Sansblogue

One of my really neat children¹ has given me a cool present to celebrate our new “farm” – our new home outside Tauranga with 3 hectares of which several paddocks as well as some bush. He’s given me a pig and a sheep :)

They won’t live on our farm though, rather a guy in Cambodia is looking after the pig, while a woman in Afganistan cares for the sheep. And all thanks to Oxfam unwrapped (if Oxfam and global poverty is not your charity there are all sorts of other possibilities to make your next present something “different” and meaningful).

_____________________

1. I use the word in its relational not chronological sense, since he is a mature man, not a child. [↩]

Stuffed tomatoes by hlkljgk

I’m increasingly concerned about the issue of meat-eating among Western Christians. The statistics seem quite clear, on a globe with limited resources, producing a meat diet takes far more of those limited resources than producing a Vegetarian diet, and the difference for Vegan meals are even more pronounced.

A person following a low-fat vegetarian diet, for example, will need less than half (0.44) an acre per person per year to produce their food,” said Christian Peters, M.S. ’02, Ph.D. ’07, a Cornell postdoctoral associate in crop and soil sciences and lead author of the research. “A high-fat diet with a lot of meat, on the other hand, needs 2.11 acres.”

It is as simple as that, the globe cannot sustain the carnivorous lifestyle we Westerners take for granted. No understanding of Christianity that I can recognise can accept that my diet choice and eating pleasure causes others to starve.

Now, at this point I need to clarify a few things:

• When I talk about unrepentant carnivores I do not mean merely people who sometimes eat meat, by carnivore I mean people who eat meat more than 7 times a week on average. (But yes, some ham or meat paste, or tuna in a sandwich at lunch does count!)
• By Repentant Carnivore I mean someone who recognises that the carnivorous lifestyle of most Westerners is sinful and who is seeking to change.
• I am not a Vegetarian – I eat meat of all kinds (almost, horse is a delicacy, rat is pretty tasty, croc delicious, but I’m not over fond of tripe ;)

But Jesus ate meat! Of course he did, and fish. Peter was a fisherman, and Jesus apparently a better one, though he may have had supernatural help ;) But Jesus, Peter and even most relatively affluent people in the Ancient world did not eat meat more than once a day, most of them only ate meat and fish on high-days and holidays, or when someone in the whanau (approximately extended family) or village had killed a beast.

Even though a moderate-fat plant-based diet with a little meat and dairy (red footprint) uses more land than the all-vegetarian diet (far left footprint), it feeds more people (is more efficient) because it uses more pasture land, which is widely available. (Credit: Illustration by Steve Rokitka/University Communications)

That sort of diet (occasional meat eating) is not unsustainable, it makes good use of land that is good for pasture but less good for crops and may have lower demands on scarce resources than Vegetarian or Vegan ones do (see Diet With A Little Meat Uses Less Land Than Many Vegetarian Diets from which the quote above and the graphic are taken).

Conclusions:

Western Christians must become “Repentant Carnivores”, we should reduce our meat (including fish, fowl and even eggs and dairy – for Vegetarians are merely wolves in sheep’s clothing, semi-carnivores) considerably.

Having lived the carnivourous lifestyle for years, with four children who (apart for Nathan for a couple of teenage years) demand meat, and complain when fed beans, I’ve regularly cooked the carnivorous way. I now, the children having left home (except Sarah who can I guess cook the meaty meals ;) am free to repent, and plan over the coming months to work towards a low meat mixed diet, with only a meal or two per day (on average) using meat, fish, fowl, cheese or eggs.

Sage is a great flavour for winter, last week I cooked a chicken for visitors down in Tauranga, and despite using a nice barn raised chook all the comments were on the stuffing. If you suffered from packeted dried “Sage and Onion Stuffing” as a child, forget it. Packet stuffing is like dried parsley, or instant coffee, not worth the time they save!

Stuffing is easy:

• some bread cut into small chunks (or wapped briefly in a processor, but don’t make it breadcrumbs, they’re too fine)
• zest of a lemon or two (add the juice later if it seems dry)
• an egg
• a handful of fresh sage leaves chopped into peices
• a handful of bacon also chopped
• salt and pepper

Mix together, if the egg is not quite enough to bind it all together then add lemon juice or another egg. Stuff the bird and roast.

That meant I had sage left over, and those little pots never really grow for me, and the NZ Herald had a delicious looking recipe for Pumpkin, Sage and Blue Cheese Fritters. We also had an unused butternut, and I love blue cheese :) So since I have sent “‘Exile away from his land’: Is landlessness the ultimate punishment in Amos?” off for what I hope is the final time, “The book of Amos and the Day of YHWH” to a colleague for criticism, and am getting on well with “Degrees of Presence” I celebrated by trying the recipe.

It too is simple:

• grated butternut (I used a cup or so)
• small red onion (also grated – yes, I grate them together in the food processor, do you think I like skinned knuckles?)
• blue cheese crumbled – not much (unless like me you are a fiend for blue cheese ;)
• a few Tbsp Rice Flour
• a little baking powder (I used 1/2 tsp)
• handful of chopped sage leaves
• egg white (the yolk will make mayo or something later)

Mix them all up and fry :)

Easy as, and delicious.

