I Wish I Was Ern Malley

I heard a great talk today from Luke 1:26–45 —where the angel visits Mary to tell her she’s going to give birth to Jesus. The speaker pointed out that people have often dismissed this as impossible. And judging from her response—“How will this be, since I am a virgin?”—Mary herself thinks it a fairly unlikely event. Indeed there have been plenty of people who have dismissed Christianity completely because it’s impossible for Jesus to have been ‘born of a virgin’. However, as reproductive technology improves it can’t be too long before a virgin could conceive with the help of Science, rather than the Holy Spirit. So, the speaker’s point was, if it’s nearly possible for people, why couldn’t it be possible for God? But the real point of the story is not the virgin birth—that’s just a fact—it’s that Jesus “will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the L...

Having grown up in a family where ‘shiny-bum’ was a term of abuse applied to useless office types who never did any real work, I’m embarrassed to confess that I’ve worn a hole in my trousers. Of my suit. I’m actually embarrassed to admit that I wear a suit to work, but there it is. I have to wear a suit. I also work for an investment bank, but I’m not even going to start to talk about. So anyway the suit has a hole in it, which is OK, since this is the suit I bought about six years ago for job interviews, weddings, funerals and other suit-requiring events. But really I haven’t worn it that much. Suits are just very flimsy. And expensive, very exensive. Which is what I really hate about suits. They cost a lot to buy and wear out very quickly. The exact opposite of King Gees . This is what really ticks me off. I now have to pay 10 times as much money for clothes which last a tenth of the time. Nevermind that I’m earning 10 times the money...

Today I was at the Web Directions South conference so I've gone geek. I loaded up Flock to write this post, claimed this blog on Technorati (currently ranked 1,157,502) and started to think about tagging everything I can find with Microformats . The conference has been great with some excellent speakers on web design, Ajax, and the future of the future of the World Wide Web (”Web 2.0 is so 2005!"). It's all very exciting and it's easy to start thinking that everyone in the world is blogging stuff, loading photos to flickr and working on a Web 3.0 application. But part of the way through one of the presentations I began to wonder whether the Web can really save the world. No doubt it has changed the world in a very big way, and it's made a lot of information available, connected a lot of people and keeps a lot of us in jobs. Still it's easy to start thinking that if everyone has access to the right information then together we'd be able to solve all the w...

At the risk of alienating a percentage of my readers, (OK, read er ) I’d like to say that I have always felt close to God. For the last week or so I’ve been reading Michael Raiter’s Stirrings of the Soul . Apart from an interesting survey of Western spiritual topography (which might possibly include a church out past Dubbo) the book talks about people, even evangelical or ‘Bible-believing’ Christians yearning feeling spiritually ‘dry’, distant from God and yearning for a deeper, more spiritual experience of God. It would come as no surprise to Evangelicalism’s critics that some Evangelicals have had enough Bible study and want to try something more touchy-feely. Evangelical Christians are sometimes characterised as unfeeling, dogmatic automatons who wouldn’t know a spiritual experience if it landed on their doorstep accompanied by a myriad singing angels. In fact, some people might say, if the angels did turn up they’d be lik...

I’ve never been a big fan of Steve Irwin’s, but his death today really shocked me. Maybe it’s because my kids thought he was pretty great, and now “The Crocodile Hunter” from Wiggly Safari is stuck in my head. Or maybe I’m sad because he obviously loved Bindi and Bob and now they’ve lost their Daddy, and Terri has lost her husband. So we prayed for them all tonight.

Today’s my 37th birthday. I’d just like to say how much I'm enjoying being 37. As I often say, it would be enough that God just saved us, but he just keeps on demonstrating his extreme generousity. Sure, you can say, Job 1:9 style, that I might be singing a different song if times were tough, but I say it would be wrong (as Romans 1:21 points out) not to thank God, because he really is very, very kind. Anyway, this afternoon we were all working together in the garden. It’s late winter here and the afternoon was sunny and perfect . My beautiful wife and I were cleaning up some trees I’d pruned with my new (birthday present) chain saw, my two older children were alternatively helping pile up the branches, riding their bikes or playing with their baby sister who was giggling on a blanket spread out on the grass. Wife, kids, backyard, powertools. What more could a bloke want on his birthday? Thank you God.

Since I haven’t blogged much lately—I completely missed July—and need quick entry to make, I thought I’d fill up a bit of space with the a subject I can go on about ad nauseum—cars. Specifically I thought I’d briefly analyse the all-new Holden Commodore . This is a Falcon. I’m not putting a picture of no steenking Holden on this blog The Commodore is an Australian car previously based on the Opel Senator but, for the first time with this VE model, designed in Australia. It is exported to the Middle East and Asia. It will also, as Wheels reports , form the basis for the new Chevrolet Camaro and presumably the next Pontiac GTO, (since the old VT Commodore is the basis for the current “best ever” GTO ). Naturally, since my chosen tribe in the great Australian musclehead ...sorry ... muscle car divide is Ford, I should cast scorn on the Commodore from a great height—it is after all a Holden. However I think the new Holden...

