Orson's Telescope

No More Twain, but One Brain

2005-03-10T20:52:00.000-05:00

Last year, while Jeremy was out of town, I was quickly clicking through The Hunger Site and all its sister sites. I have to admit that I usually do it without ever looking at any of the ads, but this time, I noticed an ad for some funky wooden bear-claw-shaped salad servers. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “Father’s Day is coming up, and we need salad tongs, and I’m bored because my husband’s out of town. I think I’ll buy these for him.” Two days later, Jeremy came home from Montana, and as he was passing out his gifts to the boys, he sent our son in with a gift for me: wooden bear-claw-shaped salad servers.

It's a very fun story to tell, especially to dinner guests as they serve themselves salad with the Montana claws (we gave the other set as a wedding gift), but it also got me thinking about what long-term exposure to the same favorite individual on a daily basis can do to a person. I’m just wondering if any of you have any stories to share about the strange ways we tend to really become one after being married several years. I’m not just talking about finishing each other’s sentences or starting to resemble each other. I’m looking for a story that could top (or even try to match) our bear-claw tale. [Oh, and just so we can properly put it in context, please include how long you’ve been married & how long you’ve known each other. We started dating almost exactly twelve years ago and we’ve been married almost nine years.]

In for J: Fly Girl K with a Fascinating Follow-up

2005-03-04T22:19:00.000-05:00

After reading Sister Andelin’s advice, I was motivated to make a list of the manly traits I admire in Jeremy. Aside from the obvious manly beard, moustache (drawn on with mascara in this case, yet, somehow, still masculine), and horse taming, the rest are too personal to reveal here, but, I would like to share with you what I consider to be one of his manliest talents:

In for J: Fly Girl K with some Fascinating Information

2005-02-14T21:38:00.000-05:00

I have appointed myself as a guest blogger for today for two reasons.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and, even better, it’s the day Jeremy finished the last chapter of his dissertation. (Don’t get too excited, he still has to spend the next few weeks dotting some I’s and stuff). Let’s all give him one of those cheesy "rounds of applause” they used to do in scouts.
I came across this little gem in my nightly study of Helen B. Andelin’s The Fascinating Girl. This comes from Chapter IV, which, for those of you who aren’t quite as fascinating as I, is the one in which Sister Andelin explains how men have an innate need to be admired. The smart girl who wants to snag a young man will do well to remember that if she can provide him with the admiration he seeks, then he will naturally be drawn to her (you know, so he can get more admiration). The following
excerpt is found under the heading: WHAT HE WANTS YOU TO ADMIRE.

What a man wants you to admire more than anything else are his manly qualities. [and I must interrupt here to explain that the emphasis is not mine – she highlights the word manly every time it appears, so if you’re reading aloud, please give the word the proper attention] If you admire traits which are admirable in both men and women, he will be disappointed.
For example, if you admire him because he is kind, thoughtful, pleasant or well groomed, he may appreciate your praise but it will do little to really stir him, or affect his feelings towards you. It is his masculinity that he wants noticed and admired.

So ladies, take notes, especially if you’re having trouble thinking of anything to write to your special valentine. She was thoughtful enough to list some manly traits (just in case you’re having trouble finding anything admirable):

Large build
Deep pitched voice
Moustache
Strong muscles
Heavy jaw
Heavy walk
Endurance
Manly beard
Large hands

Still stumped? “We see his manly strength and endurance at work in…”

Sports
Lifting heavy objects
Taming horses
Weight lifting
Managing difficult equipment
Opening jar lids
Swimming
Sawing logs
Turning screws

“Mentally his manliness lies in his…”

Achivements
Cleverness
Skills and abilities
Determination
Judgement
Leadership ability

“We see masculinity in the student who achieves in his school work [go Jeremy!], the mechanic, the salesman, the carpenter, the doctor, the lawyer and all of the other fields men engage in.” [Okay, those italics are mine]

Perhaps my favorite part of the chapter is the section that coaches us on how to listen to a man to find something to admire…

If you cannot comprehend all of what he is saying, look for the traits of his character which you can admire. His conversation will reveal them. In fact, if you only follow his subject and appreciate that, and not the man who is thus expressing himself, he will be apt to be disappointed. You may rest assured that he is not talking only to have his subject appreciated. He wants admiration to be bestowed upon himself as a man and not merely upon his subject.

A woman need not be well educated or possess high intelligence to follow a clever man’s discourse. In his pleasure at having himself admired the man seldom notices that his conversation is not understood…
If you learn to listen to a man correctly it doesn’t matter if the subject is interesting or dull. You can converse on world affairs or the intricate details of his business career and you will be able to maintain an interest. In fact, you can safely guess that if he deliberately talks “over your head” he is doing so only to arouse your admiration.
[NEXT UP, "JEREMY'S MANLY TRAITS: A PHOTO ESSAY"]

Update from the Fringe

2005-02-11T21:42:00.000-05:00

Okay, I'm still officially not blogging while I finish my dissertation, but I just had to post because things are getting WAY out of hand over at Meridian. The casual gentile stumbling upon their site today, having no previous experience with LDS doctrine or culture, would go away thinking two things:

1) Mormons think evolution is bad!!!

[Yeah, this one's already been through the ringer, so no big surprise, especially from the evangelical wannabes at Meridian. But whuh the whuh is up with....]

2) Mormons think psychics are good!!!

[Yup, ISYN, that's a real Meridian article, I didn't steal their template and Onionize it. What next, phrenology?]

And by the way, if this is the kind of Mormonism you're into, Meridian's going on tour to a city near you! Like church, but churchier!

...Okay, back to the cave. You didn't see me...

My Brilliant Son and his Not-Funny Jokes

2004-12-15T09:38:00.000-05:00

Our four-year-old is a very particular child, and one thing he's especially particular about is jokes. He has a very keen sense of comedic timing and a knack for the absurd and incongruous. Also, he often renders moot the issue of a joke's actual funniness or unfunniness by coaching you on your reaction: "laugh louder" he'll order, or "say 'cool.'"

Occasionally he falls into the formulaic. One recent pattern went something like this: "What do you get when a (x) falls on a(y)? An (xy)! (+ (z))," where x and y equal animals or objects or whatever ("booger," "chicken"), and xy concatenates them ("boogerchicken"); z equals you laughing louder or saying "cool." When this formula started getting stale, he introduced a truly clever innovation: he started telling jokes that are decidedly not funny. And by that I don't mean "not funny" in the way that kids' jokes always are(n't?), but "not funny"in the sense that he knows they're not, doesn't mean for them to be, prefaces them as such, and forbids you from laughing afterwards.

This habit traces its origins, like so many bad things in this world do, to the Veggie Tales. One day, after listening to a Veggie Tales tape of unknown provenance (we don't buy that stuff, it just appears in the house somehow), he starting riffing on Biblical stories. He approached my wife with this joke: ""Mom, what do you call a Daniel that falls on an Aniel?....A DanielAniel!" She laughed a mother's obligatory laugh , but he stopped her short. "Mom," he scolded her,"you're not supposed to laugh. It's not a funny joke, it's an important joke. I'm telling God Jokes. God jokes aren't funny. They are important."

Eventually he even abandoned the religious pretense and took to telling unfunny jokes for their sheer unfunniness. Yesterday he had a friend over, and while we were eating lunch he turned to the friend and said "Let's tell jokes that aren't funny." The friend, apparently finding nothing strange in this request, complied with a breathtakingly not-funny joke (which, had it not actually been labeled a joke, could have easily been mistaken for a banal observation). My son nodded with cold, unemotional approval--"That was a pretty good one"--as if he had some objective criteria in mind for assessing the quality of an unfunny joke, and had found his friend's joke to meet that criteria. I then gave it a shot with my favorite unfunny joke:

"What's long, brown, and sticky?"
"What?"
"A Stick!"

It was received politely but unenthusiastically. My mistake, apparently, was that I had assumed "not-funny" actually meant "so not-funny that it's actually funny." Wrong. These kids weren't interested in the relocation of the funniness, from its usual spot in a clever punchline to the pathetic silence after a terrible one--hell, Letterman does that every night--but rather the utter eradication of funniness. While I was jogging along trying to get a laugh by not deserving one, my four-year-old son had lapped me in the irony lane, circling around the track to the spot where plain, lifeless, unambiguous language caught up with itself.

Embarrassed, I lamely invoked patriarchal authority: "say 'cool!,'" I ordered. Their forced compliance brought me no comfort.

North Pole joins the Coalition of the Willing

2004-12-09T10:49:00.000-05:00

I was surprised to learn, from a Christmas card I saw recently, that Santa, turns out, is an American! Furthermore, he's apparently drawing up his naughty/nice list along geopolitical lines. It may be too small to see in this picture, but the Christmas tree in the background and the ribbon wrapped around the globe are both adorned with flags of only those countries contributing troops to the war in Iraq! Applying that same principle according to proportional military commitment, American kids are getting 90% of the toys this year. And sorry, Pierre, Santa ain't even stoppin' in France.

I can't wait to see the next card in the series--red ornaments on the tree, one for each state that went with Bush in 2004; blue-ish lumps of coal tagged NY, MA, CA, etc. -- and maybe Santa in a flight suit, standing in front of a big banner reading "CHRISTMAS ACCOMPLISHED"...

NASA gettin' all X-Files on us

2004-12-07T21:49:00.000-05:00

If you're new, or just forgetful, I direct your attention to the telescope graphic at the top of the page, which links permanently to NASA's "Astronomy Picture of the Day"; perhaps you can shed some light on the mysterious streak in the sky featured in today's photo (Dec. 7). The effort to tap the collective knowledge of APOD readers via an online discussion , I'm afraid, sounds like some Trekkies writing fan fiction: theories range from the shadow of a contrail (wow, that's what I was gonna guess!), to a wrinkle in the space-time continuum, to a "directed energy weapon/beam," to "a ufo. or a gas line." Eeeeeyeah, okay, thank you.

Incidentally, and on a totally different subject: since there has been an uptick in traffic lately, I'll take this opportunity to direct attention once more to the most recent STG microcharity blogblitz, posted below.

Shattering the male glass ceiling in the Primary

2004-12-05T20:41:00.000-05:00

When the bishop extended my new calling in his office today, he compared it to school integration in Alabama in the 60s, and assured me there would be ample security to usher me through the crowd of bigoted protesters when I arrived at church next Sunday. All tongue-in-cheek, of course, but the calling was a bit out of the ordinary: I was asked to serve as Primary Music Leader.

The church handbook clearly states that all Primary callings besides the presidency and secretary are open to men and women, but I don't know that I've ever encountered men serving in the music roles (except occasionally as substitutes) . I'd be interested to know if other readers have been in wards where males have held permanent callings as Primary music leader or pianist.

Lest you think I feel emasculated by assuming this traditionally (if arbitrarily) female calling, I'll have you know that I'm confident enough in my masculinity that I also decorate cakes for my kids' birthdays, I make homemade, enrichment-night-worthy Christmas cards, and, when I really want to look my best, I cover up the sallow-gray patches beneath my eyes with a little bit of base. Okay, just kidding about that last one.

And, in case this amusing incongruity hasn't already occured to you, let me remind you that while I'm all "Mother Dear I Love You So" and the "Reverently, Quietly" on Sundays, I be droppin' "Mama Said Knock You Out" and "Bring Tha Noize" during the week.

Trouble among the other Mormons

2004-12-02T22:35:00.001-05:00

I have to say, when I first read this headline...

US Mormon leader resigns, citing "inappropriate personal choices"

...I freaked out for a second, wondering how the church would survive such a terrible crisis. Then I thought, Hey, wait a second, what "inappropriate personal choices" is a man in his mid-90s even capable of?! Then I actually read the article and learned, to my relief, that they were talking about RLDS leader W. Grant McMurray, not LDS leader Gordon B. Hinckley. McMurray is apparently stepping down, resigning his priesthood ordination, and further breaking RLDS tradition by not naming his successor.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out for the RLDS. In the mean time, I'm more than a little bugged that the press throws around the Mormon in reference to both sects. I mean, as a member of the large, growing, politically positioned, financially sound, we've-got-Rick-Schroeder-and-Gladys-Knight cult, I resent being lumped together with the small, shrinking, no-celebrities-to-speak-of cult. Plus there's the issue of them being apostate and all. And although the article makes some distinction, a few paragraphs in, between LDS and RLDS, it is accompanied by an old file photo of a woman participating in a reenactment of the handcart trek to Utah--the trek that the Reorganized Church, um, didn't make, because they stayed back to, like, reorganize.

Oh well, as long as they're not mixing us up with the moonies.

Ken Jennings Spoiler! Don't Read! Because It's Big News! And I Don't Want To Spoil It!

2004-11-30T17:02:00.000-05:00

Actually, the cat's out of the bag and shedding all over the internet: our man Ken Jennings is rumored to lose on tonight's episode of Jeopardy. USA Today even divulges the purported losing answer and question; also, Jennings is scheduled for a conspicuous number of talk shows in the next 24 hours--Letterman and Nightline Tonight, Regis & Kelly and Good Morning America tomorrow.

Incidentally, several readers have arrived at this site recently via the search terms "Kelly Ripa mormon." Maybe KenJen gave her a pass-along card when they prerecorded the segment?

Our Brethren In Washington

2004-11-28T22:59:00.000-05:00

I will recap my Thanksgiving experience by saying only this: I ate so much of Mrs. OT's punkin pie and my brother's deep fried turkey, I seriously had to stop wearing my cell phone on my belt because the antenna was gouging painfully into my grotesquely hypertrophied cummerbund of goo.

[I pause, as you relish the image...]

Ahem, so, while I was away...

It looks like our friend, the Senate Minority-Leader-In-Waiting Harry Reid isn't the only Mormon getting some attention in Washington these days. Maybe I'm the last to know this, but LDS congressman Ernie Istook (R-Oklahoma) is at the center of a scandal related to the mysterious appearance, in the fine print of an omnibus appropriations bill, of a clause allowing the Chairmen of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees to peek at the tax returns of any individual, couple, or business, without giving reason, answering to anybody, or being limited by any privacy protections. It was smuggled into the bill inconspicuously and at the last minute, in the hope that it wouldn't draw any attention before passage, but after a keen-eyed staffer noticed it cries foul arose on the right and left. Once there was a stink in the air, Istook insisted he wasn't responsible and a comical choruse of blame-passing, fingerpointing, and dumb-playing ensued, and appears to continue--even though before the outcry had crested, no less a figure than Bill Frist had been referring to the passage as the "Istook Amendment."

It's one thing for Mormons in Washington to have a reputation for being uptight churchy dweebs--since, you know, we are. But "creepy Orwellian conspirators" is a label I'd rather our fellow Saints on the Hill not have.

This is almost as bad as when Orrin proposed frying people's computers if they downloaded mp3s.

Strengthening the Good: Send Your Books to Slovakia

2004-11-22T10:47:00.000-05:00

Strengthen the Good has selected the next microcharity to be blogblitzed: The the C.S. Lewis Bilingual Gymnaziumin in Bratizlava, Slovakia. You can read the profile on the STG site here. The short of it: American volunteer teachers at a ramshackle school are trying to put together an English-language library, and while cash donations (via Pay Pal at STG, which is now a 503(c) non-prof) would be welcomed, their main request is, basically, that you clear your bookshelves of the old Penguin Classics from your high school and undergrad English classes and send them over. While any books that you think would benefit the library will be greatly appreciated, the contact, Doug Dart, has compiled a list of specific needs, including many that are needed in multiple copies for literature classes. These are all books many of us fell in love with back in the day, and that love has compelled us to spare them from successive shelf-purgings, despite the fact that we haven't read them for years. Chaucer, Orwell, Twain, Swift, Bradbury, Steinbeck, etc.--from where I'm sitting now I can see at least half a dozen books from the list sitting collecting dust in the one bookcase within sight; spread the joy, package up a few (Alan at STG says $5 will send a pound of books -- at least a couple of paperbacks, I imagine, but you can check here), and send them to:

Douglas Dart
C.S. Lewis Bilingual High School
Benadicka 38
Bratislava 85106
Slovak Republic

Or, go to STG to make a tax-deductible donation. There's a Pay Pal button in the right-hand column. If you're a blogger and want to know more about STG, click here.

What Utahns watch when no one's watching them...

2004-11-22T07:09:00.000-05:00

All those snooty elitist liberals that harumphed at the supposed "moral values" that supposedly guided voters in the past election will delight in the hypocrisy pointed up in this piece from the Times. As it turns out, Red states are watching some pretty, um, blue shows on television. In the Salt Lake market one of the trashiest shows on TV ranked 4th. And not, I might add, behind BYU devotionals or Everybody Loves Raymond.

So if it is true that the public's electoral choices are a cry for more morally driven programming, the network executives ask, why are so many people, even in the markets surrounding the Bush bastions Atlanta and Salt Lake City, watching a sex-drenched television drama?
"Desperate Housewives" on ABC is the big new hit of the television season, ranked second over all in the country, behind only "C.S.I." on CBS. This satire of suburbia and modern relationships features, among other morally challenged characters, a married woman in her 30's having an affair with a high-school-age gardener, and has prompted several advertisers, including Lowe's, to pull their advertisements.
In the greater Atlanta market, reaching more than two million households, "Desperate Housewives" is the top-rated show. Nearly 58 percent of the voters in those counties voted for President Bush. And in the Salt Lake City market, which takes in the whole state of Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming, "Desperate Housewives" is fourth, after two editions of "C.S.I." and NBC's "E.R."; Mr. Bush rolled up 72.6 percent of the vote there.
"We say one thing and do another," said Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment. "People compartmentalize about their lives and their entertainment choices."

Mormonianamania

2004-11-20T18:26:00.000-05:00

You may recall that I posted a review a while back of Mormoniana, a collaborative project created by a group of LDS composers and visual artists. It appears now that the buzz about the work has expanded beyond the bloggish fringe of Mormondom: Meridian recently gave it a favorable review as well.

Also, if you found the $150 price tag of the original silk-covered, hand-bound edition a little too steep for your budget, you'll be pleased to learn that a paperback edition, which still includes the CD, is now available for $50. A small price to pay to be a part of the artsy-fartsy Mormon intelligentsia, I say!

(Incidentally, those that know me will be amused--but not surprised--to know that in the first draft of this post I misspelled the word intellegentsia.)

Mad Props for STG

2004-11-18T22:20:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has garnished some well-deserved praise on Alan Nelson and his web-based microcharity awareness project, Strengthen the Good.

OT is proud to be part of the STG network. Here's how it works: Alan researches microcharities, looking for projects that could benefit in profound and immediate ways from a blitz of web publicity. Each time a microcharity is selected, Alan spreads the word through the STG network, encouraging participating bloggers to post info about the charity or project in question and a link to a more detailed profile on the STG site. Now that STG is a 503(c) non-profit, tax-deductible donations can be made directly through STG to each featured microcharity.

When the next microcharity is announced, I'll pass the word along here. In the mean time, congrats to Alan for the write-up!

