“Whoa, that’s a full egg yolk all the way! Double egg yolk! It’s a double egg yolk, all the way! Whoa that’s so intense. It’s starting even to look like a triple egg yolk! Woah it’s a full on double egg-yolk all the way! What does this mean? It’s so yellow. It’s so yellow and vivid! It’s so beautiful! It’s a double complete egg-yolk right in my frying pan! What does it mean? Tell me! It’s too much! I don’t know what it means. It’s so intense.”

Which reminds me of a quote from The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce:

I had an ovation!” the actor man said,
But I thought it uncommonly queer,
That people and critics by him had been led
By the ear.

The Latin lexicon makes his absurd
Assertion as plain as a peg;
In “ovum” we find the true root of the word.
It means egg.

However, contrary to my usual interests, last month I picked up a newly released book by David J. West entitled Heroes of the Fallen.  I had run across West’s blog a few months earlier, and I had been following his posts.  I knew that he was an aspiring LDS author, but I hadn’t followed his blog closely enough to realize that he had a book about to be published.  When he announced it’s release, I was intrigued by what I had already gathered from his blog.  So I headed over to the local bookstore where he was doing a book signing and purchased an author-signed copy. I finished Heroes of the Fallen in about a week.

The book is set in the ancient America of the Book of Mormon, around 320 or so years A.D.  This setting is both a benefit and a challenge for the author.  West benefits from a pre-existing setting, complete with unusual names and places, a history, language, political system, and religious beliefs.  My favorite fantasy writers, like J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Lloyd Alexander, drew upon the histories, myths, and legends of the ancient civilizations with which they were familiar, borrowing names, plots, archetypes, and themes in order to lend weight and coherence to their works.  In some ways, Heroes of the Fallen benefits similarly from the Book of Mormon.  By adapting and extrapolating from the Book of Mormon, West is able to concentrate on filling in the details and bringing to life a fully-realized, exotic, ancient civilization without having to invent it whole-cloth.

But this benefit is also a liability too.  Unlike the Icelandic Volsungasaga, the Norse Eddas, or the Germanic Nibelungenlied from which Tolkien derived some of his work, all of which are completely unfamiliar to most modern readers,  as a book of scripture, The Book of Mormon is much more familiar to LDS readers of Heroes of the Fallen, which are its natural audience.  I found it difficult to evaluate West’s book on its own merits because in my mind I kept comparing what he was describing to my own understanding and experience with the Book of Mormon.

This comparison problem is complicated by the fact that the book has been billed in some reviews as historical fiction and not fantasy.  Tolkien was not trying to retell the Saga of the Volsungs, he was deriving a new faerie story by including elements from the Icelandic saga.  West, on the other hand, has clearly done an immense deal of research in order to present a believable setting that is both consistent with the Book of Mormon and ancient America, and the plot is situated firmly in events from the Book of Mormon.  So his texts invites a comparison that Tolkien’s does not.  I wonder if a non-LDS reader might enjoy the book more because he or she could approach it as a Fantasy novel, enjoying the detail and cohesiveness facilitated by its Book of Mormon origin, without the distraction of comparison.  On the other hand, perhaps without the familiarity with the Book of Mormon, a non-LDS reader would find many of the references to earlier events and characters a nonsensical distraction instead of an enhancement.  So the Book of Mormon setting is both a boon and a demerit.

Despite West’s expansive research and detail, the ancient America he paints includes a great deal of speculation, exaggeration, and imagination and his novel is better because of it.  He doesn’t let what we supposedly know or what we don’t know stand in the way of crafting an interesting story.  It is a story of ancient warfare, political and religious intrigue, and courageous but often flawed heroes.  The characters often read like super-heroes– seven and eight foot tall warriors, rippling with Arnold-Frieberg-style muscles who can leave fist marks in solid wood beams that they punch in frustration.  Some of his main characters are derived not from the Book of Mormon text itself, but from somewhat obscure LDS historical trivia, like Zelph the White Lamanite, and the Prophet-Judge Onandagus.  In fact, the only character from the Book of Mormon itself to appear as a substantial main character in Heroes of the Fallen is Mormon himself, and most of the events of the plot are not recounted in the scriptures.  This leaves West a lot of room to develop his story and characters independent of specifics from the Book of Mormon by filling in the gaps with his own story.  So in addition to Zelph and Onandagus, there are lots of fun references for Mormon doctrine, history, and culture buffs, including Seer Stones, an appearance by one of the Three Nephites, Book of Mormon Archaeology, and testing Evil Spirits.

