Flight of the Conchords

Prime TV has a knack of getting the really good shows - The Office, Extras, Robin Hood...and now The Flight of the Conchords! I saw this awesome folk duo last night - may favourite musical moments from the song, I'm Not Crying. First there is the lyrical genius of:

I'm not crying, noooo-ho-ho-ho.
There's just a little bit of dust in my eye
Just from the path that you made when you said your goodbye.
I'm not weeping cause you won't be here to hold my hand,
For your information there's an inflammation in my tear-gland.
I'm not upset because you left me this way,
My eyes are just a little sweaty today.
They've been looking around a lot, searching for you,
They've been looking for you,
Even though I told them not to.

Awesome!

Then this moment of excellence unequalled since Alanis Morisette's misstatement of irony:

I'm sitting at this table called love
Staring down at the irony of life.
How come we've reached this fork in the road,
And yet it cuts like a knife.

Priceless.

Anyways it made me laugh.

Shame On You

So the Labour-led government has finally found a limit on its political correctness. Having savaged our social policy in recent years with legislation covering topics such as de facto property rights, civil unions, legalisation of prostitution and parental discipline, the end is now in sight.

NZ has failed to vote for the UN Declaration on Indigenous Rights citing an incompatibility with NZ law. Except for one small detail: its a non binding declaration. So NZ could have happily signed off on this and pointed to the Treaty of Waitangi as its defining governing "legislation".

Its a cynical political move. With a dwindling voter base, shocked at the radical social engineering of recent years, Labour finally has to count the cost, ironically where the injustice is the greatest. In the end, they figure the Maori party will get the Maori votes anyway, so they better not offend the middle ground any more with spectres of reverse land grabbing and usurping of settler sovereignty.

No comment from John Key yet! Probably best to stay quiet on this one John...

Romans Course

This week I'm doing a Romans course at Carey Baptist College. So far its been good value. The lecturer is an enthusiast and I respect greatly his ability to translate the Greek on the fly. I have not been in a class like this before where the lecturer is so capable within his subject. It's also interesting being in a class of considerable diversity. Such a wide range of opinion. I have done my best to suppress my own starting points and just allow the text of Romans to speak. This can be a frustrating process if one is simply there to test one's own preconceptions (or the lecturer)! But he has a positive conviction that we should learn how to approach a book like Romans, rather than simply give us the answers. He's also prepared to allow for a healthy dose of mystery. Anyways, so far Wesley was right! ;)

Worship Restructuring

We're changing some of our worship planning processes at cession so we can free up more creativity and involve the right people in the right tasks. Its cool. One of the things this should allow us to do is action new initiatives like this:

Public Service Announcement

I'e been surprised this week by how many NZ organisations have been rushing around getting consent to continue sending "unsolicited" emails to my INBOX. It's all down to the SPAM legislation - the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act. Many of them need to. But a number that I regularly receive don't...simply because the Act doesn't apply to them.

The Act applies only to COMMERCIAL messages! So churches, charitable organisations, Bible Colleges - RELAX - you're OK.

Three in One

Anything missing?

It's Out There

I know it's almost blasphemous what those Sci-Fi types say about the earth's shape

Relax...

Soon you'll have a whole collection for the wall at Carey, Rhett...

New Fun-Die Funnies!

A picture is worth 1000 words...you can post entries for the Fundy Funny contest to the Comments Section...

"Wisdom"

More from the Emergent haters...these were the funny ones!

This was a prophetic one (even if just a tiny bit unfair):

This was just plain mean-spirited:'

Emergent Terrorism

A while back Rhettspect (RIP) stirred up the Emergent nest reporting on a local church's involvement in a savaging of the "movement" by a strangely uninformed expert. Turns out the expert was right after all. Why Al Qaeda Supports the Emergent Church should blow out all your candles, overwhelm the stations of silent contempation with virulent praise and repaint the grey with striking black and white. Thanks to Steve Thompson for alerting us all.

