The latest General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (hereafter never again to be called the LDS Church, the Mormon Church, or any of the less flattering names that internet trolls like to copy-paste in hopes that someone will mistakenly think they're clever) has been, as usual, a much-needed refuge from the stupid crap going on in the world and in my life. Although I've had more trouble than usual sleeping lately and especially last night, and was only semi-conscious for today's sessions, it was still a calming and uplifting and faith-building experience. I believe so strongly in this church and its mission and feel very blessed to be a part of it. This is my first attempt at writing about General Conference right after it happens instead of a week later, and I'm playing around with the format and trying to do something other than just comment on a bunch of talks that people just watched, so we'll see how it goes. In my preemptive defense let me point out that I'm still only semi-conscious.

I heard the rumor about church changing from three to two hours and thought it was ridiculous. Shows how much I know. Of course, I'm one of those who's excited about it for all the wrong reasons. I'm sort of an elitist jerk whose tendency is to zone out the moment I don't feel intellectually stimulated by what I'm hearing, instead of listening to the Spirit and yadda yadda yadda. And for the past few months I've been going to the family history room during the third hour instead of Elders' Quorum, which I find difficult to sit through. Traditionally I much prefer the mixed groups in sacrament meeting and Sunday school to the monolith of men. Lately I've been better at fostering meaningful platonic relationships with men, but traditionally it's been awkward. Someone helpfully pointed out the issue years ago: "I know you're uncomfortable hanging out with guys because you don't want people to think you're gay, but actually, hanging out with girls all the time is what will make people think that." And I was freaked out at first, but then I realized that if she had actually read my mind, she would have gone mad.

Anyway. The proper reason to get excited about two-hour church is that the focus of gospel learning is being shifted more into the home, for me and my two inactive roommates to deal with. I'm glad everyone else in the Church is qualified for these "higher law" changes. I still haven't done anything with "ministering". The monthly visits were out of my comfort zone already, and I got to doing them consistently anyway, and them bam, this more vague mandate that I still have no idea what to do with. I don't have a ton of experience making friends, okay?

I've been grappling lately with the realization that I can't have and don't want a family, and the discomfort that causes me in such a fundamentally family-centric religion. From my vantage point it looks more often than not as though God built me to be incompatible with His plan for ostensibly the entire human race. And I'm positive that not one person in the church's leadership understands my unique challenges. I don't think there ever has been or ever will be an Aspie ace Apostle. May people throughout the world could undoubtedly say the same about the things they're dealing with. So naturally, I zone out whenever conference talks are about marriage or raising children. But... I feel encouraged in my personal relationship with God, and encouraged that He does understand and care. And that's enough for now. I must say the positives of my membership in this church and my testimony of most of its teachings far outweigh the discomfort, or of course I wouldn't still be here. I hope my experience is comforting to some who deal with similar awkwardness.

Another talk about forgiveness. I'm not a forgiving person. How can I forgive someone who inflicted damage on me that I will have to deal with until I die? I'm not that humble or that strong. I hope they talk about forgiveness again for at least the next twenty years so I'll have a chance to get it right.

I've developed sort of an unhealthy obsession with diversity, and get an extra thrill when anyone who isn't white and/or American speaks. Don't get me wrong, most of my best friends are white and/or American, but the diversity of God's garden - and I hate myself for being so sappy, but honestly - is such a breath of fresh air. The Deseret News ran an article last week about how the number and percentage of General Authorities from outside the United States have increased in the last forty years. The actual membership as a whole is quite a bit more diverse, but that diversity is of course trickling up at an exponential rate and it's wonderful to see. The more skin colors and nations and walks of life I see represented, the more my heart burns with love for all my brothers and sisters of varying skin colors and nations and walks of life. In the words of the great preacher Emo Philips, "Why be prejudiced against anyone because of their race or nationality or creed... when there are so many real reasons to hate others?" I kid, I kid.

Nonetheless, I love President Russell M. Nelson the most. I never expected him to capture my heart like this when I had little opinion on him prior to his current calling. Maybe it's his sense of humor, maybe it's just an ineffable charisma, maybe it's that he has far more energy than me despite being sixty-nine years older, but I love and sustain him one way or another. It's always easier to follow the prophet when he's already likeable as a person.

