i am sparticus: Words

Lorem Ipsum

In lieu of some real news, here is the latest news from my church taken from the prototype of the new website that I'm working on.

"This week, an exciting new life group starts up. In It we explore the difference between sharks and dolphins and look into the way mammals behave underwater. Hopefully this group will grow and help a whole range of young Christians discover their porpoise in life."

People maybe pleased to know that when the website actually launches I won't be in charge of adding the latest news to it.

I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General

Today I paid the price for letting myself be roped in to help at my Church's holiday club, in that I actually had to help. Apparently I have amazing talents at working with kids, or they were short staffed. One of the two. The good thing though, was that it was themed around pirates, and as we all know PIRATES ARE COOL, though not as cool as Ninjas. I did try and make the most of my critically acclaimed 8th Grade drama performance as the Modern Major General, though unfortunately no-one seemed to care and I didn't feel like pressing my point. However, if I had pressed my point and made them listen, I imagine this entry would read something more like this:

"...and so I got to impress people with my recital of the first three verses of 'The Modern Major General' off 'The Pirates Of Penzance'. I say impress, what I mean is that people looked at me oddly and went 'what's a general got to do with Pirates?' to which I replied 'Pirates? Sorry, I thought you said pilots!'. And then I realised if they didn't know who the modern major general was they wouldn't get that joke. Then they stabbed me violently with a cutlass and I died."

And the lessons we can learn from this are, people's knowledge of classical British comedy post-operas is shockingly poor, kid's clubs at churches are at least as violent as church football leagues and critically acclaimed 8th Grade drama performances are only critically acclaimed at the time, and generally speaking only by your English teacher and your mum.

To Play The Gooseberry

The expression "to play the gooseberry" or as it's more commonly expressed these days "I felt like such a gooseberry" comes from Victorian times when all meetings of two young members of the opposite sex who were mutually attracted to each other (I think it was considered too risqué to call them 'dates') had to be supervised by a Chaperon to make sure that no-one did anything vaguely lustful, like hold hands without gloves on or make polite comments about each other's footwear. Anyway, if the Chaperon was feeling a tad licentious they'd say something along the lines of "Gosh, Is that a patch of gooseberries I see yonder? I may just wander over there out of eye sight and try and pick some" (I've been unable to ascertain whether this was accompanied by an excessive wink and a nudge on the part of the chaperon, but seeing as it's practically law to do such things when being licentious I'm going to say that it happened and everyone was all the more grateful for it). Needless to say the couple would recognise this as the sign that they could spend time alone together as long as they kept up the picking gooseberries illusion and kept within certain boundaries of respectability. And didn't make it too obvious that one of them had their fingers in the wrong holes of the glove when the chaperon came back.

Part Three: In Which We Find Out More About Epiphany Than Ever Thought Necessary

You'd be excused for thinking at this point that we at iamsparticus.com have lost track of things a bit, after all, wasn't this series supposed to be about the origins of Christmas? Epiphany is all well and good and the such but why should we care? Christmas is what's important! Christmas and baby Jesus in a manager in swaddling^* clothes! Christmas and shepherds and wisemen from the East! Christmas and God in human form coming down to earth to save humanity. (And for the more irreligious; Christmas and food and drink and pillowcases full of presents!) Oh ye of little faith! Take heed and see that soon everything will make sense.

Up until this point Epiphany was overwhelmingly a celebration of God's manifestation on Earth. It was associated with Jesus's baptism because wrongly some people believed that Jesus became inhabited by God at the baptism. Remember back a few sections to the part about people not caring about Jesus's birth?

"...For the first 300 years people were primarily concerned with the Cross and what Christ's death and resurrection meant, his birth just wasn't seen as important... Only as the understanding of the Cross solidified did people start to look more seriously at the issue of the birth of Jesus and how that affected their beliefs. But that'll have to wait for later."

This is later, and people are starting to be concerned about how Jesus was God and how Jesus was human and how, in some way, that meant that He was both God and human. And while this is all going on, towards the start of the fourth century, Epiphany has managed to spread its way to being a festival celebrated by the Eastern European Church.

