Raspberry Rabbit

2008-08-17T22:44:00.002Z

When the mighty Norwegian Royal Guard with their fearful feathered bowler hats needed a mascot they chose a penguin. Only a Scottish Penguin would do. Sir Nils Olaf: the world's most decorated penguin.

2008-08-16T15:01:00.003Z

Bathtime in Clerkenwell

One of the stranger things I've seen for a while. Think of it as Badger Badger, meets Wallace and Gromit meets "V" for Vendetta. Muchas Gracias to Fr Denman from Edmonton for the reference.

2008-08-16T14:13:00.008Z

The Peebles Agricultural Show

The Peebles Agricultural Show took place today during which the rain miraculously ceased for a few hours. We've got a parish outing tomorrow and we're hoping the interlude lasts until then.

2008-08-15T11:52:00.005Z

The first album I ever owned was by a group called The Collectors (whose later incarnation under the name Chilliwack was a bit better known). I can't remember how I came to own this record album - it seems to me that somebody was moving house and gave it to me. The second album I owned was a little more sophisticated - Herman's Hermits.

Anyway - back to The Collectors - there's this girl called Lydia who wears purple and lives in a steeple. The most pressing thing for the songwriter(s) would appear to be to have words at the end of each line that rhyme. Little else matters.

2008-08-15T09:50:00.005Z

An article by the Georgian president appeared in today's Guardian.

My favourite line from the last paragraph:

I have staked my country's fate on the west's rhetoric about democracy and liberty.

2008-08-13T14:53:00.003Z

A fresh spirit of militancy is rising up even in peaceful corners of the world. This is the Ginger Heartland after all. Mr Spongecake and Mr Cherry Tart, along with their families and their gods are not welcome anywhere in the oven.

2008-08-13T11:08:00.004Z

Reuters
August 12, 2008 at 5:04 AM EDT

TOKYO — Japanese police have arrested a 20-year-old man who attacked and robbed two people after they stared at his Winnie-the-Pooh costume, officials said on Tuesday.

Masayuki Ishikawa was hanging out on a Tokyo street corner after midnight last month while wearing the cuddly costume, accompanied by two friends dressed as a mouse and a panther, when he took offence at being stared at, police said.......

.......Mr. Ishikawa and his friends beat up the two victims and stole $160 from them, the spokesman said, adding the group had apparently donned the unusual garb because they had run out of clean clothes.

Hmmm. I remember the whole phenomenon of 'my cleanest dirty shirt' back in college days. I don't believe I was ever reduced to this though.

2008-08-12T12:08:00.006Z

Dmitri Orlov on the Georgian crisis. He was once a student of Abkhaz language and culture (I wonder if he's available for dinner parties - it certainly beats an after supper game of Twister) and by his his own admission his take on the present situation is influenced by an earlier keen interest in one party to the present troubles. His parallels with Kosovo make things seem a simple matter of alliances - who's bloc one supports.

Things are probably even simpler than that.

Yards of stuff here I didn't know, though, about the ethnic makeup of the region.

Thanks to Sam Norton for the ref.

2008-08-10T13:53:00.007Z

This is the route of the pipeline which is Europe's alternative route to the Russian pipeline running from Baku to Novorosslysk. It doesn't leave a whole hell of a lot to the imagination, does it?

Mixing military enterprise with the oil business is not unknown, of course. It always seems a little more craven when somebody else does it though. Amateurs! Where were the spin doctors?

2008-08-04T19:55:00.004Z

Those Primates who bothered to attend Lambeth apparently left with a lot of mutual good feelings

thx Fr David Heron

2008-08-04T11:59:00.008Z

Jonathan from Newcastle reports on a Sunday trip to Glasgow to the Cathedral where Gene Robinson was presiding at the Eucharist:

Yesterday, in the cathedral, with the blessing of his bishop, Father Kelvin presided at the blessing of two men (marriage) after their civil service.

When I got home this evening I noticed that the Grand Tufti [the Archbishop of Canterbury] is demanding that there should be a moratorium on including gay people in the Anglican Church. Well, all I can say to him after today's experience is...

YOU'RE TOO BLOODY LATE, MATE!

One little known feature of the New Blogger software is the little button behind the "dashboard" button. If you press the "dashboard" button four times with the correct pressure it reveals a control called Long Distance Time Travelling Hypothetical Universe Spectacles. I'm putting them on now and yes - there's ++Idris at a table having lunch last Friday with the bishop of one of Glasgow's future partner dioceses. They are deep in conversation as a young steward approaches the table:

Lambeth Steward: Excuse me Bishop Jones, there's a call for you from Glasgow. Somebody named Kevin, I think.

