Ben’s Musings

Its 7.20pm and the electricity has gone out in our area so the fire is on and a few candles are lit. This used to happen every other night in Uganda but it’s eerie to not see any lights at all in my whole neighbourhood. No house lights, no street lights, only car headlights and dull, flickering candles through few windows.

Mary-Lou was in the Kitchen when it happened and froze, a bit stunned thinking “Oh, what do I do now?!” I was at the Skatepark when she phoned to tell me so I came home straight away and there was still no electricity when I arrived.

It was very strange riding on the bus through my neighbourhood which was entirely dark. I was amused that some of my co-passengers didn’t even seem to notice anything unusual because they were into their book or music too much.

It rips away everything you take for granted, TV, oven, light (I’m embarrassed at the order I naturally put those in!). You go back to basics, you can’t be passively entertained anymore. You start wondering what you could do to pass the time, what your interests are! Some of our neighbours just drove off!

Woa, it just came back on with an explosion of noise - TV and house alarms!

Back to the forgotten luxuries of western life then.

Ugh, it’s been 2 weeks since my last blog - sorry!

On Sunday there was a get-together with the guys I am church with in Manchester. God is calling us to Consecrate ourselves to Him again. I’m not immediately excited by that because I know it will involve alot of dying to myself, which always hurts! What excited me was that we had friends from London, Wales, Tokyo, and Hawaii participating through M$N Messenger and Google Talk. It excited me that at last, we are using technology for our own good! At our next get-together we’re gonna all link up audibly through Skype and it will probably involve other friends in London, Sweden and Canada - I can’t wait!

Priest Idol on Channel 4. Follows the effort of an American Priest to revive a congregation of 9 people in Lundewood. Oh - I was in all sorts of emotions, excited, sad, upset, sympathetic and more!

My new(ish) book - “Quarantine” by Jim Crace. A story about the time when Jesus went into the desert for 40 days and Nights after his baptism, but concentrates on other people in the desert at the same time. It won the Whitbread Novel of the year in 1997. I read the first 7 chapters a couple of months ago but put it down to finish other books I was reading.

The Palm TX. I currently have the Palm Tungsten E, the the TX is his Daddy! Wifi, Blue Tooth, a larger screen, much more memory - uuuuuuuuuuuuurggh(dribble)!

Carisma. Mary-Lou, Nicole (a friend) and I went to Carisma’s AGM last night, and it was really great! We watched a DVD of a Rap video some kids put together, heard the Urban Superstars Winner do 2 raps, heard some really great stories, and the financial section was 1 minute long with no figures! They are planning to have a radio station for Moss-Side, and I got thinking - “Yo, Yo, Benny G, ya fave MC, in da place, makin’ space, for debates”! and if Mary-Lou joined in my show it would be “MC M-L & Benny G”!

Mothers against Violence Logo. I saw it at the Carisma AGM and loved it - I like the way the mum is punishing her 2 year old by throwing his gun away!

You may have noticed my Music Streams section of the links (if you scroll to the right). When I find a good mix while perusing t\’internet, I\’ll pop a link to it in this section.

You can simply click the links and see which media player plays them for you, but I listen to them through RealPlayer, so I advise you to use RealPlayer too. You can download it here.

You may need to tweak a couple of settings to get it to stream the mp3\’s rather than download it before you can listen to it. Go to the \”Tools\” menu, the click on \”Preferences…\”. In the window which opens, click on \”Playback Settings\” then at the bottom of that page, make sure that the \”Instantly play web-page media links instead of downloading them\” checkbox is checked.

To make Realplayer your Universal Media Player so that it will automatically play mp3\’s when you click on them, click on \”Media Types\” in that window and select \”Make RealPlayer my Universal Media Player\”.

Enjoy my Music Streams!