Random Roundup; also, as it turns out, a Book Review

2004-11-17T09:51:00.000-05:00

I've been a wicked and slothful blogger, and have lots of catching up to do, so instead of writing the individual posts that my various recent adventures deserve, I'm going to more or less give you the internet equivalent of watching me empty my pockets onto the dresser after a trip.

The weekend found me in Seattle at an academic conference, which was lovely except for all the scholarly hoop-dee-doo. It's beyond me why they schedule these things in great cities that I've never been to and then expect me to sit around all day in a tackily adorned ballroom, straining to keep my attention on the monotone voice emanating from the podium. There were a few glimmers of life, of course: one of my mentors, a professor of music theory, gave an interesting paper on Hendrix (and shook things up a bit by wearing a guitar at the podium so he could demonstrate as he went along); I also attended a paper where I learned some of the finer points of hip-hop turntablist transcription; and as soon as I get the URL, I'll link to a very interesting, though somewhat disturbing, paper on the use of music in the coverage of the war in Iraq. Of course, my friends and I had great fun sitting in the lobby between sessions watching sad, bookish people flirt. Also, I had the singular experience of going to see The Incredibles with a music theory professor from Yale and another guy who is really into music for helicoptors. An enthusiastic thumbs-up from both.

The event readers of this blog will likely be most interested in, however, was my meeting with Levi Peterson, noted author and current editor of Dialogue. I've currently got a piece in the chute at Dialogue, so I had been in communication with Levi anyway. But last week when I finished his novel The Backslider, I decided I had to avail myself of the conference's proximity to his town of residence and see if he wanted to meet over lunch. He and his wife, Althea, joined me in downtown Seattle and we had a wonderful time. If you haven't read any of Peterson's work, make it a priority to get your hands on a copy of The Backslider. Peterson has a particular gift for creating eclectic, problematic, utterly human characters, and shading his cast with subtle but telling details of appearance and mannerisms. Frank Windham, the well-meaning but haplessly weak-fleshed cowboy protagonist, is as real as they come. Peterson depicts the other figures, from Frank's puritanical mother, to his mentally unstable brother, to the visionary polygamist "prophet" he encounters on the road, with equal acuity. As a native of rural southern Utah myself, I was struck by how poignantly he painted his protagonsist's travels between Escalante, Panguitch, and Pioche. And even now, a week after putting the book down, I'm impressed by how tightly drawn together are the books deeper themes and symbolic tropes--especially the conflicted themes of lust and joy at the story's core. The highlight of the book, though, is the heavenly vision Frank receives at the book's climax; I won't spill the beans, but suffice to say that when Jesus visits Frank's world, one in which rural ruggedness and religious mysticism intermingle freely, His appearance and manners fit right in, and the divine message He delivers is breathtaking in its compassion and simplicity.

BYOC (Bring Your Own Chapstick)

2004-11-10T21:54:00.000-05:00

Napoleon Dynamite is now posed to pass from summer sleeper to camp classic (and I mean "camp" in the oddball-funny-but-not-necessarily-gay way, though I stand by my claim that Lafaynduh is a dude looks like a lady....): helpful reader John H tells me that a theater in Twin Falls, Idaho, will be hosting an audience participation screening of the film this Saturday at midnight. A few of the cues:

The Big Dance-
When: Napoleon, Deb and Pedro go to the Big Dance
What: Once the mirror ball is shown, blow bubbles until the scene ends.
Pedro Gets Hot-
When: Pedro and Napoleon return from their FFA trip and stand in the hallway watching Summer hand out buttons. (Pedro: “Do you think it’s kind of warm in here?”)
What: Pull out your fan, motorized or folding, and fan yourself until Pedro leaves.
Pedro Gets Wig-
When: Deb and Napoleon select Pedro’s Wig.
What: Place your Pedro Wig on your head.
Napoleon Offers Kid Pedro’s Protection-
When: Kid in all maroon get-up is shaken down at bike rack and Napoleon offers boondoggle and Pedro’s protection.
What: Hum the theme from “The Godfather.”

Pretty good, but they missed an obvious opportunity to link ND indelibly to the great tradition of audience participation cult movies: after the closing credits, when they show the extra wedding scene, throw rice at the screen.

Incidentally, back when I had a calling in the YM I mulled over the idea of doing an audience participation screening of old church movies for a youth activity. I was traded mid-season to the primary, though, and put the project on hold. If you've got ideas, email them to me and I'll compile and post them here. Johnny Lingo cries out for such treatment, don't you think? I also thought about Cipher in the Snow, too, but the boys in my quorum were already frightfully snarky and I didn't want to encourage them in this regard more than I already do...

The Silver Lining II

2004-11-08T09:10:00.000-05:00

My big brudda Jeff directed me to this post by Andrew Sullivan, which has cast a new and optimistic light on the election for me. In fact, I wonder if perhaps Dubya's (re?)election wasn't divinely appointed after all -- a heavenly sign sent to remind us all that people are supposed to clean up their own damn messes.

The Silver Lining

2004-11-03T22:10:00.000-05:00

I don't even want to talk about the presidential election. I'm still in the first Kubler-Ross stage, but I will take my fingers out of my ears and stop saying "I can't hear you I can't hear you I can't hear you" to the television long enough to count some blessings:

Obama won in Illinois. Here in New York, my man Schumer won in a landslide. And Rep. Matheson was reelected in Utah (a democrat! In the district that includes Washington County! By a double-digit margin! It's like Jonah in Ninevah!) And best of all, for those of us populating that tiny Mormon-Democrat Venn-diagram overlap, our sadness at the unfortunate loss of Tom Daschle's senate seat is tempered by the happy fact that Harry Reid is going to lead the Democratic minority in the Senate.

As a devout Mormon and the Hill's most high-profile democrat, Reid will have a prime platform on which to remind the GOP that they do not have a monopoly on "Moral Values." And I suspect that that will become even clearer as certain uncomfortable issues that BC04 managed to push back until after the election (subpoenas on Cheney's energy commission, further reports on 9/11, ugliness in Iraq, the Plame case) come back to haunt them.

It looks like Reid is already establishing himself as a bridge-builder. He's already talked both with Bush and with liberal leaders, and his moral convictions and political positions already appear side-by-side in the media's treatments of him:

The one-time chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission is also a Mormon who stands at odds with most of his party by opposing abortion rights. But the senator said Wednesday that he does not believe his stand on that issue will be an obstacle, noting that he has the support of at least seven women in his caucus and has already spoken to Kate Michelman, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"I'm one of her big fans, and she's one of my big fans," Reid said. "I
don't have to give up any of my principles to be someone who can lead the Democrats through the legislative morass that we have."

I'm sure we'll soon hear some griping from those godless hellbound libertines on my party's left flank who don't think Reid's liberal enough, but by and large I think most Dems will recognize how important Reid's contribution will be to the party's recovery from this rather traumatic election. And I think his position will reflect well on the Church as well. (At the very least, it will distract people's attention from Orrin!)

Democrats and Abortion

2004-10-30T15:05:00.000-04:00

Gadflyer's Joshua Holland has a great piece up about why a Pro-Kerry vote is a Pro-Life vote.

In short: the number of abortions in the U.S. went down under Clinton, and has gone up under Bush. Socioeconomics plays a crucial role: the wider the gap between rich and poor, the higher the abortion rate. This information comes not from NOW or Planned Parenthood, but from a pro-life Christian ethicist at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Is the goal to decrease the number of abortions that take place in this country? Or is it to be conspicuous and unambiguous in one's denunciation of abortion? The latter might be a good thing, but only if it serves the purposes of the former; righteous indignation is a means, not an end. It seems the unborn, as well as the rest of us, would be better served by expanding the term "Pro-Life" beyond its polarizing rhetorical application.

Our Man in Nevada

2004-10-29T15:37:00.000-04:00

There's some buzz in the press and the blogosphere about the possibility that Harry Reid, the democratic--and Mormon--senator from Nevada, might be the head dem in the Senate if Daschle loses his seat.

Imagine the possibilities: the Senate swings to the dems and Mitt becomes president in 2008 -- the two leaders of the free world in the same High Priests quorum...

It all goes back to that consistency theme

2004-10-29T09:07:00.000-04:00

As this video shows, George W. Bush's philosophy of foreign policy was already in the making back when he was governor of Texas.

October, yes. Surprise, not really.

Googling the Telescope

2004-10-28T20:46:00.000-04:00

It's a mixed bag in this round of G the T. I'm sorry to report that the integrity of the analysis has been compromised by some knucklehead doing repeated, deliberately absurd searches (all the same guy, marked by asterisks). C'mon, if I've got people doing fake lame Kelly Ripa searches, it diminishes somewhat the funniness of the absurd searches conducted by people who really do want to know stupid stuff about Kelly Ripa. Let's keep it real, aight?

Rankings in Google search unless otherwise noted.

fascinating disturbing mormon: 6*
orson is a feminine "little man":1*
kelly ripa is "big boned":1*
"relief society" seduced: 7 (Yahoo)
Newsweek naked pentacostal texas:3 (I was very pleased by this one, until I discovered to my chagrin that my spelling isn't any better than that of somebody in texas looking for naked pentecostals)
ghostbusters new york conspiracy marshmallow man:6
What is a soul patch:10 (update on the soul patch soon, I promise!)
"The phone call" "napoleon dynamite": 6 (When you hear it on Entertainment Tonight, remember--you heard it here first.)
Kelly Ripa republican: 2
Kelly Ripa democrat: 1 (Because when you just can't make up your mind, think to yourself, "What would Kelly Ripa do?" Thankfully, this googler does not live in a swing state. I'd hate to think, after a close relection, that's what had tipped the scales.)

What the suicide bombers hate is freedom; what they love is free bombs!

2004-10-24T22:31:00.000-04:00

I'm not saying there aren't defensible reasons to support the Bush administration. (Of course, I've probably said something very close to that before, but that's not what I'm saying right now.) I'm just saying that with the news out today I just can't see how "protection from terrorism" or "leadership in wartime" can still be considered BC04 selling points.

You may recall, when all the looting was taking place after the invasion of Iraq because all the soldiers were guarding oil pipelines, the Donald Rumsfeld brushed off the chaos as a minor nuisance, like tearing down the goalpost after the homecoming game. "Democracy is messy," he explained dismissively.

Well, it turns out that the looters weren't just cleaning out furniture from offices and Mesopotamian artifacts from museums. According to reports out today (NY Times, Nelson Report via TPM), the U.S. forces also left unguarded the Al Qaqaa munitions compound, which before the war had been secured by the I.A.E.A. The U.S. knew about the site and had been warned well in advance about the danger of losing track of its inventory: some 380 tons of RDX and HMX, among of the most powerful conventional explosives in existence (one pound of the stuff brought down the plane over Lockerbie). Not only was the huge site left completely open, it is still being looted. The guys rooting around there now are probably just stealing plumbing fixtures, though, because all the explosives are now gone and unaccounted for. In fact, it is generally believed that the insurgents, having helped themselves to what the I.A.E.A. called "the greatest explosives bonanza in history," are now blowing up convoys of American soldiers and sneaking into the Green Zone with RDX and HMX looted from Al Qaqaa.

In other words, we basically gave away 380 tons of explosives to the terrorists and now they're using it to blow up our soldiers, the Iraqi police recruits, and civilians.

Unsurprisingly, the White House and the Pentagon have known about the missing stuff for quite a while, but kept it under their hats and also put pressure on the interim Iraqi government to keep quiet about it too--at least, presumably, until after the election. Now that it's out, I'm anxious to see how they spin it.

An historic occasion

2004-10-21T23:01:00.000-04:00

Mark this date in your journals as the day I linked to an article in Meridian without the intent of mocking it. Jason Manning, who works as the online editor for PBS's NewsHour, has put up a rather nice piece encouraging his fellow saints to not be jerks when we voice our opinions in the political or cultural sphere.

Many "secular" people are quietly searching for meaning in life and a sure foundation to build on, but they often see us "religious" people as a modern band of Zoramites -- closed-off, self-righteous, and content in the knowledge of our own superiority....

Too often we assign a lesser value to the souls of those whose stances or behavior don't meet our standards, walling them off from our lives and our beliefs. Imagine for a moment what our behavior looks
like from the other side. At times we probably seem vicious or even a bit crazy for attempting to hold people accountable to standards they may not have heard of, don't believe in, and don't understand.

Those who don't agree with us have often taken a sincere and searching route to their conclusions. But we sometimes dismiss their efforts and their experience because, for whatever reason, they haven't arrived at the same location as us.

If Meridian would publish more of this kind of thing (rather than, say, this kind or this kind), and if they would expand their news feed beyond Fox and the Washington Times, I would publish less of this kind of thing.

(And before you drag out the pots and kettles, yes, reading the article I did recall a few posts of mine in which my left-leaning harangues took on a tone comparable in their stridency to that of some of the right-wing Mormons that irk me so. I'll agree with Manning that righteous indignation shouldn't be anyone's default state of mind, and try to behave myself accordingly...)

GOP to Poor People: Just Say No to Being Poor

2004-10-18T22:59:00.000-04:00

In the comments to a post a while back, someone asked me to explain why I'm a democrat. I have more reasons to give than time to write, but here's a biggie for starters, one that's been prominent on my radar lately: the GOP just isn't nice to poor people. Their policies, I believe,fall too frequently in direct contradiction with the instructions found in the Book of Mormon (King Benjamin in particular) -- and, for that matter, the New Testament--regarding the treatment of the poor. With each passing congressional session, especially under this administration, the phrase "Compassionate Conservativism" becomes an increasingly threadbare and cynical slogan, while the gap between haves and have nots grows ever wider. (And Bush exhibits an amazing lack of shame in forsaking the latter for the former.)

A crucial moment in the third presidential debate highlighted this. When asked about raising the minimum wage, Kerry indicated that he strongly favored doing so. He further pointed out that

One percent of America got $89 billion last year in a tax cut, but people working hard, playing by the rules, trying to take care of their kids, family values, that we're supposed to value so much in America I'm tired of politicians who talk about family values and don't value families.

On the other hand, when President Bush was asked what he would say to a worker whose job had been outsourced, he lamely claimed that his education initiatives are actually jobs initiatives--cold comfort for a highly skilled programmer with a masters in comp sci who has been replaced by someone in India. Extrapolating an answer to the question posed from the response given, you basically get something like "Wow, sucks to be you, pal."

The other night on Bill Moyers's PBS show NOW, a story ran about the presidential race in the swing state of Nevada. They followed Penny Katick, a single mom who works for just over minimum wage (which works out to about $13,000 a year) at a coffee shop in Glendale, Nevada. She arises at 3:30 to be to work at 5am, and works long hours so she can provide for here three children. Her oldest daughter works on the weekends to help out and plans on joining the military--with the intention of sending what she can of her criminally meager paycheck back to her family. The Katicks work hard make do with the lousy hand life has dealt them, always fearing that the next stroke of bad luck--a visit to the hospital, the transmission giving out--could utterly break them. When asked whether raising the minimum wage by a dollar or two would make a difference, Penny's eyes lit up. An extra $40 a week, she said, would make all the difference in the world to them.

The story also posed Penny's actual situation as a hypothetical question to the leaders of the presidential campaigns in Nevada. The head of KE04 Nevada reiterated support for an increase in the minimum wage. The reporter posed the same situation to the representative of BC04 Nevada, Lt. Governor Lorraine Hunt. Decked out in a smart business dress, a salon-fresh hairdo, and a flashy silk scarf tied at the neck, Ms. Hunt conveyed a decidedly different message to women in Penny's position, and I quote: "Don't whine to me." To be fair, here's a longer quote, but I don't think it makes her look any better.

The minimum wage was originally intended for entry-level people. It's important to try to keep - to have a basic minimum wage. It's not meant to raise a family. It was never intended - when I hear statements like, 'How can I raise a family of four on minimum wage?' that's an inaccurate statement, it would be disingenuous. You're not supposed to raise a family on minimum wage.
I don't want to baby anybody, and I've mentored a lot of young women. I say, 'Don't whine to me, I'll help you but, you know, get out there. My parents went through the Depression and they had it a lot worse than you do. Don't whine, be tenacious, be strong, and there are people that will be out there to help you help yourself.' And that's exactly what the Republican Party does, they want to help people help themselves.

How can that question be "inaccurate" or "disingenuous" if that's the reality millions of people, including the majority of minimum-wage workers, are actually, genuinely stuck with? apparently, the method for helping people help themselves is, well, to not help people. Mom works all week for a pittance. Daughter's going to join the military in wartime because she has no other options. And the compassionate conservative answer is, "Don't whine."

[Paul Waldman at Gadflyer has written a nice post about the NOW story as well.]

New speculation about The Bulge

2004-10-15T10:13:00.000-04:00

I think Tom Tomorrow is onto something: could the bulge be a Deadly Neural Parasite? That would explain so much...

Presidential debate drinking game for mormons

2004-10-13T16:55:00.000-04:00

The Fates have conspired against me on all fronts in the last couple of days, so I'm left with no time to provide the promised Mormon-friendly drinking game for the debate tonight--at least not as good of one as I had hoped. So, I'll just leave a couple of suggestions, which you may add to in the comments if you wish.

Every time Kerry says the phrase "find and kill the terrorists," pour a can of caffeinated cola into a mug, heat it in the microwave to coffee temperature, and drink.
Every time Bush tries to present the last job growth numbers as a good thing because they were a positive integer (ca. 96,000), even though they were a bad thing, because that number was actually lower than the number of people entering the job market each month (ca. 150,000) , down a can of cream of mushroom soup, straight up.
Every time The Bulge becomes visible, eat fruit out of season.

Moral Dilemma 1 of 3

2004-10-12T20:37:00.000-04:00

The events of this evening unfolded in a complicated manner and involved a number of interwoven issues, each of which will have to be teased out in a separate post over the next few days. The main parts are these:

Part One: Lesser of Two Evils, or, In which I drive back and forth past "Show World," but it's not what you think
Part Two: 83 in a 65, or, In which I Fight the Power, or rather, try to, but the Power, I am told, is gone to a meeting at the Holiday Inn, or something, and won't be back for a couple of hours
Part Three: Soul Patch Under Siege!

Part One. For reasons that will become clearer in subsequent posts, earlier this evening I was traveling an unfamiliar road in an unfamiliar rural town, looking for a particular address. The road was dark, buildings were few and far between, and many of the mailboxes and signs had small numbers or no numbers at all, so I was having a hard time locating my destination. I had determined that the place I was looking for was located on this particular road, between two cross streets about three miles apart. Squinting in the dark to find the address I was looking for, I traversed this stretch of road two or three times to no avail. One of the few well-lit businesses on this road was a merchant of ill repute occupying a large and spacious building marked by a tall, flashy sign--"Show World"--that beckoned travelers from the nearby Interstate. I didn't take any interest in the place, of course, but it was impossible not to notice it, especially since I kept passing it as I looked for my elusive destination.

