Healthy Leaders

Yesterday I attended the second day of the Wesleyan-Methodist Church of New Zealand’s National Conference, albeit only for the last one-and-a-half seminars.

The latter of these was entitled Dealing with Insecurity in Leadership and was led by Rev. Rex Rigby.

To illustrate the point, he opened by describing Moses as compulsive, Solomon as narcissistic, Saul as paranoid, Samson as co-dependent and Jonah as passive-aggressive.

In a very concise talk, he then outlined seven aspects of what he called “healthy leaders”:

1. Healthy leaders deal with their hurts.

2. Healthy leaders are authentic.

3. Healthy leaders have their own story to tell.

4. Healthy leaders commit to personal growth. (including by being accountable)

5. Healthy leaders look after those around them.

6. Healthy leaders look after themselves and their families.

7. Healthy leaders flourish, and those around them flourish.

He also said that a leader’s first call was to ask God to change him/herself, not others.

Today I was pleased to find that, while he was in town, he was also to speak at my church about Joseph.


I was honoured to be asked to do the reading beforehand, so I guess the fact that the following clip is of me, and not him, could potentially make me narcissistic…

Genesis 37:1-9

“Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved.” Psalm 55:22

“Sing unto the LORD, O ye saints of his, and give thanks at the remembrance of his holiness. For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Psalm 30:4-5

UHF – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack And Other Stuff – “Weird Al” Yankovic

It’s easy to understand why the words “MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK” are so small on the above cover – this is a brilliant album in its own right.

“Weird Al” fits in all his regular genres – parody, polka, shaggy dog story – and spices them up with musical sketches from his movie that suffer little from the loss of their pictures.

To that end, this is that rarest of beasts – an album without a single dud track on it.

Spam is a parody of REM’s Stand. (you know how it goes already!)

The title track UHF isn’t really that funny, but it’s a powerful rock track that just sucks you in and takes you wth it.

By the time we’re into Attack Of The Radioactive Hamsters From A Planet Near Mars, there’s no doubt that this is Al at the top of his game.

And, as with all his best tracks, the whole thing is clean…

The Biggest Ball Of Twine In Minnesota brings a tear to your eye, it’s such an unpatronising trip back to childhood.

I got no bad things to say. 10 out of 10.

Kids' Encounter

I was wondering if you would consider serving in kid’s encounter this year.

The above line is from an email I received from Kristen back in February, asking me to help out at Cession Church’s children’s group, and my immediate thought was this:

Naarrgghhhh!!

Despite having helped to take cubs camping in England, shown cartoons in orphanages in Romania, helped lead a Youth Fellowship group in Twickenham, helped teach illiterate kiwi kids on a camp in Arapohue, puppeteered for them in Auckland schools, worked as a schoolteacher in Highland Park for over a year, and, oh yes, actually been a kid for most of the last 36 years, they are still not my preferred company.

Still, I knew the pattern of these challenges from God. I’m invited to do something I’ve never really done before. I accept. I worry. I have to work hard to make it happen, even though I’d much rather back out of it. I bite the bullet. It goes brilliantly. And afterwards I make certain that I credit this to God.

Oh, and somewhere along the line I pray, too.

So, although I couldn’t really grab the passion for it, I figured it would still be a good experience and add another string to my bow. Setting the process in motion, I replied positively and volunteered. By April I’d been assigned a definite day for my first outing as a ‘Creative Communicator’ – October 21st, 6 months away.

Whew! With any luck my whole life in NZ would crash down around me well before then, and I’d never have to actually go through with it.

Well, today was the day, and as is so often the way, God made me fight to do something that I might rather have run away from.

I’ve had a bad back for a couple of weeks, so I could have easily used that as an excuse to cancel, but that’s just not the way I crumble cookies, so I left my flat for the church.

Next I missed my bus. Boy, now I really wanted to phone ahead and blame my no-show on this, but instead I sat there waiting the half-hour for the next one. Of course, I’d procrastinated all week with regards to the prep work that I was supposed to have done by now, so with a half-hour unexpectedly free, I sat there at the bus stop busily cutting the text for the story out and pasting it onto the back of the pictures that I would be showing to illustrate it.

When I finally walked in about six minutes before I was supposed to start, Megan (regular kids’ leader who I’d be doing this with) greeted me with a big smile and said she’d thought I wasn’t coming. Well, that of course implied that she had been all ready to do the thing without me anyway, so that was another opportunity to pike out, but I didn’t. I quickly used those few remaining minutes to shovel some food inside of me, then gritted my teeth, and strode in, knowing full well the reputation that kids the world over have for never doing what they’re told.

