i am sparticus: Words

London Tourism Day One

So, not starting work till Monday gives me four days of being a tourist in London (if you count today, which I do). Today was day one, and here are my observations:

You can drop 2p coin's from the top of The Monument, but it just gives people bad headaches. Realistically if you want to kill someone from a great height you probably want to use a grand piano.

The Monument is by far and away the coolest little known err... monument in all of London. The very fact you just had to follow through the link to Wikipedia shows how unknown it is. Basically it's a big classical pillar built to commemorate the Fire of London and to celebrate all the great and glorious reconstruction. The column has a very spiralled stair case inside of it, 311 steps in all. The view from the top is spectacular spanning from the Gherkin and the blue birds perched on the Lloyds' building all the way around to the Gherkin and the blue birds perched on the Lloyds building. That's 360° panoramas for you. You can also see the transmitter at Crystal Palace though, which is pretty impressive, it also manages to fool small children into thinking they can see Paris which makes me giggle.

I took some really good photos today, possibly my favourite ones ever. This is one of them.

Just a few metres down from the Monument is St Magnus the Martyr a small church built by Sir Christopher Wren at some point during his rather large architectural career. The church is still open and in use and is of the slightly high Anglican persuasion. This means that they believe that the Church of England never really became a Protestant church, rather the church is still catholic, the pope is still infallible and Henry VIII is still married to half of his wives. It's a bit odd and a good, if minor, example of historical revisionism. One of the information panels at the back of the church reads something along the lines of "during the changes with the church at the time of Henry VIII never was the word 'Protestant' used". Yes, well during the writing of that document never was the phrase "this is nonsensical history" used. Your point is?¹ High Church issues aside the church is very pretty in an heavily overdone style and wins points for hundreds of years ago having their vestry knocked down to build the first ever bridge over London. That's quite splendid.

Further up the North Bank is St Paul's Cathedral which is very grand and impressive. It's also £9 to enter. This is shocking. I'm not too bothered that places of historical interest charge money for entry, I wish they could all be free but they're not and that's fair enough. What bothers me though is that St Paul's is London's main church(and therefore arguably Britain's main church) and still an active place of worship. How can they charge money to enter a place of worship? This is wrong. What makes me even more annoyed is that on the doors as you enter are written the words "This is the Temple of God, God's presence is here" (or something like that, please forgive me but for all my fact checking I can't find out what it exactly reads). That statement is theologically stupid and grossly misleading and if the people who run the temple genuinely believe it then they are actively charging money to let people meet with God. Charging people to meet with God! That's one of the most outrageous ideas I can possibly think of! God sent His Son to die on a cross to defeat every possible barrier to people freely meeting with God and someone now wants to charge people for this? If God has given everything in the world to make something free and accessible charging for it is an immense transgression.

That aside, and to finish on a lighter note, the salvation army needs to work on it's punctuation, American tourists should try to blend in more, This is the best sign ever and This maybe the worst.

Tomorrow, Westminister proper.

The Monument from the bottom. Including my blurry head.

¹ If you think I'm mean to those of a High Church persuasion then I'd like to clarify that I don't think the High Church is nearly as bad as some make it out to be. Also, they're generally not part of the Liberal section of the church which endears them to me greatly.

Left

Sorry to interrupt my otherwise inane writing, but in terribly bad news today Hope of the States, possibly one of the best new-ish bands in Britain, have split up. As the only band I've known to release their difficult second album first and get away with it, it's a great loss to all that's good and new about British music. They were everything Babyshambles weren't and for that they should be very proud.

If you want to support a lost cause, or if you just want to hear really good news music then you can buy the new album Left, from shops or through the previous link via iTunes. If you're daring you can buy the first album first (The Lost Riots), which while being much harder work, is just as good, if not ever so slightly better. If you just want to get a few songs, then I recommend you start with Forwardirektion, Blood Meridian or from their first album, George Washington

Wednesday The 30th

• I've just moved into my new temporary abode in central London, it's shiny. I'm currently scrounging free wi-fi from an open local network but it's not very reliable and is of slightly dubious ethicality. First order of business tomorrow, find a local coffee shop that offers free wi-fi.

