Okay, so back in late ‘08 I discovered this guy Hugh McCloud and his blog gapingvoid
He was writing about art and creativity and posting pics of the sometimes satirical, sometimes sarcastic, sometimes sentimental drawings he was doing on the back of business cards, which he was selling.
I totally fell in love with this guy’s work.
Back in Nov 08 I blogged one of his writing pieces on creativity, “I’d like my crayons back, please”
Then, he started selling actual art prints. Quality, limited edition runs. The first one was “The Bluetrain.”
Oh, how I wanted it! I couldn’t get it at the time, but I did manage to save up to get another one of his later prints:) We even emailed a few times during the buying process:)
Then he brought out a book! I loved him even more:)
Currently, I get his ‘Hugh’s daily cartoon’ email, which sounds incredibly pedestrian, I know, but they’re fun and kinda cool and you get little gems like this sent to your inbox -
So this email thing has only been going for about 9 days, and he’s put up an offer….
HERE’S WHERE I NEED YOUR HELP!
…if you sign up to the email list by 3pm Saturday BRISBANE TIME (i already adjusted it for you!), he’s then going to randomly pick someone to give a copy of the CLUETRAIN PRINT to!!!
SO ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS THIS -
Follow this link, and sign up to get the daily email. Heck, you can even cancel it after a couple of weeks if you want. But then, if you win the print, you can consider giving it to me:)
Sweet deal, hey? ;p
“We talk as if thought was precise and emotion was vague. In reality there is precise emotion and there is vague emotion. To express precise emotion requires as great intellectual power as to express precise thought.”
- T.S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’
by Hugh McCloud
“The Good Wife’s Duties”
-Housekeeping Monthly, May 13, 1955
Some of the gems of instruction included:
“catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction”
“remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours”
“Don’t complain…even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through that day”
“Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice”
“Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgement or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.”
And the final exhortation – “A good wife always knows her place”
“Keep your heart simple. Keep it clean and uncluttered. Simply love God and remain true to him, others, and yourself. Brian has spent a lot of time unfolding the truth behind the Scripture, ‘Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life’ (Prov 4:23). The word ‘issues’ mean ‘borders or parameters.’ Guard your heart diligently, and the borders or parameters of your little life may expand further than you imagined.”
- Bobbie Houston, ‘I’ll have what she’s having’
“Island of Lost Children”
- Human Traffickers find easy prey amid the rubble Haiti
“In Haiti’s unstable post-quake atmosphere, at least one industry is poised to flourish. For those who buy and sell children for sex and cheap labor, Haiti is ripe with opportunity.
When the earthquake struck the impoverished island country last Tuesday afternoon, human traffickers suddenly gained access to a new population of displaced children. With parents dead, government offices demolished, and international aid organizations struggling to meet life-or-death demands, these kidnappers are in a unique position to snatch children with very little interference.
In today’s world, the twin causes of human slavery—poverty and vulnerability—increase exponentially after natural disasters. When the tsunami hit Indonesia in 2004, trafficking gangs moved quickly, seizing children and selling them as prostitutes in nearby Malaysia and Jakarta. In 2008, after floods devastated the Indian state of Bihar, groups of children were lured out of relief camps and sold to brothels across the nation.
I’ve seen many such stories up close. For the past three years, I’ve worked in India forInternational Justice Mission (IJM), a human rights agency with twelve offices around the world. Rescuing victims of slavery and sexual exploitation are our specialties, and natural disasters unfailingly bring us new business. One of my first cases dealt with a widowed mother and her six children who had been trafficked after a drought destroyed their livelihood. A local kiln owner, who was in the business of offering good jobs to drought-affected villagers, had approached them with an opportunity. The desperate widow took the bait and found herself and her children forced into slavery at a brick kiln with no hope of escape. The widow was subjected to violent physical abuse and raped repeatedly by the owner and his cronies.
In Haiti, as in India, human trafficking is a problem at the best of times. Even without the pandemonium unleashed by a 7.0 earthquake, an estimated quarter-million Haitian children are trafficked within the country each year. These slaves, known as restavecs, are typically sold or given away to new families by their own impoverished parents. Physical and sexual abuse is common for restavecs. Many owners use the girls as in-house prostitutes, sending them to live on the street if they become pregnant.
