I am so tired of this crap from Facebook.

Hitler's Jewish purge was not some sort of aberration, but a natural outgrowth of century after century of anti-Jewish bigotry, and this bigotry still exists. This is partially why I made a conscious decision to like and trust the Israeli girl at the mall and let her sell me those skin care products I couldn't really afford. Since Jews have been stereotyped by "Christians" as sleazy, cunning money-grubbers for so long, I chose to believe that she wasn't ripping me off and really would take me to the movies as promised. Someone told me a week later that she was probably long gone by now, so I went back to verify that she was still there, and she was, so my trust hasn't been shattered yet. Anyway... that isn't the worst of Facebook's stupidity.

It really disturbs me when pornographers make a big deal about having models as young as they're legally allowed to be. I get the impression that they would use 15 year olds in a heartbeat if they could. Anyway, trained orangutans could literally do a better job than this at policing Facebook's "Community Standards". They could be trained to recognize the shapes of the letters in certain words indicating red flags, which is obviously more than Facebook's staff is capable of. Whatever they're being paid is too much.

It's heartwarming to see the faith, goodness, etcetera of the old people at the old people place in spite of their deteriorating bodies and/or minds. One old man named Norm stands out in this regard as he joins us in singing the hymns, even though he can't stand up without swaying around like a bobblehead, his voice is so weak as to be barely audible most of the time, and he has great difficulty even turning the pages of the book. I like his attitude about life too. Last week someone told him "Have a good day" and he responded, "It's a good day when I wake up. If I wake up."

Having said that, I never, ever, ever want to be that old and frail myself, as it's probably a hundred times less fun to live through than to witness. I hope I die before then.

About three years ago I met this lady who I shall call "Janet" in an institute class and for whatever reason, she remembered me and always said hi from then on even though we never really talked or became close. This wouldn't have been a problem except that she was married and I was aware that I had in times past flirted with female friends without even realizing it, even when I wasn't actually interested, and I became super paranoid about that happening if I interacted with her too much, so I just felt super awkward every time and I think she thinks I'm "special" and she isn't really wrong. We never went beyond saying hi except for once when she was trying to use a computer terminal at the campus library and her baby was crying so I went over and made faces to calm her (the baby) down, and one time when she forgot to lock her front door so she asked me to go do it and let myself out the back since I lived close by. It took her like five minutes to ask because she kept oscillating between her worry about someone breaking into the house and her worry about inconveniencing me.

One time a year or two later my ward was gathered at the church building near my house to carpool to a home evening activity, and being Mormons, of course, they were still gathered there twenty minutes after we were supposed to have left. I got frustrated and bored and didn't want to socialize like everyone else was doing so I wandered away to the other side of the building. Across the street, Janet was out with her toddler and newer baby playing hopscotch and eating popcorn and, seeing that I was all alone with no family and no home evening, invited me to join them. So I played hopscotch for a minute, feeling awkward all the while, and then her husband appeared in the doorway. A look of murderous rage came over his face. He stormed out, down the driveway, toward the sidewalk, past me, and moved the baby a little further from the road, and then turned and went back into the house without saying a word. I decided it was a good time to go rejoin my ward.

Afterward I told myself that the look of murderous rage on his face must have been my imagination, driven by paranoia, because I hadn't been doing anything wrong and had never done anything wrong. I was just paranoid and everything was fine. But the next time I saw her she said, "Sorry my husband wasn't very nice. He thought I was flirting." Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because I saw them at Summerfest last night and accidentally made eye contact with him through some bushes as I walked past and slipped away into the crowd, and from what I could see through the bushes I felt like I should probably stay hidden. Predominantly, though, while I was scared the first time, this time I just felt like laughing. Maybe that makes me a bad person but, setting aside the fact that I've never done anything,  he must be the most insecure person in the world if he feels threatened by me.

Last week I mentioned Elder Glenn L. Pace's book "Safe Journey: An African Adventure" and his struggle to gain government approval for the temple in Ghana, and since it's such a good book I'm going to lift from it again. During this time period he also got church approval for the temple in Nigeria, albeit this was a much easier and less frustrating process. Church leadership hesitated to announce one because of the instability in the country. When he returned to Utah for General Conference in April 2000, they asked him about conditions and he responded:

"We just had riots in the north over the passing of Sharia law, and several hundred Christians were killed. In retaliation, several hundred Muslims were killed in the south, including many right in Aba where the temple site is located. In the delta region, where the oil fields are located, many hundreds of people have been killed. Whole villages have been burned from explosions caused by sabotage of oil lines. Oil executives are being kidnapped and held for ransom. In Lagos there have been serious riots in the streets. Vigilante groups are springing up all over the country - and they are recognized, condoned, and even encouraged by the police and military. In summary, things are better than they have been in thirty years." I just have always wanted to share that quote. More seriously he continued, "Brethren, if we wait for Nigeria to be stable before we build a temple, we might as well forget it. I feel we have to move forward and support the people. I understand your apprehension. However, if I remember right, there was a lot of instability in Nauvoo when we built that temple."

