the new morality

Proof if any were needed that green issues are the new morality. The guardian today is taking confessions on environmental sins...

Forgive me, Earth, for I have sinned... from Guardian Unlimited: News blog

technorati tags:culture, morality, environment

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flying wing

On a wing and a whisper: the airliner to end runway noise | Science | Guardian Unlimited

technorati tags:future, technology

Yaks are the new goats

This year, it's all about the yaks.

Last Christmas it was the idea of sending someone a goat that captured the imagination of the novelty-loving middle class. Charity gifts are so last year, so the only way forward is to make the gifts more quirky. Which charity can come up with the most random novelty animal to 'send' to some needy person?It's a dangerous game. I can foresee a situation in two or three years time when confused Saharan tribesmen will be receiving sweaty penguins, or UNICEF workers will be knocking on igloo doors (do igloos have doors?) to deliver pairs of iguanas, and Ukrainian orphans will be getting little boxes of ladybirds in the post.

Eventually of course, we'll actually swamp the third world with random animals. By February I expect Tanzania will be so full of goats they'll have a 'send a goat back' campaign. Or maybe they'll get tired of being patronised and they'll have their revenge. People could send a mosquito or a batch of weevils, or maybe purchase a 'famine experience pack', where you pay for someone to go round and remove all the food from someone's house on Christmas day.

I'm being facetious, of course, although there is an interesting social point her somewhere. In the west we have everything, but we can't be seen to be keeping all our money for ourselves. We want to buy presents, but the old 'what do you get for the man who has everything' line is practically a universal now. So we've developed two very clear strategies.

The first is the ironic gift. You get your friends something silly. Witness the sudden opening of Gadget Shop outlets right around Christmas, and their subsequent closure in January - poor taste items, toys for adults, gimmicks and joke commodities. Ironic gifts are wrong, and I don't mean wrong in the ironic, funny, 'that's so wrong!' way. I mean they actually are wrong.

And we know this, we know they're tokenistic, wasteful, and only fun for an average of 1.2 seconds. Which is why the second category has been so popular - charity gifts, and they're magic. Money is spent, and nobody is upset that you didn't get them anything, and everyone can laugh when you open it. Unlike the ironic gift, which is likely to be inflatable or need batteries, it won't clutter up the house and leave your friends with the moral quandary of wanting to throw it away, but feeling bad because it was a present. And, best of all, it's virtuous. It makes us feel great, because we're saving the world.

Buying charity gifts makes you a good person in so many ways.They may be one of those little things that I find awkward about living in Britain, like fairtrade goods and the 'red' credit card, but overall, I think I'm favour of charity gifts.

Of course not everyone needs a yak, so you can still send a goat if you like, or cow, sheep, chicken, alpaca, camel, donkey, pig, even a can of worms, each with their own awful sales tagline. 'Send a duck, what a quacking idea', being one the more horrific. If you factor in the sponsorship gifts you can have a baby vulture, or more exotically an elephant, a rhino, or a tiger. Or a lemur. (a quick hooray for lemurs) Or if animals aren't your thing, there are plenty of other things to send, from sheds or handfuls of nails, mosquito nets, wells, entire playgrounds, bikes, seeds, or the rather dubious 'Send a bog'.Although my personal favourite remains the RSPB's 'sponsor a hedge' - the gift that goes on and on, apparently. You'll all be getting hedges from me this year.

supajem's Xanga Site

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Hugo Chavez' re-election poem

Always, I did everything for love
For love towards the tree, the river, I became a painter
For the love of knowledge, I left my dear hometown, to study
For the love of sports, I became a baseball player
For the love of the homeland, I became a soldier
For the love of the people, I made myself president, you made me president
I have governed for love
There is a lot more to do.
I need more time
I need your vote.
Your vote for love

article

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Paint

After the bouncing balls, paint. Sony Bravia's new advert.

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remixing

Duncan Sheik has done an interesting thing  with his new album, White Limousine. It comes on two disks, labelled 'Yours' and 'Mine'. 'Mine' is the album, and if you don't know Duncan Sheik, think an American Aqualung and you're mostly there. 'Yours' is where it gets interesting. This is a DVD-Rom of all the various guitar, piano, drum and vocal parts that make up the album, all as separate files, so you arrange them however you like and make your own version. You can then post your remixes to limoremix.com. I had a go last night, reconstructing one of the songs in Garageband and then breaking it back down again into an electronica version. You can hear it in my audio section. It's a great experiment in involving your listeners, and it could keep me happily entertained for weeks as well, seeing just how far from the original I can take his tunes.
For those with heavier tastes, Nine Inch Nails have done something similar with a couple of their tracks. The first person there was Brian Eno though, who has re-issued his 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts under a Creative Commons license for anyone to play with.

