Mickey 3D "Matador"

I've liked this song for ages but I've never seen the video before today. Enjoy!

Aphorism of the day

If there was a song called "Life is worth living" it would sound trite, because that's the reason all songs are sung

Time management

I was going to write a post about how I need to be more focussed to get done everything I want to do, but then I got distracted doing other stuff...

I've been looking at ideas for writing more quickly. One of the common suggestions is "Don't edit while you write"; I do this consistently, mainly because I have to look at my fingers while I type. As soon as I look up at the screen I start correcting words and phrases. But the main thing I need to address is my ability suddenly to be fascinated by everything except the task at hand. I can understand this at work, where nothing I have to do holds any interest for me, but it's ridiculous that I should want to sit down and do something, them as soon as I have done, I'd rather do something much more dull instead.

Hmmm. This may be more of an insight into my psyche than I'd intended...

Belle à en crever

My favourite French singer!

Coarse phishing

This is probably the worst phishing email I've ever seen.


It's difficult to pick a favourite aspect of this. Not knowing the bank is called Alliance and Leicester is good, as is Aeicester. I think that I'd probably go for the close proximity of the words "veifry" and "verication".

Writing

One of the common pieces of advice for anyone wanting to break into freelance writing is to get their own web page. Of course, I have this lovely blog, but I'm not convinced that anyone who comes here looking for a writer will hire me (unless it's from Infrequent Rants magazine), so there is, as of today, a new little link in the sidebar to the right of your screen. Hurrah!

In related news, I'm going to give Constant Content a try. It looks as though I can post articles on there that I've written for other sites, and that people may then pay me a nominal amount for usage rights. Putting original stuff on there would mean I could sell exclusive rights as well, but I'm happier at the moment with an egg-basket diversification strategy.

Education for atheists

One of the atheist arguments against bringing up your children in any kind of faith is that it's abusive, forcing children to accept fairy stories (like the Bible) as fact, before their minds can learn to think critically. I've always had a couple of reservations about this, not least that I think it's better for the parent-child relationship if parents are truthful, as far as possible, and congruent: that what they think, do, say and believe should all fit together. It's bad for children if parents say "I really love you" and then punch them: obviously punching them is bad for them, but longer-lasting harm is done by the lack of congruence: how does that child learn to trust someone else who says "I love you"? So no matter whether or not you think that telling children about God is a terrible thing to do, I'm sure that believing in God but not telling your children about him will cause harm to a child. What will a child make of an adult who lives their life by certain rules but doesn't talk about them - or talks about them as if they are matters of little consequence? Besides which, if we shouldn't talk to children about religion before they have learned to think critically, should we talk to them about rational humanism? Do we teach them to think before we give them anything to think about?

As an aside, I'm always a little perturbed by the use of words like "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" which get applied to how believers bring up their children. I have to say that if we were seriously carrying out the kind of mind-control techniques that the caricature Christian is supposed to do, we'd be a bit better at it. Thousands and thousands of young people leave the church every year. Either our brainwashing is, frankly, a bit rubbish, or (shock!) they haven't been brainwashed at all, just brought up by their parents and chosen (like millions of other young people) to seek out alternatives. Of course, as a Christian, I strongly believe that one of the things the church should do with teenagers is to teach them to think for themselves, to ask hard questions and to be dissatisfied with facile answers. That way there is a chance that they won't get to 18 and suddenly discover that a simple Sunday-school faith doesn't really help to make sense of a complex adult world.

Anyway, this post was sparked by a piece on the Theos site, with research that suggests that converts to atheism appear to be less well-educated than converts to theism. If true, this would seem to run counter to the New Atheist proposition that if only everyone learned to think for themselves, religion would die out. In fact, it seems that if you come out of school with few or no qualifications, you may stop believing in God, but if you go to university and can write a dissertation, you may start believing in God, even if you weren't indoctrinated brought up that way.

