blinkit

24 Watch: 2 and 3

24 Watch: Two more to the bodycount, three people rescued. Plus Jack also picked up another cellphone, although that was a gift as much as anything else. And the ending of this week's episode is hilarious as it brings back my favourite TV villain outside of Baltar on BSG.

Today's bLINKit: I came across these podcasting Anglican seminary students while researching a story about local churches. It's a good marriage of faith and tech. That the Anglicans are podcasting is probably good, because the debate about God's existence rages on within YouTube. And video games are good for both your eyes and your local surgeon.

Online with the Lord

WMD: We're still under a boil water advisory, but the advisory is so halfhearted now that it can almost be ignored. My water here is slightly discoloured, but testing by the regional district shows no contamination of the water supply. I've learned two things from this experience. First, each person needs about a gallon of water a day for drinking, cooking and personal hygiene, not including bathing. That's a lot of water if you want a supply of at least a week if there's a real emergency. Second, wait until this current blip is over, then go out and buy the water you need now for a (very) rainy day. You don't want to be fighting in the aisles of Costco for precious water, as some people apparently were, once the balloon goes up. If it's a real emergency, you'll have too many other things to worry about than making sure you've got the basics for living.

Today's bLINKit: A couple of columns I haven't blogged yet. This Remembrance Day-themed one profiled a fellow who spent five years researching and writing a book on world peace. He's had a hard time trying to sell it, but I think the effort is not bad and entirely worthy for a guy in his late 80s. And I criticize the latest attempt from the local cops to install surveillance cameras on public streets. We don't need 'em.

SL Update: I followed up on a longstanding curiousity in SL and attended a virtual cyberchurch this morning, in lieu of a real one. (The pic above shows the interior of the church sanctuary. You can read about the people who run the church here.) It was a moderately evangelical service, simply structured with the familiar crappy contemporary church music followed by a sermon and then a social meet after. The music, taped, was streamed, as was the sermon, which also seemed taped, considering there were no references to anyone present. That said, it was polished, reasonable and easy on the ears and the atmosphere in general was relaxed and casual. What struck me the most about the online church was what strikes me most about SL in general: when people are placed in virtual situations that are analogous to real world environments, they behave as if they were in that environment. Everyone sat in the pews. Most stood for the prayer or singing. Some brought out virtual Bibles to read. Almost no one flew around the room, except for some guy who showed up at the end with torches. I'm not sure if he was part of the service. Aside from him, everyone gathered there treated the situation as if they were at a "real" church. The crowd who gathered for the service included some classic SL types: a furry, another person with wings, a BDSM fan and at least one escort/dancer. And their presence bothered no one. "Red and yellow black and white/All are precious in his sight." In SL, there are more than a few avies that are red and yellow black and white all at the same time.

Green for Jesus; great movie trailer

Today's bLINKit: American evangelicals, or at least some of them, are urging the U.S. government to get serious about global warming. This is not as unprecedented as it sounds. While evangelicals have been in bed for too long with corporate forces that drag their feet on the environment, their roots back in the 17th and 18th centuries included strong traditions of social reform in health and education. And some do take seriously the OT injunction to be stewards of the earth. That said, the current campaign was created a backlash from more reactionary types who say it distracts from "real" issues, such as gay marriage, abortion and making women wear hats in church. OK, I made that last part up. But it was a practice in many churches until the 1960s at least.

And speaking of gay marriage, or at least gay cowboys, here's one of the latest film trailer mashups making the rounds: I always thought Michael J. Fox had a curious look in his eye when he was in scenes with Christopher Lloyd?

Wednesday: Send Stephen Harper to Narnia

Today's bLINKit: OK, maybe he'd ruin a good thing if indeed he was sent there. But at this point I'd rather have Harper romping around in Narnia, where naught a centaur nor faun has heard of Kyoto or same-sex hitching or an equitable tax system, than running in the election as the Creeping Hidden Danger to Social Democracy. But maybe I've been reading too much Stan Persky, who writes in a recent Dooney's essay that Harper's call for "change" are unnecessary posturing about a system that works pretty well:

Are there lots of criticisms to make about the shortcomings of government programs and performance? Sure. Does government work pretty well in this country? Yes, but why are we so reluctant to admit it? Do you have to bribe a public official, who’s the brother-in-law of the local MP, to get a driver’s license, a passport, a permit? No, and the public official isn’t the brother-in-law of the local MP. If you don’t believe me, go to any available Absurdistan and watch corrupt bureaucracy at work.

