From here:
I’ve seen a lot of drool-worthy products in the last few days at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show: Smart tablet computers, high-def 3D televisions, cutting-edge phones and superpowered gadgets of all stripes.
But the thing I want the most out of all of them is the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic. It’s an affordable, open source, easy to operate 3D printer, a desktop-sized engine for making whatever you want out of sculpted plastic.
And you thought Star Trek Replicators were mere fantasy.
From here:
He walked with a limp and was known to some as the ‘poison dwarf’.
But a book reveals that Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was an unlikely lothario, nicknamed ‘the ram’ by the many actresses and society ladies he seduced.
I’m pretty upset about this; it means my favourite song – one we used to sing in scouts around the campfire when I was 9 – wasn’t entirely accurate:
Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler is somewhat sim’lar,
But poor Goebbels has no balls at all.
I spent some of my Sunday afternoon today providing the musical component of a chapel service in a local youth detention centre.
I’ve been doing this for around the last 20 years, so I’m rather more immune than I used to be to the sight of what should be a group of innocent children in a pit of despair and confusion that would be the undoing of most adults.
The girl that struck me today was, she said, short sighted and couldn’t read the words of the songs on the screen. Being an old hand at this, I thought she was pulling my chain, but I gave her a printed sheet of the songs anyway. She sang with some enthusiasm and, after a few more interactions, I saw that she was, as we used to say, a little simple, but with a very sweet temperament – something that is often the case with God’s special people.
I also noticed that she is a cutter. She has the scars from self-inflicted wounds on her arms. Why do children do this to themselves? Apparently, they are so desperate to alleviate their emotional pain that they inflict physical pain on themselves to take their minds off what is going on inside their heads. This girl is going to be baptised soon; I have no idea whether it will subdue her inner turmoil, but I hope so.
Although I don’t know how she has ended up where she is or why she is in the state she is in, I do know that for many of the incarcerated children, parents haven’t helped much. A child I used to visit some years ago – who when released, re-offended and ended up in adult prison – had a strange mother. One day when visiting him, a guard said something she didn’t like; her response was to jump on his back and try to claw his eyes out with her fingernails – in front of her son. With that to live up to, what chance did he stand?
The spirit that built the British Empire.
From here:
Around 100 people braved the cold weather to ride the capital’s underground system in their pants today as part of the annual No Trousers Tube Ride……
Participants were also told to tell fellow commuters that they had forgotten their trousers and to insist that it was merely a coincidence that others had done the same.
They were also instructed to sit in the car as they normally would, and to do ‘normal’ things such as read a magazine or newspaper.
The two requirements for taking part in the event are a willingness to take your trousers off on the Tube and the ability to keep a straight face about it.
A few photos I took this afternoon in our local woods in the late afternoon sunlight.
From here:
They have worshipped together for decades on the pews of their parish church. Generations of their loved ones have been baptised, married and buried there.
But now a Church of England congregation is being torn apart by the Pope’s offer to welcome disaffected Anglican traditionalists into the Catholic Church.
In a vote which has split the local community and left long-standing friends on opposite sides of a growing divide, 54 parishioners at St Barnabas Tunbridge Wells have indicated that they intended to become Catholics while 18 said they would remain in the established Church….
At St Barnabas the move towards Rome is being led by the vicar, Fr Ed Tomlinson. He believes that traditionalists who oppose the ordination of women have been badly let down by Church leaders.
But he has been told by the diocese of Rochester that if he and his followers leave the Church of England they will no longer be allowed to hold services, even on a shared basis, at St Barnabas – a nineteenth-century red-brick church where Siegfried Sassoon, the First World War poet, was baptised.
The firm stance has infuriated Fr Tomlinson, the vicar since 2006. “The whole thing stinks to high heaven,” he said.
“The Archdeacon made it abundantly clear that he does not want to entertain the notion of shared worship space and that he would resist my remaining here in any capacity.
“How lamentable that a solution based on unity exists but those with authority seem more intent on division.”
I have an eerie feeling of déjà vu. The Church of England’s hierarchy has demonstrated that, for all its prattle about ecumenism, what counts is kow-towing to the earthly power of the rapidly disintegrating ecclesiastical old boys’ – and women’s’ now – club of petty pointy-hatted eco-justice obsessed autocrats that pass for prelates in England’s green and pleasant land.
She married another woman.
From here:
It’s not that we wanted to make a political statement……
The direction of the Holy Spirit seems readily discernible to many of us. The Church, throughout the world, is growing in the direction of inclusion and justice for all God’s people, including Mally and me. For now, the fights continue. Anglicans, among others, fight and threaten schism over our marriages, over our love, and our lives. Mally is Canon to the Ordinary (the Bishop’s chief of staff), and I am the President and Dean of an Episcopal Seminary. Because of this, we are in danger of becoming the newest poster-children in this on-going fight. All of this–for doing something as old-fashioned, traditional, and family value-focused as getting married surrounded by friends and family in the church.
What can one possibly say in the face such chutzpah?
Nice hairdo, sweetie.
Children are no longer seen as gifts from God, bearing their creator’s image, but commodities to be picked through and discarded until a suitable specimen is found. This isn’t particularly surprising: it is one of the inevitable consequences of discarding Judeo-Christian ethics and replacing them with if it makes me feel good, it is good relativism.
From here:
A married couple who aborted twin boys the wife was expecting after IVF treatment have gone to court to choose the sex of their next child – because they want a girl.
The husband and wife already have three sons and said they now want to have a girl after their baby daughter died soon after birth.
They are both aged in their 30s and have taken their case to a legal tribunal after an independent medical body known as the Patient Review Panel rejected their bid to choose the gender of their next child using IVF.
The couple said they had made the decision to terminate the twin boys but could not continue to have unlimited numbers of children.