Armageddon, popularity of

Don't ask me why, but I was looking on Google Trends and I did a search for "Armageddon". I'd love to know the reason for this: there's a spike in searches for Armageddon just before the end of every year. It's not right at the end of the year, when people might change the calendar and be reminded of the eventual end of time, and it doesn't seem to bear much relation to related news stories.

The sermon for Advent Sunday usually looks forward not only to the coming of Christ at Christmas, but also to his coming again. Either the eschaton is being preached so widely during Advent that lots of people are going home and using Google to find out what to expect (it is, after all, easier to understand than Revelation), or the Church's traditional seasonal liturgy fits with the zeitgeist rather better than I might have expected.

Engaging with "new atheism"

I'm interested in how we as Christians can engage with the kind of anti-Christian, pro-rationalism outlook that gets referred to as "new atheism". I think that the study of apologetics should be a top priority for Christians, so that we can explain our beliefs as we should. Today I found a superb example of this. In Australia there is a campaign called Jesus - All About Life. The campaign didn't buy the .com version of their website, only the .com.au one, and now there is an atheist rebuttal site on jesusallaboutlife.com. However, it's there, on this post, that there's a wonderful discussion in the comments. The Christian commenter, John Bartik, whose strangely-named website is here, is patient, tenacious and knowledgable. I think he does a great job of ignoring all the bits of the other commenter's argument that are repetitive or recycled Dawkinisms, which would make me throw up my hands in dismay or chew my own arm off in frustration, and focuses on areas for taking the conversation forward. This is what being a Christian should look like!

Finally, an idea I wanted to write down

Actually, the title of this post is a little misleading. I've had lots of ideas that I wanted to write down, but I finally had a thought that I needed to get down before I lost it, but yet was something that I wanted to share with you, my reader.

The alarm went off at 6.00 this morning but I lay back down on the bed again to wait for the second (6.30) alarm. I was lying there in an almost awake kind of state, and a series of thoughts came to me. This has a lot to do with things I've been thinking about and reading around for a while, so it may be that my brain had finally built a connection while I was asleep. Whatever, the first thought was about how in marketing there is a need to make a new product seem popular, to create a buzz around it, because people (with some exceptions) are not keen to pay for something that nobody else is doing. We're generally herd animals - we follow the pack. Which, evolutionarily speaking, is pretty sensible.

Then I was thinking about evangelism, and about how to get people to come to Christ, or at least to come to church (in whatever form) so that they can hear about Jesus and make a decision about what they'd like to do with their lives. I wondered how much the Church suffers because everyone knows that hardly anyone goes to church, so church is clearly a place where you wouldn't want to go. I was thinking about how to create a buzz around church, and whether we do that, and how much we sell Jesus as something that the world really NEEDS.

This drifted into a thought about permission marketing. To put it very crudely, traditional marketing says "Buy our product. It's great, and it will improve your life." Permission marketing says "I've got a product that I believe in. These are the reasons it can improve your life. What do you think?" (If anyone who reads this knows more about marketing and I've got this totally wrong, please let me know.) Anyway, I was wondering about whether the church uses traditional or permission marketing - which I guess would be the difference between "Believe in Jesus or you'll go to Hell" and "See what a difference Jesus has made to me. Would you like to know more?" The second one is much more difficult to do (at least for me - though I don't do the first one either).

Then I came back to the idea of making Jesus popular, and creating a buzz around church, so that people could pick up on the excitement of being a Christian. I think that I was drifting back off to sleep at this point, because this is where the metaphorical light bulb popped up above my head. I suspect that I was working out the target demographic for an ad for church, and thinking of something that basically said "Church is for people like YOU" where "you" are 25-40, employed, in a marriage or long-term relationship, probably going to have or already bringing up children. Then I realised that it's hard to create a buzz for people like that, because so many other advertisers are already telling them lots of other stuff that they need which doesn't involve getting up on Sunday mornings, never mind devoting their lives to the service of the Gospel, so I was a bit disappointed. Then I had a worrying thought. I thought that if we created a buzz about church, but that young successful people didn't get it, then we'd end up with a church full of misfits and losers. We'd have a congregation full of old people and physically ugly people and not very bright people and unemployed people and alcoholics and drug users and people who could do with having a bath a little more often. At this point the light went on, because of course that's who should be filling the church. To quote what's rapidly becoming one of my favourite phrases, Jesus is for losers.