I dislike writing that tries too hard to be poetic or tries to come across as literary by over-employing descriptive devices.  At first I was worried that West’s writing was going to be like that.  His prologue was a little that way. Frankly, I think you could probably skip the prologue and then maybe come back to it at the end.  But I found that, on the whole, West did an admirable job of using striking and sometimes startling descriptions without distracting me or detracting from the story.

I do have a few complaints about the book, however.

First,  I wish the book had indicated that it was only part one of a long story.  I started the novel expecting it to reach a central climax where the building political, religious, and personal tensions and subplots come together.  But no, this is just part one in which everything is set up.  Sure there where sequences of action, but the plot only continues to thicken without ever coming to a conclusion, which I presume will come in the next book, or maybe a third.  It would have been better had the book been called Heroes of the Fallen – Book One or something like that.  It was kind of like watching The Empire Strikes Back and expecting it to reach some kind of resolution by the end.  Better managed expectations would have avoided my disappointment.

My second complaint was not the fault of the author.  I attribute it to poor editing.  “To nock an arrow” is a nice phrase.  “Zelph nocked an arrow” does read well.  But when everyone is “nocking” arrows every couple of pages it starts to feel tiresome.  How about some variation like “prepared” an arrow, or “placed” an arrow, or “set” an arrow, or “notched” and arrow, or even “readied his bow.”  This isn’t a serious error, all writers do it unconsciously, but I think it is something that an editor should have caught.  I probably would have noticed less if the first occurrence of “nocked” hadn’t been misspelled “knocked,”  which is even more the fault of the editor.  But that was the only misspelling I noticed.

My third complaint was that the book was very gory.  Perhaps this was unavoidable given both the human sacrificing elements drawn from ancient American archeology and history and the wars of degenerate, secret-society controlled nations drawn from the Book of Mormon.  But I did find the increasing amounts of spurting blood off-putting.  I have family members who would probably have enjoyed this book, but I have a hard time recommending it to them because I know that they will find the gore disturbing.

My last complaint is that there were a few distracting anachronisms.  The phrase “trade their freedom for security” for instance is used a couple of times in the novel.  I appreciate how the book tried to explore issues of freedom and security, but I wished that it had avoided this modern, cliché phraseology and found a way to say the same thing in different words that fit better with the ancient setting.  Another anachronism that stuck out to me was an apparent “Word of Wisdom” style prohibition on alcohol, coffee drinking, and smoking.  I suppose that falls under speculation, but it did stand out to me.  Other than that, however, West does a great job of bringing to life a degenerating ancient society without employing modern phrases that might pull us out of the story.

In fact, one thing that I really liked about Heroes of the Fallen, was that the Book of Mormon society that it paints is not very similar to the kind of American democratic, constitutional government society we have today.  The Nephite government in Heroes of the Fallen is, in my opinion, a much more accurate depiction than I’ve typically seen.  The Judges who reign over the Nephites may be elected to the judgment seat by a democractic voice of the people, but they are much more like the judges of ancient Israel than modern politicians, and even the good ones are more like Warlords than Senators.

Heroes of the Fallen is well done and other than the fact that I was not prepared to wait for the sequel for a resolution, I enjoyed it a great deal.  I recommend you purchase a copy from amazon.com and check it out.

I believe that dance is part of our human soul and represents a fundamental part of what it means to be human and a child of God.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Hat tip: North Temple

Q: What if the Beatles covered the classic Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven”?

A: The Beatnix

Watch the video on YouTube

Click her for Concert details.

And just to get you in the mood, here is a video mashup of Skook’s song “Popularity” with the incomparable Jerry Lewis dancing from a scene of the 1963 version of The Nutty Professor:

[Watch video at Google Video]

See you there!

This video of some fellows dancing the Charleston in the 1920s’ mashed up with the electronic dance music of Daft Punk is too cool not to share:

[Watch the video on YouTube]

Those of you who have known me in person for any significant amount of time know that I love to dance, though it wasn’t always so. Dancing is an important part of our family culture. I’m not talking about competitive ballroom dance or anything intense like that, though many of us have taken ballroom dance classes casually, and some have even competed on a novice level. When I was growing up it wasn’t uncommon for my parents to put on some music and dance, just for the fun of it. Now that we are all grown, when we get together we often dance—and it is blast.

Now that I have my own children, I love to watch them dance. They are so expressive and full of life, and they are surprisingly responsive to the music; changing their motions to match the rhythm and tempo of the songs. I dread the day when they may become too inhibited and embarrassed by what others might think of their dancing.

