Archives for September, 2005

Gillete’s new "breakthrough" razor

A funny post about Fast Company’s exposure to the new Gillette Fusion. In the end, it’s just another razor.

Again, you can see the wheels turning over at Gillette PR HQ: Who cares if those journalists walk out of here with their skin hanging off their face in ribbons, like what you see at a car wash? They could have their face skin peeled right off, star in a roadshow production of Silence of the Lambs; all they’re gonna remember is that impossibly hot by conventional standards woman who rubbed their face for five minutes.

09/30/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Being pigeon holed

Warren Kinsella has an excellent post on being portrayed one way by the media and now acting in a different way

The line of questioning, with regional and demographic variations usually goes something like this: “Warren, you have worked at the most senior levels of the Liberal Party, advising a Prime Minister, and writing and lecturing about political strategy. And now you have a written a book about punk? Why? How?”

Those are the words that come out, but what they really mean is this: “A lot of us knew you as one thing, and now you are pretending to be something else entirely. Quit screwing with the formula. It’s irritating, because we don’t get it, and it makes it harder for us to describe you to our readers and viewers and listeners.”

Something like that.

In other words, once you have been assigned to a particular media pigeonhole — in my case, “Chretien-era attack dog” — you are not permitted to fly off in some other, unexpected, direction. It’s complicated, and complications are too complicated for garden-variety, standard-issue ten-inch news stories. Stay in your hole.

As with all punks — because, yes indeed, I was a punk and love punk music and the punk movement, and I still play (badly) in a punk band — I am secretly delighted by all of this. I happy to be challenging, in some modest way, assumptions made by the mass media.

Now, Walter Lippmann, the famous American journalist, famously remarked about the pressing need to “manufacture” reality for “the bewildered herd.” Noam Chomsky agreed with Lippmann, but deplored the fact that all of this media manufacturing is done in the service of anti-democratic, pro-war corporate interests.

Personally, I think the pigeonholing is usually done for more benign reasons. Life has indeed become very complicated, as noted, with voters and consumers (they’re rarely the same person) being bombarded by jillions of images and words every year. David Korn, another smart American guy, calls this bombardment “data smog,” and it is. Someone needs to simplify things, and the media — come Hell or high water, as the ditherer used to say, back when we thought he meant it — have made a blood oath to do so. It is their self-assigned role.

Well, here’s one pigeon who has flown the coop and rather enjoys the sensation of unfettered flight.

Punk? Politico? None of it, all of it.

I think many of experience it in the same way. Based on people’s stereotypes of what we do, where we come from, or even race or ethnic background, when we think or act out of that box, people are disarmed and even uncomfortable when we act differently as adults. Thankfully there are those that don’t care. I need to get a copy of the book and review it here. That will be my act of rebellion this week.

09/30/2005 | politics | No Comments

Evolution, not Revolution

This long quote comes from Kester Brewin’s amazing book, The Complex Christ. You can only order it through Amazon.co.uk but it is well worth the wait (and the ridiculous fees that Canadian customs charged me). Links (and typos) are mine.

Our history, both ancient and modern, has been transfixed by the idea of revolution, of radical change precipitated quickly, requiring an uprising, an insurgence, a head of pressure and a focusing of force; demonstrations, coups d’etat, armed struggles, wars and regime changes. Warriors, dictators and their critics have been clear about it for centuries. Chairman Mao Zedong wrote that ‘a revolution is not a dinner party. It cannot be so leisurely and gentle… It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another’; Paul Virilio in Speed and Politics that ‘revolution will soon be entirely reduced to a permanent assault on time. The man on the battlefield has no safety other than in suicidal entrance into the very trajectory of the speed of [the guns]‘; and Napoleon that ‘the strength of a revolutionary army should be evaluated as in mechanics, by its mass multiplied by its speed’. Through all their blood and violence many of our politicians seem to believe that these revolutions bring genuine transformation. Yet it is abundantly clear that materially, politically, psychologically and spiritually, violent change tends to shear, to break the whole as one surface part moves and leaves the rest of the body behind unaltered.

In his seminal work Future Shock, Alvin Toffler describes the psychological damage that occurs to people when they are overwhelmed by intense change. He talks about ‘future shock’ being a disease of change, a sickness that people suffer that not so much about the direction of change as the rate of it. Future shock, he says, ‘grows out of the increasing lag between … the pace of environmental change and limited pace of human response’. In other words, for our own health, we need change to occur not at revolutionary speeds demanded by power-wielding dictators or company board rooms, but at the evolutionary speeds of the empowered human body.

Party in response to Toffler’s concerns, people have begun to see that the nature of change has been itself been required to change. If we are to transform the whole, and truly alter the very nature of things for good, then the mode of change cannot be revolution but evolution. A gradual development over a long period of time. As Robert Warren notes, ‘A good case can be made for evolution being the best single word summary of an Anglican approach to change. It suggests creativity [and] responsiveness to present environment’.

