I have just spent the afternoon in our church youth centre, building a prayer room. Well, not building the room as such, but turning the existing room into a room in which it will be a pleasure and an inspiration to pray.
And YOU are invited.
We're having 40 hours of prayer, starting 6am on Thursday morning, until, oh, I dunno, what would that be? - 10pm on Friday? I think. Everyone is welcome to call in at any time and pray, read, think, play (there's a craft table!! With paint!!!) and have tea/coffee (you have to make your own, mind). So please do. It would be nice to see you.
Cregagh Methodist, opposite the Co-op on the Cregagh Road.
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Easter
I love Easter. And spring. And daffodils and tulips and bluebells and longer days and it being a little bit sunny.
I think Easter is my favourite time of the year. Christmas is OK, but spoiled by everyone pitching in and making us all materialistic. Halloween I hate. The summer is generally a disappointment. But Easter is splendid.
A question: why does everyone worry about over-indulging at Christmas but not at Easter? Cos I think, with all the Easter eggs, I'm more likely to over do it at Easter. And at least Christmas dinner has nutritional content; in fact, it has almost your full 5 daily portions of fruit & veg in one meal (although admittedly it helps if you count the grapes in the wine). Easter just has tons of chocolate. Not that I'm complaining, mind.
I think Easter is my favourite time of the year. Christmas is OK, but spoiled by everyone pitching in and making us all materialistic. Halloween I hate. The summer is generally a disappointment. But Easter is splendid.
A question: why does everyone worry about over-indulging at Christmas but not at Easter? Cos I think, with all the Easter eggs, I'm more likely to over do it at Easter. And at least Christmas dinner has nutritional content; in fact, it has almost your full 5 daily portions of fruit & veg in one meal (although admittedly it helps if you count the grapes in the wine). Easter just has tons of chocolate. Not that I'm complaining, mind.
Monday, 6 April 2009
Waaaa-choo
WhyNotSmile has a Bad Cold®, with symptoms including (but not limited to) blocked nose, sore throat, runny nose, tiredness, sore muscles, temperature and sneezing.
I really hate having the cold: you feel awful, but you are expected to get on with things and not complain. Colds do not do well in the 'Amount of discomfort' vs. 'Level of sympathy' stakes.
For instance. You would expect that the more ill you feel, the more sympathy you could expect, like this:
Of course, WhyNotSmile would like sympathy to be distributed like this:
which may be why her life will be one continuous disappointment.
However, after a survey of WhyNotSmile's levels of illness vs amount of sympathy received over the years, I am led to conclude that this is not how it works at all. I decided to exclude sympathy from parents, which is always generous, and from my doctor, who is lovely and very sympathetic no matter what I throw at her*, and to base this on amount of sympathy from others. Furthermore, I divided it into childhood illnesses (green dots) and adult illnesses (red dots). This is what I discovered:
* I mean this in a metaphorical sense. WhyNotSmile does not condone throwing things at doctors.
I really hate having the cold: you feel awful, but you are expected to get on with things and not complain. Colds do not do well in the 'Amount of discomfort' vs. 'Level of sympathy' stakes.
For instance. You would expect that the more ill you feel, the more sympathy you could expect, like this:
Of course, WhyNotSmile would like sympathy to be distributed like this:
which may be why her life will be one continuous disappointment.
However, after a survey of WhyNotSmile's levels of illness vs amount of sympathy received over the years, I am led to conclude that this is not how it works at all. I decided to exclude sympathy from parents, which is always generous, and from my doctor, who is lovely and very sympathetic no matter what I throw at her*, and to base this on amount of sympathy from others. Furthermore, I divided it into childhood illnesses (green dots) and adult illnesses (red dots). This is what I discovered:
* I mean this in a metaphorical sense. WhyNotSmile does not condone throwing things at doctors.
Saturday, 4 April 2009
A Survey of Attitudes of Readers of This Blog
Ship of Fools has published the findings of a couple of surveys which show that Christians love porn and atheists love Jesus. My favourite statistic is that of the 21% of American atheists who claim to believe in God.
Anyway, in light of this, I decided to conduct a survey of my own:
Anyway, in light of this, I decided to conduct a survey of my own:
When you take part in a survey, how do you answer?
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
April Fool
When we were little, my sister and my cousin and I used to play April Fool tricks on each other that consisted of shouting things like "You have pen on your face!! No you don't!! April Fool!" ad infinitum. This line was dispensed at lightning speed, without giving the other person time to even wonder whether there was pen on their face, never mind to fall for it and check it.