No pictures because the kitchen gremlin seems to have put soya flour (or something) into the jar marked Rice Flour, and the recipe really needs the rice flour to make it crisp! So mine was a delicious fried mash instead of fritters, so no photo this time :(

For the post related to the image below see Reading Digitally

Screenshot from iPad Alice video

JPS has a post, Computers, you, and books that after rehearsing some of the common (and justified) concerns of modern-day Socrates that we use electronic texts so much that our attention span is withering. [For Socrates bemouning the terrors of writing it was memory that was in danger.] He quotes from the Chicago Tribune:

A friend of mine in her early 20s managed to poke a finger through the tissue-thin argument that iPads, Kindles and Nooks are just as good as books, that reading is reading, that content is all that matters.

She and her classmates at the University of Notre Dame were invited to the home of a revered professor. It was a gleaming palace of erudition, she said: Room after room was filled with elegant floor-to-ceiling bookcases; each bookcase was filled with beautiful volumes; each volume seemed to glow with the written legacy of the world’s wisdom.

It was, she recalled, breathtaking.

Alphabet book by Muffet

Here, lightly edited are my comments:

I’ve loved books, all sorts and conditions of book, for at least sixty years now. But, there are increasingly few books I am willing to fetishise. Some because this particular tome has memories, like the copy of Just So Stories my father read to me, some because the physical production is just so beautiful… but such volumes are rare, and becoming less commonly available and at a higher relative price. I notice that even renowned bibliophile Jim West hesitates before the cost of Brill’s handsome volumes…

Esther scroll from a Sephardic Synagogue (Wikipedia)

The issue, as always, seems to me to be not the format of books, but the forming of readers. That requires not the rants of creaky old curmudgeons, but the time and energy of influential parents and grandparents (or those temporarily, perhaps, in loco).
Now I do not mean that either JPS or others of you who bemoan the (not yet accomplished, indeed looking likely to survive with far more life than the scroll has done) death of the codex are  curmudgeons, but I do think you may resemble the King Canute of fame and fable ;)

The real job is reading to small children who then learn to want to read, whether on Kindle or spindle matters much less than the simple desire!

Free Listens has reviewed an interesting Librivox project I was involved with a while back. (This recording has also been getting good reviews on Archive.org.)

The Woman in White is a mystery novel, told like a court case in the voices of different “witnesses”, so for the Librivox recording we used different people for these characters retelling the story. That probably makes the nineteenth century prose an easier listen than it might otherwise be. The novel has also been adapted into a musical by Andrew Loyd Webber, and filmed several times. Two recent books have also provided a “sequel” and a reimagining of the story.

Several of my other recordings have been getting 4-5 star reviews on Archive.org :) Including the old (poor quality) Just So Stories I think so far the new Librivox version is un-reviewed…

Mysterious Manukau: Auckland's less beautiful harbour of an Autumn morning

After working for a while I went to get breakfast, on my way back I drew the blinds, a magical mysterious autumn morning across the Manukau harbour. I left my porridge (even though it is with delicious Goji and Cranberries, Almond and Honey again today) and took a photo. Autumn is such a nice season :)

The Manukau may be (as most people say) Auckland’s less beautiful harbour, certainly it lacks fancy yachts and ferry boats to island vinyards, but who can resist views like this.

Of course this harbour suffers from mud flats :(

Mud flats at low tide, in autumn

Here are some at low tide, so you can see them at their worst ;)

It’s enough to make an Atheist thankful, though who to I am noit quite clear even after listening to the podcast on ABC about the recent Atheist convention where apparently thankfulness was a recurring theme.

View from CTS across the rooftops of Colombo

Thanks to Jonathan who pointed to this: Who Says “No” to “Mission Trips”?
I had not found Sri Lankan theologian Vinoth Ramachandra‘s site. It is full of excellent stuff.

In this post, the description of many mission trips as attempts to make a holiday sound holy is so true. It raises sharply issues at the heart of such activities:

• a visit of a few weeks is not enough to even begin to learn about another people and place
• the visitors have money and power – the locals usually have not
• if you can’t speak the language and do not understand (a bit) local culture what good is your visit

He also tells (too briefly) of two chinese women who are on a real “mission trip”:

I heard recently of two Chinese women who felt called to be missionaries in Cambodia. So they simply went there overland and took jobs in a factory, and joined a local church.

Their experiences would be worth listening to. By contrast, if Western people need exposure to other ways of life:

…in America, Europe and Australia, there are millions of people today from every religion, culture and nation to be found in almost every major city: why not stay and learn about “mission” from the local churches that are working among such people?

And if people want/need more:

It baffles us why such Christian kids cannot learn about the world by doing what I, and several millions of their non-Christian peers, have done over decades: simply travelling as tourists and exploring the countries we visit, learning about the history and culture as we do so.

If the energy and money channeled into short term mission trips could be put to less selfish use think what could be achieved!