And then the light bulb got really bright, because I was thinking about how uncomfortable I'd be going to church with a load of loser type people (sorry, being honest here), and I realised that that's because I wasn't actually acknowledging what a loser I am. In Christian language, of course, we don't say "loser", we say "sinner", but it came down to the same thing. I wasn't comfortable because I was thinking of myself as somehow better than some other kinds of people, and the fact is that I'm not. I'm only allowed to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God because of what Jesus has done. I certainly don't deserve to be one. And that's the counterintuitive message of the church. We're here for the people whom we probably wouldn't chose as friends. The unreliable ones. The smelly ones. The ones who drink too much and swear too much and don't bring up their children very well. The losers and the users. In short, people like us. Bad, sad, mad and damaged people, like you and like me.

And that's why I feel uncomfortable with Christian websites that are full of young attractive people and don't have sad lonely losers with rubbish hair. That's why I'm not sure about asking people permission to pray for them. That's why I think that we can be bold about preaching the Gospel, because we know that it's not going to make us look stupider than we already are, because we're humble: we know that the winners in the Kingdom are the losers in this world. We can get churches full of the kind of people that Jesus came to call. Not the well, but the sick. Like us.

Giving up Twitter

I have decided to give up Twitter. Having adopted it when it was just emerging into general public awareness, I'm now abandoning it just as it seems to be really taking off. There are several reasons for this, which I'll go into in a minute, but first a couple of caveats. This is not in itself a criticism of Twitter: of course it has its faults and shortcomings, but they are not the reason for me to abandon it. Nor is it a criticism of other social networks, the way they are used, or the people who use them. I know several people who are enthusiastic and prolific users of Twitter and Facebook: this is not in any way intended to be a commentary on them or the way they use social networks. This is an entirely subjective point of view and a completely personal decision.

OK, so why give up Twitter?

I have recently had extended periods of not using it, first as a discipline during Lent, and lately I have deliberately not posted (though have read tweets from other people), because I was ambivalent about whether I wanted to post some things. I decided not to post anything and see how that went. The result was that I became more convinced that I could easily manage without Twitter. Of course, millions of people manage without all sorts of things that we take for granted, so I needed some reason why not using Twitter would actually benefit me. At the very least, I wanted to be sure that using Twitter wasn't adding any positive benefits to my life, in which case giving it up would save time that could be used on something more productive.

I'd been ambivalent about tweeting some things (and therefore posting them on Facebook, since that was set up to happen automatically) because ideas, impressions and feelings that were important to me at the time were not necessarily things that I would want to share with a wide group of acquaintances. This meant that I was tending to self-censor things that were genuinely important to me, and was left with my daily trivia and minutiae: what I was eating, where I was going, whether or not I had lost any weight. This is a caricature of Twitter: frequent and regular updates about nothing at all. Did I really want to be broadcasting this stuff? I know there are a few people who like to know what's going on with me, but I'm pretty sure that they don't need every detail - and I have a Facebook account to which I can post as easily as I can tweet, so I wouldn't be cutting off anyone who genuinely wanted to find out what I was doing. As for everyone else, I have to be honest and say that I'm not that fascinating.

Similarly, although I am interested in what my friends are doing, I found that looking at a Twitter stream was becoming more an exercise in skipping through tweets than actually finding anything; Twitter had become a way of using up time, or a distraction when I was putting off dull tasks. I regularly found that I would check Twitter on my phone and feel that I had neither gained anything nor added anything useful. It was not, to use a marketspeak phrase, "adding value". If the time I spent reading tweets could be spent doing something that does add value, or that at least doesn't leave me feeling like I had just wasted time, then wouldn't it make sense to give it up?