• I'm trying to sort out new headers for the site suitable for London. I've done some pictures from my limited London photos and I'm attempting to get them online however with the current wi-fi being unreliable it seems to be quite hard. The code for the headers is designed well enough to cope with most things, but not half uploaded photos of Notting Hill Carnival. Alas, if things look funny for the next few days you'll just have to cope with it.

• Speaking of Notting Hill Carnival, we went there on Monday and it was fairly swell. By far and away the best was the large drum group who had three staged conductors each conducting their own specific section in time with each other. It was very smart and very good. Respect is due.

• Other people living in this house have just come back, I'm off to socialise.

On the count of three.

London

Moving

I move down to London properly tomorrow. This is a somewhat dramatic occasion. After moving my little stuff in though, I have nothing to do till Monday other than get to know the neighbourhood and be a bit touristy.

So in the vein of are all American's idiots?, what answers would you like to me find out about London? I'll try and answer absolutely every question ever by next Monday. Obviously I'll fail, but I'll try anyway.

Overheard on the Bus yesterday

Girl: "Yeah my mum's far more hardcore than your mum, your mum drinks white wine, my mum drinks bottles of Budweiser."
Boy: "My mum's more hardcore, she drinks white wine out of the bottle."
Girl: "Your mum would never drink white wine out of the bottle, anyway my mum was being hit on by Stacey's dad."
Boy: "Yeah well everyone gets hit on by Stacey's dad, my mum was hit on by Terry's dad and she flirted back."
Girl: "Yeah well my mum danced with Terry."
Boy: "My mum danced with Terry and etc..."

How To Pack: Paper

You have too much paper in your house. You don't realise this because it's all stored neatly away in drawers and shoe boxes and ring folders. But really, if you looked, you have too much paper in your house. If you don't believe me, try moving house. I think that during the course of packing I have gotten rid of around three trees worth of flyers, old cards, instruction manuals, lecture notes, letters about my flat, mobile phone statements, talk notes and pieces of paper that had vital bits of information on them that I should never lose. Obviously there are some pieces of paper you'll want to or need to keep. The best plan is to sit on your bed (or whatever) with a big pile of paper and divide them into piles based on "Critical" "Keep" and "Throw". If for a second you deliberate over whether something belongs in the more important pile then it almost certainly doesn't. If your less important piles end up smaller than your more important piles, you probably need to throw more stuff out.

When this is all sorted here are four things to do with all that paper that will help you put off packing further:

• Try and organise all the paper that is left in the 'Keep' pile. Organising the 'Critical' pile probably isn't a bad idea but organising the 'Keep' pile is an entirely futile and pointless task and therefore will keep you occupied for hours. Just stick it all in a folder and call it quits.
• Make Paper planes (here's a website devoted to designs of them). It's quite fun to see what sort of paper goes farthest (I find classic A4 printer paper still works the best).
• Read them. Lecture notes from two years ago are fascinating bits of information.
• Remove all the staples and the plastic windows of envelopes. It turns out you can recycle pieces of paper with the staples still in and with plastic windows in, but if you don't know that you can spend a long time removing them instead of packing.

After all this is done, just dump it all in the nearest recycling bin. Paper is one of the easiest things to recycle, so if you don't do it you're a fool.

How To Pack: Priorities

Here is a simple rule of thumb when deciding on what's important enough to keep or not. If you haven't used it or looked at it inside of a year it's better off gotten rid of. Don't worry, getting rid of stuff that is still valuable even if it's now useless to you is a good exercise in simplicity. Throw it all out.

Stuff

On a packing note, stuff I have I don't want to have that you, if you want, can have for a nominal fee towards delivery.

• One Peavey practice guitar amp, 30 watts
• One Peavey imitation Strat Guitar. Front pickup needs re-soldering for it to work properly.
• One sleeping bag, not much use for sleeping outside but good if you have guests over and need extra beds
• One Sony CD player / Radio / Tape combo. Decent and only being gotten rid of because I don't play CDs or Tapes anymore.

That's it pretty much. Sorry.

