On “The Jerry Springer Show” last week, the featured guest was a trailer-trash woman who sported a Southern accent and whose hair had been teased to within an inch of its life. She was angry because her daughter, who looked like a slightly smaller version of herself, was dating a man who was not 100-percent Caucasian. The mother, whose name was Judy, was wearing tragic leather pants that fit her ample loins so tightly they were probably rubbing the ink off the tattoos that no doubt covered her lower back.

Judy was unable to coherently summarize her disapproval of her daughter’s boyfriend, other than that he came from non-Aryan stock. Why she should care so passionately about keeping her white-trash genes pure, I don’t know; if her wild, profanity-laden behavior on national television demonstrated anything, it was that her gene pool could use a good scrubbing.

But what amazed me most as I continued to watch this parade of horrors for an entire hour was the realization that while most people watch Jerry Springer and think, “Wow, what a bunch of freaks,” there are apparently some people who watch it and say, “Hey, WE should go on that show!”

How can you live in America, watch as much TV as these people apparently do, and NOT know that Jerry Springer guests are the butt of a thousand jokes? How do people not realize they’ve become living stereotypes?

I feel the same way about the people on Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” feature. This is where Jay goes out on the street and asks common-knowledge questions of ordinary people, and by “ordinary” of course I mean “stupid.” You get exchanges like this:

JAY: What is the capital of the United States?
MORON: Chicken strips?

Jay puts the stupidest people on his show, to be mocked and derided by their peers, who deserve a little derision themselves for watching Jay Leno in the first place instead of the much funnier, much more original “TV That Has Been Turned Off.”

But again, my question is this: Why do people submit themselves to Jay’s questions? Surely they’ve seen “The Tonight Show” and are aware that if they give the wrong answers, they will be put on TV. Are they so confident in their intelligence that they’re SURE they’ll get everything right and thus avoid being fodder? If that’s the case, then Jay has produced an intriguing paradox: The people he features in “Jaywalking,” who are clearly the dumbest, are the people who actually believed themselves to be the smartest.

While your view of yourself is ultimately the most important thing, I believe it is also important to be aware of how others are seeing you. If you think you’re smart but everyone else thinks you’re dumb, there’s a good chance everyone else is right. (If you weren’t so dumb, you could see that.) Time magazine reports that 30.5 percent of Americans are obese, but that only 19.8 percent THINK they’re obese. Which means there’s 10.7 percent out there who are obese and don’t realize it, which explains why some of them dress the way they do.

Whose job is it to tell people that the public perceives them as buffoons? Nobody’s. Well, mine, maybe, but probably not. The fact is, they provide us entertainment. The procession of inbred screamers on Springer; the pitiful, knowledge-deficient troglodytes on Leno; the hapless plus-sizes who cram themselves into revealing and unbecoming clothing — these are our entertainment. They are what amuses us. Were it not for a modest dose of self-awareness and common sense, the rest of us would be like them.

(Oh, and it’s Washington, D.C.)

Because I am 75 years old and we are sitting around the dinner table, I am going to tell you about my recent health problems.

The eye situation arose first. The doctor said it was conjunctivitis, commonly known as “pinkeye,” which is a term I usually associate with children whose families live in trailers. (Also: “ringworm.”) It knocked me down a peg to discover I had it, and I had to re-examine some of my closely held generalizations, though I could not examine them very closely, what with the pinkeye and all.

The pinkeye should have gone away within 10 days, but it persisted, and a new symptom was suddenly introduced one day: extreme sensitivity to light. Ordinary sunlight was so bright, I could not keep my eyes open, which made driving very, very exciting. (Something for Utah drivers to think about: Even in my blinded state, I still managed to use my turn signal.) (Though occasionally what I was turning toward was an open trench or a store window.)

