Category Archives: Arts & culture

Altered Barbie, Episcopal style

Out here in the Bay area, we are used to people who alter Barbie in various ways. After all, San Francisco is the home of the Altered Barbie art show and artist community. But now even the Washington Post has picked up on the altered Barbie trend.

Astute reader E sent along a link to a Post article about Episcopal priest Barbie. The article links to Rev. Ms. Barbie’s Facebook page, which is priceless not just for the beautiful fashion photos showing Ms. Barbie with surplice, cassock, thurible, etc., but also for the many comments, some of which are admiring and some of which are entirely disapproving. The Post also links to an earlier Religion News Online article, which had the headline “Barbie gets ordained and has the smells-and-bells wardrobe to match.” Excuse me, bub, that’s Rev. Ms. Barbie to you. And there’s a link to Unitarian Universalist blogger Peacebang’s “Beauty Tips for Ministers,” who has already posted on Episcopal Priest Barbie.

I note that Rev. Ms. Julie Blake Fisher, the maker of Episcopal Priest Barbie, lives in the midwest, proving yet again that the midwest, not the coasts, is the home of the most subversive craftspeople in the U.S. There are rumors that a midwestern craftsperson is even now working on a similar project for Unitarian Universalist ministers: Rev. Mr. Sock Monkey.

Update: Blogging at Blag Hag, Jen McCreight, a “a liberal, geeky, nerdy, scientific, perverted atheist feminist trapped in Indiana,” has created Atheist Barbie, who wears a Flying Spaghetti Monster necklace. Apparently BoingBoing even picked up on McCreight’s post, which means she probably exceeded her bandwidth limitations this month. I just want to say that from my point of view, a Flying Spaghetti Monster necklace does much more for an outfit than a thurible; accessories really do make the outfit. Did I mention McCreight was from the midwest?

Shared online documents as a planning tool

I’ve been using online shared spreadsheets (through Google Docs) as a congregational planning and scheduling tool for three years now. I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been doing, in hopes that others will share what they’ve been doing along these lines.

First, take a look at the Palo Alto churches “RE Grid 0910” (religious education planning grid for 2009-2010). This is an example of a moderately complicated planning grid using an online spreadsheet. Congregational planning in a mid-sized church like ours is focused on Sunday events, so moving up and down in the spreadsheet each row is designated with successive Sunday dates (the only exception is Christmas Eve, which gets its own row). Moving from left to right in the spreadsheet, we start off with columns for various Sunday morning time slots, and move into columns for specific programs (i.e., Children’s Choir, teacher training, youth programs, etc.). The religious education committee, the leaders of various programs, the church administrator, and I use this RE Grid for more efficient communication and coordination. From my point of view, what I like best is that other people can get answers to scheduling questions without having to ask me; furthermore, when we do planning, everyone is literally on the same (online) page which increases efficiency and reduces confusion.

Screen shot of RE Grid mentioned above

Next, here’s a worship planning grid from a small congregation. In this congregation, the musicians were very part-time, and usually could not meet with me with me to plan worship; I used the worship planning grid to share information about sermon topics, and they used the grid to share with each other the music they were playing so we didn’t get duplication. The lay worship associates used the grid to keep track of when they were scheduled. Staff and volunteers tend to be stretched thin in small congregations, and introducing this online spreadsheet as a planning tool made all our lives easier.

Two downsides to online documents for planning: (1) there’s a strong temptation to include too much information (no good solution for this); (2) there’s a tendency to delete old information without saving a copy for future reference (I export Excel versions of Google Docs spreadsheets for archives).

I’d love to hear how other congregations have used online shared documents for planning. Tell us what you’re doing in the comments, and give us a link if your online document is public.

What do you call your children’s librarian?

In a comment, children’s librarian Abs notes that parents “insist on calling the children’s librarian ‘Miss Abby’.” Abs lives in New England, so this form of address is not sanctioned by any cultural norms. Furthermore, Abs is married and calls herself “Abs,” making this completely nonsensical. What’s going on here? Why do people use such icky, stilted, obviously incorrect forms of address?

Mr. Crankypants believes he knows what is going on. Many adults today feel that they don’t want their children to refer to other adults with such formal forms of address as “Mr. Soandso” or Ms. Soandso.” Yet these adults also feel that they don’t want their children to get too chummy with other adults, and therefore refuse to tell the child to address another adult by first name only. Therefore, these adults make up icky stilted forms of address like “Miss Abby” for married middleaged women.

Mr. Crankypants can solve this problem. If you are an adult trying to figure out what your child should call another adult, don’t just make something up; have the decency to ask that other adult. Like this: “How should my child address you?” Isn’t that easy?

And if some other adult tells their child to refer to you using some icky stilted form of address, it is perfectly correct to say, “Please tell your child to refer to me as Ms. (or Mr.) Lastname,” or “Please tell your child that s/he may refer to me as Firstname.”

If an adult persists in telling their child to refer to you with an improper form of address, Mr. Crankypants gives you permission to slap them with a fresh wet trout.

iPad mania in Silicon Valley

Carol took this picture of the line outside the Apple store last night. Yes, it was raining. Yes, someone brought a tent.

Right after she took this photo, Carol saw Steve Jobs getting into a silver Mercedes without a license plate. She turned to some people near here, and said, “Was that really Steve Jobs?” “Yes,” they said. “His car didn’t have a license plate,” she said. “Steve Jobs doesn’t need a license plate,” one of them said, “he has the iPad.” “We need a life,” one of the others muttered.

Diminishing Google reliance

Scott Wells links to a good post on getting Google out of your life, a post which reads in part:

But is it dangerous to give all our information and to rely so completely on one corporation? Should we be worried? Should we be looking for alternatives? Should we be moving our data out of Google as soon as possible?

