Matthew Henry John Bartlett

The Rosalie Gascoigne exhibition on at the City Gallery in Wellington is good and free.

I remembered a thought I had the other day: The harder you think about some pain your experiencing, the worse it gets. The harder you think about some pleasure you’re experiencing the more likely it is that it will disintergrate. I remember Berwyn used to say something like that about eating chocolate and thinking ‘why is this nice?’ and then it’s not so nice anymore.

I am too excited to sleep; I’m bright eye’d and bushytail’d even though it’s 5.30 and I went to bed at 1.00. A friend offered to pay for most of the previously featured Korg, so that should be turning up in the next few days. Thankyou, Lord of my lush life.

I am distraught. Jessie is off NZ Idol. Evidentally the one vote she got from me didn’t cut the mustard. I just wanted to give her one more chance, I’m sure she would have been fantastic next week.

TradeMe auction: Some near-new tyres of mine

Happy news – Meridian Energy’s plan to divert the Waitaki has been cancelled. Read more at the NZ Herald and Newstalk ZB. [Thanks Dan]

I think it would be worthwhile to try and live in a way that didn’t require any more power generating stations.

Deb mentioned some talks from one Keith Birchley a little while ago. I’ve listened to them, and they’re pretty nifty. They’re all in MP3 format:

The Egyptian Hallel (Psalms 113 – 118)
The Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120 – 133)

I have read a lot of science fiction. Although many are dickheads, science fiction writers come up with a lot of cool ideas for new technologies. One of my favourite has always been sub-vocal speech control, where you issue commands to a computer (usually in the heat of some kind of really intense lasgun battle) by forming key words with your tongue and vocal chords without moving your lips or making any noise. This morning I read that NASA have been working on the same idea.

Korg Electribe ES-1 on TradeMe

Harmony Central review.

Please someone buy this for me so I can start Fat Freddy’s Drop version 2 with my flatmate.

An introduction to Speech Act theory
Ambivalent review of ZatAoMM
DMcC touches a wall

The various Bible books were written to particular audiences. I read them, get a feeling for what was going on then, talk to friends at our Wednesday night Bible study, hear occasionally useful sermons, participate in a skeleton liturgy, read this list, read and write on various websites, read books, watch movies, listen to music and from all that get in some mysterious way get hints and guesses as to what my part in the story is. I lose the plot from time to time, but a feeling conviction of vocation (not unlike NTW’s answer to – Did Jesus know he was God?) grows in me and I walk through my days doing what my heart tells me, more or less. Is more or less required?

A grid or specified set of layers of meaning divides up the experience of reading a book in ways that feel artificial, and obscure obliterate the gray.

If the Bible has power in itself, I don’t need to read it differently (except perhaps more attentively closely) than I read Anna Karenina, yeah?

[posted on Wrightsaid first]

RM Schuchardt on Hugh Hefner

I’m thinking of letting the beard return to keep Jennifer company. I’ve had the feeling for the last few weeks that shop keepers and people on the street are less friendly slash chatty when they behold the awexomeness of my upper lip. If apathy still reigns after a week or so of beard, it’s coming right off again.

The extent to which modern technology has taken over the work of human hands may be illustrated as follows. We may ask how much of “total social time” — that is to say, the time all of us have together, twenty-four hours a day each — is actually engaged in real production. Rather less than one-half of the total population of this country is, as they say, gainfully occupied, and about one-third of these are actual producers in agriculture, mining, construction, and industry. I do mean actual producers, not people who tell other people what to do, or account for the past, or plan for the future, or distribute what other people have produced. In other words, rather less than one-sixth of the total population is engaged in actual production; on average, each of them supports five others beside himself; of which two are gainfully employed on things other than real production and three are not gainfully employed. Now, a fully employed person, allowing for holidays, sickness, and other absence, spends about one-fifth of his total time on his job. It follows that the proportion of total social time spent on actual production — in the narrow sense in which I am using the term — is, roughly, one-fifth of one-third of one-half; i.e. 3-1/2 per cent. The other 96-1/2 per cent of “total social time” is spent in other ways, including sleeping, eating, watching television, doing jobs that are not directly productive, or just killing time more or less humanely.

The whole chapter