I have a convert!
Ali has come around to my way of thinking about twitter!:)
curates-egg.blogspot.com/2009/05/unavoidable-blockage.
Just as long as I haven’t made him twice a son of hell as I am!!
… and I really should get around to implementing comments on here. If it wasn’t for spammers and hackers it’d be up and running already. Sigh.
Just got home from a fab evening with John Barrowman.
Ok, so that might be slightly misleading. It wasn’t just me and John. Actually, I had to share him with several hundred other people. He did wave at me though.
In fact, he was doing one night only at the Harrogate International Centre, which seemed like a perfect opportunity to tick off three boxes on my “things I must do” list: (1) see a 2,000 year old time-traveller/immortal from the 51st century, (2) go to the International Centre, and (3) go out to a show.
So far everyone I’ve mentioned it to has been surprised that I would choose to go and see Mr Barrowman, which I’m thinking is because of the gay thing. I fall into none of the 3 demographics that seem to make up the majority of the audience, which were gay men (obviously), “housewives” and women of a certain age (obviously), and teenage girlies (which I was actually surprised at). In fact, I would say that teenage girls made up perhaps as much as a fifth of the audience. In many cases I would even say pre-teen. I guess it’s the Dr Who thing. (and, let’s be honest, that’s the main reason I went).
The evening didn’t get off to a particularly auspicious start. Loitering in the foyer, a slightly strange man called Robert struck up conversation. Well, I say struck up conversation, it was more a barrage of questions: Are you looking forward to the show?
What’s your name?
What do you do?
Can I get you a drink?
Would you like to meet up for a drink after the show?
. All the time about 6 inches away from me – each time I moved back, he moved forwards. I had suspicions from the start, but when he offered to buy me a drink that nailed it for me. I believe that makes the second time in my life I’ve been ‘approached’ by a man – the first time I was too drunk to remember, and I’m told I threw up on him. It’s a strategy that probably would have worked this time too. In the event I made my excuses, and was thankful to be sitting a *long* way from him… 🙂
But I digress.
It was first and foremost a musical evening. The venue is great. All the seats have a good view of the stage, and while it might have been nice to be a little bit nearer, I could see fine. The band were excellent – a drummer, mad percussionist, woodwind and sax player, bass, lead guitar (who had about 5 guitars, including one acoustic, that he switched between), a couple of keyboardists, and – slightly spookily – invisible backing singers who were obviously hidden backstage (but were credited in the program).
The turn-out was a little disappointing. I would hazard it was only about 75% capacity, but there were more than enough of us to get the atmosphere cooking.
The format tended to be songs, with short stories in between. Either autobiographical from John’s life, or comedy/interactive stuff. I have to say the musical quality was top-notch. I felt the balance could have been tweaked once or twice, but the band didn’t miss a beat. The lighting was great too – just the right atmosphere. He had four dancers (two men and two women) who were fine, but I don’t really get dancers. I can’t help but to think of Pan’s people. Interestingly, one of the keyboard players was also the conductor, and you could see him conducting (and I mean properly conducting, with down, left, right, up marking the crochets, and the swirly thumb and finger pinch thing to stop the sound. There’s probably a proper name for it) from time to time.
He also had a special guest, but I’m really embarrassed that I’ve forgotten who it was. It was Danny Boyse (or something), who won “I’d do anything” or something like that. I’m really very sorry, if you ever read this, it’s a reflection on me, not you! Anyway, this guest did 3 or 4 songs, and then a duet (“I know him so well”) towards the end.
The music choice was good too. In the main real feel good songs from pop and the shows, including one genius merging of John’s Scottish background with theatre musicals, leading to an Andrew Lloyd-Webber medley to a Scottish reel. Just brilliant.
So, the gay thing. John is overtly gay, and a big advocate of gay rights, etc. And a lot of his humour was sexual and/or gay oriented, which could easily have been a turn-off for me (as such). On the contrary though, I found that he pitched it just right. He poked fun at a lot of things, including sex and sexuality, but never descended into the crude or particularly smutty. My experience is that a lot of gay people feel they have to wear it as a badge of honour, and draw their identity from being gay. John didn’t come across like this at all. He seemed to treat his sexuality a bit like his nationality – just a part of who he is, and fair game for jokes. I suppose it helps that he isn’t at all camp (quite the opposite), so when he camps it up, it’s actually very funny.