How To Pack: Piles

I move down to London next week and so a big part of my life this week is packing up pretty much everything I own into boxes of various sizes. This isn't an experience done often so I may as well share the pain. Today we'll be discussing the packing organisational system that is known as "piles on you floor".

To get this system working the first thing you'll need to do is clear your floor. The best way to do this is to flick everything of your bed except what should be there, make it, then throw everything on the floor back on your bed. You now probably want to vacuum the carpet. Twice.

With the floor clear you need to mentally divide the floor up into 6 different sections. You can cut this down by using your bed as a variable swappable space, but it's easier if you have at least five sections free on the floor. Then starting with all the junk on your bed start piling things up into the following different sections. If you have a bunch of stuff that all goes in one pile but already is organised neatly then don't bother flooring it (for example, there's no point taking all your books off your bookcase if they're mostly going in one pile, just take the ones off that are going in another pile).

• Things I won't really pack, they'll just come with me
• iBook
• Camera
• Bible
• Pocket stuff (Phone, iPod, Wallet and now an Oyster Card)
• Things I'll need within a few days
• Shoes, Clothes
• Important documents¹
• Climbing stuff
• Things I'll want within a fortnight
• Colder clothes
• Some books
• Sleeping bag
• Things I'll want by Christmas
• Bike
• CDs
• DVDs
• Most books
• Duvets, sheets, towels
• Trusty Wilkinson's frying pan (the most expensive frying pan in the shop, costing a grand total of £7, it's absolutely awesome on every level)
• Herbs / Spices
• Things I'll never need nor want again (which splits into four piles):
• Things that can be charity shopped
• Various books, cds and clothes
• Things that can be recycled
• Papers, old worn out clothes
• Things I feel I should be able to be recycle.
• Broken shoes
• Bike parts
• Things that should just be chucked out.
• All those secret santa presents
• Anything that you haven't thought about for more than three months that only has 'sentimental' value.
• Things that I have no idea about how they came into my possession. (This pile doesn't really need a space of floor if you have a large enough window and a strong enough arm to get it into the nearby hedge

The reason for all this is that chances are you won't take everything down with you at once, or if you do you won't be bothered to unpack all at once but would rather make it a more leisurely affair. By dividing things up by when you use them you can still have boxes kicking around all packed up in three months time.

Now with everything in nice neat / sloppily haphazard piles you want to start putting the first two piles back where you removed them from. This sounds counter productive but if you put them back neatly they'll be easier to pack and really you don't want them out right now. Now starting with the stuff you can bin, work your way upwards through the list. Before you know it, it'll be time to go to bed and your floor will be a mess. But eventually it'll get done.

¹ We'll be dealing with how to pack up and organise your paperwork later this week. So don't worry about it for now.

Back

Hello!

I've arrived back safe and sound from Soul Survivor, plenty of exciting stories to tell but right now I'm not going to. Sorry. If you'd like something to wean you back in gradually to iamsparticus.com though, here's some really geeky stuff I'd like to beta on you.

Tomorrow: Pancakes

Chapter 1: Left Behind

There are two ways to write a book that finds it's purpose in copying something to show how wrong it is. The first way is to write a parody, taking the existing work and imitating it but exaggerating and drawing attention to certain bits for comic effect. If you don't have to exaggerate things much to make it amusing then it shows how absurd the original ideas are. This is why while parodies of the original Left Behind series exist, they're almost unnecessary because the original ideas are so absurd that they require no real exaggeration or attention drawing to them to make them amusing.

The second way to write this sort of correcting-through-imitation type of book is to re-write the book you want to correct but changing it so that the facts in the book aren't crazy and made up. So, for example, if you wanted to correct a book that states that Genghis Khan was so successful because he was actually a robot you would write a similar account about Genghis Khan's life but with him as a human Mongol Warlord instead.

In either of these approaches it's important not to misrepresent what the original says. After all if you can't get the original ideas of the book right how can you say it's wrong? And if you need to lie about what the other book teaches then maybe its ideas aren't ridiculous enough to justify the correction you're trying to do.

