(I’d originally intended to title this post “My wife went to the Rally To Restore Sanity/Fear, and All I Got Was a Bunch of Pictures,” but I realized I was already far too tired of that particular trope ( Read more... )

You may have seen this rather curious-and twisted-interpretation of American history:

( Cut for hilarious pictures-some of them intentionally so… )

I owe cutiepi314 thanks for suggesting that I update the Idiotic Table of the Conservatives. The original dates back to a few months after the 2004 presidential election, and with all the fresh, new crazies that have slithered into prominence since then, it really needed a good overhaul.


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An unexpected bonus of subscribing to The Economist is receiving the yearly Pocket World in Figures almanac. Okay, it was only unexpected the first year; we've come to look forward to it. I derive a surprising amount of enjoyment from thumbing through the guide and testing my predictions about how the USA and other countries compare. Sometimes I ( Read more... )

It's amazing how a trivial, chance event can amplify itself, over the course of years, in the collective conscience of a group of loved ones until it becomes an integral part of the language.

Sometime in the early 1990s, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a collection of children's drawings of favorite recipes. The idea, apparently, was to sketch a well- ( Read more... )

I enjoy teaching, but damn, am I busy. Case in point: I just now scraped together enough time away from work to write about the inauguration ( Read more... )

Here we go again with yet another Holiday Letter™ preview. We have here is the unedited version: what we will circulate officially will be about 25% shorter. Have to let this stew for a day or two and then snip out the least interesting bits. I'm quite proud of how restrained I was with crowing about the election ( Read more... )

I occasionally heard it said, when I was a kid growing up in the Happy Valley, that eastern Idaho could out-Utah Utah. Indeed, the prevalence of Mormons along the I-15 corridor in Idaho handily outweighs that of Salt Lake City or Ogden, and BYU Idaho (formerly the two-year Ricks College) overlooks the heart of Happy Valley North, in Rexburg, ID. ( Read more... )

Three cheers and congratulations to this guy here:


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I'd been toying with the idea of contributing to the campaign against California's Proposition 8 for some time now. What finally spurred me into action was this article from the Sacramento Bee (thanks to cutiepi314 for pointing it out). I promptly donated $50 to No on Proposition 8, on behalf of Orson Scott Card, leading spokesbigot for the Mormon Church's ( Read more... )