Christmas is fundamentally a family holiday. We should celebrate the Christ child, but we don’t need to be lugubrious about it. We don’t need to suppress family fun because the family is in the image of the Holy Family and pleasing to God. Your family relation is part of the deep spiritual core of Christmas, as two overlooked passages of Christmas scripture show. (more…)

Last night I had a dream. I lay it out in sequence below but the dream was all at once. (more…)

The Killers’ 2013 Christmas tune, with help from Owen Wilson and the BYU animation crew.

Apologies to John Mansfield if he was meaning to post this sometime.

[Editors–we hope that this unusual account of a Church-run focus group, along with the ensuing discussion, will be of general interest]

The church was mostly quiet last night. Brother and Sister Markoff were in the cultural hall with their two younger children planning the stage arrangement for the Christmas program Sister Markoff has been rehearsing with Primary children for the past month. There was no sign of anyone downstairs around the bishop’s and clerks’ offices. Back upstairs, outside the Relief Society room, a few middle-aged parents sat waiting and talking. More arrived. Brother Fletcher joked that we were going to find we had came for a half hour presentation encouraging us to prepare for senior missions. Some continued along that theme that we had actually been summoned to discuss lowering the age for senior missionaries. A quarter before eight, the Relief Society door opened, and four priests and six laurels walked out. In we went, where a man in his young thirties sat dressed in a long-sleeved white shirt and tie.

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Tomorrow evening an internal research group from the LDS Church is coming to interview some of my ward’s members. The topic is the youthening of missionary age eligibility, and groups of eight of us at a time will spend a half hour with the researchers. They want to meet with: priests and laurels; parents of priests and laurels; parents of soon-to-be, currently serving, or recently returned missionaries; ward mission leaders, ward missionaries, and members of the ward council to round out a group of eight. I am a father of two priests, and we have been asked to be on hand.

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Russia is having about as much fun as a nation can with a yard-long metal stick. The Olympic torch sans flame launched aboard a Soyuz to the International Space Station, and on Saturday a couple Russians will spacewalk with it. But that’s not all:

“Last month, the Olympic flame traveled to the North Pole on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker. Later this month it will sink to the bottom of the world’s deepest lake, Lake Baikal, and in February it will reach the peak of Mount Elbrus, at 5,642 meters (18,510 feet) the highest mountain in Russia and Europe.” (link)

Slate enumerates Seven Ways the Government Shutdown Will Hit Women Hardest. This isn’t supposed to happen to Julia’s Life Under Obama.

It looks like the men and boys of the priesthood will no longer gather in bodies of a few or several dozen thoughout the land to listen to their leaders cheer and admonish them from Salt Lake City. (link)

“Therefore, he took Moses out of their midst, and the Holy Priesthood also.”—Doctrine and Covenants 84:25

Is fully consistent with a most honorable tradition regarding portraiture:       (more…)

Finishing up with back-to-school night at Ridgeview Middle School, a middle-aged woman in a skirt with a name tag walked down the hall toward me and past me. All the teachers’ name tags were white with black lettering, but this one was black with white lettering. When a bishop or stake president shows up at his eighth-graders’ school, his title is Mister, and his wife’s is Mrs. The call of a mission president and his wife is full-time, though, and even when attending her children’s needs, she is Sister to all she meets, to the saints and especially to the gentiles.

Concussions being the worry du jour, my county now requires all high school athletes to perform a baseline test. CDC helpfully explains, “Baseline tests are used to assess an athlete’s balance and brain function (including learning and memory skills, ability to pay attention or concentrate, and how quickly he or she thinks and solve problems), as well as for the presence of any concussion symptoms. Results from baseline tests (or pre-injury tests) can be used and compared to a similar exam conducted by a health care professional during the season if an athlete has a suspected concussion.”

So, the football and soccer teams were examined last week. And then the cross country, tennis, golf, and volleyball teams. I have no idea in which year or decade the last high school tennis player was knocked out, but when the next one returns a serve with her forehead, she’ll have documented evidence of how much dumber that misfortune will have left her.

[A blog comment of mine from nine years ago. It came to mind this morning, reading a Mormon globe-trotter lauding her un-Mormon economic choices.]

Riding in trains across Pennsylvania these past months [first half of 2004], I became interested in learning a little more about the Amish. Farming is their main occupation, and many of them use older, horse-powered methods. An interesting point for what follows is that at the beginning of the 20th Century their agricultural practices and lack of financial opulence were not nearly as distinctive as they are now. They stayed as they were and the surrounding world changed.

In many American communities, it is the common practice for husband and wife to both be employed. It wasn’t that way forty years ago, but it is now. Among Latter-day Saints, though, generally only the husband is employed, in keeping with the guide of church leaders. This will have the result of Latter-day Saint families having less money than they would otherwise and being overall a poorer people.

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Dissatisfied with the price and worth of high-speed rail in California, Elon Musk turned some of his SpaceX and Tesla engineers loose on the idea of regional transport between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their white paper describes a pair of seven-foot diameter steel tubes mounted on concrete pylons along Interstate 5. The tubes are pumped down to 100 Pascals, or, as Musk’s team prefers to call it, 1/6 the atmospheric pressure of Mars. Inside the tubes, 28-passenger vehicles riding on air bearings would run the 350-mile route in 35 minutes, 70% of the time at near-sonic 760 mph.

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Concerns regarding brutality by the Henderson Police Department have been raised before on this website. Now a resident says his Third Amendment rights were violated. (link)

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I’m going to swim out into deep waters in this post. Stand by with lifesavers. (more…)