This may appeal to others besides myself. I wish I could see it. From the Washington Post:

“Okay, you walk — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven — and kneel on eight,” Stiefel tells Sarah Steele, a willowy, dark-eyed 22-year-old. She was recently hired as an apprentice, and Stiefel plucked her from that bottom rank to star in his ballet. Her courage at the outset of rehearsals attracted him. She possesses, he says, “the essence of a strong, brave artist.”

“You have a full eight counts to zip,” he continues. “Then you’ll get lifted. Turn on four, arms on five. Four counts for the gloves. . . . Lift on five; six, you get into the backpack.”

Steele and the dancer-crew members who are helping her dress eye him intently, tallying up the counts in their heads. The first few run-throughs are rocky — Steele’s zipper snags on the waistband of her tights, the gloves don’t cooperate. The helmet strap must be snapped — oh, where is it, where’s that dang other end? — and, meanwhile, the cyber beats in the commissioned music are racing on. Ah, at last, success! Well, the helmet’s a little askew. But Steele stands triumphant, ready for takeoff, fists clenched at her sides in the ready position.

“This is going to work,” Stiefel assures his dancers. “This will be absolutely no problem. We have two weeks to work on it.”

(more…)

“Christensen is a Mormon.” It’s got a Danish great-grandfather pulling a hand cart, courting a girl from a family of fourteen, and praying nightly about the truth of the Book of Mormon until “One evening in October, 1975, as I sat in the chair and opened the book following my prayer, I felt a marvelous spirit come into the room and envelop my body. I had never before felt such an intense feeling of peace and love. I started to cry, and did not want to stop. I knew then, from a source of understanding more powerful than anything I had ever felt in my life, that the book I was holding in my hands was true.”

More good stuff such as dealing with death as a believing Mormon. New Yorker readers will be more edified than usual. Also a bunch of disruptive innovation.

Saturday night I had occasion to try to remember my 38th birthday, and found that I could. On that birthday almost thirteen years ago, I went directly to the temple after work and realized as I drove that it marked 19 years since I received the temple endowment on my 19th birthday, a precise bisection of my life.

As for why I was calling up memory of that day, well, (more…)

Anne Case quoted in a Washington Post interview describes our times in a nutshell:

“In a previous generation, you had the chance of getting a good job with only a high school degree — a job where you could move up the ladder, where there would be what we call ‘returns to experience’: that as you grew older, your wages would rise. (more…)

“The baseball season is only a few days old, but already Stephen Piscotty has had what is going to be one of the weirdest, scariest innings of the year.

“The St. Louis Cardinals outfielder managed to get plunked by a baseball three times — in the elbow, the other elbow and finally the head — in roughly three minutes during the Cardinals’ 2-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs.

“‘ … [T]hat was probably the toughest trip around the bases I’ve ever seen,’ said Cardinals starter Adam Wainwright. ‘You just hope he’s okay.'”

link

[Note: The Cardinals didn’t win; they lost 2-1.]

“Harry Potter has become a surprisingly obsessive allegorical tool for liberals’ opposition to the Trump Administration [ . . .] I’ll disobey Occam’s Razor and offer another mostly unrelated hypothesis about why Harry Potter stories are such useful allegorical material for contemporary liberals, aside from a general hunger for myth and meaning in a post-religious age.

“Harry Potter, especially the movies, is about the legitimacy of authority that comes from schools.”

–Spotted Toad

(more…)

If I were a lawyer working in Phoenix with mostly Spanish-speaking clients, I would try to get for my office the phone number 602-214-0857, though any number in the range from 0783 to 0931 would be close enough. And I’d have a 1 kilogram silicon sphere on my desk, and somewhere where everyone could see it, a 22.4 liter bottle of gas (any gas, ideally). The thought of it makes me want to order a burrito at Chipotle and say “yes” when asked if I want to pay extra.

So, who does have that number?

Provo’s Daily Herald reports the death of Bruce Porter, an LDS General Authority. His death leaves me with questions, all of them irrelevant: (more…)

As previously noted by others, a sacrament service on Christmas day is a glorious thing. One thing that can be expected at some point in such a service is fairly direct preaching of Christ’s full mission as Redeemer. But before things that were to come, Christmas marks the commencement of the hero’s march, before any of the hard work, a time for music and singing and celebration. A happy time when he was protected and cared for.

A week and half before Christmas, Mrs. Mansfield and I saw a son off at dawn for a flight to the missionary training center. There will be hard times ahead for him before we see him again, but for this month he is a baby missionary in a nurturing place.

Bryce Harper wed Kayla Varner. The bride was Nevada’s high school soccer Player of the Year in 2009 and 2011.

Brandon Flowers wrote an opinion piece on parking valets.

John Glenn (1921-2016) was the oldest of the Mercury Seven, almost two years older than Wally Schirra, the next oldest. Gordon Cooper, the youngest, was six years younger than Glenn, and the astronauts ranged from 32- to 37-years old when presented to the world on April 9, 1959. After Scott Carpenter’s death three years ago, Glenn was the last of the Seven still alive.

I spent the Thanksgiving weekend in the home of a relative who became, in the course of his four years as a medical student at the University of Michigan, a Michigan football fan. Michigan’s series with Ohio State goes back to 1897, has been played annually since 1918, and it has been played in November as the teams’ last regular season game since 1935.

This year’s game was a great one. The Wolverines arrived in Columbus with a 10-1 record and ranked #3 in national playoff standings. The Buckeyes were also 10-1 and ranked #2. Attendance was a stadium record 110,045, and it was this season’s most-watched college football game on television. Ohio State won in double overtime 30-27. What a great weekend to enjoy being a Buckeye!

Then, two mornings later . . . eleven people “including at least one faculty member, one staff member and seven students” were sent to hospitals for treatment of injuries inflicted upon them by a student who was shot dead by a policeman to stop the student’s attack. Celebrate while you may, for it may not fit tomorrow’s mood.

Kris Bryant, the 2016 National League MVP, is a native son of Las Vegas, born in 1992. As is the 2015 NL MVP, Bryce Harper. I am not aware of a third 24-year-old Las Vegan playing in major league baseball.

For the last eight years, any disagreement with policies of the current administration were viewed as signs of racism by those inclined to view matters that way. Had the other major presidential candidate prevailed earlier this month, there would have been more of the same, with sexism taking the place of racism as the secret sin motivating any disagreement with the next president. However, with the president-elect we have the script has a little tweak: any agreement with any policy of the next president will be because he is a fascist, and those agreeing with him (about anything) are OK with that. For example (link):

“The Obama administration turned a deaf ear to us and frankly, with President-elect Trump, we feel things are going to move in the right direction,” Matthew LeBretton, New Balance’s vice president of public affairs, told the Wall Street Journal.

The answer was in response to a question about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, an initiative led by President Obama and staunchly opposed by Trump. Boston-based New Balance, the only major company that still makes athletic shoes in the United States, has said the trade policy would hinder its business and help competitors who operate overseas.

Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont also opposed the deal.

But that didn’t stop opponents of Trump from turning on New Balance altogether and accusing the company of formally endorsing not just his stance on TPP, but entire platform.

[Mafalda is an Argentine comic strip that ran in newspapers from 1964 to 1973.]