Chris Hansen’s blog

…is here, and don’t forget to “Stomp!” (left click)

I’m preaching at St. John’s on Sunday. The Gospel is Luke 18: 9-14, the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The last line of it is: “He who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.” As you’re probably aware if you’ve read earlier sermons, I like to start with a joke, but I was having trouble thinking of one. Thank God for Google. I found two, and I’ll share the one I’m not going to use.

“Father Brown was such a humble and yet able vicar that his parishioners got together and one Sunday gave him a pin that said, ‘The Church’s Humblest Priest.’ He was quite touched, so the next Sunday he wore it on the lapel of his clerical suit, so they took it away from him.”

I have a different take on the story, thanks to the Episcopal News Service, so I shall be able to write it tomorrow, along with the discussion group I’ll be leading at St. Anne’s. Sunday, after St. John’s, I shall be going to Giles Goddard’s installation as an Honorary Canon of the Cathedral. So a busy weekend.

…is a continuation of the previous literary URL.

A gentleman confesses that he knew the good Senator quite well, at least for the amount of time that it took Sen. McWidestance to screw him and throw him out of the house…

and thanks to for this, which made me smile after a long week.

It seems as though the story was halfway true. What the court required the Church to do was to record next to the baptizand’s name the fact that he had left the Church. They did not require the church to remove his baptismal record entirely.

So that’s all right then!

I have a few books like these; I guess there are a lot more that I need to get for my “collection”.

I googled for a link, but English link there were none (i’m in a rush, so I didn’t go through the entire listing)

Thanks to MadPriest, we have:

WELL, UP YOURS THEN

A Spanish court has ordered Catholic officials in Valencia to remove a man

…when the Fundagelicals were saying that the New Orleans hurricane disaster was a result of its toleration of gay men and lesbians?

If that’s so, then I presume that the fires in Southern California are a result of The Terminator vetoing the same-sex marriage bill?

Just guessing.

(P.S. I don’t believe it either, but it gives us all food for thought.)

(P.P.S. All you Southern Californians are in my prayers tonight.)

Is this Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein? I think we ought to be told.

The largest note in England and Wales is a

I have only gotten one Church Times out of the four I have now missed, I haven’t gotten any of the Economists I’ve missed, and I got two of the same New Scientist from this week: why the same two, I don’t know.

But one of the odder things I got was two DVDs from here. You may remember this post, where I waxed nostalgic about summer Sunday afternoon Red Sox games on TV, with their White Owl, Atlantic gasoline, and Narragansett Beer advertisements. Well, the two videos I embedded are no longer available for free, but tvdays.com does sell DVDs of various kinds of commercials. So I bought their two DVDs of cigarette commercials from the 50’s and the 60’s (not that there were many made after the 1960’s), and I got them a few days ago.

Nostalgia does not have to always be aimed at things you remember fondly and would like to have back. The days when no one minded cigarette, cigar, or pipe smoke are well and truly over, and I would hesitate to smoke anything, not that I ever took it up after it killed my mother. But watching some of these old commercials takes me back to those more innocent times when

• The original Flintstones cartoon was not only sponsored by Winston cigarettes, the characters lit up and enjoyed them;
• Benson and Hedges commercials showing people in silly situations because their cigarettes were too long were funny and won advertising prizes (if you’re my age or older, you can probably still hum the backing tune to this ad);
• Women were encouraged to smoke cigarettes like Lucky Strike, which were (and are) unfiltered and possibly the most dangerous things you can smoke;
• Old Gold cigarette packages with shapely women’s legs danced their way across stages into our hearts (and lungs);
• Smoking a White Owl Invincible cigar would gather a roomful of beautiful women around you;
• Kent’s jingle (“To a Frenchman, it’s the Eiffel Tower….to a Scotsman, it’s the reg-e-ment, to a smoker, it’s a Kent!”) could become an earworm after not hearing it for almost 40 years.

Nostalgia is the Bitch Goddess from a Non-Smoker’s Hades.

Apologies to two groups:

• Non-North-Americans, and
• Those who are under 45 years of age.