And I actually appreciate that he's moved the temple announcements to the end, instead of putting the best part at the beginning and going downhill from there given the pace he's set, I wasn't at all surprised when today he set the new record for most temples to be announced at one time (twelve) despite already announcing seven more six months ago. I'm so happy for myself now getting to look at more dots on a map, and I'm so happy for the Latter-day Saints in and near Mendoza, Argentina; Salvador, Brazil; Yuba City, California; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Praia, Cape Verde; Yigo, Guam; Puebla, Mexico; Auckland, New Zealand; Lagos, Nigeria; Davao, Philippines; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Washington County, Utah; which is less lame than it sounds because it's outside the Wasatch Front. It seems wev'e crossed a threshold of dotting the Earth with temples and will only go further from here, and I personally know some people who will be affected by these. Speaking of temples, Rick Satterfield's website is back online with a facelift and well worth the wait.

Tune in next week for something that I haven't decided yet.

Recorded for posterity more so than the people of today who already know this stuff.

​Trigger warning: suicide

As much as I want to, I don't like recent Star Wars addition Rose Tico. I know I'm far from alone in that sentiment. In theory, the concept of a character who's not this glamorous action hero but just a regular mook who fangirls over her celebrity crush and then gets sucked into the action alongside him is a great one, but mostly I don't like her because I'm pissed at her for [spoiler alert that shouldn't be necessary because if you haven't seen "The Last Jedi" by now that's your own problem] stopping Finn from making a heroic sacrifice and telling him they'll win "not by destroying what we hate - but by saving what we love." Um, what? a.) Saving what he loves is literally exactly what you just stopped him from doing. b.) 99.9% of wars on Earth and, I presume, in a galaxy far, far away, have been and are and always will be won by killing the other side until they give up. So she's annoying that way.

But I have nothing against her actress Kelly Mary Tran, and even if I did, I would have been disgusted to learn that sexist and racist trolls have driven her to delete all her Instagram posts and leave the status "Afraid, but doing it anyway." Of course, it's not as if she's the first Star Wars actor to be severely harassed - young white male Jake Lloyd was bullied so severely that he quit acting, destroyed all his Star Wars memorabilia, and became mentally ill - but the bigotry in this case adds a particularly vile dimension. But what can we expect in an era when self-proclaimed Nazis fearlessly march in American streets without being shot? Disgusting people are no longer afraid to show the world how disgusting they are, because the most powerful man in the world has shown them that disgusting words and behavior carry no meaningful consequences. It's not going to get better anytime soon.

The Miss America pageant is doing away with its swimsuit and evening gown competitions. I have no stake in the matter, since the only beauty pageants I've ever seen are "Miss Congeniality" and "Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous", but I do idly wonder, not for the first time, why we consider it less shallow to judge someone for their mind than their appearance. People don't choose how smart they are any more than they choose what they look like, do they? In either case, they're born with something and then they can augment it to some limited extent. If anything, people have more control over their looks because plastic surgery is a thing while brain boosting isn't. These are the things I speculate about instead of sleeping.

The Supreme Court made a rather vague ruling in favor of the Colorado baker who refused to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding ceremony on religious grounds, finding that Colorado failed to respect his religious rights, while not clarifying how similar situations should be decided. As unpopular as it is, I agree with this ruling because the Constitution protects religious freedom and does not protect getting a wedding cake from whichever business you want. Whether you consider someone's beliefs to be bigoted or invalid is entirely irrelevant. I believe that generally if you have a problem with a business's practices, unless they include putting human flesh on pizza or something like that, you should just exercise your right to not patronize that business rather than whining to the government to make it do what you want. Of course there are nuances and exceptions and a need for compromise and yadda yadda yadda, and the Court conveniently didn't bother to outline any of those in any sort of detail at this time.

A couple more celebrities committed suicide this week, giving thousands of Americans the opportunity to glean their coveted likes and retweets by pretending to suddenly care about depression and mental health. Most of them have responded with deafening silence to the 123-ish less important people who've been commiting suicide every day, but progress is progress, I suppose. I don't mean to be dismissive of Kate Spade or Anthony Bourdain, but I don't know why we need them as wake-up calls for a problem that is not new. It's just too bad that this administration has cut hundreds of millions of dollars of mental health funding and has perpetuated the stigma against mental illness by trying to pretend it's responsible for the United States' exclusive mass shooting problem. It seems like these are exactly the wrong things to do and say in an era when suicide rates are skyrocketing, but nobody asked me.

