Sunday 20 July 2003

Mutter, mutter, complain, grumble &c. Some things that would make life more pleasant at church:
  • A mixing desk

  • A drummer + kit

  • A longer practise

  • Greater proximity of microphones to mouths

  • Some kind of rota for singers

  • The moon on a stick

Someone to definitely lead might be good too. The church's (or possibly my - I never quite worked it out) electro-acoustic decided to be dodgy today, so I had to cart my electric round after a bit of fiddling. I wasn't playing too well today either, and it got generally pear-shaped near the end. Bah.

* * *

After dinner, I decided to investigate the church's sound system. Every time Alan plugs his keyboard into the wall it distorts horribly, and I thought that I might be able to fix it just by changing various output levels. No such luck. Maybe it's the speakers themselves. The whole sound system is about 30 years old now, so if something isn't integrally wrong with it, I'd be surprised. It also means that no-one has a clue how it works. They just turn it on and hope. I expect it needs looking at, but I also expect that that's not the kind of expense to be borne currently.

I read from about the halfway point of Isaiah to the end yesterday., and then scoured Dad's bookshelf for books on sin, as I think I'm holding myself back from God, but there didn't seem to be any. Closest I found was When I am weak, but I expect that it's more general approach will be more helpful anyway.

And then I watched Carrie for the first time. I liked the direction; I wonder who it was... Oh right, Brian was it? Fair enough. Ugh, he did Mission to Mars. Well, in this film he done good anyway. The bit where you know the bucket is going to come down is just horrible. Carrie's mum was a particularly flat character, but plenty sinister. Naturally , there must be psychopathic, self-hating and deluded Christian mothers, but I couldn't believe in Piper Laurie, yet I could believe in Sissy's performance, and she could like throw knives and make things catch fire with her mind and stuff. Funny how things turn out. Bonus points for the most disgusting and evil looking icon of Christ that I've ever seen. It was scarier than most of the film put together. The bit that really got me was at the end. I wasn't expecting that at all, though it did strike me as odd that someone would write "CARRIE WHITE BURNS IN HELL" when pretty much everyone who might have known died...