Thursday, October 26, 2006

The Wave

We'd like to pause for a moment of reflection as we've arrived at the 25th anniversary of The Wave. This popular sports phenomena was first started 25 years ago at a playoff game between the Oakland A's and New York Yankees. See here for more details.

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

John Wesley, Les Miserables

This past weekend I went to visit the Wesley Cathedral in London. It is where the Methodist church got its start with John Wesley and his friends as the founding fathers. He lived in a house immediately next to the chapel and was known to be a well traveled preacher. He would preach most anywhere he could get an audience- often times in an open air environment. They had several artifacts including Wesley's traveling preaching Bible on display. The chapel had very nice stain glass windows. At the time it was built, it had the largest unsupported ceiling in London. The posts originally used for the balcony were former ship masts.

I also had the opportunity to attend the musical Les Miserables www.lesmis.com in the West End. It is the longest running at 21 straight years. Once again, the performance including acting/singing/costumes/set design were all outstanding. The story is quite impactful with Jean Valjean beginning as a criminal, coming to repentence, becoming a respectable citizen, and saving more than one person along the way from peril. He is plagued through out the musical by Javert a police man who wants to put Jean ValJean back in prison for breaking parole despite his demonstrated years of honest upstanding citizenship and service to society.

A parallel can be drawn between ValJean and the follower of Christ. While once a sinner, he came to repetence and became a new man. Javert can be seen as representative of Satan in that he continuously tries to assert Jean ValJean's guilt and insist that "a man such as you can never change." ValJean fights against this idea and clings to righteousness.

John Wesley related pictures: http://new.photos.yahoo.com/aallen30605/album/576460762331437211#page1

Hipster Haiku

If you ever see the book Hipster Haiku by Siobhan Adcock, Look inside for my name. Allegedly it should be in there as a runner up in the haiku contest sponsored by Gotham Writer's workshop. www.writingclasses.com My haiku is a part of a previous post at: http://aallen820.blogspot.com/2006/05/haiku.html.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Wimbledon

This weekend, I went to Wimbledon. http://www.wimbledon.org/en_GB/index.html Mind you the tournament is in the summer but it was still very cool to take the tour and check out the museum. They even had a 3d video image of John McEnroe which gave a tour of the locker room and sundry memories of the great moments in Wimbledon history.

During the winter the grass at Wimbledon is kept at 15 mm, 12 mm in the summer, and 8 mm during the tournament. One interesting note is that foxes live in the complex. You can see the electric fence in the WimbledonCourtNumber1 picture which keeps them off of the court. Due to construction which will create a removable roof on Centre Court, we did not get to actually go inside the court but did get to go inside Court Number 1 which holds around 12,000 people.

I got my picture in the chair/room which the players are interviewed in following the matches. Following the tour, I stopped off at the restaurant for some traditional strawberries and cream, a standard dish at Wimbledon.

See pictures of Wimbledon at: http://new.photos.yahoo.com/aallen30605/album/576460762325194963#page1

Friday, October 13, 2006

Comedy Bits from Dave Ramsey

There are some hilarious parody comedy commercials that the Dave Ramsey team has put together at the following link. Be sure to listen to Home Equity Loan Lenders. I laughed hysterically. http://www.daveramsey.com/etc/cms/comedy_bits_5200.htmlc

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Photo Editing Software

A new piece of photo editing software that I've been using recently is Picasa2 by Google. It provides organizational tools as well as basic photo editing capabilities. A speedy CPU never hurts when running this graphic intensive application. The I'm Feeling Lucky button does some auto editing for the picture based on how the software reads the lighting and coloration of the picture. Another feature is the ability to post a picture directly to a blog by clicking on the Blog This button. It does just as good a job as any entry level industrial strength photo editing software that I've used. Of course if you're interested in going into deeper level graphic artistry, investing in something such as PhotoShop Elements may be a better option. If you are interested in getting Picasa2, you can either search for it in Google or download it from this site utilizing the link at the right. Happy photo editing!

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Oxford and more

A couple weekends ago I took a train out to the very cool town of Oxford. If given the opportunity during college, I would like to have spent a semester studying there. There are a variety of colleges in Oxford which comprise the University. The oldest being around 500 years old. I took a tour of the city by bus and then went throughout on foot to places of interest.

Christ Church College was pretty cool. The architecture was magnificent including the hall which the dining hall scenes from Harry Potter were filmed. Christ Church is unique in that it serves as both a church and a college. Within the cathedral, there are some beautiful stainglass windows. The Harry Potter hall also contains a window which memoralizes Alice in Wonderland. There is also a fire place with statues which inspired the long neck portions of Alice's adventures. The reverend and mathematician Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Caroll studied, taught and wrote the Alice in Wonderland stories here. Just down the road is a shop commemorating where the real life Alice went to a candy store.

Another major stop during this journey was Magdalen College where C.S. Lewis studied and taught for 29 years. It was not architecturally as impressive as some of the colleges but is one of the oldest of the colleges in Oxford. There was a very nice walking trail which went about a half mile circuit under trees and around a medow. In the medow, the college has its own herd of deer. The occasional duck swims by in the adjacent creek.

Continuing in the literary line of thought, I also saw The Eagle and Child which was the favorite pub of The Inklings a group which included the likes of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Being of the running mindset, I had to check out the famous Iffley Track while there and see where Roger Bannister ran the first sub 4 minute mile. Incidentally, I work 3 minutes from St. Mary's where Bannister studied to become a doctor. I engaged in my own session of running as I made haste back to the train station while running in the rain. This left me quite wet but on time for the hour train ride back to London.

On a more recent weekend, I went running in Regents Park. This in my opinion is one of the most beautiful parks anywhere. There are trees, green grass, ponds/streams, flower gardens, and paths that go on and on. The London Zoo and an outdoor theatre are also located within the park. Another venture that weekend included playing guitar in the evening service at my church. allsouls.org.

Please see the following link for pictures of the aforementioned adventures. There are some really nice shots included.
http://new.photos.yahoo.com/aallen30605/album/576460762321713719#page1

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

DCB Dynamite Video

There's a sweet video posted on www.davidcrowderband.com under the heading You on YouTube #2. Go now.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Multi-nationality Bible study

At a recent Bible study I attended in London, there were people from 7 different countries in my group. There was Swedon, USA, Germany, Singapore, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and Armenia.

Grace and Legalism

The life lived with grace as the primary driving force represents a marked change in world view to that of the legalist. I think human nature lends itself to the legalistic/perfomance based life. What is my "spiritual resume?" so to speak. If we are performing well and following the spiritual disciplines, then we must really love Jesus. At least this is the legalist's mindset. Society seems very oriented towards what have you done, what have you accomplished. It can be easy to slide into this frame of thinking in the spiritual realm as well.

The grace mindset is more focused on the love relationship between us and the Father. I don't do things to prove I love Him but rather I love Him and because I love Him I do things that reflect this love. It is a subtle but important difference. It helps move away from beating up oneself because of failure to perform in a spiritual sense. We will never be perfect in our lives on earth. The more we can learn to love Christ and build that relationship with Him, the more the effects of that come naturally out of our lives. This can be tough to put into practice but is a nice change in thought. Reference "Grace Walk" by Steve McVey http://www.gracewalk.org/ for more on this topic.
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