It's the second approach that the Survivor book tries to take and it's within two pages of the actual book¹ that they first misrepresent what the Left Behind series teach. The first two pages consist of some initial scene setting. There's a family called the Straits who are the equivalent to Left Behind's Steeles. They consist of a husband called Rayford who flies planes, a wife Irene who does wifely type things and two kids, Chloe and Raymie. In the Left Behind books the Raymie equivalent gets raptured and so never actually appears as a character but you hear lots about how awesomely holy and godly he was. Because the spiritual assessment of the Left Behind writers can never be accurate the Survivors' Raymie character is a bratty stupid boy. Anyway the misrepresentation occurs half way down the page when talking about jerk-Raymie's beliefs. Apparently Raymie believes that he'll be saved and taken to heaven "all because he had said a little prayer asking Jesus in to his heart".

There is a tendency in Evangelical Christianity towards reducing becoming a Christian to saying a formulaic prayer (or similar magic words). Most know that this is wrong, that becoming a Christian involves a change of heart not just saying some words and in fairness the Left Behind series' authors believe that too. But it'd be fair easier for McKay to present them as believing that people are saved by magic words so he does. Which just illustrates how weak his own argument is. If he has to twist the plot of an already absurd book and give the authors beliefs they don't really have to make his case and arguments seem sensible in comparison then his case and arguments obviously aren't sensible normally.

¹ It actually first misrepresents back in the introduction when it says that the Left Behind authors are in it for money and fame and glory. But this is the first time it happens in a chapter of their book.

Monday The 7th

A few things being dropped from the back of my brain:

As mentioned various people went to the zoo on Wednesday to see a variety of Lions and Tigers and Binturongs. I can't be bothered to make wit about it all here because I used it all up making comments on the album on Flickr. You should check that out.

On TV late Friday night:
"And remember this is Late Night Money Gamble, where you can win £30,000. And we have a caller on the line right now. Hello who's there?"
"Hi, it's Mohammed"

As I didn't mention last Thursday was Phil Brown's charity type ball thing to raise money for his gap year next year. As part of this everyone dressed up and danced. Unsurprisingly I was average at dancing. Also unsurprising was that Kev was fantastic at it all. Again all the best witticisms are on the album on Flickr.

Did you know that there is a rumour that supposedly there is a secret tube station in the base of the BBC broadcasting house in London? Also supposedly there are fake houses in London that were originally designed to cover steam vents from the old steam tube lines. These houses still exist apparently. Also, the reason that big American cities have steam rising from grates is because lots of their electricity is powered by steam. This is entirely true if entirely unbelievable.

I'm at Soul Survivor tomorrow. It should be fairly awesome but who knows how much I'll update. I may put things on the website that'll cycle up every day or so. I may not. We'll see.

Hungary: Languages and Stuff

This is Lake Balaton. It was full of snakes, mud and exceedingly nice water. The latter made up for the first things.

In case you're wondering why I went to Hungary with a bunch of young people the reason is this: Every year my former work is involved with a youth camp called rather grandly the 'international youth network' which is made up of young people from different nationalities, mostly from Eastern Europe. Every year we take young people we work with on this camp with the aim of helping them grow as Christians. This year it was in Hungary. Simple enough really.

If you're wondering how we deal with the language issues that obviously arise it that sort of environment, well it works much like the rest of the world. Everyone who doesn't have English as their native tongue is forced to speak it all week. Then the English group feel superior because they have a slightly better grasp of the language. A standard conversation goes like this:
"My English isn't that good really"
"Oh no, it's really good"
"No No, I have be learning it for four years and I should be better but I'm not"
"Really, it's not that bad"
"Thank you, it's not as good as my Russian though"
"You speak Russian as well?"
"Yes, we had to learn it in school."
"Wow, how many languages do you speak?"
"Well, my own language, Russian, some Romanian and Estonian."
"And English"
"Yes but I do not like to say I speak English because it isn't that good."
"Oh"
"How many language's do you speak"
"Well I suppose if I was to go by your standards, ummm... none."

These are some Estonians looking puzzled. Probably trying to work out where on earth Estonia actually is.