On the third or fourth traversal of the road I noticed that a bay door was open and the light was on at the local volunteer firehouse, so I stopped to ask for directions. I stood at the threshold of the truck bay and halloooed several times, but there was no answer. (This was disappointing, not only because I needed directions, but because I wanted to ask them why there was, ISYN, an industrial-sized deep fryer occupying one of the two truck bays. But I digress...) As I was returning to my car, another car pulled up and a man got out. A tourist or recent immigrant, he spoke to me in a rather urgent tone but in very broken English. I shook my head and shrugged apologetically to indicate that I didn't understand what he wanted. Finally he pulled out a scrap of paper with some words scribbled on it. "How do you go here?" he asked, pointing at the paper. Show World, it read.

Not only did I know where Show World was, it was in fact the only thing within twenty miles that I knew how to get to. So, if I said I didn't know where it was, I wouldn't be telling the truth. Plus, it was only down the road a quarter of a mile or so in the direction he was headed anyway, so within thirty seconds he was going to find it with or without my help. On the other hand, I didn't want to be drumming up business for such a place -- and of course, I didn't want to be like, "Sure, I know where Show World is!"

What to do? Will I be a liar or a porn pimp?!

At this point the more faithful among you are probably thinking I should have encouraged the gentleman to avoid the place altogether and given him a pass-along card or something. Because of the substantial language barrier, the general awkwardness of the situation, and my slight panic at being nearly late for an appointment--see Part 2, forthcoming--this option, I am ashamed to say, did not occur to me at the time. (And besides, what if he hadn't understood what I was saying, and had called the number on the pass-along card with the entirely wrong idea in mind?!)

So, anyway, in the end, deliberate evasion being the kinder, gentler sibling to outright deception, I decided to play dumb. I shrugged again, gave that same ambiguous, faux-sympathetic "Sorry, man" that I give to less-than-convincing panhandlers, got into my car, and pulled out. He followed me down the road a bit, and soon my mirrors went dark as he pulled off the road into the Show World parking lot. I drove on, squinting through the dark at the mailboxes along the side of the road...

Forget Utah, Swing N.M.

2004-10-11T09:49:00.000-04:00

Gadflyer has a nice post from a Utah Democrat who, recognizing her state as inevitably red this election, traveled to New Mexico to volunteer for KE04.

"Hello?" she says, as though she hadn't heard her phone ring in fifty years. "Hi, I'm Lucy calling from New Mexico Victory 2004, working in the neighborhood to elect John Kerry," I deliver, wondering how such an awkward line ever made it into a script. "I'm calling today to see if you're planning to vote for John Kerry this November."

She pauses then says, "Well I'd sure like to, but I can't see." I hesitate, imagining a shriveled blind woman listening to a wind-up radio in dark room, alone on Election Day. As the returns are reported, she hopes the voters have elected Kerry for her. But almost immediately, my sympathy is replaced by something far baser—a pang of joy. For at that moment, I realize I've found one, one of the coveted voters both the Bush and Kerry campaigns are spending millions of dollars to discover in swing states around the country. I have found a woman who would have been counted as a no-show, but will now be a vote for Kerry. And she's mine.

I tell her that someone could come to her home and help her vote on Election Day or assist her in completing an absentee ballot. Sure, I'm speaking off the cuff (there are no instructions about responding to blind people on my script), but here in New Mexico, a state that Al Gore took in 2000 by a mere 366 votes, every vote counts. I'm pretty sure the Kerry camp will ante up a minivan and a volunteer to get this vote. I feel like standing up and saying, "I'm a Utah Democrat making a difference in the presidential election!"

Presidential Debate Drinking Game for Mormons?

2004-10-08T23:42:00.000-04:00

Just finished watching the debates. I was pleased, of course, to see Kerry beat Bush once again, though not quite so decisively this time. The mess in Iraq, the underwhelming job growth reports, and numerous other problems make the debates a de facto forum on Bush's performance, so Kerry once again brought his superior debating skills, stronger handle on information, and more presidential demeanor to bear on an already favorable enterprise. And what small gains Bush made in his improved composure and more stable-seeming temperament this second time around were lost in part every time he did the creepy wink thing, and in whole when he tackily shouted over the moderator for about eleven seconds. The president used the inconsistency charge much less, since Kerry jujitsued him with it so effectively last time; the new sloppy soundbite is the old diehard, "He's a liberal!" That might give a rush of righteous indignation to a John Bircher in La Verkin, but I don't know that it will do much for an undecided in Wisconsin. Also, I think the morning after fact check might fall in Kerry's favor. The small-business-owner bit, for example, will come back to bite Dubya (scroll down for the "$84 timber profit" bit Kerry mentioned during the debate).

Of course, Kerry was not without his soundbites either, and I have to admit that I tired of hearing both candidates repeat verbatim the same talking points heard in both the earlier presidential debate as well as the VP debate. I know, this is how the game works: you have to convey your message in terms simple enough and with repitition relentless enough to speak to those voters for whom politically oriented cognition is a brain stem function (see previous post). But that really makes this get a little dull after a combined 3 hours (more, if you count Cheney v. Edwards).

Some members of the blogosphere have developed a fun way to counteract this repitition: the political debate drinking game. For the first debate, for example, Wonkette, provided a long list of suggested drink-worthy words and phrases. Among them: taking one sip at every mention of Halliburton or Flip-flopping, two sips for North Korea or reinstating the draft, and finishing your drink in the event of a sports metaphor or pandering appeal to the Latino vote.

I'd like to come up with an option for those of us who tire of the talking points but happen to be teetotaling Mormons. I'm commencing work on a presidential debate non-drinking drinking, which I will post in advance of the third and final debate next week. I welcome your suggestions. I'm not sure what form it will take yet, but it will probably involve the cosumption of large quantities of fry sauce.

Blather, Wince, Repeat...

2004-10-06T16:53:00.000-04:00

As a scholar studying minimalism in the arts, I spend a lot of time listening to and looking at repetitive things. I'm acutely aware of and intrigued by the way the sheer force of repetition can evacuate the semantic content from aural or visual phenomena, disconnecting them from the subjective world and presenting them as unladen, sensorial objects, irreducible physical elements. Blah, blah, blah...

Thus I recommend on both political and aesthetic grounds the following video clips. In the first, made from excerpts of the first presidential debate, Bush's grimaces and sneers transcend his moment-to-moment rhetorical frustrations to embody a stream of pure, primal angst. In the second, which consists of snippets from the Republican convention, the talking point is elevated from the rhetorically "on message" to the acoustically ontological. The phrase "9-11" detaches both from its original, tragic invocation and it subsequent, crass political appropriation, hovering freely in the air as a an endless loop of pure, shimmering, meaningless sound. (My only critique of the pieces is that they are a bit superfluous--I had nearly same aesthetic impression when I watched the events live.)

As a drunk man once said, "Das is die ewige kunst!"

Space Ship One takes me back

2004-10-05T01:03:00.000-04:00

We Mormons should all be keenly following developments in space exploration--after all, with everything in the universe being embodied and all, transcendence for us dovetails at some point with transportation. Okay, that may be carrying theology to its most banal, Babelian conclusion, but, as suggested by this blog's name and namesake, we are in some sense a church of stargazers.

So, its partly a certain cosmological resonance that sparks my interest in Space Ship One's successful flight today, which earned its inventors and engineers the $10 million X Prize. But I'm also intrigued by the retro look of the ship itself, as well as the seemingly dated designs of some of the other competitors. (A few below; click here for more.)

Space Ship One

The Da Vinci Project

Space Tourist

There's something very pleasing about the future starting to look, after all, like the one we imagined in the past. I think I can trace the personal appeal to the images that still linger in my head from my childhood--from the books that first so caught my attention as to keep me up reading through the night: The Tom Swift Jr. series. Compare, for example, the TGV Rockets entry with Tom's Dyna-4 Capsule; or the modern Rubicon with the old-school Star Spear; the Space Tourist, above, uses distinctively Swiftian technology, propelled as it is by "Blastwave Pulsejets." Sadly, there is no latter-day counterpart for the Triphibian Atomicar. Maaan, that would be a sweet ride to hie to Kolob in.

P.S. In case you didn't know: click on the telescope graphic at the top of this page each day for a special, spacey surprise.

Calculated Incompetence

2004-10-04T20:53:00.000-04:00

This is rich. Some conservatives insist against all hope that Bush won the debate. This guy, on the other hand, thinks that he blew it--but on purpose, see? It's all part of his master plan, see?

OT casts its gaze on the presidential debate

2004-10-01T15:20:00.000-04:00

I went to bed happy last night. The general consensus seems to be that Kerry appeared strong and presidential, Bush appeared surprised and slouchy, and the race is still very much on. Kerry was articulate and sure-footed. Bush crossed the line from On Message to On Autopilot.

A few folks are still in denial, of course. Predictably, the "First Line News" feature from our brethren and sisters at Meridian omitted links to articles giving the debate to Kerry, linking instead to feeble claims of a "draw" offered by the superconservatives at the Washington Times. But just about everybody else, Lefty and Righty pundits alike , seem to agree that Kerry gave a very strong showing and Bush faltered.

The attempts at damage control by the RNC have been amusing as well. Talking Points has been following a couple of incidents (here, here) in which Republican operatives tried to pass themselves off as "undecideds" in televised post-debate focus groups, so they could make an act of being persuaded by Bush.

For me, however, the most entertaining moment of the debate evening was provided by my wife, Fly Lady K. She's always making obscure, esoteric cultural references, but this one was both bizarre and trenchant. Bush was wrapping up his speech, culminating in a rather corny nature metaphor:

We've done a lot of hard work together over the last three and a half years. We've been challenged, and we've risen to those challenges. We've climbed the mighty mountain. I see the valley below, and it's a valley of peace.

Fly Lady K picked up the thread without missing a beat:

And down they went, roly-poly, pell-mell, tumble-bumble, till they came to the green grass; and there they stopped short...

One little girl, her two dads, and whether that’s such a bad thing

2004-09-28T23:01:00.000-04:00

[Cross-posted at BCC]

The topic of Same-Sex Marriage has bounced around the bloggernacle so much it has taken on a universally-recognized acronym. The topic of gay adoption has received much less attention, and, as far as I know, has elicited little (or no?) specific ecclesiastical counsel (unless one counts Sheri Dew’s controversial speech, which was delivered after her tenure in the Relief Society General Presidency – and which, incidentally, was recently removed from the Meridian website.) I don’t have any eloquent doctrinal arguments or child-welfare statistics to posit, but I do have a story to share, one that I think speaks for itself.

Two little girls, whom I will call Tuyen and Xuan, were both taken into an orphanage in Vietnam shortly after birth. The staff cared for them as best they could, given their limited resources, hygiene was substandard and the babies often slept side-by-side, several to a crib. Around the time of the girls’ first birthday an adoption agency brought a group of several prospective parents to the orphanage. It was a diverse bunch: a single, middle-aged woman, first-time adopters, couples wishing to expand their families. Also included in the group were a devout young Mormon couple (whom I know personally, and who allowed me to post this) and a gay couple. Tuyen went with the Mormon couple, and was later sealed to them in the D.C. temple; Xuan left the orphanage with her two new dads.

Before heading back to the states, however, it took the parents a couple of weeks to submit the health and governmental forms and receive all the bureaucratic approvals required to complete the adoption, so while they waited for forms to be processed the adoptive parents and their new children did lots of sightseeing. Tuyen’s mom and Xuan’s dads turned out to be naturally inclined towards group organization, and took charge of the sightseeing itinerary and shopping trips (it’s a terrible stereotype, I know, the shopaholic woman and the gay guys telling each other how fabulous their purchases are, etc., but that’s how it happened). The Mormons and the gay men became fast friends during the trip, and the friendship continued after they returned to their respective homes. Even though they live several hours apart, the two families still visit each other on occasion to celebrate their girls’ birthdays, their adoption anniversary, and American and Vietnamese holidays.

While I find that friendship in and of itself quite heartwarming (and believe me, I get a lot of mileage out of it when friends or associates categorically accuse Mormons of homophobia), other circumstances lend this story even more poignancy. Shortly after Xuan and Tuyen left Vietnam for America with their new parents, the U.S. government discontinued allowing adoptions from Vietnam. This prohibition remains in place today, largely because of bureaucratic inertia on both sides, and there are no signs of progress. This has created a grave situation for orphanages in Vietnam, as their meager operating budgets relied on adoption fees; the orphanage where Xuan and Tuyen lived has fallen into disrepair and is in desperate need of financial aid. More somber still is the future that the little girls in the orphanage face today if the adoption ban continues as they become children and eventually adolescents; if you follow the news, you probably have an idea of the bleak prospects for an orphaned teenaged girl in Vietnam. I shudder to think, but these are the questions that this situation begs: what if the gay couple hadn’t gone to Vietnam and adopted? What if Tuyen had gone home with the Mormon couple but her friend Xuan had been left behind in the orphanage as the adoption ban had taken effect, and had stayed there as she approached adolescence? Regardless of what you might think about gay adoption as a political issue –and I’m talking about an actual situation and an actual person, so it’s not really a political issue anyway–are there any grounds on which to argue that this happy, healthy little girl would have been better off if her dads hadn’t been able to adopt her?

Bush outsourcing again, this time to the animal kingdom

2004-09-26T21:33:00.000-04:00

Apparently the computerized voting system created by Diebold (a major BC00/04 donor) is so easy to hack into, a chimp can do it.

Not only does this mean the integrity of the elections at risk -- but with slave-wage monkeys available to do the dirty work of election tampering, Katherine Harris could be out of a job! Also, expect Bush to shamelessly curry the monkey vote during the debates...

Actually, the chimp stunt was a bit of a cheezy ploy--a less hairy primate located certain sensitive files in the "audit log" and highlighted them; the chimp had been trained to hit "delete" to erase the files and "enter" to verify the deletion. But still, it was all to easy for the person to access the files in the first place, without a password. The folks who put on the mouse-and-monkey show admit the stunt was a bit sensational, but say it was meant simply to draw attention to two rather more serious points:

1. Diebold sold $54 million in voting machines to the state of Georgia, with a representation that its audit log could not be altered "by human intervention." That was a lie.
2. Diebold's spokesman, David Bear, claims this demo is "impossible" and a "magic show." Yet, in Diebold's own memos, its programmers discuss the lack of security in the audit log, admitting it can be altered without a password, and that memo showed knowledge of this weakness as long ago as October 2001.

You know the campaign is getting ugly when they start wearing helmets

2004-09-25T10:40:00.000-04:00

Quick, click on this and scroll down to the photo before the Post takes it down.

UPDATE: I finally got around to posting a screen shot of the miscaptioned photo (or misphotoed caption?). No hurry though; WP still hasn't gotten around to fixing it:

Codename: Operation Moonshadow

2004-09-22T09:44:00.000-04:00

Expect the terror alert threat to be lowered a shade or two: America breathed a collective sigh of relief today when the Department of Homeland Security announced that federal agents had intercepted an Islamic terrorist trying to enter this country.

Woops. Did I say terrorist? I meant folk singer. But I suppose you can never be too careful.

Spoiler: Kerry on Letterman

2004-09-21T01:26:00.000-04:00

Kerry was on Letterman last night, and I thought he was brilliant. As a television personality, he's every bit as personable as Bush and of course far more articulate--and very straightforward and comprehensive in responding to Letterman's questions, which were at times quite direct (supposed flip-flops on the war, the $87 billion, etc.). In short, he seemed, well, presidential: smart, informed, articulate, approachable, confident, wise. I think he does very well one-on-one, extemporizing and conversing and I hope the debate formats are such that his ability to think and speak articulately off-script comes through; if so, I think many of those who dislike Bush's record but have negative preconceptions and media-driven personality hangups about Kerry will reconsider.

Also, a spoiler from Kerry's Top Ten List: Benefits of Bush Tax Cuts

#3: Under new law, Cheney can claim Bush as a dependent.

Okay, so it's a puma, not a liger, but still...

2004-09-18T21:42:00.000-04:00

To those who would dismiss Napoleon Dynamite as cruelly overstated cultural caricature rather than the hick-verismo art piece that it is, I submit as exhibit A the cover of my middle school yearbook, which I just stumbled upon this evening. Sure, it's rural southern Utah rather than rural southern Idaho, and it's a puma, not a liger, but you get the idea. I'm proud to say I was on the yearbook staff responsible for this handsome tome, though I sadly cannot take credit for the artwork itself.

Incidentally, in leafing through the yearbook, I discovered that in almost every single photo (and there are tons of 'em, since I was on staff) I am wearing the same concentric-diamond-patterned, acrylic, cardigan sweater, often over a shirt buttoned all the way to the top--and in one, I am wearing said sweater while drawing a picture of The Cure's Robert Smith on the chalkboard (no, friends, I will not be posting any of these...). All this, in combination with the enormous eyeglass frames I wore at the time, suggest that I was less Napoleon and more Kip.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. (I'll probably blog about it though...)

2004-09-16T22:48:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd drop y'all an update on the rap class I'm teaching. First off, please note my new and improved hip-hop moniker. "MC Musicolishizzle G" just wasn't cutting it for me. Snoop Dogg "-izzle" references are getting a little cliche, and at any rate I have decided to avoid emulating Snoop Dogg even in jest--both because of his foul mouth and promotion of soft porn, as well as his uncanny resemblance to Templeton the rat from the Charlotte's Web movie. So, I have chosen a new house party name that will better reflect my totally def laid-back flow: MC Smoov J. In da house. Representin'. Or something.

When I first agreed to fill in to teach this class at the very last minute I fully anticipated the comical incongruity of a pasty white Mormon primary teacher from rural southern Utah standing in front of a racially diverse classroom and teaching them the difference between East Coast hardcore and West Coast G-funk. However, I assumed that that exhilerating postmodern absurdist tinge would fade over time as my class got used to me and we settled into the semester. It hasn't -- at least not for this Sucka MC. There I was today, describing in an authoritative, professorial tone of voice, the rhetorical cadence of proto-rap black activist jam-poet Gil Scot-Heron and his resonance with disenfranchized black youth in the post-industrial South Bronx or Compton of the 1970s, while thinking to myself "I think I was eleven before I actually saw a black man in person." I can't complain, though. In fact, I'm having a great time with the class. My faith is deepened by those moments in life so bizarre and unlikely that they could have only been choreographed by a wry-witted and bemused Deity.

Strengthening The Good: The Brent Woodall Foundation For Exceptional Children

2004-09-13T09:59:00.000-04:00

As part of the Strengthen the Good network, OT is pleased to draw your attention to the STG's second featured micro-charity: the Brent Woodall Foundation for Exceptional Children. The organization was founded by a 9/11 widow, Tracy Woodall, in fulfillment of an idea she and her husband had discussed shortly before his death. In accordance with STG's mission, the Woodall Foundation is a profoundly effective micro-charity that does incredible things with limited resources, and that could turn small individual donations from the blogosphere into profound and self-perpetuating results.

Since it is not realistic for the Foundation to provide even modest financial and hands-on technical assistance to all of the families affected by autism, even in the US, the Foundation focuses on a two part plan, with both prongs aimed primarily at the youngest children with autism. In working with autistic children it is crucial to begin providing proper care, nutrition and technical assistance at the youngest possible age. The greatest impact on such children can be made by age six, and unfortunately it is difficult to diagnose in most cases before eighteen months of age. By working with these children the Foundation can provide the greatest benefit to the most people with any given amount of funding to the Foundation, and also train parents at an early and vulnerable stage how to be more self-sufficient and ask better questions of caregivers.

