marramgrass

20 st 13 lbs.

On account of spending the three days of StreetReach Lisburn eating junk.

I had a very strange evening yesterday.

I’m involved with organising an event that starts tomorrow (StreetReach Lisburn, if you’re curious — more to follow on that), and we had our final committee meeting last night. The pair of astonishing ear infections that blighted my Easter weekend have left me unable to drive until balance and spatial awareness are back to normal, so I was waiting on a colleague for a lift home.

He was providing a ride for another friend, let’s call him Al, who informed us that he had a mission to complete before we went home.

Al had been out walking earlier in the day, and being caught short had ducked down a side road into a field where he had come across a great pile of magazines of a certain type. Being a conscientious fellow, Al felt it wasn’t right to leave these publications where an unsuspecting innocent might stumble across them, so took us to load them all up into the back of the car for disposal.

That was the easy part. How would you dispose of a boot-load of suspect literature at ten o’clock at night, in an environmentally and socially responsible way? Could we find a paper recycling point? Of course not.

So there’s us in the car park of a large shopping centre, distributing piles of coloured paper between the various already-full bins, under the watchful electronic eyes of the security cameras. I’m sure we looked quite suspicious.

Very bizarre.

Al’s straightforward response to what he viewed as a problem was humbling. There’s a lot to be said for a man who sees something wrong and then, without thinking twice, goes and does what he can to put it right. More power to him, as they say.

20 st 13 lbs.

Even though our scale only marks off 2 lb intervals, I was instructed by my wife to claim the pound that showed.

Which means I’ve finally broken through 21.

:-D

Do you think the driver is relying on the sheer weight of the thing to keep his back wheels on the ground?

Spotted waiting to join the Westlink in Belfast (excuse the dust of my dashboard). I was stopped at a red light, you’ll be glad to hear. In my paranoia I also took the precaution of removing the keys from the ignition :-)

• A half-hour documentary on a traditional bespoke tailor. The blog of the main gent, English Cut, is eminently readable, and is where I found the video.
• Barack Obama on race in America. I have been watching the current election shenanigans in the US with interest — not least because the resident of the White House can have a real impact on the state of the world. Obama has struck me not only as a very talented orator, but as a guy with his head properly screwed on, even as he catches flak over comments made by his former pastor. UPDATE: See/hear the speech on YouTube.

And a few from the BBC News service:

• How to remember your dead dog. Over the last few years I have become very much a dog person, and have been repeatedly astonished at how stupidly attached I have become to an animal. But I just don’t get this at all.
• Course-work in the internet age. Sorry to admit that when reading this I found myself idly wondering if I could offer my services to some students out there. Then I wised up.
• Arthur C Clarke has died.

21 st 0 lbs.

Staying the same is better than creeping up again, no doubt about it.

I seem to have a wall at 21 :-) Time to break it.

I began blogging my exploration of this book last week. I didn’t originally intend a blogging-through-the-book series, but that looks like where it’s going.

Following on from that previous post, the next two chapters comprise the remainder of the first section of the book. In these Wright offers a defence of belief in the actual, bodily resurrection of Jesus. In doing so he places the events of the first Easter in context alongside Jewish understanding of resurrection — that it will be the experience of all believers on the ‘last day’ — and identifies how he sees that early Christian belief expresses, to use his terminology, ‘modifications’ or ‘mutations’ of that understanding. These changes, of course, came about as a result of the resurrection of Jesus, an event that Wright argues must affect completely how we view the world around us — he talks in terms of paradigm shift1. I agree.

While, in these chapters, Wright addresses in varying detail many of the arguments against belief in the resurrection of Jesus as it is recorded in Gospel, he is careful to not hang too much on historical and scientific enquiry.

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p75:

But this is where I want to heed carefully the warnings of those theologians who have cautioned against any attempt to stand on the ground of rationalism and to attempt to ‘prove’, in some ‘mathematical’ fashion, something which, if it happened, ought itself to be regarded as the centre not only of history but also of epistemology, not only of what we know but of how we know it. I do not claim, in other words, that I have hereby ‘proved’ the resurrection in terms of some neutral standpoint. I am offering, rather, a historical challenge to other explanations, and to the worldviews within which they gain their meaning. Precisely because at this point we are faced with worldview-level issues, there is no neutral ground, no island in the middle of the epistemological ocean as yet uncolonized by any of the warring continents. Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead; but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which scepticisms of various sorts have long been hiding. The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of early Christianity. The obvious fact that this remains hugely challenging at the personal and corporate level ought not to put us off from taking it seriously. Or were we only playing when we entertained the question in the first place?

(The question to be entertained being simply, “did it happen?”)

I found it encouraging and refreshing that a serious, contemporary theologian is happy to state his belief that Jesus was actually, bodily raised from the dead.

The discussion in these two chapters is compelling, but often a little quick and shallow. The author recognises this, and rightly points out that to go into full detail just isn’t possible in this book, but he regularly left me wanting more detail. As the end notes frequently point towards his earlier work (frequently The Resurrection of the Son of God, all 817 pages of it), I suspect that I am about to start a long journey through the writings of Wright.

• Some great non-traditional wedding photos on Slate. I forget where I spotted these.
• The People’s Mario. Via Wil Wheaton.
• “The romantic light started to fade fast.” I’ll say. Via Jordon Cooper.

After the death of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax last week, these last two are topical and affectionately humourous.

• The influence of D&D. I never played Dungeons & Dragons, but many of the games I do play are heavily influenced at least by its mechanics. For the best of the laugh, follow the line from the top-left corner along ‘No’. Via a tweet from Wil Wheaton.
• Ultimate Game. RIP Gary on xkcd.

21 st 0 lbs.

We meet here again :-)

Also to say, I appreciate all the support I’m getting from folks in real life and in comments here. Cheers.

On a whim, and presented with a cheap CD at the supermarket, I picked up a copy of a Nickelback CD from a couple of years ago that seems to have reappeared off the back of a successful single (the depressingly listenable “Rockstar”).

It’s been running around and around in my car for the last week or so, the kind of big, dumb, generic guitar rock that I default to when the sun comes out. I even started to enjoy it, until I began to pay attention to the occasional snatch of lyric. How’s this:

“Photograph” by Nickelback:

Look at this photograph.
Every time I do it makes me laugh.
How did our eyes get so red,
And what the hell is on Joey’s head?

I feel like no further comment is necessary, don’t you?

(Apparently “Photograph” is being released as a single in a couple of months. There’s good warning to burn your radios in plenty of time — just in case.)