Most of the people that I follow I do not know and am unlikely to meet in real life. It's always fascinating to get an insight into someone else's life (which is why so much TV is essentially "look at what these other people are doing") but if I didn't know about what these people are doing it wouldn't actually change my life. Similarly, the organisations I follow have so rarely told me anything that has made a difference to me that losing their tweets would have a negligible impact. If someone starts following me on Twitter, I check their Twitter page, and if it looks like they say things I'd be interested in then I'll follow them. Almost nobody who has started to follow me (and why would you want to, if you don't know me?) has got a follow back from me. I'm sure there's an argument that following someone back is the kind of reciprocal behaviour that makes the digital world go round a little more smoothly, but I simply don't want to know dull details about strangers. Sorry.

Online social networking is an adjunct to real life social networking, not a replacement for it. Having 50, or 500, or 5000 followers on Twitter doesn't make up for having few real friends. Having a few good friends with whom you can talk and share confidences, and a wider circle of friends that you can socialise and have fun with, plus 500 Twitter followers is significantly different from feeling isolated from people and using online networks as a way of masking loneliness. For me, it makes more sense to try and develop closer relationships with people I care about than to have a long list of people who tell me things that don't have any emotional impact at all.

I actively dislike the competitive element of numbers of followers, or indeed the value that is put on having many followers. You don't need to be Ashton Kutcher to be seduced into thinking that 10,000 followers is better than 10 followers, and never stop to question the assumption that "many, more, most" is synonymous with "good, better, best". You don't need to have any self-esteem issues to start feeling like the number of people following you must somehow be related to your interestingness, your fame, your value as a contributor to the global conversation. My most recent tweet, "Steve has nothing to say", was a couple of weeks ago. Two people have started following me in the last three days.

The wider question, whether I do have anything to say, and if so what, how and to whom, will continue to occupy my thinking. I'll use Twitter to send a couple of direct messages to people I know in real life, so that they know they won't be able to contact me that way, and then I'll tweet a link to this blog post. Then, I think, that will be it. If I miss the Twitterverse terribly I can always come back; I don't think I will.

Post-Lent reflection

It's rather more than six and a half weeks since my last blog post, though my Twitter feed has been busy, and I've even ventured into the confusion of another revamp to Facebook. Apart from being glad that Digsby plus Twitter integration means that I don't really need to go on the actual Facebook site, what have I learned?

• Giving up telling people about me was easier than I thought it would be
  
• Not knowing what was going on with other people was harder than I expected. I have got used to knowing what's happening with people since I joined Facebook, but because I never maintained friendships before that, I had no fallback methods (calling round to see someone, phoning them) of finding out what was going on for people.
• Using Twitter and Facebook is self-reinforcing. Having "I'm not using Facebook for Lent" as a status is OK, but in most cases I don't want the last thing I said to be the last thing I say, so I keep wanting to make sure my status is up to date. One tweet leads to another.
• Living online is pervasive; it encroaches steadily on real-world life, so that it's possible to spend increasing amounts of time reporting and reflecting on real-world life online, and then spending even more time reporting and reflecting on online life.
• In a consumer society, there's a strong drive to be interesting or appear important, because that turns me into more of a saleable commodity. If you don't think this is true, consider Facebook not telling you (and everyone else) how many friends you have, or Twitter without the number of your followers in the sidebar.

All this ties into my ongoing thinking on humility and self-worth, and some emrging ideas about how to prioritise stuff in life, which I may or may not blog about sometime soon.

