Traditional Japanese Bunraku Puppetry At BYU January 16-17

As many of you know, one of my many projects is the Maxed Out Puppet Comedy Troupe.  We perform fairly frequently throughout Utah Country, and will be performing for the annual Puppetry Festival at the Salt lake County Library on Saturday, March 7 at 2:30 p.m.

We are also members of the Puppetry Arts Guild of Utah which hosts an annual puppetry workshop in April where you can learn all about puppets, puppet making, puppet performance, and see performances by puppeteers from all over Utah.

The Bunraku Bay Puppet Troupe, based at the University of Missouri, will be performing at the Pardoe Theatre at Brigham Young University in Provo, on January 16th and 17th.

Bunraku is an amazing form of traditional Japanese Puppetry, more properly called ningyō jōruri.

Martin Holman, is the coordinator of the Japanese studies program at University of Missouri and the director of the troupe.  He studied Japanese at BYU, and is the first non-Japanese to ever be trained in and perform ningyō jōruri in Japan.

Holman contacted us through our Utah Puppetry website. ” We are, to my knowledge, the only troupe outside Japan that performs traditional Japanese puppetry,” he said.  He wanted to clarify that he was slightly misquoted in the BYU press release.

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Category: puppetry
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Update On My LDS Blog Portal Project, NothingWavering.org

Many of you will remember that about 6 months ago, after getting booted from the most popular LDS Blogs portal, I started a portal for LDS Blogs at NothingWavering.org focusing on more mainstream and orthodox Mormon blogs.

Unexpected changes at my employment, and in our family, prevented me from pursuing further feature developments as I had planned.  But things are finally moving along now.

With Nothing Wavering I always wanted to attempt more transparency and community feedback than is available at most other LDS blog portals.  Finally, I am pleased to announce the new Nothing Wavering Blog where you can keep up with new features and blogs being added to the portal, as well as give your feedback.  Please consider subscribing to the blog’s RSS Feed or Email List to to keep up with what is happening with the portal, since I will not be discussing it much here at Sixteen Small Stones.

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A Rough Stone Rolling Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Some fathers get their kids video games for Christmas.  Some get them fancy dolls that blink, and cry, wet their pants, or dance and sing.  Some get iPods, remote control cars, or some other gizmo of instant gratification.

What did this dad get his kids?

A rock tumbler.  That’s right, a rock tumbler:  a motor, a cylindrical container, some grit, some polish, and a bunch of scraggly rocks; four days of tumbling rocks with course grit, fourteen days more with fine grit, and another seven with polish– twenty-five days of waiting for the payoff.  For Christmas, my kids got the gift of patience.

Don’t worry, we got them some instant gratification too.

But Christmas is the celebration of the Rock of our Salvation: Jesus Christ.

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Bush’s Unconstitutional Auto Industry Bailout Using TARP

President Bush announced today that because Congress failed to authorize a bailout of the U.S. auto industry,  by executive order the National Government will be bailing out automobile companies using funds from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) , which was established earlier this year by the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 to bail out failing financial institutions.

This is a unbelievably devastating blow to our constitutional government.

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Category: politics
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Video: How Do Mormons Have Fun Without Drinking Alcohol? Here’s How.

When people think of Mormons, one of the few things they often know is that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints abstain from alcoholic drinks.  I’ve known a few people who seem to think that you can’t have fun without a little help from the bottle, and for them the idea of an alcohol-free Mormon party sounds really boring.  And depending on what they look for in a party, perhaps they are right.  Bill Cosby has a few words for those in that camp.

After Thanksgiving, my uncle, cousin, brother-in-law, brother, and various other Wilson friends and family came over to my parents home for a spontaneous jam session.  We had a blast laughing and dancing and suggesting new songs.  So I wanted to share our Good Ol’ Clean Mormon Family Fun with the rest of you.  Here they are with a spontaneous, improvised rendition of Sing Sing Sing (with a swing):


[Watch The Video on Google Video]

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