i am sparticus: Words

The Four Levels of Arrogance

Below I have outline for your enlightenment, the four levels of arrogance.

3) You think your abilities are unique
2) You think your inabilities are unique
1) You think recognising that neither your inabilities or your abilities is unique is unique.
0) You are perfectly humble

The list, while useful, glosses over the most important concept regarding point one leading some to rewrite the list as such:

3) You think your abilities are unique
2) You think your inabilities are unique
1) You think recognising that neither your inabilities or your abilities is unique is unique (goto 3).
0) You are perfectly humble

See also, the circle of pride.

Sola Scriptura

One thing reformed evangelicalism and charismatic evangelism have in common, and generally get wrong, is the efficacy of scripture.

Plank, Splinter, Speck of saw dust. Confession time. All the time, ALL THE TIME, I take kids through the bible without ever reading them the actual text of the bible. I do stories from the bible without quoting the text, I do moral points without showing them the proverbs. I do all sorts of things to hide scripture. The line between getting people to study scripture because it changes their hearts and magic bookism is probably small, but I've avoided dealing with it by not letting them see the plain text.

Caveats in place, back to the first sentence. Scripture has efficacy, a technical short hand which means, you read it, and it changes your life. It is powerful (and if I don't have to clarify, scripture means the Christian bible, the other scriptures have the efficacy of arsenic). And yet, when we preach, or lead, or it's-not-preaching-it's-speaking-from-the-front, we so often fail to recognise it. I presume this is pride, that we understand scripture rightly and therefore our words have efficacy. This manifests itself as the reformed preaching a multi-point outline of scripture and not scripture, or the charismatic preaching 'this is what God is saying to us' and not scripture.

Chancery Lane

Today I went to Barclays. Nothing new there, I bank there after all. Do you know it takes five days to order a new cheque book? I certainly didn't. A fun filled fact about Barclays:

They've recently (when recently means it's the first time I've noticed) rebranded and they've dotted all over their walls chummy posters that end in parentheses, giving the impression (or trying to) that the last bit of information is a friendly bit of inside knowledge, whispered across the bank branch to make your transaction that bit easier. They're something like:

"This ATM can help you

• Get out money
• Top up your phone
• Panic over your balance
  (and it won't flash red lights if you've insufficient funds!)"

or

"Chat now to our instore loan advisor

• Finance that new car
• Go nuts in the Apple Store
• Owe us more later
  (debt is keeping the economy afloat)"

or

"We're open 24 hours a day online

• Pay your bills
• Add us as a friend
• Now a facebook application, compare balances!
  (LOL)

or

"Tried telephone banking?

• Access your money over the phone
• Speak to a machine
• By moving to phone we can move even more positions to India and pay our staff less money.
  (Fitter. Happier. More Productive)

I had this design a few website versions back that for reason of Internet Explore 5 through 6 necessitated a text footer at the bottom of every significant block of text. With blog posts, this was easy; you'd just go:

"Posted by mark @ timestamp, in the category "not addicted to the internet at all" with x comments"
but when you go to writing more static pages like the about page you'd really start to struggle and end up giving every section needlessly forced punchlines (if you could call them that).

The same thing happens with the new Barclays design (except, it's worse, because you're no longer humouring a young man on the internet who knows no better, you're humouring an international trader of wealth). So when on Jane Smith's badge it reads;

"Jane Smith

Cashier

(I Love Work)"

I think "Not today you don't love (I don't think the word love though, I add it afterwards to make it read better, I'm not a "you alright love?" sort of person)". It's more frustrating when it happens with ATM machines. If you want to make me treat the cash machine as a person then give it the programming to swallow the card of the woman in front of me who just tried three times to take out ten pounds when the machine was clearly telling her twenties only. A little vindictiveness would do a lot of persuasion towards humanity, especially after queuing for five days for a cheque book¹.

¹ See this punchline? This is what I like to call, a Brysonism. Don't have a punchline to your piece of writing? Don't worry! Just casually reference back to the tangential affair your story starting from and act like this is a witty conclusion. If this fails, insult the foreigners. Of course, if either of these two fail, just copy what a famous, much finer writer than you did and then have the audacity to draw attention to this and then, because you can't actually hit him from behind with a plank, make sarcastic comments about his poor style of writing that you've just stolen.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Predictions

• You'll read it too fast, miss bits out, and then have to read it again immediately afterwards.

• You'll start every conversation next week with "have you finished Harry Potter yet?".

• Your second line in every conversation will either be "hurry up already", "what did you think about x dying?" or "LALALA I'M NOT LISTENING".

• You'll not get as much sleep as you should.

• Someone will tell you what happens at the end before you finish it.

Wednesday the 18th

• My father told me to update this website on Sunday. When your father is telling you to update your website you know you... well I'm not sure. It's not really that odd these days.

• I have decided that Coldplay have never written a better song than Everything's Not Lost.

• My mobile phone provider rang me up the other day and asked me if I would like to renew my contract. Here's how to get a cheaper bill and new phone; "oh, but I thought my phone contract wasn't up until iPhonember. I mean September."

