Revolutionary new air travel experiment

Look at this photo carefully

Ryanair defends use of “sky oars” in new sub-economy Galley Class

Ryanair has robustly defended the introduction of ‘sky oars’ in their new sub-economy class. Each oar is operated by a row of three passengers and the designer, Patrick from Marketing, thinks they could help propel the aircraft. Stripped to the waist and heavily manacled, passengers in the new ‘Galley’ class can expect to save up to 20% on the price of a ticket.

Having flown from Belfast to Luton this evening with Ryanair competitors easyJet, I found this quite hilarious. You have to read the whole article, especially to appreciate this punch line:

… it is nice to be able to whip the customers again.

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Graffiti in sign language with braille

Fellow blogger, Richard Littledale, yesterday wrote a blog entitled Hoist with a Digital Petard which included this photograph of the creative graffiti.

Sign language braille graffiti

Like Richard, I would love to know what it says. Any French sign language interpreters out there?

Or perhaps, like so much graffiti, we don’t want to know what it says.

More importantly Richard’s blog has good stuff to say about the preacher’s challenge to balance the too often competing sermon ingredients of presentation and content.

The thing is though, whilst good content can be spoilt by poor presentation bad content cannot be rescued by good presentation. Powerpoint is no substitute for prayer and embedding is no replacement for exegesis. This is doubtless the reason why Richard Lischer poses the question in his book The End of Words , as to how Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech might have looked in Powerpoint! We so easily get caught up in the finer points of presentation and illustration that we often short circuit the earlier stages of the preaching process. In this regard, the capabilities offered to us in a digital age are more curse than blessing. The fact that we can do all these visual things makes us feel that we must do them. A preacher who spends hours tweaking her or his Powerpoint slides compared to minutes deciding what to say has been hoist with their own digital petard, so to speak. When this happens, both preacher and people suffer.

Ouch!

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Getting away from it all on the North Coast

Walking from Portstewart to Portrush

Beautiful, eh? Yes, the North Coast of N. Ireland can be just beautiful. We got the chance of a few days in the Portrush apartment of some family members and were blessed with beautiful bright dry weather – not to be taken for granted in this part of the world.

But getting away from work..? That was the idea and we basically did although it was amazing how many Wycliffe related people we bumped into: Philip & Heather Saunders we meant to see and had coffee together at the famous Morellis; but we weren’t expecting the pleasure of seeing a Wycliffe family home from Uganda; a recent Cameroon Engage Team member; not to mention someone we had never met before who knew us because her mother reads our prayer letters…

The next day was people calmer as we walked from Castlerock to Downhill… some tourists and some sheep and us munching our sandwiches amidst the marram grass on Downhill Strand.

Mussenden Temple on the cliff top

Cute, eh?

Mussenden Temple from Downhill Strand

So thank you, Lord, for a very relaxing few days away before returning to the office tomorrow and off to Horsleys Green next week for Wycliffe Engage Teams orientation weekend.

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On Easter Monday I emigrated to America

Well, not quite, but we did visit the Ulster American Folk Park near Omagh in N. Ireland.It’s a great day out as you can see from the website blurb below…

Immerse yourself in the world famous story of Irish emigration at the museum that brings it to life. Follow the emigrant trail as you journey from the thatched cottages of Ulster, on board a full scale emigrant sailing ship leading to the log cabins of the American Frontier.  Meet an array of costumed characters on your way with traditional crafts to show, tales to tell and food to share.

I’d like to introduce you to some of the characters we met on the day: first on the Irish side of the Atlantic on market day…

Fortune teller

The priest and the undertaker

The musicians and friend

Two ladies enjoying a day at the market

And then across the Atlantic in the New World…

Lady baking flapjacks on the griddle

The Union sergeant

I can recommend a visit to all my friends visiting N. Ireland… especially my American friends!

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The Stranmillis Elephant… or is it?

The Stranmillis Elephant

Thank you to friend and Baptist pastor David McMillan for drawing my attention to the latest in public art in Belfast.

Is it an elephant? What do you think? You can follow David’s analysis here.

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