And now the really hard questions: What, if anything, distinguishes our visits to the Thai-Burma border from the sort of “short-term mission trip” Vinoth so aptly spears? Was our visit to his country to teach a course at CTS really significantly different (particularly if one removes Western ideas about the importance of getting the job done, and focuses instead on people and relationships)?

Cover of Richmal Crompton's More William

I did say this was audio week round here, didn’t I? Well the Richmal Crompton  project More William that Barbara and I collaborated to read has appeared. It had a somewhat checkered history, a victim of house sales and buying, and B’s new job in Tauranga, but over Easter we finished the reading and now it’s all available.

More William by Richmal Crompton (free audio book) also at Archive.org

“It was on Christmas Day that the centipede appeared on Aunt Evangeline’s plate, the library clock was found mysteriously dismantled, and the conjuring trick with the egg went disastrously wrong. But as William’s Aunt Lucy told him, A Busy Day is a Happy Day – and William is always eager to please adults.
The terror of the Brown family is back, leaving a trail of havoc behind him – with the very best of intentions.” (More William book jacket)

Lovers of British family sitcoms are either already William fans, or are likely to become avid followers of the dogged and imaginative child and his not always patient family.

Richmal Crompton’s William series of books tells the relationship between adults and children from a child’s perspective hilariously highlighting the different viewpoints. Most of us have been William (e.g. children who cannot understand the strange and arbitrary or contradictory rules the adult world imposes) or have dealt with a William (never sure whether he is the little boy pointing out the emperor’s lack of clothes or a nuisance defending his crimes with infuriating [il]logic. Although the world of middle class homes with cooks and gardeners has long vanished generations of adults and children alike laugh at William’s explotis, and often sympathise with either the hero or his long-suffering family.

Somehow Crompton’s William is so real, though somewhat larger than life, that he reduces the other characters to bit-players, and her female leads seem restricted to mere supporting roles. Despite (or perhaps because of) this her stories are enjoyed by girls as much as boys.

More William is the second book in the series and was published in 1922. It contains fourteen hilarious family comedies.

Old Man Kangaroo by Rudyard Kipling

April has just been declared Audio Month in the Bulkeley household, as well as starting nearly daily podcasts on the Essential 100 Bible readings over on 5 Minute Bible, I have just completed another – rather different – project I am rather proud of :) I’ve been reading Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories for Librivox. During the reading I “discovered” a new-to-me story “The Tabu Tale” and also read the picture descriptions (which really are vintage Kipling). This together makes this the most full and complete audio edition ever (so far*) of these magnificent children’s stories that adults love to read, and listen to.

If you want entertaining on a journey, or just want to listen to a new Just So do try them!

* There might one day be a more complete edition, one which includes the “bogus” story “Ham and the Porcupine” an item of biblical pseudigrapha (yes, that Ham not the forbidden one) from Kipling’s final years – but it has almost never been collected in print with the originals, so as well as still being in copyright in the USA, not in the same category with “The Tabu Tale” which was in the first US edition of 1903.

One of my hobbies is reading for Librivox. I’ve just finished what (I think) is the first/only complete audio book of Kipling’s Just So Stories to contain not only the stories, poems, and picture descriptions, but also the 13th story (see below). I have also written a blurb for the book. Can any one suggest things I should say I have left out, or things I could say better. The goal of the blurb is to encourage people who may enjoy the stories to download them but allow others to save their time ;)
Here’s the blurb (I really would appreciate criticism, as I am not used to writing this sort of text ;O

This recording of the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling includes not only the twelve stories most often published under this title (from the original British first edition) but also “The Tabu Tale” a thirteenth story (that was included in the first US edition). It also includes Kipling’s descriptions of the pictures he drew for the book. These pictures can be found in a PDF file to accompany each chapter (the file has its own page on Archive.org). This is the first complete audio book to contain all thirteen Just So Stories and the picture descriptions.

The Just So Stories for Little Children are among Kipling’s best known and loved works. The Nobel prize-winning author’s enjoyment in playing with the sounds and meanings of words are very evident throughout, and add to adults’ enjoyment of these stories for children. This playfulness is also dramatically present in the plotting. For both reasons these stories been loved by generations of both children and adults. Because the writing plays with sound and meaning they are best enjoyed when read aloud.

As we all are, Kipling was a child of his time and social setting, so for example in “How the Leopard Got his Spots” he uses what one recent reviewer called “the N word” to refer to the Ethiopian. Each listener will need to both examine critically Kipling’s attitudes, and their own.

Twelve of these stories were first published together in 1902 (and in 1903 in the US edition all thirteen were collected) but have been presented in various other ways since. They have hardly (if at all) been out of print since. The Kipling Society publishes an excellent freely available online edition with a good set of notes on the text.

The stories are fanciful, and not intended to offer historical, scientific or religious accounts of the way things became. They are simply and exquisitely stories to enjoy.

So please enjoy them in this reading. (Introduction by Tim Bulkeley)

Note: there is a fourteenth story, “Ham and the Porcupine“, it was published in 1935 and was the last story Kipling wrote, it perhaps lacks the verve and wordplay of the others, and has only rarely been collected with them.