Unable to go out in the light, I wondered if I was becoming a zombie or vampire. Also, since every ailment I have causes me to believe I am dying — I never get a headache without thinking I might have brain cancer, and I’m not joking about that — I wondered if I was going blind. It caused a good deal of introspection on my part, and my conclusion was that I would be the grumpiest blind person ever. I wouldn’t even learn Braille. I would just make people read to me. I would be a total jerk, like this blind kid named Jason who was in my first grade class. He was nice enough, as long as you were catering to his every whim and giving him 100 percent special treatment because he was blind. Otherwise, he would throw tantrums and scream a lot. One time in class we were learning about worms, and the teacher said that worms don’t have eyes; instead, they feel their way around with their heads. And this girl named Melissa who I had a huge crush on said, “Just like Jason!” And everyone laughed, and Jason cried this big, fake cry, like he wasn’t even particularly offended by the joke, but he figured if he cried he’d get some special attention from the teacher. In my current line of work, I encounter a lot of people who go around looking for reasons to be offended, and they always remind me of Jason the Blind Crybaby from first grade.

Anyway, half-blind and doddering, I went back to the doctor, and he decided it must be “allergic conjunctivitis,” or pinkeye caused not by trailer people, but by allergies. The only known allergies I have are cats and algebra, and I’ve successfully avoided both for a long time, so what caused the allergic conjunctivitis was a mystery. Nonetheless, the doctor prescribed some drops that did wonders for alleviating the pinkeye symptoms, but which also made my vision blurry. So I could go outside without squinting, but everything I saw was fuzzy. I considered this an improvement, especially when I had to watch “Knockaround Guys.”

The next day, my ear began hurting, and fluids I shan’t describe began issuing from it. One night the ear throbbed as I tried to sleep, and it throbbed in such a rhythmic fashion that I wondered if I had killed an old man and buried him beneath the floorboards and was now feeling guilty about it. Except that beneath my floorboards is another condo unit, and surely the residents there would have noticed if I’d dropped an old man’s body into their living room.

So it was back to the doctor, who looked in my ear and said, “Huh. Wow. Huh. Wow.” I felt satisfaction at having impressed the doctor. It was an ear infection, we decided — which, coupled with the pinkeye, meant all I needed was chicken pox to complete the Diseases of 3-Year-Olds Trifecta.

After a lot of eye drops, ear drops and mouth pills, my senses were restored to their original functionality. Now I can relax, spend time with my grandchildren, and enjoy my golden years.

On a recent airline flight, I was seated next to two lesbians. Actually, I only have evidence that one of them was a lesbian, because she had her hand placed lovingly on the other’s leg for the entire flight. If the second woman was straight, she was pretty lazy about defending her heterosexuality.

Of course, women can get away with a lot more physical contact than men can without necessarily being gay. Two women could kiss and and still be considered “straight,” while a man is assumed gay if he so much as doesn’t have a girlfriend.

But my point is, there are lesbians afoot, both in Utah and in the real world. Even Utah County has lesbians — two of them, to be exact. Their names are Wendy Weaver and Rachael Smith, and they are partners. And I don’t mean business partners. (I mean lesbian partners.) They have been in the news periodically over the past five years because some parents want Weaver dismissed from her teaching position at Spanish Fork High School on the grounds that her sexual orientation makes her unfit to teach.

This is a thorny issue, and we will attempt to deal with it here in a manner that is fair, even-handed and containing a lot of lesbian jokes. We will also try to use the word “lesbian” as often as possible.

First of all, what subject does Weaver teach? If it is something like hair styling or fashion design, I can see why a lesbian would not be right for the job. You wouldn’t want a gay man teaching auto repair, either, and most straight men could not handle women’s studies. But Weaver teaches psychology, which means she might as well teach the history of long division for as much as students will be paying attention.

She used to coach girls’ volleyball, too, but was fired from that position when she refused to sign a statement saying she would not discuss her sexual orientation with students. I find it difficult to believe a girls’ volleyball coach would actually have to come out and SAY she’s a lesbian for students to think she is, but whatever. I don’t think any teacher, gay or straight, ought to be discussing his or her sexual orientation with students. My primary reason for this is: Ewww. Who wants to hear high school teachers talk about sex?

Homosexuality is a hot topic in Utah. Most people are “against” it, which can mean anything from having a live-and-let-live attitude, to wishing fiery, painful death upon all practicers. And of course being against homosexuality means you have to talk about it all the time. Only in San Francisco is homosexuality discussed more than in Utah.

