Storyteller’s World

Spent a bit of time tweaking the CSS of the church website.

I love the whole concept of CSS: being able to change the whole look of a site, with just a few little edits of one file… There’s economy of effort.

Radio 4’s Today programme had one of its typical “ultimate question” items in the last four minutes before 9 o’clock. A debate between Professors Keith Ward and Peter Atkins (from the University down the road) about the Existence of God.

The good Prof Atkins (a “scientist”) asserted that “there is absolutely no evidence for the existence of God”, while Prof Ward asserted, au contraire, that many scientists nowadays were convinced of the reality of a spiritual dimension to existence.

Even in a few minutes, some delightful exchanges ensued.

Atkins: Many people who believe in the existence of God only do it to gain comfort, because they want to believe it.

Humphreys: But isn’t it just as true that you hold your opinion, because it’s what you want to believe?

Atkins: No, I’m completely convinced of it; it’s nothing to do with whether I want to believe it or not.

Herein we see the intellectual or dialectical sloppiness of so many people nowadays (not only unbelievers - you hear it from lots of politicians, too). To use the expression, “there is no evidence for X or Y” when we really mean “We don’t accept that X or Y is proven”, or even “We don’t want to believe X or Y” is just intellectually lazy. At least believers are more honest. We admit there is lots of evidence against the existence of God - it is what we wrestle with day by day. In fact we are probably more familiar with the strength and truth of it, than most unbelievers who never stop to examine it.

But at the very least, you have to say that the millions of people who have believed and do believe in God are some kind of evidence for the existence of God. We may not be very good evidence, but we’re certainly evidence.

It’s one thing for Prof Atkins to deny the existence of God. He’s big enough and can take it. But when he denies my existence, and that of millions of other members of the human race - well, that leaves me feeling undervalued, somewhat.

Li was born, 25 years ago today.

Happy birthday, precious daughter.

Who’d be the Archbishop of Canterbury?

Here we live in a world of instant news and reactions, where important issues have to be decided now if not sooner, and God has given us an Archbishop of Canterbury who is a man of deep prayer and intellect, who challenges the Church to take time over its deliberations. To make time to seek God together, to worship, to pray, to share our lives and make ourselves vulnerable, to love one another, before we make final decisions.

The world might think Rowan is not the right leader for this age of soundbites and instant responses. But I think he’s just the right man to model a counter-cultural way, by which the Church can be prophetic not just about single issues, but about the whole way we make Christian decisions.

So I’m not going to try and make any quick judgements about his reflections on The Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today. I’m going to study it and pray about it and let it marinate for a while.

I suppose it’s too much to hope that the media, or even others in the Church, might do the same?

Here’s someone else who is reading Proust and blogging about it:

Newfred: Declensions

Good luck to you!

A beautiful moment from yesterday’s Eucharist.

At the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, we had knelt for that all-too-brief moment of silence before joining in saying, “Our Father.”

In that silence, one of the babies in church began gently singing, “Abba, abba.”

Truly, you can’t buy congegational participation like that. It is priceless.

This time about WordPress. Milan’s comment about my last post got me looking at some of the features of the Write Post page I hadn’t explored before. There it turns out that you can upload image (and indeed other) files from your own HDD to your WordPress site. Images get thumbnails made of them in the process.

So for example, I uploaded this picture of me with Tom, Sun and Li (circa 1984), a time when I had shaved off my beard for about a fortnight and was clearly doing a passable impression of Mr Miserable.

Click on the thumbnail for a bigger version. If you dare.

It’s now almost two years that I’ve been using MacOS X daily. Before that I had used Linux almost exclusively for about as long, so I was already familiar with the UNIX-like basis of the new OS.

So I would have thought I couldn’t be called a complete newbie any more.

And yet there are still things I’m only just learning about the vagaries of a Mac, which I would not have thought all that advanced, and yet they are pretty well hidden within the architecture.

Example:

I was sure that somewhere, somehow, it ought to be possible to resize images. iPhoto is a great piece of software for managing and displaying your photographs, and yes, even editing them by adding various simple effects, adjusting the contrast, brightness or colour balance, retouching them, removing redeye, and the like. But the main thing I want to do with photographic images is change their size so I can include them in web pages. And for that I want control (as much as possible - did anyone say “Control freak”?) It’s not enough to rely on the way other software like iWeb deals with images for the Web, I want to be able to make my own decisions about them.