Alan at STG has written up a great post describing the Foundation's origins and objectives. He also gives instructions on how to make a donation, either directly through the mail or through the PayPal button on the Strengthen the Good site. Please read Alan's post and consider sharing a buck or two.

A Sacrament Disaster and a New Calling

2004-09-11T23:06:00.000-04:00

Although it was a change in work schedule that necessitated my recent request to change callings, I think I'm going to have a hard time convincing the members of my ward that there was no causal relationship between the recent sacrament debacle and my release from the Young Men's organization the very next Sunday.

First, let me say that as one of the adult leaders of the Teachers Quorum (14-15 year old boys, for the stray gentile that may be reading), I had put in place a number of protocols and systemic redundancies to assure that the sacred emblems would be in place for each Sunday's service. For example, in addition to assigning a young man to bring the bread on the Sunday in question--and attaining verbal confirmation from his mother, since the boy himself usually assumes a cultivatedly sullen manner, and had responded to my request with a kind of listless shrug and harumph that seemed less than absolutely affirmative--I had stashed a reserve loaf in the freezer. The boys know to thaw the reserve loaf five minutes before the start of the meeting if, for whatever reason, the bread hasn't arrived by that point. And in the very worst case scenario, several members from whom bread could be begged live within a stone's throw of the meetinghouse. So, you'd think one would never have to, say, run to the Mobil station down the street at 9:07am to purchase sacrament bread. You'd think.

Confident that my young charges had their duties well in hand, that Sunday I arrived with my family just as the meething was starting. To my disappointment, I saw that the water trays were still being brought out as the bishop was giving the opening announcements. Then, to my horror, I noticed that the bread trays were empty. And, to my utter amazement, I noticed that no one seemed concerned by this; the teachers finished and sat down, and the gaze of the priests (16-17 year old boys that bless the sacrament) remained blankly tethered to the back wall. From my seat in the second row I eventally caught a priest's eye, and, through an unecessarily elaborate combination of standard charades gestures and modified semifore, drew his attention to the empty trays ten inches from his face. He shrugged helplessly, but still didn't seem to register the level of concern I felt the situation warranted. After some more frantic gesturing he finally left the sacrament table and met me in the foyer. The kid with the bread hadn't shown up, but we could still nuke the reserve loaf and maybe have it on the table by the time the sacrament hymn started.

The freezer was empty. Either someone in the other ward in our building had taken it or our zealous custodian had thrown it out. At any rate, the sacrament hymn was about to start and we were breadless. I sent the priest to alert the bishop of the situation and headed for my car. I sped to the Mobil station and ran in, elbowing my way past boaters headed for the lake and picnickers filling their coolers. Outta my way! I'm on a sacred errand, jerk! I grabbed two loaves of bread in order to avoid the embarrassment of making a credit card purchase for $1.89 (I had no cash on me), and also because I figured hell, if the sabbath's already broken, I might as well get some mileage out of it. That same logic prompted me to consider buying a bottle of Dr. Pepper while I was at it--and, for a fleeting and stress-induced moment, a pack of Marlboros, even though I have never been a smoker. I left with just the bread, though, and hurried back to the chapel. I arrived to discover that, in a move unprecedented in my experience, they had rearranged the agenda, putting the speakers first and the sacrament last. I sheepishly walked up the aisle and gave the priests a loaf of bread and my fiercest scowl, then returned to my seat.

The very next Sunday, as per a previous discussion with the bishop regarding my inability to attend YM/YW activities due to my new employment, I was released from YM and called to the primary. I anticipate that my new job will not place me in circumstances that require me to break the sabbath. It's a class full of infamously rowdy 11-year-old boys, though, so I imagine that on occasion during church meetings I may again momentarily feel the urge to take up smoking.

Googling the Telescope -- On Company Time!

2004-09-08T21:43:00.000-04:00

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been wasting all of my blogging time in arguments with conservatives (here and at PoliticalJuice) about the Republican Convention. In case you haven't been following the various threads, I've summarized the argument here:

That sucked.
Nyuh-uh.
Nyuh-huh.
Nyuh-UH. [link to article in National Review]
Nyuh-HUH. [link to post at Talking Points Memo]
NYUH-UH-uh! [actual talking point from actual memo]
NYUH-HUH-uh! [argument over who first brought up Nazis]
etc.

So, to lighten the mood a bit, I thought I'd bring my republican and democratic readers together in an activity we can all enjoy: pointing and laughing at the freaks who visit this blog and the freakish things they come looking for. Standard G the T format (search term: rank [analysis]). Google search results unless otherwise noted.

napoleon dynamite conspiracy mormon: 8 (yahoo) [Hide the moonboots! They're onto us!]
telescope for watching neighbors: 49 [Should I have turned the IP for this one over to the authorities? Also, if that's why you're shopping for a telescope, do you go and say that's why you're shopping for a telescope?]
"Todd Coleman" street food: 1 [I'm assuming there are two Todd Colemans; I'd hate to think one of our most talented up-and-coming composers is selling goat kabobs in Pakistan]
hate slipknot mormon: 19 [One of the less useful knots, to be sure, but "hate" seems like a rather strong word--and I don't know why you have to bring religion into it.]
Taxidermied unicorn: 3[I dunno, maybe check Craigslist?]

Also, I've amused to see how many folks are visiting OT on company time. In the last month I've siphoned productivity from the airline, healthcare, and television industries, as well as state and county governments, federal courts, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and two branches of the armed services. I wish "Drag on the Economy"/"Wasted Taxpayer Dollars" figured into my TLB ranking!

A Prayer Unanswered

2004-09-03T14:13:00.000-04:00

I just can't figure out how anyone wouldn't be put off by the mean-spirited tone of the Republican convention. In his speech and the press appearances afterwards, Zell Miller got so worked up and out of control he challenged Chris Matthews to a duel, and Cheney attained new and unimagined levels of vitriol in his attacks on Kerry. It wasn't the delivery that bothered me, though, but the sheer fact that they were lying. Not election-time twists or predictable spins, but outright lies. This Slate piece enumerates the lies quite convincingly, especially Cheney's particularly egregious misrepresentation of Kerry's (and his own) record on defense and defense funding. The short of it: all those defense programs Kerry supposedly fought? Cheney himself fought them strenuously when he was Secretary of Defense, while Kerry--as well as many others on both sides of the aisle--rejected them only insofar as they were collectively part of entire appropriations bills. Karl Rove's dirty tactics have been adopted as the entire RNC's playbook.

This reminded me of a phrase from Sheri Dew's opening prayer that seems to have been forgotten, or at least unheeded:

...We plead with Thee for peace and continued freedom-not only freedom from those who would terrorize us and encroach upon our peace of mind, but also freedom from acrimony.

Fascinating Girls and "Phantoms of Delight"

2004-08-31T21:17:00.000-04:00

I'm still overwhelmed by my new role as MC Professa Grimshizzle and all the extra facial-hair grooming that it entails, and it's been quite a while since we checked in with that maven of manhunting, Helen Andelin, so here, courtesy of my wife, Fly-Girl K, is another choice excerpt from the classic quasi-Mormon boy-baiting guide from 1969, Fascinating Girl [emphasis K's].

The…way that you can help a man feel superior as a provider is to not excel him in his own field. Here again women have made serious mistakes. Not only have they invaded the man’s world but they are competing with them for excellence! They are competing for advancement, for honors, awards and recognition. They are competing to “do a better job” than men do. They are trying to outdo them in almost every field and thereby stand as a threat to the man’s position. In some instances the wife brings home a larger pay check than her husband’s. You can imagine what this does to her husband and his struggle to feel like a superior male. She is defeating him on his own ground.

When we steal from men their rightful places as our providers, we tend to “demasculate” them. A man can suffer a most unhappy feeling when he thinks he is lacking in masculinity. The fact that he may not be responsible for the situation does not lessen his feeling of inadequacy. When the woman proves that he is not needed, he feels inferior, less of a man. The feeling of adequacy in his masculine role is essential, not only to his basic happiness, but to his ability to succeed in life. It is also important to his feelings for his wife – to the success of their relationship.

Equally serious when the woman works, is the harm which comes to her. When she attempts to play a part not intended for her she sacrifices her own special beauty and grace. The moon, when it moves from its sphere of night into day, loses its luster, its charm, its very poetry. And so it is with woman, when she attempts to play a part not intended for her. Gone is the luster, the charm, the poetry that says, “she is a phantom of delight.”

MC Musicolishizzle G in da House

2004-08-28T21:30:00.000-04:00

With all the hooey related to the Swift Boat Vets for Sale, er, Truth, and the countdown to the vacuous, rameumptan jingofest in NYC, you'd think I'd be blogging away, railing against the follies of BC04 and encouraging my fellow saints to rethink the presumed allegiance of Mormons to the GOP. I haven't, for two reasons. First, PJ over at PolicalJuice has been doing a fine job of this already; check him out if you haven't already. Plus, whereas my political analyses are usualy based on a combination of fuzzy recollections of factoids I heard while nodding off to Letterman the night before and spurious numbers derived from a roll of an old twenty-sided D&D die I keep in my desk drawer, PJ actually knows his stuff and articulates it persuasively. (Incidentally, though, my numbers were pretty close on the recent census report on the poverty rate, and my assessment of Rumsfeld's political liability is holding fairly true, if you convert his poll numbers into hit points.)

The second reason I haven't been blogging about politics (or much else, for that matter, is that I've been focusing all my efforts and energies onto a single goal: growing a soul patch.

Actually, truth be told, the soul patch is part of a much larger effort, one that those of you who know me may find even more amusing (in fact, it might be a good idea to go to the bathroom now so you don't pee when you laugh): this fall, among my teaching duties will be to instruct an upper division undergraduate course on Rap Music. That's right, in my first real job after spending years in a doctoral program at an esteemed music conservatory, I'm going to be leaving the canonical anthologies and period-accurate recordings of Bach and Beethoven on the shelf, and instead I'll be introducing my young charges to the fly turntabling of Grandmaster Flash, the politically charged aural activism of Pulic Enemy, and the dizzying verbal acrobatics of Busta Rhymes. And I figure the easiest way for a pudgy, white, churchgoing, married father of three from southern Utah to establish some street cred in this situation will be to show up on the first day of class with some funky fuzz beneath my lower lip. (Also, I may stop by the mall monday and see if I can find one a them big Flava Flav neck clocks.)

I've been interested to see people's reactions to this news. Some wonder if such a task should be the domain of a (more or less) upstanding Mormon, you know, what with all the misogyny and profanity; I try to explain that scholarly observation of a cultural phenomenon does not necessarily imply categorical advocacy of all its aspects, etc., etc. Others, who previously knew me only in the context of my service in the Young Men's organization and/or as the father of the most strikingly handsome children in the ward, simply wonder what else they didn't know about me ("He teaches rap. Also--and you didn't hear this from me--I hear ha has a blog!"). The most amusing reaction, however, was that of the service representative at my credit card company, when I explained to him why an account that usually had very little activity on it was being used to purchase $600 worth of rap CDs within a single week. I'm not sure whether he went away thinking the card was stolen or that I was having a bizarre and desperate mid-life crisis.

Anyway, once I get past the first day of class (this coming week) and I've settled into a routine, I'm sure I'll return to a more regular blogging schedule -- especially since I've gotten so much blog love lately and don't want to lose all the new traffic. And I imagine I won't make it through the republican convention without posting something snarky. Or at least quoting something outrageous.

Strengthening the Good: Hurricane Charley Relief

2004-08-24T09:45:00.000-04:00

Our blogosphere friend Al has identified the first charitable effort to be the focus of the Strengthen the Good Network: The Gulf Coast Community Foundation Of Venice Hurricane Charley Disaster Relief Fund. (Read this earlier post about STG if it's new to you). Thousands of people are in desperate need of housing, food, water, and baby formula, and STG hopes to leverage its web presence to draw focused attention to a group that can make a big and immediate difference. The GCCF, though large in its scope, supports an impressive number and variety of worthy local causes, thus resonating with the STG mission to foster support for microcharities, but, as Al suggests, it's big enough to marshall its resources to address "macro" disasters like Charley. What's more, the group's board of directors have decided to match every dollar donated for hurricane relief, up to $100,000. Also, 100% (x2) of Charley donations will go to aid; no overhead.

Click here to read more on the STG site, and, if you feel you can, click through to the GCCF site and make a donation. Again, the whole point of Strengthen the Good is that if the word spreads far enough through the blogosphere, even small donations of a dollar or two from all over the country and world will collectively have a big impact. And in this case, it will have double the impact.

Tidying Up for Company

2004-08-20T21:45:00.000-04:00

Laughable as it may seem, it appears that beliefnet.com has kind of designated me as the Mormon representative to the rest of the religious blogosphere. In this recent article on "Best Spiritual Blogs," OT is receives an honorable mention under the "Christian Blogs" category, and appears to be the only Mormon blog listed in the article. They must have been impressed by my profound theological insights and my efforts to creat bridges of understanding between Mormons and their neighbors. Or maybe they just thought it was cool that I'm buddy-buddies with Alan Osmond.

Whatever the reason, I'm glad for the traffic and welcome wanderers from beliefnet. I'd feel bad, though, if you went away thinking that what you find hear is representative of the Mormon blogging community--direct your browsers here or here, or check out the links on the right under "The Bloggernacle," if you're more into doctrine and scriptures and less into malformed goats, survivalist wackos, and all things Osmond. Cause seriously, me being Mormonism's ambassador to the blogosphere is like Elvis being Nixon's drug czar.

Strengthenthegood.org: an experiment in "open-source" charity

2004-08-16T16:05:00.000-04:00

My big bro's office colleague, Alan, happens to be a minor celebrity in the blogosphere: he was a co-founder of command-post.org, a collaborative experiment in decentralized journalism that quickly gained millions of readers during the invasion of Iraq.

One evening last May, Alan encountered two startling images in the media: on the internet, he saw photos of the beheading of Nick Berg; on TV, he saw a documentary about Susan Toms, a woman so selfless she had adopted 13 children, 11 of them with severe disabilities. Counterpoising these two images, one atrocious, the other inspiring, Alan decided that, instead of alternately and passively lamenting the state of the world (as embodied by Berg's killing) and basking in the warm fuzzy conveyed by stories like Toms's, he'd do what he could to help counterbalance the evil of the former with the good of the latter. This idea took an elegantly simple form: he informed Command Post readers that during the subsequent few days all PayPal donations made to the Post, instead of being used to defray the blog's operating costs, would be donated to a college fund for the Toms children. Alan set what he thought at the time was a foolhardy goal: $10,000. Within a week they had raised $15,000.

Having caught the internet Samaritan bug, Alan has come up with another idea along similar lines, one that will operate on an ongoing basis. The plan, as he explains, is to

Create a network of bloggers who raise awareness of “micro charities”—charitable opportunities that are simple, personal, non-bureaucratic, and inspiring. Charitable opportunities where someone can feel great about giving $1, or even just from reading the story of the charity, it’s sponsors, and it’s beneficiaries.

I’ll find them, if you’ll link to them. Every third Sunday night at Strengthen The Good I’ll post about a micro-charity with enough detail that people can qualify the charity and feel good (or even inspired) by what the charity stands for and who it benefits. I won't ask for donations; the mission is only to raise awareness.

All I ask is that you join the network and every third Monday link to that month’s charity post. To help us all remember, I’ll email a reminder and permalink to the network on Sunday night.

The gathering place for the network is the hub blog Strengthen the Good. If you're a reader, check back here for the first STG post: Alan's currently looking for an appropriate opportunity related to the hurricane damage in Florida. If you have a blog of your own, join STG here.

Karaoke: the first step down the slippery slope of apostasy

2004-08-12T19:33:00.000-04:00

Tal Bachman, the singer-songwriter who rose to fame after the success of his single "She's So High[-ee-eye-eye]," has left the church.

Apparently, in his capacity as Sunday school teacher, Bachman discovered for the first time some of the church's more difficult historical bits and was unable to find satisfactory answers (clearly, he didn't do enough soul-searching and/or bloggernacking!).

I find this sad, of course. On the other hand, I find the press's treatment of it quite amusing. The way they describe how Bachman relishes his new-found freedom, you'd think he'd been Amish.

Things like karaoke are a bit foreign to him — what with him having recently split from the Mormon Church where stuff like karaoke and dancing aren't really on the good-times agenda. (link)

Elsewhere, Bachman muses that whereas before, Led Zeppelin and the like were guilty pleasures, "Now I just think of them as pleasures."

Whuh? Since when do you have to leave the church to listen to Led Zeppelin? In my ward, under the current bishop anyway, you don't even have to leave the church building to listen to Led Zeppelin. As for karaoke, obviously he's never attended our Elders' Quorum on a fifth sunday. I wish Bachman would gloat about being able to do something that is actually verboten for the rest of us, like smoking crack or using face cards.

Already Getting Ugly for Goss

2004-08-11T19:47:00.000-04:00

The fierce partisan battles over Porter Goss's nomination as CIA chief haven't even begun yet, and already his PR guy is flailing. First, this unfortunate headline in the Palm Beach Post:

Goss began ties to intelligence right after college

I thought that's what college was for, but better late than never, I suppose. Then, it emerges that Goss made the highly unintelligent decision to sit for an interview with Michael Moore's producers during the filming of Farenheit 9/11. I wonder how this quote from Goss (which didn't make it into the film) will go over during the confirmation hearings:

I couldn't get a job with CIA today. I am not qualified... I don't have the language skills. I, you know, my language skills were romance languages and stuff. We're looking for Arabists today. I don't have the cultural background probably... And I certainly don't have the technical skills, uh, as my children remind me every day: 'Dad you got to get better on your computer.' Uh, so, the things that you need to have, I don't have.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of himself.

"I don't like cool. I like beautiful."

2004-08-09T21:23:00.000-04:00

For a week know I've been meaning to get around to reviewing the new box-set by Low, the (2/3 Mormon) "slo-core" band from Duluth, but I haven't had time to give the whole thing a proper listen yet. After all, for the, er, reasonable, reasonable price of $32 (if you order directly from the band's label; $52 from Amazon), you get 3 full CDs of rarities, b-sides, and covers, plus a DVD of tour documentaries. I'll post at more length about it once I've had a chance to soak in it a bit. However, I can report, preliminarily, that I have found the vanilla and baby-blue color scheme and understated fonts used in the package design to be almost narcotically mellow:

In the mean time, there's an amusing little interview with the band here. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, the (LDS) husband and wife/guitar and drum duo that, together with (gentile) bassist Zak Sally, comprise the band, never make a big deal about being Mormon -- that is, aside from the occasional cryptic reference to Mormonism that only initiates will catch, they don't consider themselves a "Mormon" or even "Christian" band, and I doubt they'll be appearing on any Halestorm soundtracks any time soon. Still, the Seattle Weekly interview, which follows a name-that-tune format, offers an endearing and unlikely glimpse of Mormon domesticity: Alan's got their two-month-old baby boy asleep on his lap, and partway through the interview they are joined by their daughter Hollis, a four year old with a reputation for pronouncing sagely aphorisms (like the one appearing as the title of this post).