Homosexuality is such a big deal here that in 1998, when the Daily Herald ran a front-page story about Wendy Weaver and Rachael Smith, including a photo of the two hugging in a very non-suggestive, casual, we’re-just-friends sort of way, at least 50 people canceled their subscriptions. (I am guessing they found another way to glean daily information about news events in Utah County, perhaps by hanging out at Floyd’s Barbershop, or by talking to people who still read the Daily Herald.) The picture itself was harmless and said very little. But when filtered through readers’ knowledge of the accompanying story, it became pornographic and lewd.

And so in this environment comes the current controversy, over whether a homosexual is fit to teach high school. I say the same standards should be applied to all teachers, carbonated and non-carbonated: Don’t talk about your personal sex life with students. Don’t make sexual advances toward your students. Don’t harm your students in any way, and that includes assigning homework over the weekend.

Regardless of my opinions on homosexuality, which you’ll notice I have not expressed, I admire Mrs. and Mrs. Weaver for standing up for what they believe in. But I also question their sanity a little: Why would any homosexual choose to be out of the closet in Utah, where the level of compassion for people who are “different” is lower than a BYU hemline? If Wendy Weaver is unfit to teach, it’s for being a glutton for punishment, not for being gay.

Until about a year ago, I rarely read novels. I had myself convinced they were too long and that my attention span was too short. Then I realized that was absurd, that surely I could focus my mind on something long enough to — look, a shiny thing!

Sorry, where was I? Yes, I was talking about food. At Red Rock Brewery in Salt Lake, they have an appetizer called “warm goat cheese.” When a friend urged me to try it, I told him I don’t want anything warm that came from a goat. I thought that was pretty funny.

Books. I was talking about books.

I finally buckled down and began reading novels and was surprised to learn how fast I can get through them. Of course, like an illiterate man who has recently learned to read, or a foreigner just learning the language, I started with young adult fiction. Am I embarrassed to be seen in public reading something written from the point of view of a 14-year-old British girl and called “Knocked out by My Nunga-Nungas”? Yes, but not as embarrassed as I was checking it out from the library.

Speaking of being embarrassed at the library, I was recently embarrassed on behalf of the 50-ish gal who trundled up to the information desk and said, loudly, “I’m looking for ‘Less Miserables,'” pronounced exactly as I just wrote it: “less miserables.” I wondered whether she wanted to read a translation, or if perhaps her interests were more scholarly and she planned to hunker down and scour the original French text of “Less Miserables.”

Anyway, once I’d been through the young adult fiction, I began to desire a true challenge. I debated whether to read “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. This is a massive, heavy book with a lot of words and very, very few cartoon illustrations. It is not a pop-up book, nor does it contain a great deal of rhyming. It has been recommended to me by friends. But I thought: Do I want to be the sort of person who reads “Atlas Shrugged”? Next thing you know, I’m growing a goatee and hanging out in coffee shops and, worse, telling people about how great “Atlas Shrugged” is.

Instead, I picked up a magazine called True Experiences. It was the “Collectors’ Keepsake Anniversary Issue!,” not to mention “A Treasury Of The Best Stories Ever!” On the cover was a vaguely pretty blond woman who was smiling for the camera as if her family were being held hostage and she was being ordered at gunpoint to smile for the camera. She had a look about her that suggested she was a Kansas girl who had just gotten off the bus in Hollywood and would be working in the porn industry within three days; her smile had a porny air about it. Around her picture were the titles of the various “true experiences” being retold in this issue, including: “If You Ever Leave Me, I’ll Kill You!”; “She Killed My Baby, Now I’m Taking Hers”; and “Only Six Months to Live: I’m Not Ready to Die!”

Obviously, it would have been impossible for me not to buy this magazine.

The stories are written anonymously and almost certainly do not have a grain of truth in them. They’re also rather boring, surprisingly enough. It’s the titles that are titillating: “Desperate for Illicit Sex” is one, followed by this summary: “Stolen moments of secret sin were what I lived for. Still, I couldn’t tame my married lover’s wild heart.” Instantly, you know what this story is about, and you know you probably don’t actually want to read it, now that you think about it. It’s trash — pure, unadulterated, adultery-related trash.

