My book is now available for sale!

Get your Christmas gift list checked off NOW, because the book you'll give your friends and family members is now available.

We Shall Be Changed is an adult daily-devotional and inspirational book, edited by ME! And I wrote 92 of the 365 inspirational essays, so I'm the principal author, too. This hardcover book has 375 pages.

It was begun in 2004, printed by my former employer in 2005 as four separate quarterly paperbacks, and then Review & Herald Publishing Association picked it up for 2010 hardcover publication. They manufactured the books in June 2010, and my "baby" is for sale now, in time for Christmas  and end-of-year birthday gifts--and to satisfy those New Year resolutions to improve oneself.

Some of you have suggested you'd like a signed copy. If you're a friend in the Phoenix, Arizona area, you know how to reach me. (I have none for sale.) If you purchase the book from the publisher, Amazon, or an ABC bookstore, and would like a signed bookplate, contact me by commenting on this article, and I'll send you a sticker to affix inside.

Each article is written (or re-written or edited) in a breezy-fresh, conversational style, and is accompanied by a scripture for the day, taken from modern, contemporary versions of the Bible. Some of the modern applications of ancient texts will surprise you (in a good way, of course).

The book was created from the beginning (I know, I put it in the writers' guidelines!) for a non-denominational, Christian audience, so you won't find dogma, branding, or secret rituals in these pages! Just everyday situations with a fresh, upbeat perspective, tied to a daily scripture text. If you're looking for a positive kick-start to your day, this book should be open on your night table. If you're looking for an inoffensive, nonpartisan, inspirational gift for a friend or family member--this is it. It might show another dimension to the God you thought you knew!

Here are the online ordering sites for We Shall Be Changed:

Publisher (RHPA) will ship faster than Amazon. Ask them about institutional discounts or volume discounts.

Amazon (visit this site to "see inside" the book, including text and graphics). Note that Amazon's shipping is 2-5 weeks (because they have to order it from RHPA).

Or call toll-free to order We Shall Be Changed: 1-800-765-6955.

Related posts:
http://christykrobinson.blogspot.com/2010/06/we-shall-be-changed-is-now-in-hardcover.html 
http://christykrobinson.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-book-manuscript-is-officially.html

Riley County Domestic Violence Task Force Remembrance Event: October 1, 2010--Silent Witness

At the Riley County Courthouse in Manhattan Kansas, a group of people gathered to remember how we lost women, men, and children:

Lost to violence committed by those who should have loved them most.

Relational violence is mind-bending,

 as the Power to Hurt and Control others is used to temporarily assuage inferior feelings.

What a loss; how sad for us. To hurt those of our own species, our mates, our co-parents, our children.

Well, you can read about the personality style that does this HERE.  You can learn more about Domestic Violence HERE and HERE.

Here are some pictures of the Remembrance event; The Crisis Center Inc invited the Community to come.

After the pictures are some facts about this horrible crime. Here is a youtube video of one of the stark and moving readings of the event.

.: click the video twice to enlarge.

When someone says,

"WHY DOESN'T SHE JUST LEAVE HIM?" please tell them that

women DO leave, and are beaten and killed, along with their children, when they do.

Click on pic to enlarge


The Crisis Center Inc Prepares for the Event



Lost to Violence

Speakers Prepare to Read the Crimes.

Detective Darla King became visibly moved

as she read of the loss of a law enforcement officer.

Riley County Courthouse

Judy Davis, Director of the Crisis Center Inc

A K-State Student

A male silouette marks the loss of a law enforcement officer

Why Doesn't she just Leave Him?

Our own Captain Don Stubbings, K-State Police

The Riley County Courthouse.

 Perhaps there would have been hundreds of people to mark the memory of those lost if this issue was more highly discussed in the media and lindsay lohan's exploits were left to her parents to discuss.

Among those attending the event were the SANE SART nurses, the mayor, members of the Flint Hills Sexual Assault Coalition, the county attorney, and the leaders of the RCPD, along with K-State Police, students from the K-State Women's Center, and others.

