A bit of history…

On August 23, 1779, the USS Constitution set sail from Boston loaded with 475 officers and men, 48,600 gallons of water, 74,000 cannon shot, 11,500 pounds of black powder and 79,400 gallons of rum. Her mission: to destroy and harass English shipping.

On October 6, she made Jamaica, took on 826 pounds of flour and 68,300 gallons of rum. Three weeks later the Constitution reached the Azores, where she provisioned with 550 pounds of beef and 6,300 gallons of Portugese wine.

On November 18, the ship set sail for England where her crew captured and scuttled 12 English merchant vessels and took aboard their rum. But the Constitution had run out of shot. Nevertheless, she made her way unarmed up the Firth of Clyde for a night raid. Here her landing party captured a whiskey distillery, transferred 40,000 gallons aboard and headed for home.

On February 20, 1780, the Constitution arrived in Boston with no cannon shot, no food, no powder, no rum, no whiskey. Just 48,600 gallons of water.

Google takes over the world

Google Talk:

Google is taking over the world. They’ve just released an IM client, which will allow you to chat via text or voice, and hopefully will tie into all your other IM services like Yahoo and AIM in the future. Google Talk uses Jabber, an open standard for instant communications over the internet.

If you do not already have a gmail account, you can comment here and I’ll send you an invite. I have 49 at the moment.

How to run a Con: The Myths

There are several myths about running conferences. Some con planners, even after having many under their belt, never get over these myths. Con planning always goes better once the planning crew gets over these.

MYTH: Planning and Running is Hard

Good Communication is A.R.T.

This is My pet theory. We all have one, this is Mine.

Any group or person that is responsible for planning events, meetings, and the like needs to be communicating well with their potential audience. Breakdowns of communication are all too common, but often are the result of not following the 3 Rule of Good Communication:

• Accuracy of content
• Redundancy of distribution
• Timeliness of the whole shebang

When any one of these is only partially fulfilled, or ignored completely, the end results can be drastic, from lackluster involvement in group acticities, to complete group disillusionment and eventual dispersal. Let’s take a look at each of these in detail, using confrence/meeting announcements as examples.

Regional Needs Task Force Strategy Plan

The following is the document that was presented to the ConCentric Plenary, and should be considered Canon. There may be supporting and dissenting ideas in the ether, but this is THE document for primary discussion.





In order to fully study and research how to best serve local, district, and regional campus and young adult leaders, and because we believe we could not reach consensus on how to best continue at this time, the Regional Needs Task Force proposes the following alternative. Ideas presented in the original Regional ConCentric proposal may be brought into conversation in the future as a long term solution.  Because the Alternative position sees the goal of Regional ConCentrics as finding and empowering new local/regional leaders within the US and Canada, we propose:

Regional ConCentrics, Redux

Radical Hapa: Regional ConCentrics On Hold:

Joseph brings us news from ConCentric, which is ending as I write this. To break down his post with my initial, gut reaction commentary:

The Regional ConCentric Resolution and the work of members of the C*UUYAN Regional Needs Task Force was withdrawn at ConCentric 2005 due to blocks in the consensus process that led to a compromise proposal that did not require Plenary action. The resolution will continue to be a point of discussion throughout this year with CUC and UUA District Young Adult Representatives and Local YA & CM Group leaders.

Not surprised this happened, and I am happy to hear that further study is being conducted. I know we’ll hear a lot more about this on this blog.

This fall C*UUYAN SC has authorized the submission of a Fund for Unitarian Universalism grant to help finance 4 Regional Events in Spring 2006

four? FOUR?! I would like to see exactly how having only four regions to cover the ENTIRETY of North America is going to lessen the cost of travel. Reducing the cost of according to some of the rules I’ll be outlining in my How to run a Con series might reduce overall cost a BIT, but the travel isn’t going to be significantly, or at all, reduced for many people.

Depending on the location of the Regional meetings, and their timing (spring), there are going to be some interesting logistical issues. I’ll wait to see a map, and attendance numbers before making final judgement of course. I’ll even seriously plan on going, if there is a region I can drive to. I still hold that regionalization will not have the effects desired until C*UUYAN reliquishes control to local groups they don’t control.

each local Young Adult and/or Campus Ministry group will be asked to send a delegate to the Regional Events (to-be-named).

That’s a good goal, and one I can personally get behind. Here’s to luck and passion to make it all work.

Tales of the Plush Cthulhu

Tales of the Plush Cthulhu:

This is quite funny, and an example of a Good Day surfing the web. Hang Loose!

Superfluous post

This past weekend was busy, but good. I’m still tired from it, honestly. Between 8 hours of driving, meetings, a wedding, visiting with family, it’s been real.

This post is ALSO to test the new automagical posting system that lets me schedule things to be posted at specific times.

More Godliness

EK-CHUAH – from Mayan Mythology:
Patron god of the Cacao bean!

MEBD – from Celtic: Goddess in Ireland involving lots of sex, death, and drink. Not always in that order.

OMETOTCHTLI: King of the drunken bunnies.

Claim YOUR God…

GodChecker.com:

Oh my goodness. This site is GREAT. It’s irreverant, but factual. Alas, I have yet to find a god of Coffee. This is bad. I need to find one. One HAS to exist in SOME pantheon…