I think I know why suicide rates are skyrocketing. I think it's because we've created an incredibly shallow, fake, moronic, greedy, self-absorbed, polarized, annoying, unnecessarily and gratuitously stressful society and people, even celebrities who are supposed to be happy because they have lots of money, don't want to be in it anymore. I sure as hell don't. Sometimes the only reason I put up with it is that a new Star Wars movie is coming out every year. Maybe our society could grow up and stop being crappy and see if that helps. But I won't hold my breath. To end on a more pleasant note, here's a soothing song I've listened to a lot this year.

If you don't accept that humans are a product of evolution and still subject to natural selection, then I don't know how you make sense of the fact that teenagers are daring each other to eat laundry detergent. If I'd ever had a shred of faith in humanity, I might be surprised that I'm putting those words in a sentance in that order, but I hadn't and I'm not. Some people see this as a problem. I don't. But in an effort to be more compassionate, I've tried to think of how I would feel if my own teenager died from eating laundry detergent.

Me: *sobs uncontrollably*
Bystander: I know, it's always hard to lose a loved one...
Me: No, I'm crying because my genetic material created something that stupid.

Actually, this is implausible because, like I said. my teenager would most likely be adopted. Anyway, on to the main portion of our program. How good it feels to be returning to school nearly three years after I was supposed to graduate. How good it feels to still see some familiar faces from a year and a half ago or more. The man whom I may have to kill if he turns out to be a better writer than me. The woman who always looks like she's wincing from a terrible pun. The man whom I never spoke with in the previous class we were in together but who now wants to be best friends. The woman who - wait, is that her, or is it a sister or something? She looks slightly different... I can't tell... The man with long, silky, flawless, sexuality-confusing hair. And so on and so forth. Here is an edge-of-your-seat-thrilling rundown of the classes I'm taking this semester. I'm already far busier than any semester before and it looks like homework is going to be my primary hobby six days a week for the next four months. I attracted a few stares in the bookstore as I shuffled to the register with my literally twenty books.

Bookstore Worker: Do you need help finding anything?
Me (out loud): No thank you.
Me (not out loud): I know how the alphabet works, thanks.

And also, every class requires participation as part of the grade.

So I've been proactive in each class at contributing something as soon as I can so I can relax, and most of my comments end up being kind of banal and useless and everyone probably thinks I'm a simpleton.

Me: It reminds me of "Shrek" because he said ogres are like onions and they have layers...
Professor: Ha, so you're saying [intellectual articulate stuff].
​Me: Yeah.

That's it, the class is just called "Shakespeare". It's a 4000 level class and about five minutes into it I was thinking, Uh, you do realize I have other classes, right? I had four days to read "The Taming of the Shrew", but I misunderstood and read it in two days, which was fine because I had no shortage of other homework. I'm not sure what to think of it. It's so misogynistic it makes Donald Drumpf look like Gloria Steinem, but it's also a thousand times more intelligently written than his Tweets. Obviously our female professor feels that it has some redeeming value somehow. We discussed at length the various mental gymnastics that can be employed to make Petruchio seem like less of a monster. I don't understand his methodology anyway. Being deprived of sleep doesn't make me more compliant, it makes me more homicidal. That's hyperbole. Mostly. I can't wait to read other, less repugnant Shakespeare plays because I actually quite enjoy him and wish people were still that smart.

Just another English student in the music building for a science class, that's me. I started out in the sciences. I majored in Wildlife Science for a few years and that's how I took a bunch of biology classes, came out of the closet as an evolutionist and gained the expertise to refute every creationist I've ever argued with on the internet. Even though I ultimately decided that I don't love science and would rather just stare at its butt as it walks by, I have no regrets about spending that time in that area. And I certainly never imagined that I would come back to it so near the end. This class meets some requirement or other. It's not entirely a science class, but wants to equip us to make science accessible to normal people through art, so obviously that's where the connection comes in. I definitely want to use art to convince people to agree with me on science, religion, politics, and which Star Wars movie is the best (but actually we all know what that is already).