Now the Eastern European Church were a fairly sound bunch, and they fell down on the side of the Bible when it came to thinking about who Jesus was. They believed that Jesus was God at His birth and human at His birth, that He didn't just get God at his baptism. So obviously their Epiphany celebrations were slightly different, as they could hardly celebrate Jesus becoming God at His baptism, they were still celebrating God becoming manifest and so if they weren't going to be celebrating it in relation to Jesus's baptism, they were going to be celebrating it in relation to His birth. Celebrating God coming down to Earth, At. Jesus's. Birth. Three hundred or so years after Jesus is born and finally someone gets around to throwing the most famous person in the world a party. Gosh, isn't that exciting? So exciting that I think, on the note we'll have a pause.

Footnotes

* Swaddling: Clothes used to swaddle. Swaddle: wrap (someone, esp. a baby) in garments or cloth. Just so you know.

Two Books I Found In Someone's Bookcase Yesterday

• The Death Of Death
• The Sinfulness of Sin (previously published as 'The Plague Of Plagues')

Part Two: In Which We Find Out That Stealing Other People's Festivals Scores Low On The Novelty Scale For Christians

By far and away the most celebrated Christian festival in the early church was Easter. The dating of the current Easter festivities is another series of (far less interesting) posts but in the early church it was initially celebrated at the same time as the Jewish festival of Passover (March / Aprilish depending on the Moon). In fact, in all probability the first Christians, who were for the vast majority Jews, still continued to celebrate Passover but celebrated it in the light of what Christ has done. They saw Christ's death and resurrection as the fulfilment of everything celebrated at Passover and celebrated it accordingly. This would probably have happened the first year after Jesus's death. Only a year old and already Christians are stealing other religions' festivals! You'd probably want to argue that reinterpreting a Jewish festival so as to fit with the modern developments in God's plan to save the world isn't the same as stealing a Pagan festival and you'd certainly be right in doing so. However that argument doesn't stand with the next festival that Christians are about to steal.

For the first hundred odd years the dates Christians celebrated were as follows. Passover, Pentecost, probably for some at least the Feast of Booths and the Day of Atonement (those are all Jewish festivals) and then the dates of the death of various Apostles and Martyrs. So no real shortage of occasions to take the day off work. However by the second century on the 6th (or possibly 10th) of January a group of people in Egypt had started to celebrate a new and highly exciting festival, the festival of Epiphany. Epiphany is a bit of an odd festival in that it eventually came to remember two unrelated things; the visitation of the Wise Men to Jesus (age 3ish) and Jesus's baptism (age 27ish), initially though it was just Jesus baptism that was remembered. The people who started celebrating epiphany were a heretical Christian sect led by a Gnostic teacher called Basilides who was based in Alexandria, Egypt. I call the group heretical because they believed that Jesus Christ wasn't both one hundred percent man and one hundred percent God but rather God living inside a human body. God the body-snatcher as opposed to God the Son. They believed that Jesus was not God from birth but rather that God came down to earth and took over Jesus's body at Jesus's baptism. So for them, the celebration of Epiphany became a rather important date, being the date that God came down to earth and was made manifest (the root Greek word that gives us Epiphany, epiphaneia, means 'appearing'). Obviously a whole bunch of people didn't like this idea, but those people will have to wait. What's relevant now is why people were celebrating Epiphany on the 6th of January. The reason for this is that January 6th was a very pagan festival, with at least three different Pagan celebrations, included one in which a virgin gave birth, occurring on it. On the night before the 6th the Nile was supposed to gain miraculous powers. This seemed like a suitable time to stand up and proclaim that the real God had already come down to earth and that's what the followers of Basilides did, even if they got the nature of His coming down to earth very wrong.

Wednesday The 19th

• I do realise that Beth's question "What is Yellow?" was the winner of the "Ask me a question" vote thing. I will get around to answering it just Yellow's proving very elusive.
• I'm going to London today! Huzzah!
• I've started a new productivity drive in which this plays a two minute part. It'll either go really well or give me a heart-attack. Aaah Timer! SAVE TO DRAFT!
• The new 65daysofstatic album is very good, and excitingly they played them on Radio 1 last night
• Even more exciting news, Gareth and I found a coin return slot on the side of the Jukebox down the Black Horse! It turns out that the machine doesn't just randomly swallow our money sporadically! It's taken us a year and about £20 quid, but we've found it!

