reflection of The American Way Of Life. However, shortly after that they showed a documentary about Robert Frost the American poet, filmed mainly at his home in Vermont, and that evened the score. I am sure that that is nearer the real America. I made my first movie last week. Just a fifteen minutes short, but it gave me some good experience for a full length deal I have starting in January.”