Saintspeak 13: The Letter K

Tweet

by Seattle Jon (bio)

Another installment from Saintspeak, the mormon humor dictionary from Orson Scott Card. Previous installments can be found here. Reproduced with permission from Signature Books.

Keys Something that only prophets, apostles, and meetinghouse custodians are permitted to have.

Kimball, J. Golden A legendary General Authority whose irreverence and profanity were a constant delight to the Saints and a constant embarrassment to the Brethren. The Saints loved him because he didn't seem to be pretending to be something he wasn't; the Brethren were annoyed at him because they didn't understand the words.

Kingdom, The In the old days, the Saints thought the kingdom of God would fill the whole world through their sacrifice, hard work, cooperation, charity, and righteousness. That didn't work, so now we're just going to buy all the land.

Knowledge The ultimate level of certainty, much stronger than faith, It means that you have had faith in something so long that you can't remember even thinking about it and you certainly don't intend to start now.

Kolob The star or planet "nigh unto the throne of God." Also an investment company, a pharmacy, a petroleum firm, a real estate office, and an insurance agency.

Guest Post: Finding My Niche

Tweet

Eliana is married and has kids and a dog and is the only woman in her ward who kept her maiden name, which has provided thirteen years of awesome conversation. She writes and teaches English at a community college and swims and travels and tries not to go crazy. Read Eliana's first guest post here.

Photo by Nojae Kim via Capital Area Food Bank Brand Central.

At my local food bank, you can get an emergency food box six times a year. Volunteers fill a shopping cart with available goods: expired bread, donated farm produce, canned goods, one package of hotdogs, a whole chicken, generic cereal, and damaged bakery products. You give me your blue approval slip of paper listing the number of people in your household; I trade you enough groceries for a lean week of eating.

After more than a decade living in my city, I began wanting to do more than donate blood twice a year and give money to a few local charities. This is where I live, where I am raising my family. This is my community and I needed to act like it.

One windy Saturday morning I ventured out with a crew of graffiti busters to paint a mile of concrete fence a slightly different shade of tan. A few dozen of us spread out, rolling the thick paint up and down and further down. By the end I was splattered with sand mixed with dirt, afraid to drive my car without a towel on the seat.

I tried the Red Cross Disaster Action Team, watching videos to learn about the seven point mission of the organization. I endured endless meetings discussing protocol for handling the most common type of disaster--fires--and waited for a call. In eight months, I went out to two fires; assisting families unsure of where to spend the night after their homes were damaged.

I left Red Cross at the end of the year, wanting more hands on and less management, sad to leave the impressive group of volunteers I’d come to know.

Guest Post: Advice for Parents of Newborn Babies

Tweet

John Landbeck is a husband, father, member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and attorney. He likes his life, wants his family to be happy and wants happiness for others, too. He trends towards long, lecture-like commentaries. After all, he is the child of a lawyer and an English teacher; he loves the English language, but loves best hearing himself speak it. John's personal blog can be found here and his first guest post can be read here.

Photograph by Katie Tegtmeyer.

I wrote these advisory thoughts to a good friend as he was preparing to welcome his first child.

It is not possible to spoil an infant by holding it too much, so touch your baby as much as possible. Cradle, rub, hug, massage your baby every day. Find comfortable positions to read/watch TV while the baby sleeps on you. You will never regret having spent five more minutes touching your baby.

Of course, it is also not possible for an infant to harm itself by crying, so if holding/burping/bathing/serenading the baby isn't working, it is OK to put the baby down and go listen to the radio for five minutes. Eat some chocolate, and try again.

No one is interested in your baby's poopies but your spouse, so no matter how interesting you think they are, do not discuss them. The baby's poopies are a legitimate and important subject, which you by all means should discuss with your spouse, but no one else. Unless you need advice.

Discuss parenting choices with your spouse now. Will baby be nursing? If so, who will do all the other baby work at night, so Momma can nurse in a relaxed environment? If not, how will you share all the baby work? How do you feel about co-sleeping (letting the baby sleep in bed with you)? Pacifiers, yea or nay?

Words To Live By 4: On Courage

Tweet

by Seattle Jon (bio)

Words to Live By is a series featuring short selections by eminent men and women from the mid-twentieth century. Originally published in This Week magazine, the selections represent a mosaic of what people were thinking and feeling in challenging times. Read previous entries here.

On Courage
by Alfred Lansing (Author of Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage)

"Men wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success." - Sir Ernest Shackleton

Sir Ernest Shackleton was an Antarctic explorer. To recruit men for one of his expeditions, he rant the forthright want ad quoted above in a London newspaper.

Sir Ernest wasn't joking. The ad proved grimly prophetic for the brave men who volunteered for the three Antarctic expeditions he led. On one, the ship itself was lost, along with most of the supplies. The men spent 21 months in a living nightmare, camped on drifting ice or struggling toward civilization in three tiny boats.

Yet the men who had signed up for the "hazardous journey" not only refused to give up - they somehow managed to remain cheerful. And they won. Every last one of them returned to civilization alive.