Narnia is on my mind, thanks to the imminent release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I want to see it, I don't want to see it. An obvious attempt at cashing in on LOTR and Harry Potter, it feels crass. Do we have to mine every children's or fantasy's book for cinematic cash? But just as I was in no hurry to see LOTR when it came out, I was in tears while watching it: bored to tears by the tale of Gollum, whose internal dialogues between Evil Gollum and Merely Conflicted Selfish Gollum were roundly tedious, but also moved to tears by the expansive mountain ranges and the swelling music and the cool castles, like a camera went inside the limitless landscapes of my youthful imagination and soared around at will. The same thing could happen with Narnia. I loved the books, but I also didn't quite believe in them. I hate fauns and centaurs and little frilly dressed English school children, and get very restless whenever they appear in anything. But to see the landscapes, the cities and towns, even the Witch and, of course, Aslan played out, I'm not sure how I'll handle that.

What I won't have a problem with is the Christian subtext. Hey, get used to it. Neither understanding it or believing it is necessary to enjoy the story. At least that's the argument of Salon's Laura Miller, who writes that the kids (and I'd add most adults) who see the film won't get or won't care about any kind of hidden theological propaganda:

If they're like the generations of children before them, they won't see or learn the lesson Lewis was trying to teach. Instead they'll see battles and adventure and magic -- and who's to say that's not what really counts?

Amen to that.

 

 

Moving, ants and Rapture flicks

WMD: My boxes arrived today from Moving Blocks, a company which rents out plastic boxes and other storage material for moving. I went the rental plastic box route to avoid having to find and collect boxes and, hopefully, to prevent taking any little cardboard-loving critters with me to the new place. The boxes were delivered to my door this morning, and they'll be picked up from new place when I'm done with them in a couple of weeks. Thanks to Randy for the Moving Blocks recommendation.

The only problem now is that the boxes make the move real. I now have to put all my stuff in them. And that's work.

Meantime, the ants smell victory. Their patrols have been small but steady (with heavy casualties inflicted on them by me), and this morning they set off the smoke alarm again for about three seconds just because they could. The silverfish also grew bolder, skittering along the living room carpet in plain sight, but a well-placed foot put a stop to that for now.

Today's bLINKit: The Tyee seeks donations to pay for independent investigative journalism. The Onion reports on yet another new television standard coming into play in the U.S. And certain kinds of Christian filmmakers still seem to be making cheap, awful movies. Back in the day in church, we had to put up with the worst cinematic dreck you can imagine, especially the Rapture-paranoid The Thief in the Night series, discussed at hilarious length here. Not all Christian films targeting aesthetically gullible evangelicals were bad. One exception is the film version of the moving Holocaust-story The Hiding Place, with a terrific cast including Julie Harris and Jeanette Clift. For its camp value, there's the The Cross and the Switchblade, starring (and I'm not making this up) Pat Boone and Erik Estrada.
 

Civic election roundup and other news

Today's bLINKit: A comprehensive look at the weekend in which Sam Sullivan beat out Christy Clark for the NPA nomination. The left in Vancouver wishes he hadn't won, 'cause Clark was their best ally.

What's with people sending out emails in the name of their infant children and babies?

A hip Mennonite church holds services at the movies. Unfortunately, they don't serve popcorn. And Jesus in the background looks highly unconventional.
 

Monday Miscelaney: God predicts election?

Today's bLINKit: As the election approaches, two good election-centred websites to pay attention to would be Terminal City's blog and especially the Tyee's election blog. The Tyee has a good repository of stories and opinion drawn from various sources, including its own material.

Also the latest from the Courier, in which Michael Kissinger examines the use of music in electioneering.

Also, news from a little while back (and spotted on Rick's Miscellany) that Jim Goll, a charismatic Christian evangelist from the U.S., predicted a change of government in Victoria. The prediction was made in 2004 when the American evangelist visited the Fraser Valley (where else) and said:

There is going to be an upsetting of governmental things in British Columbia. The government shall change in British Columbia and Victoria Island shall not be a place where it shall be of witchcraft and new age practitioners hiding. But it is going to be a place where the victory of God is going to be seen in a governmental seat.

He was no more specific than that. Someone better tell Goll, or his prophetic source, that it's Vancouver Island. Goll also predicted some kind of religious revival in Vancouver and in Prince Edward Island, of which he fell back again on his deep storehouse of geographic knowledge by adding: "I don't even know where in the world this is." That's OK, because God does.