Could I work out how to do this simple and most useful thing? It’s not covered by any of the menus. It’s not dealt with anywhere in the help files that I could find. It’s not mentioned in the otherwise excellent “Missing Manual” by David Pogue.

So for two years I’ve had to use The Gimp - a bit of a long workaround, because you have to load the programme, open the image, resize it, save it etc., or else upload it to Flickr and then paste the code of one of their smaller versions.

Then I was reading a book on HTML which (delightfully refreshing!) gives Mac examples as primary, with Windows second, and which asserted that if you haven’t got Photoshop (I haven’t, it costs money) you can resize images with iPhoto. So I went back and had another look and muddled around in the menus a bit more.

And there I suddenly came upon the Export command under the File menu. Previously I have only used this to export pictures to say the Desktop prior to burning to CD or whatever. Now I discover you can define a different size for the export, so that it will fit the dimensions of your web page.

And that’s how it’s done.

But is it just me being stupid? Does every other Mac user know this from their cradle? Is it that the whole concept of Export is a universal Mac concept which you’re supposed to pick up? (It was several days before I discovered in Pages that this was the equivalent of “Save as …” in a different format like .doc or PDF.) But if that was the case, why haven’t I seen it mentioned anywhere in the help files, or magazines, or other documentation?

So this little tip comes with apologies to any Mac users out there who are saying, “Well, der, everyone knows that”; while to any who didn’t know, I hope you find it helpful.

Don’t anybody laugh - at least, not too hard - but I’m trying to shed the Grumpy Old Man persona. This is not altogether productive for blogging, since it transpires that Grump is one of the prime movers of blogging. (You don’t need me to give chapter and verse for that, surely? Just look at any RSS feed you subscribe to, pretty much.)

But having just celebrated the Eucharist for the Birth of St John the Baptist - which was a quiet, intimate, prayerful occasion with the people who usually meet for prayer on Saturday mornings - I found myself noticing again the state of the Common Worship altar book, which I don’t use every time but was using this morning. We’ve only had it a few years - obviously - and already it is splitting badly along the spine.

It is, basically, poorly and shoddily produced by Church House Publishing. I reckon an altar book should be something fine and worthy and durable, something fit to use in God’s service. It certainly was not cheap, after all. I know that in the modern church nothing is going to last for ever, like it used to; and it probably shouldn’t, either. Probably the shelf life of a liturgical book isn’t meant to be more than about five or ten years. But it ought not to look cheap and nasty, and fall to pieces before the Liturgical Commission have even begun to meet to plot what comes next.

OK, Grumpy Old Man over and out.

I’m a great fan of the TextMate text editor, and am constantly discovering new, wonderful, joyful things about it. The latest thing is a “Bundle” for blogging, which appears to be able to upload material to your blog directly from the editor.

Let’s see if it works….

Another piece of junk mail arrives with the postman, addressed to Alison. This takes the form of a catalogue, with the most bizarre fantasy scenario on the front cover:

STOP
IMPORTANT NOTICE!
WE MIGHT STOP MAILING YOU!
WE WOULD HATE TO DO IT, BUT RISING COSTS
MAY SOON FORCE US TO MAIL TO
ACTIVE CUSTOMERS ONLY

Devout choruses of “We wish!” arise from all quarters of the house. If only it were that easy! Far from being active, I have laboured long and hard to be inert, moribund, supine, a veritable dead parrot of a customer, to most of these people. But do they stop sending me invitations to buy their cheap and shoddy merchandise (opening this one at random I discover the “Wooden Pet Cafe” which comes in two designs: Wooden Kitty Cafe and Wooden Doggie Cafe. Only £12.99 each)?

Do they, heck.

E-mail spam continues to astound me with its volume. To say nothing of the questions about how it can possibly be worth the spammers’ while? Who responds to any of this rubbish? How can it possibly be beyond the wit of legislators and lawyers and programmers to outlaw it?

Although Mail redirects most of it into the Junk folder automatically, (something like 95% of messages received), there are still a few that slip through the filters, and the Junk folder still needs daily looking at for the few false positives that get in there. Today’s brief look yielded a subject line:

Between you and I

Good grief! If there’s one reason apart from most others to despise spam and spammers, it’s their appalling grammar and spelling. I wouldn’t open this if came from a friend or relative, or even anyone I’d ever heard of. Let alone from “Merideth Vasquez”, whatever that is.