The members of the first group will not remember any of these commercials unless they spent a lot of time in a country that still permitted cigarette advertising on TV and had the same brands as the US. The members of the second group will possibly wonder why anyone ever allowed tobacco advertising on TV.

…and many many happy returns of the day!

In Taipei, there is a native god of homosexuals. Thanks to MadPriest for the tip.

This week was my stint at St. Anne’s Bermondsey. When we’re not taking the service, we’re just there to be with the congregation and soak up the ambiance, as it were.

It was, yet again, a Family Service, and the person who took the service, a lay reader, started out her sermon with ten minutes for the kiddies, in which she condescended to them in a very unfortunate way. (She didn’t bother to tell the adults that after condescending to the children, we’d get a dose ourselves). Then there was 8 minutes for us on prayer. I don’t usually comment on manner of speaking, but she has an unfortunate speech impediment which is common here: her “r”s come out as “w”s. Prayer becomes “pwayer”. I had a difficult time trying to separate her speech from her message, which was that pwayer, er, prayer is something we ought to be doing all the time and that God listens to our prayers. This is totally diometrically opposed to my own strategy when I preach on prayer: Prayer doesn’t work on God, prayer works on us.

The hymns were unfortunate: the first hymn, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” is very familiar to most Anglicans, Protestants, and Roman Catholics. Unfortunately, the canned CD had six verses stored in it, but there were 8 in our hymnals. So we kind of stopped short in the middle of the hymn, as it were. The last hymn, Shine, Jesus, Shine, is a pimple on the buttocks of Protestantism and really ought to be treated with a giant tube of Clearasil and made to disappear forever. If it’s on the sheet at St. Matthew’s, I’d just not bother. At St. Anne’s I have to be a bit more circumspect, so I sing it, albeit very softly. But now I’ve got an earworm of the chorus. It must be something I did to God.

So this afternoon I’m off to the gym, but before then I have to decompress.

I strongly support the Singaporean lesbian and gay community’s efforts to repeal Section 377A, the part of the criminal code that makes gay sex illegal in Singapore.

I just saw this written on ‘s Facebook, and I had to steal it and embed it here. Watch it. If you’re Singaporean, spread it around.

As a non-Singaporean, the possibilities of my support are limited to moral support and good thoughts and prayers. But this video rocks!

Had a very busy week, but not really at work. The client has brought me on site not to do work, particularly, but to keep me from being put on another project. He’s promised to pay my employer once the budget is approved in Head Office. This could take until January. In the meantime, there’s no way to start anything meaningful, so I have been sitting around reading technical documentation, eating lunch in the Big Investment Bank’s cafeteria, which is very sumptuous, and trying to look busy.

Meanwhile, we had Deanery Synod on Tuesday night. It was a joint meeting between Camberwell Deanery and Southwark and Newington Deanery. The focus was to be on crime and the Church’s response to crime and disorder. Some people from the Constabulary were due to join us, but through some oversight (not ours) they were never confirmed. So we had to talk amongst outselves. This got quite teejus quite quickly. The new Area Dean and his Camberwell counterpart hoped that we would do this again next year. Unless we run it, I’d say let’s just have a social event and have done with it.

By Thursday I decided that I’d better talk to Vodafone about renewing my phone contract. I had my heart set on a Blackberry, and that’s what I got, BlackBerry Curve 8310. However, it does seem a bit daunting and I haven’t as yet had enough time to configure it properly, although I have received a call and made a call. I gather it can be connected to my btinternet.com email account but haven’t succeeded in doing it just yet, and the software installer rots.

Did I say that the software installer ROTS???

Last night we went to a new Thai restaurant in the same premises as an old Thai restaurant on Old Compton Street. It was surprisingly good, even though the portions were smallish. The gado gado (Indonesian/SE Asian salad with peanut dressing) had bok choy as the vegetable, which was a bit…um…unusual but it tasted OK. My Thai green curry was very nice, and we got home satisfied. HWMBO had Singapore laksa (a kind of curried soup with chilies, seafood, chicken, noodles, and the like) and, when asked, he said that it wasn’t authentic. I believe that anyone who opens an authentic Singaporean restaurant in London would clean up just with the expats’ custom. Why has no one done this yet? Or has someone done it and we haven’t found out about it yet? Enquiring minds (and stomachs) want to know.

