Mowing the Lawn

Lately, I find myself reciting in my mind portions of The Living Christ: The Testimony of the Apostles . I memorized it years ago when our family was studying it at Easter. It has been a constant source of strength and perspective in my life. For all the scripture and sermon that exists about Jesus Christ, I’m not sure there is a more succinct and beautiful treatment of who he is and why it matters. There is one passage that repeats D&C 76. Referring to Jesus Christ, the Prophet Joseph wrote, “We saw him, even on the right hand of God; and we heard the voice bearing record that he is the Only Begotten of the Father— That by him, and through him, and of him, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.” ( D&C 76: 23-24 ) I find in these truths evidence of Jesus Christ’s sweeping love and grace. Because of the universal atonement of Jesus Christ, he brings every inhabitant of every world he has ever created back into t...

Is news really so hard to come by that people are talking about Mitt Romney using the word "zany" to describe Newt Gingrich?  You'd think Mitt Romney was caught on tape spouting an expletive while smoking a cigarette made by illegal immigrants. What's next? A flibbertigibbet? A will-o'-the-wisp? A clown? Apparently, the "z" word is strictly off limits in political discourse and worth devoted coverage when it breaks the lips of a politician.  The Los Angeles Times noted that Romney "lobbed some rhetorical grenades" by using the word.  "With lines like this, just think about what Mitt Romney has saved for Thursday night's debate." The Daily Mail called the comment Romney's "most personal assault yet on Newt Gingrich." ABC News characterized Romney's new word as "the latest in a string of attacks" and Ed Rogers, who writes as one of "The Insiders" for the Washington Post, reasons ...

A comment I hear every now and again is that no one responsible for the collapse of our economy or the mortgage crisis at its center has ever been held responsible.  I have a few problems with that statement. First, who deserves the blame?  I'm not informed enough to know precisely who is responsible.  I suspect blame can be shared far and wide from the bankers and investors who concocted shaky financial instruments to  ratings agencies to regulators to the parties taking out mortgages they couldn't afford.  Did I leave anyone out? Second, it isn't true that no one has been held responsible.  There have been at least three criminal cases and a handful of civil cases brought against various individuals and institutions.  Still, in an environment where so many people are out of work with little prospect of finding sustainable employment, it is hard to feel like justice has been done when you compare the relatively few fines to the billions of dollar...

miscellanea |ˌmisəˈlānēə| plural noun miscellaneous items, esp. literary compositions, that have been collected together. ❖ ❖ ❖ I'm not sure which is better: the title of the book ( "Fiction Ruined My Family" ) or the title of the book review ("Mom’s a Drunk, Dad’s a Writer: A Recipe for Disaster and a Memoir"). Memoirists impress me.  (And I'm lucky to be married to one .) It seems like an impossible feat to pull off a memoir.  First, you have to have lived an interesting life.  Second, you have to be talented enough to write about it.  Here's an excerpt where the author describes the affects of living with a father who insisted on high standards for language: I was under the impression clichés could ruin you, ruin your life, your hopes and dreams, bring down your whole operation if you didn’t watch it. They were gateway language, leading straight to a business major, a golfy marriage, needlepoint pillows that said things about your golf ...

Did you happen to see this picture of the southern rock band Jeff the Brotherhood? That's Jamin on the left.  He's sporting a $1500 shirt and $1300 pants.  The cheapskate on the right is Jake whose $1400 shirt needs to be a little longer so I don't have to see his $830 pants.  Personally, if I had that kind of money to spend (and already had a wave runner), I'd get me some of Jake's hairdo. ❖ ❖ ❖ Did you happen to read the Sherlock Holmes mystery " The Adventure of the Speckled Band "?  If so, did you happen to laugh as I did when you came across this passage: "I should  be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket....  That and a tooth-brush are, I think, all that we need." I've been trying to come up with a way to slip those sentences into casual conversation. ❖ ❖ ❖ Did you happen to read or hear about the book " Lost in Transition " in which Notre Dame professor Christian Smith sh...