We watched an hour and a half National Geographic documentary called "The Story of Earth". I was riveted. I knew many of these facts, of course, and had read a ton about dinosaurs, but to see the whole thing animated from start to finish was a new and enrapturing experience. The British narrator's pronunciations were occasionally a bit jarring, though. In his mouth algea was "AL-gee" and methane was "MEE-thane". I have to wonder, in a class like this, how many students are Mormons and how many of those Mormons are resisting what they're hearing because they don't believe in evolution. And I wonder how many are conservatives and how many of those conservatives are resisting what they're hearing because they don't believe in climate change. I didn't believe in either of those things when I took my first college biology class but I put aside my biases and listened to the material anyway and here I am now.

American culture is obviously difficult to define because, contrary to what the current admistration obviously believes, it's a melting pot that incorporates every other culture in the world. Yet at the same time, it's distinctive enough to be recognized as it in turn forces itself onto every other culture in the world. I've given some thought in the past to how I would define uniquely American culture: spirit of free enterprise, gun fetish, fast food, pornography, rap music, country music, cowboys, getting offended, lawsuits, Hollywood, leg-humping obsession with skin color, polarized mud-slinging politics, creationism, separation of church and state. Looks like I get to find out how close to the mark I was. I'm the least concerned about this class because it's only a 2000 level and the professor's name is Christopher so he's already biased in my favor. One day he showed us three songs and asked us to brainstorm what they say about American culture.

We seemed to reach a consensus that John Mellencamp had a bit of a White Savior complex and played into stereotypes a little too much, but his heart was in the right place, and this was back in the unenlightened days of 2007 before we'd ever had a black president and so on.

I actually love this song for both the melody and the nostalgia of hanging out with Cece, but I never paid much attention to the lyrics. Even now if you put a gun to my head all I could recite with total confidence is "You've got a fast car". So it turns out the lyrics tell a depressing story about being unable to achieve the American dream.

Kendrick Lamar speaks to my tortured soul. He seems to have some similar gripes to Tracy Chapman, but goes about expressing them in an altogether different way, focusing on raw emotion over storyline, arguably making his version more easily identified with by a broader range of people.

The professor asked us each to suggest a song we like that says something or other about American culture, to be sprinkled in throughout the rest of the semester. And that was a no-brainer if I ever heard one. 

Unsurprisingly, we've already talked about race issues every day. I want to apologize again for previously being ignorant of the depth of racism that still exists in this country, and again add the disclaimer that if a certain side of the political spectrum hadn't constantly exaggerated it and tried to weaponize it to shut down legitimate discourse I would have taken it seriously much sooner. The professor believes in free speech and thinks people should be able to air their views, no matter how repugnant, as long as everyone else then has the right to tell them their views are crap. I agree. We should give even the Nazis and white supremacists a platform, as long as it comes with a rope and a long drop.

I thought this would be like nineteenth century stuff, but we're going way, way back farther than that. We're reading contemporary writings about the Spanish conquistadors, and we're reading about the horrible abuses and genocide they dished out to the Native Americans, and it's disturbing and disgusting and depressing and gives me an idea for a novel. The best part, really the only part I liked, was when some Native Americans captured some Spaniards and held them down and poured melted gold down their throats and were like "You want gold? Here's your gold, Christians! Enjoy!" They weren't really Christians, of course, not by a long shot. Oh, and also my former co-worker Smile Girl is in this class. I call her that inside my head because she smiles at nothing and everything. I couldn't help wondering, for example, whether the muscles in her face were stuck or she just really got a thrill out of the soap dispenser. She must have missed the memo that she doesn't owe anyone a smile.

On the first day the professor was like, "I don't know what's in the stories I'm making you read and I'm not going to censor what you write. There might be rape scenes, convenience store robberies, '----' every other word... Consider that your trigger warning for the whole semester." But that was essentially the same trigger warning I got in Fiction Writing and Poetry Writing and Creative Non-Fiction Writing, each of which failed to deliver anything more scandalous than the average high school lunch period, so I wasn't too fazed. And it actually occurs to me just now that I became art of the reason those warnings were given. It actually occurs to me just now that my story about a lady who goes around cutting off people's hands and wearing them on her head could have been unsettling for some readers. My other stories and poems weren't all sunshine and lemondrops either. I guess I've been desensitized to a lot of things. I don't know how else to not be thoroughly miserable every waking moment on this planet.