President Hinckley announced that temple at the end of conference a couple days later. The moral of this story, in case you didn't catch it, is that sometimes you just have to go ahead and do something and not wait to be ready for it because you never will be.

The choice paralysis described by Aziz Ansari in "Modern Romance" and mentioned here extends beyond marriage to several other aspects of life. For example, I have over three months' worth of music on the hard drive from my busted laptop, so when recently I was able to remove said hard drive and put it in an enclosure, I was faced with a real dilemma of which song to listen to first. (My life is horrible.) The winner ended up being "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" by Norah Jones, which was a free iTunes download in December 2012. There's a lot of legally free stuff available if you know where to look. The reason I accumulated so much music was that after the first time I had a laptop fry, and was without it for so long, I realized that was what I missed most of all. And as Aspies are prone to do with this or that, I developed an obsession with it. I became at least as fixated with accumulating music as with actually listening to it. I developed a mindset that I was moving toward a goal of "completeness" in my collection, which of course was nonsense given the sheer volume (pun intended) of music in the world.

Of course I was already aware that I needed to re-balance my priorities and not spend so much time accumulating more, but being without a laptop again helped me to accomplish that more quickly. Now, with over three months' worth of music suddenly available at once instead of gradually, the thrill of accumulation is there again and I don't feel compelled to keep doing it so much. Of course I still have the list of albums that I intend to get someday, and tracking down obscure and out of print things on the Internet is still an adventure, but I'm doing it over a longer timeframe and not devoting so much time to it all at once. Listening to music, on the other hand, is good but not inherently productive, so the idea is to write stuff while doing so (like right now, for example). What I like most of all is to shuffle all three months plus of music at the same time. Then I never know what will come up and it removes the problem of choice paralysis or bias. When I first heard the concept of a "playlist" after getting my first mp3 player about ten years ago, I thought it was weird. Why limit yourself instead of playing it all?

Now, continuing on with another alien invasion song, this one from UFO Phil, a strange individual "who has made a name for himself through appearances on national radio programs, television, films, and internet videos speaking on the subject of extraterrestrials and the paranormal. Whether Phil Hill is an actual believer in the paranormal or is engaging in a kind of performance art is the subject of some debate." (Wikipedia)

These are from my recently concluded Creative Non-Fiction Writing class. Long after this post has faded into the mists of time, they will still also be readily accessible from the Essays page. The professor, who is a published creative non-fiction author and whose job it is to know about this stuff, likes them, so if you don't, you're wrong.

Ass Burgers

In Defense of Pickup Lines

Chasing Kelsey

Also, though my novel "Space Girls" has not been published and won't be until at least 2020, it has already garnered blurbs from several people.

I have been most negligent in failing to mention the great act of kindness that was performed for me a few weeks ago when, after waiting at a red light, I rode my bike into a crosswalk and one of the pedals immediately popped off. As I swore and hastily retreated back to the sidewalk, a ginger-bearded guy named Zack pulled up with his wife Katie or Kathy and baby whose name I forget (Luke maybe?) and offered to give me and the bike a ride home. Almost immediately, however, he thought better of that idea and decided they should take me to his friend's bike shop to get it fixed instead. I accepted because I was broke and figured he would be blessed for his generosity. Out of consideration I just took an old pedal that doesn't match the other one at all, instead of a new set, and now whenever I see it I will remember what a great guy Zack is.

​On Memorial Day, I was looking for a copy of "A Giraffe and a Half" by Shel Silverstein, which is not to be found at the library or at Hasting's. I got desperate enough to try "Fun Unlimited" at the mall, which didn't have it either, and on my way out I was intercepted by a girl visiting from Israel to sell skin care products from the Dead Sea. "You there, may I have a few moments of your time?" she called out. "Are you married? You have girlfriend? Of course, you have seven girlfriends, one for each day of the week, yes?" Her warm demeanor and smooth sales tactics, in conjunction with her ethnicity and broken English that made me extra cautious to not accidentally be racist, kept me riveted, grinning like an idiot as she held my arm and rubbed it with this stuff, even as I realized that it was way too expensive for me at this time.