Here's a collection of things that have caught my attention lately. The Dangers of Time Travel Apparently, when the Chinese authorities aren't busy funding our national debt, they're busy policing the television airwaves for unhealthy programming.  The latest danger to the Chinese population:  time travel. In "Palace", a woman travels back in time and falls in love with Qing Dynasty princes. According to the Chinese government, television shows that depict time travel "lack positive thoughts and meaning."  The broadcasting guidelines discourage these shows, pointing out that they often "casually make up myths, have monstrous and weird plots, [and] use absurd tactics."  In other words, they are too much like The Disney Channel. Personally, I think the Chinese are still mad that Bill and Ted chose to travel back in time to capture "the very excellent barbarian" Genghis Khan—the "dude who 700 years ago totally ravaged Ch...

The latest hidden camera exposé by a conservative crusader finds a senior NPR fundraiser saying NPR would be better off without Federal funding while disparaging Republicans and the Tea Party movement.  Combined with NPR's  firing of Juan Williams for honest but impolitic comments made on Fox News, the recent events have become the perfect fodder for the vocal chorus of NPR haters who want to see Congress cut off funding for NPR by eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The argument is simple.  NPR is a biased, left-wing media outlet subsidized by taxpayer money it doesn't deserve. The argument is also wrong. Does NPR have a liberal bias?  Speaking as someone with a conservative bias, I think they do.  So do some people working at NPR, though they might prefer the term "sensibility" instead.  But so what?  Everyone has a bias toward issues they feel are important and the things they care about.  And organizations...

A popular refrain in the ongoing debate about the cost of health care in the United States accuses health insurers of making record profits at the public's expense. During a press conference last year, President Obama put it this way: "There have been reports just over the last couple of days of insurance companies making record profits, right now. At a time when everybody's getting hammered, they're making record profits, and premiums are going up." The inaccuracy of that statement is pretty easy to prove, but let's take it at face value for now and agree with the assertion that record profits are a bad thing, especially when the customers who fund those profits are hurting economically. (Let's also agree that President Obama doesn't really think we're all staggering around drunk when he says "everybody's getting hammered".) What then should we make of the fact that the Federal Reserve just announced record profits of $47.4 bi...

Too often I find reporters trying to strike a balance in their reporting by publishing comments that have little news value.  For example, take the following quote from an article in the New York Times about possible Republican health care proposals .  The comment seems to have little to no news value and sullies an otherwise useful article about the types of proposals that might become part of bipartisan health care reform: Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said, “If the Republicans’ health care plan was a plan for a fire department, they would rush into a burning building, and they would rush out and leave everybody behind.” The statement is inflammatory.  It is contradicted by the article.  It does not benefit the national discussion on healthcare.  It allows partisans a cute sound bite for avoiding the debate about whether our nation should invest in sweeping changes, incremental improvements or more of the same.  Surely there is at least one Democrat who can p...

The Democratic leadership in the Senate unveiled their health care bill on Wednesday: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  With a name like that, what's not to like.  Who doesn't want to protect patients?  Who doesn't want affordable care? In my quest to know more about the bill, I'm steering clear of the radio, TV and blogs.  Tomorrow morning will find my radio fixed firmly on the sports talk stations.  I'm not quite ready to be inundated by punditry from the left and right.   Still, I want to know what the bill contains.  Until about an hour ago, everything I knew about the bill I had learned from NPR.  It will reduce the deficit by $130 billion.  It is 2000 pages long.  There aren't enough votes yet (60) to bring it up for debate.  I needed more, so I turned to the New York Times for an (unhelpful) overview and have been perusing the analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Here's what gets me after a quick read.   The headlines a...

It's just my luck that I would pick tomorrow, the day the earth is going to implode, to take my first real vacation in who knows how long. Check out the headlines. Fingers Crossed, Physicists Are Ready for Collider to Roll Worst Case: Collider Spawns Planet-Devouring Black Hole Researchers Set To Recreate Big Bang Scientists hope to find 'God particle' in mini Big Bang Will the Large Hadron Collider Destroy Earth? Scientists hope for surprises in Big Bang experiment They're doing WHAT! Anytime the world's top physicists feel the need to collectively cross their fingers, I start to get worried. What has physicists going to these extraordinary measures? At roughly 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, say they will try to send the first beam of protons around a 17-mile-long racetrack known as the Large Hadron Collider, 300 feet underneath the Swiss-French border outside Geneva. ( more ) The point of this 14 year...