The Crisis Center Inc website is HERE.

October Is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month

The Silent Witnesses remind us that domestic violence – always harmful – is often lethal.
In Kansas, intimate partner homicides constituted
· 17 % of all homicides in 2004
· 11 % of all homicides in 2005
· 9 % of all homicides in 2006
· 10.5 % of all homicides in 2007
· 8.6 % of all homicides in 2008

From 1866 - 2007, 241 Kansas Law Enforcement Officers lost their lives in the line of duty. Fifteen of those officers were killed while intervening in domestic violence cases.

The Riley County Domestic Violence Task Force was formed late in 1995 to develop and sustain a coordinated, community-wide response to domestic violence. Task Force members are: Sunflower CASA, Crisis Center, Inc., Ft. Riley Family Advocacy Program, Pawnee Mental Services, Riley County Attorney, Riley County Court Services, Riley County Police Department, SRS, and Stepping Stones Child Advocacy Center.

For victims of sexual and domestic violence, the Crisis Center provides free, confidential assistance, 24-hours a day. If you or someone you know needs help, please call 1-800-727-2785.

Friday, October 1st  12:00 p.m.  Riley County Courthouse Plaza

We will unveil the silhouettes and share the stories of a dozen Kansas victims of domestic homicide, including members of our regional community.

Riley County Domestic Violence Task Force
A Project of the Crisis Center, Inc.
785/539-7935

Task Force members include representatives from:

CASA, Crisis Center, Inc., Ft. Riley Family Advocacy Program, KSU Family Center, KSU Police Department, Mercy Hospital, Pawnee Mental Health, Riley County Attorney, Riley County Court Service, Riley County Police Department, SRS, Stepping Stones Child Advocacy Center, Community Members

For more information about the Silent Witness Program, please visit http://www.silentwitness.net/

More info regarding domestic violence:
http://marysbeagooddogblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/we-are-reaping-what-weve-sown-violent.html

watch the oscar-winning film,  DEFENDING OUR LIVES if you ever can.
http://www.cambridgedocumentaryfilms.org/defending.html

Generation | Poetry | TS3L10T

"Poems are machines for remembering themselves."

-Don Paterson

For the first time in years I went cycling today. It was exhausting. I kept thinking to myself 'machines are much better than people at the whole transport thing, aren't they?' I mean, having a nice bike ride or a run from time to time is pretty fun, but cars are essentially better built for the job, in terms of efficiency and all that, right?

Successful Machines = Efficiency + Autonomy + Saving of Money + Sexy Design (optional)

My point is... I have recently been reading an equally fascinating and mind-numbing thesis on machines being able to generate poetry. Aside from the idea itself being quite poetic, the paper makes for frustrating reading. I get the impression that the author, one Hisar Maruli Manurung, doesn't spend much time with poets, based on phrases like:

"We propose a model of poetry generation as a state space search problem, where a goal state is a text that satisfies the three properties of meaningfulness, grammaticality, and poeticness. We argue that almost all existing work on poetry generation only properly addresses a subset of these properties."

Part of me likes the idea of poetry being the litmus test for the existence of A.I., as it is supposedly "a task which, if done by a human, requires intelligence to perform." Is the hard-wiring of a soul provable only through poetry? Would The Terminator enjoy Ezra Pound? I can sort of imagine his data-scrolling infra-red vision scanning the Cantos for esoteric references. 

The problem with this line of research is that poems are fundamentally at odds with machinery in so many ways.

Firstly, poetry ain't efficient and it certainly isn't about saving money. To write, read and publish poetry is a financial dead-end, and is procrastination of the highest order. Poetry is what happens when you try to take your mind for a walk in the park and it stays rooted for hours, sniffing the trunk of a tree covered in another mind's piss.

