marramgrass

From the BBC, yesterday:

Mr Jarrar’s black cotton T-shirt bore the slogan ['We will not be silent.'] in both Arabic and English.

He said he had cleared security at John F Kennedy airport for a flight back to his home in California when he was approached by two men who wanted to check his ID and boarding pass.

Mr Jarrar said he was told a number of passengers had complained about his T-shirt - apparently concerned at what the Arabic phrase meant - and asked him to remove it.

…

After a difficult exchange with airline staff, Mr Jarrar was persuaded to wear another T-shirt bought for him at the airport shop.

(HT: RELEVANT’s Daily Slices, 31/8/06)

So according to the BBC the problem was that passengers didn’t know what the Arabic text said, and were concerned it was something ‘bad’. It would be disingenuous of me to ask if they would have been concerned if the text was in Greek, or Cyrillic characters, but this does leave me not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

Have re-written the About page if you want to know a little more about me and what I’m doing here. Still haven’t got round to fixing the layout, though.

Against my better judgement I have taken the dubious step of signing up at MySpace. I object to it in countless ways, but my principles were over-ridden when a mate pointed out its usefulness in networking as I begin to look for musicians back here in NI who won’t mind me photographing them.

Trying to implement Technorati tags around here, but I’m having trouble getting ecto to do it in a way that doesn’t make messy mark-up when passing through WordPress. And if I can’t do it from ecto then I’ll never keep it up.

And I have finally gotten around to trying out del.icio.us as a bookmarking service. For keeping track of bookmarks (without cluttering up your browser) in a useful way that actually lets lets you find stuff again, it is the business. Seriously, it’s the perfect application for tags. Try it.

A Scanner Darkly is an adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel, and it’s all about drugs and their effect on the characters.

It’s quite a surreal tale that takes a little concentration to get your head around, but it’s an interesting film to watch, with some very entertaining dialogue. Nicely paranoid, the film certainly gives your brain something to do, and plenty to think about.

Of course, I say paranoid, but the constant surveillance in Dick’s near-future society perhaps isn’t that far off, and the disintegrating consciousness of the ‘hero’ - caused by his use of fictional drug Substance D - gives us a creative window into his world. It’s all helped along by the slightly wonky rotoscoped visuals.

If you give the film a chance it is worth watching.

Because the quality of teaching at the conference was very high indeed. But that’s the old story for me - I come with these totally unfounded prejudices and misconceptions only to have them rightly confounded. The chat from Chap Clark was excellent, taking us through some of the conclusions from his research into the nature of adolescence, as was the time spent with Duffy Robbins investigating the Church’s response to Clark’s info.

All good, but by far the best part of it was so many youth workers together talking out the issues - and only a small number were employed in youth work, most being volunteers. That was healthy, as most (ie, almost all) of the people doing the work out there do so in a voluntary capacity. Excellent chance to put heads together.

I’ve never waited on tables, but I was sitting in a cafe last night. And I do remember being told that the staff at Butlins identify Spring Harvest guests as the toughest and most demanding crowd they serve. Unfortunately I find it all to easy to believe.

Sometimes, when you’re putting together a presentation (or, like I can be, a talk or something) there’s a bit of video on Google Video that you’d to make use of, but Google Video’s proprietary player makes it a pain to do - who wants to stop in the middle of what they’re doing and get into Google’s software just for a clip?

A little bit of Googling (heh) let me piece together how to convert them into whatever format you want (for the bits you’re allowed to anyway - copyright and all that). This is done on the Mac, but the same software is all out there for Windows; also, there’s a small amount of expense involved here, but it can be probably be done legitimately for free with different software.

1. Find your clip. I selected this one at random.
2. Click the download button. Download and install the Google Video Player, then download the video.
3. The video download is a very small .gvp file. Open this with the Google Video Player and it will proceed to download the actual video file.
4. Find where GVP put the video file. It will have a .gvi file extension. (On OS X it’ll go to your Movies folder by default.) It’s actually a DivX-encoded AVI file, so rename the file to have the extension .avi - on Windows your Folder Options will need to be set to show file extensions, on OS X it will ask you if you’re sure you want to, but it’s okay. Your computer won’t explode if you do.
5. Open the file - it will go to your default video player. If you have the DivX codec installed (there’s a good chance you do already) then you should be watching it by now. If not, go to DivX.com and download it.
6. That’s all the magic that isn’t magic. If you want to convert the file to a not-DivX format, QuickTime Pro is cheap and user-friendly. There’s better and more powerful out there, but it does the job just great.

What format you want will dictate what software you use for the final, conversion, stage. But then you’ll have your clip ready to be puled into Powerpoint or whatever. Just don’t do it for clips you’re not allowed to - copyright infringement is bad!

I will indeed give you concrete instructions about how to pray, but these are merely preparations. The reality takes place only after all thoughts regarding ‘methods’ are forgotten. Those who enter the prayer life, the life of spirituality, take their life in their hands. How could I seriously tell you prayer and spirituality is about counting repetitions and breathing rhythmically with a prayer formula! Methods have to do with the known, with what we do. The life of prayer and spirituality has to do with the unknown, with the Mystery of God’s deifying activity in our lives. The name of this Mystery is Jesus.

William Wilson, Four Essentials: Classical Disciplines of Christian Spirituality.

Still being early days in my new job, I’m actually 40 miles away in the student accommodation of Loughry College, just outside Cookstown.

I’m here for the Youth Ministry Summer School organised by a bunch of people including the PCI. On the one hand it’s a slight pain to be away for a week so close to starting somewhere new, but on the other it’s handy to get to meet some people and hear a little about what’s going on over here - since it all seems very different to six years ago when I left.

There are a lot more people here than I expected, which is great. Seems to be plenty of people involved in youth ministry, and in a deliberate way where a chance to get a little bit of training from some big names is welcomed. I doubt it would have been quite so packed five or six years ago.

Ah, yes. Those big names. Two American guys (Chap Clark, Duffy Robbins) and their wives, plus a couple of UK bods. I fully admit to being a little cyncial (yes, I realise that those of you who know me IRL may be shocked by this admission), and my first reaction was to wonder why fly people in from the States when there are so many talented and expert practitioners in the UK whom we could all probably benefit from spending a little time with?

But, it is true that there is a longer standing academic approach to youth ministry in the States than in the UK, and these two guys are pretty heavy hitters. And having had the first teaching session this morning, it does look like it’s going to be a good - and a very useful - week here. Sometimes I feel much too jaded.

The Hoff has invaded my domain registrar!

But enough of the gimmicks and shiny toys - day to day, how’s it going?.
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