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!

Old computers

Until about 4 years ago I used to have a PERQ in the attic and eventually I threw it out - I'd had help to get it up there but to get it down I disassembled it with loving care, disk drive weighed a ton - and took it to the tip.. and now I see this -$1500 spit! Used to make a noise like a small ocean liner.....at least I suppose there's now room in the attic!

Winter Classics again

A few comments on The Turn of the Screw and Where Angels Fear to Tread both now finished. Nothing profound from me but both books enjoyed - if you can say that with the James! Need to get on with the book group book 'Island Magic' before the next meeting on 5th, then I can start to think about the Dostoyevsky!

Lace

Beth finished a piece of lace she's been working on for a few years, at the weekend. Present for some friends who had a partnership ceremony back in 2005...but it was still appreciated. Another photo in the album here but I hope there are a few more to come of it in situ.

Breaking the glass

Preached at thehospital this morning and quoted some Chase Twichell from her poem Makeshifts

Nothing has a name it can't
slip out of. The waterfall is solid ice
by late November; the white pines
vanish under snow that's
blue in the morning, pink in the dusk.

thinking about dealing with change. The title of this posting is related to one of her oft quoted poems also from the same collection - Snow Watcher - that I picked up by chance in Saratoga Springs when I was there for work - the full version being:

Poetry's not window-cleaning
It breaks the glass

I see that she runs a publishing house for poets - I've signed up to their emailed newsletter.

Flying pebbles!

I'm not sure whether this was a bug in terragen or a deliberate effect upon my part but those ribbons could look nice with a bit more work.

Increased traffic..

Noticed increased traffic here - did a web search - and so welcome to those who have arrived here as a result of Mad Priest's kind mention.
To stop you all dropping off I shall try not to blog too much about the preparation I'm doing for the python course I'm helping to teach next month. I shall hope for even more traffic as after speaking to Terry at a funeral on Monday, he promised that some friends would be making a blockbuster out of this set of postings.
I have an overdue posting or two on my Winter classics pile - having now started Tim Binding's Island Madness - the BATS book of the month (I spent some time - before I started this thinking there was a Bernstein connection - but that's Island Magic... Trouble in Tahiti), I also have two DVD's on the go (attention span of a gnat at the moment) - Mediterraneo (the Italian version looks a lot more complete but my language isn't up to it)and Lord of the Flies - this was an X certificate film when first released and it is now PG... but the original licensing decision was ludicrous - and I suddenly realised that all three are to do with small island communities in times of war.
If you want to know how I know there's increased traffic here - shhhh - but it has something to do with my difficulties in uploading pictures here and my consequent workaround

Uploading images with blogger

If you are having this problem (bX-68tbuv) then using the advice here is what fixed it for me - it was failing after pressing the upload button.

Remembering The Life of Brian

Not the film, but a funeral this morning which went a long way to conveying the essence of the man. It went from the choir of Chester Cathedral singing 'Be Thou my Vision' to 'Do you hear the People Sing' from Les Miserables (a/the? song of Sale Sharks Rugby Club). We went via Colleen Hitchcock's Ascension and Jerusalem (shades of the rugby pitch again). We sang 'Be Still, for the presence of the Lord..' which we sang 14 years ago at Brian's wife Pat's funeral. Much laughter and sadness with many stories of the man, his roguish ease, his dependability, his punctuality (sometimes arriving at rugby matches hours or even days beforehand) and the witness of the many people from widely different spheres who came to celebrate his life. I last saw him when I sat next to him at a Silk Screen showing of Kandahar - 'not a barrel of laughs' was, I think, his summary but laughter was never far from from his lips.
I did the above poster 2 years ago when he got us well lost on a Thursday evening walk, but yes, Brian, you were wanted. And we missed him there today for his presence was what united us.
PS More photos of Brian are among my album of the 2005 All Saints' Walks - the last that he organised.

Shotgun wedding in Cana?