I’m used to having authority in my own classroom at the school where I work, but that’s usually with adults. Here I was entering territory where these kids were perfectly at home, but I was unfamiliar. Perhaps I was overthinking the whole thing.

Still, as if to prove the point, we kicked-off with some songs to a cassette, which they all knew the actions for, but I didn’t, so I had no choice but to simply follow them.

Then we moved onto some songs for which no-one knew any actions, so I had to make some up. Suddenly those who were taking part were all deciding to follow my lead.

The irony about this - the only worship session that I’ve ever led – was that I was very quickly feeling at home. Jumping up and down and doing actions to music was something that I really hadn’t expected to be doing… and yet it was extremely similar to the aerobics classes I’ve attended.

There were a few kids who didn’t want to take part, and this seemed to be normal, so I didn’t pressurize them.

This would be an appropriate point to mention that I spent a lot of this evening glancing over at Megan in order to check what ‘normal’ was here. Although as the guest ‘Creative Communicator’ I was supposed to be driving proceedings, she was the one who seemed to be continually cleaning up after me, in terms of retrieving kids who ran away from the group, and filling in the blanks about exactly what I should be doing next. It seemed to me that I had the cushy deal, while she was the one doing all the real work.

And they were a bit of a rowdy bunch, although not really troublesome. Just before the end however, they all fell dead silent. The closing item was the story Kristen had given me to tell them.

As I produced the pictures and began to read the text that I had so painstakingly glued to the backs of them at the bus stop, a complete and total hush descended upon the room. Even Megan was now getting to sit-down too, with no-one to run after and fetch back, and holding one of the kids next to her as that seemed to calm them down. I really had to be impressed at the effectiveness of the words that I had been given to say. The story was one that spoke to me personally, (I admit I hadn’t even pre-read it at home) and you literally could have heard a pin drop.

And then, after the final prayer, it was over. One of the kids spotted that I had the story and the prayer written down for me, and that I had in fact just been reading it. They seemed to think that I had on some level therefore been misleading them, but I happily showed them all the notes I had been working from. One thing that I do feel quite strongly about is not patronising them. They might be doing this stuff themself one day.

Afterwards I thanked Megan for all her help, honestly stating “I couldn’t have done it without you”, and we tidied up.

I felt it had gone extremely well, they seemed to have had a good time, and while my words to Megan had been truthful, I was in no doubt about who I reckoned had really looked after us all that evening.

Doctor Who: Gridlock

In the opening TARDIS scene, the Doctor offers to take Martha to another planet.

This “other planet” turns out to be another Earth.


We’re into the third series of modern Doctor Who now, and still there has only been one story not set on or just next to a planet called Earth.

Also, following the pattern of the last two series, once again we’re opening with a present-day Earth story, followed by one in Earth’s past and one in Earth’s future. All three future Earth episodes (The End Of The World, New Earth and this one) feature the Doctor bumping into the Face Of Boe by pure coincidence. They're also all written by the same person.

New companion Martha is almost identical in concept to old companion Rose – here she even gets to repeat Rose’s regret at joining the Doctor without considering her family, just as Rose did in The End Of The World. Will next week’s episode be another two-parter in the present-day with her family worrying where she is just as Earth gets invaded again, too?

This episode does have some good ideas in it – the notion of a story about spending your whole life stuck on the M25 has a lot of… err… mileage in it, but again it was the familiar pattern of setting up a great hook, and then never answering it. In this case the hook was “why are all these people spending years driving a distance that I walk on a daily basis?”

This one really showed up how copying the US 40-minute format has failed, too. There was nowhere near enough room for this motorway environment to be explored, and certainly not to bring back the Face Of Boe, bring back the macra, bring back the cat woman, poison the atmosphere, wipe-out Earth’s population with a virus and carry a pseudo-religious overtone too.

By the end of this episode the hoards of alien macra, for example, are merely escaped from by our heroes, and noone has time to care or even remember that they are all still there.

There’s also yet another scene promising to tell us about this alleged “time war”, but after two years the writer still appears to have come up with little more than the war's name.

The “you are not alone” line is hardly a revelation either, neither to us or the Doctor. What other direction could the extinction of the Time Lords have gone in, but the same one that the extinction of the Daleks has three times now? (in the stories Dalek, Bad Wolf / The Parting Of The Ways and Army Of Ghosts / Doomsday) No explanation for why the Face Of Boe didn't tell him this earlier.