Tags:

• film global warming

Being Yourself

Eltham 24-7
If you're in the area, the Church Army and 24/7 in Eltham are using our Being Yourself exhibition on the high street on the 11th. I've always wanted to see it on a high street. We did it at the Christian Resources Exhibition, but the high street is where it belongs!
Inspire magazine are covering it at the moment, or see the Eltham 24/7 site.

Or, for that matter, check out the Being Yourself site if you haven't been there yet.

First impressions of Greenbelt

I went to Greenbelt for the day on Monday. I hadn't been before, and thought I'd best pay it a visit sooner or later, what with the years of nagging that I've been subjected to from various friends. It does inspire fanaticism, does Greenbelt. And hatred too. In some churches I've attended I'd have been excommunicated for peeking through the fence. In others people practically burst into song at the mention of its name. All of which is quite intriguing.
So what did I make of it? Well, in my mind it appears to be two festivals crammed into one. The first is a forum for new ideas, for creative approaches to faith and church, and for informed debate and political Christian action, all things lacking in mainstream Christian festivals. Great. The other half, however, is tie-dye shirted irrelevance. You have these two things going on side by side, interesting conversations competing, quite literally, with spontaneous drumming sessions. I feel like I’ve been to two festivals.

The bad news first - sadly, the hippy half seems to be doing much of the art side of the festival. I was looking forward to seeing some good art, and aside from a disturbing (in a good way) exhibition on self harm, there wasn’t much to see. Most of the ‘art’ seemed to be primary coloured banners tied to trees, rainbow windmills, that sort of thing, a little disappointing for something that bills itself as an arts festival.

The ones in the hemp clothing are also running the site. The Greenbelt ‘vibe’ is something people really wax lyrical about, but to me the overall atmosphere was just willfully odd. Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m always a little suspicious of people in crazy hats. Trying to be different, or anything that’s alternative for the sake of being alternative, is usually a futile exercise, and being ‘zany’ is often a poor excuse for genuinely being your own person. (I saw a Volkswagen van in the car park with ‘make love not war’ painted on it. Surely, that’s gone beyond irony and well into farce by now) So if it were up to me, there’d be less of the dreadlocked vegan elements, though I’m sure fans of the festival will disagree. But that was just my impression as a new comer, and I was only there for one day…

The good news is that the other half of the festival was great. Where other gatherings have central ‘teaching tracks’ and main meetings, here you have dozens of things to choose from in any given hour. It’s a festival that recognizes that each person has their own interests and passions, and that everyone is on their own journey with God. We don’t all need the same truth download. You can choose what you want to feed your mind with, and no one is assuming that we all need to hear the same thing. If you need milk, there’s milk. If you want meat, it’s like a South African barbecue. There are poets and novelists, MPs, pacifists, thinkers and philosophers. Yes, there are Bible teachers too, and worship leaders. There are filmmakers and programme commissioners. There was a Muslim there, not to debate, but to talk about his conversion to Islam. Draw your own conclusions. There are bishops and social workers, charity workers and asylum seekers, ecologists and environmentalists. There was a talk on The Da Vinci Code, again, but we won’t hold that against them.

There are dozens of issues here that the church in this country needs to be talking about. There are far too many Christians who aren’t engaging in serious conversation about the environment or social action, because they’re too busy fretting about whether everyone’s got a sound understanding of Romans. Unfortunately those people won’t ever go to Greenbelt. Like so many things, the festival is bound to appeal least to the people who need it most, and that’s a real shame.

In short, I’m not entirely converted to the Greenbelt cause, but it’s still the only Christian festival I’d ever want to go to.

How cool would this be if it works?

A man who claims to have developed a free energy technology which could power everything from mobile phones to cars has received more than 400 applications from scientists to test it.Sean McCarthy says that no one was more sceptical than he when Steorn, his small hi-tech firm in Dublin, hit upon a way of generating clean, free and constant energy from the interaction of magnetic fields. 'It wasn't so much a Eureka moment as a get-back-in-there-and-check-your-instruments moment, although in far more colourful language,' said McCarthy. But when he attempted to share his findings, he says, scientists either put the phone down on him or refused to endorse him publicly in case they damaged their academic reputations. So last week he took out a full-page advert in the Economist magazine, challenging the scientific community to examine his technology.McCarthy claims it provides five times the amount of energy a mobile phone battery generates for the same size, and does not have to be recharged. Within 36 hours of his advert appearing he had been contacted by 420 scientists in Europe, America and Australia, and a further 4,606 people had registered to receive the results.