Not all of these trafficked children end up as domestic slaves within Haiti—plenty of others are promised work in the Dominican Republic but are instead sold to work in agricultural fields or brothels across the border. Poor children who escape a life in bondage most often end up in street gangs; if they are fortunate, they may be accepted into overcrowded orphanages.
In some cases, countries with trafficking problems have been able to rally around their children after natural disasters. After the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, an article from The Guardian reported stories of mysterious “relatives” showing up to take children from their hospital beds—a friendly male stranger, a never-before-seen aunt in an orange shawl. Doctors and medical staff knew exactly what these adults were after: earlier that same year, 400 Pakistani minors had been rescued from the United Arab Emirates, where they’d been enslaved as camel jockeys during the racing season. The hospital protected its young patients, refusing to turn them over to any adult without legal documentation. After several thwarted kidnapping attempts, The Guardian reported, a policewoman was guarding the doors of Islamabad’s largest hospital and its 960 hospital beds were under constant supervision.
Such a concerted effort appears unlikely, if not impossible, in Haiti today. Keeping an eye out for suspicious strangers would seem to be the least of the nation’s problems. With most of Haiti’s hospitals reduced to piles of rubble, aid groups like Doctors Without Borders are struggling to set up inflatable care centers in parking lots. Prisoners are escaping from their destroyed cells, and the riots surrounding food trucks have stretched police forces to their limits.
Meanwhile, an entirely new chunk of Haiti’s population has become homeless over night. Even with aid pouring in from around the world, essential resources like food and medicine are enormously scarce on the streets of Haiti. But for predators looking for boys and girls to sell for labor and sex, Haiti is the right place to be.”
- Nicolette Grams, The Atlantic, Jan 18th 2010
When I read something like this; this something that is happening right now, right now as I’m writing, as you’re reading, that’s happening and still happening and happening much too much because at all is more than too much…all I can tell myself is that I have to stay crazy mad, because this kind of evil is so crazy, so outside the way our minds were designed to work, to think up something like this…that we can’t afford to get normal about this, we can’t afford to react normal or act normal…we have to get a little crazy in the fight against this kind of crazy evil…and then stay crazy mad…
So I remind myself to pray more. Give more. Buy another fusion A21 shirt for way more than it’s worth. Find out what else I can do.
I remind myself this shouldn’t happen – can’t be allowed to happen. I remind myself to stay mad, really crazy mad that it still is.
“The best friendships never truly die.
We may go our separate ways, for a while.
But the friendships not only lead the way home.
The friendships are home.”
- Bob Greene, from CNN.com
I was a little suprised to find such unabashed sentiment from a career journalist writing about athletes and sports broadcasting. But there it was. Instead of cynicism, idealism. And, I believe, a nugget of truth too beautiful and yet, for those of us who find it, genuine.
What a glorious day – books galore at bargain prices, a lovely west end lunch, and great company:) Even ran into more Nexus bibliophiles, the Jensens and Barnes:)
Picked up 6 great books for 50c each -
1. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien. Because I’ve always meant to read it and I don’t already own a copy.
2. The Gulag Archipelago (which I now know how to pronounce correctly – thanks James:) ) - Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Because I love this book and I already have a copy but it has now fallen literally into 3 pieces:(
3. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak. Because after reading Solzhenitsyn I wanted to read more about this time in Russia’s history, and this is the big classic novel about it.
4. The Mentor Book of Major British Poets - Various. Because I love 18th and 19th century English poetry.
5. Selected Prose - T.S. Eliot. Because I find T.S. Eliot so interesting. If you’re a Christian and and artist, you should check him out.
6.The Literary Critics – George Watson. When I first started studying literary criticism at uni, I found it the most boring subject in the world, but have now come to discover how intertwined the main thinkers of literary criticism are with the progression of popular thought, culture and policy.
“You can choose to organize to make decisions quickly. Or you can have the market ignore you” – another from Godin
Banning speaking of the battle in Ex 17 in which Moses went up on the mountain with the rod, bringing victory to Joshua in the battle down below as long as he raised up the rod towards the Lord:
Joshua succeeded in the battle because of his alignment with Moses, and Moses’s alignment with God.
The rod speaks of authority, and that authority lay with the older generation; with Moses.
If we are not properly aligned with the older generation, we are disconnected from the authority needed to be victorious.
It is the enemies plan to disconnect the rod and the sword.
