I wanted this to be boring

Thinking up titles for blogs is hard.

It's kind of like thinking up a name for a band or a Laundromat. You can only have one Suds-R-Us and then every other band has to call themselves something else. Unless they're a cover band I suppose.

In the early 90s there was an Australian band called "People with Chairs Up their Noses", which right up there with Exploding White Mice as one of my favourite band names.

I wanted this blog to be called "Boring", but blogger wouldn't let me do it. Maybe they thought it would erode their brand if they had a boring blog. Actually a quick search may confirm this since none of the hundred boring blogs is on blogger and utterlyboring.com has its own domain. Still it shows that boring is a fairly common theme amongst bloggers or at least self-deprecation.

I wanted to call this blog boring because years ago I when I worked for a Christian organisation I had it in mind as the title for a magzine. I've worked on a couple of Christian publications over the years, incuding a couple of youth-oriented titles and Boring would have been one of them.

My idea was that Christians are always trying to be attractive to people who aren't Christians. This comes from the desire to persuade people that they really do need to change the way they're living, to believe that Jesus died for them and is lord of their life, and so on. The message is as old as Christianity itself: "repent".

Christians, and especially Christian organisations spend a lot of time trying to dress up that message. They try to get attractive people—such as Christian sports stars, scientists, rock singers and so on—to say it. They try to say it in groovy ways, or perhaps in a magazine.

In the worst cases they dress it up by watering down the message, trying to make it attractive by making it no message at all.

I thought that we should just give up trying to be attractive and stick to saying the same old thing: repent. You're going the wrong way without God. Turn around or you'll end up in hell.

It's the same thing Chrisians have always said. It's what Jesus said. We're still saying it 2000-odd years later. Which is pretty boring. But it's also life.

Anyway, I couldn't call it Boring, so I went with something obsure and wanky.