From Madpriest and a Video from CANA:

The Nigerian Anglican Church fully intends to attack every denomination in North America. Any church congregation that sees itself as "bible based" that feels its denomination is not "bible based" will be encouraged to leave their denomination and join the Nigerian church, preferably along with their wealth and property.

You have been warned (sorry to remove the shouting from the original blog entry!). Though this intent from Nigeria has always IMHO been pretty clear.

Church Rota delights

For the first time for months I'm not slaving over a hot checkout on Saturday afternoon and am instead having an enjoyable(?) few hours trying to get the Church rotas for February/March planned. This includes all the rotas - the leaders/preachers has already been done - but I then have to fit readers/prayers/sidepersons/tea makers etc. so that they all don't clash (too much!) It then gets put on the web. I use LaTeX to format it but am considering moving to OpenOffice.org if only because it makes pasting things around a little easier. I see that my latest version of OpenOffice.org comes with a LaTeX export tool so I could still get a good final copy. At the moment I'm still hesitating mainly because I do things in a rush and a migration will take a little longer.
With an interregnum coming next month there are inevitably people who were on the rota who are no longer doing it, thus making things just that bit more tricky. Musing on whether things need specifying more completely with no-one around to pull things together Sunday by Sunday or to be a little freer and easier.
I've also taken temporary charge of the parish blog - Rod - who is leaving - did offer to cybersquat on the account but we said it wasn't necessary - but there's not been a lot of action there recently. For ease I've moved it into being administered by the same google email as this one and I now see that the about section has a picture of me rather than one of the church(!) - anyone know if you can get different photos there? If I'd known I'd have grabbed myself another gmail account - which I suppose is still a solution toghether with giving this account posting rights.

Last night's menu

Yesterday, I decided that we'd have baked apple and custard for pudding and only after returning home did I read the review of Thursday's Television in the Guardian. I didn't read it before, nor did I watch the reviewed programme (The Truth About Food: How to Be Sexy)- honest! To quote the review:

And guess what aroma gives the Brits the raging horn? Apple cake and custard. There's something quite comforting about that.

Now - no doubt - I shall have some checkout operator blogging about the p*rv*rt who bought cooking apples and custard powder (well I didn't quite but you know what I mean) and nothing else! Also on the food theme, thanks to comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html for these two - Chocolate Covered SQL - I do read the Daily WTF but hadn't for a few days..and there's this cake, apparently the cake decorators didn't understand Italian, as if that excuses anything, more to the point the company's emailer didn't understand Microsoft HTML extensions - but shouldn't it have treated them as comments?

Winter Classics Challenge Update

Now finished the J K Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) and the Henry James (Turn of the Screw) - reflections to follow on the second - now for Where Angels fear to Tread! Two down three to go!

Va, Vis Et Deviens

Went to see 'Va, Vis Et Deviens' (the English translation is 'Live and Become' which rather misses out one of those verbs!) last night at the local Silk Screen cinema. The web reviews claim 149 minutes in length though our version appeared to be only about 135 minutes - it felt long but an emotionally absorbing film. Sometimes it felt a little manipulative but a strongly political film as it covers the evacuation of the Jews from Ethiopia to Israel back in the 1980's reflected in the experience of one boy - who is not a Jew - but pretends to be one in order to escape. It covers most of the history of the Middle East between then and now. The end felt like an - oops we've run out of time moment - and was far too convenient but that shouldn't denigrate from the journey travelled. Washington Post review is here.
I loved the contrasting exegetics on the colour of Adam! The white Jew went for the surface text the red-skin(!) Jew reached the heart.

Another terragen 2

experimenting with lighting. The constraints of the wine problems in running the app - I'm needing to do lots of shading and unshading the windows to force a redraw - mean that I'm still messing around in the shallows though.
Still blogger won't let me upload images....! Click image to see a larger version.

A bit late for the Christmas season!

.. at least as far as my finding this blog entry. A delicious version of the Chrismas story told in French Cheeses not very sound though! Reminded me of the Daudet Three Low Masses story.

While Mr McGregor was away..

link borrowed from Mad Priest - not safe for work!- in case you couldn't guess from the preview...