I was looking forward to reading Senator Obama's acceptance speech at the covention on Thursday night. I made a conscious decision not to watch the speech because I didn't want to be distracted by the pomp and spectacle. Thelma was watching it when I got home from work, though, so I decided to stick with it. I haven't gone back to look at the transcript yet. My immediate impressions after watching it? I felt like I was watching multiple people. On the negative side, there was the doom and gloom Obama predicting the end of the American dream if he wasn't elected. There was the ridiculous Obama insisting his candidacy is somehow a selfless act. There was the naive or disingenuous Obama claiming he could somehow pay for his giveaways by pruning government. On the other hand, there was the Obama who argued for more personal responsibility. There was the aggressive Obama willing to challenge his critics directly. There was the ambitious Obama declaring that we coul...

I'm tired of negative politicians telling me that life in America is on the brink of disaster, that no one in the world likes us, that the only hope for America is to elect some politician who can make everything better. Senator Biden's speach to the Democratic convention is just the latest example. "We learned [from our parents] the dignity of work, and we were told that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough. That was America's promise.... but today, today that American dream feels like it's slowly slipping away. I don't have to tell you that. You feel it every single day in your own lives." What a bunch of empty words. The problem is not the American dream. The problem is the American dreamers. Too many of us aren't willing to "try hard enough." It isn't sufficient for us to just "make it". We want more than we've earned so we go into debt to finance our purchases or vacations. And because we aren't wil...

I found myself pleasantly unmoved by Barack Obama's announcement that he has chosen Joe Biden as his running mate. I'm not sure Obama could have selected anyone in serious contention that would have made me more inclined to vote for him in the Fall. In picking Biden, though, he selected someone who is clearly experienced in foreign policy and generally even-handed. Both are important considerations for me. When we lived in Connecticut I used to listen to Imus in the Morning out of New York City. Biden was a frequent guest. He was never too partisan and I generally agreed with his foreign policy assessments. Thelma, Braeden and I watched him campaign (on C-SPAN) during the Iowa caucus season and were impressed on balance by his demeanor and positions. He has a reputation for verbosity and not choosing his words carefully. The Republicans and affiliated pundits will blow all that well out of proportion in the upcoming days. Some of it might stick and some of it should. I...

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported today on a recent survey that found location plays a role in how groceries are priced . The survey was conducted by a group of teenagers who have been meeting once a week this summer to learn "how food relates to race, class and social justice." The students visited grocery stores in the Seattle area and priced a common basket of goods. They found that stores in more affluent neighborhoods charge more money for the same products, even if the stores are part of the same chain. I don't see anything very remarkable in the findings. What does surprise me is the reaction from one of the students conducting the survey. Diana Estrada-Alamo, 16, shops for groceries near her White Center home but buys lunch in the wealthier, less diverse neighborhood around West Seattle High School where she is a student. She assumed there would be some price difference because of the areas' demographics, but was shocked it appeared to be so large. ...

It's interesting to note that the first half of the Book of Mormon ends with a story of pacifism while the second half of the book is dominated by stories of soldier-saints going to war in the name of God. Would a latter-day saint be praised or condemned for choosing pacifism in present circumstances? What if there was a draft? During family home evening last night, each of us took a turn reciting an article of faith of our choice.  For no particular reason, I chose the twelfth article of faith : 12 We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law. For our lesson, Emma had written a play reenacting Daniel's consignment to the lions' den for not obeying the magisterial decree against praying to God.   Was Daniel right or wrong to do what he did? Clearly, he wasn't subjecting himself to the king.  I shouldn't judge Daniel against the standards of a latter-day pronouncement.  Instead, what if I f...

I was struck by the wording of Alma 23:7 while we were reading it in Sunday school a few weeks back. 6 ...as many of the Lamanites as believed in [the preaching of Ammon and his brethren], and were converted unto the Lord, never did fall away. 7 For they became a righteous people; they did lay down the weapons of their rebellion, that they did not fight against God any more, neither against any of their brethren. 13 And these are the names of the cities of the Lamanites which were converted unto the Lord; and these are they that laid down the weapons of their rebellion, yea, all their weapons of war; and they were all Lamanites. What struck me was the description of their weapons. They laid down the "weapons of their rebellion." Rebellion. When you rebel, you act out against an established authority. Against whom were the Lamanites rebelling? They were rebelling against God. The label is both an acknowledgment of God's authority and an acknowledgment that they und...