A One Cent Coin From Nauvoo

A couple of weeks ago we were helping my parents move a lot of their stuff into storage.   In the last decade, they have moved at least ten times, and, as I’m sure you know if you have moved frequently, there are some boxes that just get shuffled from one home to the next without ever getting unpacked or sorted.  As we were sorting stuff and stacking boxes, I ran across a box of apparently random stuff.  In it there was a small metallic container. I picked it out and opened it up to see what it held. Inside there were two old plastic bags, one containing some kind of white stuff and the other a yellow substance, and tucked in with them was an old coin.

My father said that he believed that the white and yellow stuffs were frankincense and myrrh that some friends had brought them back from the Middle East.   The coin I vaguely remembered from a family vacation we had taken many years before.  It was a road trip from Utah to New York and Washington D. C. and back, stopping along the way to visit sites from U. S. and LDS Church history.

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Full On Double Egg Yolk All The Way

The other morning I was cooking some breakfast when I saw something amazing. Here are a couple of photos I took with my phone followed by a rough transcription of my reaction:

“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: Continue reading

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Why the New Mormon Feminism Will Fail

I recently read an essay by Tresa Edmunds entitled “The Next Generation of Mormon Feminism” which was published on Patheos.com as part of a collection of essays on the topic of the future of Mormonism.  Sister Edmunds feels that we are at the “brink of a Mormon feminist renaissance,” facilitated by Internet technology which allows like-minded LDS women, and not just academics, to support and protect each other, and to coordinate and evangelize in ways previously unavailable.

She describes young women who are choosing to leave the church rather than “shrink themselves down and become less” to fit into the role prescribed by the Church for women because the “vision we give them of their future is not a future they want.”  To confront this issue, she and others have created “Women Advocating for Voice and Equality” (WAVE).  Their objective is to change the church.

I empathize a lot with these women.  I have watched over the last 6 years, mostly from the sidelines, as these Internet communities of Mormon feminists have grown.  They often have heartbreaking stories of abuse and pain, often caused by men who wickedly point to church doctrines in order to justify their unrighteousness.

But this new wave of Mormon Feminism will fail.
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Vote in the Utah 2010 Primary Election – Information and Endorsements

This past weekend I received a phone call to my Google Voice phone number.  Since we were involved with a family wedding at the time, I let it go to voice mail.  The Google Voice service attempts to use voice recognition technology to automatically transcribe voice mail messages and then email the text to you, often with humorous consequences.  Here is the transcribed voice mail message I received:

Hi. This is Regina work. Sort of. I’m calling to set the record straight about my friend Mike Lee. The truth is the bikes the key part of all the clear waste out of Utah we work together. I’ve got her husband’s Council. He stopped it from being transferred across our highways ad for big story, it does West desert. You may not know but my ex father. Rex week passed away from cancer related to be there with her. So, if you might expect. Mike, please record his commitment to keeping you talk to say from high level nuclear waste a second not anybody who tells you otherwise. If it’s a resort. It’s a last minute mislead attack ads for the role personal game. That’s the truth. Again, I’m not sure of the calling to set the record straight, and I encourage you to join me support likely the upcoming primary election. Thank you. Goodbye just calling to pay for. I found it and I agree.

That’s right, the primary elections are here in Utah once again! Tuesday June 22 is election day so make sure you take the time to vote.  If you are registered to vote, you can find out the location where you should vote at the Utah State website.  The site will also tell you what party you are currently registered with and let you see samples of both the Ballot for your party and the non-partisan elections for your area.  Also check out Abigail Adams Project – UTAH for information about the candidates.

If the erroneously transcribed voice mail above was complete nonsense to you, then don’t worry, a lot of the information that has been published during this campaign has been just as messed up even when properly transcribed.

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Category: politics
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Book Review: “Heroes of the Fallen” by David J. West

I don’t typically read LDS Fiction.  A lot of it just doesn’t appeal much to me.  Those few books that do draw my attention are often either, in my estimation, much too preachy, superficial, and emotionally manipulative on the one hand or on the other veer off into apostasy in order to be edgy, artistic, intellectual, and morally nuanced. Blech.

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.

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