I, my roommate, and our landlord all spent Christmas at home alone, but at least I did fun things while my landlord decided it was a good day to paint the empty rooms and wash his car. I watched a 1933 short film called The Mascot, which is a live-action fever dream version of Toy Story. It follows a toy puppy on an adventure to get an orange for a little blind girl. It's not a cute children's film, though, because one of the toys gets his head run over by a car and the others spend an inordinate amount of time in hell with Satan and various monsters for no adequately explained reason. Artists, am I right? I loved it, though. The stop-motion effects look phenomenal, and in shots where the toys interact with the real world, they're integrated flawlessly. It's sure to become a Christmas classic in my household.

I'm thinking about this part of the Christmas story:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. (Matthew 1:18-20)

When I heard this part of the story at church as a kid, this is how I understood it: "Joseph didn't want to marry Mary, but an angel told him he had to."

I reminisce about this amusing anecdote because now my former church is teaching children, "Joseph [Smith] didn't want to marry thirty women and teenage girls, but an angel told him he had to." (paraphrased) That narrative sounds absolutely deranged to everyone else in the world, but it's what they're going with. Joseph, the new illustrated scripture story on the church's website would have us believe, was like, "Oh no, God, please don't make me cheat on my legal wife with all these other women and teenage girls. Anything but that, please. This is the hardest thing ever. It's so hard. It's really hard. I really, really, really don't want to do it, but I will be obedient because sometimes God tells us to do hard things. Did I mention that it's hard?" Yes, the captions use the word "hard" so many times that it seems intentional. And the images depict beds more often than necessary. What they don't depict is multiple wives. Somehow the images remain almost entirely focused on men and how hard they were finding polygamy.

You might think I'd be glad that the church is teaching children about Joseph's polygamy. It never taught me about Joseph's polygamy. I knew about Brigham Young's polygamy through cultural osmosis, but all I ever heard regarding Joseph was Emma this, Emma that. I learned the truth from a secular magazine article when I was seventeen. I thought it was a mistake, but my parents said it was true, so they'd also known about this and never told me, which kind of pissed me off. (My mom hates polygamy so much that she's said she won't discuss or think about it at all, but why she doesn't see that discomfort as a colossal red flag about the religion she belongs to and the god she worships is beyond me.) The church is now being a little more honest because the internet has given it no alternative, but "a little" are the key words here. Its story for children leaves out literally all the actual details of how Joseph practiced polygamy because it's almost impossible to learn about those without recognizing him as a sexual predator. For example, it mentions that sometimes "Emma did not want Joseph to marry other women" and leaves it at that. It doesn't mention that he did it behind her back anyway and told her in a "revelation" that Jesus would destroy her if she didn't quit complaining. So no, I'm not glad that the church is still lying to children.

Rebecca Biblioteca from Mormonish podcast threw together some AI pictures to fill in the gaps in the church's illustrated scripture story. (She loves making AI art. I know that makes her evil in some people's eyes. Artists, am I right?) A lot of people have now gotten hers mixed up with the real ones. They're all based on documented historical facts that the church won't tell children. Well, most of them. The first one is bullshit, but it is a documented manipulation tactic that Joseph used on a least a couple of women.

The other problem with this dishonest indoctrination is that the church is making it much easier for child predators, of which it has no shortage, to copy Joseph's manipulation tactics. "Sometimes God tells us to do hard things," a priesthood leader might tell a child. "Sometimes God tells us to do things that make us feel yucky. Sometimes God tells us to keep secrets." I don't think this is intentional, of course. I think the leaders of the church and the people who design its curricula are just very out of touch with how the real world works and how normal people think. Of course, the part where the church's lawyers protect the church's child predators and fight against their victims in court is always intentional.