This is about the level of April Fool that I can be bothered with. 9 year-olds being silly. I quite like a well-exectuted joke on telly as well, my personal favourite being that one about the spaghetti plants that the BBC (I think) did many years ago. I also have fond recollections of 'That's Life!'s' Lirpaloof - an animal resembling (if I recall correctly) a hippo, which they claimed had moved into some zoo or something.
However, we now seem to have reached the stage of evolutionary development which requires every publication everywhere to run an April Fool story every year, and while some attempts are admirable, mostly they are dire. For your convenience, I supply a round-up of those I have found so far. Do feel free to add to this list, or to correct me if I'm wrong.
1. The Guardian claims it is abandoning paper and moving to Twitter format. They are also putting their entire archive into Twitter format, including such gems as "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?". I can't help feeling that this could have been funnier, but the most impressive thing about it is that a chap called swanstep actually claims to have fallen for it.
2. The Belfast Telegraph reports that the Westlink is to be made one-way during rush hour. I'm fairly sure they did some variation of this last year; it is also reminiscent of the year the Newtownards Chronicle said that the one-way system in Ards was to be abolished. Thankfully a chap called Phil has already expressed doubts about it in the comments ("April Fool...?") - on the ball there Phil.
3. The BBC is harder to call. CBBC has 'Kitten's Got Talent', which cannot possibly be real, but will no doubt lead to lots of small children turning up at Broadcasting House with cat baskets and being turned away disappointed, and then parents trying to sue, and then the BBC deciding it's actually not a bad idea after all and running with the idea.
Other than that, there are several candidates for The Joke, and I'm honestly not sure. I suspect that they are taking us for fools, however, when they show the Presidential Limo being turned around in Downing Street and the caption says officials 'struggled' to execute a three-point turn. That is not struggling to do a three-point turn. They want struggling to execute a three-point turn, they should watch me drive some time.
Edit at 1.45pm: I forgot to mention an email which was in my inbox this morning, which is presumably an April Fool, and an excellently dire example. There's some company called Laptops Direct who keep emailing me; no idea how I ended up on their mailing list, except that maybe they were the people I bought my laptop from, or something. Anyway, today's email was entitled 'Funerals from Laptops Direct'. On going into the email, there was a picture of a hearse with 'Laptops Direct' painted (well, photoshopped) on the windows. And then their standard email about laptop offers.
A poor attempt, and badly executed.
This is about the level of April Fool that I can be bothered with. 9 year-olds being silly. I quite like a well-exectuted joke on telly as well, my personal favourite being that one about the spaghetti plants that the BBC (I think) did many years ago. I also have fond recollections of 'That's Life!'s' Lirpaloof - an animal resembling (if I recall correctly) a hippo, which they claimed had moved into some zoo or something.
However, we now seem to have reached the stage of evolutionary development which requires every publication everywhere to run an April Fool story every year, and while some attempts are admirable, mostly they are dire. For your convenience, I supply a round-up of those I have found so far. Do feel free to add to this list, or to correct me if I'm wrong.
1. The Guardian claims it is abandoning paper and moving to Twitter format. They are also putting their entire archive into Twitter format, including such gems as "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?". I can't help feeling that this could have been funnier, but the most impressive thing about it is that a chap called swanstep actually claims to have fallen for it.
2. The Belfast Telegraph reports that the Westlink is to be made one-way during rush hour. I'm fairly sure they did some variation of this last year; it is also reminiscent of the year the Newtownards Chronicle said that the one-way system in Ards was to be abolished. Thankfully a chap called Phil has already expressed doubts about it in the comments ("April Fool...?") - on the ball there Phil.
3. The BBC is harder to call. CBBC has 'Kitten's Got Talent', which cannot possibly be real, but will no doubt lead to lots of small children turning up at Broadcasting House with cat baskets and being turned away disappointed, and then parents trying to sue, and then the BBC deciding it's actually not a bad idea after all and running with the idea.
Other than that, there are several candidates for The Joke, and I'm honestly not sure. I suspect that they are taking us for fools, however, when they show the Presidential Limo being turned around in Downing Street and the caption says officials 'struggled' to execute a three-point turn. That is not struggling to do a three-point turn. They want struggling to execute a three-point turn, they should watch me drive some time.
Edit at 1.45pm: I forgot to mention an email which was in my inbox this morning, which is presumably an April Fool, and an excellently dire example. There's some company called Laptops Direct who keep emailing me; no idea how I ended up on their mailing list, except that maybe they were the people I bought my laptop from, or something. Anyway, today's email was entitled 'Funerals from Laptops Direct'. On going into the email, there was a picture of a hearse with 'Laptops Direct' painted (well, photoshopped) on the windows. And then their standard email about laptop offers.
A poor attempt, and badly executed.
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