Matthew Henry John Bartlett

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We the 16 Russell Terrace crew are looking for a new flatmate or two

Oily breakfast (or, Organic w/o local is no good) [via w-berry list]

You remember that internationalist idea I had at the start of last year? Well, would one of you like to be the Iraq person?

… faith in the Bible like a talisman, lucky charm; easy to slough off at eighteen.

Wednesday night’s movie at 8 Kelburn Parade is The End of Suburbia, cos it’s our dream too

Turns out I’m a neo-Luddite
Masamania: Japanese cutter girl tattoo

Turns out I do need a new old PC capable of running Windows XP.

The last paragraph of Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue:

It is always dangerous to draw to precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined in the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occured when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognising fully what they were doing – was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. (more…)

I want a tenor horn again. A beat up cheap one with a good sound.

I recommend the national portrait competition exhibition on at Shed 11 on Customhouse Quay. I recommend going with seven Japanese girls. The best painting I saw is called ‘Bob’. I don’t recall the painter. Bob is I’d say fifty-five, sitting in front of one of those long low freezers, I guess out in his garage. I can’t tell if he’s Maori or an outdoors Pakeha like dad. If it’s true, as I’ve heard, that you have the face you deserve by the time you’re fifty, he is a good man.

I’m going to this David Suzuki doco tonight at 7pm at the film archive. Come along if you want.

Wendell Berry commencement address, featuring a pretty neat programme for a political party

I’m reading Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, recommended by Stanley Hauerwas. It’s nice:

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle. You may not remember me very well at all, and it may seem to you to be no great thing to have been the good child of an old man in a shabby little town you will no doubt leave behind. If only I had the words to tell you.

Russell Brown on David Parker

Helpful gallery of CSS layouts
Being There is this Wednesday’s free movie at 8 Kelburn Parade
David Suzuki movie showing Friday & Saturday at the Film Archive

Is there a better, more civilised feeling than having a book waiting for you on reserve at the library?

Should I try Ruby on Rails for my next web programming project?

I saw a hundred skinks today and baby crabs a millimetre across and the harbour 360 from the old concrete gun emplacements on top of Matiu/Somes.

I was trying to explain “Behold the lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world,” typeset attractively on a bookmark, to a Japanese girl. It was not easy, when I barely understand it myself. It’s not easy, if sin is (among other things) materialism, oppression, oil spills and homeless drunks. When does he take away the sin of the world?

Does anyone have a spare PC that I could buy for a few hundred? It needs to run Windows XP. I don’t need a monitor, keyboard or mouse.

Said Wendell Berry: “If you’re not economically free, if you don’t have economic choices, you’re not free.” (In a July 2004 interview with Sojourners.) Would you describe yourself as economically free?

Wendell Berry on some missing mountains in Kentucky

Gideon S reads the Bible

Free movie, The Conversation, 8 Kelburn Pde, Wednesday 8pm

I was at the tuwhare show last night (thank you Mr Steele) and I saw & heard Don McGlashan peform ‘Rain’. He was accompanied by a pianist and played a little euphonium. It was about the most beautiful thing I’ve seen & heard for eversolong.

RDB heart Wellington slideshow
John Howard Yoder on disagreement, patience and being in the minority

Last weekend man, it was massive. Just a blast, a lenten blast. Portentious, the end or beginning of something. Three parties, one feat. v.good DJs; the Newtown festival where I saw half an hour of inspiring line dancing (“here’s Nora, she’s in her eighty-third year, she’s been coming to Line Dancing for six years now and has lost fifteen kilos!”), and The Little Bushmen, Warren Maxwell’s post-Trinity Roots band, a kindler gentler Mars Volta, maybe, and Salmonella Dub like a bolt from 2002, a surreal drop-in centre of a mosh pit. And on Sunday a man said some true words in church and it was all I could do to keep from weeping.

Wikipedia on taboo deformation
John Howard Yoder on theodicy
Photoshop + ugly celebrities = pretty celebrities

People born in my year: Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Rachael Leigh Cook, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Kate Hudson, Norah Jones, Heath Ledger, Sophie Monk, P!nk.