I'm definitely of the Mary Poppins Spoonful of Sugar School when it comes to giving medicine to kids, especially since artificial sweeteners make the medicine even worse than normal. For the last couple of weeks our children have had a really rotten cold which made them all cough terribly and generally be very miserable indeed. Calvin ended up with a chest infection that meant that he had to take paracetamol (for the fever) and antibiotics. This is no trivial thing because getting nearly-three-year-old Calvin ended up with his two parents holding him down and pouring it down his throat or, in one case, me sitting on him and pouring it down his throat, take-it-it's-good-for-you-style. This is because the medicine tastes vile . Of cource, medicine always has, but at least before pharmaceutical companies would sweeten it with sugar, or Mary Poppins would. But because everyone's obsessed with diets and all that crap the medicine has to be sugar-free. Which means that instea...

It's been a long time between posts. Work has kept me busy with late nights and weekends. The kids have kept me busy as always and frankly, this is about the first time I've had some time where I've felt like writing anything. … Well, that was worth waiting for wasn’t it? Anyway, I have a bit of time now because my wife is watching the finale of Survivor and, because we're a couple of weeks behind the USA, we already know what happened. Rita wants to see how the whole thing plays out but, not being a huge fan of ‘reality’ TV, I'm not going to worry about watching the whole two hours. Nevertheless, I've enjoyed watching some of the show over the last couple months. Rita and I have been following Terry, mainly because he—along with Shane—has seemed the most honorable. (Shane was weird, so we didn't like him as much). According to Rita this has made him one of the show's most popular competitors—with the audience. It's nice to know that integrity ...

Zoë Kate is two months’ old today. It’s been a long two months and has gone very quickly as well. It seems like only a short time since she was born but it seems like she’s been part of our lives forever. It may also explain why I haven’t posted for a while, and why I always need more sleep. Zoë is, of course, georgeous. In the last few weeks she’s started to give us smiles, especially to her brother and sister, who love her to death—almost literally at times, it’s hard to teach toddlers what “gentle!” means. We thank God every day for his precious gift.

Anna Ayala has been sentenced to nine years’ jail after fraudulently suing the Wendy’s fast food chain, claiming she had found a severed finger in her chili. Wendy’s sales fell sharply following the alleged discovery, costing the company approximately $2.5 million. Ayala, 39, of Las Vegas, had put the finger in her chili before attempting to sue the restaurant owner. Her husband Jaime Plascencia had got the finger (no pun intended) from a co-worker who had lost it in an industrial accident. Apparently the guy owed him $50, and gave him the finger instead. * Right. So how would that conversation go? “Hey Bob, sorry to hear about the finger.” “Yeah, it really hurt.” “Oh. … So how about that 50 bucks you owe me?” “I’m a bit short this week. You want the finger? Micro surgeons can’t do a thing for me.” “Sure.” So anyway I’ve got this arm in my freezer that a mate d...

I’ve just finished reading Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and I’m convinced that the ony reason it’s been so successful is because God wants it to be. Dan should get down on his knees and thank the Lord for every million he makes. The book’s a bit of a dud really. A second-rate thriller based on a third-hand plot, dodgey history and pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo. I’ll admit it’s a decent enough page turner, but I was getting pretty tired of it by Chapter 90 and the ending was a real fizzer. Philosophically and historically it’s all over the shop. At the end, I didn’t care about Leonardo, the Holy Grail, the sacred feminine ( <span lang="yiddish"> Enough with the sacred feminine already! </span> ), or anything else, I just wanted to finish it so I could tick that box, give my friend his book back, and slag Dan Brown off on my blog. Note to Dan: Can’t write. Can’t research. Give me the money. But...

A new study of New Zealand women has concluded that abortion in young women may be associated with increased risks of mental health problems. This included depression and anxiety disorders and they were also more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs. The study’s leader, Professor David Fergusson, is at pains to show that he’s not a pro-lifer and he’s just telling it like it is. Fair enough. But with over 80,000 abortions being done each year in Australia, there’s a lot of people who will be suffering, assuming you can extrapolate the study to Australia. As the study shows, not all women feel bad about abortion or suffer consequences for it. And Emily Maguire in The Sydney Morning Herald offers suggestions about how women could feel better about their abortion experience. I say it doesn’t really matter. What really matters is what God thinks. It’s clear from the Bible that God is against abortion, for plenty of reasons. I’m with God on this p...