Media Heads Up

2004-08-06T11:13:00.000-04:00

Mitt Romney is a guest on the Diane Rehm show this morning. You can hear it on your local NPR station (mine streams here), or hear it archived after the broadcast here.

Dirty Politics

2004-08-03T11:49:00.000-04:00

I get a deep and almost guilty pleasure out of seeing democrats finally fighting fire with fire. The first link describes typical, weasely Rove; the second demonstrates how comedians setting out to mock Bush have to straddle the fine line between slapstick caricature and straight acting--the original is so amusing that little exaggeration is necessary.

How Universal Healthcare Would Make Better Mormons

2004-08-02T23:50:00.000-04:00

A while back I joined our ward’s scouts for a couple of days at an “International Camporee”—international, in that several LDS troops drove a few hours down from Canada to mingle with us Yankee troops in the shadow of the Hill Cumorah. That might not seem like such a cross-cultural experience at first; after all, aside from pronouncing “process” so that it rhymes with “Moses,” Canadians aren’t all that strange. As our troop spent time with our assigned Canadian counterparts, though, one topic discussion did point up a bit of a rift: universal healthcare. (I’m speaking here of the after-dinner conversations among the adult leaders of the troops, of course; the boys soon tired of these discussions and headed off into the woods to catch bugs and have farting contests.) I overheard one discussion in which a leader from an American LDS troop strained to veil his utter surprise that his Canadian LDS counterpart, a doctor, talked in so matter-of-factly favorable a manner about his country’s single-payer healthcare system. The surprising part was that the scoutmaster and fellow saint insisted that the system actually worked. You’re Canadian, you get sick, you go to the doctor, he fixes you up, you go home, he gets paid. For an ungodly socialist plot authored by the devil’s earthly minions, it seemed to run pretty smoothly.

Universal healthcare increasingly seems like a “duh” issue for the rest of the developed world, even while many Americans resist it vehemently. Many inhabitants of countries that have adopted the single-payer model (Great Britain, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, others) see this as a no-brainer: a civilized society seeks to protect it citizens’ health by paying their doctors, just like it pays their firemen and police officers. Many of these countries have high tax burdens, and their healthcare systems undoubtedly have various systemic glitches and problems, but it appears that they think it’s worth the investment. And as healthcare costs in the U.S. continue to rise, it will get to the point where we might as well be paying Swedish taxes; even the most Reaganite among us would have to admit that the current private healthcare system gives the government a run for its money when it comes to bureaucracy, inefficiency, and corruption.

This recent article in salon.com has further convinced me that single-payer healthcare isn’t just a public health issue, but a pervasively economic one and even a family and church issue. If the government paid for healthcare, rather than just asking nicely for employers to do so, unless they can’t afford it, in which case, well, sucks to work there, companies would be more prone to turning economic gains into new jobs. Even as the economy starts thinking about stretching its legs, job growth has been slow and new jobs that offer healthcare benefits are still rare indeed. A shocking number of college graduates are taking jobs well below thier training level, in fields that were supposed to be staples of the modern economy (especially technology). Companies don’t want to take on a new person and pay for benefits, especially when that person’s healthcare costs might increase anywhere between 18 and 30% a year; they’d rather just “increase productivity” (i.e., give two employees the work that 3 or 4 might have reasonably completed in a normal 40 hour week). As Salon puts it:

What might be called the "single-payer difference" is only going to grow larger. In years ahead, as new drugs appear, as we beg for our lives from the drug company gods, the cost of healthcare for one Fortune 500 company could dwarf what is spent for health in most of Africa. Put it this way: General Motors in the United States will tremble to add a job at the margin; General Motors in Canada will go blithely ahead.

Maybe the best single predictor of a country's ability to add new jobs is how close it comes to single payer. In Norway, Sweden and Finland, despite huge tax levels, it seems to be relatively easy to add jobs. In Australia, which has a mix of single-payer and employer-paid healthcare, the record on jobs is mixed -- it's better than in the United States… but not as good as in Canada, Britain, Finland and Sweden.

Aside from all this, there’s the fact that we already pay for a lot of public health care in the most inefficient way possible: a single mother who makes too much to qualify for Medicaid takes her kid to the emergency room of a public hospital for an earache. We all pay for this, one way or the other. And the alternative is for hospitals to turn people away who don’t have insurance or money to pay. If you think that’s what should happen you’re a godless jerk and I don’t want you reading my blog.

Which brings me to my titular assertion: a single-payer healthcare system would make better Mormons. I’m not going to argue at length here about how economically feasible or not such a system might be in the United States; what I've read the subject suggests that it would be viable if it were given the appropriate kind of support (read one like-minded opinion here), and it seems to work elsewhere, but I’ll let the good folks at the opposing think tanks duke that out. In the mean time, if we did have a universal healthcare system in the United States, I think its benefits would extend into the familial and ecclesiastical realms in significant ways. Although I personally am a yet-to-be-employed dissertation-writing humanities grad-student layabout, I happen to live in an upper-middle-class suburb of an otherwise economically stressed city. An increasing number of the ward members here fall into two categories: highly skilled but recently unemployed professionals (engineers, programmers, etc.), and the dudes who are working 80 and 90 hour weeks at the same companies to cover for the people that got canned. In short, a large portion of the ward has either no money to support their family or no time to spend with them. Neither of these options seems to me to foster an atmosphere in which to teach “family values.” The same goes for church callings; there are a number of otherwise devout saints I know who, fearful of losing their jobs if they don’t stay as late as the guy in the next cubicle, have simply resigned themselves to the fact that their career demands preclude any church service that extends beyond the three-hour Sunday block. (On more than one occasion, I’ve even seen brethren inconspicuously reading memos and reports for work during stake priesthood meetings at which they were obliged to show their faces--one frazzled guy was surruptitiously doing office work during a training session with a general authority, like a schoolkid hiding a comic book in his math primer.)

According to the Salon piece, if the United States implemented a universal healthcare system, employers – especially those in the kinds of industries in my area – would be more apt to hire on more employees, because they wouldn’t have such high per-employee costs and could devise their HR strategies according to overall man-hours and thus make more reasonable and less family-unfriendly demands upon individual workers. The information revolution was supposed to usher in an era of both high productivity and increased leisure, but, largely due to the astronomical increases in healthcare costs, instead of everybody both participating in the productivity and partaking of the leisure, our economy has respectively assigned those roles to reluctant specialists: workaholics and the unemployed. Is it too Cleaverish of me to imagine a world where everybody goes to work at 8, gets home at 5 or 6, and doesn’t have to worry about whether they can afford to take their kid in to see the doctor? My Canadian scoutmaster friend insists that something like that exists north of the border, and wonders when we’ll catch up. I suspect he would predict that when we do, we’ll have more time to spend with our families and devote to our callings. So there’s my pitch for universal healthcare: because employment and reasonable work demands are both family values; and also because if everybody in my ward had a day job that didn't extend so far into the night, we’d have one less excuse for having such lousy home teaching numbers.

"Mormon Genes Are Hot"

2004-07-30T23:37:00.000-04:00

Thus sayeth this article in today's New York Times. Of course, I already knew this Mormon's genes are hot, but turns out so are those of lots of Utahns--from a genetic researcher's point of view, anyway. We keep family records, we have big, traceable families (many of them interrelated through common polygamist great-grandfathers, etc.), and we are more maritally faithful than most groups (apparently, in the rest of the world, an unsettling 5-10% of children aren't fathered by their fathers, if you know what I mean.) That means that researchers looking at Utah family lines have a much easier time cross-referencing genealogists data with genetic data to identify the distribution and inheritance of certain traits and the genes associated with them.

The only problem with the article is that it presumes that the confluence is accidental and theologically insignificant, a mere by-product of Mormonism's combination of large family size and enthusiam for family history. I see the science of family ties just as much an example of the "hearts of children turning to their fathers" as the collection of group sheets and journals. Malachi in the microscope as well as the microfiche, if you will.

Our Weaknesses Can Become Our Strengths; Thus, One Day, I May Be Able To Dress Myself Properly

2004-07-28T23:29:00.000-04:00

First the layout of my blog suddenly and inexplicably goes nuts and I have to spend more time than I have fixing it. Then, I run into all sorts of trouble with my belt.

Yes, my belt. The sort of thing most people usually don't have problems with. Well, I ain't most people.

Technical Difficulties

2004-07-28T10:03:00.000-04:00

Without any change to my template, blogger suddenly decided to put posts in both columns and bump my right-column content to the bottom of the page. I'll see if my feeble HTML skills turn up anything under the hood. Thanks for you patience in the mean time.

UPDATE: I think it's fixed now. I'm not sure how. I just kept typing until it worked.

Mormon Muckraker Retires

2004-07-28T09:45:00.000-04:00

Mark Feldstien in the WaPo has a nice piece on the retirement of Jack Anderson, the last of the old-style Washington muckraking journalists. " Anderson was for years the only Washington reporter of genuine influence who consistently exposed wrongdoing in the nation's capital," the article notes, "from the fur-coat scandals involving presidents Truman and Eisenhower, to corruption by numerous members of Congress, to the secret foreign policy machinations of the Nixon and Reagan administrations."

Feldstien calls Anderson's brash, unapologetic style "evangelical," even divinely appointed:

He was a strict Mormon who viewed investigative reporting as a noble calling from God. He believed as a matter of theology that life is an eternal struggle between good and evil, and that the First Amendment was quite literally a divinely inspired charter that sanctioned his muckraking mission.

Kay Whitmore, 1932-2004

2004-07-27T12:32:00.000-04:00

I read in the Rochester and Democrat and Chronicle this afternoon that prominent businessman and devout Mormon Kay Whitmore passed away last night after a struggle with leukemia. It's only by chance that I read it in the paper before I heard it over the phone; he happened to be a member of my ward.

I can't say I knew him very well. When we moved here he and his wife were serving in a singles ward in the next stake over, and they subsequently only attended our ward for a short time before they got restless and left on a mission (their second; previously they had overseen a mission in England) to southern California. They were simply too busy doing good things for me to run into him very often.

I did see him about a month ago, however, around the time of his diagnosis, and the circumstances of the meeting speak concisely to his character as citizen and saint: this former CEO of Kodak--the board of which, incidentally, forced him into retirement in 1993 because they wanted to trim more employees from the company than he was willing to fire--was sweeping up the gym floor after the boy scout pancake breakfast.

(Cross-posted at BCC)

The Church's Totally Tricked-Out Music Site; also, the MoTab's Unlikely Side Gig

2004-07-24T23:09:00.000-04:00

The church has already established a reputation for sponsoring killer websites. Familysearch.org gets something like a gazillion hits a minute, and providentliving.org, in addition to offering a wealth of valuable information about the church welfare system and self-reliance resources, has this little orbiting-dot interface that I find debilatingly hypnotic in and of itself.

By far, though, the coolest thing the church has put on the web so far is the music site. Not only does it offer access to most of the church's music resources (hymns, primary songs, tutorials), but it presents them in an interactive environment more sophisticated than any I've encountered on any music-related site on the web. The first thing I noticed was this little scroll-over deal that, though the time taken to code it may not have been the most efficient use of tithing money ever, is utterly cute as heck: each time you move your mouse over a menu item it triggers the next note of a song or hymn. After I finished messing around with that for, like, twenty minutes or something, I proceeded to the site proper, and found a ton of even more impressive features. Say you're trying to learn a hymn that is unfamiliar to you. You can go to the church site, look it up, and download an .mp3 in one of two versions: with voices and accompaniment, or accompaniment alone (kareoke style). Even more impressive is the interactive music player, which allows you to follow along with the music as you listen to a recording of the hymn. And it's not just a picture of the music on the screen; the musical notation is encoded so that you can transpose the hymn score to any key (and, conveniently, print out the hymn in your chosen transposition) and also listen to a synthesized (MIDI) rendering of the transposed version. (This caused an awkward moment when my wife walked in on me as I was trying out "As Sisters In Zion" transposed down to my range--you know, just to see.) You can alter the tempo of the playback as well, and even control the volume of each of the voices in the four-part SATB texture. So say, for example, you're singing a hymn in ward choir and it has a really tricky tenor part that you just can't quite get. You can go home and pull up the hymn on the church's interactive player, turn all the other voices down or off so the tenor part is isolated, and sing along with your part at reduced speed until you've got it down. The site's other resources included tutorials for accompanists and choristers, suggestions for teaching songs to children, and even a bouncing-ball guide to conducting. So, if you have access to the internet, you no longer have any excuse for being a lousy singer or for conducting "The Spirit of God" in 3/4 during PH opening exercises.

I only encountered two real drawbacks. The first is unavoidable: none of the numerous hymns or primary songs with copyright restrictions are included because special permission had to be attained to get them into the hymn book and putting them up on the site would constitute and/or facilitate copyright infringement. (So, sadly, no "If You Could Hie To Kolob," since the music is borrowed from the English Hymnal.) The second drawback is probably temporary, especially since Internet Explorer is losing its market share due to security vulnerabilities: the interactive features like transposed notation and MIDI audio worked fine in IE, but would freeze up completely when I used Netscape/Mozilla. You'd think the one true church would at least co-develop for the one true browser. Otherwise, the site is really impressive. So impressive, in fact, I think I'll show it off to some of my music/web geek friends just on the merits of its coolness.

* * * * * * * *

Speaking of church music, members of the Tabernacle Choir recently took an interesting freelance gig: they sang for the soundtrack and music cues of a forthcoming videogame, Advent Rising. The game has another Mormon connection, too: its storyline was created by Orson Scott Card (which probably means there's some surreptitious mormon subtext in there somewhere...). This isn't the MoTab's first videogame credit: they also contributed to the sound track of a Lord of the Rings game that came out last year.

Googling the Telescope: Basking in the Glow of Your Blog Love

2004-07-21T22:13:00.000-04:00

It speaks to the broad demographic appeal--or, more likely, short attention span and scattered focus--of this blog that this week I got an unusually large amount of traffic via links to OT from three comically disparate sources: the hip (needless to say!) online magazine salon.com, the rather less hip (but I'll take their clicks anyway, sectarian suckas!) Christianity Today Online, and, of all things, a Sondheim Fan Site (just for the record, I'm neither gay nor Jewish--but my message of love and peace is a universal one that speaks to all!).

The bountiful traffic makes up for a somewhat disappointing pool of googlers this time around (the last G the T reached new heights of oddity). Still, a few worth noting, listed in the usual fashion (search term: rank [analysis]):

Karl Rove Mormon: 7 [Hell, no, he's not! And as long as that "Are you honest in your dealings with your fellow man" question remains part of the baptismal interview, I think we can safely say he won't be. Not to mention that "Are you the chubby, balding, boorish, whorish, forked-tongued, cloven-hooved spawn of Satan" question, which I think would likewise rule him out.]
Kelly Ripa+secret past: 6 [I know, the Ripa thing is getting stupid, but somehow I just can't stop]
napoleon dynamite calls a zoo for a liger commercial: 1 [I've made the prediction before: the liger is the new unicorn]
brain hemmoraging: 9 [Yeah, um, in case you didn't know, "brain-hemmoraging" is a slang term, used with increasing frequency among the younger cohort, and roughly equivalent in meaning to "mind-blowing."]

Also, somebody in Brazil has been reading OT in google-translated Portuguese. I'm worried about the accuracy--I mean, I hate to think how the phrase "rupturas potty" comes across.

Family History and Food Storage: Two Separate and Distinct Activities

2004-07-20T08:33:00.000-04:00

When I first heard about this disturbing idea for a Days of '47 Parade Float I wondered if perhaps the Holladay South Stake was extending an ecumenical hand of fellowship to the good folks up the street at Summum.

(And I thought the 20-year-old jars of mustard pickles in my Grandma's basement were gross...)

Review: Mormoniana; or, the Aesthetic of Minding Your Own Business

2004-07-18T23:45:00.000-04:00

“An increasingly significant group of young composers and arrangers has addressed Latter-Day Saint themes in the later 20th century. Their work is not to be confused with Mormon ‘religious pop’, which, though prolific, is generally undistinguished.” Thus writes Dr. Roger Miller at the close of his article on Mormon music in the definitive New Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians. I’ll do my former music history professor one better and forego his gracious diplomacy: in terms of sheer volume, most of the “Mormon” music available for purchase is shlocky, syrupy, self-congratulatory garbage. I’m not being elitist here; I might (aspire to) be a bookish, posturing academic, but I do have my guilty pleasures as far as music goes (I’m currently struggling to overcome an utterly inexplicable affinity for the Black Eyed Peas’s “Where is the Love?,” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya” doesn’t seem to lose its hypnotic grip on me even as it becomes so cliché they use it as a crowd participation cue at professional sports events). So, yes, I’m Mormon, and I listen to pop music, but I don’t mistake my indulgence in the latter as potentially enhancing in any way my fidelity to the former. I say, instead of listening to an hour-long Kenneth Cope album, split the time evenly between thirty minutes of better doctrine (for example, the scriptures) and thirty minutes of better music (for example--hell, anything).

This all serves as introduction to the real topic of this post, the first part of Miller’s quote—the “significant group of young composers and arrangers addressing Latter-day Saint themes.” I was lucky enough to have been entrusted with a reviewer’s copy of Mormoniana, a superb multimedia project produced by Glen Nelson and the Mormon Artists Group, and I can’t say enough good things about it. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has sat around wondering when Brigham Young’s and Spencer Kimball’s predictions about Mormon Michelangelos and Beethovens would be realized, and while I wouldn’t be so audacious as to grant (just as their authors wouldn’t be so audacious as to claim) universal, canonical status to the works in this collection, I can praise them as fine pieces individually—and more importantly, I can discern in their collective quality and diversity a cultural climate that makes the Brethren’s artistic prophecies seem much more plausible and considerably less distant.

The idea was rather ambitious: take a bunch of works by Mormon visual artists and have a bunch of Mormon composers write piano pieces based on them, then compile the pieces into a kind of extended, polystylistic suite, then present a score and recording of the music together in a bound volume with prints of the visual works the composers had used for inspiration. And the really ambitious part: see if you can get anybody to buy it. Certainly, this is more a labor of love than a commercial venture: only about 200 copies were made, and the setting, printing, and binding are of the highest quality—Nelson even did the binding himself, on his dining room table, using a custom-embroidered silk binding. It’s a collector’s item, then; the $150 price tag certainly befits the CD and handsomely presented musical score, prints, and accompanying essay and notes (the book totals about 120 pages).

