Let's face it: the internet has us all freaked out.  It's 1439 all over again--maybe more like 1450--and this Gutenberg dude has just revolutionized the way information is disseminated and all we know for sure is that those monks who make a living doing awesome illustrated manuscripts are probably all going to be out of jobs. More...

I don't know if you heard, but on Monday, the San Francisco Giants won the World Series.  I know what you're thinking. "Holy Schmikes, he's going to post about baseball.  Again.  What is his deal?"  Or, if you're from Utah, "What is his dill."

But. Okay.  Here's the thing.  I know that it's ridiculous, to spend so much time and energy cheering for a professional sports team.  Like they care, these preposterously well-compensated, hopelessly overprivileged mesomorphs whose main skill in life involves being able to toss a ball in a hoop, run really fast with an oddly shaped inflated pigskin, or hit a small ball with a stick.To what end, this emotional investment, this misplaced passion, this obsession with arcane statistics and obscure strategies?  Dude, grow up. More...

I don't know about your face-to-face writing group, but mine is the coolest. Cooler than yours, I'm dead certain. First, we meet in a small café, which, admittedly, is trés ordinaire, but our café is in the Super Target on Highway 66 in Rowlett, Texas, a place you've never even been. We have our own mascot, a certain red soda machine that growls like crazy if our prose stinks, which it only does at first, before its critiqued. Because after it is workshopped, by jinkies, our writing sings and that machine purrs. More...

I still remember the first time I heard "One Bad Apple" by the Osmonds on Casey Kasem's American Top 40. I think it was fall, 1971, and I was doing some 6th grade homework on a Sunday night. I caught myself singing along with Donny, "Oh, I don't care what they say, I don't care what you heard." Someone at church had mentioned them to me, calling them the Mormon Jackson Five. But when my non-member friend Bill Scarbrough, and my most influential music critic, refused to listen to their songs on the radio, I was swayed by his opinion. More...

Lest we forget the many sacrifices of certain of our Mormon artistic forebear(er?)s during the 1970s who pushed the envelope of gospel creativity, I now take a moment to honor them and their efforts. Yes, I'm talking about Mormon clowns, mimes and puppeteers, those unsung gospel arts pioneers who fascinated and inspired thousands of Latter-day Saints during this decade. More...

In baseball, it's possible for a pitcher to achieve perfection.  A perfect game is one in which no batters are allowed to reach base, either via error, walk, or basehit. Every single batter is retired: twenty seven up and twenty seven down.  Perfect games are very rare at the major league level, with only twenty since major league baseball began its record-keeping.  And yet, there have been, improbably, three so far this season.  (Bear with me on this: a relevance to Mormon literature may yet emerge.)

The first took place on May 9, pitched by Oakland A's lefthander, Dallas Braden.  When scouts talk about young pitchers, they differentiate between 'stuff' and 'command.'  'Stuff' refers to raw talent--how fast can this young man throw the ball, with what kind of diabolical movement.  'Command' refers to control.  A pitcher with good stuff and poor command may be able to throw the ball 98 miles per hour, but with little idea where it's going, for example. Dallas Braden epitomizes a pitcher with mediocre stuff but superior command.  His fastball tops out at 85 mph, but it  goes exactly where he wants it to go, and he changes speeds admirably.  He's otherwise known as a fun-loving and admirable young man--still trying to solidify his position as a big leaguer, but a guy who's known for running out on the field during rain delays and sliding on his belly on the wet grass.  May 9 was Mother's Day, and it turns out Braden's own mother passed away when he was a senior in high school.  He dedicates all his games to her, offering a little prayer at game's end. More...

I've always found certain figures of speech involving language and texts interesting. We have "food for thought," a phrase that goes beyond it's mere equivalence to "thought provoking," raising the reading experience to a taste sensation. We refer to "a consuming read," suggesting that the book itself is eating us, the reader, or that we are at least caught in its jaws and can't be extricated. And there is the "omnivorous reader," someone with a voracious intellectual appetite that knows no limitations.

Of course eating as figurative speech is not limited to texts, no doubt due to the universality, necessity and pleasure of eating as a human activity. Among others, people "bite off more than they can chew" and bad experiences "leave a sour taste in your mouth." And who hasn't been told by someone that they intend to make you "eat your words?" An odd phrase, but what better way to visualize taking back something you've said, the very sounds that come out of your mouth, if not by eating and swallowing your own words?  As a book lover, I've wondered why reading is never used figuratively with food. "Oh man, this Hollandaise sauce is so Nabokovian--it would make even sewage taste good!" Or, "Mmm mm, this Étouffée is as complex and tasty as a Henry James sentence."

There are at least five circumstances, however, in which "food for thought" may go beyond mere metaphor or simile. More...

A few years ago, when my oldest daughter was in fifth grade, she asked us one day if we wanted to see her school play.  She didn't seem very excited about it; kept saying things like "you don't have to if you don't want to," and "honestly, it isn't very good," but we wanted to support her and so we went.  This 'play' was called, if memory serves, Tommy the Traffic Sign.  My daughter played a yield sign. None of the kids had any lines or anything--they lip synced to a pre-recorded sound track, and from time to time would hold up a traffic sign. We parents didn't even have to provide the signs--apparently, the school bought some kind of do-it-yourself kit from some company that did this. The theatre version of paint-by-numbers.  No harm, no fuss, no sacrifice.  And absolutely no fun at all, for anyone.

I was so horrified by the whole thing, I went to the principal and offered to direct a play of her choosing the next year.  More...

To date, no one has adequately explored spittle and spitting in the Mormon experience. This blog post is intended as an introduction to this studiously neglected topic and an invitation to the further exploration of it. More...

There's a musical playing right now at BYU that I'm not going to see.  Casey at the Bat it's called, and already I'm cranky.  I'm on the committee that decides these things--I've read the script.  That's why I'm boycotting it.  It's not just a bad book for a mediocre musical.  Lots of musicals have bad books--'book' means 'script' in musicalese--including some really popular ones.  My favorite is the Elton John Aida.  Okay, at the end of the musical, Radames, the Egyptian prince, and Aida, the Nubian princess/slave he's fallen in love with are running from the cops/Egyptian army.  There's this bridge.  If they cross the bridge, they're safe.  If they don't cross the bridge, they'll be captured and tortured to death.  They stand on the bridge.  They sing a very long love duet, which goes on long enough for the cops/Egyptian army to catch up with them.  Honestly, I'm not kidding, that's what happens. They sing and sing and sing and get their silly butts caught. Apparently, it never occurs to them to sing once they're across the bridge; nope, that song's gotta get sung right that very second.  I laughed out loud in the theater, earning the eternal enmity of many many weeping coeds.  When they die together--tragically, so tragically--I kept thinking about the Darwin awards, how killing these two dunces just improved the gene pool something considerable.  I mean, that's bad writing. Right?  Well, Casey at the Bat is worse than that. More...