The biggest problem with this research however, is that it is based on a false premise. Writing poetry is not "a task which, if done by a human, requires intelligence to perform". Sorry poets, but it's not. In fact, poetry is often a task which requires its writer to fight against their own intelligence, combating prolixity and deliberate encryption in the name of honesty. Sometimes.

What does require intelligence however, is reading poetry. This is the biggest problem with the premise of a machine generating poetry... poems are designed to make the readers do half the work themselves. The Red Wheelbarrow is the finest example of this - the poetic sentiment is there once we realign our perceptions and bring our own semantic contributions to the reading.

This is why, when we interrogate Manurung's thesis, he is not genuinely giving us the promise of a machine that writes poems but rather assuring us "that computer programs can indeed autonomously generate texts that are considered poetic". And right there, in that word 'considered' is the achilles heel of the argument. For all the ideology behind 'meaningfulness+grammaticality+poeticness=poetry', the only thing that makes something officially poetic is 'consideration'.

Well, I argue that we don't need machines to sit round naval gazing, poking away with quill and parchment. Humans and machines have always lived in a shifting artistic equilibrium. Look at what beautiful artistic movements came as a result of the camera doing a much more convincing job of portraiture.

Now consider thermal imaging, ultra-sound scanners, aeroplanes, iMax, triple-distilled vodka, roller-coasters, silent discos, Facebook...

These things are all doing the job of poetry. That is, they are showing us the same world we have always lived in, but in a way which we are not always ready for. And, as a result, our poetry is effected. We scribble our verses now, not at the pace of footfall, but at the speed of engines. Our references and influences and motifs are as varied as the internet allows us for inspiration. Our egos and ids are irreversibly hacked into by every aspect of the media.

So please, by all means train a computer to write poetry, but I implore you not to do so until you have programmed it to start running an application for jaded solipsism every time it gets a bad review.

Generation | Music | Generation Xzibit

So I was going to write something about the Generation Game and then I remembered Jim Davidson is a racist cunt.

Generation Game’s a no-go, then, because my only experience of it, being 22, was of J ‘go back to Kenya’ D doing a reasonable impression of a nice bloke, rather than Forsythe’s extraordinarily hairy ears – which would, I daresay, justify any quantity of critical comment. I say impression, because here’s Jim’s own account of his fourth marriage to one Tracy Hilton, which I guess represented the real-life personal backdrop to his salt-of-the-earth affableness on the telly (they were married between 1990 and 2000):

We’re like a couple of boxers. On the first occasion, I poked her in the eye by accident. I actually went for the mouth. Thank heaven I missed, I’d have fallen in. I just took a playful punch. Unfortunately I caught her completely wrong. The second time I gave her a shiner. I threw a bunch of keys which whacked her in the eye. Just for a giggle she kept blackening it up to make it look worse. (Jim Davidson, The Full Monty, 1993).

The man was once called upon as a character witness for a guy who eventually got put away for 30 years. Oh Auntie Beeb, giving a platform to chaps like this, you’re so leftwing.

Anyway, I’m actually going to use this week’s theme as an entry-point into a wee discussion of the letter X. It’s not that I have any interest in Generation X as a concept. Indeed, it’s a remarkably meaningless coinage, having been used to describe the generation born immediately after WW2, the atheistic yoof of the sixties, post-Vietnam Americans, seventies British punks (a punk band actually called themselves Generation X – thereby labelling themselves, to the minds of those familiar with the work of the photographer Robert Capa anyway, as acolytes of precisely the Baby Boomer Man they were supposed to be freaking out) the children of Reagan and Bush Snr, 90s grunge kids and so on. And is so loosely associated with the vaguest of vague notions of postmodernism, anti-authoritarianism, sexual liberation, moral relativity and so on that it might actually be considered THE ULTIMATE BOURGEOIS CHIMERA or something.

Rather, I’m interested in the fact that all-important X was considered a reasonable typographic barometer of the unknown, of (yes, rather suspect) radicalism for four or five decades.