I’m wondering whether anyone has done any studies of people who suffer with paranoia and related conditions, to discover whether they, like depressives, are affected by seasonal changes, weather, etc. The reason I’m wondering, is that two of our “eccentric” characters in the parish, who possibly meet this description, have been behaving very oddly in recent weeks. And even I (”EVEN? What do you mean EVEN?” intervenes the Internal Monitor / Instant Messenger) have been feeling out of sorts. Last night, for example, I woke up in the small hours from a real anxiety dream and couldn’t get back to sleep.

I am in a strange city, needing to get to the station to catch a train in 20 minutes’ time, but can’t find my luggage. The people I am with have gone on ahead, so I can’t ask them if they have my case or know where it is. In any case, one of them is in a wheelchair, and I’m pretty sure that even if I catch up with them, they won’t make the train in time either.

Is it the heat? The lack of moisture? The light evenings and early mornings? The atmospheric high pressure? The relentless football (always World Cup and never Wimbledon)?

These are things we should be told: why is there a conspiracy to keep them from us?

I’ve been re-watching Edgar Reiz’s Heimat, which I bought half-price (still not cheap!) from Sendit.com.

I watched it when it was first broadcast on BBC TV back in the 1980s. In those pre-VCR days, if you wanted to watch a late night TV programme it meant staying up for it. Many’s the night I would crawl into bed at past midnight, trying not to disturb Alison, because I’d been watching one of these minority interest programmes. And not always hearing it very well, because of having to keep the volume turned down low.

Philip French, film critic of the Observer, called Heimat “one - perhaps several - of the finest movies of our time.” And a more recent critic tried to sum up the whole sprawling saga like this:

Heimat is about leaving and returning. About the respect one has for one’s work and home and about living on credit. About mothers and sons. About fathers and how early morning light shines into the room. About summer clothes and uniforms. About the three eggs on the window sill. About that first car and about radio tubes. About saying goodbye and the key behind the window shutter. About animals and motorcycles. About brothels in Berlin and about falling in love for the first time. About kitchens and attics. About aeroplanes and chocolate. About bomb-disposal units and discovering faith. It is about the differences between men and women. About the loaf of bread you hold up against your chest to slice. About pillows and chewing gum. About prayers during the night and weddings by proxy. About the hammer and the anvil. It is about the dawn of a new age and about grandmothers. About the construction of highways and feet that walk 5,000 kilometers to get home. About a letter from the USA and about blueberries. About air raids, hairdos and bank loans. And always about rolling stones gathering no moss.

There’s also this on the BBC website, and in Wikipedia.

It is a whole lot of Story, about Maria Simon and her family over several generations, from 1919 until her death in 1982. (It helps a whole lot that Maria is beautiful - and wise: when she’s in her seventies and her wealthy industrialist son wants to give her a TV set - “The first colour TV set with a remote control” - she refuses. “Those things are for people who are just waiting to die.”)

Naturally the Hitler years and Second World War loom large in the story; and naturally, one of the great attractions of the film(s) to me, is knowing and loving Germany. One of the astonishing things I reflected on, watching Heimat again, is that the first time I visited Germany was only 18 years after the Second World War ended. Eighteen years is no time at all, now. Back then, it was more than a lifetime for me.

Read the papers most Sundays, and it’s impossible to miss one indictment after another of the state of Britain today, of its Government and institutions. But the most damning indictment of all is Nick Cohen’s piece in last Sunday’s Observer about the New Labour Government’s failure - now endorsed by all the other political parties, including, at last, the Lib Dems - to grasp the nettle of the super-rich, and deal with the growing inequalities in enjoyment of the nation’s wealth.

Cohen writes:

New Labour has been a far more egalitarian government than commentators from the leftish middle class have been prepared to admit, myself included. But the wealth it has redistributed has come from the reasonably well off and gone to the relatively badly off. The 600,000 or so in the top 1 per cent have barely been touched, and they now receive more of the nation’s income than at any time since the Thirties.

