'Squat students set to defy uni order'

The students who have been squatting in some of Melbourne Uni's terrace houses have been given till tomorrow to move out:

This week the university issued an ultimatum to squatters that they leave by tomorrow.
But the students, who formed the Student Housing Action Collective (SHAC), have refused to move out and will hold a rally at the houses tomorrow.
"We have nowhere else to go and this rally shows that we're not planning to go quietly," student Elizabeth Patterson said.
Inner Melbourne rental vacancy rates are only 1.1 per cent and median rents have gone up by 17 per cent.
The students have proposed converting the properties into a student-run housing co-operative under housing association Common Equity Housing.

Read the whole article from, The Age, here.

'Homeless crisis at top university'

THE Rudd Government is facing pressure to boost income support for tertiary students, as Victoria's most distinguished institution — Melbourne University — reveals that hundreds of its students are homeless due to rising living costs.

Read the whole article at The Age, here.

DVD launch

Thursday night we launched a DVD of people from the Credo community telling their stories. (We're going to be using it internally for our education work.) In the laneway we set up a whole heap of televisions playing bits of the DVD, for people to have a look at as they came in to Credo for the launch. (I was actually outside for most of it, looking after the equipment.)

MLC retreat day

Today we were hosting the year twelves from Methodist Ladies College, for their Religious Education retreat day. (It's their one day of RE for the year.) Several of us were up most of last night getting stuff ready.
This is Marcus being overhelmed in the Land of Easter Eggs:

And this is when Marcus lost his pen under one of the shelves in the Land of Easter Eggs:

And this is a special little installation me and Ray and Stella did for the elevator:

What took most of the time was setting up the contemplation and prayer stations in the sanctuary. (I helped with that last year.) This is what they looked like last night before they'd had prayers written all over them:

Today I was taking groups of students on city walks with Brent and Kate, while Marcus was looking after the installation in the sanctuary, and Simon was running nonviolence workshops to do with competition.
Took these pictures of some of the prayer stations at the end of the day:

(The international time map is from this screensaver.)
If you want to make some slightly coherent sense of what the stations were all about, read what Marcus wrote about last year's MLC retreat day.

Frontlines of urban education

Street Smarts is the blog of an art teacher at an inner-city public school in Celveland:

The Cleveland Municipal School District is a system fraught with the challenges inherent to a large district and an impoverished city. I am publishing this journal in response to those who are quick to criticize "those lazy, greedy, teachers". I offer you a glimpse into my world. I have always been a student of behavior. As a child, I would tame wild creatures and befriend strays. When I grew up, my natural empathy helped me become adept at observing, understanding and predicting human behavior, as well as discovering and studying what inspires and motivates people. Especially fascinating, are relationships; who we choose to associate with, and why; how we interact with one another, and how we affect each others lives.

Also, for some reason I got hits from two closely linked Cleveland blogs (Cleveland Humour and Surfing Lake Erie) yesterday, and can't work out why.

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism

Noticed this at BoingBoing a little while back. Noticed it again just before at Signposts.

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.
(Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster)

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (or Pastafarianism) is a religious parody created by people as a protest against having intelligent design taught in American schools.
When will we Christians learn that forcing our beliefs on other people just makes them angry? WWFSMD?