So I turned from that unfulfilling dreck back to the more respectable American novel, in this case “Catcher in the Rye.” It’s barely less salacious than True Experiences, but at least it has the distinction of having been banned by some high schools. Books are fun, and they — ooh, a butterfly!

I had no idea Utah County’s jail was in a remote part of Spanish Fork until I had to go there over the weekend to bail out my brother.

This is my Big Fat Greek Brother Jeff we’re talking about, and you should know he hadn’t committed any major, violent crime. Violence is not in his nature (at least not against people; pies are another matter, and there are several all-you-can-eat buffets that tremble when they see him coming).

The arrest came because he had neglected to pay a traffic ticket a few months ago. This led to a warrant being issued against him, and when he got pulled over for having only one functioning headlight (well, for his CAR having only one functioning headlight), the cop discovered the warrant, put Jeff in handcuffs, crammed him into the backseat of the squad car, possibly with the aid of a shoehorn, and hauled him off to jail. Jeff got arrested for laziness, essentially, which I can totally see.

I learned of all this when I received a phone call from a friend of Jeff’s who had been riding with him at the time. He said I would have to purchase Jeff’s freedom by posting bail, which was set at $650, or $2 a pound. I had to come up with this money because I was the only relative nearby, and because I am believed to have flora growing in my back yard that produces fruit made of cash. In truth, I don’t even have a back yard, and $650 was more than I had in my bank account. Fortunately, Washington Mutual offers overdraft protection, and charges only $22 every time you use it. (Twenty-two dollars is such a low sum that I’m sure the bank loses money on the deal.)

So I headed to the nether regions of Spanish Fork, which is already in the nether regions of civilization, to fetch Jeff out of the hoosegow. It seems awfully inconvenient to put a jail so far from the county’s population center. Unless a majority of criminals come from Spanish Fork, in which case it makes perfect sense.

The reason, of course, is that people don’t like to have jails near their homes. I don’t exactly understand this. In terms of building asthetics and the caliber of people it attracts, a jail is no worse than a Wal-Mart. And even if the jail has a high incidence of people escaping, it seems unlikely they’d be stopping off at neighborhood homes to commit more crimes on their way out of town, especially given that it’s a county jail, and most inmates are there for being drunk or for not paying traffic tickets and aren’t liable to try escaping anyway, what with being too drunk or too lazy. I wouldn’t mind having a jail in my neighborhood in Orem, especially if it made it easier to visit family members. As it is, Jeff lives in Provo, and I hardly see him.

At any rate, I learned that personal checks are the one form of payment the jail does not take, but credit and debit cards are OK, and I assume cash works, too. Who has $650 cash lying around, I don’t know. I suspect bail amounts are not chosen for reasons of convenience.

(How are they chosen? Is it like airline tickets, where prices are determined by drawing random numbers from a hat? Or is there a conversion chart somewhere, “1 unpaid traffic ticket + 1 non-functioning headlight = $650”?)

At the jail you are not allowed to have any direct contact with the police officers. They stand behind thick windows and communicate with you via telephone receiver, and to hand documents and debit cards back and forth, there’s a metal drawer you put the stuff in that slides from your side of the glass to theirs. It is the same procedure used in leper colonies. I wondered if I would receive Jeff via sliding drawer, too, but that did not turn out to be the case.

He had been in jail for only 45 minutes when I retrieved him, and he seemed none the worse for the wear. In fact, he thought it was all pretty funny, though his smile faded quickly when he learned the county had assessed his worth at only $650. I told him that in my book, he’s worth $650 plus the $22 overdraft fee.

For some reason, I allowed my TV to show me a local news broadcast the other night, and I heard the anchorperson say this: “Coming up next, a school’s show-and-tell time gone horribly wrong!”

I was intrigued, of course. Anytime a newscaster tell you something has gone “horribly wrong,” you know you’re in for a treat. (Why don’t things ever go any other kind of wrong, by the way? “Pleasantly wrong,” or “casually wrong,” or “magnificently wrong,” for example.)

Since this was TV news, alerting viewers to important events was not the priority. Instead, the focus was on teasing us, to keep us watching for as long as possible. If it were discovered at noon that the world would end before midnight, the TV news would say, “You may die today. Find out why at 10.”

