Whew, digging a 300 square-foot bunker suitable for young children is hard work. My back isn’t what it used to be. So far, we’re 50 feet down in the backyard and are about to pour 10-inch thick WiFi-proof concrete walls. The kids will have goldfish, coloring books, a Kindle that contains all of Western classical literature, Play-Doh, and a hose for drinking water. They’ll be lowered into the hole when they turn six, and we’ll let them climb out when they turn 18.

We plan to tell any nosy neighbors that we sent the kids away to a new progressive anti-racism academy.

Cruel, you say? Not if you’re trying to insulate your precious children from the all-powerful wokeness algorithm. In fact, it’s the only way to be sure.

Will I miss them? Sure, but I’m comforted knowing they’ll be among the few who survive the radioactive wokelear fallout released this year.

-thus Peachy Keenan. I envy the writing.

Most of this stuff is simple stuff. Mere table stakes. But because of the easiness of the way, many would not.

My kids are stout and sturdy. Doughty redoubts of goodly goodness. But who are they going to marry? It looks like a wasteland out there. Get your act together, friends.

The greatest of all achievements that we can attain in our long and challenging journey through immortality is when our claim to discipleship of the Lord Jesus Christ reaches the stage where we can say, with all honesty, His ways are our ways and His thoughts our thoughts.

–thus Brother Shimabukuro

We have higher goals. That is the reason we are different.

Other posts from the Sunday afternoon session of the April 1992 General Conference

 
Marilyn Nielson Resurrection is another creation

Someday a poet will arise. He will take each work from the 19th through 21st centuries and lovingly consider what in them poisons men’s minds and what in them points to the greatness of mankind. He will, like a surgeon, alter each work delicately, subtly, to remove the story elements which are unworthy. Each arc will be replaced with one closer to the true Story behind each work, a clearer and cleaner vision, the mirror darkly a little more polished.

-a prophecy from the ether

The poet will pray each time. Angels and Christ and the authors themselves will talk to him.

Everyone wants to know the secret of Dr. G’s Hyperreal Fat Camp.  Why is it so wildly successful?

Let me peel back the curtain a little bit.  Let’s take a peek at  a hyperreal part of the hyperreal first day.

After orientation and other preliminaries, the inductees are taken into a pitch black room.

The room is strewn with furniture and other obstacles. (more…)

This advice is framed as weight loss advice.  It’s actually advice for life.   It was the message of General Conference.

If you want to lose weight, don’t start tomorrow. Don’t start today. Start yesterday. Start last year. Start framing your life as a continuous series of learning experiences rather than a fragmented series of failures.

-thus twitterling @realJohn_Taylor

The difference between a hero who comes out of nowhere to overcome all odds and a loser who pathetically stumbles from disaster to disaster is whether they get up that last time they fell.  That is it.

Americans in all age groups have been getting sicker since 2000.  Fatter, more inflamed, more depressed, more ill, and there is not one of those trends that explains all the others.

Salus populi suprema lex.

Take care of yourself.  It’s not your fault that you live in a charnel house.  But you do, and you have to overcome.

You have feared men and have not trusted in me to strengthen you, like you ought to have.    Your thoughts have been in the things of earth more than in the things that are of me, your creator, and in the ministry to which you have been called; and you have not paid attention to my Spirit, nor to those who have been placed over you, but those who have persuaded you are people I did not send.

-my paraphrase of D&C 30:1.  I struck me with more force in Spanish than in English.

My daughter did something neat this conference.  She wrote down all the things she laughed at and all the good stories.

There were some good stories and some deeply moving ones, like  Sister Aburto and Elder Palmer’s experiences with their siblings dying.

I wasn’t trying to write any type of note in particular, but as usual I seem to have gone for memorable phrases and pithy aphorisms

(more…)

He was a Cowboy Billionaire with scars on his heart.

That was the tagline on one of those Kindle ads for a romance novel.  We’ve been laughing about it since.

Last night we had too much milk and too many frozen bananas so we blended them up and sat around the table coming up with our own romantic heroes. (more…)

The tomb is empty.

All tombs will be.

That is their telos.

Say what you hear.

Among other things, I am looking for insight on how to be more than I am and how to lead my family to greatness in time and eternity.

I also hope to spend some time at the foot of the cross with some of the speakers, this being Easter weekend.

The ruler of that land was called the Tiger King.  He lived in great luxury and had utter sway from harvest to harvest.

When the harvest was in, he stepped down.  The time for choosing who would next wear the Tiger Crown came.

The choosing went like this.  They had a certain large field where they held a combat.  The last man standing among all the aspirants took the Tiger Crown for the next year.  But this was no ordinary combat.  Each man had to be mounted on a tiger.  Either his own, or one that would be provided.

More men were laid low by their own tiger then by another’s blows. (more…)

A great bear came out of his winter cave to see the sun rising pink over the still snow-patched fields and meadows.  The bare trees were dark against that brilliant light.  The bear was overwhelmed and had what he felt was a vision of true insight.  “Beauty is good,” he said to himself.

He painstakingly set to etch patterns in each claw using his other claws and gentle patient nibbles with his great jaw.  It took a long time.  The changes were subtle.  But when he was done he was an ordinary bear in all other respects, but each claw was truly beautiful.

In his rejoicing, he lifted a great log and tossed it, and felt the joy and glory of his strength.  “Strength is good,” he said to himself, and then improved his strength in the ways that even bears can do.  When he felt himself to be truly strong, even for a great bear, and with his claws truly beautiful, he went forth slashing and destroying.  He knocked down and ripped and tore and left broken trees and dying animals and dead men and women in his wake and horrible death and corruption.  In that way he became the first ogre and the grandfather of all that kind.

Moral:  Beware isolated beauty.  Beware isolated truth.