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Truly vile

I spotted this pink stretch limo in London, near the IMAX, on Saturday.

A quick Google on the phone number on the side led me to Wild Stretch Limousines. This is their “Pink Expedition”, made by Ford. It seats 14 people. It has a “funky purple and cream interior, along with an amazing disco floor ceiling”. Have a look…

I chatted to a Hummer stretch limo driver outside a wedding a few months back. The hire for a quick journey to the wedding reception was around £850. Air-conditioned, and the engine was for on the whole of the wedding to keep it cool and the champagne chilled! And he estimated it used 4 miles per gallon of fuel.

Well, it is a free country, I suppose. The web site proudly proclaims that this is the only pink Expedition in the UK. For which we can be boundlessly grateful.

Susan Boyle: a heart-warming story?

Image by Bert Kommerij via Flickr

Reactions to Susan Boyle’s astonishing singing performance on “Britain’s Got Talent” are popping up all over the blogosphere. Demi Moore’s heart is warmed by it on Twitter. The YouTube clip been watched nearly 13.5 million times now. There have been suggestions that, on this over-produced show, the surprise of a frumpy 48 year old woman who has never been kissed singing with beauty and passion has been managed and hyped.

I don't much like show music, but I was moved, I confess, by Susan Boyle's voice and her sheer determination to show everyone that she could sing. Very heart-warming.

Susan Boyle on "Britain's Got Talent"

And yet. Surely there's got to be more to this than meets the eye. A show that relies on hype and surface glitter finds itself, apparently, purveying a simple, homely message: don't always look on the surface of things; don't judge people by externals, but rather by who they are, inside.

So what's going on? Is this, basically, a set-up? Did they know there was going to be a stark contrast between how Susan Boyle looked and how she sang and communicated? Had they arranged for her to wear that dress and to look rather unkempt? Have we been duped?

Well, it's possible. But I don't think so. Unless they are consummate actors, the body-beautiful judges (as indeed all the audience) thought they were in for a treat, and the treat was to be about belittlement, about someone making a fool of themselves. And they were wrong, and had the balls to admit it.

As for Susan, what came through to me was the fact that she didn't really care. She knew she looked frumpy. She knew she'd been nowhere much, and had never married. But she knew, too, that she could sing, and wow an audience. Here's a lady who seems pretty secure in herself, and is to be admired for it.

As someone who's larger than he should be, and has never been quite sure that his body is as obedient or presentable as he would like it to be; but as someone who also knows he has gifts, and presence, and, on a good day, a kind of charisma - as that person, I really appreciate her chutzpah in doing for it and in not allowing herself to be defined by how people react to how she looks.

I don't care if the show's message comes over a bit shallow. There are plenty of people out there who forget to look below the superficial into what makes someone the person they are. However it comes about, it's good to be reminded, because we all do the externals thing, and we shouldn't.

Good for you, Susan Boyle!

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• UK church volunteer becomes a singing sensation on the web (news.bbc.co.uk)

Tacky magic

If there’s something tackily magical about a fairground when it’s working, there’s something fascinating too about coming across a fairground – as SSO and I did yesterday – as they are setting up the rides and stalls.

This was the Hampton Court Fun Fair. We chatted to the stall- and ride-holders. I imagined that fairs like this were still run by extended families. Not so - too Romantic a notion. In this case anyway, there’s a trade paper, and stall-holders apply for given fairs, coming from all over the country. Gloucester and Walsall, the ones we spoke to. The guys from Gloucester were much more friendly!  Set up and pull down, every 3-4 days. £2 or £3 a ride. In these days of recession, too.

Fairs during set-up can be an opportunity for the surreal. Take this for example…

And for abstract beauty…

More photos at my Flickr site here.

Colony Collapse (2)

I blogged a little time back about the global collapse in bee colonies. Here’s a fascinating video on the subject, from TED, via Front Porch Republic. Well worth a look, I think.

Make meadows, not lawns, Dennis van Engelsdorp says in this video. Well, I live next to woodland, with deer in the garden, and it's practically impossible to keep my one acre as a lawn. I knew I was being lazy for a reason!

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• Ted 2009 (q-ontech.blogspot.com)

Wheat-free diets and the Panasonic SD-255 breadmaker

Prompted into action by this Heart Scan Blog, I’ve decided to try a wheat-free diet for a month.

It’s not as easy as it looks. Bread, cakes, biscuits, pasta: all these standards and more are now off the list.

I hate commercial gluten-free loaves. So I’ve bought a Panasonic SD-255 breadmaker, because it will cope with rye, spelt and gluten-free flours. I’ve always thought that Panasonic breadmakers are the best of the bunch, and I’m quite pleased with this model so far.