WMD: Speaking of VE Day ... Sunday, I was going to see Downfall, a German movie about the last days of Hitler and Berlin in 1945. It seemed appropriate. But I didn't get out to the theatre, thanks to needing to do laundry and other errands, and instead, I rented Blade: Trinity on DVD, a movie about jumping, swordfighting, aerobics and fangs. Sort of like Downfall, except no Nazis. Or Hitler. Or invading Russians. And it wasn't set in Berlin in 1945. Other than that, quite similar.

Wednesday: We're mad as hell, and we're forming a committee

Today's bLINKit: Beware, everyone! According to Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle, the Unitarians are out to get us. Their manifesto begins:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Sends shivers up my spine.

Writing Wednesday: God in the burbs

WMD: My column about God, same-sex marriage and divine judgment got picked up by a couple of the suburban weeklies in the chain. The difference in the response from burb readers compared to urban Vancouverites was interesting. As far as I know, the Vancouver appearance of the column provoked two letters, one a fundamentalist response and the other a missive from a reader who took up the idea of divide judgment and applied it to the Gaia thesis, in which a potentially self-aware Earth is using plagues, storms etc. to shrug off a pesky human infection. That's environmental fundamentalism. Meantime, in the burbs the letters were along the lines of "You idiot, haven't you read Romans/Genesis/Exodus etc. so and so?" It turns out I have, many times.

Today's bLINKit: Speaking of divine judgment, Gaia etc., JaqPike sent me this link about yet another superbug, called Marburg, in Africa that's scaring people who know things about such things. This cute Ebola-like bug has a 90 per cent fatality rate. The problems of containment in Angola, where the virus has been found, is making people nervous. "The first thing that comes to mind is the international airport," said one concerned official. Sleep well, everyone.

Over on Randy's blog, you'll find a link to Irish bookmakers and the odds they're giving for various cardinal candidates for the next pope. Two Canadian cardinal possibles are rated at 80-to-1 and 100-to-1. Steep odds, but did that stop Paul Henderson in 1972?

And, Canadian Geographic has a free and comprehensive online atlas. You'll never need to ask where the Bay of Fundy is ever again.

Blogs that provoke far more hunger than my blog: Tara alerted me to Jim Cowling, someone we knew (or at least I knew him peripherally) in Victoria. He's now moved to Vancouver, is a blogger, and seems obsessed with food and cooking on his smart and sharp blog. Seems to know what he's talking about, too, judging from his recipes and his condemnation of crappy fast food.

Wednesday roundup: Black uniform trooops in British Colubmia and other stuff

Today's bLINKit: JaqPike passed this link on to me from a guy who claims black uniformed troops are building bases in the B.C. Interior. It could be the UN, it could be the U.S., there could be secret mind control experiments going on, or it could be that the Canadian federal government has secretly handed over B.C. to the Americans, or so says the guy behind this page. Apparently, hikers have encountered the troops in the wilds of the West Kootenays:

The soldiers were invariably described as having "hateful" expressions or unusually ugly  dispositions. Encounters generally consisted of one soldier coming forward from the squad waving his machine gun and ordered the hikers to withdraw immediately, saying they were in a restricted military area. The hikers reported they were only too happy to comply.

Well, if they can make the damn 98B line bus run on time, I say let them take us over.

WMD: And although I don't have a link to it, thanks to the CanWest subscriber wall, last week's Friday Sun had a good Lloyd Dyck piece on the strong tradition of music and song in Mennonite culture and why much of what passes for church music now sucks compared to it. Mennonite-trained singers have had a profound impact on some of the better choirs around, according to Dyck, including the Vancouver Chamber Choir, and choirs with a high proportion of Mennonites rank with the best of them. Dyck also quotes extensively from Wes Janzen, music director of Trinity Western University. Janzen notes how part-singing has been replaced by one-line melodies sung using the words projected on overhead screens. Janzen says young church musicians still have a lot of talent, but they have replaced musical literacy with technology. In the meantime, sacred music has become indistinguishable from commercial, secular music. Janzen notes that a very popular song in churches now has the same chord progression as a Home Depot commercial ditty. "You can actually sing the 'worship' song while you listen to the commercial," he is quoted as saying. "Commercial secularism is influencing the house of worship, not the other way around." Come to Jesus, buy a mop.