Why I Love My Danish Friends

On seeing a car with two dogs in the boot and the leads hanging out... "Well I suppose it's better than the other way round... although I suppose it'd be good exercise for them"

Part One: In Which We Find That For 300 Years, No-One Really Cared That Much

Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the man considered to be the Son of God, God and the Saviour of the world by Christians and so it may come as a slight surprise to find that for the first 300 years after the birth of Jesus Christ no-one seemed to put much importance on the dating or celebrating of his birth. Really, no-one much cared, the writers of the Bible included. The Bible mentions nothing about His date of birth; hell, the Gospel of John effectively doesn't mention anything to do with Jesus's birth and the Gospel of Mark just plain doesn't mention anything to do with Jesus's birth . Luke and Matthew are the only two Gospels to speak of the birth and neither of them give much away about the date of the event. In fact the only thing that narrows it down is that Luke talks about shepherds in the fields and so we can assume that Jesus was born during the season for sheep to be out on the hills. That narrows it down to the very small period of anytime between March and November. In short, the only thing we can drawn from the Bible on the subject of dating Jesus' birth is that it wasn't on December the 25th.

There are some manuscripts exist from the 3rd Century that talk of the date of Jesus' birth but all of them are very speculative about when it actually happened. No-one seems to know when it is and so everyone decides to invent clever mathematical formulae to try and work out when it happened, ingenuity and originality are the order of the day and consistency and common-sense are dutifully ignored. Why let simple logic get in the way of a good theory? A good example is the dating of the birth to the 28th of March. This was done on the grounds that the Roman Calendar recognised the Vernal Equinox (the day in which night and day are the same length) as the 25th of March and therefore this must have been that date that God created the world as on the first day of creation he split light from darkness (presumably into equal parts). As Jesus is referred to as the "Sun of Righteousness" in Malachi 4:2 it follows (somehow) that Jesus must have been born on the same date as the fourth day, the day in which God created the Sun. Therefore Jesus must have been born on the 28th of March. If you don't buy that theory other suggested dates you can pick from are January 6th, March 25th, April 2nd, April 19th, May 20th, November 17th and December 25th. Interestingly enough December 25th was probably first suggested because it was nine months after March 25th which was considered to be a good date for conception (probably due to similar logic as the example above). Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century mentions the attempts to date the birth of Jesus and labels them as vain and stupid, though he himself seems to be a fan of November 17th.

The reason no-one seems to care about Jesus' Birth is that for the first 300 years people were primarily concerned with the Cross and what Christ's death and resurrection meant, his birth just wasn't seen as important. In theological terms for the first while people were concerned with Soteriology not Christology. Only as the understanding of the Cross solidified did people start to look more seriously at the issue of the birth of Jesus and how that affected their beliefs. But that'll have to wait for later, as right now we need to deal with the issue of the other festivals.

The Origins of Christmas

There's a lot of talk about how Christmas isn't originally a Christian festival, but rather a Pagan festival that was Christianised and made holy and how this was an important step in the Church's plan to brainwash the heathen and take over the world. Most of the people who say this sort of thing are very confident of this fact, but would be hard-pressed to tell you where this knowledge of theirs has actually come from. It's one of those 'but that's what everyone says!' things. As of late at iamsparticus.com though we've started to take an interest into fact checking and corroboration of stories, old skool style journalism if you will, and in and among our studies of just about everything we've found out some relevant information. So for your intellectual pleasure, over the next few days, we'll be telling you the ever so fascinating story of the origins of the festival known as Christmas

Wrong Cash Machines

What's wrong with the above cash machine?

The £10 and £20 signs are on the wrong side. The Wrong Side. This may not seem like much, but seeing as every cash machine in the world does it the other way around it does make life very very annoying if you just want to take out £10.

