Matthew Henry John Bartlett

We use about 800 million plastic supermarket bags every year in New Zealand. That’s lame, they’re all made of oil, 90% are imported, and they’re hard to recycle. Bad stewardship! Happily, a solution is at hand. Ireland had the same problem and put a €0.15 (NZ$0.30) levy on each bag in 2002 and now use about 10% of the bags they used to. The levy goes towards other waste management efforts. (This is an example of Paul Hawken’s ‘tax the bads, not the goods’ idea.) If you’re into it, you can find out more at the BagsNOT site, or read the short Zero Waste report, and then do what I did and write a letter to your MP. BagsNot have a convenient list of MPs’ electorates and email addresses.

William T. Cavanaugh, “The Unfreedom of the Free Market” [PDF, via SubversNZ]

What do you do when your laptop has run out of zone changes, and you’re stuck on a mostly useless zone?

It was a really fun party. I will take a picture of the painting which is not called Matthew en el día de los muertos.

Ten good books about cities

The Party is tomorrow; the heart palpitations are palpable.

Hey, I made WellingtonCalendar.co.nz a whisker prettier.

Sermon from me about resurrection work
Some like Midlake videos. Midlake!
Against environmentalism, for good work

CHURCH CREATE PLURALITY BY TRYING TO BE A UNITY THAT CRACKS OPEN THE UNITY THAT SAYS IT’S PLURAL

Tom Beard’s top ten Wellington buildings (#10 to #1): Jellicoe Towers (swee), School of Architecture and Design (ug), Freyberg Pool (swee), Te Puni Kokiri house (swee), The Hannah Playhouse (ug), Umbrella Park apartments (swee), Rutherford House (swee), First Church of Christ Scientist (swee), Racing Conference building (swee), Wellington City Library (so swee)

It’s TV Turnoff Week.

Alasdair MacIntyre proposes a curriculum to heal the fragmented university

Perhaps I have two axes: sad–happy and quiet–excited. So I could plot myself in a box with corners sad/quiet, happy/quiet, happy/excited and sad/excited. I’ve been ranking how I feel out of ten quite a lot lately, and trying to get other people too as well, but that’s probably inadequate. Better would be “rate yourself out of 33 in base-4, why not?” Then 00 is sad/quiet, 21 is pretty gently chuffed, 33 is shouting happy.

Al Gore’s on Apple’s board, which will keep sending e-waste to developing countries
Council building inspired by termite mound, Melbourne [via Deb]
my truth is not like yours

Faking it, like the Monkees or Neil Young [via Daniel S]

[via WorldChanging]

“The Failure of Syntax”, from Friedman’s Fables, Edwin H. Friedman:

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax or eloquence or rhetoric or articulation, but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.

Janine Benyus’ nine basic principles of biomimicry:

1. Nature runs on sunlight.
2. Nature uses only the energy it needs.
3. Nature fits form to function.
4. Nature recycles everything.
5. Nature rewards cooperation.
6. Nature banks on diversity.
7. Nature demands local expertise.
8. Nature curbs excesses from within.
9. Nature taps the power of limits.

(you might like to insert a less icky word for ‘nature’)

Curitiba, Brazil, with average per capita yearly income of less than $4,000, is one of the world’s great cities, saith Bill McKibbon
New bus lanes planned for Wellington
Burnt-out vicars, disfunctional fish, not caring, and systems thinking [via Debbie/CD]
A Friedman Fable: The Bridge [60KB PDF]
Summary of the Friedman model
Greenwich village, revolution, gospel

More Yoder, from “Civil Religion in America”, from The Priestly Kingdom:

… If the God-reference of civil religion is inward or upward, it provides no effective leverage for critique or transformation. The God-language of the Bible does not point inward to the renewed heart alone, nor upward to the “higher power”, nor forward to the “hereafter”, but backward to the salvation story, outward to the claims of the rest of the world, the enemies to love and the slaves to free, and forward to a city not of our own making. (more…)

1000-word sustainability in design manifesto
Owners’ manifesto/makers’ bill of rights

Mr Vonnegut is gone. “… his goal in writing novels was to ‘catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents’ and ‘poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world.’ ” KV on The Daily Show [via Russell Brown]

I’m gunna go play trombone in a hard rock band. Hey I just thought of a name for it: “the music of the spheres”.

Wendell Berry (swoon) interviews Bill McKibbon [WMV video]
(or I can put it on CD for you)

Today I found a plugin for InDesign, Teacup TableStyles & CellStyles Pro, that will let you link Excel spreadsheets to InDesign documents so that when you make a change to the spreadsheet it updates the associated table in InDesign, and preserves its formatting. Which is good because I have a big project on where I have to put together a document for printing which will at the last minute have loads of figures revised. Not bad for a Friday.

Russell Brown on climate change scepticism here and abroad

Listen to Midlake (“did you ever want to run around with bandits, to see many places and hide in ditches?”), they channel Bread and the Eagles and my theory is mum played David Gates when I was fetal and I’m now powerless to resist. Thanks John & Simon. Also Sarah Blasko.

John Howard Yoder’s The Priestly Kingdom is blowing my mind like it blew Cam’s before. Here is a quote:

Worship is the communal cultivation of an alternative construction of society and of history. That alternative construction of history is celebrated by telling the stories of Abraham (and Sarah and Isaac and Ishmael), of Mary and Joseph and Jesus and Mary, of Cross and Resurrection and Peter and Paul, of Peter of Cheltchitz and his Brothers, of George Fox and his Friends. How pointedly, and at what points, this celebrated construction will set us at odds with our neighbors, will of course depend on the neighbors.

hippy skyscrapers & other beautiful news