++Idris: No, no that would be Kelvin our Provost. For God's sake don't refer to him as Kevin he gets really shirty about that. Oh crap! Um...tell him that Lambeth is winding up over the next couple of days and that I'm busy having a last minute conversation with a potential new Partner Bishop. Tell him I'll see him back in Glasgow when I get the time. In fact, tell him that when you told me he was calling, I got red in the face and pounded the table.

Lambeth Steward: Uh, okay....I'll try....

++Idris: Sorry about that. Yes, so I think that an exchange of theological students would be a grand idea. I'm worried about the heat at your end that time of year, though. Our postulants are all a little over the....

Lambeth Steward: I'm sorry, Bishop Jones, this Kelvin says that it's precisely 'partnership' that he wants to talk to you about. He says that his congregation is the only really exciting place in the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway to worship and that if you won't talk to him he'll talk to The Herald. Um....he asked me to put that in a way which didn't sound like he was exerting too much pressure but, Jeez Bishop Jones, I'm only seventeen and ......."

++Idris: Good night nurse! Give me the damned phone, will you!

At which point the Long Distance Time Travelling Hypothetical Universe Spectacles start to get hazy. It's a Beta thing you know. The folks down at Blogger.com haven't ironed the bugs out yet. I'll let you know if they start working again.

2008-08-04T11:51:00.000Z

Stephen Colbert on the Lambeth Conference.

2008-08-01T21:37:00.006Z

Nice to see you so well!

Missing his specs and badly needing an update on recent royal history - Bishop Burton of Saskatchewan introduces himself to the Queen Mum.

2008-08-01T19:59:00.004Z

Disclaimer

Please note this sign does not appear outside the house of a clergyman just returned from holiday. I don't feel remotely the way this man feels.

Don't even suggest that I do.

The rectory at Penicuik is open for business.

2008-08-01T12:43:00.009Z

Snowdome

At over 11,000 feet, this glacier-capped massif drains in three direction. It is a (possibly 'the') hydrological apex of North America. Its glaciers drain into the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River, the Arctic Ocean via the Athabasca and Mackenzie Rivers and into Hudson Bay via the North Saskatchewan and Nelson Rivers.

If you've got a big screen you might click on the picture. I'm pleased with how it turned out.

2008-08-01T07:00:00.006Z

The Stanley Cup has apparently been used in a 'private christening', according to the Canadian Press. The service took place in Sweden where Tomas Holmstrom was having 'his day' with the Cup having been a member of the Detroit Redwings which took the Cup out of the country (Canada) and the city (Montreal) which would ordinarily merit it.

Okay, so Detroit is a cold place and the Redwings a venerable team. We've now got a whole lot of teams in places where ice doesn't occur normally. They get the best teams American oil money can afford. Long past are the days when desirable foreigners had to defect in order to play hockey and all the American teams had Canadian players.

There is a long tradition of Canadian Naval Chaplains using an upended ship's bell for baptisms so I suppose it's not too much of a stretch. No mention in the article of a minister being involved in the service or whether the baptism was properly peformed using Trinitarian formulae.

We eagerly await to hear about the child of a Formula One winner being sprayed with champagne. Thanks to Joe over at Felix Hominum for the link.

More news from Rev Ruth about other innovations in ecclesiastical hardware.

2008-08-01T05:32:00.003Z

Back in the saddle

Scotland is suitably grey and rainy. Will look idly out the window for an hour or so this morning and get back into it. Coming back from holidays isn't always easy. But we did see bears, and mountains. We spent time with my family in British Columbia and a week in a great summer community in Sorrento. Good worship - new friends. The whole nine yards.

The picture above is of two nice little people standing in the Columbia Ice Fields with somebody who looks like the rector of Weyburn Saskatchewan.

2008-07-24T22:13:00.004Z

I can report that a wonderful time is being had by all at the Sorrento Centre in the interior of British Columbia. All the good ghosts - all those memories of past summers - are still well and truly in place. Many new friends and insights. I am probably not the first to discover that placing one's self in the tutelage of brothers and sisters in the faith is a good idea. I must do more of this. Caireen and I are in different courses - a good idea - Stewart is spending hours climbing onto the wobbly little dock out on the lake with his friends until it begins to upend, falling off with great shrieks of delight and then climbing up onto it again.

A good time being had by all.

RR

2008-07-15T11:25:00.004Z

I'm leaving on a jet plane.......

Off on holidays with my wife and stepson.

Three days with the folks on Saltspring Island, British Columbia and then off for a week to the Sorrento Centre in the interior of the Province. I first went to Sorrento with my parents in about 1967 or thereabouts and have made my way back there periodically.

It's a magical place filled with grace and good memories. I'm hoping that my new family will sense some of what I sensed there.

Will finish up with a couple of days bumping around the Rockies before getting on the plane in Calgary and returning to Scotland.

2008-07-15T07:49:00.018Z

And, as it turns out, it's also good for you!