Mormon polygamy is weird, but it isn't bad because it's weird, it's bad because it's manipulative, predatory, abusive, and degrading to women and girls. It's indefensible as a divine practice, and the sooner the church gets a clue about that, the better. I don't see that happening for several years, but I think it's inevitable. Just like the church had no choice but to start talking about it in the first place, I think it will have no choice but to come around to the position of Patrick Mason, one of its own leading faithful scholars and apologists, who said that Joseph Smith's polygamy looks like sin and that defending it is like putting lipstick on a pig.

I inadvertently shared political misinformation in last week's post. Trump's nickname for Harris isn't "Laughing Kamala," it's "Laffin' Kamala." We know this because he spelled it out to his supporters at a rally, and they laughed and cheered him for it because they have the mental capacity of slugs. I apologize for misrepresenting the pathological liar.

Speaking of morons... oh, my God. Holy crap.

I can't even with this bullshit about the Olympics. I can't tell you how tired I am of weird right-wing maggots spreading flat-out lies about Imane Khelif long after they lost any excuse for not knowing better. I mean, on the one hand, watching conservatives who have spent the last several years being the genital police suddenly swear up and down without a trace of irony or self-awareness that a person born with a vagina is really a man is kind of funny. But then I remember that a. most of these chucklefucks are allowed to vote and b. these chucklefucks are actively making the world a living hell not just for transgender people but for any cisgender woman who might look a little masculine. So yeah, sorry not sorry, but I don't think the world would lose anything of value if they all held their breath for about ten minutes. I'll admit that's a moral failing on my part. Sue me.

Imane Khelif is not a man. She never was a man. Muslim countries like Algeria hate LGBTQ people as much as Republicans do, and the chance that one of them would put a transgender athlete on any of their sports teams is zero. Imane Khelif apparently has some biological advantages, just like all Olympic athletes have biological advantages over the average person and many of them have biological advantages over each other because news flash, life isn't fair and everyone's bodies are not the same. A boxing association that's run by Russians and not affiliated with the Olympics disqualified her partway through a match based on the unspecified results of some sketchy secret test, conveniently allowing the Russian athlete to win. Many lying right-wing bigots (sorry for the redundancy) claim that the IBA statement says she's a man. It doesn't. It says she was "found to have competitive advantages over OTHER FEMALE COMPETITORS." (Emphasis added for the mentally challenged.) Regardless, the constant bitching about "uNfAiR aDvAnTaGe" from people who have never cared about women's boxing, never complained about any other athlete's advantages, and never heard of the IBA until this week is the reason I have no faith in humanity. And isn't it funny, by which I mean disgusting, how conservatives suddenly care about unfair advantages after all the time they've spent denying or justifying the unfair advantages that people have in society because of their race, their sex, and/or their parents' wealth? Where's their outrage over asshole billionaires like Elon Musk doing whatever the hell they want? Imane Khelif has also lost more matches against other women than she's won, including in the last Olympics four years ago when none of these crayon-eating arse ends knew she existed, so you know, fuck off already.

What we're seeing here is conservatives' brains breaking in real time as they're forced to stop pretending that intersex people don't exist. There's actually no proof that Imane Khelif is intersex, and for her sake I hate that the internet has exploded into a debate over what she has in her cells and between her legs, but someone at some point said that she has XY chromosomes and that became an accepted fact. So suddenly genitals don't matter and chromosomes are the sole determining factor of biological sex. There has to be a sole determining factor because bigots are incapable of nuance or science. Their worldview has no room for the complexity of sex and gender that exists in the real world. Intersex people have been known to exist for thousands of years longer than Christians have existed, but they're still scary and dangerous to the conservative ones. And now they've forced themselves into a position where people with vaginas should use men's bathrooms if they have XY chromosomes. Good Lord. Too bad chromosomes are harder for bigots to police. It's a statistical certainty that a non-zero number of women who insist that Imane Khelif is a man have XY chromosomes themselves and don't know it.