Lenten discipline (more silence)

I've decided to fast from online life for Lent, and as a start I'm going to stop using Twitter and Facebook, and have changed my browser from Flock back to Firefox (and uninstalled the Facebook and Twitter add-ons). I'm also going to try and cut down on the surfing that is purely for distraction, though that may be difficult - how much time spent on BBC News is for keeping up to date and how much is avoiding doing anything else? I also want to try and keep up with writing, which will mean using Helium and Google Docs (as well as research). I will simply have to make sure I draw the line between what's necessary and what's not; I guess that's where the discipline comes in.

Hopefully in about six and a half weeks I'll let people know how it went.

Silence

10 days ago I decided to take a break from using Twitter. Initially this was a fairly pragmatic decision - I was feeling down and the only things I wanted to write were miserable little snippets of my internal world. But then I started thinking about the spiritual value of silence (or at least online silence). I wondered how much of my blogging, tweeting and status updating is to keep people informed, and how much is to bolster my self-image: "Look at me. I'm here, I exist, I'm important!" So I decided that it would be at least a week before I used Twitter again. Of course, we then had interesting weather,but I resisted the urge to tell everyone that I, too, had noticed the snow. I've now got to a stage where the craving to tweet seems to be wearing off, so I may start doing it again - though cautiously.

My job

On my way into work today (bus, not bike: I'm too tired and having to transport the laptop as well was the final straw) I seriously considered going and telling my boss that in fact I have been lying misrepresenting the facts when speaking to her recently. I rehearsed in my head as the bus went along Portsmouth Road how I had thought that saying I was happy with my work would be the most politic course of action. I went over the Itchen Bridge relishing the feel of the words "To be honest, I hate this job. It's just filling in pointless forms recording things that I couldn't care less about." And I arrived in town pleased that my mental health would no longer be adversely affected by having to smile and pretend that all this corporate nonsense held even the slightest interest to me.

Then I walked past Blackwells and was immediately seduced by a "Buy One Get One Free" offer on Teach Yourself books. On going into the shop, I found that in a small display, there were three books on writing (this, this and this). It was the work of a moment to acquire an even number of books, and I was out of the shop, reflecting on the kindness of Divine Providence in putting inexpensive guides to writing for a career in my way just when I was utterly sick of my current employment. (The more rational and sceptical of my readers will be relieved to know that I also reflected on my propensity to invoke the Divine for doing something I really wanted to do anyway - particularly when it involved spending money.)

My boss wasn't in the office this afternoon, so I didn't have an opportunity to ask her for a quiet chat. I did spend a little time submitting an article (which I'd written previously - not during work time today) to Triond, and followed a link from there to Helium, which looks quite promising. I have to say, even the sniff of a chance to earn money from writing has cheered me up - so much so that I sat in a meeting and agreed to work on the Quality section of the Community Services Contract and barely felt an urge to run screaming from the room.

Frustration

I had some stuff that I really wanted to write down, but I had a series of frustrations and interruptions and now I've not only lost what I was going to say, but have convinced myself that it was rubbish and not worth saying anyway.

Lose weight the difficult and tiring way!

I had a look via Google at a couple of sites to try and work out how many calories I’m burning by cycling to and from work (not many, given the pain involved and how tired it makes me feel – but that’s because I’m basically too slow and it gets classed as “leisure” or “gentle” cycling. I will not record my thoughts on this on a public blog) and was struck just how many ads there are on fitness-related websites for quick, almost effortless weight loss. I could probably have spent an instructive couple of hours finding out how to target belly fat or lose 10lbs in a week with herbal supplements. Presumably enough people must sign up to become members or purchase herbal supplements to make these adverts worthwhile, but it did make me wonder about whether I should use my current weight loss as a springboard for an online business empire. The ad could be something snappy like “Lose weight by eating less and exercising more – even when you don’t feel like it”. Then I could sell interested customers my secrets to weight loss success. I still need to work on the details (which I obviously wouldn’t put on here, or else I’d never make any money, duh), but I think it could probably be something like