And, assuming he was telling the truth and not just acting, for me the mark of the man came across incredibly strongly in 3 things:
In my book, all of those make me doff my hat to you, John. I have to admit that humility and genuineness would not have been attributes I would have previously associated with you, based on what I’ve seen on telly, but I am happy to have been shown to be wrong.
Well, completed the upgrade to FC9. Wasn’t that painful actually – but I can now run Firefox 3, Adobe Air, and all that malarkey.
The painful bits were shifting from IMAPD to Dovecot (had to translate all my mail from MBX to mbox format – thank you “mailutils”), and I haven’t got to grips with SELinux at all.
In fact I’ve turned it off – it was stopping MySQl, spamassassin, an Apache from working, because I had all the relevant files hanging around from the last install, hence the file contexts are all wrong. The correct thing to do would be read up on SELinux, and understand what magic I need to weave… but frankly life’s too short.
Otherwise everything worked out the box. “yum upgrade” wanted 1.1Gb of downloads, but FC9 is a bit old now I guess.
Not noticed any particular difference in performance, and no doubt I will be finding all the things that are now missing over the coming weeks.
After a friend blogged about not liking Twitter so much, I thought I’d blog why I do!
I think that starting from (say) Facebook is the wrong place to understand Twitter. For me, Twitter is not really social networking, but more like a blog, so starting from blogspot is probably closer to the mark. In fact, Twitter is a bit like a blog and RSS feed rolled up into one, with guaranteed easy (and quick) to digest morsels. I accept that that this in itself raising questions about meaningful relationships, soundbites, and attention spans, but perhaps I’ll cover that another time.
So, take this morning – I logged in, and discovered 34 updates waiting. This took me probably less than a minute to read. Compare with trying to looking at 34 friends’ updates on Facebook (yawn!), or worse, trying to read 34 blog posts.
I guess there’s two parts to being on Twitter – the first is posting your own tweets, the second is following others. I personally think to do the first without the latter is a bit narcissistic. On the other hand I know plenty of people who ‘lurk’ – that is follow others without actually posting (much) themselves.
If we start, then, with why one might follow someone on Twitter, I can think of a few reasons:
Oops – missed one off:
In this regard, these are the same reasons as you might read someone else’s blog – or indeed read a newspaper or magazine, or listen to the radio. I see blogging very much as an extension of the traditional media, and bloggers are analogous to columnists or DJs.
Now, contrast this with the reason you’re friends with someone on Facebook
Perhaps I’m being a little harsh there? In any case, the first item definitely further breaks down into people you are in regular contact with, with whom Facebook is a supplementary communication mechanism, and old/distant friends, with whom Facebook is the only (or major) communication mechanism. I think Facebook is fanastic at this second point in particular – I can ‘touch’ people who I have a connection with, but don’t really see or communicate with in any other way.
Of course Facebook is a very poor, or ‘thin’, means of relationship and communication. But a lot better than none at all, IMO.
But I digress….
Back to Twitter. So why do people tweet. Well, the reasons are basically the same as above, with one addition:
The last one perhaps sounds a bit grander than I would intend, but my first “blog” was essentially me recording my efforts at the gym, and were intended solely for my consumption. It gradually expanded to other bits and pieces I wanted to record (not unlike del.icio.us, now I come to think of it), and then grew to be general comments on like. Of course, it begs the question why I (or anyone) would want their journal to be public…
This trend continues – my tweets and blogs are essentially my own musings, perhaps a catharsis even. I attempt to pick off the entertainment and informative aspects too (and succeed with rarely paralleled grace and flair, naturally). So take my recent(ish) Stag Weekend adventure. I tweeted the whole thing, with the intention of providing both a running commentary and an historical record I could roll up into one blog for the whole of humanity to use to enlighten themselves, and for 23rd century anthropologists to use to deepen their understanding of British culture in the noughties.
So, Twitter is plain fun. It takes a very light touch to use – whether tweeting or reading others. I laugh at loud at times, I enjoy reading what others have got to say, and I’m exposed to thought provoking and stimulating material I would otherwise not come across. On the other hand – this post is probably approaching an hour of my time. No less enjoyable, but considerable more effort to write and read.