Coffee-table cachet aside, the actual contents of the collection live up to their presentation. I was somewhat familiar with the work of some of the visual artists represented (Valerie Atkisson, Lane Twitchell, Trevor Southey, Douglas Snow), but most were new to me. I’ll not attempt to convey all their varied styles in a few clumsy words, but a few stood out to my admittedly art-ignorant eye. Monte Anderson’s “Fallen Angel” (1962) depicts its subject matter so viscerally and immediately you feel compelled to look for figures in the abstract color and shapes just so there’s entity to attribute the terror to. Twitchell’s “The Swirling World of Ersatz Earth” (2001) is, on one level, an engaging study in color and intricate shape (using his signature cut-paper technique), and on another, a trenchant commentary on our taste for the artificial. David Linn’s “The First Principle” is at once the most stylistically traditional painting and the most clever: an almost photographically depicted figure lay on his back on a barren stretch of ground; he holds a bow in the air with his feet, the tip of the arrow between his toes, the butt of the arrow against the string pulled nearly to his chin, and, with a shawl covering his eyes, prepares to shoot into the air at an unseen target.

The musical compositions cover equally varied stylistic terrain. In fact, in the lengthy and insightful essay included in the volume, Michael Hicks identifies that diversity as the single trait that might be discerned as “Mormonistic” in the collection. Hicks looks to Mormonism’s resistance to “creeds” (the Articles of Faith notwithstanding) and finds there an aesthetic model. He recalls, after all, that the only “Mormon Creed” that was ever known and identified as such, as committed to print in a stained glass window in the Logan Temple, read as follows:

Mormon Creed
Mind
Your Own Business.
Saints
Will
Observe This
All Others Ought To

What’s “Mormonistic” about this music, then, is both its shared collective subject matter (to the extent that the visual works the pieces are based on address gospel themes) and its multiplicity of styles. After all, we’re supposed to look for everything that’s “lovely, praiseworthy,” etc.; furthermore, we believe in a God with a body, a Being who takes pleasure in sights and sounds in something like the way we do. “No creeds for these musical and visual artists,” Hicks concludes, “who have essentially nothing in common but their membership in a church that enjoins the divinity of all and the sanctity of the senses.”

Since I’m a music person, I tend to have stronger feelings one way or the other about the piano pieces, and certainly some appealed to me more than others. At any rate, though, my initial apprehensions about the idea of a 16-movement suite by 16 different composers proved too pessimistic; Nelson, with the help of David Fletcher (the music engraver and designer for the project, as well as one of the composers) created a convincing whole out of the sundry parts. Fletcher’s own piece proved to be one of my favorites, a serene, somewhat impressionistic musing on Twitchell’s work. Lansing McLoskey, a Harvard-trained composer (and, curiously, proprietor of a Mormon-themed custom skateboard business) contributes a whisper of a piece, all quiet, sustained notes that, according to the performance instructions, change “from opaque to translucent.” Todd Coleman’s piece cuts perhaps the most contemporary arc: it is scored for live piano performed in sync with recorded electronic sounds (performers can download the electronic part from the Mormoniana website). Coleman’s soundscape is lush and appealing, though, and his depiction of the life cycle is actually quite straightforward, with an allusion at the beginning to Brahms’s Lullaby answered later by a nod to Purcell’s haunting aria “When I Am Laid In Earth.” In addition to the promising representation by these and a number of other “younger” composers (I wish I could give justice to more of them), many of Mormondom’s established musical figures participate as well, including Robert Cundick, Crawford Gates, Murray Boren, and others.

Except for a couple of cases where the collaborators thought the pieces would be better served by putting the composer at the keyboard, famed Mormon pianist Grant Johannesen recorded the Mormoniana suite. The collaborators sought, as Nelson put it, to “approximate the energy of a live performance” by recording each piece in only one take. Johannesen concurred that the recording should have a greater element of spontaneity, even “danger.” Frankly, I am generally less prone to such sentiments; I think of performances and recordings as two inevitably and entirely different animals, so I don’t have a problem with a composer using technology to realize a piece as precisely as possible when committing it to disc; sure, a performance is “dangerous,” but to pretend that risk in the studio as a matter of principle, when the resources and opportunity are available to fix mistakes, seems a little restrictive. Not that Johannesen makes many mistakes; his forte isn’t contemporary music (probably the reason he deferred on Coleman’s and Christian Asplund’s pieces, both of which involve “extended” performance techniques), but, aside from a few irregular rhythmic figures that don’t quite seem to sound as they appear in print, his performance conveys the composers’ varied visions quite faithfully. Only in a few minor cases would my views about the ethics/aesthetics of recording techniques have created a different result. As it stands the project speaks well to the future of the artistic climate of Mormonism, both in the level of quality and extent of creativity of the projects, as well as in the impressive breadth of the artistic terrain they cover.

Ultimately, the value of this project (and others that the Mormon Artists Group has planned for the near future) is that, unlike serving as the spoonful of sugar that helps the gospel medicine go down, or, conversely, an obligatory gussying-up of gospel subject matter to make us feel cultured, these visual and musical works induce thinking. I think deep down the problem I have with Mormon pop is that its underlying message seems to be “Well, here we are, we’ve arrived. Doesn’t it feel good?” In cosmological terms, the only real damnation there is to speak of in Mormonism is stasis; getting somewhere and stopping there. Mormonism needs serious—dare I say difficult—art because it makes us think. It defamiliarizes those seemingly hyperfamiliar concepts, like faith, hope, charity, love—concepts that, because of frequent utterance, can become shopworn answers to Sunday School questions rather than the powerful guides for living that they’re supposed to be. Mormon pop says “The gospel is true.” Mormon art, when it’s good, says, “It’s true. Now what?”

UPDATE: Glen Nelson informs me that Mormoniana will be available later in the year in a paperback edition (including CD) that will sell for $50.

On the Passing of Arthur Kane and the Value of Incongruous Mormons

2004-07-16T22:58:00.000-04:00

I didn't know Arthur Kane, and I wasn't a huge fan of the New York Dolls, but I was saddened by the news of his passing (you can read the obits in the NYTimes and USA Today here and here), and, like many others, intrigued to learn of his conversion to Mormonism. Of course, all of us like to casually mention famous and/or unlikely Mormons in conversations with non-mormons; it has a certain associative cultural cachet (Steve Young is Mormon, and you like him; I'm Mormon, so why don't you like me?). I suspect that such observations also carry a hint of hint of inevitability (Ricky Schroeder joined the church; it's only a matter of time until you do too!). Of course, the Church's esteem among the cognoscenti of underground musical esoterica has surely risen exponentially as word of Kane's Mormonism has circulated in his obituaries, and I'm sure that within the week, in conversation with some like-minded music snob or other, I'll find myself unable to resist nonchalantly floating the implied syllogism (Arthur Kane was Mormon, and he was totally, totally cool…Ahem...yeah, so, you know, I'm Mormon…).

The coolness factor, however, is only a small part of why I was pleased to learn of Kane’s Mormonism. If you're like me, you delight in hearing about conversions that involve people that come from “unlikely” backgrounds, and/or that don’t look like the overgroomed and anonymous models in the church promo materials. It speaks to the validity of the gospel that people find their way to it from wildly diverse places, and once they’re in, they help the rest of us extricate eternal church doctrine from arbitrary church culture. Also, as I’ve worked in the youth program for the last couple of years, I’ve gotten to know several kids that feel out of place no matter their context: on the one hand, they dress like punks and listen to Slipknot, resisting the unspoken paradigm of cosmetic morality that too often takes a more prominent position in church culture than actual morality; on the other hand, at school or among friends they resist just as strenuously the assumption that their rebellious tastes in music or clothes must by accompanied by careless attitudes towards drugs or sex. Take, for example, the kid in my ward who in virtually every regard remains beyond reproach in terms of his personal behavior, and is one of the kindest, most respectful kids I’ve ever met, and who has a mohawk. Seriously, a full-on mohawk. (I should point out, however, that he doesn’t spike it on Sundays.) This kid’s arrival in our squeaky-clean upper-middle-class suburban ward, perhaps in combination with the struggles among a few of the ward’s better-groomed youth, has fostered a widespread reassessment of what battles are worth fighting in our kids’ lives. As the mohawk kid’s dad puts it, “If I can keep him away from porn and drugs, he can wear his hair however he wants.” When I mentioned that a few parents had voiced their disapproval of his son’s hair, he smiled and said “What would they say if they knew I had given him the haircut?” It’s gratifying to see that kids like this feel like there’s a place for them in the church—or insist on making a place for themselves. That’s why its crucial for the church to have people like Arthur Kane—who suspended his volunteer gig at a Church Family History Center in L.A. to reunite with his band for a series of concerts just months before his death—as an example for kids who can’t seem to find where they belong.

I imagine Kane raised a few eyebrows when he first showed up at sacrament meeting (although presumably by that time he had cleaned up a little), just as many of us were surprised to learn that Kane had converted to Mormonism—there's just such a strident incongruity between the photos of the Dolls bassist “Killer” Kane smirking menacingly at the camera in a red leather jumpsuit and the image of Bro. Kane, sober and sans the heavy eye makeup, helping some old lady thread the microfilm machine. In a way, though, I think that incongruity is what all this churchy stuff is about, and if we had a broad enough perspective, we'd realize that in the eternal scheme of things it's pretty incongruous for any of us lurps to even be thinking about hie-ing to Kolob any time soon. We've all got things to give up, and some of us stubbornly cling to the less obvious ones for decades or even lifetimes after baptism. The drastic--and visually striking—change that Kane made simply points up in a more readily discernible way the change everybody has to make in one way or another. That the stuff Kane gave up--drugs, booze, shoulder-length man-perm--happened to be more externally conspicuous doesn't diminish the fact that the part of the road that all of us have to traverse is infinitely larger than the distances between our various starting points.

Salon Magazine Pulls Me Back from the Brink of Blog Oblivion (I Was Looking for a Shoe)

2004-07-14T00:13:00.000-04:00

In response to his open query in last week's Wednesday Morning Download--hereafter WMD(!)-- several people emailed Salon.com music critic Thomas Bartlett with info about Mormon bands (he had wondered aloud if Low was the only thing going in Zion). Much to my surprise, today's WMD not only discusses a few of the bands sent in by readers, but also links to Orson's Telescope! Since this raises the distinct possibility that my blog readership might expand beyond its two current core demographics--members of my immediate family and victims of my Kelly Ripa googlebombs--I thought I better unlock the observatory, open the roof slats, and give the old space peeper a squint.

You'll notice that the date of my last post coincides roughly with the beginning of Ken Jennings's obliteration of the old Jeopardy record; since then, as his winnings have approached $1,000,000, I have pretty much given up all my blogging and virtually all other nonessential activities in order to consecrate myself 24/7 to KenJen Watch. When I'm not glued to the boobtube during actual Jeopardy matches, I'm typing away on the Jeopardy message boards. (I started both the "Where can I get one a them Japanese Hoochie-Coochie Good Luck Dolls, or whatever the hell it's called," and the "Can you believe KJ said "ASS" on Letterman last night?!" threads.)

Just kidding. I mean, I did check out the Jeopardy message boards, but when I saw how dogmatic the regulars were about including the exclamation point every damn time they type the show's title, or even abbreviate it ("J!"-!), I promptly left. Meanwhile, my real reasons for not posting to OT recently are much less interesting than Jennings's tyrranical game show reign, so I'll spare you. You might simply say that my blogging hobby suffered severe head trauma and, like that missionary in Australia who fell off a cliff trying to get a shoe, was placed in an induced coma while the brain hemmoraging subsided. All the Salon traffic, and the consequent prospect of boosting my TTLB ranking to something land-dwelling, has snapped me out of my funk, so I'll attempt to resume semi-regular posting.

Incidentally, Bartlett also mentions a Mormon band I was heretofore unfamiliar with, Landing. I will look into it and return with a thorough musicological report at a future date.

One more bit of catching up: after blogging fawningly about it for several weeks now (here, here, elsewhere), I finally went with a buddy of mine to actually screen Napoleon Dynamite. The friend and I both have special access to the kind of culture depicted in the movie: I grew up in rural southern Utah, my friend in rural southern Idaho, not far from Preston, where the movie is set. Like the rest of the audience, we laughed to the point of near-incontinence throughout the film; it occurred to me, though, that while all the New Yorkers in the audience were laughing because the characters seemed so wildly implausible, my friend and I were laughing because we recognized so many people we grew up with.

Entrepreneurial Spotlight

2004-06-15T09:32:00.000-04:00

Back in the day, which is to say, five weeks ago, invites to join the beta-test of Gmail (Google's 1000 Megabyte email service), were selling on eBay for $60 or more. By the time my Gmail account gave me invites to send to friends, however, the market was flooded. Now they're selling for about $6-10, and the price appears to be dropping. I'm conducting a little experiment to see if sweetening the deal a bit improves the bid price. No takers so far, but I'm counting on a rush during the last hour of the auction.

More N.D.

2004-06-14T17:22:00.000-04:00

Not only are the director, writers, and star of Napoleon Dynamite all Mormon, so is the llama.

Googling the Telescope; also, My Six-Year-Old's Assessment of the Reagan Funeral

2004-06-13T20:36:00.000-04:00

Real google searches that recently brought web-wanderers to OT [search term: Rank (Analysis)]:

Yay!

"Magnet Therapy for Pets": 5 (This one's too good to be true. I think my dear reader from Toms River, NJ is jerking my chain; but while you're at it, how bout you give me some hydroponic lettuce action too, eh?)

Kelly Ripa No Makeup: 16 (I think one of my brothers did this one, though I really can't say whether it was meant deliberately for my amusement or whether he was googling in earnest and happened upon my blog by coincidence.)

Boo!

Gail Ruzicka: 1 (!!!!) (That's right! The first impression googlers get of the hyperconservative Utah Evil--er, Eagle Forum lady is the one I give'em--and it ain't pretty. I am drunk with POWER!!!)

Creepy Chris Cannon Congressman: 3 (Constituent's note to self: before voting for Cannon, find out if creepy)

"some call you the elite" "I call you my base": 9 (And I call you friggin' unemployed in six months.)

Ashcroft Torture Memos: 70 (How could somebody read sites 1-69 without sending their fist through their computer monitor in a fit of rage?)

Huh?

plexiglass pulpit in fort worth, tx: 3 (I know a guy.)

Sentiments, Zingers, and Sayings: 3 (You think that's weird? No. 1 is a site called, ISYN, "Falcon Crest: A Tribute")

Manolo Blahniks homepage: 5 (Utterly inexplicable. Everybody knows I'm a Louis Vuitton gal.)

Murray Perahia heterosexual: 5 (Utterly inexplicable. Everybody knows he's a Louis Vuitton gal.)

lds movie saturday's warrior lyrics to in your humble way: 8 (You people are sick.)

Alan Osmond goat: 19 (Again, I suspect my brother; again, can't say whether ironic or not.)

================

My eldest son, who will turn six in two weeks, upon encountering coverage of the Reagan funeral on television: "Dad, I think this is General Conference for Jews."

OT Exclusive! Hess Speaks Out: Rumor on Evangelical Website Untrue (Unless "Buttload" Counts as a Swear)

2004-06-11T18:08:00.000-04:00

Says director Jared Hess, in response to my emailed query about the rumor (floated on an evangelical Christian website--see previous post) that Fox/MTV made him dub in a couple of swear words so Napoleon Dynamite would have a PG-13, rather than PG rating: "That is completely bunk. It's a very amusing rumor though. The film has a PG rating."

Or, maybe the 'gelies were talking about this line:
Napoleon: You know there's like a buttload a gangs at this school. This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bowstaff...

Napoleon? Dynamite!

2004-06-11T00:10:00.000-04:00

First, I should write headlines for the New York Post, no?

Second, guess which publication's review of Napoleon Dynamite (see trailer here) included this graf:
The radiant sweetness of "Napoleon Dynamite" — its absence of cynicism and ridicule and de rigueur profanity — may have something to do with the fact that the people who made it are mostly Mormons: First-time feature director Jared Hess (who cowrote the script with his wife, Jerusha), natural-born-star Jon Heder (who gives a one-of-a-kind wonderful performance as Napoleon) and Aaron Ruell, who plays the limply lovable Kip Dynamite, were all classmates at... Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Whether or not the film's becoming reticence — its disinclination to shock or hurt — is rooted in religious scruple, it's an edifying demonstration of how hip — how almost avant-garde — a movie can be without resorting to such shopworn strategies. What a revelation.

Deseret News? Meridian? Nope. Try Kurt Loder of MTV News. Hip? Avant-garde? The church is ill-prepared for this kind of coolness. Of course, MTV has entered into a joint venture with Fox Searchlight to promote the film, so it's got an interest in talking it up.

USA Today ran a positive review too, which also highlight the director's and star's Mormonism, but counted it as a career liability:
If his BYU association has you guessing [Napolean star] Heder might be Mormon, you're correct. Though his faith and two-year mission to Japan built his character, the religion's book of don'ts could challenge his chances for success in Hollywood... Potential publicists hoping to mold Heder into the next edgy indie Gyllenhaal had best rethink their game plan.There's plenty Heder, adhering to his strict beliefs, refuses to do. No sex (except with [wife] Kirsten)/no drugs/no cursing. Not even in character.

Ironically, Keith Phipps, the reviewer at the Onion, of all people, waxed self-righteous in his assessment of the movie.
The film... score[s] some unearned points by taking a stand against the inevitable, dull tyranny of the popular kids. If this didn't seem so much like a film made to make those same kids bust a gut laughing at nerds, the ploy might even have worked. The parade of misfits over a bottomless pit of humiliation suggests that Hess has spent time with the works of Todd Solondz. The formal compositions, out-of-time production design, and attempts at wistfulness suggest that he's familiar with Wes Anderson. But the sweetness that the film manages seems like an afterthought, an attempt to take the edge off the cruelty. Napoleon Dynamite only thinks its heart is in the right place.

Yes, of all the movies coming out this summer, this one will surely stoke the fires of hate and malice in the hearts of our country's youth more than any other. Honestly, it seems like Phipps is pissed that a bunch of fuddy-duddy puritanical Mormons could make a runaway Sundance hit, with nary a cussword or bare buttock, so he bends over backwards to find a deeper immorality elsewhere (it's always there, lurking unseen behind the smiling facade of churchy folk like us). Or maybe he's right, and this summer will see a spate of hate crimes against moonboot wearing nunchuck enthusiasts.

UPDATE #1:
I haven't encountered this rumor anywhere else, but an article in an online Christian magazine claims that the studios that bought Napoleon Dynamite felt compelled to spice up the otherwise squeaky-clean script with some cusswords.

Fox Searchlight and MTV’s NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, which was released in June, was almost entirely devoid of objectionable content – enough to earn it a possible PG rating. Fearing that a PG would scare off some of the older, ‘hipper’ audiences, they have seemingly dubbed in two exclamatory obscenities so that the movie would obtain a PG-13 rating. The actors’ mouths aren’t even moving to form those words! Therefore, Fox Searchlight and MTV altered the content of their movie just so they could have a higher, more restrictive rating. This is manipulation at its plainest.

I can't verify this until I attend the advance screening in my town later this month (so, if you catch one before that, give us all the scoop, eh?). I'm a bit suscpicous of the claim, though, since the movie's website indicates a PG rating.

UPDATE #2: More N.D. clips here. Is it just me, or when you hear the Mormon country twang in the principal's voice and see his 30-year old suit do you also feel, for a fleeting moment, as if you're watching an old seminary movie?