100% spelt bakes quite flat (make sure you use the slotted paddle provided), and tasted nutty and delicious. 100% rye was not quite a full success – but I’ve only tried it once so far. I’m not sure that the kneading action fully mixed all the ingredients, and it feels as if the top of the loaf, again quite flat, is not so much undercooked as containing an unduly high proportion of the wetter ingredients put into the pan at the beginning of preparation. But I may be doing something wrong – I’m well used to breadmakers, but haven’t tried 100% rye before.

If you can’t decide between the SD-255 and the SD-254, I would go for the former: it has an automatic dry ingredient dispenser, and the price difference is minimal.

Anyway, more in the way of a full review once I have used it more.

If you want to have a further look, you can download the manual here.

Alone, Suburban and Sorted

Richard Beck has a most interesting series of posts on suburban living here. Written from a North American perspective, it's very incisive and creative in its thinking. Here’s a taster, but all the posts are worth reading…

Specifically, I want to highlight one major facet of contemporary life in America: We rarely encounter difference in any meaningful way. For two reasons noted thus far. First, we are alone. Our civic disengagement, particularly our lack of bridging connections, gives us fewer opportunities to encounter people who are different from us. Second, we are sorted. The migration patterns of Americans over the last 30 years have sorted us into communities of like-mindedness. Thus, even if I do mix with people in my community they are likely to be people very much like myself. People who share my voting preferences, my religious beliefs, and my skin color. Again, we fail to encounter difference in these homogeneous communities.

My concern with these trends is that we rarely get to practice the skills of welcome, debate, listening, inclusion and hospitality. We begin to find difference shocking, deviant, weird and effortful to live with. Worse, as the research on group polarization showed us, separated from difference we grow more extreme in our views, demonizing difference rather than listening and learning to make room for strangers.

Isn’t church (ideally, at least) one of the few antidotes to this kind of fragmentation? There we may find (if we are fortunate, and if the church hosts this possibility): connection, welcome, debate, listening, inclusion, hospitality and difference. And, as Beck suggests, these values, paradoxically placed together as they are, promote the very opposite of extremism. in fact, the tension they set up - for example, hospitality and difference - is one of the most creative things an ecclesial community may have to offer.

Might then a properly envisioned church not be a third place (alongside home and work) whereof Beck speaks?

Secular fundamentalism

There’s a really intelligent article by John Gray in the Guardian here on modern atheist crusaders (Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens in particular).

Truly these people are as committed in their assumptions, their prejudices and their evangelism as your average religious fundamentalist.

Platitudinous

I love BBC Radio 4. And yet there are times of day when I must avoid it like the plague.

The Archers, for example. I have only to hear that yum-tee-tum opening music for my day to be utterly ruined, beyond repair.

And Thought for the Day. I consider myself, not a ‘religious’ person (I do so hate that word!), but a person of some fumbling faith. And yet I can’t stand the sanctimony of it all. Why do religious leaders and movers and shakers feel they have a right to speak to the nation (or the part of the nation that’s listening!) for 2 minutes every weekday, and on Saturdays too?

I do admire the skill in honing a presentation so that it can begin and end and have a middle, all within 120 seconds. But, beyond that, no, thank you. Reach for the off button.

And yet it may serve a purpose of sorts. At least I have found an antidote, courtesy of kenodoxia: Platitude of the Day. It takes no hostages. It’s based on the broadcast, which it roughs up very considerably. And you can read it against the sound of the pious presenting person, via a link to the BBC web site.

Delicious. Scandalous. Well done, the author, for listening to TFTD so faithfully and mediating it to us in such assimilable form! At last, something good (apart from me, of course) comes out of Southend-on-Sea!

I wonder if the deity minds being referred to as "my Invisible Magic Friend"?!

Discretion in Beijing

My 21 year old daughter (of whom I am of course inordinately proud!) has just flown off today to join a three-week, all expenses paid, Study China programme, sponsored by the UK government, in Beijing. Last year she spent three weeks in Dharamsala teaching Tibetan Buddhist monks to speak English.

I am wondering how these two facts sit together.

Should she be visiting China at all, with its deeply depressing human rights record and occupation of Tibet? Part of me wants to say it’s a bad idea. On the other hand, learning anything about China in a constructive way must surely be of benefit.

Will she be able to say anything about her Tibetan interests? We discussed this, and we doubted it. I would find it a real bind to have to hold my tongue in that regard. But better that than being thrown out of the country, or into a Chinese jail.

This is where ethics gets tricky for me. She is sympathetic, as I am, to the Tibetan cause. But she wants to learn about China too. Should we cut ourselves off from areas of potential knowledge and mutual understanding for the sake of our principles?

What does her visit, sponsored as she is from the UK, say to the Chinese about relations with the UK? How much of this is there for pure study, and how much is it a PR exercise?

And, I wonder, does the UK government sponsor study trips to the seat of the Tibetan government in exile? I rather suspect not.

More later…

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