Just been slashdotted..

there goes user security - if they can do that what could an unscrupulous owner of one of these do!?

Winter Classics

I'm about to participate in the 2007 Winter Classics Challenge to read five classics during January and February. I'm somewhat busy so I've cheated slightly by choosing some based upon length (or rather lack of length)! They are:

• J K Jerome Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) - I've read this before but it is the BATS' (the book group I participate in) classic read this month
• E M Forster Where Angels Fear to Tread - I may have read this before.
• Henry James The Turn of the Screw - is this cheating? being rather of a short story!
  
• Hermann Hesse Steppenwolf
• Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment - I last read this many years ago when a teenager and the BBC had a series on the great Russian novel.
  

They get gradually longer! Blogging on the books is likely to happen on my BATS weblog but I'll try to post pointers here as well. The Jerome book group discussion is tomorrow night so I need to finish it...

.. and another candidate

.. though in this case I was the purchaser. These were both things that I needed (so this is not a fix!) and on my way out last night I bought a fresh chicken and a smoke alarm - I did consider stuffing one inside the other! The chicken is currently in the oven and - when I find time - the smoke alarm will replace the defunct one.

Basket of the week

... and a few hours after this post I found someone I know slightly from one of the Team Churches at my checkout with a fresh chicken and a spanner set (thanks Neil but I don't think he reads here) - a good first try - any better offers?

An announcement

Due to various factors - including wanting some time for things other than work - I have (regretfully) resigned from Macclesfield Sainsbury's and my last day will be 13th January.
So I have one more week's scope for 'Basket of the week' - if you wish to produce a basket for me consisting of razor blades and sprouts or a bottle of wine and a tin of cat food (or something more bizarre) you don't have much time left!
Friday and Saturday afternoon's are probably the best time for self promotion!

A posthumous knighthood for Saddam?

well see Andrew Brown!

All must .. come to dust

The Alan Ecclestone daybook (Gather the Fragments) that I've been reading in the evenings had this as its reading for 30th Dec:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Shakespeare Cymberline

Appropriate for the end of the year and doubly so in view of the events in Iraq that morning.
The last night we settled down to watch Candide on BBC4 from Le Châtelet - a production that has recently been in the news due to La Scala having cold feet over it.
It may have something to do with this scene -
but may not! - a scene with a public hanging was the one that had strong echoes of Iraq for us.
Some Flickr photos are here but don't include the Klu Klux Klan and the hanging.

PostScript - from operachic I see that La Scala may be reviewing its decision!

Christmas day on the motorway

.. or rather at the Banbury service station off the M40 these things are probably 10 a penny but still amusement at someone else's bug. Bit blurry I know but taken quickly using the mobile phone. Surely there's some way of preventing this appearing and just restarting the application...

Boxing day tea

Boxing day tea (not at home) consisted of

• toasted tea-cakes
• trifle
• mince pies
• Christmas cake (actually birthday cake) iced fruit cake
• Simnel cake

I make that raisins et al in five different forms, maybe that's the main theme of Christmas menus?

I hope to repay to you...

.. well it's pretty close to 'may we ever serve you right' - the wonders of machine translation in this case the Google translation of www.niccoloammaniti.com which reveals that: I clearly need to practise some Italian to work out what on earth's going on - found as a result of posting about Ammaniti's Steal You Away.

Two pictures

First, a getting a hold of terragen2's planet settings
the division between night and day on the planet looks a bit odd?
Also - anticipating Christmas a bit, Hecate was introduced to her new toy:


Is blogger's image upload broken? - again I've had to put these pictures on my ISP's webspace!

Basket of the week

Not much opportunity for obviously strange combinations this week - everybody has been buying far too much in one purchase to notice patterns - though there was someone one day who bought eight boxes of taste-the-difference tea and some mascara...maybe she needed to adjust the colour of the tea leaves or was going to use the tea for some particularly bushy eyebrows at a Christmas fancy dress party?
And then at 6:30 yesterday a shelf collapsed while a colleague was doing something to it - unfortunately it was loaded with red wine - I was in a good position and just see the frozen horror in his back view! After around 5 minutes the fumes reached us....

