Things that make me grumpy!

I have a pet hate. I hate a particular sub-species of grammar nazi. Well, a couple of sub-species actually.*

I hate it when I write perfectly parsed, syntaxed and phrased quotes to be included in a third party’s media release and they come back changed.

I especially hate it when that change includes the addition of an exclamation mark, or a change of spelling (program v programme) because your style guide is stuck in the mother country.

You may think you’re a better writer than me, you may be a better writer than me – but don’t ask for my help and then bastardise my quotes with awful punctuation.

If you do this I will laugh at you when nobody comes to your press conference – even though you waste almost an hour of my CEO’s time.

That is all.

*I also have a mild disdain for the Grammar SS, those Grammar Nazis who run around pulling people up with a public rebuke for a grammatical error. If it’s an issue for you at least have the courtesy to raise a mistake in private rather than trumpeting your grammatical superiority via a snarky comment. It may be that the mistake is an innocent typo.

November 19, 2009

Become a mathlete, impress nobody

I don’t want to pretend to be all that interested in maths. I’m not. But I am interested in party tricks. Especially party tricks that make me look smart.

Here’s Wired’s collection of mathematics hacks to impress your friends (except the friends of yours who have maths degrees who don’t like jokes about e^x. That’s you Benny. Dan has a maths degree and he liked my jokes…

“To multiply, say, 11 x 32, add the digits of 32 (3 + 2 = 5) and insert the sum between them: 352. Numbers with two-digit sums use a slight variation: For 11 x 84 (8 + 4 = 12), add the 1 from 12 to the 8 and leave the 2 in the middle: 924. “

November 19, 2009

How to really mess up your kid

d’Armond Speers is obviously a bit angry at the name his parents gave him. So he decided to seriously mess up his son’s life by speaking to him exclusively in Klingon for the first three years of his life.

“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers told the Minnesota Daily. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”

Luckily for the kid, it seems is all turned out ok…

As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.

Although some of the things he’s done lead people to believe he’s a “Star Trek” fanatic, Speers said it’s actually a passion for language that attracts him to Klingon.

November 19, 2009

Back to school

Tonight is the second installment of my birthday present to Robyn. We’re going to round two of cooking school at Townsville’s De Studi kitchen shop.

Round one – Moroccan – was a smash hit. Robyn has already produced delicious Lamb Sigaras since. I will post the recipe one day… but first… the cook off…

There wasn’t a whole lot of interactivity in the classes – we were able to fill, and roll, our “sigara”, which is some sort of language for cigar shaped filo pastry thing stuffed with sensational lamb mince…

November 19, 2009

Someone already made my shirt…

There’s nothing new under the sun…

They don’t have Optimus Prime though…

Oh well. Voting for getting my shirt designed will open if/when Threadless approves it…

November 19, 2009

A performing fartist

Let it never be said that I have standards. I present to you… Mr Methane, Britain’s premier flatulist. His website has annoying music. But it’s not as bad as this video.

November 19, 2009

Theological Smackdown: The end is the beginning is the end

The last few weeks of Westminster Confession of Faith classes (WCFC) left me feeling a little bit like Hulk Hogan at a press conference…

We’ve changed the order somewhat due to the absence of our venerated leader, who for some reason decided that stuff about end times would be less controversial than stuff about the sacraments.

He was wrong. The chapters on the state of men after death and the resurrection and the one on the Last Judgment ended up being pretty heated.

The judgment study got bogged down in the question of whether Christians go through the process of judgment to be found innocent – or if we skip the process altogether.

It was a case of the one proof text verse the many proof texts – and both sides of the debate walked away thinking they’d won and the other side were idiots.

Our group features some John Macarthur fanboys (surely a breed as rabid as my posse of Mark Driscoll fanboys), who are very rigidly stuck on the idea that dispensational premillennialism is the only way to understand end times.

I’m not one of them. They told me I don’t understand Revelation. Or the Bible. I told them that Calvin was an amillenialist. It got a little ugly.

For some reason they also hold Revelation to be the most important book of the Bible. It’s like a trump card that can be played to render all perspicuous passages of Scripture relating to the same topic unclear at the sake of a fringe interpretation of a complex book.

The millennium sure is a curious little issue to think about – but at the end of the day it’s not a salvation issue. And we have freedom to disagree.

I think it matters though – because it’s the vocal fringe that brand Christianity as a bunch of crazies – and if you have a look at Christian cults – you’ll find that most of them subscribe to a premillennial eschatology. This may or may not be a strawman.

I just think they’re wrong. My thinking, like Dave’s about Christianity, comes from my parents. Check out dad’s most excellent sermon series on Revelation to see what I think about the millennium and the book of Revelation spelled out…

I think we get into trouble when we disregard the style a book is written in when we’re looking to it for meaning. That’s part of looking at context.

I got angry when I read this list of reasons Superman is better than Jesus because the guy took a verse (Luke 19:27) from a parable about a king out of context and applied it to Jesus.

Revelation 1 – “Witness Protection” – MP3

Revelation 2-3 – “To Him Who Overcomes” – MP3

Revelation 4-5 – “Who is Worthy?” – MP3

Revelation 6-7 – “When are we going to get there?” – MP3

Revelation 12 – “Defeating the Accuser” – MP3

Revelation 13-14 – “The Power – or the Passion?” – MP3

Revelation 15-16 – “Exodus Again” – MP3

Revelation 17-18 – “The End of the Scarlet Harlot” – MP3

Revelation 19 – “Onward Christian Soldiers?” – MP3

Revelation 20 – “Pit Stop” – MP3

Revelation 21-22 “Coming Home” – MP3

One of the things that Willows Pressy doesn’t do that MPC does really nicely is the sermon outline and pithy title. I like the structure a sermon outline provides for my listening – even if it’s just so I know how long the guy up the front will keep talking for – I assume listeners to my sermons feel the same way…

November 19, 2009

“Spiritual” Style

Someone has decided that someone at the Associated Press has decided that when Christians talk about the Holy Spirit’s guidance they actually mean something else.

