Iain Strachan

There is a really useful website titled Bullshit Bingo that is a very good concentration aid during management meetings. The web page produces a five by five grid of randomly chosen meaningless management metaphors ( like "traction", "vertical market", "horizontal market", "hardball", and "leveraging core competence"). You listen out during the meeting and every time one of the phrases is used by someone, you cross it off. When you get a line of five together, you jump up and shout "Bullshit!!" (or not, if you want to keep your job!). It really improves your listening skills. In a company I once worked for someone I knew actually got a line during a meeting, so it is possible. Other choice examples were when the CEO, in a 20 minute recorded telephone message to employees used the phrase "Moving Forward" a total of 39 times (someone was actually counting!). A couple of other hilarious comments were: ... this n...

Canal Walk, Indianapolis, 27th Jan 2008. On business in Indy in January, we had a weekend to kill. The folks at the office recommended we visit Chicago, but neither of the two of us, mad Englishmen that we were, fancied a round trip of seven hours in the car to see a city where we wouldn't know where to go. So we found in the hotel room a guide that said the Canal walk in Indianapolis is very beautiful, so we decided to give it a try. Alas, it had been drained for the winter, making the warning in this picture somewhat superfluous. Fancy diving into that! I shall be out there again next week, and I am sure the canal walk will be beautiful, but I doubt if I'll get to see it, as I'll just be there during the week :-( And here's the proof that I was really there! Such a lovely picture it might have been!

From a letter from 2001 between the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams and Dr. Deborah Pitt, a psychiatrist and evangelical Christian: "By the end of the 1980s I had definitely come to the conclusion that scripture was not dealing with the predicament of persons whom we should recognise as homosexual by nature. I concluded that an active sexual relationship between two people of the same sex might therefore reflect the love of God in a way comparable to marriage, if and only if it had about it the same character of absolute covenanted faithfulness." Good for him!! I agree with the above 100%. Apparently the Church of England is going to split on this issue, and some Conservative Christians say Williams's position is now "untenable". Some Conservative Christians need to go back to the Bible and read Matthew 7:1-2 . Some Conservative Christians need to understand the truly horrific abominations that are perpetrated on innocent children, not by h...

This was a poem I wrote about a year after my father died, in his memory. The image of the half-mown lawn was one I had long intended to write into a poem, but the recollection prompted by the incident at the end was the spark that got the poem written & thus a sad memory got sandwiched between two happy ones. "Please, Daddy, can you mend my coach?" Me. Aged five. At the airport. Clutching broken toy. You, ever the patient father, Tired from your business trip, complied. Thirty years passed, and then you died, Mowing the lawn. For three days I stared out of the window At the mower's slanting swathe across the uncut grass, Marking your last path. Then started it up again, continuing your work. Felt your last moments in the vibrations of the handle. Knew your last conscious act; To halt the mower and save your precious lawn. Then yesterday, you came to me again, Through my five-year-old's broken toy, And for a few moments that spanned the gap of all those years...

Over at Willful Grace there is a posting about the Myers-Briggs personality profile. As Grace, who is an INFP points out, there are some good things about INFP's (like being very caring etc), and some things that really suck, like having a "subtle tragic motif" running through their lives. Well, on reading about it, I went and took a Myers-Briggs test, and answered a lot of impertinent Yes/No type questions, and lo and behold, I also came out as an INFP! (Introverted, iNtuitive, Feeling, Perceiving). I guess my "tragic motif" is my penchant for sad music as exemplified in these posts: No easy fixes, but we can try Funeral songs ( choosing a song for my own funeral?! How tragic is that ???) Hunger for Seriousness But I also seem to remember that I took an M-B test around 20 years ago, during a management course, and came out as INTP (T = "thinking"), reflecting my analytical, scientific, rational nature as opposed to the touchy-feely-liking-depr...

Today we undertook a massive clearout of the garage and attic. The chaotic jumble of papers, books, toys and so forth was thoroughly sorted, some to keep for special memories, but many assigned for recycling. My past life seemed to flash about me with fond and forgotten memories revived and relived once again in a random patchwork of reminiscence. Here was found my first ever Paddington Bear book, whose stories delighted me as a child. Among my extensive university lecture notes was an essay I wrote on how to explain the particle-wave duality of Quantum Mechanics to a non-scientist. In it, I had tackled the problem of how we understand that light can be simultaneously a particle and a wave, by making an analogy with Christian Theology - that theologians too have the magnum mysterium of Christ being fully man and fully God at the same time. My crusty physics professor (Sir Brian Pippard, who was Cavendish professor of Physics at Cambridge) was not impressed, and wrote the following c...

One thing that is deeply ingrained into me, which I can't explain, is the desire to reach out to those who are in pain or distress. It has been there from quite an early age - part of my make up, I suppose. Last weekend, I heard this song, for the first time, sung by a woman with a beautiful voice, at a lunch party, and fell in love with it straight away. It shows how out of touch with contemporary culture I am that I was unaware it was a big hit for Coldplay in 2005; but came home and immediately found it on YouTube, then also found my daughter had it in her collection. The words spoke directly to me as part of what I want to do. There aren't any easy fixes for people who are in pain, but that doesn't stop us wanting to try. The song also made me feel sad, because of someone I know of, who is suffering as the result of a terrible injustice. I guess this post is dedicated to that person. On the other hand, it's also the case that I've only recently discovered ho...