Terragen 2 again

The image is: - image uploading seems to be sulking at Blogger this evening...a larger png can also be seen! This was the quick start in the download with a few tweaks and around 8 hours rendering.

Two quotes

Read these last night - current bedtime reading is only three books - but I'm gradually reducing the pile!

The preoccupation with religion as an ideology leads to over-identification with the group, its language and symbols. Group loyalty becomes the test rather than loyalty to God or the truth.

Richard Rohr again - yes we all have those mental ticklists we assess every thought by and group pressure is insidious even where your group is 'I am the cat who walks by himself'

And then:

Sidda grabbed an apple out of the wooden bowl on the counter. Then she stepped out on the deck into the warmth of a Pacific Northwest summer morning. She looked out at the tall fir trees that surrounded the cabin. She bit down into the apple. I know nothing, she thought. She looked around at the tall fir trees that surrounded the cabin. I know nothing but the smell of the sun hitting those countless needles from these old evergreens.

from The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood - Rebecca Wells. A moment wonderfully captured (I see that she lives near Seattle). When I was given this book at the book group I was told I wouldn't like it - I had mixed feelings until I got to the story of the trip to Gone with the Wind (a film I've never seen) and I was hooked. Maybe there's a resemblance to Twain's Huckleberry Finn maybe it's just the rawness of the book.

Two rather different books but I suppose they're both American.

Christmas letter

A link to our Christmas letter has appeared ... here ... as it is not now finished!

Terragen

Started playing with the Terragen 2 technology preview - freely downloadable - doesn't play so well with wine - the means by which I run WIndows programs under Linux. Buttons and panels keep on disappearing until I move the mouse over them for force a redraw - so I keep on having to shade and unshade the window! This is a wine problem and doesn't happen in windows... The above picture took around 90 mins to render, now to work out how to add vegetation (new in terragen 2)!

Two links

You may have seen the news item on the clash between a vicar and a Lions group - one of who was dressed as Father Christmas - when I saw Mad Priest's coverage, my coffee nearly went the wrong way due to the photo at the head of the item.
And a comment on the Reform proposed covenant:

At this time in the life of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, faced with a faulty view of revelation, false teaching and indiscipline, we believe that it is necessary to set out where we as orthodox Anglicans stand, and to invite others to join us

from Thinking Anglicans:

.. indiscipline. This will be the group who withhold parish share, carry out extra-parish church plants, irregularly ordain ministers, declare impaired communion with their bishops, actively organise to defrock other priests... I could go on. Reform only want discipline if they carry the stick. They are themselves, indisciplined and scream blue murder when lawful action is taken against them.

oh the irony!

a late entry..

following last nights basket was the guy today who appeared with (only) a pair of rubber gloves and a wine box (no, he was wearing something else!). He said

I bet you don't get invited to parties like this

He's probably right - though I warned him that I run a blog!
Importing into wordpress was easy! My wordpress blog - Working on it (or wit for short) now has the contents of my other local weblogs, just need to decide whether to rename the blog and/or/how to make the other blogs redirect to the new location.

Basket of the week

Or maybe this should be barf of the week(!), someone bought only six toffee yogurts and 3 packs of the 4-pack of very sweet yogurts (coffee, strawberry and chocolate etc - can't find it on the Sainsbury's website!). I just hope they'd been earlier and these were the things they'd forgotten! Spent this afternoon on the quick checkout closest to the door - brrr - but by the time I'd had the adrenalin rush of the local school I was nearly beyond noticing.

Shhhhhh!

Thinking of moving my home webserver blogs from MovableType to WordPress. Why I write this on a blogger blog I've no idea! Wordpress didn't work for me last week but it does now - user stupidity I think!

I've been lent Richard Rohr's Everything Belongs and found this last night

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes

Hear my complaint

I saw a reference to the Helsinki Complaints Choir in yesterday's Guardian and meant to find the web source

but I see that Geoff Coupe has beaten me too it. Currently listening to Maxime le Forestier's Le Roi in the form of an alternation between him and the audience which seems to have strong melodic pre-echoes of the complaint piece.

