Blending good ingredients
30/9/2007
Didn't work last night, when I cooked... I'll leave it up to you to decide whether it works here, tho.
Why am I showing you it, if I'm not sure it works - rather than something that I'm confident is a beautiful success (U2's own version of the song, or R.E.M. performing one of their own... probably nightswimming...)? First reason is that you're big enough and ugly enough to make your own decision ;-). Secondly, just going for a safe option feels a bit cowardly. And finally what's the point of coming to a website to be shown stuff you already know? I guessed most people wouldn't have seen this, so it was worth just giving it a go...
Now for the pedantic moment - the video may be titled "R.E.M. - One", but it's not really R.E.M. performing, it's a hybrid of Michael Stipe and Mike Mills with Larry & Adam from U2, adding their local expertise as t'were.
Search engine silliness
23/9/2007
I first bought the gilesfleming.com domain name (and moved my site onto the server of some rather expert friends) about two years ago, I guess, and when I did I suddenly found that entering my name into google produced this site as the top result. And, of course, that filled me with general glee and merriment, until earlier this year - I changed to the new site design and to my own server, in the process going offline for about a month. Google punished me for this, and for a while I didn't even come up when you put "gilesfleming.com" into the search bar... Slowly things began to recover, and it was around may that "gilesfleming" began producing this site at the top. Then today I discovered that using my name as you'd actually spell it (with a space in the middle) was working again - it might've been for a while, it's not exactly something I check regularly, but I noticed it today. So general jollity returned to my heart ;-)
I should point out that this means more or less nothing, but it just makes the geek in me feel good... And while I was thinking about google, I had a quick look at their analysis of my site content to see if it says anything about me. After removing words like "it's" and "that's", the top 25 words on my site (or the bits of my site that google has looked at) are these:
- music
- people
- school
- permanent
- play
- flute
- news
- certainly
- life
- myself
- stage
- concert
- imagine
- thoughts
- doing
- feel
- given
- idea
- linux
- attention
- greenbelt
- happy
- history
- intimacy
- night
I'm quite glad that "music" and "people" are at the top :-) (although in all honesty "it's" was the very top word). And that "myself" doesn't come too high... "Permanent" is a bit of a dark horse there, coming in at number 4 - I didn't realise I talked of permanence nearly so often. Oh, and it's quite right for "greenbelt" and "happy" to be next to each other - clearly every time I write about one, I have to include the other ;-)
While we're on the subject (and this'll make Will very happy if he's around) typing in "you're getting closer to my armpits every time" (with the quotes) also produces a page on my site as the first and (suprisingly) only result... dont ask...
TLAPD
17/9/2007
I see it as an essential part of my service to the public to provide you with advanced notification of important dates to observe. Thus it is with great joy that I bring to your attention the fact that this wednesday, 19th September, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day!
Avast, blackguards! Ye'd best prepare thysel'es with thar learnings o' piraticism, afore ye skippers be skuttled. Ah'll not be takin' any o' ye scurvey landlubbers abord this 'ere ship two days yonder less thar lingo be right.
Shorn...
13/9/2007
Well it's finally happened... I need to get a job, so I need to look vaguely respectable. So it is that the familiar sight of Giles' hair, world reknowned in its aspect:
is no more. Instead, I perhaps blend into the crowd rather more than I did before:
To be fair, I was becomming a bit bored with the old look, and with only ever being remembered as "the boy with the hair"... But I still feel rather forlorn without it. A new chapter must begin.
In reply to Steve
4/9/2007
You're really going to need to read the original post if this is to make complete sense - it's all about presentational failings of churches, so if you dont give two figs about that, it's probably not worth it... ;-)
The problem with "if you're not good enough, don't do it", is that churches are very local: they don't have a wide base of people to call on. There probably aren't always the neccessary skills to do things well in a particular area (certainly in the mass of rural churches - this may not apply in London, I'm not sure).
I'm sure you'd say "so? just stop" or words to that effect... But what you're worried about is people being put off God by poor presentation. Again I can only speak from the churches I've seen, but a damn sight more people are going to be put off if the only church they can get to folds because the people running it have arbitrarily judged themselves to be not providing a sufficiently high-quality product.
I can't believe I'm arguing from this perspective, but it's quite fun...
So I don't know, would you make the argument that in larger towns there's bound to be sufficient skills, so lets concentrate them into a few churches, and close the others? It probably holds more water there, but you still risk (a) alienating the "old faithful", who (even if you think that being put off by something like that makes their faith not strong/serious/intelligent enough to be valuable) still aren't dispensable, since they, errrr, pay for most of the church; and (b) there being people who can afford to walk to church if it's half a mile away, but wouldn't be able to afford the bus/tube.
I've argued that we can't improve the presentation skills of the church by just stopping it where it's not working. But as I said, I'm quite familiar with being on the other side of this argument, saying that the situation simply isn't good enough as it is. So lets broaden our view a bit - there must be other ways of improving things, without just going round and removing the dead wood to goulags. Perhaps there ought to be a big chunk in ordination courses on "how to not make your church look like it's run by 9 year-olds" (or possibly "how to hide the fact your church is run by a PCC, a body which is automatically reduced to the level of a 9 year-old"). Of course there's several different ordination courses, and I don't know for sure that such an element isn't part of some of them - perhaps things will work out if we wait for the church to adapt at it's usual pace (god help us).
That, if it is the case, is great for the future, but leaves us with 40 years of purgaory to get round somehow... Not sure about that one - and I think I've meandered far enough away from the original point for one post...