Anti-Meridian

www.bravesaintsaturn.com

Starling


I think I'm going to cry!

Ducks Forever

Today I performed 'the duck joke' on my professor in front of a whole class of second year electrical engineering students. It was awesome. If you haven't heard this joke, ask me next time you see me.

It was awesome.

Special thanks to Alana Drost from Redeemer for telling me that joke way back when.

Christian Schools

Hey Friends. I have a song and a blog for y'all to look at.

So...go to Mark Mathis' ReverbNation page. On that page there is a blog/buzz section. Go to it and look at the post called 'Christian Schools'. There is a song on there that you can download, or you can also listen to it at his Myspace Page. Listen to the song(its pretty chill, I hope you like it). Also read his blog about it.

So this struck me kind of hard. I went to a Christian School, and some of my closest friends are homeschooled as well, so I have a bit of a mixed perspective on both. Now I'm not going to point the finger at my highschool (Guido De Bres) because that is not the point here..niether am I going to comment on homeschooling.

What I was thinking about is this: What are we doing here? like the song says in the bridge..we have so many opportunities to show Christ's love and I think sometimes we get caught up one of two mindsets:

a) WE have pie-in-the-sky ideas that don't actually do much except help us feel good and are not realistic.

b) WE are selfish, and don't want to give stuff up, because after all in our cultural position, its hard to live 'sparsly'-living is expensive, and also the things we 'need' to have are expensive.

So I don't really want to accuse anyone of being a miser, or of being an idealistic evangelist or anything like that..but I want to encourage you all to think about what you are doing here, right now. What are your goals? What is your life's ambition? What is that going to do for you when you die? Like the song says..there were people who devoted everything they had to give to others, just so those others could have an education. Not because they were going to be able to necessarily 'make them into Christians'..but just so they would be able to do something with themselves. I dunno..I think it would be hard to give myself up like that..giving up what I have so that someone else can have it-watching others enjoy what I could have had..that would be hard. And I think thats something I need to change.


Anton(aka Capita'n Carot)


PS. I love Mark Mathis

electro-magnetism

Ok, so great minds have been churning, and new ideas are pouring out of the woodwork like flies out of a fly-machine. Sorry, that may sound dumb, but it was the first thing that came to mind.

So, The new articulating/non articulating buses that the HSR(hamilton transit) purchased recently are very nice, are they not? But there is one problem. They have a very rough textile seat covering. Now this is a very nice covering for sitting on because it is soft and it has just the right kind of friction to keep you from sliding around on it. But the problem lies in the fact that it also has the property of really-good-sticks-to-food. So when some schmuck beside you spills all the mayonase and mustard out the end of his sub and it goes on the seat..it stays there. Now the old buses had vinyl seats, and why? They slide, like leather. Now this is a good thing for maitenance, but they are also very slippery, and on a bus, with all the stopping and starting, slippery is not good.

The problem at hand, then, is how can we solve this problem? Either slippery seats that send you head over heals across the yellow line every stop, or soft seats that are impossible to clean and get dirty quick. The answer?

Electromagnets.

Picture this: you buy a bus pass with your student card, and the bus pas comes with a years use of a special pair of bus-riding shorts. but these are not just any shorts, they have magnets in them! I'm thinking like a diaper type of thing, made of like vinyl or something, like one of those cushioning mats they have in gymclass, or like a high-jump mat-durable but comfortable. So you are going to go on the bus right? so you strap on your custom-fitted ferro-magnetic vinyl diaper and you step on the bus and you go to your seat and you...wait for it..

you dont sit down. Why not? well why would you..that takes energy! Why not let magnetism do the work! So you stand by your seat, and the busdriver looks in his mirror to make sure everything is hunky dory, and he closes the door. Then he flicks the Transit-Magnet button, and worlds collide! A giant electrical current travels through solenoids in your seat, creating an ELECTROMAGNET which attracts the magnets in your diaper and sticks you firmly to your seat! No Effort. and no mess! Problem solved! I'll let your imagination fill in the gaps.

Special Thanks go to Sarah, Garnet and Nate for their contributions to this grandiose scheme.

advertising

so, Its been a while.

has anybody every clicked on my advertisement? The last thing i ever added to this blog was my advertisment..apparently i get a cut of whatever business it generates.
Unfortunately, no one every clicked on it, so..I didn't get any money. Thanks guys.

Ok, but seriously, now you can't click on it, because it would be fraudulent for me to tell you guys to click on it. Only click if you are interested.

Gee, I can't even click on it myself, because that too is fraud. What a sad little advertisement..its all alone. I'm sorry, advertisement. I really do love having you here, but you are neglected! Poor thing.

Ok, so seeyou next year!