Afghanistan in the 60's

..the 1960's that is. For our book groups (BATS) book of the month - actually my book of the month as we're all reading a different one this month as we have a box of travel books - I'm reading Dervla Murphy's Full Tilt, an intrepid Irish lady who cycled from the UK to India in 1963 (I remember that winter). Not exactly a chronological tale as the end of the first chapter finds her in Teheran but the telling is wonderful. I was reading her account of Afghanistan a few weeks (!) ago when Blair was there and I found some of her insights very telling especially of their (then) rush to Westernisation

With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology

but maybe she - Murphy - always yearned for the rural idyll. Interesting that she describes the country then as being competed over by the US and the USSR.
Need to finish the book for tomorrow's meeting!.....

Post Quality?!

Technorati Profile but I'm not sure this is necessarily going to increase the post quality..!

A suggestion for shoplifters

If you're proposing to steal something (I wouldn't advise it!) do make sure that the door you're proposing to use for your escape - when you're laden with your ill-gotten gains - isn't locked that day. This happened a few weeks ago now and caused us quite a bit of amusement and the memory still brings a smile.

Basket of the week

There was an early candidate for this today - lots of alcohol and a tin of new potatoes but unfortunately the new potatoes were destined for the Lions Christmas charity collection. So I waited for a bit and someone else appeared with seven bags of cat litter, some cat food and five tubes of cotton wool pads. Maybe their cats needed some serious makeup removal?

Vanity citing

Was searching for citations of this blog and I found an entry from Storyteller's World that I missed the first time around and as that blog's archivers are currently in pieces on the floor, let me cite it here (oh for trackbacks, but I suppose as the cited page only exists in the google cache that wouldn't get me very far!)

Again, Sutherland has a digression about the way your book buying makes a kind of statement about yourself. Hence, in the bookshop queue, everyone is curious about what other customers are buying. Not so at the supermarket:

At the Tesco or Safeways check-out line, you do not care in the slightest whether the person in front has smart organic baked beans or the supermarket’s own cheap brand, so long as their cart is not heaped so mountainously high that you will be waiting all day for the till.

Oh no, John! You may feel like that; but I’m much more curious about what other people are buying at the supermarket than at Waterstones. Their trolley contents are an endless source of fantasy and speculation - as I would like mine to be for them. Why is that woman buying just two bottles of gin, a tin of shoe polish, and a toothbrush? What kind of party is that going to be, with the couple stocking up with a dozen loaves of white sliced bread, 2 dozen bananas and a packet of Alka-Seltzer?

If you don’t believe me, try sampling some of rajm’s checkout experiences.

Ah, further inspection (edit on 25th Nov) reveals that the original was part of those rescued

Must make sure I keep an eye on the contents of those trollies!

Letting go

More apposite words from Alan Ecclestone's day book:

Let the roses go, that you fastened in my hair
One summer night in a garden, and the song
That we heard from another house, where the piano was playing:
The shadow a street lamp cast though the net of a curtain,
The river at night, smooth silent Thames, flowing though London.

Kathleen Raine from Parting

Fitted in well with my mood that day, letting go of a person - or of one's image of a person is always traumatic, oh yes I can handle that new information but it involves losing and that's the point where it is not so easy.

Was looking for quotations of this poem - mainly so I didn't have to type it! I found this moving piece

Gunfight at the quick checkout

.. well nearly..
On Tuesday I was working one of the quick checkouts when I was aware of a customer speaking about someone apparently in the third person, I eventually realised he was talking about the person next to him as if she didn't exist. She had apparently remonstrated with him about the number of items he had (10 items or less) but he had 13 (gosh!). But he was totally over the top sexist, violent.. I was trying to get him to think about his shopping and cool things down while talking quietly and trying to decide whether I ought to be pressing my panic button. He eventually left with the injunction to 'call your husband here and we'll sort things out properly'
And we all breathed a sigh of relief! And I've still never had the opportunity to see what happens when I press those buttons!