Dance is a great blessing and I am so thankful for a family and a church that celebrate our bodies, created in the image of God, through wholesome dance and music. When some day I pass on and I reach the afterlife, I hope that as I am reunited with my deceased loved ones and ancestors dance will be a part of the celebration.

If you live in Utah or will be visiting during the week of Independence Day, bring your family over to the Tahitian Noni Auditorium in north Provo, near Provo Canyon, on July 6th for an evening of family-friendly music and dancing with the former members of the local Ska Band Skook. The concert is free, but they will be accepting voluntary donations for LDS Humanitarian Services.

Brothers Ben and Joe Wilson formed Skook about 10 years ago in Cache Valley as a ska-influenced punk trio. Soon thereafter they moved to Utah Valley where they added some excellent horn players and their sound evolved into their own flavor of ska. From the beginning Skook was decidedly anti-popularity, and the theme is reflected in their lyrics. From the sarcasm of “I wanna be a suave mac-daddy man” to the still popular anthem “I shop at D. I.,” Skook was cool because they rejected what was “cool.”

Listen to a 5 minute sample mp3 of excerpts from nine Skook songs

Excerpts: Popularity, I Shop at D.I., Y2K, Obladi Oblada (Beatles cover), Da Bomb, Elephant Skank, With or Without (U2 cover), Cheese, Mac-Daddy Man

(most of these were recorded live without sufficient recording equipment so forgive the sound quality and enjoy the music)

Skook disbanded, as is usual here, when the members all left on LDS missions. Since then they have done a few reunion shows, but most of the members have their own musical projects now, several of them performing with some of the most accomplished musical groups on BYU campus.

This will likely be Skook’s final reunion show as the members move on to graduate and medical school. Each member will showcase his current musical projects as opening acts with the original Skook band as the headliner.

The 9th Street Jumpers
Cut a rug to Jump-Swing Music in the style of the neo-swing bands of the late 90’s like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.

timothYoung
Deep dance beats, soaring guitar lines, lush chords, and thoughtful songwriting in a staggering variety of musical styles—and every sound you hear is produced, live on stage, by one human voice.

The Aaron Southerland Trio

Sean and Isaac Hess

Ben Wilson

Come enjoy the music and donate to LDS Humanitarian Services if you can. I’ll be there with my family, so if you’ve been reading my blog, bring your family and have some fun with us.

1. Wordy
Wordy is a fascinating and addictive online macromedia flash game that combines the classic word-finding game Bloggle with the falling tile action of Tetris. The only thing that is annoying about it is that it doesn’t recognize a some words that I know are valid. I guess they need to expand the game’s dictionary. Check it out.

2. Javascript Visual Wordnet
This website is interesting on two levels. If you are interested in language, it generates an animated, visual relationship cloud for any word for which you search. Yo can click on any word in the cloud to generate its cloud. From a Javascript programming standpoint it is also fascinating.

3. Same Language Subtitling
Dr. Brij Kothari has an interesting idea for improving literacy through same-language subtitling for T.V. and Movies. I’m curious about the effectiveness of this approach.

4. Zelda Classic
If you loved the original classic video game The Legend of Zelda, this free reproduction for the PC is wonderful. Download it and enjoy!

5. Finding Mudbugs in Utah
An article about how to catch crayfish in Utah (something I wish I had known when I was a kid!).

6. Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA
Check out this article from the NY Times on a possible additional code superimposed on the already familiar DNA code.

7. Death and Taxes
A visual guide to where your federal tax dollars go. It is both captivating and repulsive at the same time!

8. Online Collections at BYU
Too many great resources to describe. Just check it out.

It is far too easy to putter away a vacation at home without actually doing anything substantial. You watch videos, surf the web, eat, neglect the laundry, sleep in, and before you know it you have wasted away the entire vacation.

While we have certainly done a deal of that, we decided to use this home vacation to do some fun things that we don’t usually have time for. The weather this week has been perfect so we have been out and about.

Monday we drove up to The Living Planet Aquarium in Sandy. The entrance fee is half-price on Mondays after five o-clock. We had been meaning to go up and see it for some time, but this was our first time. While the aquarium is still more of a prototype for a more extravagant, future facility, they had some very cool exhibits. There is one section for aquatic life you might find in Utah, and another for out-of-state creatures. We loved the triops, the seahorses, the jellyfish, the giant octopus, and the stingrays (to name of few).

The stingrays are in a large touch-pool and you are welcome to reach down into the water and pet them. They clip the stings frequently, so there is no danger of getting stung. Unfortunately, the pool is just a little too deep for our young children to reach the rays. Some of them swim up high enough to reach for a moment, but our girls weren’t lucky enough to have one swim up to them. I almost bought some triops eggs from the gift shop, but I figured I would just do it later online .