Abundant, grainy and not overly expensive. Think of it as Red River Cereal for the soul. We know already that incense is an appropriate symbol of the soul's ascent and a means of hallowing or 'pointing to' significant places or actions - something which enjoys both clear Biblical warrant and obvious analogues in other religious traditions.

But is it good for you? From the reaction of certain folks it might appear not:

... Consider this symptom of distaste: the Protestant Frankincense Cough, a psychosomatic or (as we used to say) hysterical phenomenon. People who disapprove of incense often respond like Pavlov's dogs to the dinner-bell. I, way up in the sanctuary of my last parish, could merely hold up an unlit thurible, for one dear soul, thirty yards away, to hack and retch as if gassed. Her Scotch blood, perhaps: she only had to see an incense machine to think of popery (rather than pot-pourri), and she couldn't think of popery without gagging on the thought of Inquisitions, idolatry of false bones, pyres at Smithfield, Armadas, papal concubines, Jesuit assassins -- and of Galileo, mocking Abbés in powdered periwigs, salacious nuns, the Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing schools -- .

Now Fr Major has, I suspect, never been accused of understating a case. Nonetheless there is much unhappiness on the part of some people when the new rector begins to slowly and carefully introduce the practise on selected Sunday mornings. Not all of it has to do with the physical effects of the stuff.

This just in: It is now being suggested that the components of frankincense act to reduce anxiety and depression - at least among mice.

Those short unhappy lives, marked by high heartrates and quick dashes between corners of the kitchen looking for crumbs and dodging the cat and the householder's broom. If such lives can be made tolerable with the addition of a little frankincense think of what it can do for you.

If you've not read the irascible Fr Richard Major's (as yet) uncompleted series of articles on the Mass entitled 'The Freeze-Frame Mass" it's worth a read. The link sends you to a table of contents. Look a little further and you'll see a link to download the .pdf file

I heard some vile little creature cheering him on at certain points and realized, to my shame, that it was me.

2008-07-14T15:18:00.002Z

Not just because he's Canadian!

......but because it's a really good thumbnail sketch of what takes place at the Lambeth Conference. Canadian Primate, Fred Hiltz

2008-07-11T23:17:00.003Z

Jeez, I suppose this is vaguely familiar.......

thanks to Ugley Vicar via Tim Chesterton

2008-07-10T21:28:00.005Z

Jello moulded in the shape of St Paul's Cathedral......wobbling. What makes this video unique is not that somebody would so mould a batch of jello but that (Scottish Synod meetings notwithstanding) the sound of jello wobbling has never been recorded before. Behold......

with thanks to Scott Gunn

2008-07-10T11:35:00.016Z

The story of ex-vicar and now ex-deputy Mayor of London, Ray Lewis, promises not to go away and probably to get more interesting.

When allegations of past clerical misconduct on the deputy mayor's part while he was the vicar in a London parish surfaced, the Church was eager to tick the appropriate box and to declare that they had done the right thing. Apparently, the bishop of Barking had warned Boris Johnson at a football game that his 2IC was a 'dodgy vicar'. Nothing like choosing the right venue to pass on bad news. No indication was given whether the bishop whispered this bit of news to Boris as the crowd was going mad or whether he scrawled it in lipstick on the mirror in the toilet.

Such a conversation apparently never registered in the mayoral memory. Boris took exception to being told that he'd known something he (maintained he) hadn't. After a few angry exchanges the chaplain to the Bishop of Chelmsford (of which Barking is a part) was asked to check with any bishops languishing in the office whether such a conversation ever took place. The answer? Oops, sorry,I guess it didn't take place. They were talking about other things at the football match.

But the bishop did warn him in a letter. Cue in the sound of another box being ticked.

Or ..... maybe he didn't. At least not really. Mixed in to an elaborate thank you letter to the mayor there appears the following curious bit of unsolicited language viz.

"As you probably know your deputy mayor Ray Lewis was a Church of England clergyman in my episcopal area in the Nineties. He is no longer serving in authorised ministry in the Church of England. If at any point you wish to speak to me about this, do be in touch."

which an archdeacon might understand as 'worth following up' but certainly not Bozza.

I should declare my interest. Not being a 'natural Tory' I was nonetheless thrilled that Boris was running for the mayor's chair and I sent him ten quid for his campaign since I couldn't vote for him.

Such 'laying low' of politicians by the press on the basis of what they've done or what those close to them (or their spouses, associates and old girlfriends) have done always makes you wonder whether anybody can survive in politics who has any messy real world connections. Or maybe it's it's just a matter of one's predecessors refusing to stay dead and making an appearance in a later episode when you least expect them.

Boris, keep your pecker up! You're the best London mayor Scottish money could buy! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

And when you talk to bishops, make sure you're taking notes.

2008-07-08T12:21:00.001Z

Feelgood video for the day