Basket of the week

Came from some folk who bought a large quantity of alcohol some soft drinks and a lettuce. Bill came to £101.10 (love the binary!). They said that the lettuce was for the hamster but didn't say whether the hamster drank.

The purpose of bringing in chip and pin was so that people could share their PINs (and hence their cards)

- from someone else this afternoon. I'm not good at fuming quietly!

Deepest failure

Just tried and failed to get deepest sender working with this beta blogger setup, I tried the instructions here but without success - get a message about the feed specified not being enabled... anyone....?

Just have to manually state that: Mad Priest reports that

In a Vatican first, Pope Benedict XVI will appear in a photo calendar featuring shots of the pontiff in different poses for each month of the year. The 79-year-old Catholic church leader will appear in 14 different poses for the 2007 calendar, to be distributed with Italy's Famiglia Cristiana weekly magazine.

boggle.

Procrastinate!

via Exigency In Specie comes this piece of fun:

Writing and Gender

Via Geoff Coupe comes the Gender Genie, supply some writing and it tells you your gender. I gave it a blog posting (well two as it prefers longer texts) and it had me as just male (458 vs 454). I then supplied it with some Julian of Norwich one of the earliest known female writers in English and it recognised her as female (305 vs 212).

I liked yellow

The picture's fuzzy due to the sun being about to rise in that direction but this should be the last time those yellow windowframes are seen. We had most of the windows replaced yesterday - outside temperature < 5C brrrr! - and today they're back for the more difficult ones. The view from the webcam - assuming it can still be attached will then have a boring white window frame instead of its current deep yellow. No doubt the webserver will also be down for a bit.

Letter from school

The software has been replaced, this will not happen again

- wot never? They obviously have a higher expectation of software lifetime than me!

Ideology and Faith

Spotted this review by Stephen Bates in yesterday's Guardian of a number of books on religion the US and politics.

Ideology is a lot easier because you don't have to know or search for anything. You already know the answer to everything. It's not penetrable by facts.

Faith as an exploration doesn't seem to get on the map, just easy certainties. Ideology: You get an ology: yo're a scientist
Or from Randall Balmer an evangelical

I went to Sunday school nearly every week of my childhood ... but I must have been absent the day they told us that the followers of Jesus were obliged to secure even greater economic advantages for the affluent, to deny those Jesus called 'the least of these' a living wage and to despoil the environment by sacrificing it on the altar of free enterprise. I missed the lesson telling me that I should turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.

An evangelical though I doubt if he's a republican!

Basket of the week

... well last week. Was serving at a quick checkout and someone appeared with six packets of large mushrooms (2 or so per packet) and nine packets of beef tomatoes. She claimed they were for work.. I tried not to mention that it was a 10 items or fewer checkout,

Sago!

Semolina shower over Great Yarmouth. Spotted this tale in today's paper, no doubt it is everywhere else!

The streets of Great Yarmouth were paved with semolina this week when more than two tonnes of the grain billowed out of a silo and scattered over the Norfolk town.

Report doesn't specify which day this week it happened so maybe it's very old news - it would appear it happened on Thursday morning - CBBC(!) was the only one I found that gave a date -err the Guardian gives a date but in the quote from the guy from Pasta Foods (company tag from the website - where reality exceeds expectation!!), The Great Yarmouth Mercury has some coverage - oops!

Why Baghdad Will Keep Burning

Read!

"While negotiating in Hanoi a few days before Saigon fell, U.S. Army Colonel Harry Summers, Jr. [...], said to a North Vietnamese colonel, 'You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield.' The Vietnamese colonel replied, 'That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.'"

our impasse is just a formula for more deaths in Iraq, a formula guaranteed to keep Baghdad burning.

Changing Attitude Chester

As I'm attempting to advertise this elsewhere, I'll also give it a plug here..

The Changing Attitude Chester group are running a day conference
with speakers Kenneth Leech and Jean Mayland

Does the Church limit God's Love?

