Monthly Archives: June 2007

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Today is Keane Fine’s Birthday

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I wish the internet worked at my house. Today it is not, and that means this Birthday wishes for my brother will be short and sweet. My brother is creative genius. By far one of the most creative people I’ve ever met.  I love him and have grown to appreciate him much more now then I did when I was an immature teenager.

My brother is an inspiration to me, and now (for a limited time) he can be to you too. Keane recently started taking his notebooks and scanning them in to put online. They are brilliant and hilarious, and often beautiful. Here’s the two step process to wishing Keane a true happy birthday:

  1. Link to Pocket Ponderings on your blog. Seriously, do this now. Just mention it at the bottom of the post your write today. Keane just started this project and it needs a credibility jump start in the blogosphere so get linking.
  2. Subscribe to keane’s blog. I think he just has RSS options up right now, but there will be more. At least browse around and give it a look and be sure to check back for email or rss subscriptions in the future.
  3. Leave Keane a Happy Birthday Greeting in the comments.

Happy Birthday Bro, I love you.

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Q Conference: A Qool Idea

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My friend, Aaron Linne, went to this conference and has been blogging his notes about it for the last few weeks over on his blog, Life of Linne. I just thought the concept of the conference was pretty cool and worth repeating in other fields. I for example go to conferences and trainings each year as part of the requirements of on going training for my job. It’s a good thing to continue your education and training in any field, but if that’s the case we should have good quality conferences around. I have to admit most of the conferences I’ve gone to for work have been sub-par. The concept of the Q Conference seems cool to me. So I thought I’d just give a run down of it as I understood it.

Basically it’s a church conference for the leaders of the leaders (the elite if you will). The goal was to have an intimate setting, not a numbers, but a quality thing. I forget how many people they invited but the goal is to keep it small. Then they had about 20 different speakers. The kicker is that each person who presented only presented for 18 minutes. They had 18 minutes to boil down everything they wanted to convey into the meat and into an amount others could comprehend. I think that’s a great idea. There are far too many all day and multiple hour conferences and trainings that leave you with too much information to remember when you leave, and to vague an understanding to even be valuable. And then the speakers hung around so everyone could chat and talk and digest the stuff they’d been discussing all day.

That’s really about it. I just thought it was a brilliantly simple and cool way to format a conference and something that is worth repeating. Maybe I should write and give a 18 minute schpiel on everything I think is essential to be passed on to others. In an ambitious moment I thought it would be cool to create this kind of conference for people in my field. I think it’d be a really neat and fun thing to do and truly impacting to the youth that we serve. Well, speaking of, I’m off to another conference this week, here’s hoping it’s a good one.

Anyways, for those that are interested here’s a link to Aaron’s notes on the Q Conference.

Devotional thoughts

Sacraments: Is Birth a Sacrament?

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I don’t know much about sacraments, I know very little in fact. Some of what I know is basically that sacraments are things that religious folks (particularly some Christian denominations) are into, to varying degrees. Sacraments are ‘special’ things and events, stuff like baptism and communion. I wasn’t sure of what I thought about the concept, but I liked one of my profs views back in college, Quakers believe everything is a sacrament.

From Wikipedia on Sacraments:

The Quakers (Religious Society of Friends) do not practice formal sacraments, believing that all activities should be considered holy. Rather, they are focused on an inward transformation of one’s whole life. The Quakers use the words “Baptism” and “Communion” to describe the experience of Christ’s presence and his ministry in worship.

So, the point of this topic, was just that I was thinking about ‘special’ moments in my life, and more or less, religious/spiritual experiences. We haven’t gone through the birth of our baby yet, but we’ve had 9 months of pregnancy and we are eagerly anticipating this amazing event of bringing another human life into the world. If anything is considered ‘sacred’ and ‘sacramental,’ I think birth should be on the list. Of course I don’t know enough of about the theology or religious tradition, but I figured bringing it up would give others a chance to chime in on that.

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Flash Back: Sexist Assumptions At Relevant Mag

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I just posted a few weeks ago a bunch of the articles I’d written for Relevant magazine. Not saying this had anything to do with my lack of writing in the following year, but my post concerning Relevant’s new women’s mag, Radiant, got some interesting attention.

Basically I posted this advertisement from Relevant’s website:

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And I wrote about the trouble with the assumption behind “It’s Our Turn Now.”

Radiant Magazine as you can see from the site is geared towards women. What’s so terrible about a magazine geared specifically towards women? Nothing; the terrible thing is that it implies, that Relevant was/is geared toward men. I am not saying Relevant was, or is, a men’s magazine, I’m saying their choice of wording implies that it was.

Take a look at the ad for Radiant on Relevant’s homepage. It says, “It’s Our Turn Now.” Does this mean that Relevant was the “men’s” turn? Clearly the approach towards this new magazine does reveal that assumption (just like so much of our culture). Why wasn’t Relevant a level place for men and women? Why can’t guy’s learn to take turns in the same place, rather then forcing women to go off on their own to have a voice?

If Relevant is a magazine for 20-something males it should say MALES outright. Personally, I don’t think they had any intent for Relevant to be a ‘male’ mag, it’s their choice of wording that hint at the sort of assumption that ‘normal’ or ‘regular’ means male or oriented towards men.

Conversation ensued, including comments from Anna and Kyle of Relevant. Go ahead and hop over to the original post and comment, there’s a handful of people still subscribed, we might stir up some new and interesting conversation.

Comment Here. 

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Month One of Comment Love: $29.00

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Well, the first month of comment love has come to a close with a grand total of $29. The goal of comment love is to encourage conversation about the topics discussed on the site by ‘incentivizing’ every comment with a donation to a charity. This month’s comment love money will be going to Kiva, which was Jamie’s choice (our top commenter this month). I’m gonna let her pick out the person to donate too and then I’ll post a link, picture and bio to the person we donated too and you can check in on the loan progress and the impact your comments have made.

I’m going to continue the Comment Love project. We’ll donate somewhere else next month (I’ve got babies on the mind so maybe something related to babies would be good). This coming month it’s up to you to raise the bar and comment a little more so we can make an even bigger impact in the world around us.

Continue the conversation.