Bringing Out the Conspiracy Theorist in All of Us

2004-06-09T19:18:00.000-04:00

I'm not that big on looking in the paper for signs of the apocalypse, but there's got to be something in Isaiah or the Book of Revelation about the recent coronation, as King and Messiah, of Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder of the fringe-dwelling Unification Church. The fact that it took place in a Senate Office Building, and that a number of legislators were on hand to congratulate the "True Father" and compliment him on his new bejeweled headwear (Utah's own Rep. Chris Cannon was one of six "Congressional Co-Chairs" of the event), makes it all the creepier. And the fact that it got virtually no coverage in the press back in March when it took place-the Washington Times, which Moon's Unification Church owns, mentioned it, but conveniently left out the Messiah part--draws a notable spike on my secret combination meter.

It's easy to brush Moon off as loopy but harmless--that is, until you see the Washington Times's Tony Blankley on Meet the Press, being spoken to and listened to as if he worked for a real paper; or until you notice that Moon's publication is also the journalistic authority of choice for Meridian Magazine (over one third of the headlines in Meridian's current "First Line News" feature link to Washington Times articles); or when in a speech in Virginia in 2003 Moon says the Jews got their just desserts in the Holocaust and nobody bats an eye; or when he claims endorsements by Jesus, Mohammed, and Buddha, and politicians still rush to curry his favor.

Read the story on Gadflyer, or follow along on this Moonwatcher Blog.

A Very Special Multimedia Equi Puga Award: Grandma Millie is Pissed; Senator Biden Moreso

2004-06-09T13:49:00.000-04:00

Two contenders, and they're running neck and neck (or, as it were, puga to puga):

1. The Enron Traders. No wonder Cheney won't let anybody in on the folks on the energy task force. Surely Ken Lay was there in spirit (Enron was Bush's biggest campaign donor), if not in person. And as if links to Enron weren't political poison already, new tapes recently emerged that confirmed everyone's worst suspicions: Lay's boys totally screwed people over during the California energy crisis.

Puga #1: "They're f------g taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?"

Puga #2: "Yeah, grandma Millie, man"

Puga #1: "Yeah, now she wants her f------g money back for all the power you've charged right up, jammed right up her a------ for f------g $250 a megawatt hour."

Before the election, the traders looked forward to special treatment from a Bush/Cheney admin. ""It'd be great. I'd love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy," said one trader. "When this election comes Bush will f------g whack this s--t, man. He won't play this price-cap b------t."

When I heard excerpts from the tape (click on "Flap Over Enron Tapes"), it made me wish we didn't have all those namby-pamby "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibitions, because I just wanted to hood those jerks and tape wires to their fingers. But wait...

2. John Ashcroft, et. al. So, after 9/11 the White House and the Justice Department drafted these memos that that offered a new perspective on the presidential authorities granted by the constitution: basically, the memos say, congress, the courts, and cosigners of international treaties entered into by the United States, can all just shove their checks right up their balances; during wartime (a term stretched to its limits in this administration), Bush can do whatever the hell he wants. Specifically, the memos say, it's okay to torture and even kill prisoners, even if we've promised not to. I have to say, I giggled like a schoolgirl watching and hearing John Ashcroft squirm in his seat and grasp for explanations when the senate judiciary committee grilled him about the memos yesterday. (And my glee was all the greater because the chair of the committe, Orrin Hatch, had such a nasty case of laryngitis that his introductory encomium to Ronald Reagan left him more or less voiceless for the rest of the proceedings.) In this clip from the Washington Post, Sen. Biden of Deleware, through literally clenched teeth and barely contained anger, mercilessly scolds the Attorney General. I've tried to capture the tone typographically:

There's a reason why we sign these treaties. To protect MY SON in the military. THAT'S WHY WE HAVE THESE TREATIES. So when americans are captured, THEY. ARE. NOT. TORTURED!

When some members of the committee suggested that the contents of the memos might mean the president should take some of the blame for the Abu Ghraib scandal, Ashcroft strenuously denied it--Bush might not have even read the memos, he insisted (which, come to think of it, isn't all that hard to believe...). Faced with the fact that torture took place, and that the memos said that torture was okay if the president said so, Ashcroft invoked what I can only guess was some esoteric principle of quantum nonlocality to insist that there was no connection between the two. And when, as heard in this audio clip from NPR, the committee pressed him about whether the president did approve of torture, Ashcroft's answers were so evasive that he put himself in danger of contempt of congress. You can read the transcript here, but it's much funner to watch and listen: it's like witnessing Sam the Eagle morph into Beaker.

The Transvestite of Venus, or Whatever; also, Apocalypse by Marshmallow

2004-06-08T21:56:00.000-04:00

If you're new, or you just haven't been paying attention: if you click on the telescope at the top of the page, you'll hie away, in the twinkling of an eye, to NASA's "Astronomy Photo of the Day" page. Make it a daily ritual: visit my blog, roll your eyes at my puerile blather, then click on the telescope and gaze in wonder at Creation. This morning, for example, I burned out my retinas trying, to no avail, to see the transponder of Venus, or transmigration of Venus, or whatever the hell it was Venus did this morning. Happily, after I regained my sight (I'm at about 85% now), I saw a cool--picture of the whole thing on the NASA site.

There's something transcendent about observing something like this, an event that puts the vastness of the heavens and the elegance of the celestial mechanism in perspective for you. And by transcendent I mean friggin' creepy. Wigs me out. I like the skies to remain uneventful and two-dimensionally facade-like, leaving me blissfully oblivious to the ineffable endlessness of the cosmos. Just flipping past Abraham 3 gives me a panic attack.

Speaking of wigging me out, after checking out the Venus pic, you should continue onward, with that same speed to fly, to yesterday's photo, which is even spookier: a sky full of rare Mammatus clouds. 'Member that scene in Ghostbusters where the marshmallow man 'splodes all over the place? Now, imagine if they'd had that Matrix "bullet time" technology back then.

Latter-day Skankin': Aquabats on Tour

2004-06-06T22:38:00.000-04:00

Skank: n. a rhythmic dance to reggae music performed by bending forward and extending the hands while bending the knees

The bizarro-land ska band The Aquabats have a snazzy new website up just in time to promote their new EP, Yo, Check Out This Ride. They're also on a 26-stop tour, so click through to find them in a city near you. (I know I've got a few readers in Boston and New York: they're at Axis on June 17 and The Knitting Factory in June 18.) I haven't heard the new album yet, but am tempted to purchase it on the merits of the cover art alone:

If you're unfamiliar with The Aquabats, they're comprised of 2 parts Bosstones, 3 parts Blue Man, and 1 part Wonder Twins. Oh, and a dash of Osmonds, I suppose, since some of the founding Aquabats are upstanding Mormon boys. (Though perhaps a more direct musical lineage can be traced back to the Osmonds' hyper-theatrical, spangled-jumpsuit-wearin', karate-moves-executin' days.) Aquabats live shows, I'm told, feature onstage battles with all manner of vintage sci-fi evil-doers (giant floating eyeballs, clunky robots), whom the 'bats defeat through fresh beats and superior skanking.

I would try to make it to their Buffalo show but I'm in charge of the mutual activity that night. I'd take the whole teacher's quorum if I thought I could get away with submitting 11 ticket stubs to the financial clerk for reimbursement from the YM/YW budget...

(Incidentally, to all you A-bats fans out there: my little sister was friends in high school with Pig Boy. Yes, THE Pig Boy.)

@BCC (I Like Scouting, Except for All the Scouty Stuff)

2004-06-04T00:15:00.000-04:00

Baden-Powell's original from 1911; also, my misgivings about making young boys wear kerchiefs...

Back in the Saddle; also, Bush is Funny Until You Remember He's President

2004-06-03T17:25:00.000-04:00

I'm not wild about Michael Moore. I don't think the left needs a counterbalance to conservative loudmouths--part of its integrity derives from its suspicion of propagandism and distaste for sensationalism. So parts of the trailer for Moore's new movie, Farenheit 9/11 strike me as silly and unimpressive--like when Moore approaches a congressman and, with cloying earnestness, asks him to enroll his son in the military, or when he circles the Capitol in an ice cream truck reading excerpts from the Patriot Act over a loudspeaker.

What I do find valuable--and chilling--is the footage of presidential pronouncements he includes. Two gems are featured in the trailer. In the first, the president stands at the podium at a black tie fundraising dinner and says, with that wry, smarmy grin of his, "Well this is an impressive crowd: the 'Haves'--and the 'Have Mores' [laughter]... some call you the elite; I call you my base [more laughter]." In the second, the President looks into the camera with a studied and strained look of solemnity on his face, and says, puncuating the accented syllables with his hands, "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers." Then, giving only a perfunctory nod and a "thank you" as a segue, and oblivious to his own outlandishly irreverent incongruity, he steps back from the camera, clutches his golf club, and says "Now watch this drive."

Remember when Republicans were comparing this guy to Winston Churchill?

Like Enos, except singing, and with potty breaks

2004-05-24T01:41:00.000-04:00

I'm not blogging this week, but if I were, I'd definitely have something snarky to say about this.

GONE FISHIN'

2004-05-21T15:48:00.000-04:00

After hrmmmmph years of graduate studies the possibility of gainful employment has suddenly presented itself (I only recently realized that the phrase "writing one's dissertation" wasn't a euphemism, and that student loans must be paid back, etc.--must have slept through that part of graduate school orientation). I'm busting my @$$ to get my lectures and presentations ready, not to mention trying the un-learn the bad hygeine, grooming, and social habits I've developed while working in near-seclusion writing my dissertation for the past year (I swear, if I didn't have to shave and put on a shirt once a week for church, I'd be looking like Captain Caveman right now). What this boils down to is that my time is so constrained that I either have to more or less suspend my blogging for the next week or start keeping a chamber pot next to my desk. After carefully weighing my options, I decided upon the former (but who knows, I might have to implement the latter as well--we'll see how things go). In the mean time, why don't you get some of that scrapbooking done that you've been meaning to get around to?

@BCC (Abu Ghraib: The Least of the Least)

2004-05-18T08:29:00.000-04:00

I posted some thoughts about Abu Ghraib over at BCC today.

Googling the Telescope

2004-05-17T13:55:00.000-04:00

A few of the searches that brought recent web wanderers to O.T.:

"family home evening" "moon landing" #3
"Lane McCotter" Utah mormon #3
Ex mormon boy comes out of closet #29
Tobey McGuire Muscle gallery #10
Kelly Ripa inescapable banner #1
Kelly Ripa USA Today phono #10
Kelly Ripa mormon #1
a sentence for self-depracation #3*
lion tiger cross liger pictures facts #6
Hogle Zoo home to first liger #3
Liger Napoleon dynamite drawing #3

Executive summary: Lots of googlers seem to want to know if Lane McCotter, the former Utah prison official contracted to set up the prison system in Iraq, was Mormon (I don't know if he is or not).** Damn, John Krakauer is thinking, if I'd waited a couple of years to publish my book, I could've blamed Abu Ghraib on "blood atonement"! Also, my Kelly Ripa googlebombs have been highly effective; my outreach to the magnet therapy and hydroponics communities less so. No explanation for Tobey McGuire, moon landing, or post-closet ex-mormon. Finally, Ligers:2004::Unicorns:1974.

*due to my, and searcher's, identical misspelling of search term
** UPDATE: if the word of a person whose online handle is "googly bear" can be trusted, Lane McCotter is, or until recently was, a stake president in Midway, Utah (see comments to this previous post).

My Kind of Sister

2004-05-15T21:16:00.000-04:00

Sunday's N.Y. Times features an article about a fierce battle brewing in the tiny hamlet of Caliente, Nevada, over whether or not the town should become the transfer point for radioactive waste headed for Yucca Mountain. The mayor volunteered his town for the site, enticed by the promise of job opportunities the government's plan would bring to the restless rising generation of his dwindling stewardship. His most outspoken opponent ? Marge Detraz, "a 77-year-old widow who offers strangers brownies with nuts," and who has also spent $125,000 of her own money to fight the waste transfer plan.

She is a fixture in the local Mormon church, which [Mayor] Phillips also attends. She considers him a good, spiritual man and compliments him on his skin-tingling oratory. But when it comes to the train, her invective for her neighbor is stinging, referring to him as corrupt, tyrannical and an unwitting tool of forces more powerful than himself.

I'm a relative and neighbor to several persons who, despite the government's assurances, contracted cancer from the nuclear testing in southern Nevada in the 1950s, so it warms my heart to see an average, everyday Mormon break out of the characteristic "go-along get-along" mindset that made such exploitation of my loved-ones possible. I also find the picture accompanying the Times article particularly endearing: sweet, smiling Sister Detraz, leaning against her fence in her matronly floral-print blouse, standing behind a sign reading "Do we oppose nuclear waste in Nevada? YOU BET! OUR FAMILIES ARE NOT EXPENDABLE!"

New Lefty Mormon Political Blog; also, Talking Politics at the Fathers and Sons Campout

2004-05-15T12:56:00.000-04:00

I just discovered a lefty political blog, Political Juice, run by a Mormon English professor. Lots of appropriately outraged news recaps as well as some very thorough point-by-point policy assessments--such as the current post comparing Bush's and Kerry's healthcare plans.

Discovering this blog buoyed my faith in the Mormon electorate--a much needed boost after a disturbing political discussion last night at the fathers and sons campout. My stake president and I, who often congregate for solidarity in situations where political discussions arise among Mormons (he's an outspoken democrat), were having a late-night fireside chat with a couple of dudes that also happened to be lingering randomly after their kids' bedtime. All of the sudden this guy I don't know launches into this tirade about something that he heard from somebody about something Kerry said once that was "totally anti-American." His conspiracy theory continued on for some time, wandering through several threads and snatches he had picked up bits and piece of on Hannity and Colmes, Rush, etc. The rest of us sat there in awe (including, I think, the other guy, who as far as I know wasn't a democrat) as this guy went on with a seemingly unending stream of half-cooked, all-phony, Weekly World News-grade rumors. I was waiting for him to get to the part about the cloven-hooved love-child Kerry sired with Jane Fonda, but instead he veered off, with hardly a comma, into a discussion of how amazing Junior Brown was when he opened for Toby Keith. For some reason that struck him as a cadence point, so he wrapped it up there, signaling his conclusion by folding his fingers across his belly and exhaling contentedly. The Pres and I exchanged winces and retired to our respective tents.

The situation reminded me of something conservative columnist George Will wrote recently:

You, valued reader, probably can barely imagine how unlike many—actually, most—of your fellow Americans you are. Here you are, reading a news magazine, which is a minority taste. Stranger still, you are reading the back page, a habit that is, in the eyes of most Americans, weird. You find politics interesting, so you may be startled to learn from a sifting of various polls that more voters know that Kerry is a veteran than know that he is from Massachusetts—and most voters do not know that he is a Vietnam veteran.

In many of the crucial 18 battleground states, voters have heard more about Kerry from Bush ads than they have heard from Kerry. And then there is the Fox News factor. A Pew poll asking how Americans get their information about the presidential campaign reveals that 35 percent say the network evening newscasts—and 38 percent say the cable-news networks. Four years ago the networks still dominated, 45 percent to 34 percent. This change is not all because of Fox, but because in four years Fox has become ascendant in the cable-news competition, the Bush campaign can take comfort from the evolving contours of the information marketplace.

The Separation of Church and Statesmen

2004-05-14T09:24:00.000-04:00

Amy Sullivan over at Gadflyer has penned a great article on media coverage of politicians' religious lives. She asks why, for example, people made such a big deal about pro-choice John Kerry taking communion on Mother's Day (after the Catholic Church's pronouncement about not giving the host to pro-choice politicians), when no one peeped about prominent pro-choice republican politicians doing so. She also observes that recent Republican presidents have avoided going to church altogether, even as they have forged strong alliances with the religious right, while recent democrats haven't just attended church occasionally, for photo-ops, but have participated actively in the fellowship of their congregations.

Of course, I'm in no position to dismiss Clinton's moral failings, church attendance notwithstanding, any more than I'm in a position to question the sincerity of GWB's convictions, church non-attendance notwithstanding. For Sullivan, as for me, all of this is only an issue because Bush has made it one:

Frankly, I don't give a hoot if Bush goes to church... But if reporters are going to spill plenty of ink each and every Sunday on the church activities of one candidate, then they had better do the same for his opponent. Particularly if that opponent has staked much of his domestic agenda on the argument that civil society -- and particularly religious congregations -- holds the key to solving social problems. I think it's perfectly relevant and fair to ask why a man with such firm convictions about the power of religious congregations doesn't belong to a congregation himself.

Deacons Shall Shuffle No More

2004-05-12T23:37:00.000-04:00

There's been some griping lately in the bloggernacle (here, there) about the lackluster quality of church dances. Hope looms on the horizon, however: by day he's Ryan Raddon, U. of U. grad, Mormon husband and father; at night, though, he puts on his headphones, lays down the boh-tss boh-tss boh-tss, and becomes Kaskade, the Bay Area's hottest new DJ. (Article here. Close-up of soul patch here.)

I haven't heard any of his stuff yet, but I'll see what I can get my hands on. Apparently, his debut album is or was the #1 Dance/House download on iTunes. Anybody out there know the guy?

Also, a question: when he gets roped into doing a youth conference dance, do kids address their requests to Brother Kaskade?

New-Improved O.T.; also, The All-Googling Eye Smiles Upon Me!

2004-05-12T09:51:00.000-04:00

I'm busting it to get a diss. chapter finished, so I haven't done particularly thoughtful blogging in the past few days. But I have fiddled with the links on the right:

1) I removed the link to wonkette.com. She's funny as hell, and her news wrap-ups are insightful, but her potty mouth was becoming something of a liability. I mean, if my mom stops visiting my blog because I link to off-color material, there goes half my readership.

2) I added a couple of political news sources, Gadflyer and and Media Matters. The former is a lefty news zine; the latter is a media-watching newsletter started by David Brock, the guy who defected from the ultra-conservative media corps and wrote the stinging expose Blinded by the Right. Media matters posts rebuttals to stupid stuff right-wing windbags like Limbaugh and O'Reilly say on the air. Needless to say, they are very busy.

3) I posted a link to Roy Moore's Presidential Campaign website. Ten Commandments in the courthouse? Hell, I wanna see'em 100 feet high on the Washington Mall! Maybe on Mount Rushmore! Because that will show that we're really, really righteous, and will perhaps relieve us of some of the burden of actually, you know, obeying the commandments. I encourage all my republican friends to consider voting for Ralph Na...er, I mean, Roy Moore. For America. Amen.

4) Thanks to a javascript graciously supplied by Grasshopper over at Let Us Reason (a new and shining star in the bloggernacle firmament), I've added a "Recent Posts" section. Because actually scrolling down the page can be so taxing.

And finally, some fruits of my Googlebombing efforts: I'm starting to get traffic from Kelly Ripa searches!!! Yay!!! Now, where are all those magnet therapy freaks?

Sex in (Colorado) City; or, is Warren Jeffs the new Tony Soprano?

2004-05-10T23:17:00.000-04:00

Maybe I'm the last person to hear about this, but in case it's news to you: HBO has ordered production of a pilot for a new dramatic series produced by Tom Hanks, Big Love. The main character, Bill Paxton, is a practicing polygamist struggling to keep all three of his wives happy.