The slowness of evolution certainly has a divine beauty about it with its gentle, unseen transformation so hard to plot yet so undeniable in its force. We would like change immediate effect — we want revolution — but God’s ways are not our ways and God’s thoughts are higher than our. Despite this, sas we will see in the next chapter, we have projected our revolutionary tendencies onto God, and it is only as revelation has become clearer over time that we have seen that ours is not a God of violent uprising, but of slow, slow evolution. So since forever, and until whenever, those that have sought to change God’s way have had to endure a prefix of…

Waiting

As Sarah waited: Ninety years for a son to fulfill God’s promise.
We wait in hope for what we thought had been spoken to us.

As Moses waited: 40 years in the desert, being prepared by God to lead his people.
We wait for emptiness and humility; for bravado to wither.

As Israel waited: 40 years of wandering, hungry, depressed, thirsting, unsure.
We wait for the right time to act

As the Prophets waited: 1000 years of promises that God would raise up a Saviour.
We wait for the signs that God has not forgotten.

As Mary waited: 9 months of her 14 years for the child of God.
We feel the birth-pains, yet fear for the child.

As John the Baptist waited: Scanning the crowds for the one whose sandals he would not be worthy to untie.
We long for an experience of the Divine

As Jesus waited: 30 years of creeping time.
40 days in the desert of temptation.
3 years of misunderstanding.
3 days in the depths of hell.

So we wait for God’s time. Preparing the way.
Our turn to toil on leveling mountains and straightening paths.
Our turn to watch the horizon.
Our turn to pass on the hope that He who promised is faithful and will come back.
So God, we ask you to bless this bread.
In its brokenness we remember the sacrifice you made for us.
May it nourish the visions you have planted in us,
and strengthen us in the wait to see your promises come to pass.

Over my travels I have had the opportunity to sit in on the occasional “revolutionary church” and I keep going, “This is what radical looks like? It doesn’t look that much different than traditional”. I kept going, “wheres the revolution?” but instead I am starting to realize that there wasn’t one, they just evolved. The revolutionary language comes in the need to sell books and conferences and the need for alpha males to see themselves as visionary alpha males. The problem is that I think is that parts of the church have resisted evolution and has remained unchanged since their traditions last revival.

It’s a great book and Kester Brewin publishes an excellent and provocative blog as well.

09/30/2005 | environment | 1 Comment

Mayfair Community School website

So the other night Wendy and I went to Mayfair School’s Fine Arts night. It was nice and like all things like this, the school administration made a couple of announcements.

Now this parenting a school kid thing is new to Wendy and I but we do have a vested interest in what is happening at Mayfair School for both Mark and the rest of the school. Like all schools everywhere, they send home a lot of paper announcements and also have a Front Page templated website. As a parent, this is what I would love for the school to have. A weblog with a RSS feed. You could do a simple Blogger blog on their own website or host it on Blogspot with the minimum of fuss. If they got more ambitious down at the school board hq, a Movable Type or Word Press blog would allow them to organize the posts by class or grade making it even easier to keep up-to-date. An RSS feed would allow you to monitor things by My Yahoo!, Bloglines or your favorite aggregator.

Even cooler would be class specific blogs but I can understand getting all x many teachers blogging might be difficult.

Now that I think about it, the same can be said for seminaries, Bible colleges, and local churches. Wendy and I hear from the college that we are alumni of, twice a year in the form of a fundraising letter. Compare that to the local churches and ministries that have RSS feeds (generally blogs). I find that I pray often for Gateway Covenant Church in Prince Albert (pastored by Randall Friesen) because I subscribe to their blogs RSS feed and when they post, I am reminded of them.

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09/30/2005 | Saskatoon, blogging, technology | 1 Comment

On the Candidates’ Blogs, Writing Right and Wrong

As a former Catholic schoolboy from the Bronx, surely Fernando Ferrer knows that falsehoods can trip you up.

Mr. Ferrer, the Democratic candidate for mayor, nevertheless found himself stumbling yesterday after his political opponents pointed out something amiss on his campaign Web site: a personal log entry “posted by Fernando Ferrer,” in which he recalled attending “public schools for most of my education.”

Mr. Ferrer actually attended Catholic schools for most of his education, graduating from the prestigious Cardinal Spellman High School with a scholarship to New York University. Certainly, he has not forgotten his Good Book amid his pursuit of votes from public school teachers, parents and graduates?

He has not, aides said yesterday. They maintained that Mr. Ferrer did not write the blog entry attributed to him.

“An item submitted by Freddy Ferrer was inaccurately edited regarding Freddy’s education,” Nick Baldick, the campaign manager, said in a statement. “We apologize for the mistake and have corrected the entry.”

