Tag: postaday2011

The teleological significance of the Egyptian unrest

Joseph made ruler in Egypt
Walking in Memphis?

In many respects, the life of Christ depicted in the Gospels echos the history of the people Israel. Once of the aspects strongly identifying the person of God the Son with Israel is that in his very youth he is taken to escape disaster from Israel into Egypt, echoing the escape of Joseph’s family into Egypt to escape the famine in Israel. Later on other Pharaohs appear who do not know Joseph, and it culminates in the Pharaoh at the time of Moses, who oppresses the Hebrews and is forced in the end to let them go home. In the same way regime change – in the case of Jesus’ life the removal of Herod – enables Christ’s family to return to Israel from Egypt.

In the Bible, Zechariah 14.2 to be precise, you will read a prophecy of all nations gathering against Israel to fight. This verse has remained in every copy of the Bible ever printed, even through the hundreds of years when there was no Israel and atheists would have used it as another one of their “proof texts” against the veracity of scripture. The most savage enemies of the state of Israel are the Islamic States, with a notable exception in Egypt. The regime change now occasioned against Hosni Mubarrak, whatever his faults may be, is this a symbol that the final battle is now coming? The most influential Arab state that had been keeping peace with Israel is now in turmoil, and some other states, like Iran, are claiming that the unrest has an Islamic revolutionary character and are calling on Egypt to wipe Israel out. So now all the surrounding nations would be hostile, and a situation emerges where the prophesy of Zechariah 14.2, which many people believe to be an end times prophesy.

What does Jesus Christ say about this time in Matthew 24?

1And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple.

2And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

3And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

4And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you. Continue reading “The teleological significance of the Egyptian unrest” →

Review of Hotel Centralny, Kedzierzyn-Kozle, for Google.

Kedzierzyn-Kozle - aleje JPII
Kedzierzyn-Kozle on a good day.

(Published to Google Hotpot earlier this evening, and it also gives me my post for the day here. I think that’s fair.)

I’m sitting here writing this actually in the hotel room having found it on the road in Google on my Android phone when I discovered that the place I was really supposed to be going was unexpectedly booked up.

I had a bit of a nightmare getting here from where the GPS said it would be only 9 km. The main bridge in Kedzierzyn-Kozle was shut, the next bridge up on the Oder per the GPS turned out to be some seasonal ferry that wasn’t there, and when I finally found the new road that wasn’t on even google maps and still isn’t, it turned out that there had been a nasty accident so I got caught in the road over the middle of the Odra waiting for the emergency services to do their bit. Continue reading “Review of Hotel Centralny, Kedzierzyn-Kozle, for Google.” →

This Evening’s Table

image

This evening I’m back in the Hotel Amber, in Olesnica, a place which has featured in videos in my Youtube channel for two years running. This would be the third year, but no film this time, as there is really nothing new to show, that can’t be shown by an atmospheric pic of the table with the pot of rooibos tea, the Polish barszcz with crocquet, one of the icons of Polish cuisine, the candle, the fabrics, the slightly incorrectly presented cutlery. . .

Tonight, my musician friend Krzysztof whom you may remember from videos of this place can’t meet me as he is preparing a group off musicians down in Walbrzych, which is a pity, but the food is still good, the atmosphere still great for what is essentially just a glorified roadside motel.

ICMTSU – #4 Pyramid Selling

Retouched versions of this picture from the ge...
If you want pyramids this year, try South America.

Despite the latest travel “advisories”, whatever that horrible concocted word means, warning people to watch their asses in the land of the Pharoahs, a typical one being on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website of HM Government:

This advice has been reviewed and reissued with an amendment to the Travel Summary and Safety and Security section. We advise against all but essential travel to Cairo (all four governorates, including Giza), Alexandria, Luxor and Suez.  The nationwide curfew has been extended from 1500-0800 local time. We recommend that British nationals without a pressing need to be in Cairo, Alexandria or Suez leave by commercial means where it is safe to do so.  British nationals in other areas of Egypt where there are demonstrations should follow the advice below and stay indoors wherever possible.

and all the scenes in the news of upheaval and revolution going on over there, the selling of “dream holidays” in Egypt by travel agents in the Czech Republic, Poland and other places continues unabated.

Yesterday’s “Hospodarske Noviny” reported that as other countries are doing their best to evacuate their nationals, Czech travel companies are still chartering tourist flights into these destinations. Polish TV news a few days ago reported how some tourists are intentionally trying to get into the areas which have the hottest riots, just as thrill seeking, and advised against people doing so. Maybe they are seeking some practical experience in civil unrest so as to be one jump ahead when it all kicks off over here?