In a recent article in Backstage, Grace Zabriskie, who will play Paxton's mother, anticipates a complex treatment of the subject matter:

I really do have the impression that [the show's creators] got their finger on a very important pulse in doing this. I am far from believing that polygamy is the way to go, but it raises issues that we are damned if we're going to address as a culture. I think they need to be addressed, because they are not unrelated to a lot of other things that need to be addressed, like gay marriage.

This sounds like polygamy will be getting something of a sympathetic treatment--if perhaps only in its role as a subtextual stand-in for "non-traditional" relationships in general.

[The more pressing question for me, though: now that Sex in the City is off the air, will hip, well-to-do women, still in the habit of taking their fashion cues from HBO, trade in their Manolo Blahniks and Chanel dresses for high lace collars and ankle-length gingham skirts?]

Utah connection to Abu Ghraib?

2004-05-08T14:07:00.000-04:00

Today's New York Times contains a disturbing article suggesting that some of the horrific abuse documented in Abu Ghraib prison may have found precedent in some techniques used in the U.S. prison system. At the center of the story is Lane McCotter, former head of corrections departments in Utah, New Mexico, and Texas, and current chair of a private, Utah-based prison operations firm. McCotter resigned from his post in Utah in 1997 after a clinically schizophrenic inmate died from a fatal blood clot while chained naked to a chair for 16 hours. His company was later involved in a number of controversial negligence and abuse cases, included one that prompted a reprimand from the justice department. Despite this riddled history, McCotter was tapped to oversee the reorganization of Iraq's prison system.

In my own perusal of Lexis-Nexis, I discovered that during his tenure in Utah McCotter had also quashed an effort in 1996 to discontinue the use of firing squads in capital punishment cases, in the wake of the highly-publicized execution of John Albert Taylor, which McCotter oversaw. Also in 1996, a hazing scandal erupted under McCotter's watch, in which inmates "celebrated" other prisoners' parole dates by binding them with duct tape, harassing them verbally, and in some cases abusing them physically; in a number of cases prison guards watched the hazing, and even participated and took pictures. According to the Deseret News article (1/11/96), "Those who have witnessed it or participated in it say it's usually just 'good, clean fun' but admit there are times when inmates are hurt or humiliated and property is damaged in the attacks." In another scandal during McCotter's directorship in Utah, a mentally ill inmate was strapped to a steel plank for three months, and the lights in his room were never turned off.

McCotter responded to the author of today's Times article by asserting that he left Iraq only a week after the first wing of Abu Ghraib reopened, and that the guards implicated so far must have learned the naked-except-for-the-hood harassment technique from somebody else. Still, as I've been following this story (mostly on Talking Points), I can't help but be suspicious of the Defense Department's claims that the low-rank army grunts working at the prison came up with their sadistic designs completely spontaneously and independently. ("Quick, hide the leashes and hoods! The boss is coming! Ahab, Omar, get your pants back on!") This seems like something that would grow out of, or at least find misguided validation in, an established (albeit perhaps unofficial) organizational culture--whether it came from McCotter's team or elsewhere in the military/intelligence system.

Equi puga; or, so many stupid people, so little time

2004-05-06T20:53:00.000-04:00

Other than an initially promising but ultimately underwhelming incident in Idaho involving some seagulls and crickets, it's been a pretty slow news day in Mormondom. It's been a breathtakingly busy news day for stupid people, though, so, to recognize the exceptional mindblight demonstrated by some of the people in the public eye recently, I herewith declare open the nominations for the weekly(?) O.T. Equi puga award, and propose as inaugural candidates the following individuals:

JAMES GUILLEN. At his team's annual awards banquet, Mr. Guillen, a junior high basketball coach in Pleasantville, New Jersey, gave each of his players trophies and certificates to recognize their efforts. The trophy given to the last player called to the podium, however, was different from all the others. It featured a gilded caricature of a bawling infant, and a placard reading "Pleasantville M.S. 2004 Boy's Basketball Crybaby Award." (And, compounding the malice with ignorance, the coach had spelled the player's name incorrectly.) Handing the trophy to the stunned 13-year old, the coach explained that "he begged to get in the game, and all he did was whine."

DARREN JAMES. Guy has sex with a gazillion people. Gets AIDS. Passes it along. Whooda thought?

UNIDENTIFIED AMERICAN SOLDIER, ABU GHRAIB PRISON. Of all the horrible stories to emerge about prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib (like those reported in the Post and the New Yorker), this AP story may well be the most revolting: an elderly woman, held without charge for six weeks, is forced onto all fours, harnessed, and ridden like a donkey by an American soldier. Makes me wish Mormons believed in hell, so I could picture that @$$hole burning in it.

RUSH LIMBAUGH. I know, I know, easy target. What week wouldn't he qualify? But this remark from Tuesday's broadcast (which I picked up on TPM) is so exquisitely asinine it deserves special mention.

CALLER: It was like a college fraternity prank that stacked up naked men --
LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?

First off, I wasn't in a frat, so frankly the kind of aggressive, nonconsensual homoerotic "pranks" that seem so commonplace to Rush and his caller strike me as rather offputting in and of themselves. Second, blow off some steam?! He didn't really say that, did he? I mean, sure, we all have our own ways of unwinding after a long day at work--going for a jog, reading the paper, getting 'faced on a handful of OxyContin that our maid scored for us--but doing the things these soldiers did to those prisoners goes way beyond mischief, into the realm pure evil ("Men, as soon as they get a little authority...") Having a good time? Emotional release? What doesn't that justify in Rush's mind, for hellsakes?

GEORGE W. BUSH. Didn't think I'd let him off, did you? The question is, which of the week's blunders should be given pride of place? There is, of course, his shocking ignorance, until recently, of the Abu Ghraib scandal (according to a quote posted to TPM, as of two days ago he hadn't even read the Taguba report; according to the Washington Post, he first heard about the extent of the abuse from the media). Then there's his, er, less-than-straightforward way of securing funds for his haywire war (forgot to tell Powell about the $25 billion; still hasn't told everybody else that he really needs $65 billion, but, well aware that it's easier to get forgiveness than permission, wants to wait until after the election to ask for it). Last, but not least (and probably not last, either, since it's only Thursday), conservative columnist George Will of all people is taking the president to task for his general cluelessness. Will starts with this quote, which the president inserted randomly into an appearance with the Canadian Prime Minister last Friday:

"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."

Says Will:

What does such careless talk say about the mind of this administration? Note that the clearly implied antecedent of the pronoun "ours" is "Americans." So the president seemed to be saying that white is, and brown is not, the color of Americans' skin. He does not mean that. But that is the sort of swamp one wanders into when trying to deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters.

Will continues:

Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.

[BTW, I think Will totally horked that last bit from the last paragraph of my recent post. What a friggin' amateur.]

So, anyway, those are my nominees. Submit your own, and/or cast your vote. May the biggest Equi puga win!

Cross-Pollination w/BCC: Consecrating Your Eyeballs

2004-05-04T00:10:00.000-04:00

You can read this post over at BCC. Or, you can bypass the thinky stuff altogether, go here, and give a hungry person a meal for free. Well, not totally for free. You have to push a button and look at something for a few seconds.

Young Pianist Gets the "Steve Young" Deferment; also, The Times Gets Temple Fever

2004-05-04T00:05:00.000-04:00

The arts section of today's NY Times features an article about the Brown family pianists, five brothers and sisters from Provo who all study (or have studied) at the Juilliard School (I'm a grad student at rival Eastman, so here's the obligatory thpthpthpthp to my turtlenecked colleagues downstate). Gregory, 19, was just about to break his piano teacher's heart and go on a mission when he and his four siblings were offered a recording and touring contract with BMI. According to the Times and the Browns, Gregory consulted with a general authority, who told him he should continue his piano career, because he'd been given a special gift that could touch the hearts of millions and introduce the gospel in places it might not otherwise reach; and also because, frankly, the kid's too sallow and artsy looking to get in anybody's door anyway. (Okay, I added that last one.) So, anyway, watch for them in a concert hall near you, playing five-piano (!!!) arrangements of your favorite classical hits: Liszt's (Morbidly Obese) Hungarian Rhapsody, Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the (200-Foot) Bumblebee, Beethoven's Für Elise Four More Pianists than Necessary, etc. [I gotta million of em, folks! Send me yours!]

Incidentally, the Times, perhaps in deliberate response to the upcoming opening of the Manhattan Temple, seems to be on a Mormon kick right now. In the past week, they've also done features on Kim Smith, an Area Authority Seventy and executive at Goldman Sachs, and Neil Labute, the controversial Mormon director and playwright.

Even Big-Boned Gals Can Be "Fascinating"

2004-05-02T22:46:00.000-04:00

[The previous excerpt from The Fascinating Girl was so popular I've decided to post more of them on occasion. This one's for all the girls who didn't ever think they could be fascinating.]

IF YOU ARE A BIG, STRONG, AND CAPABLE WOMAN

What if you happen to be a big, strong, capable woman, or have a powerful personality or in some other way overpower men? How, then, can you possibly appear to be tender, trustful, delicate, and dependent? In the first place, size has nothing to do with the quality of feminine dependency. No matter what your size, our height, or your capabilities, you can appear fragile to a man if you follow certain rules and if you will take on an attitude of frailty. It is not important that you actually be little and delicate, but that you seem so to men.

WHEN THE LARGE WOMAN ATTRACTS THE LITTLE MAN

Occasionally we will see a rather small short man, married to a large woman. It is interesting to observe that she does not seem large to him because she has given him the impression of smallness. Such a man is even apt to call her "his little girl." She has managed, in spite of her size, to give him the impression of delicacy. By letting him know that she can't get along without him, that she is utterly dependent upon him, he has been able to disguise her rather large, overpowering figure.

If you are a large, tall or strong woman you will have to work to disguise these features so that men will have the impression that you are little and delicate. And if you are an efficient and capable woman, you will have to "unlearn" these traits. As you begin to develop your feminine nature, the one you were born with, you will tend to lose some of your qualities of fearlessness and efficiency and supplant them with the virtues of true femininity.

...

YOU NEED NOT BE BEAUTIFUL TO BE FEMININE

You need not be beautiful to have all of the charms of femininity. There are thousands of rather plain girls with irregular features and faulty builds who succeed in being attractive to men because they are models of femininity. On the other hand, there are thousands of other women who are beautiful in their faces and features, but who, because of woodenness or masculinity of manner, never impress men as being especially attractive... Even when the woman is so homely that the fact cannot be overlooked, the men are often attracted nevertheless. While they may not consider her beautiful, they may consider her pert, cute, charming, dainty, lovable, saucy, and everything else that is highly fascinating.

Farnsworth Finally Getting His Due?

2004-04-30T16:52:00.000-04:00

New Line cinema has just announced that it has purchased a script by Aaron Sorkin (creator of West Wing, A Few Good Men, etc.) that tells the story of Philo T. Farnsworth, the Mormon kid who struck upon the idea of television while plowing a potato field. The plot will center on the patent dispute between Farnsworth and David Sarnoff of RCA, which left the latter rich and famous and the former virtually penniless and (until recently) all but forgotten.

Sorkin will produce and his frequent collaborator Thomas Schlamme will direct. Any bets on casting? I say black and white, good and evil: Tobey McGuire as Farnsworth, Chrisopher Walken as Sarnoff.

May 2003: "Mission Accomplished"; May 2004: "We Have Failed." Ouch.

2004-04-29T22:26:00.000-04:00

[Since this is an avowedly Mormon-themed blog, and the post that follows isn't particularly Mormon (except generally, to the extent that honesty, integrity, and humility are traits that Mormons ostensibly value), I thought about prefacing this with some quote from The Miracle of Forgiveness about admitting one's mistake being the first step in the repentance process, but that seemed too much like something that someone at Meridian would have done (or, for all I know, did in fact do) during Monicagate, so I decided against it. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't think a little presidential sackcloth and ashes would be in order...]

Every time a former member of the Bush administration has come forward to criticize the president, Karl Rove [there's the Mormon theme--Rove is from Utah] has sent out the attack dogs. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was dismissed as a clueless bureaucrat. Richard Clarke, counterterrorism chief under both Bushes (and the only member of the administration to offer an apology to the 9-11 victims) was smeared as a chicken-little and an opportunist. President Bush, on the other hand, when asked in one of his recent (and rare) press conferences whether he thought he had made any mistakes, went cross-eyed, drooled on his notes, moved his arms in erratic, mechanical motions, and shuffled back and forth behind the podium chanting "Does not compute, does not compute," so unprepared were his neural networks to even process such a notion.

Sooner or later, though, Bush is going to have to say sorry. Or at the very least, oops. I mean, how many times can they blame the naysayers before they turn themselves into self-caricature? Bush should know from his days in AA that denial aint just a river in Egypt. (Cheap shot, I know, but after a week in which the chickenhawks have the audacity to question whether the shrapnel went far enough into Kerry's arse to warrant his purple heart, I can't help but indulge.)

Maybe, finally, this most recent conservative rank-breaker will burst the distended, hypertrophic bubble of Bush's, Cheney's, Rove's, and Rumsfeld's collective hubris. One year, almost to the day, after Bush's flight-suit photo-op in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner, retired Four-Star General William E. Odom, head of the National Security Agency under Reagan and current director of the conservative Hudson Institute, has come forward with a grim assessment of the war in Iraq: "We have failed." Odom recommends as speedy an extrication as possible, and predicts that the poorly-planned and unexpectedly elongated war will leave the entire Middle East far more unstable than it is already. He also warns that Iraq itself may well become a haven for terrorist organizations--an ironic outcome, since Saddam's supposed ties to Al Queda, which the president used as justification for the war in the first place (and which Cheney still clings to with brazen, tenacious dishonesty), have been proven spurious and the WMDs remain AWOL. And apparently, Odom is only one of a whole slew of retired generals and ambassadors who are currently at work drafting a harsh critique of Bush's Middle East policy.

Karen Hughes continually uses words like "resolve" and "decisive" to describe Bush's leadership style. But those are only virtues if one's resolutions are sound and one's decisions are just. (For example, if a graduate student, say, were to show firm resolve in his decision to blog on a Thursday evening rather than finish the dissertation chapter that he had promised his advisor by the weekend, that wouldn't be praiseworthy, it would just be stupid.) What good is it to have a president who sticks to his guns if he hasn't the faintest idea what to point them at?

Notes From The Washington Bureau; Or, We'll Start The Bidding On The Statue Of The Mass-Murderer At $40,000

2004-04-29T20:27:00.000-04:00

Rico and Charo, my Washington (Utah) correspondents (and parents), report that the Washington City Council has decided not to erect the statue of John D. Lee that they had commissioned for their town square. Apparently the public outcry was strident enough to convince them that Lee's leadership role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre was not absolved by his skills as settlement planner, mill builder, and irrigation engineer -- or at least that it wouldn't it be worth the scorn (and, I imagine, inevitable vandalism) that would accompany the statue's unveiling.

The question remains, then: what to do with the statue, which the city spent $35,000-$40,000 on? A less conspicuous venue? Placement on private property? One councilmember suggested getting rid of it altogether. "Put him on eBay," suggested councilman Steve VanDerHeyden. This upset the pro-statue folks, like Lee descendent Raeola Connell. "There is so much hatred, and there shouldn't be," she said. "We all ought to be able to forgive."

Fine, I won't presume to ponder Lee's eternal fate. But, since I'm not a victim, I won't presume to extend forgiveness. And it seems to me that it's one thing to put Lee's controversial past to rest, and quite another to heroicize it by casting it in bronze and putting it on the town square.

Sweeeeeeeet

2004-04-28T00:04:00.000-04:00

BYU's own Jared Hess, the slap-happy ying to Niel Labute's splenetic yang as far as Mormons movie directors are concerned, got some sweet publicity in the latest Newsweek. In the print spread of the summer movie preview ("Summer Muscle," p. 56-7), Jon Heder, as the painfully lerpy title character in Hess's debut feature film Napoleon Dynamite, appears in his signature three-piece, three-decade-old suit and lopsided 'fro, as the center figure in a publicity photo triptych--between Tobey Maguire (in a shot from Spider-Man 2) and Brad Pitt (as Achilles in Troy).

The movie's official release date is June 11, and Fox-Searchlight, which bought the film at Sundance (for between $2.5 and $4 million), has put up a snappy website and released the trailer, which is a must-see.

Incidentally, even though the trailer yuks it up about Napoleon's favorite animal being the "Liger" (half lion, half tiger), don't go thinking it's like a unicorn or a griffin or a platypus or something fake and mystical like that. Ligers are for real. I distinctly remember the taxidermied one that used to be on display in a plexiglass case at Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City. Don't go looking for it there, though; it's now housed, wouldn't you know, in the Life Sciences building at BYU. So, that makes two characters that Hess ripped off from Church sources.

Brigham Young (Or Whoever) Was Right About Unmarried Men

2004-04-27T10:14:00.000-04:00

First off, apparently it was Elder George Q. Cannon, not Brigham Young, who said it: "I am firmly of the opinion that a large number of unmarried men, over the age of 24 years, is a dangerous element in any community."

Whoever it was, a couple of scholars from Young's namesake university have concluded that it could be true--and have grave consequences on a global scale. In their new book on gender and demographic trends in Asia, Valerie M. Hudson, a poli-sci prof at BYU, and Andrea M. den Boer, a BYU alum who now lectures in international politics at the University of Kent, in England, warns of looming trouble in Yangtze River City: a new generation of restless young Asian men is emerging who, because there aren't women for them to marry, will have nothing to do but congregate at the proverbial pool hall and cause trouble. The centuries-old traditional favoritism towards boys in many Asian countries, combined with emerging technologies that allow parents to determine their baby's sex (not to mention the older, unspeakably gruesome methods of gender selection that linger in some rural areas), have resulted in a wide imbalance between male and female populations. Drs. Hudson and den Boers argue that, as has happened in similar demographic circumstances in the past, such imbalance results in delinquency, which leads to high crime, which often leads to an expanded military (as an effort to keep the men in check). This, combined with the ultra-nationalism that often results from the combination of widespread male boredom and increased testosterone levels, could lead to war. "In 2020," says Dr. Hudson, "it may seem to China that it would be worth it to have a very bloody battle in which a lot of their young men could die in some glorious cause."

The answer to this problem seems obvious to me: the international community must urgently insist that Asian countries with disproportionate populations of young males implement mandatory participation in marching bands.

Notes from Washington(s)

2004-04-26T13:30:00.000-04:00

Roll Call reports that:

"During the House debate last week over reconstituting Congress in the event of a terrorist attack or natural catastrophe, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) seemed to come out against the 17th Amendment, which authorized the direct election [rather than election by state legislatures] of U.S. Senators."

The city council of my home town of Washington, Utah, pop. 8136, must feel vindicated, since several years ago, despite the considerable problems of jurisdiction, they actually tried to rescind the 17th Amendment. So, perhaps DeLay's remark will bring up the issue anew -- and detract attention away from their current PR disaster.