Matthew Henry John Bartlett

Mara (the Devil in Buddhism) said

“Long is the span of human beings, one should live like a milk sucking baby.”

The Buddha replied

“Short is the span of human beings, one should live as if one’s head is on fire.”

tardme.co.nz [via RDB]
Bob Lloyd: The End of Oil (presented at eco-justice 2-2)

Tonight because of Charles Ringma’s talk at Central Baptist where I saw none of you I was thinking: if a middle-class Christian like myself gives up ministering from a position of strength, providing services as from afar, from away up, down to the poor, the less fortunate, the lowly, and instead gives up what wealth, status and influence he has and identifies with the poor in their poverty, sharing that pain on the level, seeking justice because injustice would be a lived reality, not a word on TV, then he would find out whether the holy spirit is in fact there with him, whether Jesus’ name is in fact powerful – when stripped of all he now relies on, his only strength and advantage would be that name.

I suppose a good poem could be a night-time ride on a souped-up camel halfway into the desert, stalled and stranded and short of breath.

Yesterday at the Gospel of John study Kat said “the New Testament is the rubble left after an explosion.”

UPDATE: as in, Jesus, particularly in his resurrection is a category-shattering singularity, reorganising experience and thought in a way that is not necessarily orderly, but paradoxical (three in one, a divine human, 1st-century Jewish expectations being fulfilled in startling ways). The world being turned on its head.

Peak Oil seminar tomorrow 7pm at Vic [160KB PDF]

Swell parkour video [via T]

This morning between seven and eight I dreamt about a tsunami but it wasn’t one of the good tsunami dreams I’ve enjoyed four or five times in the past where it’s a giant wave to surf and I can surf or bodysurf or fly over everything and it’s a very exhilarating time with no destruction or suffering and it’s nowhere in particular. Instead it was at Castlepoint and Island Bay mashed together and there was foreboding, suprise, and then a tide that wouldn’t stop, roiling and bits of wood and houses but no people apart from me and the owner of the house on the hill we could see it all from. The sea only lapped up to the doorway but I woke sad for the first time for the people in America, and sad realising that it’s not a happy or a safe world outside or inside the city.

NT Wright: The Prayer of the Trinity

Cook steak & babes with RDB

Philip K Dick wrote

The basic premise dominating my stories is that if I ever met an extraterrestrial intelligence (more commonly called a ‘creature from outer space’) I would find I had more to say to it than to my next-door neighbor. What the people on my block do is bring in their newspaper and mail and drive off in their cars. They have no other outdoor habits except mowing their lawns. I went next door one time to check into the indoor habits. They were watching TV. Could you, in writing a sf novel, postulate a culture on these premises? Surely such a society doesn’t exist, except maybe in my imagination.

[via Joel]

Electricity Commission on nuclear energy & NZ

and while we’re at it, here’s an addition to my lovely table, this time from energy engineer David Haywood:

Trial run election @ TradeMe

Sam E king of the upper case: ROCK PAPER INCISORS
Russell Brown say BAD NATIONAL

Enjoy a quote from the epilogue of EF Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful, written in the early 1970s:

In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty or even health, it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss. The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus becom ethe highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, no matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place. The highest goals require no justification; all secondary goals have finally to justify themselves in terms of the service their attainment renders to the attainment of the highest.
  This is the philosophy of materialism, and it is this philosophy – or metaphysic – which is now being challenged by events. There has never been a time, in any society in any part of the world, without its sages and teachers to challenge materialism and plead for a different order of priorities. The languages have differed, the symbols have varied, yet the message has always been the same: ‘seek ye first the kingdom of God, and these things (the material things which you also need) shall be added unto you.’ They shall be added, we are told, here on earth where we need them, not simply in an after-life beyond our imagination. Today, however, this message reaches us not solely from the sages and saints but from the actual course of physical events. It speaks to us in the language of terrorism, genocide, breakdown, pollution, ehaustion. We live, it seems in a unique period of convergence. It is becoming apparent that there is not only a promise but also a threat in those astonishing words about the kingdom of God – the threat that ‘unless you seek first the kingdom, these other things, which you also need, will cease to be available to you.’

D Silliman’s cowboy boots