In his want ad, Shackleton had promised "honor and recognition" - and it was heaped upon them. But actually they had earned something much, much greater. Shackleton himself later sought to put it into words: "We pierced the veneer of outside things," he wrote. "We suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory ... we reached the naked soul of man."

Nowadays, it seems, security is all-important. Too often, I feel, we are satisfied to play it safe, to aim only for the "sure thing." And while most of us still dream of making some sort of "hazardous journey" in our lives, not very many really make them. As a result, our lives many be safer and saner - but we may in the end be making a world in which fewer and fewer every catch a glimpse of the magnificent naked soul of man.

The Turkey Bowl Potshot

Tweet

by LJ (bio)

We still talk about our family Turkey Bowl in 1998 because it spurred The Most Blatant Potshot Ever. (If you're unfamiliar with Turkey Bowl games, this article from the Wall Street Journal is an excellent primer.)

The stage for The Potshot was set the year before when my mom bought my little brother Jake a set of mini football pads, helmet and jersey from the Sears Catalog. Jake had been drooling over this same set for at least two previous Christmases, and Mom even got iron-on letters and put FROST on the back of the jersey. When it showed up under the tree, Jake was over the moon.

Jake insisted on packing the entire set from Arizona to Utah the following Thanksgiving for our annual Turkey Bowl game. We drove to the high school soccer field with a slew of Litster cousins and when we emptied out of our vans, we had at least two dozen players decked out in mismatching cold weather gear, plus one full-fledged running back for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Our Turkey Bowl had few rules and we followed them religiously:

1. The ending score was always a tie.
2. It was a touch game.
3. If a little kid got the ball, they made a score. No exceptions.

Jake and I benefitted from Rule #3 for years. One of my brothers would catch the ball and hand it off to one of us, then two other brothers would pick us up by the armpits and run us into the end zone. When we got a little older, we'd run the ball ourselves while the defensive line made an elaborate show of trying to tackle us. By '98, Jake and I were 9 and 13 and too old for such privileges, so we joined the ranks as regular players.

We played for an hour before my brothers and cousins got the idea to hike the ball to our 5-year-old cousin Adam. Off he ran, the big kids blockading the defensive line from the front and all other cousins diving out of his way to give him a clear shot to the end zone.

All Jake saw through his little plastic face mask was that they had finally given the ball to someone smaller than he was.

He didn't hesitate. He didn't even think, "I can get away with this." He just ran out of pure instinct and tackled Adam from the side, smashing his little body into the grass.

There was a collective gasp, punctuated by Adam's wails. Then the big kids pulled Jake off and started yelling variants of "What were you thinking?!" As the condemnations floated through the ear holes in his little blue helmet, Jake said it was the first time he questioned his decision to crush a small child.

Needless to say, he got benched for the rest of the game. But you better believe the story of the Turkey Bowl Tackle still lives today.

Giveaway 22: Winner

Tweet

Christopher Bigelow, owner and operator of Zarahemla Books, is giving our readers one copy of each of Zarahemla's 18 titles over a series of four giveaways. This giveaway's winner is receiving the following titles (click for book previews): The Death of a Disco Dancer, Hooligan: A Mormon Boyhood, Rift, The Tree House and Hunting Gideon.

And the winner is: Clark Draney (link to comment) - please email us your home address

In operation since 2006, Zarahemla Books publishes Mormon-oriented fiction, humor, and memoir, with an emphasis on adventurous Mormon stories that are unorthodox but not apostate. Theric Jepson, of A Motley Vision blog, calls Zarahemla "the most valuable brand in Mormon letters today" and "the Pixar of Mormon literature." If you didn't win these titles, buy them or other Zarahemla books now. Look for the third Zarahemla giveaway soon!

Shows I Wasn’t Allowed to Watch as a Kid

Tweet

by A-Dub (bio)

Let's face it – there's a lot of crap out there on T.V. And with the ever increasing amount of T.V. programming in general, there's bound to be more and more that's not only just horribly made, but inappropriate as well.

Far be it for me to tell someone what media is or isn't appropriate. I would almost never (except for my kids) call someone to the carpet for watching something I thought was inappropriate. But there are some shows that are clearly over the line of acceptability. I'm sorry, but there just isn't a single redeeming quality whatsoever about Jersey Shore. The people, what they're doing, why they're even on T.V. to begin with – all reprehensible. And I haven't even seen it to be able to make that claim – I can just intuit from my uncanny understanding of the media zeitgeist that the show is awful in every send of the word. Sorry if you're a fan ... you just ... shouldn't be.

With all the crap that's currently on, it makes me think back to milder days 25-30 years ago when there were less than 100 channels and most non-cable T.V. shows were fairly tame. However, there were still a few that we were forbidden to watch:

1. Three's Company: I'm guessing I'm not alone on this one. In the show, Jack Tripper lives with two female roommates, Crissy and Janet, though none of the three of them had a relationship. They're just Company. I guess these living arrangements were pretty scandalous, because I've had numerous friends comment on how they weren't allowed to watch this show either. Not that I ever wanted to watch this show; Wikipedia says "the humor in the show was based on farce, often relying on innuendo and misunderstanding," which can only mean hilarity from the get go!