TheGeoffRe(y)port

…not much happening here. There’s a few things in the back of my mind, waiting for a post. In the meantime,there’s a prediction for 2008 post up on The Wounded Tiger.

(image from xkcd.com)

photo credit: Howie_Berlin

Immediately after Heath Ledger died, especially for the time that it looked more likely that it was a suicide rather than accidental death, the reactions were remarkably interesting. There was the standard fan response - tributes and the like, but there was another response that I found to be remarkably interesting. It came in letters to the editor and blog comments and went roughly along these lines:

• “Why would he do this to himself?”
• “This guy had everything, and yet he’d kill himself”
• “How dare he do this?”

It wasn’t just disbelief - this was an angry response. The very same comments could be heard about Britney Spears’ latest breakdown, or whichever celebrity it is who has been caught drink-driving or checked into rehab. There is a real anger that these people would have everything - and “everything” is the word that gets used to describe it - and yet that’s not enough for them.

It seems to me that this anger doesn’t look much different to the sort of righteous indignation we get from fundamentalists at having their nicely boxed theologies challenged. Celebrity, and with it the concept that fame and fortune are somehow the pinnacle of human endeavour, is the state religion. So it doesn’t go well when someone’s actions come along and challenge that. 

For those of you who skip over the Richmond related posts, help is at hand. And for those of you who only visit in the hope that I’ve written something about our fearsome yellow and black warriors, I can help you too! I’ve decided that the next adventure in my blogging career is to quarantine off the Richmond related posts over to “The Wounded Tiger” - thewoundedtiger.com

From the about page:

The Wounded Tiger is the heartbroken lament of a Richmond supporter who has undergone far too much trauma with his team to ever give them up.

I’m mostly doing it because a) I saw a cheap deal on domain names, and b) most of my Google traffic is for Richmond related content, and I couldn’t handle forcing people who have come to find out about Richo and Browny instead looking at wedding video and theology. So tell all your yellow and black friends: thewoundedtiger.com

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I wanted to recommend a great blog. Jess (famous in these parts for things like that engagement story video, as well as being one of Bec’s bridesmaids) is a film student who writes great film reviews at Gold Stars (goldstars.wordpress.com). She’s not always right (she can’t agree with me all the time, but on the whole it is very rare that Jess would recommend a film that’s not worth your hard-earned cash, at least as an overnight rental.

So for really honest and genuine film reviews, as well as a bit of cheerful banter, head on over to Gold Stars and tell her why The Notebook was such a magnificent achievement in modern cinema, or why Daniel Day Lewis is a hack. (Not because it’s true, but it would be funny to watch!)

I’ve written before about my obsessions (and I’m thinking in particular about the whole “stacking thing”), but partly due to the whole being married thing, I’ve become aware of some funny little things I do. So here they are:

1. Once I get home from work, I’m unlikely to have a proper conversation for about half an hour, or an hour if it’s been a long day. Then, I suddenly get a rush of talking-ness and everything is OK.
2. I have a nasty habit of bidding on things cheaply, thinking: “it’s OK - I’ll never win it at that price”. That’s how come I’ve got Original Munchkin which arrived on Friday.
3. I frequently talk back to the news. Worse to “current affairs” shows. Even Especially when there’s no one else around.
4. I think better when I have something in my mouth, which leads to either bouts of obesity, or an inability to lend my pen to anyone other than my wife. I’m flipping between the two.
5. There’s an air freshener in our public toilet at work that goes off periodically and sounds like someone sniffing. Every single time it goes off, it makes me freak out that there’s someone standing over my right shoulder.
6. My Google Reader is currently subscribed to 186 feeds. I know that’s too many, but there aren’t any that I’m willing to give up. Not all of them are blogs: I check the news headlines from the BBC World News, and The Age, and I also get things like IT security notifications just to keep an eye out. But it’s way too many.
7. Despite my football team only having made the finals twice while I’ve been alive, having also won the wooden spoon last year, and our prospects for this looking faint at best, I still bought a membership for my wife and I for the upcoming season.

So there you are. Does anyone share any of my freaky-ness?

Sure, there’s the whole “getting married” thing, but check this out for exciting…

Google, google, on the screen

Who’s the most famous Geoff you’ve seen?

Well. In the land of Oz, that can only be the number one result for the search term “Geoff” from google.com.au. Which at the moment is - “TheGeoffRe(y)port”. It’s a bit of a laugh really, it seems to me that there should be a whole bunch of sites that would be better served as the number 1 for that particular search term. But hey, while it lasts - why not point it out.

The title already implies a point that I’m not really trying to make. It sounds from the implication of the title that I’m having trouble reconciling Christianity with feminism. The truth, I’m afraid is that I’m far more ignorant than that. I just don’t have a solid grasp on a) what feminism really means in the here and now, and b) how that interplays with people’s faith.

Basically, I’ve run into a few people (both in the blogging world and the real world) who self-identify as feminists, and I’m not really sure what that means for them. And to tell you the truth, I’m partially interested because I’m not sure that I wouldn’t identify as a feminist myself - if only I knew what that really meant.

So the question is out there: what does it mean to be a feminist in 2007? How about a Christian feminist? How does your faith interplay with your thinking around these issues? And finally, as someone who is at least interested in exploring feminist ideas: are there any books/blogs/whatever that people could recommend.

(Crossposted from Amateur Theology) 

…to shame the wise. (1 Corinthians 1:27)

This from the Herald Sun of all places - “Taking Jesus as his word, what a radical idea”

“Being a Christian is about choosing Jesus and deciding to do something incredibly something daring with your life,” he writes.

He quotes singer Rich Mullins, who died in a car accident 10 years ago.

“Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you,” he said.

As you’ll have noticed, activity here on the report has been nigh on non-existent, since I started working on Amateur Theology. So far AT seems to be going quite well, but I thought it was probably pretty important to let you all know roughly where I see TheGeoffRe(y)port sitting now that I have another outlet for my theological musings and ruminations.

In the long term: I’d really like to have TheGeoffRe(y)port be roughly what it is right now, with slightly less theoretical theology, more commentary on news and current affairs, and slightly more personal slant on things. Ultimately I’m hoping that Amateur Theology will reach a place where I’m writing about 25% or less of the posts on there, so that it becomes a much more collaborative blog rather than Geoff’s blog that some other people post on once in a while. So TheGeoffRe(y)port is likely to contain more direct reflections on things that happen to me, while my Amateur Theology posts will probably end up more theoretical.

So the long and the short of it is: please stick around. It might get worse before it gets better, because between launching AT and the aforementioned wedding prep, my blogging time for the report has been reduced to not very much. But I won’t forget you, friends.

PS. Thanks to all the people who very generously have clicked on the advertisement links that they are only ever genuinely interested in - I received my first cheque from Google the other day - so there you go. Crime might not pay, but blogging kind of does.