I couldn’t resist!

I am famous for starting projects and not finishing them. Its a male thing I suppose. In my case the remains of these 1/2 finished projects litter the hard-drive of my computer in the form of Wordpress themes, PhpBB themes, Wordpress plugins, Java projects and the like. Well, no more. I finished something! I released it and at the time of this post, there have been over 80 downloads so far.

The Wordpress theme “Henge” was released at the weekend. It was a statement on what I feel about the phenomenon of “sponsored links”, monetized blogs, search engine optimization and all of the rest of the “commercialized blogging” world. Specifically, it’s released under a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported” license that allows non-commercial use only, with the provision of freely sharing and hacking the theme to your heart’s content.

This is only the first such theme. I have others in the pipeline. Also coming are a couple of plugins (actually, sidebar widgets) that will be similarly for non-commerical use only.

This just puts me in mind of a scene from “The Mummy” where Evelyn translates a section of hieroglyphs and exclaims “take that Benbridge Scholars!” - releasing the software was my own “take that, sponsored link spammers!”

A coworker sent me this:

Thanks, I needed the laugh that provided!

The BBC has a fascinating article on the “economics of ticket touting” where they talk to Princeton University’s Professor Alan Krueger about the topic. It says at one point:

“The reason why people are going to the secondary market is that they want to get a better seat than what’s available and I think that is an indication that they were not priced properly in the first place,” he says.

“In the secondary market, the tickets average 50% more than their list prices, and some go for a lot more than that. The very best seats go for double or triple the list prices.”

I was told by a serious concert go-er that paying up to 3x the face value of a ticket was OK so long as the ticket was for a great seat in an otherwise sold-out show. His advice to me was to shoot for anything up to 50% over face value simply as “the norm”.

Floor seats in a great location (as opposed to up in the ‘nose bleeds’) to see The Police on July 2nd in St Louis, at 35% above face value was a steal. I figure on it being a simple matter that Ticketmaster doesn’t give me any choice over the location where I would be sitting, so the 35% over-face value is the cost of choice and well worth it.

Music meme wrap-up, the missing answers:

• How, how am i supposed to feel?
  (”Cant stop the rain” - Cascada)
• It’s five and I’m driving home again
  (”Dancing with tears in my eyes” - Novaspace cover of the original Ultravox track)
• I will not make the same mistakes that you did
  (”Because of you” - Jason Nevin’s club mix of the Kelly Clarkson track)
• I am sitting in the sun, I can feel the power
  (”Light” - Benassi Brothers)
• The summer sun was fading as the year grows old
  (”Forever Autumn” - from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds)
• Received a letter just the other day, dont seem to want to know you no more
  (”Embarassment” - Madness)
• Where’s will?
  (”Spybreak” - Propellerheads, from the Matrix soundtrack)
• I dont want your adoration, dont want your train stopping at my station
  (”Ga Ga” - Melanie C, from her album “Northern Star”)

It’s probably obvious that there’s a theme in my music tastes:

1. Modern covers of older songs
2. Dance remixes
3. Dance / electronica

The song by Madness was misquoted slightly - I posted what I thought the words were without doing the appropriate lyrics searches. That said, it’s an awfully depressing song which I thought I’d post in full along with a second song that ranks as the next most painful. For some strange reason these 2 are ones that I know by heart, and the lyrics pop back to mind quite quickly. Perhaps this is a little too self-revealing, but, here they are:

You have Merinda to thank for inspiring this post…

• Put your MP3 player or whatever on random.
• Post the first line from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.
• Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.
• Strike out the songs when someone guesses correctly.
• Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!

So, here you go. Have at them (some are easier than others):

1. Twentyfive years and my life is still
   (”What’s up” - DJ Miko’s dance remix of the origianl track by 4 Non-Blondes - Quantum Tea)
2. I’m gonna wake up, yes and no
   (”Die another day” - Madonna, radio edit - Quantum Tea)
3. All the leaves are brown (And the sky is grey)
   (”California Dreamin” - DJ Sammy cover of the original 1966 hit by the Mamas & The Papas - Merinda)
4. Boy meets girl - You were my dream, my world
   (”Miracle” - Cascada - Quantum Tea)
5. Your cruel device, Your blood like ice
   (”Poison” - Groove Coverage’s dance cover of the song by Alice Cooper - Quantum Tea)
6. Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit lonely and you’re never coming around
   (”Total eclipse of the heart” - dance cover version by “Jan Wayne meets Lena” on the album 80’s energy - YouTube video! - from the original by Bonnie Tyler - Edeyn)
7. She says her love for me could never die
   (”Run to you” - Novaspace cover of the original track by Bryan Adams - Quantum Tea)
8. How, how am i supposed to feel?
9. It’s five and I’m driving home again
10. I will not make the same mistakes that you did
11. I am sitting in the sun, I can feel the power
12. The summer sun was fading as the year grows old
13. Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste
    (”Sympathy for the devil” - Guns ‘n Roses cover of the Rolling Stone’s original - Merinda)
14. Received a letter just the other day, dont seem to want to know you no more
15. Where’s will?
16. Now I will tell you what I’ve done for you
    (”Going under” - Evanescence - Quantum Tea)
17. I dont want your adoration, dont want your train stopping at my station
18. Feels like you made a mistake, made somebody’s heart break
    (”Disease” - Matchbox Twenty - Quantum Tea)
19. Never made it as a wise man, couldnt cut it as a poor man stealing
    (”How you remind me” - Nickelback - Merinda)
20. I get out of bed at half past ten

Lee Strobel is quoted in an interview as saying:

Women in first-century Jewish culture were not given credibility in a court of law; their testimony was not considered reliable. So why [do the gospel writers] say that women discovered the tomb empty, even though it hurts their case in the view of their audience? I believe it’s because they were trying to accurately record what actually took place.

(read the full interview on Beliefnet.com)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in “Letters and Papers from Prison” wrote:

SOCRATES mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as “the last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26). There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection. It is not from ars moriendi, the art of dying, but from the resurrection of Christ that a new and purifying wind can blow through our present world. … If a few people really believed that and acted on it in their daily lives, a great deal would be changed. To live in the light of the Resurrection—that is what Easter means.

Lastly, Christianity Today has a superb interview with the current Bishop of Durham (N.T. Wright) - “You Can’t Keep a Justified Man Down“

Within the Enlightenment world of the last two centuries (as represented not least by liberal theology), we see a horror of any idea that God might actually act in the world. People produce fancy-sounding reasons for this, as though it would be quite wrong for God to step in and raise one person from the dead. Why didn’t he step in and stop the Holocaust? And so on. But in fact the whole Enlightenment project is at risk. They want God banished upstairs so they can get on with running the world downstairs.

But with the resurrection, we have God saying, “No, I want to put things downstairs to rights, thank you very much. I started doing it with Jesus and you’d better get in line.” That’s a shock to liberal theology, just like it’s a shock to all kinds of other tyrannies - and liberal theology has become its own sort of tyranny.