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  1. Soul Survivor 2010 – Hope

    March 19, 2010 by Geoff

    Soul Survivor 2010

    We interrupt this complete lack of posts, to remind anyone and everyone that the Soul Survivor Festival is less than a month away, and if you’re in Melbourne-ish between April 7 – 11 you’d be mad not to at least drop by for a couple of days. Plus if you’re registering for the whole time you should get on down to http://soulsurvivor2010.eventbrite.com and register yourself today to save a cool $20. (Unless you’re reading this after the 19th of March, in which case I can’t help you).

    And if you’re the sort of person who would be keen to lend a hand here or there, let me know and I’m sure we can find a job for you!

    Category God Stuff, Personal | Tags: | Comments Off

  2. Life

    February 8, 2010 by Geoff

    So I realised that despite still getting regular visits, this blog has been remarkably dead for the last however long (last post on Jan 14 is a joke!). Must admit that at the moment life has been taking precedence, and with a tonne of my head-space being taken up with ruminations about teaching and a heap of my time being taken up with actually teaching: the report has been on the backburner. No apologies really, just some reality.

    With that in mind, I figured I at least owed a bit of an update with respect to where life is at. We’ve just been away at a Soul Survivor team retreat (tarnished only by the website going down while we were unable to do anything) which was a great time to get to know a heap of the new team members, as well as to refresh spiritually. We really are blessed in Soul Survivor to have such an amazingly talented and committed crew on team.

    Teaching is going well – though it has been a roller-coaster. Any available blogging effort has gone to my teacher blog: Son of a Teacher Man. Does certainly feel like I’ve found the place I am meant to be – the classroom must be it for the moment. Ran into some students at the shopping centre on Sunday, which was a weird experience.

    The biggest struggle in the past few months has been that it’s crappy for Bec to be looking for work. Nobody likes looking for work, and it’s made the isolation of having moved house a lot tougher for her particularly. But there’s light – Bec’s got a trial doing some web stuff for a stationery crew starting tomorrow so lets hope it all goes well (both for her liking it and them liking her) and maybe that might be the end of the dramas. Who knows.

    Regardless – there’s the update.

    Category Personal | Tags: | 2 Comments

  3. Google taking on China

    January 14, 2010 by Geoff

    We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

    via Official Google Blog: A new approach to China.

    While I realise lots of you will have heard this news already, congratulations are in order to Google who have decided that it’s not enough just to say you’re not going to be evil, and are instead doing something about it as well.

    Category World | Tags: | 2 Comments

  4. Inspired by Freire

    January 8, 2010 by Geoff

    Being inspired (and distracted) by Paulo Freire.

    • “No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors”
    • “This concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”
    • “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to turn them into objects”
    • “When a word is deprived of its dimension of action: reflection automatically suffers as well and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah”. “
    • “There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world”

    All taken from “The pedagogy of the oppressed”. All inspiring. All distracting me from writing my learning theories essay.

    Category Personal | Tags: | Comments Off

  5. Making the rules help the bad guy

    January 6, 2010 by Geoff

    I found this and thought it summed up the Western world’s response to terrorism as best as I can understand it. For the uninitiated LeBron James is probably the best basketball player in the world at the moment (other’s might tell you it’s Kobe Bryant, but they’re wrong).

    “I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

    Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

    (1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
    (2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.”

    Sourced from: Lawyers, Guns and Money: Terrorball

    Category World | Tags: | 1 Comment

  6. Geoff’s Glühwein

    December 24, 2009 by Geoff

    Mulled Wine in saucepan

    Mulled Wine. Note the mangled lemon and orange pieces

    This is normally more of a Bec thing to do – but it’s Christmas so why not have a go. With this year’s Christmas being a relatively chilly one, I decided that our Christmas Eve celebrations should involve my favourite German Christmassy tradition: Glühwein (mulled wine).