She twisted my arm by offering a huge time-sensitive discount. I didn't believe for a moment that this was exclusive for me and needed to be kept a secret, of course, but still... I don't worry much about my appearance, but her description of what this would do to my skin sounded exquisite... Another determining factor was her promise that if I bought it she would take me to two movies. I realized then that there were two branching paths available, and one involved gaining a new friend from another country, culture and religion, and the other involved never seeing her again, and the former would hopefully be worth [redacted] dollars. So with any luck, I just bought a friend. She has my number and if she doesn't keep her commitment, I know where she works.

So that's how I ended up with less than fifteen dollars to live off of for two weeks. Fortunately I've had plenty of practice at that sort of thing.

That evening I found out there's an Australian person in the ward combined with my ward, and I would have met her a lot sooner if I were attending my ward, but life is full of trade offs like that. I thought at first that she was British, which would have lent an amusing irony to the American flag she made for Memorial Day out of marshmallows, grapes, and blueberries. Since she's from a white English-speaking country (sort of; see below), I allowed myself to be sort of racist and listen to her talk just because of her accent, and I decided that asking a ton of questions about the accuracy of Australian stereotypes was worth the risk of annoying her and ruining a potential friendship. There was no need to worry, though, because when I decided that enough was enough, she said "Come on, what else you got?" So I asked her if she could arrange to teach us all Strine. And that was shamelessly disingenuous, since mainly I wanted to show off how much I already know from David Morgan-Mar's podcast interview with Professor Jack Bandicoot, head of the Department of Australian English at the University of Sydney.

DMM: No doubt you are aware of the fact that many people around the globe regard the Australian dialect as being
so full of peculiarities as to be almost opaque to comprehension.
Prof. Bandicoot: Indeed, yes.
DMM: As an expert in the subject, is there any truth to this reputation?
Prof. Bandicoot: No, it's a complete furphy.
DMM: So as a country, what can we do about it? Should we just cop it sweet?
Prof. Bandicoot: No, bugger that for a joke. We can't have mug lairs telling porkies about us like that. I mean, fair crack of the whip!

This is my second favorite scene/song from "The Wedding Singer" (my first favorite is not appropriate to share with a family audience). I think the fat man looks like Paul McCartney. Am I the only one who thinks that? Also, whoever did the Spanish subtitles took some creative liberties with the refrain.

"Some of them may even display selective mutism, speaking not at all to most people and excessively to specific people. Some may choose only to talk to people they like." - from Wikipedia's article on Asperger syndrome. As I look at it in isolation just now I realize that "excessively" is a very biased and subjective term that probably shouldn't be in a Wikipedia article. But the reason I copy-pasted it in the first place is that I find it amusing. Do normal, sorry, "neurotypical" people regularly choose to talk to people they don't like? How dumb.

What a strange feeling it is when an old Facebook status about your crush is liked by a total stranger who upon investigation turns out to be your crush's mother, though at first you think it's her sister because she looks twenty years younger than she must be. Yes, what a strange feeling, especially when you weren't aware that your crush's mother even knew that you existed because you didn't know that your crush had ever mentioned you to her family because you thought you were out of sight, out of mind. But what a good feeling it is when you realize that you had nothing to hide, except for that one status that she liked, but nothing "bad". Yes, perhaps you would want to hide some of these things if you had any shame, but you don't, which is why your profile is on its most public setting.

By "you" I mean "me" and the rest is pretty much literal. This actually happened a month or so ago, but I didn't know whether it was prudent to mention or not, but now I think it's okay. I told a couple people, and I asked Marie, and I asked if I should message her, and Marie was like "No, that would be weird", so I didn't, but then I decided to do it anyway because I have decided that as long as my behavior is respectful I shouldn't have to be dictated by society's arbitrary whims of whether or not it's "weird".

So that was a good feeling. A slightly more disturbing one is when strangers are arguing with me and feel the need to look at my profile and then bring it up. (Ex. Mike Poole from last week, "It's ok, I'm sure the leadership will give you bonus missionary points for having a Jesus cover photo.") Why are they so obsessed with me? I couldn't care less what's on their profiles.

Grammatical note: "I couldn't care less" is the proper term. "I could care less" makes no sense at all in the contexts where it's used, which people would realize if they thought about what they were saying for two seconds instead of just running on autopilot.