For all that, the episode is quite fun, proving that the central traffic-jam-of-years concept was a really good one. When Ardal O’Hanlon shows up armed with a litter-ful of cat-gags, you sort of go all dewey-eyed for the joy of that other show he’s famous for.


For years now I’ve tried to remain positive that the writing on this show would improve (because it is only the writing that lets it down) but unless I see some sort of growth in this latest season – the third now – I can’t see the slack I’ve been cutting them lasting for much longer.

What Goes Up Might Come Down – David Gunson

David Gunson is a British air-traffic controller, who moonlights as an after-dinner speaker.

And on the basis of this CD, he was hilarious.

"Airports are difficult to hide, however, you can put billboards up but people tend to notice the odd jet flying in and out. Consequently the Government knows where 80% of the UK's airports are."

The extraordinary thing is that he knows what he’s talking about. As a result, his entire act is based on hum-drummingly mundane facts, which gives every surreal gag a kick of believeability that no amount of fiction could ever have accomplished. To that end, Gunson takes his beaurocratic life and effortlessly proves that he’s a self-employed civil servant, and only in a job because we’ve made the business of flying so dangerous. His account of the French air-traffic controllers’ strike in 1972 just wouldn’t be funny, if it didn’t sound so real.

This is sparkling, start to finish.

Knockout.

Buy it here!

Scrubbed

You know how adverts for digital TV always claim that you won't have to put up with any more of that mythical poor analogue reception?

So we were all watching Scrubs tonight, only with about a six minute delay, off of the MySky box, which is basically the local version of Tivo.

In other words, while we were watching the start, the rest of New Zealand was already six minutes into the episode.

Anyway, mid-way through, being digital, the picture started to freeze, pixilate and jump, as the sound cut-out. This kept on happening, and each time the middle of the screen was obscured by a large caption informing us that the recording had been interrupted due to atmospheric conditions. Soon it became so constant that there was barely a sentence left complete, and it was reminiscent of watching an LWT cut-down.

Ultimately we solved the problem when the picture had jumped so much that we had actually caught-up the whole six minutes to the show's live transmission in real-time, so we just flicked over to watch the rest of it off the pristine analogue transmission, which despite massively expensive advertising to the contrary, was not in the least bit affected by any inferior reception.

Today’s Celebrity Bible-Reader Is… Mr T

"By talking, a fool gets into an argument,
and his mouth invites a beating."

- Proverbs 18:6

Never Drink Two

Despite having never been a drinker, tonight I was pleased to have contributed in some small way to Cession Church's 80s trivia quiz, part of a service on alcohol...

Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Code

The Doctor and Rose-clone Martha travel back in time and meet William Shakespeare, who’s trying to put on a sequel and getting hassled by three witches…


This one works. Yes it’s got early-90s level CGI work, a thoroughly overmilked running joke, and bares a suspicious resemblance to The Unquiet Dead too, but hang on, it’s fun, and without all the usual pretentiousness.

Transplanting the show’s love of taking well-known modern London landmarks and turning them into camoflaged alien bases, here it’s the original Globe Theatre that is the catalyst. The Doctor’s reasoning, that just as humans express science using maths the carrionites use words, was a great idea too. And the final chase away from Queen Elizabeth was fun as well.

On a more personal level, I guess I was also able to buy into this one more, having performed on a replica Globe stage in Jack Drum's Entertainment in the nearby Bear Gardens Globe Museum 1987.

This ain’t highbrow stuff (it’s got historical errors a schoolkid could see through) but it captured the ideas and silliness of the brand.

I could list other shortcomings, but I don’t much feel like it. I guess I enjoyed it too much.

2001: A Space Odyssey

This is curious.

If you can stomach the slow 2-hour+ running time, one might even call it fascinating.

Left to their own devices, Clarke and Kubrick come out with a movie that steadfastly refuses to be pigeon-holed. Initially it looks to be all about an alien monolith, however midway through one realises that the exposition is taking far too long, and we are now in a different film about another subject entirely – artificial intelligence.

And then there’s the last section – deliberately provocative and nonsensical. Like the final episode of The Prisoner, I think it deliberately means nothing in order to feed off of the viewer's presumption that it’s a film, so surely it must mean something, right???

I could watch this film’s awesome pondering documentary-like visuals for hours. In fact, hang on, I just did.

I have to say I enjoyed this, for its amazing visuals and uncompromising narrative, but, fairly, I’m also a bit relieved that it’s out of the way now.