Long live Twitter.
In general I’m a fan of convergence, but I’ve recently realised that I use various ‘social’ websites in different ways, and it is appropriate for them to remain distinct.
Take Facebook – it’s the way I keep a connection with friends and family who I don’t see much, but also to mess around with some I do. But it’s all essentially built on mutuality, that is any action I do automatically gets pushed to my friends, whether they like it or not. If I want to see someone’s details, updates, etc, they have to also get mine.
Something like Twitter, on the other hand, is not based on mutuality, and only those people who opt in to my gibberish actually receive it. This is liberating, in one way, as the onus is on them to opt-in to my posts, and I don’t have to gets their tweets if I don’t want to.
Finally of course, there’s this site, which is the ultimate opt-in, in that it doesn’t get pushed to anyone (except Google, I suppose).
So whereas I tried having all my blog posts automatically added as notes to Facebook, and my Tweets added to my Facebook status (and vice versa), I now have come to the conclusion that I use them all in very different ways, and with different ‘audiences’, so I’m keeping them apart.
Now you know!
Went to the Leeds Wall with a friend from Church at the weekend. His boys are in the climbing club there, so he gets to climb for free while they have their lesson. Anyway, he invited me along to be a belay partner.
My climbing background is principally traversing. I got the bug doing a outdoor climb in Wales, but 99% of my climbing experience was doing an hour’s traverse every lunchtime for 4 years while at Uni.
So at one level I wasn’t mad keen. I’ve only really had one great experience of belay climbing, and that was the aforementioned Wales one. The times I’ve been since then, I’ve either not had anyone to go with, or I’ve gone with someone really good, and felt like I was holding them up and frustrating them.
Fortunately about 18 months ago, I signed up to the new climbing wall at the University of Leeds and had to do an assessment of my rope skills before I could climb unsupervised. Of course I’d forgotten it all, and was pants – but fortunately the dude took pity and gave me a crash course, and it all came back.
I’d also happily registered as a full member of the Leeds wall back in 2001 (!), so I was allowed to belay my friend (otherwise I would have had to go in as a guest, and not be allowed to).
I have to say it was fab. He has only recently started climbing again, so we’re about the same level (ish), which means we could take turns on the same climbs, and we run out of puff at about the same time (he did 5 climbs, to my 4.5). The highest grade we did was 5/5+ – I think a 6 might be beyond me until my fitness is back up.
Let’s face it, I’m unlikely to finishing tweeting the stag do, and seeing as it’s the wedding tomorrow, I’m just going to go for it here instead.
That said, I am going to post the tweets I did make, and I’ll see what’s left to say at the end!
… at this point my phone battery went flat! No more updates, until…
Wow – I tweeted more than I realised!
The club was The Funky Fish Club – a fantastic joint. Funk, soul, jazz, motown. Everyone was chilled, and there to have a good time. There wasn’t the “meat market” and bare breasts that seem to be the staple of most nightclubs these days – just a whole lot of people having fun and dancing. Was absolutely brill.
The journey home was actually funny, it was so bad. But I need to get off to bed, so I shall relive that particular joy another day!
Looking forward to the wedding!!!
Chrysalis (Faith in an Emerging Culture), by Alan Jamieson, is a book that’s hard to fit into an exact category. The back of the book proclaims:
Have you ever felt that the very things that once inspired and nurtured your faith now seem lifeless and perhaps even frustrating?
I guess it says something about my journey over the last few years that such a book appealed. 🙂
Anyway, it’s essentially a book about change. About drastic, radical, all consuming change that leaves some without any faith, and some with a far deeper, more complex, and real faith. Other authors refer to this passage as the long dark night of the soul, but Jamieson uses the metaphor of a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly (hence the title). It’s a metaphor that fits extremely well, I think, into what can happen to Christians who undergo a critical period of transformation. He would have it as the journey from black and white, to greys, to an equal respect of black and whites and greys
. Or a journey from uncritical acceptance, to doubts, questions, and critiques, through to embracing mystery and paradox
.
The book has a very help structure – after an introduction and overview, Jamieson spends on chapter on “pre-critical” Christian life, as a caterpillar. The next 5 or 6 chapters about the time in the cocoon – the transformation. The book finishes off with a couple of chapters on butterflies, then rounds off with the big picture stuff of what this process means and how it fits in.