That’s the only conclusion I can draw from this AP story about Catholics and celibacy.

Here’s the offending (or offensive) paragraph…

“Apparently seeking to squash any speculation that Rome had been courting the disaffected Anglicans, the Vatican said the “Holy Spirit” inspired Anglicans to “petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion” individually and as a group.”

Actually, the “journalist” has gone a “little nuts” with the “quotation marks” as though every “noun”, “adjective” or “clause” that is a little “complex” needs “punctuating”…

Here’s the post that raised the conspiracy theory. I think it more likely that the journo was providing quotes from the document he cited in the first paragraph.

November 19, 2009

Where to eat

I’m not eating fast food this financial year. But if I was. And if I lived in America. Then this flow chart would be useful.

It can be easily adapted to our Australian milieu…

November 19, 2009

Ten famous blogs that make me laugh

Single themed blogs are so hot right now.

If you’re not aware of these already then maybe you should be…

  1. Passive Aggressive Notes
  2. There, I fixed it
  3. This is why you’re fat
  4. Failblog
  5. Surviving the World
  6. Stuff White People Like and the spin offs – Stuff Journalists Like, Stuff Christians Like, and Stuff Christian Culture Likes…
  7. Fancy Fast Food
  8. Insanewiches
  9. Super Useless Super Powers
  10. Larknews.com

I’m not sure that “Just Google It” will ever make it to that list…

November 18, 2009

Don Watson on Rudd Speak

There’s a great interview transcript on the ABC website featuring author and speechwriter Don Watson.

Here’s his plea to the PM…

I think he really ought to see it as one of his responsibilities to use the language as it’s meant to be used. I mean he does understand language very well, he knows when and how to use it well, which makes it all the less forgivable that he uses it so tiresomely so often.

Here’s his take on spin.

They just send us messages, and they call it spin, you know, which look if it was spin it would be fantastic, I wouldn’t mind it. Spin sort of suggests something mesmerising. This isn’t spin it’s anaesthetic. It’s like a big cloud of gas that comes over and makes cutting your toenails look interesting.

Spin gets a bit of a bad wrap. Everybody spins. Some people just declare it more than others. Here’s an example of how spin can be helpful, not dishonest.

Fact: Townsville is not widely known as a holiday destination.
Bad Spin: Nobody goes to Townsville for a holiday.
Good Spin: Townsville is an undiscovered and emerging holiday destination.

Both statements say essentially the same thing. One is more likely to get people to consider a holiday in Townsville.

November 18, 2009

The best bunch of Links since the Zelda games

So. There hasn’t been a link post around here for a little while. Lets fix that shall we…

Simone stirred the hornets nest by pondering the impact the increasing prevalence of same sex relationships will have on the perception of close friendships amongst Christians.

Izaac posted about iChurch. He’s also posted a series reviewing the church plant he was part of… it’s not quite finished, but when it is it’ll be worth another link. Izaac, and his wife Sarah, will be spending next week with us in Townsville. This is very exciting.

Sarah blogs more than Izaac and today she wrote about moving house, and moving church – two of the most stressful things a person can do…

Amy likes good TV shows and believes good stuff… or at least stuff I mostly agree with.

Jeff posts good links.

Dave Miers shows why customer service is important – and why coffee cup holders in cars are a necessity.

Ben posted a crepe recipe. We bought a crepe pan. The two may have been linked.

Mikey encouraged people to think more broadly than their local congregation when it comes to ministry. He also posted a link to this article/lecture (PDF) from Michael Jensen on the CASE website on apologetics that I’ll post more on eventually. Michael Jensen is the Australian Christian blogosphere’s everywhere man. Seriously. How many sites does he contribute to?

Ben was away for a week – but he’s back. And we’re all happy. He kicked things off on Monday with a new leaner looking quiz…

Andrew Katay writes good stuff and he’s looking for student ministers next year… if he ministers like he writes that would be a worthwhile opportunity.

Andrew Finden is in Germany being an almost world famous opera singer… well, one day… he shared his thoughts on church tourism. And a string quartet tribute to Nirvana. String quartet tributes are one of my favourite sub-genres. You really should check out Muse or Radiohead in all their string quartetly goodness.

Leah wrote five tips for surviving the Internet. Pretty sound advice and worth reminding yourself of… I’d add a couple – don’t forward stupid emails without going to snopes, and don’t believe anything without checking with google first.

November 18, 2009

Armed and dangerous

When you’re young you’re taught many lessons that you ignore. Like don’t eat watermelon seeds. Don’t pull faces when the wind is going to change. Don’t wear old undies when you go out in case you’re in a car accident. And don’t carry everything with just one hand.

This is so you don’t end up like this guy. Who at least is able to compete in world arm wrestling championships.

November 17, 2009

Keep your friends close, and your bobble heads closer

If you’re looking for motivation to do your work properly – or to treat people right – then this Vito Corleone Bobble Head is the perfect desktop companion.

November 17, 2009

I made a shirt…

I just designed a shirt. The idea came from a tangent on my last post.

It’s called “Future of Evolution”…

Here it is – you’ll be able to vote for it to be produced on Threadless any day now…

If they reject it you’ll be able to order copies from wherever I can get it printed…

November 17, 2009