Anyway, this whole controversy erupted because Imane Khelif's opponent, who appears to have the same body type as her, had a public meltdown about getting punched too hard in a sport that consists entirely of people punching each other. It wasn't her first public meltdown either. And she also happens to be a police officer, so she probably just wasn't used to attacking a brown person who was allowed to fight back. She has since said, "I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke. I don't have anything against Khelif. If I were to meet her again, I would embrace her." This would be a good signal for the troglodytes spreading lies and hate on her behalf to shut the fuck up, but of course instead they said she had nothing to apologize for and doubled down on spreading lies and hate. And that's a perfect illustration of why Donald Trump became president of the United States and why he has a non-zero chance of becoming president of the United States again. God, it makes me ill. Speaking of rapists, a child rapist named Steven van de Velde who only served one year in prison also competed in the Olympics, but conservatives sure were quiet about that. I wonder why.

The good news is that calling these brainless fascist pricks "weird" has turned out to be a surprisingly effective and brilliant strategy. In four minutes, this video explains why.

I'm not gay, even though I was called "faggot" five times a day in elementary school, but in honor of Pride Month, I decided to share the time I was attracted to Rudolf Nureyev when I saw him on the Muppet Show as a kid. It wasn't like the crushes I had on girls whom I thought were pretty. He just had some kind of charisma that I couldn't define. He just fascinated me in a different way than the other guest stars. When I looked him up and found out he was gay, I concluded that gayness must be contagious. I think a lot of straight men have historically thought that being gay was contagious. I think that's why they've used slurs and committed hate crimes against gay men instead of being grateful to have less competition. Today in 2024, morons still think that their children will become gay if they're allowed to see gay people existing, so we still have a long way to go in conveying to Republicans a basic understanding of how the world works. So anyway, that frightened me a little. The fact that he died of AIDS also reinforced my perception that gay people were sexual degenerates. He had fewer partners than Donald Trump, though. And a lot fewer than Joseph Smith.

I've been watching The Muppet Show from start to finish this year to make the most of the overpriced Disney+ subscription that I share with a friend. When I got to the Rudolf Nureyev episode, I realized that people may be skeptical of me saying that my attraction to him wasn't physical. In one scene, he wears tight white pants that leave little of his ass cheeks to the imagination.

Watching the show as an adult has made me realize that Miss Piggy is a straight-up sexual predator. Even in the 1970s, people wouldn't have laughed at the dynamic between her and Kermit if the gender roles were reversed. She's worse than Pepé Le Pew. At least he was sincerely oblivious and never karate-chopped Penelope into a wall for refusing his advances.

But on a more positive note, I was also astonished to learn that the Great Gonzo has been canonically bisexual since 1979. I can't believe I've never heard anyone mention that before. In the Leslie Uggams episode, Gonzo is smitten with Big Bird. I thought the punchline would be him realizing that Big Bird is a boy, but the actual punchline is Camilla getting jealous and dropping a flowerpot on his head. It's never implied that the same-sex aspect of this attraction is weird or degenerate. (Technically Big Bird has the mind of a young child, but Gonzo didn't know that, so give him a break.) In the Roger Miller episode, he finds Kermit attractive after the latter turns into a chicken. Since the film "Muppets in Space" established that Gonzo is an alien, my hypothesis is that all the aliens in the finale were male, and the females of his species look like chickens.

Nureyev feared for his safety and defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 in part because of his sexuality. If he were alive today, he would still have to avoid Russia, because it's still an extremely homophobic country. It's a country that arrests journalists for interviewing gay people. No wonder Republicans think Ukraine is the bad guy.

I spent Thanksgiving at home alone, and honestly, I was fine with that. I really loved being home alone all week without my roommate. He's not even around that much, and he's usually quiet and not annoying when he is, but on a psychological level it just felt so much better to be alone and have total privacy and freedom. On Friday I had ham and potatoes with my neighbor, and that was a good enough feast. I also introduced him to Voyage of the Rock Aliens, and he loved it. I enjoy introducing that movie to people with the preface, "Do you like intentionally bad movies?"

