Weekly World News

....and here's a wrap-up of the Weekly World News :)

Greece's parliament approved an austerity bill, cutting 15,000 government jobs and reducing the minimum wage by 22 percent in exchange for $170 billion in bailout funds from the European Union and the I.M.F.

More than 80,000 protesters marched in Athens on Sunday, some of them looting and vandalizing local stores. At least 34 buildings burned, including a Starbucks and an underground movie theater once used as a torture chamber by the Gestapo. "This is worse than the Forties," said an elderly woman. "This time the government is following the Germans' orders." 

While striking in Brussels against an increase in their retirement age, hundreds of firefighters broke through barricades outside the prime minister's office and soaked riot police in water and fire retardant. 

A man was arrested in The Hague after trying to throw a marijuana snowball over a prison wall.

Dutch ice skaters expressed hope that the extreme cold in Europe, which has killed more than 500 people, would allow them to hold the traditional 124-mile Elfstedentocht speed-skating race for the first time in 15 years. 

Anonymous hacked into the servers of the Syrian Ministry of Presidential Affairs, gaining access to staffers' email accounts, many of which had the password "12345." 

Following complaints from Catholic officials, President Barack Obama amended a recently issued mandate requiring employers to provide free contraception to employees. "Thanks to President Obama," said Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, "we are all Catholics now." 

Florence Green, the last known veteran of World War I, died at age 110 in England.

singer Whitney Houston died at age 48 in Los Angeles.

A Wisconsin company was reported to have granted a four-year-old's Christmas wish for a $380 "Persuade" dual-flush toilet. "'Mom, wouldn't that be great if I could have this?" the boy said during a visit to the company's showroom. "Could you imagine all of the things I could do?"

New York City hotels announced plans to issue panic buttons to their maids.

British mathematicians used the Rapunzel Number to solve the Ponytail Shape Equation. "We all have likely wondered about the fluffiness of hair," said Raymond Goldstein, Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems at the University of Cambridge. 

Following incidents in four other states, the notorious Piggyback Bandit was spotted in Minnesota, where officials feared he would again rub the necks of high school athletes and jump onto their backs. "It's the creepiness of the behavior that alarms most people," said a North Dakota activities director. "It's a little creepy." 

Filmmakers raised money to release a movie about Osama bin Laden and an "army of zombie terrorists." 

In the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth formally rededicated herself to England.

English gardeners dug up a bed of blue centaurea growing in the shape of a swastika in Weston-super-Mare.

The Newtown Creek sewage-treatment plant in Brooklyn planned a Valentine's Day tour package including gifts of Hershey's Kisses and views of its stainless steel "digester eggs," which process millions of gallons of gas and sludge each day.

OMG!

The account of the resurrection of Christ, as recorded in John 20 is probably a very well read scripture... but as I went over it again recently, a new thought occurred to me (new to me anyway).

Here we have a real OMG moment, and it brings vastly differing results to three people...

