Reflections on Michael Vasey

From Storyteller's World - Michael Vasey on leading liturgy

Say them like you mean them, as if they were the newest, most exciting and important words that anyone could say. And visualise what you’re talking about, as if it’s happening right in front of you.

World View?

Cultural Creative 88% Idealist 75% Fundamentalist 69% Postmodernist 63% Romanticist 56% Existentialist 44% Modernist 31% Materialist 13% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

Definitely not materialist then...

Thought on reordering

from Good in Parts

Our church, you see, has so many pillars, both literal and metaphorical, that it's impossible to tell which ones are useful to hold the roof up and which simply block your view!

been there...

More typos

(typing very carefully!) one of my favourite typos in the Mission Praise hymnbook was the one with the line about the bells peeling - tangerines I thought - I see that google gives 144000 for bells peeling and only 41000 for bells pealing. Other hymn lines I've recently met were 'Thus untied in this water' and 'In Jesus name we shall be string' - unfortunately not superstring.

Simon Winchester on mallemaroking

Article on mallemaroking, it was one of my favourite words from that edition of Chambers too. Sadly the latest edition omits the word.

Washington State Ground Water Association - oops

Washington State Ground Water Association:

"This hardscrabble cluster of mobile home parks and legal brothels is becoming a bedroom community of a different sort."

- it's the curse of the spell-checker - I'm pretty certain they mean boreholes there...

Latest piano workings

Grade 8 over I'm now working on a couple of new pieces,

• Jeremy Dale Roberts: Stele for John Lambert (off the ABRSM's Spectrum 1 collection)
  
• Percy Grainger's reworking of Gershwin's Love Walked In
  

hard to get two more different pieces (well I suppose it's not), but giving different challenges. Also looking at some Schubert and Poulenc..

Firefox 1.0.4

New version of firefox (1.0.4) is now out - if you are using an earlier version - you need to upgrade due some security problems with the earlier one!

A day in the life of Africa

stunning pictures

lighter spamassassin

A bit back I complained about spamassassin reducing my machine to a crawl - the latest version (3.0.3) doesn't have this 'feature' - probably the problem was the auto whitelisting feature where a bug has been fixed. Though installing the MIME::Base64 perl module may also have helped things along. The software is much appreciated and it looks as if real spam is even higher scored than before.

Anglican Mainstream and the politics of untruth

Two issues that I know of:

Their FAQ claims

87% of the Bishops present at the 1998 Lambeth Conference and the vast majority of the Church of England General Synod are opposed to the blessing of same-sex sexual relationships.

.
That 87% figure is untrue and they know it - and also I've informed them of that a number of times - the 87% figure relates to those bishops who voted for the 1998 sexuality resolution and comparing that figure with those who voted no. When you take into account those bishops who abstained and those who weren't present for the debate the true figure is about 70%.


Just for comparison

• the number of times homosexuality appears to be mentioned in uncomplimentary terms in the Bible - seven
  
• the number of times lying appears to be mentioned in uncomplimentary terms in the Bible - well I managed 50 without breaking into too much of a sweat!
  

Back in July 2004 Anglican Mainstream went to 10 Downing Street:

Anglican Mainstream believed that to characterize the groupings in the church today as lying on a spectrum between anglo-catholic and conservative evangelical was inaccurate. Therefore the whole breadth of the church is not covered in the present pattern of appointments. To illustrate they pointed to the concern at the fact that in the appointments announced in the 12 months to April 2004 no graduate of Ridley Hall, Trinity College Bristol or Oak Hill Theological College, had been preferred to the office of suffragan bishop, dean or archdeacon in the Church of England.

The implication being that conservative evangelicals are not fairly represented in the current pattern of appointments (at least in the 12 months to April 2004). However there are a number of other evangelical colleges within the Church of England - Wycliffe Hall, Cranmer Hall and St John's Nottingham. Various of those colleges did have people in the suffragan bishops, dean and archdeacon classes appointed in that period (Paul Butler (+Southampton) was Wycliffe trained. James Langstaff (+Lynn) was at St John's Nottingham. Richard Inwood (+Bedford) and David Hawkins (+Barking) are Durham). There were also episcopal appointments in that period of folk from AM's group of 3 colleges - but that doesn't go via that committee. Clearly a meeting designed to pull wool over the eyes their choice of evangelical theological colleges being curiously selective - though it would seem that Oakhill were under-represented in that period.

And then there's the Anglican Mainstream Comedy Petition

Myers Briggs type

NP'S -- THE INTUITIVE PERCEIVING-MODE TYPES: "INFPs present a calm, pleasant face to the world and are seen as reticent and even shy. Although they demonstrate a cool reserve toward others, inside they are anything but distant. They have a capacity for caring which is not always found in other types." - test at I think the result was a little different last time.
No I'm wrong - last time I took this test and that also reported me as INFP

For May Day

From: Your Daily Dig:

As we enter a new society, work cannot be considered the dark side of life but rather the opposite. Our educational task in the coming years is to transform work into a moral necessity, an internal necessity. We have to rid ourselves of the erroneous view -- appropriate only to a society based on exploitation -- that work is a disagreeable human necessity. We have to bring out work’s other aspect, as a human necessity within each individual.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara, from "Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism"

Though we celebrated by remembering two half birthdays and going out for lunch!