    Geoff’s Glühwein recipe

    • 2 bottles of whatever Red Wine you have lying around
    • 1/3 of a bottle of leftover port (also lying around)
    • A packet of cinammon quills
    • Some brown sugar
    • Grated whole nutmeg (much nicer if you can get the whole ones – plus the insides of whole nutmeg looks a lot like brains!)
    • Cloves (we didn’t have any whole ones around so it was pre-grated for us)
    • Chinese Five Spice (Smells about right)
    • A Dash of Orange Juice
    • Two Whole Oranges (from our new backyard, Wooo!) – one sliced, the other squeezed for all its juice and mangled
    • One Whole Lemon – likewise juiced and mangled
    • A (really decent) dash of Cointreau

    Directions:

    Put everything except the Cointreau together in the saucepan, over a very low heat. Stir until spices and sugar have dissolved. Taste. Add some more of whatever you think is needed, until the harsh edge has been taken off the Red wine. In theory this should take about 5 minutes, but if you’re doing it right it should take about an hour and a half. Enjoy the delicious aroma permeating through the house. Add the Cointreau close to serving time or once you have taken off the heat (don’t want to lose the alcoholability of the liqueur).

    Serves best if left for a number of hours to stew in the rind of the citrus and the cinammon sticks, but if not you can probably just serve straight away – nice and hot.

    Category Personal | Tags: | 3 Comments

  7. The (un)balance of power

    December 23, 2009 by Geoff

    Rich white straight-acting blokes who believe in God, or pretend to, hold a disproportionate amount of the world’s power and have for centuries. It’s not because, as many would like you to believe, it’s a case of ‘we are the best, chuck out the rest’. It’s simply due to circumstance. Class, freedom, money and education are the basis of power. And access to these is almost entirely due to where you were born and to whom. Sexually transmitted hereditary privilege and genitally determined advantage.

    via Sexism | discrimination | God | Catherine Deveny.

    This quote has been waiting in my draft posts for over a month now, waiting for me to have something valuable to add to it. And like her or hate her (and there are plenty on both sides of that divide), I don’t think that you can really argue that Catherine Deveny is actually wrong here.

    Category World | Tags: | 2 Comments

  8. If you can’t blog sensibly

    December 17, 2009 by Geoff

    …then just dump in a youtube clip of a little kid playing the ukelele.

    Of course if genius-freak children aren’t your thing you could always follow along my teaching adventures over at Son of a Teacher Man.

    Category Personal | Tags: | 3 Comments

  9. Blissfully in-between

    November 23, 2009 by Geoff

    For those of you who notice these things – it’s been quiet here for the past week or so. Back on Friday the 13th (ominous I know) I finished up at work, and so for the past week and a bit have been taking it easy and not doing any more than I need to. There has been a few things to do: we had an open for inspection for our current house that required a bit of preparation, and managed to get a golf game in with Dad on Friday (followed by a brief but intense period of not being at all well). We’ve got another week off coming up: and we’ll be down at Rye for most of it.

    Starting to think that unemployment is looking like a pretty sweet deal.

    Category Personal | Tags: | 5 Comments

  10. Berlin Wall – then and now

    November 10, 2009 by Geoff

    Say what you want about print media, the New York Times come out with some freaking cool stuff on their website. Their current feature on the Berlin wall has some fantastically interactive pictures of Berlin from 1989 and today. Stop reading this and check that out, because it’s freaking cool.

    The Brandenburg gate in 1989, and today

    The Brandenburg gate in 1989, and today

    The fall of the wall in Berlin seems to me to be one of those events that the West has a pure love for: mostly because (at least in the retelling) it is a triumph of “democracy, freedom and capitalism” over the tyranny of communism. It’s a story we can tell where we can unambiguously claim the moral high-ground. And make no mistake: this is a beautiful story: a triumph of the force of will of a people, to overthrow their oppressors. How nice it is to be sure that you’re the good guys in the story.

    But I couldn’t let this opportunity go past, and while I have no ability to verify the accuracy of this story, that doesn’t change it’s worthiness. In my year 11 German class, we were studying a bit about the fall of the Berlin wall, and saw a great film: “Das Versprechen” (The Promise). In one scene they were showing the East German guards in their guard towers, while just the other side of the wall, West German propaganda was blaring from cars driving alongside. Through the loudspeaker came one of my all time favourite quotes:

    “The Roman soldiers would wear red so that their enemies could never see their blood, and your soldiers wear brown pants”

    Feel free to get someone to explain that to you if it doesn’t make sense at first pass.

    Category World | Tags: ,,, | 3 Comments

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