Inequality of this order is a mark of true decadence in a society. An unequal society cannot call itself truly humane or civilised, cannot promote the real prospering and well-being of all.

The failure of any of the political parties to propose higher rates of tax for the super-rich, is allegedly because they are reluctant to “penalise success”. This is crap. And it will always be crap until a successful nurse or teacher or refuse collector or shop assistant has the same opportunities to “earn” ridiculous salaries as the million pound a year lawyers, footballers, entertainers and businessmen that Cohen describes.

BBC SPORT | Football | World Cup 2006 | England 1-0 Paraguay

I thought I’d watch England’s opening World Cup match, and pretend I was a regular human being like everyone else.

Trouble was, by the time I’d got the new (to us) TV set and other assorted technology working properly, they had been playing for 5 minutes.

This is like the story of my life. Or then again, it could prove a useful sermon illustration the next time I’m trying to persuade people to arrive at church in good time for the service…

I’m a great believer in the importance of the Daily Office: Morning and Evening Prayer each day. It’s the mainstay of my own prayer and my parish ministry. I say it every day, well, religiously. In normal circumstances, that is, when I’m in control of the diary, it’s the number one priority: everything else has to be arranged around it; meetings, visits, appointments - all can’t start until after, and have to end in good time before, the Office.

So what am I to make, then, of my current so-called ‘responsibilities in the wider church’ (duties of Acting Area Dean, interviewing to appoint new incumbents, meetings with Archdeacon and opposite numbers in the next deanery) which I am not in control of, and which “have to” be arranged so that they overrun the time of prayer and make it impossible to fit in?

There is a school of thought which says that, because we belong to a church which says the Office, others are saying it for us, on those occasions when our particular duties make it impossible for us to be present. But this feels like a Jesuitical cop-out. It may benefit the Church and the world - it may even benefit God - but it doesn’t feel like it helps me. I am the one who needs the time of prayer and recollection to help me deal with all the other stuff.

There’s a part of me that wants to challenge and question the Church about its “busy-ness”, if it’s so busy that it stops us from doing the real Work. What does it say about what we think we are doing, and whether we really believe what we profess, if our meetings take priority over prayer?

I had to laugh at the meeting with the Archdeacon, though. After two hours of quite interesting, positive, and I hope productive talk we were brought to a swift conclusion and bustled out of the house, while the Archdeacon hurried off across the Quad to dine at high table.

Truly, it’s a hard life.

I, meanwhile, went home to my plate of re-heated pasta bake.

I publish the banns of marriage between Rufus, of the Parish of Trumpeting Noisily, and Sun, on the Electoral Roll of this parish.

As I write this in the book, and imagine how I’ll read it on Sunday, the first time of asking, I feel the strangest sensation in my throat. A sort of tightening dryness, you would almost call it a lump. And at the same time the words on the page blur the very slightest bit, as if I’m looking at them through a sort of fog.

I hope I’m not feeling this tired and sentimental on Sunday morning. At least I’m neither preaching nor celebrating (unheard of!) so I’ll be able to blub quietly in a corner if needs be.

Le silence du blog - j’ai voulu dire; et puis je me suis demandé, Le mot ‘Blog’: c’est masculin ou féminin?

Alors:

Franciser l’anglicisme

La forme blog est un emprunt lexical à l’anglais, et vient du mot-valise weblog (issu d’une contraction de web et log).

La francophonie tente de trouver des équivalences ou des alternatives à cet anglicisme, mais le franglais est fréquemment d’usage sur le Web, notamment parmi ses techniciens. Ainsi, de manière générale, pour rendre compte de la nouveauté et la multitude des blogs, le recours à des néologismes et des anglicismes est monnaie courante.

Au sein de la blogosphère francophone (l’ensemble des blogs et leurs communautés), on tergiverse sur l’appellation. Blog semble être le plus couramment utilisé, mais blogue (forme francisée) a été proposé par l’Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), et diverses traductions. Ces traductions sont le résultat de différentes communautés de blogueurs (rédacteurs de blog), mais aucune ne s’est encore véritablement imposée, on peut les considèrer complémentaires.

So: un blog, but would it be une blogue?

All which is to say: I spent the whole day interviewing to appoint a new incumbent in the deanery, and can’t blog a word about it because of confidentiality.

I really love, “on tergiverse sur l’appellation”… That’s such a good description of what bloggers do, in any language.