Student: This part where the funny sidekick animal says 'He just needs an axe to the face' is kind of dark.
​Me: Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way.

We talk about all kinds of literary techniques - the aforementioned onion thing, for example, and stuff like facades and icebergs where people don't say what they mean or prove themselves to be unreliable narrators when you read between the lines. Putting this into practice may prove challenging for an Aspie. The closest I've come to understanding real people in this regard is to just assume they're lying most of the time. One student gave Drumpf's tweets as an example of facade. When he calls himself a "stable genius", you kind of get the opposite impression. "I'm not making a political statement, I just find it fascinating," he said. No, I get it. Drumpf's lack of character, morals or intelligence is hardly a political issue. Plot twist: Drumpf really is the greatest genius the world has ever known and the rest of us just aren't smart enough to see it. Getting back on topic...

This is of course the most exciting class because it relates most directly to what I want to do with my life. And, uncoincidentally, it's also the class that most makes me suddenly feel like not such a great writer after all. So it looks like it's going to be awesome and hellish at the same time. Which will probably also describe the whole semester.

Okay, I'll give the blathering on about Star Wars a rest. A review of "The Last Jedi" will probably be forthcoming in a few weeks. I'll just say for now that I liked it much better the second time.

Visiting my family in Indiana required getting up at 6 am on Saturday morning. So like most people would do, I set an alarm. But additionally, my brain does this really helpful thing where it likes to wake me up at least an hour before my alarm goes off. And it did that. So after a bit of unpleasant half-sleeping delirium I came to my senses, such as they are, enough to figure that I should check how much time I had left. And the clock said... wait for it... 12:46. So I had probably been asleep for like two minutes. I said to my brain, I said, "Are you ----------------------------------- kidding me??"

I got back to sleep and, sure enough, woke up again. I checked again. Maybe it was almost time. Or maybe it was 2:59. It was 2:59.

"I hate being me," I told God. That was an overstatement, of course, but it was how I felt at the moment.

The third time, I wasn't optimistic, but it was 5:49 and that somehow came as a relief even though I felt like crap. I just wanted to put on a blindfold like Kanan Jarrus and never open my eyes again. How was it possible to be so hungry and so needing to throw up at the same time? Ironically, I felt worse than I did a week later, yesterday, when I went to bed at 10, fell asleep sometime after 1:30, and was woken up at 5:24, aka 3:24 MST. Somehow I got so hot while being unable to sleep that twice I went outside in my underwear and stood with my bare feet in the snow and it felt like a cool spring day. But I digress.

I had to get up so early, in large part, so I could arrive at the airport two hours before my flight to make sure I would have plenty of time to get through security even though it's never taken more than five minutes. But this time it did. This time it took an extra ten minutes. When my laptop didn't come out of the scanner with the rest of my stuff, I knew something was up. When the TSA guy carried it over to another station and asked "Whose laptop is this?" I knew something was up. When he gestured me over to him with a couple fingers and pointed to the external hard drive enclosure duct taped to the top of it and asked "What's that?" I knew something was up. He said that for future reference it looks suspicious to have something taped to a laptop in an airport and their explosives expert would have to look at it. That was fine with me, as I had nothing to hide, but I started to get a little worried that they would confiscate it anyway like they did my toothpaste one time, and then they may as well just shoot me too because it has my tens of thousands of songs that took years to accumulate.

It was nice of the people at both airports to let me through with my expired ID. There was an officer at one of them who looked like Will Smith. I wanted to get a picture of him, but I might have gotten in trouble. I traveled all day, had the usual delays, and got to Indiana around 9 pm EST. It was another hour to the house and then I was ready for bed. And right as I got out of the car I remembered the trains that pass like twenty feet from my parents' house several times a day and night and always blow their horns. I used to like trains. On a more positive note, the next morning it was once again nice to attend a congregation not completely full of white people. Don't get me wrong, most of my best friends are white, but it just gets stifling when that's all I'm ever surrounded by, you know? Because it was Christmas Eve, somebody thought it would be a good idea to sing like eight hymns. I opted out of all the extra ones because I was tired. The black Baptist convert behind us complained that we had ruined the tunes, and she wasn't wrong.