Facebook's reporting system is really a piece of work, isn't it? I wonder about the logic behind it. (All of the following are based on real instances.)

Mook 1: Oh dear, someone has reported a meme of a woman with tape over her mouth that says "Don't wrap it and tap it, tape her and rape her". How should we handle this?
Mook 2: Mmm, well, I myself do not for a moment share the viewpoint expressed in this image, but we can't just go around censoring everything we disagree with. After all, America was founded on the free exchange of ideas.
Mook 1: Right then. It stays up.
Mook 2: Here's another one. It's a meme of a nuclear explosion that says "Some cancers need radiation treatment. Islam is one of them."
Mook 1: Ooh, tough call. Some of my best friends are Muslims. But, you know, maybe they just meant that sometimes Muslims get cancer and they need radiation treatment, and then they did a Google search for "radiation" and grabbed the first picture they found even though it doesn't really match.
Mook 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Not our place to judge others' mistakes. It stays up.
Mook 1: Let's see here, what else do we - SWEET JUDAS PRIEST, IT'S A PICTURE OF A  MOTHER BREASTFEEDING AN INFANT. AAAAAAH!
Mook 2: AAAAAAAH! TAKE IT DOWN TAKE IT DOWN TAKE IT DOWN! I'D DO IT MYSELF BUT I'M BUSY BLEACHING MY EYES!

You're supposed to be able to appeal the decision or whatever, and sometimes that accomplishes nothing but sometimes it does. One time I reported a blatantly pornographic page, they said it didn't violate their community standards, I politely asked if they were retarded, and then they took it down. I suspect that no one actually, you know, looked at it the first time. Or read what it was called.

I thought this was amusing, especially the bit about Planned Parenthood.

Christmas was good. The highlight was receiving another crocheted R2-D2 hat from my sister to replace the one she gave me last year that got stolen (at church no less). This one fits better anyway.

Another highlight was what I discovering on my grandparents' bookshelf in the basement, which I have looked over many times but obviously not paid close enough attention to. My grandfather pointed out a picture of him with his parents and sister when he was four or so, and though I had seen it many times, this time I noticed partially obscured behind it not one, not two, not three, but four books by Mary Frances Sturlaugson Eyer, the first black sister missionary, who was once a celebrity among Mormons but has since faded into obscurity for whatever reason. Since I am enthralled with this kind of topic this was a veritable treasure trove. These were evidently owned by my great-grandmother, Geraldine Jensen, and three of them were autographed.

On a related note, I recently recently added in its entirety this story that has also faded into obscurity for some reason even though it deserves to be famous.

​Because we live in a cruel and horrible world, wonderful luck sometimes happens to the wicked and undeserving, and so it was that on Monday I won two tickets to see "The Force Awakens" from Kool 103.9's contest. I was so happy that for a while all I could do was walk around the house clapping my hands like one of those toy monkeys with cymbals. The tickets were for the next day. So you see, I do not regret my decision to wait for a while because free tickets that aren't for opening night are better than opening night tickets that aren't free. To enter the contest all one had to do was comment on their Facebook page that one wanted tickets, and I made a point of asking very politely and deferentially, so I don't know if I was chosen randomly or if that had something to do with it.

Pros:
The movie was hilarious
The pacing, action etc. was exciting and superior to that of the prequels
The special effects were very good and superior to those of the prequels
Kylo Ren was a unique villain and not merely a Darth Vader clone

Cons:
It felt more like "Guardians of the Galaxy" than a Star Wars movie (largely because it was so hilarious)
Except for Chewbacca, there were no familiar aliens until near the end (would it have killed them to add a few Rodians and Twi'leks?)
Much of the plot was clearly a reboot of the first film
I felt like too much of what happened between "Return of the Jedi" and this one was left unexplained (why, for example, are the New Republic and the Resistance two separate entities and what is the relationship between then?)

I wonder how long I have to wait before I can comment on the major earth-shattering spoilers without being a waste of skin who doesn't deserve to live.

​On the whole, I considered it worth watching, though it wasn't quite what I expected from Disney. I thought it would be something more like this.

Now that Christmas is over and everyone else will have forgotten about it, I am taking the opportunity to post this video which remains as applicable as ever. I happen to particularly like this one. Sometimes I find them hokey because I'm cynical and I can't help it, but I like the artistry and the discount Morgan Freeman narrator voice.

I suppose this is probably my last post of 2015. Pity it's nothing spectacular, but then I suppose most of them aren't anyway. Not fishing for compliments, but I'll take them if you have any to give...