In the story, we have three characters, Mary Magdalene, Peter and John. They are very different people who all have a common experience, they are all witness to the open tomb of their Lord, yet their reactions are vastly different. For those who want it, here is the account from John's gospel:

~~~~~~~~~~~~

 ¹ Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. ² So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

 ³ So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. ⁴ Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. ⁵ He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. ⁶ Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, ⁷ as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. ⁸ Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. ⁹ (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) ¹⁰ Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.

 ¹¹ Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb ¹² and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

 ¹³ They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

   “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” ¹⁴ At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.

 ¹⁵ He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”

   Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”

 ¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Mary.”

   She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So, first up, we'll look at John, who was known as 'the disciple whom Jesus loved'. Here was a follower who's faith in Jesus was unflinching, built not on logic, persuasion or rhetoric, but love. He enters the opened tomb, sees the grave clothes neatly folded up, and immediately believes! He doesn't need to be led through the steps of what Jesus said and did to come to a conclusion, he understands straight away that Jesus is alive.

Next we have the much maligned Peter, a man who is at this point full of self-loathing, recrimination and has lost belief in himself. He is at such a low point mentally and emotionally that he has given up on himself as a follower of Jesus, and soon decides to throw it all in and go back to fishing as a living. He looks into the tomb, sees exactly what John has seen, and gets,... nothing. 

It won't be for another week before Peter has to face his 'demons', when Jesus gently re-validates him, and restores him strength and leadership through a showing of love and forgiveness.

Mary, who's back-story with Jesus has led her to a deep and abiding love for him as a man and her Lord, is devastated at the 'desecration' of the empty tomb. When she looks in, after Peter and John have run off to tell their story, she sees a new thing - two angels are now in the tomb, and she then encounters Jesus himself outside the tomb. Jesus gave her all she needed to give her the joy she would feel, just one word - he called her by her name. Mary needed that personal, close and intimate encounter to bring her into the truth.

The over-riding point I got from all this is, Jesus knows us intimately, knows how we think, knows what we believe, knows our strengths and our weaknesses. And he deals with us in just the way that heals.

Peter needed the time to think, to reach the depths and strip away his self-reliance, before he would accept a life of relying completely on Jesus. John simply needed to see a small thing to understand the larger picture, he already had built a relationship with Jesus out of love, the one true foundation for faith. Mary received from Jesus that direct personal encounter, a recognition of herself as a person, not just a part of the crowd.

Jesus knows just what you need to bring everything into perspective, to open your eyes, your heart and your mind. Of course, you won't get it if you're sitting on the couch not looking... have you run to the tomb and confronted a Jesus that is no longer dead and buried?

Wrap up of weekly world news

Here's the pick of the world news for the past week:

Russia and China vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Syria for its campaign to suppress dissent and backing an Arab League plan for Bashar al-Assad to step down as Syrian leader. The vote came as the Assad regime was launching a major offensive on the city of Homs, whose residents were under mortar attack over the weekend and into Monday morning. "A couple members of this council remain steadfast in their willingness to sell out the Syrian people and shield a craven tyrant," said the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice. 

In Damascus, one of the Syrian cities previously least affected by civil strife, residents were stockpiling food and water and enduring rolling blackouts. "Nobody is comfortable anymore," said one socialite, adding that she had curtailed her weekly visits to the nail salon. "And I paint my nails black when I come, just like the situation." 

At least 70 people died in a riot at a soccer stadium in Port Said, Egypt, and in Moscow, tens of thousands of activists rallied in Bolotnaya Square to oppose Vladimir Putin's presidential candidacy, while tens of thousands of Putin supporters rallied at Poklonnaya Gora, calling the antigovernment activists "Orange trash". Putin's detractors turned out in spite of below-freezing temperatures. "We are not revolutionaries in mink coats!" shouted one speaker. "I am!" replied a woman in a mink coat. 

A fifth of dogs and a quarter of cats in America were classified as obese. "I didn't notice the weight creeping on," said an Atlanta woman of her dog, Dodger. "All of a sudden he was just this fat dog." 

Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign deployed robo-calls falsely accusing Mitt Romney of having deprived Holocaust survivors in nursing homes of kosher meals during his tenure as Massachusetts governor, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie refused to apologize for calling a gay state assemblyman "numbnuts." 