Maybe learning how to turn up the front nozzle of a water cannon so that it only shoots into the air is a valuable survival skill in the decade we have just embarked on. Maybe it’s a handy thing to learn how to dance in front of a tank and get out of the way at the last second if you can’t manage to face it down? With additional activities like flag-burning, molotov-cocktail throwing (alcohol-free ones for the kids) food-hoarding and embassy wall scaling, as well as optional extras like looting and pillaging and dropping bricks from bridges, a holiday in Egypt right now could be the ultimate adventure holiday. Great for corporate teambuilding, I should say.

Or is the new football hooliganism? Will coaches adorned with scarves containing scores of chanting skinheads start turning up at revolutionary hotspots in North Africa? Will motorway service stations turn them away? Will these unrests become like a syndicated event with huge sponsorships and advertising revenues? Will Putin try and snatch “Revolution 2024” from under London’s nose so that he can catch the spend that will become associated with it? Will protestors be asked to show a particular brand of bottled water on their shirts?

In any event, it seems that now more than ever these so-called “last minute” holidays may indeed live up to their inherent promise, in the case of some holidaymakers.

DND – End of January

Shōgun (novel)
Image via Wikipedia

OK, I got to the end of January making a post each day so at least one month of the resolution has been achieved.

However, instead of driving views, the regular postings seem to be actually diminishing the daily views, and my stats have actually shown less in January than they did in December, in the time before daily posts.

Is the readership telling me that less is more? By all means let’s have your comments on whether you welcome the Postaday challenge being followed by this vlog, whether you’d prefer less width but more quality, or whether you don’t care either way.

I wanted to say just a couple more things to you today as we come to the end of January. Firstly, this is the month in which I have piloted a couple of new ideas, mainly ones that I planned to do, some that came along unplanned and I will just re-write my plan to include them as I would have done if I had known about them earlier.

One planned thing I piloted was to listen to the Michel Thomas Method Greek Course, which I have nearly completed 6 CDs of.  It is very good, as have been all of the new courses made by MT acolytes.

One unplanned thing was that I discovered the website http://www.readthekanji.com – it is a very well constructed staged repetition system including all the cards and materials and all the research done, really the ultimate resource for learning Japanese and once you get the hang of it very addictive. I am seeing how far you can go with the free sample – it’s given me a good twenty hours’ worth of drilling so far, and I don’t think I’m even a half way through what you can get on the free trial so that seems very fair – I already made up my mind to buy a proper annual sub as they really do deserve it, but in the mean time I just wanted to see what happens if you just keep going until the JLPT 4 vocab is all at 100%.

It seems to be fairly close to Ebbinghaus compliant as far as the repetition algorithm is concerned. I’m not sure if there is a bit of supermemo style code in there or not.

So I am quite happy to admit that it is a good alternative to the gold list method for Japanese. The only advantage that the Goldlist might have here is that you don’t get your hand in, you type Romaji and the Java interface magically turns all the answers into Hiragana. Sometimes you have to watch out to make a double n for “n”, and care needs to be taken over some of the bya, cha, etc characters (the ones with the small soft vowel following) as the way I was expecting to write them different from the way the programme accepts them, but you can always see the right answer if you get it wrong the once.

So January seems to be a good month for piloting. Now is the last day and after three months of not using my car I also got it back today and paid a huge amount for the repair. But I will need to drive it tomorrow, and I needed to get it working.

So I’ll pilot my own car, as well.

I also started reading Shogun this month, which tells the story of a pilot they called Pilot, or anjin-san, as they could not pronounce “Blackthorne“.

And “Lost” final series started to show on Polish TV – all in all a month full of pilots.

So it reminds me of the song by the group Pilot about January, from way back in 1975:

When I was 11 years of age, I thought that the lyrics “January, sick and tired, you’ve been hanging on me” was all about how this dingiest month of the year seemed to go on forever.

Now that I am old I assume that the lyrics refer to a woman, but I still don’t fully understand whet the poet is getting at.

I think I’ll stick with my initial interpretation.

January is now nearly over, and a good thing too.  The days will be getting longer day by day and there are only four weeks of February to go until it’s March.

February and March are both quite capable of delivering challenging conditions in Poland, but we will have to see how we fare. November gave us one of the earliest starts to a really tough winter, so we are now I’d say just over half way there. We have to just grit our teeth and work hard and not notice, and soon Spring will be here. I’ll be able to go and use my terrace again and the pleasant days will be here again.

And I have to use every opportunity to walk and lose weight, which was the idea of not repairing the car in the first place, but now I have places to go that aren’t well served by trains.

Let’s see how it develops. Please give me feedback on whether to keep up with the daily postings.

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