#rofl

Her: "Stop making geek jokes."
Him: "Why? Hexadecimal jokes are great."
Me: "99ccff"
Him: "A0CCD89"
Me: "000"
Him: "Racist"

You Said No

I just had something of a revelation; for the first time in my life I listened to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' not through the TV with its mono flat sound, or through some bass heavy nightclub's speakers, or on the cut in / cut out of FM radio, but on a decent pair of headphones playing at high quality. It's still over-rated. Mind you, the whole Nirvana thing passed me by¹. I'm not sure why they were such a big thing with kids my age anyway, seeing as Kurt redecorated his swimming pool when most of us were only just getting over the Spice Girls². I blame older siblings and the Johnny Cash effect ("Wow, Johnny Cash is dead!" "Who?" "Johnny Cash, you know, he's really influential" "Oh, Johnny Cash! I mean yeah, I've always liked him."³). The point is, I never got into them and so consequentially have a confession to make; I don't own any Nirvana albums and really rather prefer the Foo Fighters⁴ (and about a thousand other bands).

¹ Top Five Nirvana Songs in no particular order; - Heart Shaped Box (x 3), - Come As You Are, - You Know You're Right

² Top Five Spice Girls Songs in no particular order; - Wannabe, - Spice Up Your Life, - Stop, - That one they're in a desert in a video and throwing ninja moves (x2).

³ Top Five Johnny Cash Songs in no particular order; - The Ring Of Fire, - When The Man Comes around, - Hurt (x3).

⁴ Top Five Foo Fighters Songs in no particular order; - Everlong, - February Stars, - Best Of You, - M.I.A., - Razor.

Transport XP

It is (was) 12:21 am. I have just arrived back from cycling from the girlfriends from dinner, friends, the smoke free pub, and fixing the girlfriend's computer. Guess which of those five to six things have been least fun.

The essential problem with the girlfriends computer is that it wants to get on the house's wireless network, which is secured in a way Windows XP service pack 1 doesn't understand. So you drop the wireless down on another computer, spend ten minutes getting it online, spend another hour or two downloading service pack two, install service pack 2, restart, watch it crash, watch it crash, watch it crash, restore it back to service pack 1 levels, cry a bit, and give up. And so forth. You don't really care about the details. Needless to say, the Mac's are better than Window's thought's I've been encouraging on this website shall carry on being encouraged.

And then cycling home. It's fine till you get to Pentonville road (hotel!) and then find that you can't turn onto it in the direction that you want. And then you find, that all along the ring road you need to travel upon, you're not allowed to turn right. The way to turn right, is to turn off left and hope you can find the right right turns to make to get you back onto the correct road that leads across the ring road. Obviously you don't find the correct road, because there seems to be no need to signpost it and you end up horribly lost somewhere in Bloomsbury's back streets occasionally seeing the street you want pass by at the end of a wrong way road. Eventually you find yourself back on the ring road a block further down than when you started still not being able to turn right, so you get off your bike, push it over the road at a pedestrian crossing and carry on, ruefully thinking how much time you'd have saved if you'd have done this earlier.

The point; don't try to fix windows while trying to make a right turn on a bike in central London I guess.

A Bit Rubbish.

I read on the internet a few weeks back, a news story about how basically, terrorists, generally speaking, are a bit rubbish. What inspired that news story was the sending to jail of some wannabe terrorists who thought they'd blow up JFK airport, armed with a monkey wrench, a French dictionary and some fine leather jackets¹. They failed, because, well, it's actually quite hard to blow up an airport with those three items. It seems that it's quite common for people not to do their research before they attempt to do blowing up stuff.

Take in point, these car bombs (by the way, thanks to everyone who asked if I was okay in all this (hi Raych)). First, they crash one of the cars into a lamp-post in one of the busiest parts of the entire country, though they do it at 2am when the place is considerably emptier (though not completely so). If they were hoping it would go off then, well, they obviously weren't very good at the whole making a car bomb concept. If they were hoping to leave it there till it blew up in the morning (more likely, given the other bomb found) then they probably shouldn't have crashed it into a lamp-post in a part of town that would still have people in at that time of the morning and where someone was bound to report it to the police. Which they did. But then they left the other car parked at the side of a busy road in central London. And this is where their poor planning really shines through. Westminster has ridiculously low council tax, something like the second lowest in the country. The reasons for this are many; the high proportion of tourists with lots of money, all the big businesses, all the rich folk, all the shopping, the relatively small size of the city. But if you ask a resident why council tax is so low, they'll tell you it's because of parking tickets. Westminster Council employs a ridiculously large number of parking wardens, fines at the drop of a hat, and makes it nigh on impossible for you to complain. And given the number of rich folk living in the borough who just have to drive everywhere, it makes them a lot of money.

And so, if you'd asked a resident or worker in Westminster what would happen to a car parked at the side of the road without the correct permit displayed or meter paid or badge in place, the answer would be "they'd get fined in about five minutes and towed within the hour". Which is exactly what happened. Terrorists; generally a bit rubbish.

¹ Imagine life was as simple as Monkey Island. You wouldn't do work, you'd just have to use pen with paper. Mind you, getting the paper would probably involve your stapler, the hair of a goat and giving Phil from accounts a mild diarrhetic. Simpler times.