Six Nations Rugby
I’m going to put my neck on the line and make a prediction, here, that on Saturday 29th March Ireland will play England at Lansdowne Road with the Grand Slam at stake. Daring words, I know, but there you go! (I’m saying nothing about which way it’ll go…)
Seen a couple of flicks this week. Two Weeks Notice is the usual formulaic rom-com affair, but Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant are both pretty entertaining in it. Of course, there’s that typical Hollywood bit where they realise they love each other (aaawww!) and the next thing is a strong hint at going and jumping into bed…
Daredevil is nothing particularly special – it’s no Spiderman – but very entertaining. Ben Affleck couldn’t act for buttons (although we know he can write) but he does make a suitably dark and conflicted ‘hero’, a nicely pain-filled vigilante. Couple of laugh-out-loud moments, too.
Of course, in the next six months we have a new X-Men flick and the remaining Matrixes (Matrices?), which are closely followed by The Return Of The King. Can’t wait.
I’m still doing a lot of thinking about how we (Christians, and everyone else) engage with the stuff we watch and read for entertainment. Too often the Church condemns without listening and without looking for any inherent value to what is being said. That’s something my English Lit. GCSE taught me: most entertainmaent says a lot more than we give it credit for, if only we’d listen. Even those things that don’t necessarily intend to make a big statement give lots of hints at underlying values and attitudes, from which we can in turn learn heaps about society and life.
Expect an essay or three soon, after I stop fooling around with PHP to try and get some dynamic stuff on here!
Two things to tell y’all about, one nice, one nasty.
Nice: There’s something very cool I stumbled across ages ago, and have just rediscovered. Its called Everything2, and is pretty much… everything. Think “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” where anyone can be a researcher. Go see. (Actually, somewhere on the BBC website there’s a thing called “H2G2″, geddit?, which claims to be exactly that: “let’s all write the Hitchiker’s Guide”. But it pales in comparison to E2.)
Nasty: I got in from the prayer meeting, and put some dinner on. About 20 minutes later I heard a clatter in the kitchen, but couldn’t think what it could be so I ignored it. Dumb, I know. Five minutes later I smelled smoke. Rushed into the kitchen to discover the oven shelf had collapsed, leaving my chicken bits lying in the flame at the back of the oven. Not impressed.
Mafia.
Not the secretive family-type thing, but the party game. It’s a game I picked up a few years back when I was with YFC. It’s pretty much the best clean fun you can have with a mixed group of 6-20 people. It is simply the business.
And it’s so clever I couldn’t remember how to play it, and had to reach for my trusty Google. “Easy,” thinks me. “I’ll chase down a copy of the rules, and we can play it with the teenagers tonight.” (This is Friday past.) Try it. Hit Google and search on something like ‘mafia group game’. Loads of hits, as it turns out that there’s somewhere in the region of nine hundred thousand variations of this game. Not only that, but it appears to be at the root of this completely unexpected subculture!
And there’s a web page devoted to each variation, but I still intend to put up an outline of the way we played it on Friday, because it was fun and it’s about time I put something useful on this site.
A busy week has just gone by, with a lot to mull over.
Most recently, last night I was at a discussion group after church on the topic “Worship…?”, which was a lot of fun. It was a keen reminder that you don’t have to get too many Christians in a room to get loads of major disagreement on what you might expect to be a fairly simple, un-controversial thing. I may have been a bit liberal with the big wooden spoon, but there’s nothing like a quick stir! And actually, the chat was very interesting and mind-stretching – it’s great to be able to disagree amicably and have our own thoughts and views tested and tried and studied under the microscope. It’d be really dull if we all thought exactly the same thing in exactly the same way.
I’ve also enjoyed a couple of movies lately, and there’s been one I haven’t enjoyed at all. I watched the Aliens special edition and was reminded just how fab it was (and it was made in the 1980s!), relived the innocent pleasure of A Knight’s Tale, and was thoroughly disgusted by another movie I won’t name: I’m pretty easy about what I’ll watch and enjoy, but for the first time in my life I turned a film off after half an hour on the grounds of “I just don’t want to watch this stuff…” Shame Blockbu$ter don’t see it as grounds for a refund. Oh, well…
Screwy email links unscrewed :-)
Just had a thought: COMING SOON a form to ask for a notification when anything is added to the Writings/Resources section. And maybe a contact form. And, hey, maybe even a guest book! (But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here…)
The whole dish-washing thing didn’t come off. It had been a kind of last-minute attempt to replace a much better idea that fell through at the last minute. Yet I suspect you’re confused – I guess a bit of background is in order…
In one of my classes in college, the idea was put forward for a thing dubbed “A Better Day”, the idea being simply to attempt to make one day (today!) better than it otherwise would be for some of the people in the area around the college building. We had hoped to spend a morning in a local school armed with a video camera taking vox pops, but for various logistical reasons this was called off late last week, and we were kind of stuck.
Enter the dishes. While it sounded like a rather funky idea, we figured that few people would accept the offer of a couple of guys banging on their door wanting to do housework. Think about it – would you? :-)
So we went our separate ways and joined up with what other people were doing under the same banner. I ended up serving as roadie/tech for a few folks who were putting on a rock gig in a local church hall (which would also feature a bouncy castle and other cool things that youthworkers do love so), which meant a few hours spent lugging heavy gear around the place, and trying to track down a new PA as the one we had borrowed was just too quiet for such a big hall! (As it transpired, the hard bit of actually finding it was done by someone else – I just had to go and get.) This was eased when the bass player decided he wanted to play guitar for a few songs and I got to stand in for him. Four songs I’d never played before, picked up in a quick run-through beforehand, and then performed! FUN!
But by far the coolest part of the day was playing Giant Jenga with a seven year old (oh yeah, by the time I left, all the young people who had come were actually primary school kids – doesn’t detract at all: they had fun), who was average height for a seven year old. Which means that by the time the thing fell over, it was significantly taller than she was. One day I will be happy when I find a Jenga that I can play that will be taller than me…
A good day. “A Better Day”!
The Youth Church are painting a mural of Noah’s Ark – it looks rather cool. If you want to have a look at part of it as it currently stands, click here. Be warned, it’s a pretty big file (about 281KB).
Well, the site is finally in a state to go live with something other than a holding page. The design is so-so, and there’s a couple of screwy email links, but I’ve no motivation to sort it out! I thought I might try my hand at this blogging business – it can’t hurt.
After I got the site mostly down this morning, I spent the afternoon helping a friend of ours move house. Gillian was moving into the wee house she’ll be sharing with her fiance after they get married at Easter. It’s a pretty cool house, and certainly more than enough to make a flat-dweller like me a bit jealous. My wife will tell you that I’m not the most committed to keeping our flat clean and tidy (!), but I found myself helping Gillian clean the kitchen and the bathroom – it’s amazing how much there is needs looked at in a new place!
It might warm me up for Tuesday, when I’ll be spending the entire day knocking on people’s doors offering to do their dishes or their hoovering. What fun. The things I do for college…
Which may in turn get me in the form to do something about the shocking state of our flat. When my better half goes away it kinda goes down the tube, and she’s only been gone a fortnight! Need to get some discipline, here. That’s a familiar story!