Mitt Romney said on CNN that he wasn't "concerned about the very poor," and the Dutch bedding company Snurk angered Swedish homeless-advocacy groups by selling luxury duvet covers resembling cardboard boxes.
Residents of Isafjorour, a town in northwestern Iceland, celebrated the return of the sun, which arrived several days late.

American monkey-lovers continued to evade wildlife-control agents. "It's not what I fought for, to be treated like this," said Jim Clark, a disabled Vietnam veteran who lives in a motor home on the Texas-Louisiana border with his wife, Donita, and their four capuchins, Tina Marie, Meeko Mae, Sara Jo, and Hayley Suzanne. "So many of us want to disappear," said Ann Newman, president of the Simian Society of America, "and have our own community where we can safely keep our monkeys."

As the world turns...

Well, here it is, the end of another year, and the blogernets will be overflowing with 'What a Year That Was' posts....

It's true we'll never see another like it, simply cos you can't go back (unless you're the Doctor's companion). But the world keeps turning and the sun will rise on 2012 without a jolt or murmur. Yet I will look back briefly, just to see if the monsters have stopped their chase...

I didn't make any new year's resolutions 12 months ago, so I can score 100% for not failing any. That's a good way to start. I'm still alive, and for a guy who has in the past been a step away from depression-related suicide that's also a bonus, although 2011 was not by any means a bad year. I can count my blessings.

For starters I have a wife who has stood by me through difficulties, slow times, unsure times and poor times. Love can inspire passion, but at bedrock it is patient, kind, forgiving, loyal, selfless and hopeful. I can't ask for more.

Work has been slow, with occasional photoshoots (I got to shoot the World's Greatest Treasurer...) and some steady delivery work to bring in the $$. So I'll be looking for something that can inspire me and be enjoyable while earning me a crust.

I've helped some groups and people get books published, and put out some 2012 calendars of my own work.

My trusty iMac crashed, so I had to replace that, which made me think what can I do on an iPad? Is it an expensive toy, or can I do my work on it? After a slow start where the apps seemed geared towards fun rather than functionality, I'm getting to discover that some serious work can be done, even on the original iPad (which is what I got).

I'm a photographer (among other things) so I've been playing with photo apps, and let me tell you, good ones are thin on the ground. The usual suspects are fine and fun - Camera+ and Instagram are great for the 'retro' look that's a craze on the internet. But I need something with a bit more bite, as I usually work with Photoshop, and those apps don't have the chops.

First up I tried Photogene, which has some good controls built in  - but runs out of puff before the finish line. A good try nonetheless. Then, hidden in the deep dark recesses of an app review, was PhotoForge2. Now we have controls for curves, levels, brightness/contrast, HSL, vibrancy, Unsharp Mask, white balance, and more. There's also a plethora of presets that people expect nowadays, to replace photoshop 'actions'. In the mix is a range of camera, film, lens, filter, flash, developer and paper choices! And layers, this app does layers! And it also comes with a multi-level undo. Now this is more like it! All this for $10, and it replaces more than 90% of what I would do in photoshop.

As a printer, I relied heavily on the Pantone PMS colour matching system. The print world revolves around it. But a PMS colour book costs hundreds of dollars, and there's more than one needed. So of course now there's a cheap app from Pantone with all that on board. One gripe I have is you can't do a search, typing in 330 and getting the colour and breakdown with it - seriously, why not? But it does have a good touch for designers, photographers, printers and decorators, you can upload a photo (of say a shop interior) and it will hunt up the PMS colours in that photo. Great for web designers and interior decorators etc. Get it!

For audio work, which  do occasionally for my radio show, I've got most bases covered, except for a decent replacement for Audacity, but I'm hopeful! I have Dragon for converting speech to text, Speak It for converting text to speech, and Translator who knows why as our guests are all English speaking, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. But I do need an app to do serious editing work on sound files and export as mp3's. I'll probably find one next week...

As for fun, I look to the early days of PC games and came up with Retro Pinball, which is Epic Pinball rebuilt for the iPad - seriously awesome :) Then to top it off, I came across that psycho pair, Sam n Max in the game The Penal Zone. Who could ask for more?

So with all its ups and downs, the year hasn't been too bad. The thing is, a lot of this stuff is just things. And things come and go. There's more important stuff that makes life worth living. So when I put my iPad down, life doesn't just stop! People are important, relationships go on, they sustain you, help you think and grow, and come with their own rewards. And above all that, there's a God who has proved to me that he will 'never leave me or forsake me'. He's there in the bright sunlight, he's there in the darkest pit. If I turn my back on him, I can't see him, but he's still there, guarding my back. That's my greatest treasure.

All the best for 2012.

Making it App'en