Answers: Yes. Yes. Yes. Maybe not all, but anything that is the least bit sensitive — as a minister, I have steadfastly refused to use Gmail because Google stores email data for a too long, and doesn’t seem to have any real understanding of confidentiality, and the only documents I put on Google Docs are ones I’m willing to share with the whole world.

I’ve placed some links to alternative Web sites in the sidebar. Feel free to add your own non-Google favorites.

Straight Edge for our time

A couple of days ago, I happened to be looking up Rev. Hank Peirce, and stumbled on a 2008 interview with Hank in Double Cross, a hardcore fanzine. The interviewer asked Hank about his straight-edge reputation:

[Doublecross:] When did you become Hank Straight Edge and not just Hank? Were you straight edge the second you heard of the concept?… Are you still proudly straight edge?

…You are right on with the description of how I became Straight Edge, as soon as I heard the concept I was sold. I already wasn’t doing drugs or drinking and was so psyched that there was a name for it and bands who were singing about it…. I just looked at how all of the idealism of the 60s shit the bed once drugs were introduced. Fuck, the kids getting high and drunk in [my home]town were the ones who I was getting into fights with every day, so why the fuck would I want to be like them in any way?

Continue reading →

Death of the codex? Maybe not.

Christian Century magazine just published an excellent essay on their Web site titled “Booting up books.” The author, Rodney Clapp, begins by saying, “Hardly a day passes without someone declaring the death of the book.” Clapp goes on to say:

The form of the book that many now think is passing away is the codex, in which leaves of paper are bound into a single brick. Invented by the Romans in the third century before Christ, the codex is a remarkable piece of technology—it is compact, durable and affordable. With its folio organizational system (that is, page numbering and chapter labeling) and such devices as a table of contents and an index it is an efficient and precise vehicle of textual memory and communication.

This is a good distinction to make. When people claim the book is dying, what they really mean is that the codex is dying. (I do wonder if there were people mourning the death of the scroll after the codex was invented, but I digress.) Yet Clapp says the codex may not be dead after all:

The electronic book, as its name admits, depends on an abundant and cheap supply of electricity. It has been commonly assumed that electronic reading media would be less ecologically burdensome than the “dead-tree” technologies of print media. But Chris Anderson argues on his blog The Long Tail that “dead-tree magazines have a smaller net carbon footprint than Web media.” Nicholson Baker in McSweeney’s observes that in 2006 computer server farms consumed 60 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, while paper mills consumed 75 billion kilowatt hours. This means servers and paper mills already leave “a roughly comparable carbon footprint”—and server energy consumption is increasing exponentially.

Maybe now that we’re past peak oil, we better not count on the electronic book lasting for more than a century.

More bad religious jokes

First joke. Heard this one from Philip, who made it sound far funnier than it will sound here:

There’s this militant atheist. He’s such an atheist that the word “god” never escapes his lips, except to prove the impossibility of such a concept. One day, he goes out for a walk in the woods. He’s admiring the beauty surrounding him, and thinking how amazing the natural world is. Suddenly he realizes that a bear is following him. He starts walking a little faster. The bear starts walking faster. The atheist starts to run. The bear starts to run. The atheist starts running really fast. The bear surges forward, leaps on the atheist, draws back one big paw to deliver the coup de grace — and without thinking about it, the atheist shouts, “Oh my god.”

Time freezes. All sound stops, the leaves are no longer waving in the breeze, the bear’s paw stops just short of the guy’s head. A big resonant voice comes out of nowhere. “So at last you call on me.”

The atheist is astounded. “Well, I guess I can’t disbelieve my senses,” he says. “All these years I’ve said there’s no god, and now I see there is. I guess it’s too much for me to ask you to make me a Christian at this point.”

“That would be too much to ask,” the voice says.

“Then could you make the bear a Christian?”

“Sure,” says the voice. Time starts again. The bear draws back his paw, looks at it speculatively. The bear rears back on its haunches, puts its paws together in prayer, and starts to speak. “Thank you, dear God, for this feast thou hast laid out before me.”

Second joke, worse than the first:

A man is lying in bed in a hospital, tubes coming out of him, machines beeping ominously. He’s dying. And as he dies, he’s talking to the hospital chaplain: “Could it be? Naw. But what if? I mean, who knows?” The hospital chaplain is sitting there saying nothing, just listening and nodding.

A doctor walking by hears the man, and she pulls the chaplain aside. “What’s going on?” says the doc.

“This man’s dying, and he’s getting some things off his chest before he dies,” says the chaplain.

“Oh,” says the doc. “Deathbed confession?”

“No, he’s a Unitarian Universalist. Deathbed confusion.”

Told you they were bad jokes.

Sean says it’s a revolution

A few minutes ago, I was talking with Sean of the blog Ministrare — he’s here at the Palo Alto church while Amy, our senior minister, is on sabbatical — and he showed me a video that he likes. He put the video up on his blog, and I’ll embed it here, so you can watch it, too:

 

 

Over on his blog, Sean says that he believes we religious liberals are not ready for the social media revolution. I think Sean is mostly right.

But I can find some bright spots, places where we do use social media well. Here in Palo Alto, we’ve been piloting a podcast for Sunday school teachers, and the teachers tell us they love this venture into online learning. And although I write my blog on my own time, I find that some people in the congregation do read it, and what I have written here has sparked some very interesting conversations in the face-to-face congregation. When we do use social media, what we do online strengthens and reinforces what happens in our face-to-face congregation.

So I’m ready to embrace the social media revolution. I think it will make congregational life that much better. What do you think?