So after a commercial break and some scripted banter among the anchors, the story about show-and-tell time gone horribly wrong was told. What happened was, there was a tiger at a school assembly in Scotts Valley, Calif., and it jumped over some seats and put its mouth around a kid’s head. The boy received relatively minor injuries, considering his head had been in a tiger’s mouth, and is now doing fine. The tiger is now a pantsuit.

No, surprisingly, the tiger was not put to sleep, and what a dreadful pantsuit that would have been anyway. Usually, when a thing like this happens, the animal is summarily executed despite acting only in the manner prescribed by nature, and whichever human beings were responsible for letting it happen get off scot-free — seriously, not a bit of scot on them.

Entirely without scot, so far, is Zoo to You Wildlife Education Inc., a child-terrorization agency that brought the tiger to the assembly as a reward for students who had sold magazine subscriptions, and as a punishment for students whom administrators had determined ought to be beheaded.

(In fairness, Zoo to You has an excellent reputation and seems, on its Web site, to be genuinely sorry about the incident. In unfairness, tell that to the kid who’s cleaning tiger saliva out of his nightmares for the next 20 years.)

According to the TV newsperson, “parents are now questioning what the tiger was doing there in the first place.”

That’s always a question you ask in hindsight, isn’t it? “You know, in retrospect, perhaps bringing the wild jungle cat into a room full of children wasn’t the best idea,” you say. “Maybe a mime would have been less deadly and only slightly more traumatic.” But it’s a little late for would-haves, Hector.

So it really wasn’t “show-and-tell” after all, despite what the TV person said. Show-and-tell is when kids bring items from home and share them with classmates, not when outside organizations come in to promote the devouring of kindergarteners.

Show-and-tell is what my 4-year-old friend Miles has at the pre-school he attends in Orem. Miles is the son of Claire and Monty, who you’ll recall recently spent a year in England, and who also have a 2-year-old son named Owen, who acts as if he has crazy bees in his head.

For show-and-tell, Miles, the non-crazy child, has taken the following items to school:

– His Viewmaster, an item I didn’t realize was still being manufactured in this day and age;

– Post-It Notes;

– Glow-in-the-dark adhesive stars that you can stick on your wall to make it look like you live in outer space. (Miles reports: “Some of the kids were wondering if they were glow-in-the-light, but I said, ‘No, they’re just glow-in-the-dark.'”)

I believe Miles has captured the true essence of show-and-tell in that the objects he chooses reflect the whimsy and innocence of his youth. Also, the Post-It Notes did not attempt to eat anyone. School administrators should take note: After a GOOD assembly, no one needs stitches.

When we refer to the “new TV season,” we must note that the word “new” is being used facetiously. There is nothing new about the shows premiering this month. The situations, the jokes and the plots are the same. Using a template, you can create shows that the networks will probably come up with, too, if you give them enough time.

The “Guy Starts over with a New Life” family drama
“Head Trip.” A wealthy, selfish Wall Street tycoon only cares about money and beautiful women, both of which he has access to in vast supply. Then, he learns what’s really important in life after his head is severed in a boating accident. No longer able to see, hear, speak or think, he stumbles around New York City, teaching valuable lessons to strangers about the meaning of life and the importance of sitting down when the boat is going fast. Craig T. Nelson stars.

The “Celebrity Gets a Show in Which He Basically Plays Himself” sitcom
“Life with Adolf.” Adolf Hitler stars as Adolf McGee, a short, silly-looking man who’s a tyrant at the small carpet-store he owns … but he plays second fiddle to his free-spirited wife (Lisa Kudrow) and his precocious kids at home! Sample dialogue:

ADOLF: I can’t believe you got your ear pierced!
SON: Don’t get mad, Dad. All the kids are doing it!
ADOLF: Mad? I’m not mad. I’m Fuhrer-ous!

Each episode ends with a hug and the audience saying, “Awwwww,” and then “Heil!”

The “‘Family’ Show That Airs During the ‘Family’ Hour That Is Full of Dirty Jokes” sitcom
“Up Yores.” The Yore family — Dad, Mom, trashy teen-age daughter, sullen teen-age daughter and smart-aleck pre-teen son — move up the New England coastline to live in Nantucket. There they meet a variety of odd local characters with whom they engage in smutty repartee. In a Very Special Episode, the trashy teen-age daughter starts her own adults-only Web site; hilarity ensues.