Tuesday we headed up to Alpine to the Peppermint Place candy factory. The factory has upper-story observation windows that overlook different parts of the factory floor and the decorating division that are open to the public for a self-guided “tour” from ten o-clock to Noon and then from one o-clock until three. It was interesting to see how the factory workers combined the ingredients in huge cauldrons and then stirred them with giant, oar-like paddles. Then the assembly line workers pour the white, liquid candy into metal molds as they passed by on a conveyor-belt. We couldn’t tell if the molds were of ghosts for Halloween, or of Christmas trees. The second group of workers in the line added sticks to the bottom of the candy. Then the candy-filled molds passed through a huge metal oven, emerging hardened on the other side where they were removed from the molds and taken to be packaged. Then we browsed the factory store for a long time and each chose a couple of wonderful candies to eat on our way to our next destination.

We took the highway from Alpine out to the interstate and to the nearby city of Lehi to visit one of Utah Valley’s best kept secrets: The Hutchings Museum . Even though I have lived in Utah for a long time, I had never even heard of the Hutchings Museum until this summer when they contacted me to arrange for a puppet show performance from our puppetry troupe. We performed there back in July but didn’t have time to check out the museum itself while we were there.

The museum markets itself as a “Natural History” museum, but natural history is really just one wing of the facility. It also has a wonderful Utah History wing. Too many modern museums feel cold and corporate, with lots of open spaces and fancy multimedia presentations. The Hutchings museum, on the other hand, is the best kind of museum for museum lovers: every wall seems lined and every corner and cranny seems stuffed with stuff in a good-kind-of-claustrophobic way. The museum building itself is historic. They do have some interesting multimedia, but it is crammed in among all of the other fascinating stuff instead of over-emphasized the way it is in other museums. They have also taken pains to have frequent child-oriented “hands-on” exhibits interspersed among the stuff. Magnifying glasses and microscopes are common.

Rocks, minerals, gemstones, fossils, animal pelts, taxidermy, eggs, insects, shells, working horns from old automobiles and carriages, coins, ceramic bed pans, buttons, firearms, wanted posters—there were simply too many things to take in with one visit. One of my favorite items was the ancient dictaphone (ancient in the realm of technology anyway) that James Talmage used to dictate the book Jesus the Christ in the Salt Lake LDS Temple. The gift shop was also fun—-like the museum, packed with stuff anywhere it would fit. Rather than the typical plush toys and postcards of corporate museumdom, which were nearly scarce, they offered all kinds of fun doodads for the inquisitive mind: loadstones, popcorn crystals, books on the history of automobiles in Utah, old-style wooden-handled jump ropes, and birth-stone rings, to name a few.

Incidentally, we are performing another puppet show at the museum on October 16th, so come check out the museum before the show.

Our vacation adventures continued on Wednesday when we went up to the Tracy Aviary in Salk Lake City and enjoyed seeing flamingos, parrots, scarlet ibises, hornbills, cranes, an emu, an awesome Andean Condor, and a handful of other fascinating birds. The aviary has an interesting walk-in exhibit where you can interact with the kinds of birds one might see in the backyard if you lived in Patagonia, like the Guira Cuckoo . One of the Guiras hopped right up to our girls and followed us around the enclosure. It even let them pet it. We got to watch the Bald and Golden Eagles ripping meat off of what appeared to be the remains of rabbits too. Very interesting and fun.

Thursday we took a break from our vacation and I visited the Dump with a carload of junk.

We hope to go up to a Gemstone Fair today in Sandy.

It has been a fun vacation and we didn’t have to live in a car, a tent, or a hotel.

We are looking forward to the LDS General Conference this weekend. Then it is back to work.

Good Idea/Bad Idea

Good Idea: Whistling while you work.

Bad Idea: Whistling while you eat.

I’ll just let you chew on that a bit.

The artists of that era were truly amazing performers and their energy and talent is often missing from our modern entertainment industry.

Watch the amazing video above, from the film “Stormy Weather.” It showcases the extraordinary talents of some of my favorite performers from that bygone time: the fantastic Cab Calloway and the stupendous Nicholas Brothers . Fred Astaire said this sequence was the finest piece of tap dancing ever filmed.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I went to check out a news story on Governor Huntsman playing rock music in the basement of the governor’s mansion and found my uncle Brent wailing on his guitar and singing with the governor accompanying on piano.