Yet even that explanation was not quite right. Jen Bluestein, a spokeswoman for the Ferrer campaign, said the candidate did not submit a written item but rather “passed on some ideas” to an aide, who then wrote three paragraphs and posted them in his name. The prose has a quality that could be confused with Mr. Ferrer’s speaking style, but in whole it reads like a news release.

Asked why Mr. Ferrer was credited for words he did not write, Ms. Bluestein offered an everyone-does-it defense.

“This happens in political campaigns all the time,” she said. “In this case he called in some ideas, and someone got a little loose with the editing.”

Look, we all know that parts of jordoncooper.com has been ghost written by Peter C. Newman and for years while he is recording off the comment comments by myself for a later biography but this is generally not a good practice. Especially by someone who is running for elected office. What I don’t understand is why the campaign did not do what the Howard Dean campaign did and have to people like Matthew Gross and Zephyr Teachout do the writing and be your spokesmen. Have the candidate or CEO/executive to post occasionally to the blog (like the Dean campaign or GM’s Fastlane blog. It’s a lot better option than being outed by the press for being fake. via

09/30/2005 | politics | No Comments

Contextless Links

09/30/2005 | Contextless Links | No Comments

Jason Clark has a great post on over promising in the church

Over the years I have been to gatherings with 10,000 people where revival was promised (it never came), read books that promised me the ultimate marriage, the deepest possible relationship with God, the most superlative whatever. You name it, we’ve promised it.

I’ve also got memories of seeing dozens of people over the years being prophesied over, ‘I see you changing a generation’. Given that maybe one or two people have that kind of influence historically, there are a lot of disappointed people out there, who that has not come true for.

So we move away from this stuff but what are we promising? I’m still reading, hearing, seeing promises of the newest and latest, it might now be called holistic, incarnational, missional, emerging, but in the enthusiasm of us involved, are we over promising again? We can now all be freed from the evils of the modern church to be ‘authentic’ and ‘real’, we can all be missional revolutionaries now.

09/29/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Anatomy Of A Disgrace

I was a Pat Tillman fan when he played in the NFL. The San Francisco Chronicle has a chilling story on how the facts of his death were changed for political purposes by the Pentagon. I am linking to a blog post that summarizes the article.

09/29/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

Contextless Links

09/29/2005 | Contextless Links, environment | No Comments

The first of many

Last night Wendy and I wandered over to Mayfair School to the Mayfair Community School Meet the Teacher and Fine Arts Night. Mark’s class said a poem about an apple tree and I realized that I have eight more years of this at least unless he shows a passion for theatre and then I have at least 12 more years but it was fun. Mark was so excited in reciting his poem that he offered to say it all day yesterday but Wendy managed to tactfully persuade him that he should save it for the performance.

Mayfair is an old school being built in 1919 and the gymnasium is in the basement of the school. Considering that Mayfair sits on a large park and real estate wasn’t a problem when the school was built, I have no idea why it was like that unless it was designed to serve as a bomb shelter or as a dungeon. I looked around for Randall was here or Leighton was here carvings but I didn’t notice any. Maybe next time.

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09/29/2005 | Saskatoon, technology | 2 Comments

PodBible

PodBible: The Bible as regular MP3 podcasts or download what you want by book and chapter. Hey, someone had to do it. via

The Message is the first Bible to publish itself as MP3 but of course you have to pay and there isn’t any distribution method other than retail and Amazon.com and it sure isn’t freeware although it is inexpensive.

09/28/2005 | podcasting | 1 Comment

Contextless Links

  • Five Canadian fiction writers have made the short list for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the country’s richest and glitziest literary award, organizers announced Wednesday.

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09/28/2005 | Contextless Links, theology | No Comments

Torontoist: Liberals for Stephen Harper

From the Torontoist

It’s like Republicans supporting Ralph Nader during the last two presidential elections in the United States: Keep a party out by supporting an un-electable candidate. Liberals for Stephen Harper!

Don’t freak out too much in the comments as I will probably be voting Tory in the next federal election anyways. via noted Maurice Vellacott supporter, Leighton Tebay

09/28/2005 | politics | No Comments

Ummm, thanks Wendy

Wendy was so nice to point out that we have known each other a decade today by revealing my darkest secrets on her blog. Since our marriage is based on love and not revenge, I won’t post my own list but just suffer in love :-)

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09/28/2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments

WhatIfSports.com: THE Sports Simulation Site!

What an amazing website. It’s a sports simulation website where you can match up teams from different eras and have them play each other. In my simulation the 2004 Calgary Flames beat the 1989 Calgary Flames 4 games to 2 to win a playoff series. A lot of fun. The 89 Flames also beat the 85 Oilers 4 games to 1. Nice.

09/28/2005 | sports | 3 Comments

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