Virtual Methodist

What is wrong with this picture? A shorter answer might be elicited by the question what is right with this picture? No-one in their right minds would combine a picture of an armed Klansman and a quote from Martin Luther King Junior. Yet in my home area of East Belfast the following mural has been painted over a recently commissioned mural of footballer George Best... At least they didn't have the gall to put Dr. King's name to the quote. Alliance MLA Chris Lyttle's comment that it is "Perverse beyond belief" probably sums up my feeling on it... Although the people that painted it probably couldn't care less what people like Chris or myself think... They clearly don't care what anyone else thinks. They are the faceless men with guns who answer to no-one. Neither democratically elected representatives, including the PUP who have historic links with the UVF, or the people who elected them. It is they who op...

It was supposedly meteorologist Edward Lorenz who first suggested the "Butterfly effect" which,  in one version, suggests that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can ultimately cause a hurricane off the coast of America… This has become one of the most widely quoted illustration of that branch of mathematics known as "chaos theory." Well, if that’s the result of 2 butterfly wings, then is it any wonder that the collapse of 2 skyscrapers in New York have produced such chaos in the past 10 years? It devastated the lives of not only those who lost loved ones that day but in many subsequent events the world over. They may have been called the World Trade Centre, but their effect on world trade was probably greater in their demise than during their existence… their fall was like the beginning of a row of dominoes toppling, with the affects spreading wider and wider with the passing years… The cloud of dust they kicked settled on the lungs of thousands of...

Channel 4 aired Penny Woolcock's film "Exodus" on Monday night past (19th November 2007). It was a, that dreaded word, "reworking" of the second book of the Old Testament, and like many Channel 4 Films, and films with a religious/Biblical dimension, it was both interesting and frustrating at the same time. The director, Penny Woolcock , has a history of making films in avant garde ways, and are usually imbued with a strong sense of social conscience, from her first film When the Dog Bites to Shakespeare on the Estate and the drama trilogy Tina Goes Shopping, Tina Takes a Break and the controversial 2006 release, Mischief Night. She often uses "real" people rather than actors (as a former actor I am not sure about that contrast!), and that was very much the case here, with a number of the set pieces being filmed at a special Exodus Day Festival in Margate, a somewhat run-down seaside resort on the Isle of Thanet in Kent. The broad gist of the plot is th...