The Observer | UK News | Scientists flock to test 'free energy' discovery

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fossa!

I was just doing a little research for children's story that I've been working on recently. It's about lemurs, and I needed to do a bit of reading up on Fossa (pronouced Foosa), Madagascar's largest predator and the only thing that a lemur fears.
I was just going to keep my reading to myself, but look at it - second only to lemurs themselves, it's the coolest animal in the world. So cute, and yet so deadly! It's so sneaky that until 1996 scientists thought it was nocturnal, but it's not, it's just the ninja of the cat family. It can run up trees, leap from branch to branch and take a lemur down in mid-air.
(If you had your big toes on the outside of your feet instead of the inside, you'd be able to run up trees too.)

Anyway, I stole these rather fine photos from here and there's a nice little article here if you're bored.

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Crop circles

Am I wrong in saying that everybody loves a good crop circle? I don't think so.

I read a report on wired news today about this, not so much a circle, more like a clever piece of 3D modelling.

Aliens, clearly. Unfortunately, the aliens have also sold out, and are now ads for Nike and Big Brother.

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short films, again

I was at the Rushes Soho Shorts festival last night. A tiny little underground bar called 22 Below is showing films, as well as a Costa coffee place, several bars and restaurants, and a buch of galleries and cinemas. Unfortunately I only heard about it yesterday, so I've missed a lot of it.
Perhaps I'm in danger of becoming obsessed with short film, but I reckon in the next year there's going to be a huge upsurge of interest in the genre. Video ipods and video on mobiles has been slow to catch on, but it will, and when it does there'll be a whole new market ripe for exploitation.

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Futureshorts

Went to an outdoor film festival on sunday night, in Greenwich park, part of Stella Artois' effort to associate cinema with their overpriced Gallic lager. The main feature was Ferris Beuller's Day Off, an inspired choice - lots of people joining in with the singing, or shouting 'do it!' at that bit when Cameron pushes his Dad's ferrari out the window. (if you haven't seen it, there's no point in attempting to explain how a ferrari can be pushed out a window...)

The best bit was the short films tent though. It's worth getting along to any event that Future Shorts puts on. There's one this weekend in fact. Sunday night at Tooting Lido, the pool is celebrating 100 years of splashing, and there's a programme of short films about swimming on the sunday night. If you're fortunate enough to have a decent independent cinema near you, (Brixton Ritzy, Rio Dalston, Greenwich or Clapham Picturehouse, etc) keep an eye out for their monthly set of films too. There are trailers for each month's programme on their myspace site.

get swimming

I fully understand why councils are reluctant to maintain lidos, since you only really want them for about six or seven days of the year. But they say today might be the hottest day ever recorded in this country, which means you need www.lidos.org.uk

Lidos in the United Kingdom

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The London Noise Map

This is my online toy of the day, a map of london by decibel level. My old flat was there, on that noisy pink road at the top, with noise levels at 70-75Db.

and here's where I live now, in the middle of  all that blissful quiet 45-50Db yellow on the right there.

The London Noise Map 

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News

It's a bad day for Politics students and newsreaders everywhere as Polish president Lech Kaczynski prepares to announce his twin brother as prime minister.
Just thought it was interesting.

Also news related, have you ever come across 10x10? It's a website that monitors the news wires and picks out the top 100 words being used in the news for every hour. It's quite an intriguing visualization of what's going on in the world at any given moment.

'Zidane' is word number 36 at the moment, and 'Italy' is only number 52. If I were Italian I'd be a little upset at the news today. All the headlines are about Zidane, and I'd be going "excuse me, world champions, yes? Italy?"

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Hampstead ponds

This weekend I was introduced to the joys of Hampstead Heath's swimming ponds. So cold, and so green, but so different from swimming in a pool.

Here's Lou, self professed evangelist of the pond swimming cause, at Hampstead yesterday.

Just one word of warning. If you go, follow the signs and swim in the designated pond. If you rock up and swim in the first pond you come to, it'll be this one:

technorati tags:london

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National siesta day

"In Britain the Siesta has not been part of our culture. But that is changing. Research shows that a siesta in the middle of a working day recharges our energy levels, increases memory, concentration and human productivity by up to 34%."