From the Journalling Jar

The latest slip from the Journalling Jar Sun gave me for Christmas - pulled out some weeks ago, but I haven’t got around to blogging about it yet - is

How you felt meeting Li for the first time

Sun meets Li for the first time

Meeting someone for the first time is always a momentous thing, to an extent that we often don’t recognize. But when it’s a someone who wasn’t even in the world five minutes before we meet them for the first time, the word “momentous” doesn’t do it justice. I lived through this four times with Alison - who claims she was living through it a lot more intensely than I was - and don’t remember feeling a thing. Is that how it is with the really key moments of life and death: that they are so huge and all-absorbing that you haven’t any energy to feel them, you’re too busy actually living them? (It’s like the difference between looking at the sights with your eyes, and looking at them only through the lens of your video camera.)

It’s only afterwards that I felt it. And even now, it’s easier to feel it vicariously, than to remember how it really was. I’ve only got to watch a film of childbirth - even a simulated one - and I get all choked up and teary-eyed.

Even this tiny narrow screen (4 cm) Real Player clip, which was the only one I could find on the Web, does it for me. Try it.

Li arrived at about 7 p.m. on a Sunday evening, so I got to miss Evensong. Sometimes there are more important things you have to do, even than worshiping God.

Where was it I quoted that old saw which says that “Good writers borrow; great writers steal”?

Well, it’s one thing Dan Brown borrowing from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Now we have the writers of Doctor Who stealing from the Book of Revelation - and very scary it was too. (”Don’t turn around. If you look at me, you will die. I’m right behind you. Oh, I can touch you.”)

But what I want to know is, if the Doctor’s as clever as he’s usually made out to be: Why doesn’t he know what’s going on? Why isn’t he suggesting it might not be such a good idea to take the lid off the Pit? Why is it always the really gorgeous woman crew member who’s the first to get sucked out into space and float off into the black hole? Why do we have to wait till next Saturday to find out?

Love Libraries?

Oh yes. I do.

Only just picked up this nearly-a-month-old post:

One more reason to watch House at A Modest Construct

(I haven’t been reading blogs recently, either.)

Here’s some of the reasons why I don’t like hospital visiting.

There are six hospitals in Oxford - that’s just the NHS ones, and perhaps someone will remind me of another one or two, which I’ve missed because every time you try and count them, they’ve moved. There are also at least two private hospitals where I’ve visited people when I’ve had to (should private patients get pastoral care under the Church of England? Hmmm. Knotty theological problem.)

These six hospitals are scattered at all points of the compass, and it’s very likely that if you have parishioners in hospital, they will not be in the same one. Also, they all have inadequate to appalling (but always ridiculously expensive) provision for parking. The best bet is to walk or cycle, which I’ll sometimes do if I only have to go to the nearest, and once did when visiting two of them. (Since the second is at the top of one of Oxford’s hills, I thought I might need to be admitted myself when I got up there.)

And then, if you decide to drive, you need to remember that Oxford’s roads are mostly gridlocked, especially when schools are coming out - which is most of the afternoon. Still, I reckoned that it might be worth a try on Thursday last, since it was half term holiday (and there’s not much about Oxford’s traffic problems that wouldn’t be cured by closing the private schools, which are more numerous than hospitals.)

So I drove to the hospital in question, only to find they have opened a new car park since I last went. Lots of empty spaces, but the same minimum charge of £2 for up to 4 hours. And then it’s just a matter of finding where the new Main Entrance is (which only has temporary signs on it, because it too changes every couple of months), and then the half mile walk to the ward. Space was not an issue when this hospital was built, so it’s all on ground level but a day or more’s journey away.

Arrived at the ward I inquired after the lady I was visiting, to discover that she had been taken out for lunch and shopping by her teacher daughter. Because it was half term holiday. (Oh, and she thoroughly enjoyed her outing.)

Given that this window of opportunity for a visit was rudely snatched out of a difficult schedule this week, I did wonder whether any of this was the best way to be trying to use my time. And quite what God thought he was up to, too.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment reports that
One hundred special tickets were hidden inside Kit Kat bars in a bid to find a member of the public to join the contestants in the Big Brother house.

I was about to restock Kit Kats, but I think I’ll wait now…