For though I believe we’re now well out the other end of Generation Y and might even be reaching the twilight days of Generation Z (but readers, what happens next?) X is still the one letter in the English alphabet that functions as a symbol way more than it does as a letter. In a world in which .xxx websites might imminently help structure an entire porn wing of t’internet (when X-rated became XXX I don’t know I’m afraid; what can’t be denied is X’s general porno credentials) X still matters. The same can be said for a musical world what has just awarded a Mercury Prize to an album called xx by a band called the XX, a musical world in which a five-piece called Xerox Teens, when taken to court by the same-named US office equipment giant, chose to change their name to XX Teens rather than, I don’t know, Photocopier Teens or summat funny like that.

Before exploring X’s relationship with music a little further, though, here are three question-observations on the X phenomenon:

1. (Hat-tip to a GQ article I read ages ago that I can’t, unfortunately, now find) If Xtina is Christina’s burlesquey slut-side, does that make Xmas the porno Christmas?
2. Based on the fact Rob Cohen’s blockbusting trainwreck of a film has the title XXX (or possibly xXx, although we’re not going to enter into the whole case debate here, beyond making the following point: bell hooks is an idiot), but that this title is apparently pronounced ‘Triple X’ (and it seems .xxx names are pronounced similarly) does that mean X’s impact is a largely visual, rather than aural one? Because of the way three Xs is a row form a pretty pattern? I guess a spoken X sounds too much like ‘ex’, which has a rather passive meaning by comparison.
3. Is the reduction of ‘Christian’ to ‘Xtian’ the first recorded example of a single letter playing the part of both text-style phonetic shorthand and illustrative image? Isn’t that therefore incredibly important? (I love little typographic images: there’s this massively underrated singer-songwriter, Talons’, that’s an inverted comma representing an actual talon rather than denoting possession y’see, how cool is that?)

This is the thing about X, you can go on about different manifestations of it for many minutes. X and music though: it’s a weird one. For one associates X or XXX with pornography or moonshine or hazardousness or the unknown, whereas both the XX and XX Teens are none of those things, the former rather quiet and the latter rather silly and that being that. And for every record making the most of XXX’s more traditional connotations (stand up ZZ Top and Peaches; now sit down) there’s invariably also something much more complicated in music, like the fact the Minor Threat-inspired straight-edge movement attempted (still attempts) to redefine XXX by taking it on as an ironic symbol of ethical restraint.

Indeed, music often challenges assumptions about X. Why is that? Elsewhere, in the form of, say, !!! or ¡Forward, Russia! other fragments of symbolically potent typography are used to conventional effect, so why not where X is concerned?

It’s a question Xzibit addresses in the rather superb ‘X’, a track which also features Snoop making sense of the quite extraordinary poetic potential inherent within the Xistence of X:

So there you have it; A-B-C, D-P-G-C
X to the motherfuckin Z,
Mr Xuberant, Xtravagant, Xtrordinary, Xciting, X-a-lotta
X-O with a little bit of Xtasy
X-ing your bitch-ass out if you tryin to test the G
And what’s the recipe? Xcalibur weaponry
And we shoot Xceptionally
That there is hot – X marks the spot?
Fuck naw, X spots the marks
Xclamation point, niggaz!

What’s even more interesting, though, is Xzibit’s own chorus (is chorus the right word?):

(X) Rearrange the whole game with my rugged sound
(X) Won’t even say your own name when I come around
(X) Stay on top but remain from the underground
(X) to the Z and we all in the family

‘X: Rearrange the whole game with my rugged sound’: in X, Xzibit argues, resides a veritable microcosm of the way music and language interact – for music, sound, rearranges the rules of language, the whole linguistic game. Within a musical framework, one has an obligation to think about the function of language differently, its purpose, what makes it beautiful and resonant and so on. It’s a basic principle when it comes to lyrics: a good lyricist does not a good poet make. Xzibit’s particular genius was to realise that this concept had the almost mythological connotations of X, possibly stemming from the ubiquitously pointless branding of plural Generation Xs, at its heart. Hell, he even made X the defining aspect of his name.