The book personally helped me to start to get a handle on a fair confusing time in my life. Probably the first time I’ve seriously began to question what I believed for my whole life. I’m not saying I never had doubts before, but this was different. This book doesn’t offer answers in the traditional sense, but it helped me understand how there are phases and cycles of the walk of faith – and to assume that one will remain a caterpillar forever is kind of limiting.
But, like Rob Bell, what Jamieson has to say just rings true, and feels right. I’m actually quite inspired by the vision of monarch waystations and butterfly houses.
This is not a book for everyone. A decade ago I probably would have thrown it out after the first chapter. I guess the analogy is that people who aren’t drowning have no need of one of those floaty ring things – and probably don’t really see the point. But if you’ve ever fundamentally had to rethink who God is (indeed whether He is!), and what your relationship is with Him and the church, I unreservedly recommend this book as a way to at least structure your thinking about what might be going on.
Jamieson somehow leaves a pleasant (or at least hopeful) taste in your mouth after you’ve had to eat something rather unpleasant in life.
Rob Bell is rapidly becoming one my heroes. The nooma DVDs are an inspiring breath of fresh air, and the books of his I’ve read – Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (on Amazon) and this one ( Jesus Wants to Save Christians (on Amazon)) have been excellent.
He has studied the 1st Century Jewish culture extensively, and brings alive the teachings of Jesus in an amazing way. I find that a lot of what he says just Makes Sense, and he avoids the “theological fancy footwork” that some people seem to employ to make parts of the bible say the opposite from what a ‘plain’ reading would suggest. In fact he says that a ‘plain reading’ isn’t even possible: even assuming the Bible is the directly inspired Word of God, we still have it through 3 filters (the person wrote down what he thought God said, someone else translated based on what they thought the first person said, and we read it based on what we think the translator said).
Elvis is more accessible, and really scratched me where I was itching – but Christians is an altogether less comfortable book.
It’s all about empires, and empire building – harking back to the Jewish Empire in the days of King Solomon, through the Babylonians, the Roman Empire, up to the (according to the author) American Empire. Us Brits get away without a mention, but I’ve no doubts that the same analysis applies to the British Empire.
The central tenet (as I see it) is that Empires are inherently and unavoidably anti-Kingdom. Whenever a people grow strong, and start investing resources in developing and protecting that strength – there will be other people who are disposed, suppressed, and abused – and it is these people that Jesus came for. This is quite uncomfortable, because we in the west principally associate with the empire.
Rob Bell is not saying that wealth, health, and security aren’t important – but he is saying that when we stop seeing it as a blessing (and the means by which to bless others), and start seeing it as our right, and something to be defended and protected… at that point we lose the plot.
To quote from the back cover:
There is a church in our area that recently added an addition to their building which cost more than $20 million. Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty
This is a book about those two numbers
It’s a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity; it’s about empty empires and the truth that everybody’s a priest; it’s about oppression, occupation, and what happens when Christians support, animate, and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.
It’s about what it means to be a part of the church of Jesus in a world where some people fly planes into buildings while others pick up groceries in Hummers
The book isn’t at all judgmental though. It’s like the difference between a parent telling off a child for being too scared to go on a slide, and a parent running up the stairs going hey this is great – come on, you’ll really enjoy it.
There is one major downer though.
Yes, even in a book this good.
It’s true.
I’m
not
making
it up.
What is the problem?
If you haven’t guess from the above, it’s the incredibly annoying and disjointed layout, which I think is meant to emphasize the point. Turn to any page of the book, and you will find several one-line paragraphs of five words or less. One page has got one sentence spanning 7 paragraphs, where each line is 3 words.
It’s very hard to read.
Very
hard.
Not the content (although that is hard to read, but in an ‘this isn’t very comfy’ way), just the layout.
Rob – if you read this review, I loved the book. I am being very challenged by what you wrote, and how seriously (or not) I take my responsibility as a human and as a Christian on this planet. I am inspired by most of what you say and write, and it has lead me at things to seriously question my assumptions and change my world view. But I was really annoyed by the one line paragraphs, and it hindered and distracted my reading!
Oh yes, I meant to say – I thought the two Archbishops’ contribution was excellent.
Absolutely spot on.