Principles & practice and Changing Attitudes - Workshops & Discussion

Saturday 11th November 10am - 4pm at Chester Cathedral

Drinks provided, bring your own lunch.
To book for the day, send cheque (payable to Changing Attitude, Chester) for £7 (£4 concessions) together with your details to: Irene Pendleton, 55 Carlton Close, Parkgate, NESTON, CH64 6RB.

For information: e-mail imp<insert obvious symbol>fish.co.uk (or me!)


Posters available at the Chester Group's website

Before they go..

visit on Sunday to Crosby to see the Gormley statues -also a visit to the Formby red squirrels. Old stamping grounds for me as back in the early 60's I went to school in Crosby. Inevitably the beach was very busy and unusually for the West Lancashire coast, the tide was in. Hadn't been to see the statues before but I was determined to get there before they get uprooted.

More pictures to come - but at the moment I can find neither the camera USB cable nor the memory card reader!

I see the last post was number 256 - a long way to 512..

News from the building site..

At the moment we are surrounded by works in progress - for the last 24 hours drains have been cleared - the lorry was there all night - and it is still going on. Yesterday was the start of the areas move from black bin bag rubbish collection to householders sorting their rubbish for recycling, so just at the point where the bin lorry appeared to collect the paper and cardboard - for the first time - the drains people blocked the reoad with their works so the stuff couldn't be (easily) collected.
Then we have the Jordangate/Hibel Road works until Christmas, 50 yards the other way - with luck my webcam may have some pictures of this though you'll have to imagine the pneumatic drills! Unfortunately the cam can't cope with bright lights during the day - I've tried attaching dark 35mm film to the lens but haven't got it to work well yet - so when it is too bright it gets trained on here so you're likely to see me (or not!). Week after next we have the windows being replaced (needed as you can see from the window frame in the picture.

Shut Smutty Books

..with apologies to Tom Lehrer - from Anna Russell to Lehrer! via biblioblog.net where I was looking after searching for a James Barr obit(!) comes this blog entry on Hot Library Smut - I liked the St Gallen picture with the shadowy people but, alas, I've not been in any of the pictured libraries. The book is reviewed here - with an introduction by Umberto Eco!

.. as long as you sing it...

Anna Russell has died.
From her summary of Wagner's ring:

Gutrune is 'the only woman that Siegfried's ever come across who wasn't his aunt. I'm not making this up, you know!'

Chocolate Teapot Dept

Haven't had a bare link for some time so here is one - thanks to Whiskers...

Sheep and goats

Didn't notice this on Sunday but the second google ad for the Iona Benedicite amused me.

Birdsong

A few weeks ago I attended a funeral where we had a version of the benedicite that included these words

O ye puffins that brighten the clifftops,
Bless ye the Lord,
O ye curlews and lapwings
O ye dunlins that wheel together over the waves,
Bless ye the Lord.

and so on

O ye orchids that gem the grassy slops,
O ye golden flags that deck the waters edge with glory,
Bless ye the Lord.
O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord,
Praise him and magnify his name for ever

The deceased was a keen bird watcher - I thought I'd find more details on this via google but not a thing...anyone know the authorship? - ah Google groups has it Iona - as I might have guessed - and by E.D.Sedding - I see we missed out some of the more localised references.

And then that same evening - from Ecclestone's Gather the Fragments - this is currently out of print and the first google english hit is www.medicaltextbook.com - boggle! - came a poem of Charlotte Mew - Moorland Night -also on birds but far darker

...
This is the end of all the roads
Over the grass there is the night dew
And the wind that drives up from the sea along the moorland roads;
I hear a curlew start out from the heath
But fly off calling though the dusk,
The wild, long, rippling call.
The Thing is found and I am quiet with the earth.
..

One parsnip?

Two separate people appeared with one parsnip in their baskets yesterday at the checkout - with no other vegetables that obviously went with it. So what do you do with one parsnip?

Vanity searches rule!

Looks like just the first of these isn't me, was also amused by this HTTP id, found by use of googles codesearch

BATS Blog is back!

