fishers, surfers and casters

I’m sitting with my best blog buddies, but they’re not the type to be so excited that they have to blog about it right now!!!!

Alleluia

Today is a joy of most joys.

Democracy works!

Let us run out into the streets, “The future is sane!”

Fortunately I lost my voice a few weeks ago. I let my supervisor know about it over the phone, who responded with “I don’t want to hear that voice for an hour tomorrow”, which meant I got reprieve from presenting at the Graduate Research Conference.

Unfortunately I used that extra time for more important things like sleeping, and went down to Melbourne for today’s GRC as unprepared as I was three weeks ago.

But I had a good time. One of my examiners took an issue with something I said within the first minute I was talking and we spent the whole time talking about that. And it was a very interesting discussion – about the Technorati authority algorithm and its imposition on communities of interest. I will be making a paper on it in a few weeks, after I wake up. If someone reminds me I’ll be on it soon. I’m excited about doing it, but like everything else in my life, if I stop thinking about it for fifteen seconds something else surfaces to emergency level and I forget all about it.

My supervisor is thinking of offering a seminar to us postgrads about how to swim through oceans of data without drowning, how to organise and filter data. Should be good, except that he’s just like me. So I have to call him every fourteen seconds to remind him.

This sign appears out the front of a certain Baptist Chruch on the road from Shepparton to Bendigo. The second time I drove past I felt the urge to take this photograph, just to share with you.

For one, apart from perhaps high schools sarcasm, I think puns are the lowest form of humour. I mean like anyone can make a play on words. Sometimes humans need the power to filter all word plays before deciding to place one on a huge friggin billboard outside their community’s houses.

And secondly, what this poster says about this community’s ideas of evangelism, mission and relationships with the community is that even the lowest form of entertainment must be good enough to get your attention. It says nothing about what they believe, apart from the fact that only kneeling down by your lonesome will get your closer to God. Not reading the Bible, not sharing your faith story with others, not trying out new experiences of the world, not even drugs. Just bending over repentantly will get your there.

Which basically means if we treat our audience like idiots who only respond to punny lines will we ever make a difference in the world.

Or maybe I’m just sick of churches at present, especially ones throwing themselves in my face. Sorry. End rant.

I met Megan Emily Emerson when I was 31 and she was 3. She was one of the most delightful creatures I had ever met. We got along immensely, fantastically. We talked at length over the really important things in life, such as The Simpsons, boy germs and how to jump off a step ladder without making mum angry. She made me feel things I didn’t have words for when first explaining them to her mother, such things as joy, pride, humility, wonder. Those feelings were foreign to me.

The day she moved in with me she asked if she could call me Dad. The request knocked me down, and I should have thought about it some more, but there was really only one response for it. Yes.

Five years on the few attempts we’ve made to have her named changed have been in vain, so I’m changing mine. Meet Paul Emerson Teusner, a brand new man.