Have a look at that Davidson video that I linked to in my first paragraph: in it, he rather inevitably derides ‘rap’, for reasons that he limits to a rather curious impression of a squinting crab accompanied by a mumbled ‘hey motherfucker motherfucker hey motherfucker’ or something.

Xzibit the linguistic theorist: just one more reason to regard JD as the most ignorant fuck still sweating on a stage.

Sam Kinchin-Smith
Music Editor

sweetest friday

nap time, dinner time, date time, music time, time to get a dog?

Have a laugh.

Click pics to ENLARGE  more fridays HERE

 

baby with boston terrier

baby with jack russel

baby with giant mastiff

more mastiffs HERE

baby with golden retriever

pew pew

A Police Inspector Calls

Titel: Un comisar acuza / A Police Inspector Calls
Genre: Kriminaldrama/Thriller
Land: Rumänien
År: 1973
Regi: Sergiu Nicolaescu
I rollerna: Sergiu Nicolaescu, Gheorghe Dinica, Jean Constantin, Corneliu Gîrbea

Handling: Järngardet fick stor makt i Rumänien under andra världskriget, de bildade pakt med Hitlertyskland och arbetade med att rensa de politiska motståndarna i landet. I fängelset i Jilava satt fångar anklagade för mordet på sin ledare, Corneliu Codreanu, och en natt under det brinnande kriget massavrättas fångar utan rättegång i sina celler. Kommisarie Moldovan sätts på fallet, men högre uppsatta vill inte att han ska komma för nära sanningen...

Omdöme: Sergiu Nicolaescu lär anses som en av de bästa regissörerna i rumänsk historia. Men vad jag inte visste var att han även spelade huvudrollen i flera av sina filmer. Här syns han som kommisarie Moldovan som är en duktig polis, men även utan politiska sympatier. Han sätts på fallet efter att ett flertal politiska fångar blivit massavrättade i fängelset. De högerextrema, som samarbetade med Nazityskland, försöker övertyga honom om att det var kommunisterna som ligger bakom, medan kommunisterna påstår att det var tvärtom. Nu måste Moldovan med hjälp av en ditsatt högerextrem spion (Limba) utreda det hela, men blir minst sagt motarbetad.



Filmen har ett relativt högt tempo utan så många döda punkter, men inte heller överdrivet mycket action för att man ska tappa intresset. Storyn är relativt enkel, men blir ändå lite svår att hänga med i under delar då många nya karaktärer bara introduceras med namn och man egentligen inte vet vilka det är. Men det mesta klarnar och även om vi som tittare vet hur allt ligger till är det kul att se hur Moldovan utreder det hela. Sergiu Nicolaescu sköter huvudrollen på ett bra sätt där han spelar kyligt och underhållande kaxigt när det behövs. Förutom huvudrollen måste huvudskurken Paraipan (skönt spelad av Gheorghe Dinica) samt spionen Limba (en sliskig och hal Jean Constantin) nämnas lite extra.



Gjord kort efter The French Connection (1971) känns det helt klart som man tagit inspiration härifrån med miljöerna. En annan stor inspiration tror jag säkerligen var min personliga favorit Jean-Pierre Melville då man bjuds på många skottlossningar, avrättningar och en story som påminner en del om franska motståndsrörelsen som Melville behandlade i Army of Shadows (1969). Gjord under kommunisttiden granskades manuset och man tvingades ta in en del positiva kommentarer om kommunismen. Men Nicolaescu lyckades minimera skadan tack vare den alltså neutrale huvudpersonen. Med ett minnesvärt slut och några skönt roliga scener funkar detta förvånansvärt bra.



3 - Skådespelare
3 - Handling
3 - Känsla
2 - Musik
3 - Foto
--------------
14 - Totalt

Betyg:
IMDb: 7.2

The Daily Farm Commute

Driving in farm country is its own reward. click to enlarge

Morning on the Farm

September morning

Tree on Fire