However I did make some effort in other languages. I've known Danish people for three years now and I currently know how to say "I am a...", "you are a...", "sorry", "no" and two sorts of "yes". I also know the word for Cow and Chicken. I know slightly more about the Estonian language but slightly fewer words. Here are the two things that you need to know about the Estonian language. Firstly, it's only really related to one other language and that's Finnish. It has nothing to do with English and so is very hard to learn. Secondly, and far more interestingly, it has the worst insults of any language I've ever heard insults in and that's a fair few languages. I should clarify that I don't mean worst insults in the sense of 'oh my word how could you say something so unbelievable offensive? For that I shall never speak to you again'¹ I mean worst in the 'I'm sorry was that meant to be offensive sense'. For example, in English if we want to tell someone to get lost with some severity we say 'go to hell', which is fairly harsh when you think about it. Because we find their presence offensive we're telling them to go to the place of eternal torment where they can never get any joy, peace or rest. In Estonian the equivalent phrase is 'mina metsa' which translated literally is 'go to the forest'. I don't want to take anything away from the scariness of forests late at night in a country that has bears, wolves and former communists but go to the forest? Either some country needs work through unresolved issues with conifers or they need to work on how exactly to insult people.

By this time the Estonians had realised they had no hope of finding where Estonia was. So they thought they'd just look smug and get on with life.

¹ Arabic wins that award worryingly comfortably

How To Read The Bible

Phil Brown asks:

"What is a 'safe' alternative to the dispensationalist framework to interpreting the bible - in particular the notion that the bible must be "understood plainly unless it would do violence to the text"? "

The problem with reading the Bible as "understood plainly" is that in ambiguous cases you are the person who decides what is plain and what is not. Have you ever seen a film where afterwards you go "well it's obvious he really loved her all along" and the person you saw it with went "clearly that is not true, he fell back in love with her when she appeared at the ball with the silver dress on"? Or better yet have you ever been to Starbucks with Me and Gareth and heard us debate the sexuality of that male barista? To me he's plainly not gay, he just acts it in a foolish attempt to get close to the ladies. To Gareth he is obviously as gay as a kite¹. If a case is ambiguous then your individual personality and beliefs sets the meaning of the text for you. And while you can appeal to a higher source of truth to find out the reality in most circumstances - with a film you can watch the DVD directors commentary and with someone's sexuality you can ask them² - you can't do that with your interpretation of the Bible because the Bible is the highest source of truth and your interpretation is plainly correct.

So, how should you interpret the Bible? Well, I'm no expert on this so what I say here is going to be very simple and very basic. Anything more than that and I shall be parlerai hors de mon derrière. But basically; you should interpret the bible as the bible interprets itself. Or said in perhaps a slightly more comprehensible way, you should understand the Bible as the Bible understands itself. Therefore the Bible sets how you interpret the Bible. And the Bible is written as 66 books of differing styles and authors inspired and made infallible by God making up one complete book that reveals God's plan for creation and for humanity and profoundly centring on Jesus Christ³. It is useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteous for every Christian ever. It's consistent and un-contradicting across the whole. Most importantly the Bible is a book designed to change your life and affect you. Reading it as a cold distant book is not the way the Bible should be read and reading it that way will lead to error. The Bible can only be read and should only be read (at least by Christians) as God speaking to us now telling us about Himself.

So when you read Revelation 1:9-11 and it says:

"I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, "Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea."

you'd say "well John is writing this as an account of a vision he had and he's sending it to the churches in the North Eastern part of the Mediterranean who were under-going persecution at the time." You wouldn't say "this is an account of how the world ends" because that's not what John set down to write, that's not how the Bible understands itself. Also it fails the test of being teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteousness for every Christian. Imagine the churches John writes to, who are suffering immense persecution, getting a letter saying "hey, if you're interested here's how the Antichrist is going to use barcodes and computer chips to take over the world, oh and by the way all Christians will disappear from the face of the earth before that knowledge will be of any real use". They might not be best pleased.

In summary, the best way to understand the bible is as the bible understands itself, reading it as a child of God seeking to learn from it.

¹ I think this is the correct expression. If not, it's a good one.

² We found out in the end, Gareth was right.

³ Some people would say that the bible is not such a cohesive whole and that it's more lots of little bits with Christ being the biggest of the bits, or the thing that appears in most bits. These people are wrong. It's all about Christ and it's all about the story that leads to Him.