Siesta 2Siesta Awareness

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flaming lips

Flickr: Photos from supajem

saw the flaming lips at the O2 festival in Hyde Park on friday. Awesome. Dancing spacemen, santas, aliens, superheroes, confetti, balloons, and of course wayne in his space bubble...

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Meteorogical meditation

"At The Cloud Appreciation Society we love clouds, we're not ashamed to say it and we've had enough of people moaning about them. Read our manifesto and see how we are fighting the banality of ‘blue-sky thinking’."
The Cloud Appreciation Society


On the subject of things found in the sky, this week I have also been enjoying Flock.

It's a free browser, it's simple, uncluttered and it's very cool. Best of all, you can just highlight something, right click and blog it in seconds. Magic. You can get it here, so not actually in the sky at all.  (Thanks to Mark for the tip.)
Unfortunately it doesn't yet work on xanga, but that should be only a matter of time... The integration with blogger, typepad and flickr is awesome.

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Unknown white male

I saw this the other day at the ICA. An intriguing documentary. A man wakes up on the New York subway with no idea who he is, where he has come from or where he is going. The film follows his story as he works out who he is, and the reactions of his friends and family.
Since he's forgotten all the events of his life, he gets to see the sea again for the first time, fall in love again for the first time. He has to meet his own dad and his sisters, and watch old holiday videos without any of the memories attached. Being a photographer, he his friends film the whole thing, and it raises a whole load of questions about who we are and what makes us us - are we the sum of our experiences, or is there a fundamental personality that exists apart from our experiences?
If it's showing anywhere near you, do go and see it...

www.unknownwhitemale.co.uk

crimes against humanity

Some strong words here from E F Shumacher on economic priorities. It really resonates with me as a christian, though Shumacher is actually applying the principles of Buddhism to his economic theory. I don't think we've even begun to work out how to genuinely live as Christians in our current economic system. There are ways to live differently as real communities that we haven't explored at all.

“If greed were not the master of modern man - ably assited by envy - how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher ‘standards of living’ are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rich societies to work towards the humanisation of work?
That soul destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done - these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence - because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”

E F Shumacher, Small is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered, p24

easter

Here are a pair of short easter films that we developed at work this year. Take a look...

eternity

everything is complete, and there is no more time to keep

A brief exercise in comparative religion

If I were not already a Christian, I think I would subscribe to one of Kurt Vonnegut’s religions.
I quite like the teachings on Bokonon in ‘Cat’s Cradle’, whose principle rule is this: “Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

Even better however, is the religion introduced in ‘The Sirens of Titan’, the magnificently named Church of God of the Utterly Indifferent. Here is a prayer from said church, from the lips of the Reverend C Horner Redwine.
“O Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagneic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia - what could we do for thee that thou couldst not do for thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say ‘Somebody up there likes me’. And no longer can a tyrant say ‘God wants this or that to hppen and anybody who doesn’t help this or that to happen is against God.’ O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!”

film 2006

There are some refreshingly unHollywood films out at the moment. If you haven’t seen ‘Goodnight, and good luck’ yet, you might need to be quick. It’s black and white, nicely understated, and is a very simple piece of film making. It’s set in a 1950s TV studio, concerns a reporter’s conflict with Joe McCarthy, and has a lot to say about modern journalism. It’s also a good deal better than ‘Syriana’, which is slightly less clever and controversial than it thinks it is.

There’s also some great African cinema out in ‘Tsotsi’ and ‘Shooting Dogs’, and African cinema is a rare bird indeed. I think technically they’re billed as British films because of funding, but there are fair percentages of bona fide South Africans and Rwandans in the crew.
I haven’t seen ‘Tsotsi’ yet, but ‘Shooting Dogs’ is worth a look. It’s a true story from Rwanda, focuses on a specific school, and is shot in the actual locations with survivors of the genocide among the crew and extras. It’s an unusual film in that you know there is no happy ending. The characters develop at the same pace as the sense of menace, and you begin to understand and like people just as it becomes obvious that they’re fate is sealed. It’s a bold way of structuring a story, to frame it in a context of impending death.

If you get a chance to see it, do. And let me know what you think. Both this one and ‘Goodnight…’ have some interesting Christian perspectives.

2006…the year the film industry remembers its audience has a mind?

famine psalm

We wrote psalms in church last night. This is mine.

Father in heaven, I have a matter to raise with you.
I read it on the guardian online this week, and I know you did too.
It concerns the land of Kenya, a place that is near my heart,
And I know that you and I share a love for its people.