Check out the online video of them playing classic rock songs (scroll down for links to video of individual songs):

http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_141222707.html

Most people probably don’t know that Brent is also the uncle of the relatively famous classical pianist siblings, The 5 Browns, who are my cousins.

Maybe the governor will invite them up to his basement too and they can do some classical piano arranged for six pianos. They could call it “5 Browns and 1 Musical Politician from Utah that isn’t Senator Hatch”.

However, I am annoyed under certain circumstances by obvious grammar mistakes. Three recent bad grammar sightings that annoyed me:

1. My wife, our two daughters, and I were waiting in the office of our family doctor for the nurse to come out to tell us that the doctor was ready to see us. I grabbed a couple of the children’s books available there to read to the girls while we waited. The first book was one of the books from the “Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library” series. (This was a few weeks ago and I don’t remember the specific title, though I think it was “On Beyond Bugs: All About Insects ”).

Perhaps I am somewhat prejudiced because I have never been very impressed by the third-rate Dr. Seuss knock-offs that have been produced using his characters. Anyhow, about half way through the book there was a severe verb agreement problem. If I get a chance to take a look at the book again I’ll copy down the exact phrase, but it said something like “There’s three of them…” I know that is common for people to misuse “there’s” in everyday speech (I have done it myself), and perhaps the editors approve of bad grammar in order to keep the meter right (though the meter in the rest of the book wouldn’t seem to indicate a real concern for such). In any case, the mistake really annoyed me and I stopped reading and commented about it to my wife.

2. There is a song by the modern progressive rock band, Coheed and Cambria, called “The Suffering” that I like a lot. However, throughout the song there are various phrases that begin with the construction “If it was up to me, I would have…”

Now it seems clear to me from the lyrics that these portions of the song are supposed to be what in grammar is called the past subjunctive mood. The past subjunctive is used to to describe an occurrence (or hypothetical) that the speaker presupposes to be contrary to fact. But the correct construction of the past subjunctive is “If … were, … would ….”

So every time I hear the “If it was up to me, I would have…” in the song, I just shudder and think “If it were… if it were!”

You can hear a 30 second clip of the song with the offending phrase from amazon.com (Windows Media ).

It doesn’t annoy me enough to stop listening to the song…yet.

3. The last example is from a song that I don’t like, by a band that I generally don’t like. System of a Down’s music has been called nu-metal, and progressive rock. I call it Anarcho-AgitPop. Their music is primarily concerned with socio-political commentary. Their most recent radio release is called “Lonely Day.” It is hard for me to take their generally liberal socio-political lyrics seriously when they can, in all seriousness, sing the grammatically grating words “The most loneliest day of my life” over and over and over again. Arrrrggghhh! Listen to a clip from amazon.com if you can stand it (Windows Media).

Anyway. I guess I am just in a griping-grammar freak mood. Good night.

Well, The New York Dolls, without Kane who passed away in 2004, have released a new song and music video: Dance Like a Monkey.

The catchy song makes a lot of fun allusions and references to the modern Intelligent Design vs Darwinism cultural debates. The video has a lot of awesome visual references to modern events, as well as cultural monkey references (watch for a cartoon Charlton Heston pounding the sand before the remains of the Statue of Liberty, Darwin dancing with a Galapagos Tortoise, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster of the Pastafarians⁴ ).

Personally, I find a lot of merit in the criticisms of Darwinism from the Intelligent Design movement, I have friends and family members who strongly disagree, but it is fun to step back from the debate and laugh at it a bit.

Watch the Music Video at Google Video

“Oh joy! Oh rapture! I’m so excited I could just barf!”

”…I think I’d rather stay home and pluck my nose hairs.”

However, over the years the Garfield comic has become tired (ironic isn’t it). I stopped reading Garfield a long time ago because, frankly, it isn’t all that funny anymore. Perhaps it has become a little too predictable and formulaic.

Today I ran across an interesting game that suddenly makes Garfield funny for me again. The game goes like this: You go through the online archive of Garfield comics to find strips involving only dialogue between Garfield and John. Then remove (mentally or using a paint program) all of the dialogue from Garfield so that only John is talking. Suddenly, the Garfield comic becomes a comic about a lonely, pathetic, eccentric named John who talks to his cat. Garfield becomes a mime…a fat, feline Mr. Bean whose reactions to John are deftly expressed without saying a word.

Here are a couple that made me laugh while playing this game:
Garfield 10/07/2005
Garfield 03/07/2005
Garfield 08/18/04

I first encountered the idea here

Perhaps I am just easily amused…