• Be overweight and dissatisfied with your reflection in the mirror – good selling point this, as most of the people who are interested in weight loss already meet these criteria
• Try to have teenage children around who will regularly point out how fat you are. For customers without teenage children, we could perhaps offer a discounted rental service – “For only 24.99 per hour, a fifteen year old will sit in your lounge and make disparaging comments about your belly”
• Make a decision that health risks, disastrous body image AND snarky comments are too much and you’d rather find an alternative way of suffering
• Get up at least half an hour earlier than you have to (an hour earlier at weekends). Weigh yourself, then exercise. A Wii Fit is good for this, as it will combine weighing you with motivational messages and will even give your Mii a huge gut to really ram the point home. The best exercise, however, is to go out for a run. If possible, start doing this in the winter, so that you can drag yourself out in the dark, as well as having a good chance of rain or freezing temperatures.
• Start walking to places instead of driving, and then take up cycling to work instead of catching the bus. Try to make sure that your route has the lowest point in the middle, so that whichever way you go, you’ll always finish with a hill.
• Drastically change your eating habits. Breakfast should be a bowl of bland cereal with skimmed milk, or possibly plain porridge. Don’t even think about sugar. Evening meal should be less than half of your total calorific input for the day. Apart from that, all you eat is fruit. Lunch and snacks are fruit. Any fruit you like. Apart from bananas. Or dried fruit of any kind.
• Drink lots of water. Then drink more, until you slosh when you walk.
• Set yourself challenging weight loss goals and berate yourself when you don’t achieve them.
• Follow these simple steps (plus our guaranteed extra step, only 59.99) and you too can lose weight frustratingly slowly over a period of several months.

I think that about sums it up. Re-reading this, I realise that I’ve even got a name for my wonderful regime – “An alternative way of suffering”.

Small achievements

It seems appropriate that this is my 200th blog post and I'm recording having achieved something. I finally managed to cycle to work this morning, after weeks and weeks of not getting around to buying a new rear wheel and then several days of not fitting the inner tube and finally having to buy a new pump, followed by another inner tube when my brand new one blew a hole. I think it was sometime last year that I last cycled to work, though the memory is old enough to have faded quite a bit now. I can't even be sure whether it's more than a year since I've been on my bike. It's certainly a lot longer than that since I cycled any further than the 4.5 miles into the middle of Southampton - I can't remember doing any significant journeys since we moved down here 10 years ago. So I'm quite pleased that I managed to go 12.45km (7.74 miles) without serious injury - by which I mean that the pain in my legs isn't bad enough to stop me from cycling home again.

Cycling will not only help save money spent on bus fare, it will also help towards the other area where I'm achieving a little: losing weight. It's still too early to start saying "I've lost x amount since Christmas" but I've now lost enough that it's obviously the result of doing exercise and eating sensibly rather than just natural fluctuations in my weight. Getting the Wii Fit for Christmas has actually been a big boost - apart from the fact that it's a fun way of being a bit more active, it's a significant motivation to see a graph of my BMI and weight going up or (hopefully) down.

There are still lots of things I need to do, or to do better, but I'm confidently looking forward to more cycling, more weight loss - and another couple of hundred blog posts.

My journey to work this morning

Getting a bit of fresh air

Decided to go out for a brisk walk over to the greengrocers in Shirley rather than wandering round to Tesco. This meant that (a) I got some exercise (b) I bought some fruit for healthy snacks and (c) I supported a small independent trader rather than a massive chain.

18 minutes, 2.4km, 175 calories. Thank you Nokia.

Twitter Grader

This is a bit sad. What's worse is that I look at this and think "How could I get more followers so that I can move up the rankings?" And then I get depressed because I'm less interesting than the Red Funnel Ferry.

No, it's OK, life is not a popularity competition. It doesn't make any difference to my self worth whether 6 or 60 or 600 people choose to be informed about the minutiae of my life. (But if you are reading this and use Twitter, please follow me, please please please)

Thanks to James for the link and helping me realise that the world is, in fact, madder than I suspected.