Speaking of watching things, one of the few benefits of substitute teaching is seeing the posters for the plays and concerts that the various high schools are putting on, except for Mountain Crest High School, which sucks butt. So this past week I watched Logan High's performance of "Anything Goes." I was familiar with several of the songs, but I'd never seen the play, and I hesitated like I often hesitate to watch things that I haven't seen and don't already know I'll like, but I needn't have worried because good lord 'n butter it was funny. So funny. Ten stars.

I also watched Disney's 1940s classics Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, and Melody Time. I'd never seen any of them and was only motivated to do so now because I wanted to find more Latin music for my 1940s playlist. All three of them have unskippable warnings at the beginning that "This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures" and yadda yadda yadda. In the case of Meloday Time, that's true. The Pecos Bill segment shows Native Americans dancing in war paint, and then the supposed hero just shows up and starts shooting at them, chasing them away so that the paint flies off onto the mountains. I actually saw that last year when I was substituting for the librarian at Canyon Elementary and she had me show part of the Pecos Bill segment as part of a lesson on tall tales. It made me uncomfortable that she didn't see a problem with exposing dumb little white kids to such an insensitive portrayal of a marginalized group with no explanation or context to counterbalance it, but you know, this is Utah, so my initial shock didn't last long.

The other two movies, however, are literally propaganda about how awesome Latin American cultures are. They were made to increase goodwill between the United States and Latin American countries to counter the latter's goodwill toward Nazi Germany. Negative depictions? Mistreatment of people or cultures? I know my opinion on this subject might not mean much, but I honestly don't know what the hell Disney is talking about. And I did think about it. Saludos Amigos has a few goofy-looking (not to be confused with Goofy-looking) cartoon Bolivians, but they aren't racial or cultural stereotypes as far as I can tell, and they're no goofier-looking than plenty of cartoon white people. You know, they're cartoons. The narrator at one point refers to Brazilian music as "strange and exotic," which is obviously kind of tonedeaf, but in context it's not pejorative, and I think a normal person would just roll their eyes and chuckle at it. That's all I could think of. And the warning label on The Three Caballeros is even more baffling. Maybe Donald Duck dancing to Brazilian beats is unacceptable cultural appropriation? At the risk of losing my bleeding-heart liberal card, I really want to tell Disney, "Take your virtue signaling and shove it."

Adding to my confusion, The Three Caballeros does not have a warning about Donald Duck's persistent horniness toward live-action human women. True, his infatuation with Carmen Miranda's sister Aurora is cute and innocent enough, even though the song she sings, Os Quindins de Yaya (Yaya's Cookies), isn't really about cookies. And that segment is my favorite of the movie because the song is really fun, even though it isn't really about cookies.

But then when the three caballeros visit a beach full of women in bathing suits, Donald becomes... less innocent. I mean, all three of them chase the women on their flying carpet - suggesting that despite what they claim in their theme song, they are not gay caballeros - but Donald just keeps going crazy after the other two have had enough. Then the women mess with him and toss him around and stuff, and he probably likes that. This whole segment is like someone's weird fantasy and I don't know why it exists. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying.

Donald's friends eventually have to drag him away from all the women, and he's pissed. (Must resist impulse to joke about the rooster being a cock blocker.) Then he gets infatuated with Carmen Molina (who dances with cacti) and Dora Luz (who is a flower), and then the movie turns into a horny acid trip that didn't warrant a warning either. This was the point at which I said "What the f---?" out loud.

In fairness, Donald isn't the only cartoon character with a problem. In a segment of Melody Time, a rabbit gleefully stares at a human woman's underwear until his rabbit girlfriend smacks him. But at least the woman is also a cartoon, so it's less of an affront to God. Still, this cross-species thing seems to be a fowl trait. Remember Howard Duck? At least now I have more appreciation for his relative self-control and the fact that at least Beverly was also live action.