As you will be aware, without the help of the guardian,
there has been no rain,
and much of East Africa is in the grip of drought.

The land has dried up and hardened,
The earth is warped and cracked.
The riverbeds run dry,
And no water is found in the well.

The trees are shrivelled like driftwood,
No grass, no leaves, nothing green.

The dogs lie panting in the shade,
And the goats stagger in the sun.
The cattle drop to their knees in the wasteland.
Their bleached bones lie white in the sand.
The sheep are led out to graze and find only dust,
And the wind throws it back in their faces.

How much worse it is for the people,
Who know of cities and supermarkets,
Who have seen in movies and magazines,
McDonalds and KFC.

God, how is it that I can choose from a thousand places to eat, while others scratch among the rocks?
How is this fair? How is this right? God, where is your justice?
It makes me angry, and yet, I am angry that I am not angrier.
I am familiar with the images of famine.
The starving children no longer move me.
I am saddened at how de-sensitised I have become,
Even when disaster strikes a place I know and love.
Lord move me, break me, show me what I must do,
For I feel so powerless in the face of such a system.

But I digress. For Kenya Lord, send rain.
Send a harvest.
And until then, Lord, send food,
with honest distribution and good government.
Aid with no conditions, a gift to those who can give nothing in return.
Stir up those who have to provide for those who have nothing.

And again Lord, send rain, and revive the land.
Coax grass from the desert plains
And fields of maize from the windswept hills.

Bring life from the dust,
for you are a God who specialises in life out of death.

Hear my prayer Lord, from this your well-fed servant,
and feed the hungry.

article: killer drought threatens east africa
article: only god knows how we will survive

Ice sculpture

The Snow Show

The mad farmer liberation front

In everything I read at the moment there seems to be a quote from Wendell Berry. Has anyone read any?
This is something of his that I liked:

The mad farmer liberation front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.


So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.


Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.


Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?


Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

subverting the empire

I'm reading this at the moment. Here are a couple of quotes I liked.

''Dreams, by definition, are supposed to be unique and imaginative. Yet the bulk of the population is dreaming the same dream. It's a dream of wealth, power, fame, plenty of sex and exciting recreational opportunities' When a whole population dreams the same dream, empire is triumphant.'

'Even in a post-modern world, the human mind continues to think in terms of stories, and naturally seeks to order experience, looks for explanations of sequences of events, is attracted to dramas. There is, if you will, a narrative quality to human experience. In allowing ourselves to adopt and be adopted by a particular story, we are in fact assuming a set of practices which will shape the way we relate to our world and destiny.'

I'd never made the link between idolatry and imagination before, but in the modern context you can see how this plays out - we take on the dreams of the idol of consumerism, and we cannot imagine any other way things could be.

tragedy, comedy and fairytale

I'm reading ‘ telling the truth - the gospel as tragedy, comedy and fairytale’

It's an interesting book. Let me throw two quotes at you:

“One wonders if there is anyting more crucial for the preacher to do than to obey the sadness of our time... by speaking out of our times and into our times not just what we ought to say about the gospel, not just what would appear to be in the interests of the gospel for us to say, but what we have ourselves felt about it.”

“So let us use words, but in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let us use them to evoke, to set us to dreaming as well as to thinking, to use words at their most prophetic and truthful. The prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let us use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask, but which help us to hear the questions that we do not have words for asking...”

In between those two quotes the author, Frederick Buechner, describes Pontius Pilate’s commute, the pictures on his desk, and how he’s been trying to give up smoking. He contemplates the difference between truths and the truth, and notes that the silence before a preacher speaks is often the most profound part of a sermon.
I haven’t got very far yet, so I’ll have to come back to you on this one, but the point so far is this: that the truth of God, life, the gospel and the way things are is a truth that is too big to be contained in particular truths, in statements and propositions, in the aforementioned explaining, exhorting and expounding.
And when you look at the Bible, this is what you find. Sure, the epistles are full of exhortations and explanations, but because we focus on them so much we forget that most of the Bible isn’t written in that style. It’s in poetry, in prophesy, in story and drama, from the woes of Jeremiah to the dances of David, the warnings of Amos or the great hopes of Isaiah.
When Jesus was asked difficult questions, he asked questions back, changed the subject, or told a story. And when he was asked ‘what is truth?’ in John 18:38, he said nothing.

Can there be more truth in silence than in a smart answer? Is a metaphor more honest than a statement of fact?

Anyway, I’d better finish the book before I say anything else...