So, the fifty degrees of winter thing the previous and only time I'd visited Indiana turned out to be a fluke. It was very cold. One day I walked a couple miles from the house and on the return trip my fingers felt like they had been hacked off. I have gloves, I just don't know where they are. But it was sunny! I was asked to post some pictures and bring the sunshine back to Utah! So here are some pictures and I got a pocketful of sunshine which, as anyone in Logan can attest, is being put to good use. It wasn't too terribly cold some days, but one day I went for a walk and my fingers felt like they'd been hacked off. I have gloves somewhere, I just don't know where they are. I hope I got enough pictures to satisfy the person who requested pictures.

Trains that were very hard to photograph through the trees

As Douglas Adams famously wrote in "Last Chance to See", here be chickens

​

My parents have the best kind of neighbors

A church we don't go to

Bustling city stuff

​​My scary friend Mackenzie is starting to sound even more like a mob boss

​I knew what she meant the first time, of course, but I like messing with her. My advice to her and anyone else hiring someone to take me out is make sure you're not talking to an undercover cop by mistake. I saw that on TV once. It was real, filmed with a hidden camera in the cop's car, and this woman was hiring him to shoot her husband and he was playing Satan and trying to goad her into being more evil. He was like, "You know, sometimes when I shoot people, it takes them a long time to die and they suffer a lot. Does that bother you?" And she was like, "I don't care, I don't care, I just want him gone. Ohhh, I'm gonna sleep good tonight." You can spot undercover cops because they never actually drink the beer. Wait, wrong setting. You're on your own then.

My parents have a few books

I took the time to read some of them and record my thoughts.

"Lost Race of Mars" by Robert Silverberg. Written in 1960, set in the distant future of 2017, where the colonists on Mars still use film cameras and paper mail. I'd trade digital cameras and email for a colony on Mars. We haven't even put a person on Mars, which is pathetic and inexcusable. We should have done it decades ago. Would we even be able to get emails on Mars? Could they set up the internet infrastructure between here and there? But hey, at least we have fidget spinners, amiright? 

"Peanuts Classics" by Charles Schultz. This one is mine. I don't remember it having a broken binding and a brown stain all the way through. Let's see... oh, I know all these comics by heart even though I haven't read them in who knows how long. I read them so many times and yet I never really understood how great some of them are.

"From First Date to Chosen Hate" by Brenton G. Yorgason. Oh, "Mate". Right, I always read that wrong the first time. It's not the best font. Well, maybe I ought to read this famous book. Plot twist: it's for Australians wanting to escape the matezone. "Hooley dooley! So you've come the raw prawn with another true blue Sheila and she's dobbed she just wants to be mates? Do you just cop it sweet and hope she'll be apples, or bugger that for a joke? Fair suck o' the sav!" etc. 1977? Then it should be good for a few laughs. I'm sure it's very... dated. Hum de dum. Oh, so dating sucked even before millennials ruined it? So much for my... romanticizing the past. Creative date ideas - skip! Satan's deceptions - skip! Getting engaged - skip! Oh, look, it's available on archive.org and I just wasted my time reading the hard copy instead of something else! Well, it was very dated but it did have some good stuff. I recommend modern readers to supplement it with  "Modern Romance" by Aziz Ansari and "Animal Behavior" by John Alcock.

"Happy Valley Patrol" by John "Blitz" Krieg, pseudonym for Robert Kirby. This book has seen better days. The binding is all but gone and at least a quarter of the pages are not connected to anything. I didn't do it, though I have read it many times. It's a collection of the eponymous newspaper column about Kirby's time as a police officer in Utah, and I love it because it makes fun of two things that I love making fun of: the human race and Provo. And it's just as hilarious this time around.

​I also read through all my Tintin books that my sister is keeping safely for safekeeping. I hadn't read them since before I started college, and now I get more of the jokes and references. Hergé truly was a rare breed of genius, which would explain why most Americans don't appreciate him. If you haven't read Tintin, do so; you won't be sorry unless you have no taste. If you want to be thorough you can start from the actual beginning with the mediocre "Tintin in the Land of the Soviets" and the racist "Tintin in the Congo", but it's probably better to just start with the sanctioned volumes and come back to those for thoroughness after you're hooked.