West Michiganders:

You really need to check this out

http://bicynicalist.blogspot.com/2007/08/in-case-mark-gorveatte-goes-missing.html

Metaphors

I've long had a professional interest in the power and limitations of metaphors. The concept of metaphor is a complex one, yet foundational to how humanity thinks and communicates. Metaphor is a way of expressing understanding but it also represents the way we think when seeking to understand. Gareth Morgan (Images of Organisation) defines metaphor in this way:

“Metaphor is a comparative figure of speech often used to add a creative flourish…But the nature and effect of metaphor is much more complex, much more fundamental. It is a primal force through which humans create meaning by using one element of experience to understand another.”

Even familiar concepts that have long since passed into common parlance have metaphorical origins. The idea of “organisation” is a metaphor based on the Greek for tool or instrument. The concept of “management” itself is based on an image drawn from horsemanship.

The weakness of metaphor arises as a result of its great strength – the removal of distinguishing detail from the item under comparison. Morgan notes that because of this metaphor will always create distortions:

“…metaphor frames our understanding…in a distinct yet partial way – partial, because metaphor always produces a one-sided insight. In highlighting certain interpretations, it forces others into a background role.”

In this understanding of metaphor lies an important contradiction – the insights generated by a metaphor must be balanced by the inevitable acceptance that the metaphor or theory has its own blindspots which may lead to misunderstanding or biased interpretations – “the way of seeing created though a metaphor becomes a way of not seeing.”

What this understanding of metaphor means is that we are driven to accept that no one theory or metaphor is capable of describing reality in an accurate manner.

The acceptance of multiple metaphors to describe anything reveals the enormous complementarity that can exist between metaphors. This approach can lead to complexity and diversity – different features of divergent metaphors may have a simultaneous presence within the organisation oir concept under discussion. However, ironically, the complexity that arises from such a viewpoint actually makes the point – life is complex despite the panacea that "simplifying" metaphors seem to offer at first blush!

Which is why metaphors break down. It's also why long debates focused on that point of breakdown are largely a waste of time!

Smog or Smokescreen?

So it's a year to go to the Beijing Olympics and you'd think it was opening ceremony time judging by the celebrations in China. As if they didn't have enough problems with smog, a whole bunch of fireworks went up in smoke. It's the smog which has dominated media reports in this country, but I wonder if there's a denser smokescreen in all this.

Are the Beijing Olympics the most politicised Olympic Games since the so-called "Nazi Games" in Munich, 1936?

China's human rights record remains appalling. In a more-ironic-than-most announcement earlier this year, the Chinese Radio, Film and Television's Propaganda Administration Department announced a ban on, among other things, discussing whether the media should be free. Perversely this even prevents the Chinese citizen arguing in favour of a state-controlled press! Add to that the repressive internet restrictions that have led to the coining of the phrase "the great firewall of China". How will the media-hungry West cope with the climate? The government has publicly recommitted itself to allowing foreign journalists unrestricted geographical access during the 2008 Olympics. But the government will forbid those same journalists from reporting on corruption issues, legal reform and efforts by activists to protect human rights.

In other words, its the Olympic coverage itself that will be the real smog cloud obscuring ongoing abuses by the Chinese government. Once again the Olympics become window dressing for a corrupt regime.

A New Convert

So with Rhett talking about evangelism amongst other things, it seems right that I announce my latest conversion...

A little while ago Frank received great plaudits from Rhett for the role that his blog played in Rhett coming to cession and to the blogging world. I smiled with paternal affection, for Frank is my blogging son - true the son may now have exceeded the father, but is that not every father's dream? Which makes Rhett my blogging grandson...

All this to say my latest blogging convert is my father-in-law, which makes him my blogging son-in-father-in-law...You can catch him over at The Bicynicalist - he's making up for lost time - with all the freshness of a blogging adolescent.