I had a call from a recruiter about a new job. Unfortunately, it was with another Indian outsourcer. I am not enamoured of being in a frying pan so to jump out into a fire is ill-advised. I doubt whether I’ll go for an interview but we’ll see what transpires with that. The last interview I went on also came back disappointingly: not because they didn’t like me, though. The finance director of the company has now decreed that there is no money to hire any testers or test managers for at least six months. It would have been cheaper and more polite to have conveyed this to the people who interviewed me BEFORE I went for the interview. I suspect that their internal processes are more chaotic than indicated.

Now we’re off to the Serpentine to see the Matthew Barney exhibition. He’s married to Bj

…to which he might add an item or two…

…and many happy returns of the day. You’re nowhere near the point at which the BBC stopped wishing the Queen Mother many happy returns of the day, and just wished her a very happy day.

Oh, but have a happy day, too.

But, of course, the village’s in Finland…

…and many happy returns of the day.

is in the general area for a week and a half, so we grabbed the opportunity to have a bite of lunch and a drink with him this afternoon. HWMBO, of course, was there too, but the picture was taken by him so he’s not in it. We were in our local Chinese eatery, The Well, where the picture was taken.

Doris Lessing wasn’t aware that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature as she was out shopping when the announcement was made. The media were all gathered outside her residence when she returned, and here is her reaction on video.

I think that “underwhelmed” is the word I’d use to characterise what she thought of the whole business.

It’s been a busy week. Monday I got a surprise in the morning when I discovered that I was supposed to be on site that very morning, when I had resigned myself to another week without an assignment. So I scrambled and got to Big Investment Bank’s (BIB) office at Canary Wharf. The rest of the week was spent in starting to familiarise myself with the applications which we will be testing. It has become blindingly obvious that, although BIB has not gotten budgetary approval for the project, the project manager was afraid of losing me to another project. Thus, they agreed to pay my employer retroactively for my services once approval is achieved. The QA project manager admitted to me that he has no idea when, or even whether, approval will happen. So, there is nothing to do but read online documentation and get my head around it. I fall asleep quite frequently for short amounts of time, as the material is, at best, soporific.

Tuesday night I went to Lodge of Improvement at Kenton, blowing off a meeting of Diocesan Lay Chairs. Unfortunately, not enough brethren showed up at the meeting, so we spent the time chatting and having a drink. While that was nice, I am a bit miffed about it. I wish that the meeting were in a place that was more accessible to my Lodge brothers so that they might be more likely to attend.

Wednesday night was yoga class. I managed to do several things that I couldn’t do before, which was quite good. There will be no classes next week as the teacher is going on holiday, so I’ll just have to do my cardio.

Thursday morning I had blood taken for my diabetic appointment at the end of the month. There was a bruise in my arm when I took the Bandaid off later that day. The nurse is very good at slipping the needle in without much pain, but I think a little bit of blood leaked out. Thursday night I thought I was going to a book signing, but discovered when I got there that I’d misread the date and it had happened a week earlier. Boy, did I feel annoyed.

Friday evening, instead of going to the gym like I should we went out to Nando’s to have chicken, and then I tried to shift the backlog of emails and communications I’ve had all week. I finally did it this morning. I discovered that celery and carrot juice, mixed with some ginger beer, is quite tasty. Everyone else in the house went “Yuck!” but I think it was fine, and solved the problem of what to do with a half glass of ginger beer (diet) that was left in the bottle.

Today I have to prepare for the second meeting of the Nurture group at St. Anne’s, and try to relax a bit. I hope it will work well.

You may remember this post, in which I related the story of Carabba, a very sick cat. Well, I’m happy to say that he has now made a full recovery and is at home with his adoring companion^Wowner. A picture is below:

A post detailing this week will follow anon.

We had a postal strike last week that extended into Monday, and kept a shedload of post in the mailboxes.

So this week, on Wednesday, we got our first post for a week.

It was three pieces of mail.

None of them was for anyone in this flat.

Am I bovvered? You bet your sweet donkey I am!