A noble crusader against injustice has brought to light that in the last five years, twenty Holocaust victims were posthumously baptized by various Mormons in violation of LDS Church policy, sparking another round of complaints about baptizing dead people without consent. One should always obtain a dead person's consent before performing an ordinance that will either unlock their path to salvation or have no affect on them whatsoever. And it is, of course, incredibly selfish and thoughtless for Mormons to spend time baptizing people who will never be on the membership records, pay tithing, or help a church ball team. How would we feel if someone did it to us? I, for one, would be outraged if I were dead and a Muslim or a Hindu or a Rastafarian did something they thought would help me get into heaven. In fact, there's a website called "All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay" which purports to make that happen, and you can guess how much that upsets me by how many times in my life I've mentioned it. (This is the first time in my life I've mentioned it.) Why doesn't every religion just do this for everyone, and then we'll all have all our bases covered?

Several Jewish leaders take this practice personally because it reminds them of the long history of Jews being forced to convert to Christianity or die. That's understandable (even though, as people keep pretending to forget, Mormon teachings state that dead people are free to accept or reject the ordinance). The LDS Church is under no legal obligation to stop the baptizing of Holocaust victims, but does so as a gesture of good will. Most of the people feigning self-righteous indignation over the very few who slipped through the system are atheists who believe that Holocaust victims ceased to exist as soon as they were murdered. That in their lives, millions of lives, the Nazis permanently and irrevocably won. And these complaints about baptizing dead people without consent ring just a little hollow coming from them. And do they care one iota about Jewish religion or culture at any other time? A random teeny little hunch tells me probably not. Some people need to grow up.

The world has survived year one of Drumpf's presidency. True, he didn't accomplish much worthwhile, and he consistently refused to behave in an intelligent or dignified manner befitting a nation's leader (which comes as a surprise to no one), but he hasn't started a nuclear war ​yet despite his best efforts so I say we should count our blessings. I look forward to blogging for another year, and striving to please my loyal fans, unless of course I unexpectedly die and move beyond this vale of tears, which would be even better. I suppose it's also possible that Daesh will cut off my hands. That would really suck. I will surely face many challenges in this coming year, and just as surely God will bring me through them as He always has in the past, as undeserving as I am. I don't stress nearly as much about them now. So there's that.

There aren't a lot of New Year's songs. That means there also aren't a lot of good ones. Enter George Harrison's "Ding Dong", which ought to be a lot more famous than it is, and might become a tradition with me since this is the second time I've shared it.

My search engine optimization spree several months ago (shout-out to Mark Bell for the advice) appears to have finally paid off, as I am finally satisfied with the page views I'm getting. Less than a year ago I struggled to consistently break 100 and now I'm always somewhere between 300 and 2000. Sometimes I see that sometimes people who Google reasons to support the war on drugs find my page of sarcastic reasons to support the war on drugs. And sometimes people find my site, not sure specifically which page, by searching for black/African porn. If I could figure out why and replicate it on purpose, I could be getting millions of hits a day. And my review of "David and the Magic Pearl" has spiked in popularity for some reason. To my surprise, "In Defense of Pedophiles" still hasn't garnered much attention. That disappoints me because I had hoped it would be controversial enough to trick people into learning about an important topic. My little map at the bottom of the site, which is supposed to track all visitor locations but misses most of them because cookies or whatever, broke 3000 locations last month and that was exciting.

I read this article about this documentary by an Indian featuring several other Indians claiming that "The Simpsons" character Dr. Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is racist. And I don't want that to be right, because I consider "The Simpsons" to be one of the best and most clever shows ever made, but I'm forced to concede that it probably is. I'm in no position to say it's not racist when I'm not on the receiving end of it. I'll just say this, that in my particular case, I don't feel that watching Apu had any detrimental effect on how I perceive Indians or their culture. On the contrary, it seemed to me that Apu was one of the smarter people in a world of mostly doofuses. In the episode "Much Apu About Nothing", for example, we have this exchange from his test to gain American citizenship:

Examiner: All right, here's your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter...
Examiner: Wait, wait... just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.

