Time is running out!

80 minutes to go on the Winter Classics Challenge and 30+ pages of Crime and Punishment left - shouldn't be a problem but I need to get on with it.
Was at a Readers meeting this evening discussing St Paul (and Tom Wright on Paul) - what would Christianity have been like just with the Gospels?
I was therefore missing the Silk Screen's showing of Raise the Red Lantern which came with some wonderful subtitles, 'forth' for 'fourth', 'past' for 'passed' etc, I bet a computer had something to do with it, it is not a terribly funny film but I gather it nearly became one!

Where are the men in white coats?

when you need them?

Tom Wright on non-violence

From Sojourners

To a nation bent on violence, anyone who claims to be speaking for God's kingdom and who advocates non-violent means as the way to it is making a very deep and dangerous political statement.

Very apposite at the moment. Also appropriate as I've just finished Tom Wright's What St Paul really said - a review is here we are going to discuss it tomorrow evening - and before then I hope to get a reasonable way through (or even finish!!) Martin Hegel's The Pre-Christian Paul

My working enviroment

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

- though the above is Dave Walker's - I have to make space for a desktop as well and he doesn't have any space for boxes of audio cd's...

Busy...

Trying to finish two lots of work and dealing with additional workload of an interregnum (a previous vicar called it an interrectum and even convinced some of his congregation that this was the correct word - google suggests that he hasn't been the only one and also throws up this quiz. Before we knew the vicar was leaving I volunteered to lead and preach somewhere else that was vicarless - and then for some reason - that I still can't work out - volunteered to preach locally that morning - next weekend, a busy week beckons!
I let terragen run while I work:
but I must clear up that work area as it is getting on for 1GB of files - I need to dump the not so good ones - don't comment on this!
Also the Winter Classics approaches its end - will I finish Crime and Punishment in time?

A voice from Africa

I wonder if somebody could calculate how much money is being spent on these meetings, which deal with one issue and one issue only, when we have 48 million orphans. Whose agenda is this? Definitely, in my view, this is not God’s agenda. Nor is it the average Anglican’s agenda. I interact with people on the ground. They don’t care about the lifestyles of people in America.

Archbishop Ndungane
Says it all really

Tanzania...

It's a good job someone in the Nigerian Anglican Church knows where they're going! Akinola wth Davis Mac-Iyalla and the BBC

More culture..

Last Saturday I did get to the Wilmslow Orchestra's performance of the Shostakovitch 10th Symphony - why do these sites remove the last concert details - keeping the site up to date is commendable but it is as if the concert never was!! The there was the Edward Gregson Metamorphoses which started the concert which I rather enjoyed - heavily under the influence of Lutoslawski I thought - though I plead guilty to that too! The Mendelssohn violin concerto was ok I though the soloist took a little time to settle down and the Shostakovitch was good - the bassoon began to show signs of exhaustion before the end - but for an amateur orchestra it was I thought pretty good!
On Tuesday a trip to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at the library theatre in Manchester - after initial excitement of having wine spilt over us at the Italian restaurant opposite the theatre - turned into a most enjoyable evening. I've always wanted to see this, I have a copy of the play but have never seen it before and somehow missed out on the film - so I knew where the jokes were. I thought Michael Jenn - as the player - came close to stealing the show - a review is here. I seem to remember a theatre group in Cambridge in the 70's alternating performances of this with Hamlet using the same cast.
Then on Wednesday evening it was Central do Brasil at the Silkscreen which I thought was brilliant with the interaction between the young lad and the letter writer - Guardian review here.
A busy week - both workwise and in the evenings!

More on Hatto

news:rec.music.classical.recordings is the place where most of the action is on the continuing fun with the Joyce Hatto story - though Operachic's posting is worth reading for the picture if nothing else - though it doesn't look a lot like Hatto to me - but there aren't many less than 30 year old pictures of her - which has sparked another theory..

The Unearthly Child

But what was Cherie Blair doing in the Tardis? - but I suppose I must be the last person who has spotted the resemblance between C Blair and Jacqueline Hill. The five minute summaries of Dr Who appear pretty funny - at least the ones I looked at.

Blogging the primates

Dave Walker has just produced a typically brilliant summary of the Anglican Primates meeting - about which there are blogs everywhere, this one appears close to the action and coming from the right POV :-), though you should also read Raspberry Rabbits take on the events of yesterday - not that it differs...

Synergy is wonderful

When working at home things tend to get somewhat cramped with a desktop and a laptop sharing the same desk - I listen to music using amarok on the Linux desktop whilst working on the XP laptop - but thanks to Richard I've found Synergy. This app runs on Linux, Windows and Macs and allows you to drive multiple computers with the same mouse and keyboard without any additional hardware! Apparently it even allows clipboard sharing, though I've not tried this yet.
I just need to work out how to stop the work's VPN software from routing everything through the connection so that it still works when I have a connection to email - it would also be nice to be able to print via the home network - rather than forcing you to print on devices 15 miles away - I think I need to read up on the DOS route command...

Eating one's Hatto

The piano playing of Joyce Hatto has been much celebrated in the last 12 months, this evening comes this item on the Gramophone website which suggests that all is not as it seems and the recordings may be fakes. I never succumbed to the impulse to find out what was going on with this sudden fame - we shall see!