The “Legal Drama Where Everything Gets Solved in an Hour” show
“Lawyer Cop.” Dennis Franz IS Lawyer Cop, the man who is a lawyer and a cop. As a loose-cannon cop who plays by his own rules but always get the job done, he’d tough as nails and won’t let the scum take over this city (because he lost his son to drugs years ago and now it’s personal). So each week he catches a bad guy single-handedly, even though he often gets so personally involved that the chief (Brian Dennehy) takes him off the case. Then, in the second half of the show, because he is a lawyer who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, Lawyer Cop prosecutes the bad guy in court and eventually wins. Except every now and then, Lawyer Cop loses a case, and it teaches us all some very profound lessons. Like the importance of sitting down when the boat is going fast, for example.

BYU President Merrill J. Bateman reminded students a couple weeks ago that their bodies are temples and ought to be treated as such. This is important advice, because many students treat their bodies not like temples but like sugar refineries or waste-treatment plants or petting zoos.

When I was a student at President Bateman’s university, I exercised regularly and attempted to stay in relatively good health. Now, such ideas mystify me; I cannot recall how or why I ever felt that way. My current goal is to see how fat I can get. I view it as a science project. This is ironic, since the most interest I ever showed in science when I was at BYU was in finding reasons not to go to Biology 100 (which, in a bit of even deeper irony, I had to take twice, having failed it the first time due to my poor attendance).

Issues of health and obesity have been in the news lately after a New York man sued several fast food chains because he was fat. I saw a picture of this guy, whose name is Caesar Barber, and he sort of has a point: He is very, very fat. If his case goes to trial and there is any dispute over whether or not he is fat, I will gladly testify on his behalf.

But the issue is probably not one of fatness, but of whose fault the fatness is. Barber sued McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken — coincidentally, the four chains with the most money — saying they are to blame for his being the biggest, fattest man in the world.

(The following is an actual quote, which you can read for yourself at http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/19/fast.food.lawsuit/index.html.)

“For years, I ate fast food because it was efficient and cheap,” he said on CNN in August, his salty breath barely escaping the confines of his huge, floppy jowls. “I had no idea I could be damaging my health.”

That’s right: He had NO IDEA fast food might be bad for him. Which means he ought to be suing his parents or the public school system, too, because in addition to being the biggest, fattest man in the world, he is also apparently the stupidest.

Speaking of food and health and whatnot, the LDS Church’s Missionary Training Center had to evacuate 1,200 of its trainees Wednesday night because there was a gas leak. No one suffered any lasting effects and everyone was back in class the next morning after what was probably the most thrilling night they will ever have at the MTC. (“Dude, we got EVACUATED! We were out until MIDNIGHT!”)

If you, like me, spent the first part of your missionary experience at the Provo facility, then you know which jokes I’m going to make about there being too much “gas” at the Missionary Training Center. The flatulence level there is legendary. My MTC companion had some sort of intestinal disorder that, coupled with the carbohydrate-rich MTC food, caused him to emit the flatulations of the damned. They were like shrapnel, filling every cubic inch of the room immediately upon being launched, yellowing the eyes and singeing the neckties of anyone present.

Which brings us back to President Bateman’s remarks on treating our bodies right. “When we understand that the body is a temple, we will not deface it,” he said in his devotional address on Sept. 10. “We will understand the importance of modest dress. We will understand the incongruity of individuals stripping to the waist and painting their faces and bodies at football games.”

Unless President Bateman has seen women doing this, or men doing it not at football games but at church functions, I’m not sure what he means by “incongruity.” He can’t be saying there’s no excuse for going shirtless in public or for painting one’s face, because most water-related sports require toplessness and pretty much all stage acting requires makeup. I guess it doesn’t apply to me anyway, since I’m not a BYU student and I don’t take off my shirt in public or paint my face at all. My body is not the sort of temple you’d want to see half-exposed or painted blue, not even in the interest of science.

I am glad to have been born in this day and age, as opposed to one of the days and ages when life was deadly, deadly dull.

