Making Wealth History since 2007

Make Wealth History is one today.

Not sure how far along we've got, but I think we're asking the right questions at least.

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Just in case anyone is visiting from the RVA 98 website, I tend to be found here on xanga, although some of us are on facebook too.

the least of these my brothers

This story alone is reason enough to reconsider everything we do in church:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory with all of his angels, he will sit on his royal throne.
The people of all nations will be brought before him, and he will separate them, as shepherds separate their sheep from their goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, "My father has blessed you! Come and receive the kingdom that was prepared for you before the world was created. When I was hungry, you gave me something to eat, and when I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. When I was a stranger, you welcomed me, and when I was naked, you gave me clothes to wear. When I was sick, you took care of me, and when I was in jail, you visited me."
Then the ones who pleased the Lord will ask, "When did we give you something to eat or drink? When did we welcome you as a stranger or give you clothes to wear or visit you while you were sick or in jail?"
The king will answer, "Whenever you did it for any of my people, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you did it for me."

Then the king will say to those on his left, "Get away from me! You are under God's curse. Go into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels! I was hungry, but you did not give me anything to eat, and I was thirsty, but you did not give me anything to drink. I was a stranger, but you did not welcome me, and I was naked, but you did not give me any clothes to wear. I was sick and in jail, but you did not take care of me." Then the people will ask, "Lord, when did we fail to help you when you were hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in jail?" The king will say to them, "Whenever you failed to help any of my people, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you failed to do it for me." Then Jesus said, "Those people will be punished forever. But the ones who pleased God will have eternal life."

BibleGateway.com - Passage Lookup: Matthew 25;

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.

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• 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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