Captain Carrot

More megamorphic metaphor-sis

Ben also pointed the following out to me, and subsequently I experienced it. When you chip stones up, you take some parts of the stone away, and what you uncover is something that has been around probably since the very beginning when God created land. The stones sometimes have hairline cracks in them so they crack right through under the force of your hammer and chisel, often rendering the piece useless or no longer fit for the spot you intended. however the other day i had one split apart along its face, so it's shape didn't change, only its thickness. the new face was incredibly contorted and turbulent, as if the lava that cooled to form it had cooled in little balls that had broken out of the face, leaving bubbles and spheres and ridges like a glacial landscape(this is from a purely geographic viewpoint, i could not prove that they were formed this way, although I think it is likely. i should write a post about evolution and stuff sometime, that would be cool..it would be interesting to get some sweet comment/debate going). but i realized, having been alerted to this by Ben, that the face i was looking at had never been looked upon by any person in the history of this entire earth and all the stones that had ever been formed. the only ones who knew what it looked like were me and God.

A new meta-phore

You know how in the Bible and in well known poems and certain songs, the Christian is compared to clay? The comparison is made that God is the potter and we are the clay, and so God molds us into the shape that he desires, and he doesn't ask us what kind of bowl or pot we want to be, he just makes the way he sees fit. It is interesting to note that God is a very skilled potter, since he has made all different shapes and sizes of pots, even square ones-quite difficult since usually the potter molds the clay on a wheel..it would be hard to make a square pot on one of those, and yet God does. And, also interesting is that usually potters make certain types of pots that they are good at over and over and over again, and sell the same pot to different people. God, however, being the ultimate craftsman and artist that he is, one who works in a medium of hearts and minds and spirits and bodies and the like, has never made two pots the same

Anyways, on to the real stuff of this post. So I was at work to day, and I'm not going to tell you what I was doing because that would give it away about 2 sentences earlier than I'd like. The suspense is killing you. No really, it is, you should take some medication for that!

Anyways, on to the real stuff of my post. So I was at work today, and I got to thinking..you know, clay and potter are a good way to express the power of God in our lives, but they don't give a very accurate description of how God brings this about. So, If you know anything about the way I think, you might know that my mind sometimes goes really fast-no, not when I need to make decisions or speak or something, or like do something simple, but when I'm doing math or physics or daydreaming..so I kind of thought up a new analogy for how God forms us, our personalities and talents and gifts.

I would like to suggest that in our lives, God is like a stone mason and we are like stones. Not bricks or tiles or blocks, but real natural stones, like the ones you put on a wall. Wall stones. See, when you make a stone wall, and you get your stone, you first start off with this big, thick, ungainly hunk of rock that looks like it would never look good. So first you have to square up the sides so its kind of a uniform thickness, so you have a starting point, something to work at. So you lie the stone on its back and mark around the edges of the stone so that all your markings are the same height from your workbench. then you chisel all the edges so that the front face of the stone is the same thickness around the outside-roughtly- and more importantly, the edges are all on a plane. But this chiseling is not always easy-sometimes the stone doesn't chip easily, or it doesn't chip at all, and you end up with a wierd looking shape where the stone broke.

The next step in building the wall is to find a spot for the stone. So you try to find the best spot where the stone will fit on its own, but you almost never can find a perfect spot, so you take the stone back and you cut pieces off of it and then you fix it so it fits. Now, you have your finished stone. It now looks like..a big hunk of rock with sharp corners and weird chunks out of it and cut marks on it. Great. So you take it over and put it on the wall and mortar it in, and you keep going, and by and by your wall is finished, and you look, and lo and behold, you have a beautiful stone wall. And you think to yourself 'You know, i knew that shape would just lend itself to making this wall beautiful. The colours of this stone match perfectly with the ones around it, and all its blemishes and imperfections that make it have rough edges give it a beauty I cannot describe easily'

WE are like stones. We start off as just hunks of rock, and we look like we could never make any wall beautiful. But God sizes us up, closes one eye and lines up his thumb, and says "Hm, well its coulor would fit right here, and its shape lends itself to this, and..hmm" and he gets out his chisel and starts to change us. But he doesn't grind us down into perfect little squares and line us up in rows-no he takes our imperfections and the shape that we have, and he finds a spot for us- a little chipping here, a little realignment there. Sometimes he cuts off a big chunk of us because we are no good when we have that extra. But its not always easy! Sometimes we resist-we don't want to chip and and break and be shaped, so we resist his will-even to the point of crumbling in his hands. But even then, God can use the pieces left over for some other spot in the wall. When we are finished, we might not look like much-one stone is all we are, and we just look like a rock. But when we are put amongst all the other stones that God has laboured over, we become a beautiful creation. Being the stones that we are, we can't always see how good we look on that wall..all we know is the chips we have lost and the cutting of the saw. But God sees us, and he sees our beauty, and he says "I knew that was just the spot for you!"