Everything In The World Can Be Made Right With A Carefully Thought Through Points System (Or Christ)

Driving Home

• Members: 4, +1
• No of members wearing old jeans: 3, +3
• Amount of guitars: 1, -1
• Hair factor: 1 bald, 1 short, 2 long, +2
• Ability to play instrument factor: Drums 0, Bass 0, Singer -1, Guitar +1
• Amount of Converse Shoes: 2, +4
• Bonus points for girl bassist, +4
• Bonus points for drummer in shorts, +2
• Bonus points for apologising for cool vocal affects as apparently they were accidental: -8

Total Rock Points = +6 points

The Mirimar Disaster

• Members: 5, +1
• No of members wearing old jeans: 3, +3
• Amount of guitars: 2, +0
• No of members wearing black t-shirts: 1, +1
• Hair factor: Negligible, +0
• Ability to play instruments: All bar singer very good, +4
• Converse shoe factor: 1, +2
• Bonus points for non-scrawny singer, +5
• Bonus points for not saying a single clear word, -2
• Bonus points for lack of tune or melody, -10
• Bonus points for lack of same rhythm for more than 7 seconds, -12
• Bonus points for occasional 7 seconds of genius, +5

Total Rock Points = -8 points

65daysofstatic

• Members: 4, +0
• No of members wearing old jeans: 3, +3
• No of members wearing black t-shirts: 2, +2
• Hair factor: 2 normal, 2 spiky, +2
• Ability to play instrument: V. Good, +6
• Converse shoe factor: 2, +4
• Bonus points for crazy stage movement head shaking factor: +4
• Bonus points for having enjoyable songs: +4
• Bonus points for being very very loud: +4
• Bonus points for v. fast drum solo bit in "Install A Break": +3
• Bonus points for multi-instrumentalism, +3

Total Rock Points = +35

Saturday Night

So you guys know how life should be lived, this is what I did with my Saturday night.

• Nothing

Maybe that's a slight exaggeration, I do seem to remember doing something but I can't remember for the life of me what it was (and not in the 'it was all a haze after the eighth pint' sense). I also managed to get Marmite on my keyboard when writing this. Maybe it was "made toast"?

Serenity

I'm sick of doing this, but it feels neccesary. Don't worry though this is the last time I plug something using this website until I buy the new 65daysofstatic album on Monday.

Serenity comes out today, you should all follow my example and go see it as soon as possible. It is very fantastic.

Best Response To The Axe Joke I Ever Heard

"But the child won't come off the swing, it'll just stay there and go limp"

Installing a new Dell PC

The following is the list of programs, automatically installed on the new business machine we bought at the office, that I uninstalled in the first half an hour of setting the machine up.

• AOL Coach version 1.xxxx
• AOL Connectivity services
• AOL Spyware protection
• AOL UK
• AOL Screensaver Picture Viewer
• ARTeuro
• Dell Media Experience
• Dell Picture Studio
• LivReg (Symantec)
• Liveupdate (Symantec)
• Myway search assistant
• Norton internet security (Crashes if you try to add / remove when live update is running, will not remove unless logged in as the supervisor for it, creates default password on first boot which unless changed there and then seems to be stuck as a random password)
• Norton Security Center
• Sonic DLA (disappointingly not the hedgehog)
• Sonic Recordnow copy
• Sonic Recordnow Data
• Sonic Update manager
• Tiscali Internet (disappointingly not the entire internet)
• Wannadoo installer
• Jasc Paint Shop Pro 5 (has a good uninstalling trick, gives you a "time remaining" box that counts down really quickly, then when it runs out replaces it with another quick one, then another, then another. In the end it's same speed as one slow box making it's Window's equivalent of Go-Faster stripes)
• Jasc Picture Viewer Media Edition

I am a productive youth worker

In The Pub

Overheard from a group of women: "I've done my research on the net, having a baby will have no consequences"

More Dating Nonsense

So, as I endeavour to think about the long and hard consequences of my dissertation on dating I ponder this question: "What is the difference between dating and marriage?" And then I think why should I ponder when other people can answer the question for me?

Update

Obviously I know the standard differences between dating and marriage, that marriage has a level of commitment that dating doesn't and that marriage has a sexual intimacy that dating doesn't (well, in my opinion shouldn't). But other than that are there any other differences? Is there a difference in the level of exclusivity? Is there some mystical thing in marriage that doesn't exist in dating?