Prior to reading this article I didn't realize that Apu was voiced by a white guy. That certainly factors in. I think that in an world, we could all poke lighthearted fun at each other's accents and cultures and religions without being hurtful, as we do to a limited extent now. For example, in "Prisencolinensinainciusol", Italian Adriano Celentano sang a bunch of gibberish words that sound like English in a fake American accent. It wasn't controversial, I presume, because a. both groups are predominantly white European in makeup and b. Americans have never been oppressed by Italians, so no one would worry that this imitation was symptomatic of any deep-rooted prejudice. Imitating an Indian accent can have different connotations of the skin color difference and because Indians were oppressed by British for a long time. (It looks weird to not write "the British", but I'm not talking about all British people. How come I don't have to write "the Indians" but I have to write "the British"? That's stupid.)

It's not going to happen, but if humans ever got to the point of eradicating true prejudice altogether and all such teasing became acceptable, that would be great. We could eliminate all teasing instead, but where's the fun in that? I tease my friends, I tease my favorite franchises, I tease my own religion and its culture and usually find it hilarious when others do so as well. But we're not at that point with the human race, so yes, it does sadly appear to me that Apu is more or less racist, though like I said my opinion doesn't really matter.

I read this other article about how Hollywood drastically underrepresents and marginalizes women and non-white people. I won't call them "minorities" because that's increasingly an inaccurate term. Pretty soon white people will be the minority in the US, and since I'm not a Nazi I don't have a problem with that. Naturally, the asinine comments on the article by white and/or male people trying to rationalize why this isn't a problem were depressing to read. As much as I hate sounding like an SJW, defending this status quo is privilege at its finest. But, you know, it's ridiculous for these hoity-toity scientists to suggest that sexualizing women in the media causes women to have self-esteem problems, because men get sexualized too. Like all those muscular superhero guys. That's definitely the same thing, and since everyone knows men and women are exactly the same it's inconceivable that they could be affected differently. I wish I were making this idiocy up.

Star Wars, in particular, has made great strides in this area, leading some children to gripe that even Han Solo will be a woman in his upcoming solo film. I hope that in a future day there will be no need for conscious attempts to put more diversity in movies, because it will just be happening automatically. But Disney, the Imperial ranks are exactly the wrong place for more female representation. Part of their shtick is that with very few exceptions they don't like women or aliens. Maybe the First Order is different.

​I would like to point out that I made both the protagonists in my manuscript female over seven years ago. I did this because I discovered that women, aliens, robots, and fantasy creatures were the only characters I could write with any feeling of investment and authenticity. And I never intended this as a huge feminist statement or anything, though the working title "Space Girls" may suggest otherwise. I knew there was a need for it after someone heard about them and expressed incredulity that they weren't lesbians. At one point I gender-swapped some of the characters to have more female representation, and I suppose that was a feminist statement. But most of the Earthling characters are, at least in my mind, white, and that's because I grew up surrounded by mostly white people and I'm still surrounded by mostly white people, so it was a subconscious thing and when the movie version is underway I'll make sure casting is open to people of all races.

Speaking of my manuscript, here's the latest feedback from a test reader:

Send a message like this to someone and make their day. They probably won't know what you're talking about, but I'm sure it will make their day.

Moving on to even more cheery and uplifting things. I'm grateful to know that this attitude exists, and that some of my "friends" share it, because I wasn't afraid enough of women already and this really helps with that. (I'm being sarcastic.)

In fairness, her remarks have been taken out of context. She goes on to explain "that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay". The fact that she herself isn't paying jack should hardly detract from the sincerity of these words. And of course, "[i]t's a microscopic risk in comparison to the issue at hand", which should be a source of great comfort to all the men who have lost their jobs and reputations and been incarcerated on rape convictions. It's not that you don't matter, guys, it's just that you don't matter. Because microscopic. But if you're lucky you live in a state that, after your innocence is discovered, will reimburse you less than minimum wage for the years of your life that they stole. And it really bothers me that Emily Lindin looks like Felicity Jones in this picture. I don't want the respect I hold for Felicity Jones to be tainted by mental association with this other person.

Moving on again, don't be this guy. I haven't gotten so many likes on a comment in a while.

Here's Sarah Brightman again already to ring in the Christmas season. This version of this song is the sort of thing that, given the choice, I would listen to on my deathbed while happily drifting out of consciousness surrounded by my loving and beautiful dogs. Beautiful song + beautiful voice = aural perfection.