At long last I worked around my MySQL issues and the BATS Blog works, now I just need to get it up to date and keep it up to date!

Home again

.. and with a full photo album of the last week. Friday lunch was another trip to Restaurant Meerfräulein in Laufenburg - I see they use JAlbum for their photo album too! Had a weird experience there on Thursday where they produced a salad before the main course whose dressing I'd last had back in 1963 when staying in Basel at a place in the Rosenthal Strasse - an amazing flashback - I'd forgotten about their salads until that moment...
Back by train from Frick to Zurich not sure what the plane was, I think it might have been an Avro RJ decorated with Swiss in Rural costumes...

Day 3

First the boring (?) picture of work

and now a picture of the laptop working hard surrounded by the Rheinterrasse

Only one extra restaurant today - I risked the wild boa here this evening and this lunchtime was at the Restaurant Meerfräulein in the Swiss end of Laufenburg.

another day..

.. another two restaurants and my digestive system is beginning to flag!
For lunch the Athene(?) restaurant in Laufenbug and in the evening having ducked out of a wonderful sounding trip to The Oskar Reinhart Collection at Winterthur. I had a quiet evening at the hotel enjoying their menu with 'Venisson (wild boa) steaks' though I'm sure my German translation of English would be just as risible. Couldn't face the game menu though so settled for fried pike (not sure that was much of an improvement) followed by pear sorbet. The software is now working though...

Because it was possible...

or something?
Despite a Swissair strike I seem to be at the Hotel Rebstock Laufenburg having enjoyed a wonderful meal at restaurant schlössle - the lamb is recommended as is the San Gimigiano Rosso! Assuming I manage to get photos off my camera card - I forgot a vital usb cable - there should be some photos tomorrow! No doubt more restaurant visits - the area appears to have some good restaurants and the scenery is breathtaking!

Ummmmm

This image appears to be going the rounds - I thought at first it must be a spoof. Via though I actually found it at Mad Priest but how much different is it to fighting for peace, or the other one?

Who are these people!

- a meme going the rounds - or maybe it has gone and I've just been too busy!

Basket of the week

... 420g of red chillies...well maybe there were a few other things!

Nice peaceful evening

... until the pneumatic drills opened up over the way. Indistinct webcam image: The webcam updates every minute or so and is here on my webserver though it's often not running!
The big white building is an ex-pub that's being done up and I assume they've broken something. Heading downstairs where at least there's some shielding from the noise!

Making waves

More new terragen rendersare here and older ones here - these last have a few asteroid-like renders. There was a bit of a challenge on the terragen list to produce waves so I messed around with water levels and produced these, not too impressive for waves but I'm quite pleased with them.

L'ascenseur

Another Doudi Samantha video:

Had to hand edit a previous blog with a youtube entry to get this...not sure why firefox is not co-operating?
Lots more Samantha on YouTube here
No subtitles so you'll all have to listen hard - but as I'm currently watching a DVD where the subtitles frequently have </l> in the midst of the text sometimes having no subtitles is less distracting!
And that should be France2 rather than tv2 in the previous blog

It's nearly poetry...

From a website that is spamming my webserver, I visited and pushed some of the foreign text through Babelfish

ludicrous cowgirl prostitute council,
with that too much they praise ch' I without I am suffered;
505 in mixed sky ludicrous cowgirl prostitute to mercy,
than more beloved;
From God, soon the bite is born in they left.

Squirrels

via news:rec.music.classical.recordings and thence to the Register comes this news item Suicide squirrel in opera-hating kamikaze bike spoke mangle - doesn't say if it was a Red Squirrel though! Must get around to watching this film

From TV2

and Doudi as Samantha we have this video. Should have bought the DVD...
Unless you're into camp you probably won't enjoy....
Couldn't paste the embedded player from that site to the blog entry - maybe it didn't like firefox?

Beta...

This now claims to be beta blogger - but this is definitely not a test post.


What is amarok up to categorising Pogo.. as Disco
PS Have just upgraded to this week's 1.4.3 amarok release and things are now a lot more sane and Pogorelic is no longer Pogo'ing