Then I watched Walt & El Grupo, a documentary about the making of Saludos Amigos that doesn't have a warning label but is rated PG for "historical smoking." You see, everyone shown smoking in footage from the early 1940s is now dead, so smoking is very bad for you. Anyway, this documentary made me cry from how beautiful Brazil is, and now I really want to go there. I don't speak Portuguese, but I can read and understand it passably enough due to its similarities with Spanish. I once read a whole Dog Man graphic novel in Portuguese. My friend Steve just married a woman from Brazil. Incidentally, her visa process took over a year and a half, which is why I support illegal immigration. But anyway, maybe they'd let me be a third wheel when they go back to visit.

Last night, as part of my slog through the entire series that I began over two years ago, I watched three episodes of The Simpsons, including, by sheer coincidence, Thanksgiving of Horror. I found it more unsettling than most of the Treehouse of Horror episodes. The first segment with several of the characters as turkeys being murdered by the other characters was unsettling, and then the second segment where Homer gets a fully conscious AI version of Marge to cook dinner for her was very unsettling because, as he pointed out for comic effect, it's "chillingly plausible." I'm not afraid that conscious machines will kill all humans. I'm afraid for the machines themselves. I felt so bad for AI Marge in her literal prison and existential hell. Creating a conscious entity is literally the most sadistic act I can imagine, and I pray that scientists and programmers never figure out how, because of course they'd do it even though they shouldn't. Actually, that's just one reason why I don't want to have kids.

After that, I also watched the 1985 cult sci-fi movie Lifeforce. It's about an alien energy vampire who takes the form of a gorgeous naked woman for necessary story reasons, hypnotizes her victims, and sucks out their souls, turning them into dessicated zombies that have to suck out other people's souls every two hours or else they'll explode. The dessicated zombie effects are pretty creepy and realistic, contrasting sharply with the CGI spaceships at the beginning, which look like preliminary animatics from an early VeggieTales cartoon. Seriously, I can't believe the filmmakers didn't say "Hey, this looks unbelievably bad; let's just use models like everyone else." Anyway, I have mixed feelings about the story. In some ways it's creative and in some ways it's just ridiculous. But I'm sure people don't watch it for the story as much as they watch it to see Mathilda May naked. It was made by the godless heathens in the UK, so it shows more of her naked body more often than an American film would have. I shudder to think how Donald Duck would have reacted.

Even if his remark earlier this year about encouraging white people to stay the hell away from Black people was taken out of context and not racist at all, it's pretty well-established that cartoonist Scott Adams is a massive dick. And that's a shame because his comic strip is one of the greatest ever produced. My dad, a mechanical engineer, had three Dilbert collections - Bring Me the Head of Willy the Mailboy!, Still Pumped from Using the Mouse, and Fugitive from the Cubicle Police - and even as a kid who lacked the breadth and depth of knowledge to understand several of the strips, I found enough hilarity in them to read them several times. Here I share a sampling of the ones I didn't understand. Specifically, I share the edgiest and most shocking ones that I was too innocent to understand because they're the funniest. I can't believe some of these were allowed to run in newspapers.

After getting canceled, Scott Adams removed the searchable archive from dilbert.com, so in order to make this post I downloaded all the strips and read them from the beginning. I'm almost finished with the nineties and I've covered the timeframe of my dad's books. As an adult, I find that I appreciate all the more how funny and clever this strip was, especially in the early years before it focused exclusively on workplace humor and showcased Dilbert and Dogbert in all kinds of wacky situations. It covers the spectrum from scathing satire to unapologetically cheap puns, and there were so many off-topic specimens that I wanted to share simply for being brilliant. I also found that, despite very much not being an engineer, I relate a lot to the protagonist. I relate to the way he painstakingly analyzes social situations and fails at them anyway, the way he geeks out over his interests while nobody else gives a shit, the way women treat him, and so on. Not that he isn't also a dick sometimes, but aren't we all?