I'm No John Dorian

Doctor Who: Smith And Jones

The first episode of the latest dumbed-down series of Doctor Who started off in the same way as usual…


1. Present day London.


2. Zombies.


3. Fairly high-profile alien activity forgotten by the final scene.


This was the new series’ third story to be set in an earth hospital, and was this time about the hospital itself getting stolen and dumped on the moon, complete with patients and staff. The first third of the programme hung on the awe-inspiring question of just why this had happened.


The ‘explanation’ for moving the hospital to the moon was because these intergalactic police drones don’t have jurisdiction over the earth. I'm sure I don't have to point out the inherent flaw in that reasoning.


New companion Martha notices that everyone can still breathe on the moon, an observation that the Doctor calls a “Very good point! Brilliant in fact!” All I can conclude is that she was wrong, and that the actual lack of oxygen was in fact distorting the Doctor’s judgement. The air discrepancy is something that just about everyone in the thousand-strong hospital would have picked-up on straight away, as was the gravity thing, and the temperature thing. But hey – this wasn’t written for anyone cleverer than Martha.


As if to prove this point, the plot-explanation “because the aliens are thick” gets used twice this week.

Further, in order to explain the appearance of the same actress in the last series, we’re told that the earlier character was her identical twin cousin.

In the light of that claim, I feel I must draw attention to how, upon paradoxically meeting the Doctor a second time, Martha automatically asks him if he has a brother, but not if he has a cousin.


David Tennant was brilliant as ever, but he was fighting a losing battle. The final irony must surely be that I was able to enjoy this episode, purely because, after the last two years, my expectations are now low enough to.

BOLIVIAN DIARY by Ernesto Che Guevara

I made a good choice in skipping the foreword of this book, as it totally and utterly gives away the ending.

Unfortunately, so did the back…

On the whole though, it’s probably a good idea to read a foreword before ploughing into someone’s real-life diary. Che’s daily notes on who’s done what and where they’re going are thoroughly confusing, because it’s just not written to make sense to anyone but himself. We’re not introduced to these protagonists, and neither is their overall objective clearly set out at the beginning. As a result, one gets the impression that they were just wandering fairly aimlessly in the jungle for a long time, without much plan other than to hope that this would somehow cause a revolution to take place.

The irony is that, in reading the foreword afterwards, I discovered that this actually was the plan.

While Che’s motives come across as fine, his plan to hopefully start a war makes it hard to cheer him on, but reading his daily hassles against such colossal odds inevitably make one want him to succeed. But then you get stuff like:

”…this type of struggle gives us the opportunity to turn ourselves into revolutionaries, the highest state of the human species…”

Okay.

But for all that, it is extraordinary. Assuming that it is true, it’s real. And for that alone you can’t help but feel when real people die on these pages.

Over the Hedge

Funny!

Over The Hedge is about a group of animals who wake up from hibernation to discover that, during the winter, an entire town has been built where their wood had previously been. So they have to pool all their individual natural skills to adapt to life foraging for the humans’ leftovers.

Like many of today’s cartoons, this starts slowly but never stops accelerating. Garry Shandling plays well against-type as an old conservative, and Bruce Willis plays David Addison as usual, while William Shatner… well, he’s always played himself, hasn’t he?

This was brilliant, funny and I even learnt stuff watching it. Apart from the absence of the traditional “Khaaan!” joke in the closing credits, I’m at a loss as to how to wish this were any better.

Remember That Night – David Gilmour, Live At The Royal Albert Hall

I’ve never quite understood why recordings of concerts appeal to people.

I mean I can understand the appeal of listening to music, sure, I mean that’s the whole point of music isn’t it, to listen to it, but really – why on earth watch 2 hours of close-ups of people’s fingers pressing buttons, pulling strings and clapping their hands to show us how it’s all been made? It’s just a glorified Making Of video. You might as well sell me a DVD of David Blaine with all the other volunteers left in.

Anyways, this DVD of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour in London earlier this year fell into this category for me.

Not that that’s a bad thing. I was perfectly happy to zone-out for most of the show and let the awe-inspiring music take me on a journey through my thoughts and imagination. It has to be said that his earlier work did a better job of this, purely because I happen to like all that 80s synth stuff.

I remember seeing him perform at Live 8 a few years ago. (on Frank's TV) It was the first time I’d really noticed the age of some of the performers there. Again, not a bad thing at all – rather something that imbued the tracks with an air of authority that their younger selves would surely have lacked.

13 bonus tracks to go. What does ‘bonus’ mean again?

:)

(available here)

Out with flatties at GBS in Howick tonight, bidding farewell to Tim downstairs, as he and his cat Smokey are moving to Australia later this week.