Although I use Apple computers for preference, my philosophy with phones has always been 'Keep It Simple Stupid'. I don't want a phone that takes photos. I have very decent cameras for that. I don't want a phone that tells me where to go, I have a Melways for that. I don't want a phone that knows all and answers my questions, I have a wife for that! All I want my phone to do is make calls and txts. That's it.

So the world of Apps has been growing around me with no discernible effect. Until now. 

Out of a mixture of curiosity and excess cash (temporary), I bought an iPad. I don't really know why. I certainly don't need one. Everything I do for my business I can do far far better on my iMac. So put it down to mild insanity.

Being part Scottish, I hate to spend list price on anything (and I mean ANYTHING). On the flip side, if something is on special and I don't need it, I may well buy it anyway, 'cos it saves me money! (refer back to the mild insanity part...)

So my iPad is an ex-demo iPad 1 from Apple. Not pre-owned as such, but pre-pawed, if you will. Saved a couple of hundred on it, thank you very much.

But the platform aside, it's the apps that the iPad is all about. Lots of them. Way too many to get all caught up in, as of Dec 2nd, there were 1,000,000 apps to choose from. So I trawled review sites for the low-down on downloading useful apps, just to keep things under control.

I kept my list pretty short, just to give me time to road test the apps and not be overloaded. In trialling them, so far I've only given two apps the flick, so prior research pays. The ones I'm left with are pretty good, but I'd love to hear from my readers what apps you guys find useful and fun....

To begin with, I went for apps that were free (that Scottish thing again), but a few apps I paid a dollar or two for.

I began using the 'Notes' app that came pre-installed, but soon switched to 'Evernote' as it synchs with my desktop computer. It will synch with yours too, whether you use Apple, or some monstrosity from the dark side :) It also can handle pdf's, pictures and websites pages.

I'm a reader (I used to read a book a day, for years), so this whole ebook thing is a boon. So yes, I have iBooks, and a few free novels on board. I also have Kobo, which isn't as intuitive. But it's great to have the flexibility to read books from all 'camps' and not have to own three different readers.

Being a photographer, I wanted some photo apps. I know, I know, the iPad 1 doesn't have a camera... But I have a dozen perfectly good cameras, both film and digital, so why can't I just upload pics onto my iPad? Well, I had to figure that one out myself, apparently MOST iPad users get one with a camera if they want to take photos, go figure! So after some experimenting, I found you CAN upload photos via an attachment for either an SD card or memory stick ($30 at Apple thanks very much). So you plug in your memory doohicky and the pre-installed photo app will upload the photos of your choice. 

Then you can use apps like Camera+ to manipulate them with a variety of built in 'styles', which is a bit of fun. It ain't photoshop, but none of them are, even the app from Adobe. But its fun and it works. One tip though... once you're done manipulating, make sure you 'Save' before you 'Share' or your pic will be a useless bunch of blurred pixels. Once 'saved' though, the resolution will be fine.

For those addicted to social media (and who isn't) the best app out there by far would be Flipboard. It's a home base for all your social media sites, and it does a lot more too.... First up, it works, visually, like a magazine. So if someone posts on facebook a link to a website, then pictures or video on that site are featured prominently, along with the lead paragraph of the story. And you can flip through facebook, twitter etc like a magazine, which becomes a visual feast for the user. AND if that's not enough, you can also choose a host of other services to include in Flipboard, alongside your social media sites. So I have News streams, Time magazine, Tech news, National Geo, Gizmodo, Dark Roasted Blend and more, all updating with their latest, and it was all  FREE.

When I go to church, I usually choose if I take a nice modern language Bible, or my trusty 'direct translation' version with me. Now I just take my iPad, cos its got both on board. I trialled a couple of 'Bible' apps, and the one that won me is simply called 'Bible'. Put out by YouVersion, it can access a huge range of versions wirelessly, or you can download them for use when your out of network range (which I often am). So I've got the NASB (for purists) and The Message locked and loaded. You can change the text size, and also have a 'low-light' option so the screen doesn't spotlight you if you're in a darkened auditorium.

I'm a news junkie, or more correctly, a newspaper junkie. I've had newsprint on my hands since I left school back in the 70's. I've printed them, done the layout, hunted up stories, taken photos, made up headlines, designed them from the ground up, owned them, published them, distributed them, and loved them. So of course, I had to have some newspapers on board. The best Australian paper (no arguments here, I'm right) is The Age. When I got it it was free, and I download The Age every day. You have access to all the stories, and galleries of photos (which I love, being a photographer). One small point, the Green Guide on Thursday has the articles, but not the TV guide - maybe cos I'm on the free version? Overall a marvelous app for news junkies.

Other news sources I keep up with via apps are: the ABC news. This app has access to all the news coming from the ABC, but the layout isn't as clear as The Age app, although the content is excellent.

Then there's SBS World News. Again, the content is up to the standard you would expect from SBS, but the layout is messy. Finding particular stories is harder than it need be.