Struggling with digital memory cards

Took some pictures yesterday of the vicar's leaving do and I find that various of the pictures I can't view getting error messages such as:

Corrupt JPEG data: 515 extraneous bytes before marker 0xd8
Invalid JPEG file structure: two SOI markers

I'm not sure whether this is the camera that is at fault - I stupidly put it as hold luggage on a recent flight when hand baggage was at a premium - the memory card, or something not playing nicely with Linux? Some pictures are fine but around 25% of them end up being unreadable, if I knew what the internal structure of the jpeg looked like, I'd try editing the binaries...!
Into Didsbury today - picked up two cds to listen whilst in the car - well you try getting from here to there by public transport - I'd selected one of Oklahoma and the other of Luciano Berio's Sequenzas it seemed a natural - yes I'd like to listen to that cd - but the distance between those two pieces of music(!) - but I went ahead and swapped straight from a musical to the flute Sequenza

The ruin on the hill

Terragen 2 latest image. The ruin was produced by a strata and outcrop shader.

Felix Watts OP

.. Back from the kitchen having done most of the preparation of a dessert for tomorrow's leaving lunch for the vicar (the instructions said plenty of chocolate!) - so I've prepared a Tarte Montmartre - you, stop sniggering at the back! - I've done this recipe before but hadn't realised the double meaning until now - far too innocent you see - in future I shall have to call it a Tarte Pigalle.
Anyway before more sermon preparation - and I'm hoping to go to the Wilmslow Symphony Orchestra's performance of Shostakovich 10 this evening - probably my favourite of his symphonies - I've heard it live once before by (I think) the USSR Symphony Orchestra - in Leeds back in the 1980's, which will take some living up to!
Back to the subject of this posting - I saw an obit for Felix Watts in the latest college newsletter and something of what David Isitt wrote is worth repeating:

..he was, in theory at least, a research student of the college, working on Aristotelian arithmetic. It is not clear whether the thesis was ever submitted but rumour said it did not extend beyone one side of A4. What is certain is the Fr Felix, though something of a trial to his fellow Dominicans contributed a great deal to enjoyment of life at the Hall....He was the life and soul of a great many parties and his conversation was much enjoyed for its wealth of 1920s slang. In his last years he embarked on a new edition and translation of the Tome of Leo.

I remember wickedly sending him a postcard of Paul VI to him from a trip to Rome - he wasn't a great fan, but his enjoyment of life and music was most infectious.
Now back to that sermon preparation!

And onto the blogroll he goes

due to this post:

Once again there are screams of 'Persecution!'. Let's be clear on this when I get to church to find it has been closed by order of the government. When I am arrested for owning a Bible or taking part in Christian Worship then I will yell persecution.

I will not in response to the SOR because homophobia is not an article of faith. The Nicene creed does not end

"And I reserve the right to call a spade a spade especially if that spade is a screaming bender with no more right to live on God's clean Earth than a weasel"
...
Let's also be clear on what the SOR is trying to achieve here. At the moment a woman walks into a print shop to get some cards printed, something like:
"Clair and Amy invite you to a house warming at 24 Croxeth Road, to celebrate our move and our 5th anniversary"
and she can get a call 20 minutes later telling her to "come and take away this filth" because the printers refuse to "do that sort of thing" and she can't do anything about it.
Surely outlawing this is sort of thing is a brilliant thing that Christians should whole heartily applaud. Isn't it? Isn't bigotry horrid? Why aren't Christians celebrating?

Maybe every one else read this weeks ago and I'm just catching up (found this by following an interesting collection of links) - maybe that's due to me having to write a sermon this afternoon ... heads down to the kitchen to look for a recipe book!

Now that's scary!

Google's related search on this blog. Know quite a few of the names too, and in some cases I'm sure I've not blogged about them!

Naval legs

And as a comment on this posting of mine which picked up resemblances between Mediterraneo and Lord of the Flies I found one of the most striking resemblances to be in the denouement of each film. The parties are both rescued by the British Navy and in both cases you see the the rescuer in a slow pan upwards from immaculate shoes to shorts to eventually the face contrasting with the state of the rescued - in both cases. I'm sure Salvatores must have been paying homage!

Venetian lepidoptrists

Just in case blockbuster correct this I thought I'd better put in a screenshot.

A shy entomologist drawn into a torrid lesbian affair following the discovery of a mysterious new species of bug finds herself faced with a startling metamorphosis in May director Lucky McKee's creep-crawly entry into Showtime's terrifying Masters of Horror series. Ida Teeter (Angela Bettis)'s life revolves around bugs, and upon discovering a large, unidentified crawler while simultaneously being drawn into a heated affair with a beautiful young woman named Misty (Erin Brown), the studious wallflower's personal and professional lives begin heating up like never before.

And as for the 'starring John Eliot Gardiner'....boggle. Maybe it could have something to do with the status of the Italian moth'er?

The Cheshire Winter

Out into the fog this evening for a trip to hear the Stockport Symphony Orchestra in a Russian programme of Rimski-Korsakov, Rachmaninov and Balakirev. Started with R-K's Easter Festival Overture - definitely the wrong liturgical season but great fun and then Vanessa Latarche was the soloist in the Rachmaninov Concerto No 1 - played with gusto but the work didn't convince, there were points - particularly when the orchestra came in after the cadenza when I felt that the piano and orchestra had two different scores. Probably wasn't helped by the piano being rather more prominent than the orchestra. The soloist bravely played in a dress with straps - the hall was very cold.
After the interval came the Balakirev Symphony No 1 - a work I didn't know and until half way through I thought that the R-K was going to be the highlight of the evening but then came a lovely slow movement and and energetic finale. The slow movement appeared to have cribbing from Scheherezade though I see that wikipedia has the symphony well before (1866) the R-K work though the programme note claimed that the symphony had a much longer gestation than that, so it looks as if it was Rimski doing the pinching! There were also bits which B or R-K had nicked from each other in the finale as well as echoes of Prince Igor - I suppose 19th C Russia was a bit isolated and that group of composers were pretty close!
Then it was out into the Russian (sorry Cheshire) winter and home!