I also have The Onion, satirical news from America. As their standard news outlets are too right-wing to be taken seriously, you might as well get the satire from people who know how to do it right! When is Fox News gonna realise they exist just to give comedians new material?

So that's news, what about magazines? Plenty out there, and I have AU Magazine, which seems to come out monthly, and has a great standard of layout and visual appeal to go with the written content. Not so much a lifestyle mag, but interviews with a large cross section of people/achievers here in Australia. Great stuff.

As I mentioned before, I like to get things for free, so when I saw I could get Inpress for free, I jumped at it. Very handy not just for an extensive gig guide, but as I do a radio show or two, the up to date info is a boon.

From the same camp as Inpress, you can also get Time Off, another music and band review mag. Also there's Three Magazine, only available on iPad (no print version), aimed at 'youth', its visually attractive, inoffensive, nicely interactive and surprisingly instructional.

Everyone raves about GarageBand. So I will too. Not because I'm a musician and know how to get the best out of it, but I've had musician friends run my iPad battery down playing with it. They love it. Get it.

Hate typing? Get Dragon Dictation. It's the best speech to text app, as they've been in the business for years and have all the bugs ironed out.

Want to play your music on your iPad? With Audiogalaxy you can get your music streamed from your computer to your iPad. It works, but seems to slow down your desktop while its running. But it does give you access to all your music without taking up room on your iPad's flash memory storage.

I have a guitar. I'm not sure why. Maybe I could learn to play it one day.... In the meantime, I have Guitar Tuner, which is a great little app to help you tune your 6 string accoustic to a variety of tunings, including standard, Drop D, Open D, Open G, Open A and more. Its great :)

Lastly, I have Wikipanion, which gives you access to search Wikipedia for answers to life, the universe and everything.

Let me know what apps you use, love or loath....

Red pill, blue pill.

In the film 'The Matrix', the choice is given to take either the 'Red' pill, or the 'Blue' pill. The blue pill lets you believe in the world as you have grown up to see it, but the red pill will transport your understanding of the world to how it really is.

Well, today, I'm offering you the chance to take the red pill!

You see, the 'world' that you live in is, not so much a lie, as a severe distortion. You (and I) are used to thinking that the world that we live in is the same world everyone lives in. 

And therein lies the lie.

Your everyday world (and mine) is actually more like a gated community, separated from the majority of the world and acting in a very insular way.

Firstly, to be fair, the reason we see our 'world' as the real one is because we control and consume the major media outlets. So our 'News' is largely a navel-gazing exercise.  We read about ourselves, we watch TV about ourselves, we listen to radio talking about ourselves and we visit websites geared to ourselves.

Yet we are the minority.

Now, I've made several claims here that I really need to back up, so I've used figures released in March 2011 by Nielsen Online. (Found at www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm)

Broadly, just 30.2% of the total worlds' population (now 7 billion) use the internet. To turn that around just under 70% of the world do not use the internet. The reason I'm picking on the internet first off is that it is the vehicle that most media people (and most companies) use to measure what they call 'the world'. For example, there's a lot of press given to the (unreal) claim that one gadget or another (e.g. iPhone) will 'change the world'. To believe this sort of hype, you'd have to completely ignore the fact that even less people use internet connected phones than use the internet in general, bearing in mind that internet users are in the minority anyway.

You may be rolling your eyes now and yelling at my blog that this is just marketing at work. Yes. Yet that's the way we think. We think that the world is 'connected' and that we're all in the same boat, living the same sorts of lives. We lie to ourselves, because we're too tired, too lazy, too brainwashed to think beyond the hype.

I'm in Australia, where just 60% of people use the internet. That's right, 4 out of 10 people I pass in the street don't use the internet. If you are reading this in Nth America (even more inclined to think they are 'the world') over 20% of your fellow Americans don't use the internet. If you are in Europe, almost half are not connected. In Asia, less that 25% are internet users. And in Africa, almost 9 out of 10 people don't use the internet. It all adds up to more than 2/3's of people in the world aren't online. At all.

So much for 'our world' being the norm.

So what's my point exactly?

Just this. Open your mind. Don't swallow blindly all the claims we hear/read/see every day that the way we live is the way the world really works. Get your brain out of the gated community and see the world as it really is.

Oh yeah, are you a Christian? Agnostic? Muslim? 'Middle-class'? Home-owner? Well, you're in a minority. 

Have a nice day :)

Ten bands for $10

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=224707320898626

26 November · 10:00 - 22:00

1330 ~ 1330 FERNTREEGULLY RD SCORESBY VIC

DOORS OPEN AT 9:45 AM
CAFE OPENS 9:45 AM
CAFE PERFORMANCES
MERCHANDISE STALLS IN FOYER ~ BUSKERS ~

AFTER THE CURFEW
STEEPLEJACK
MEET ME IN COGNITO
ROSANNA PALMER & BAND
RIVERTRIBE
WONROWE VISION
ADRIAN AUSTIN
KATIE HARDER & THE GENTLE FOLK
e11even
BLUES JAM
EDDIE COLE & BAND
ANDROO CROTHERS
SIMEON
MARTIN FAWKES
SARAH-ROSE MCIVOR
RICHELLE BOER