Let’s consider life 130 years ago in the Wild American West. You probably own a farm. You get up at dawn, feed the chickens and pigs and buffalo or whatever, and then do your various farm work until sundown. Then you go inside, have dinner, and now it’s 7 p.m. Since you’re getting up at 5 a.m., you don’t really need to go to bed until 10. So what are you doing from 7 until bedtime? NOTHING! There’s no TV, no movies, no radio. You can read books, sure, but EVERY SINGLE NIGHT? For three hours? By candlelight?!

OK, so there’s conversation. You sit around the fire and chat with your wife and kids. But there’s NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT. When your whole day consists of the same tedious farm work over and over again, during which you rarely encounter other human beings, what possible stories could you have to tell?

“So I harvested some corn today.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“Well, I went out and … uh, harvested it. Then I put it in the, uh, corn … holder … or whatever it’s called where you put corn after you harvest it.”

“Fascinating.”

And then you have two hours and 59 minutes to kill.

Dating must have been particularly hard in those days. In the modern era, if the guy a woman has gone on a few dates with does not call her for a couple days, the power of her insecurity is unleashed at full velocity, and she comes up with an amazing array of reasons why this may have happened, all of which boil down to: He hates me. He found out something unpleasant about me, and now he hates me. He met someone else, and now he hates me. He realized I’m fat and ugly, and now he hates me. With cellphones and e-mail and fax and everything else we have, there is literally no logical reason not to hear from someone unless it’s on purpose. And if he’s intentionally not contacting her, then according to the workings of the female mind, it’s obviously because he hates her. The best the woman can hope for is that the man has been in an accident of some kind — but even then, she would hear about it on the news or see it online or something.

But in 1872, there were no phones, no lights, no motorcars, not a single luxury. If a man didn’t come to call within a few days of his last episode of woo-pitching, the woman’s imagination could come up with a wide variety of legitimate, plausible reasons for it, none of which had anything to do with the man’s feelings toward her. For example, it could be a 10-mile buggy ride to her house, thus making a visit an all-day affair, and perhaps he couldn’t get away from the farm or the mercantile or wherever he worked. He could be attacked by bears or Indians on the way. He could have been stricken with tuberculosis since they last met. With no way of communicating rapidly, couples — even those engaged to be married — might go several days without hearing anything from each other — AND THAT WAS OK. Somehow, people still managed to function. Compare that with my engaged roommate, whose contact with his fiancee is such that when he belches, she says, “Excuse me.”

A couple months ago, a storm knocked out the power in Provo, and many of us felt like modern-day pioneers. For example, my friend Tanny (names have been changed) reported having to watch “Scrubs” the way our forefathers did, on a tiny, portable, battery-operated TV that he propped on his stomach. The TV operated via antenna rather than cable, so when he laughed, the resultant jiggling of his belly caused a momentary loss of reception.

For myself, I had to maneuver through Provo when there were no traffic lights. To make it worse, I had a car full of friends following me, and we were all trying to choose a restaurant to go to, but no one in the other car had a cellphone. So when we were stopped at intersections, I had to get out and run back to suggest a new place for us to try, and then they had to follow me. Eventually, we reached the promised land, which I think in this case was Chili’s, which seems strange to me. We made the onion rings bloom like a rose, though, and we were grateful to have interesting lives.

Our topic of discussion today is food. You might think parts of the column are about something else and that I have tangented, but surely that is a figment of your imagination.

I never take food home with me from restaurants, regardless of how much is left. For one thing, there’s usually not much left. I tend to eat like I’ve never seen food before.

But also, I know I’m not going to eat the food later. Restaurant food only tastes good to me in the restaurant. Out of context, it loses all its impact. Maybe having someone with a nametag serve the leftovers to me in my kitchen would help, like in that “Far Side” cartoon where the young snake has to jiggle Grandpa Snake’s rat so he’ll think it’s alive. But who’s going to do that for me? You? I didn’t think so.

Besides, looking at the food later would only bring back uncomfortable memories of the restaurant. “I remember you!” I would say to the food accusingly. “You’re from when I was at Macaroni Grill and ate so much I couldn’t breathe!” Such experiences, when recalled to memory, tend to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth, as it were.

My one recent exception to the no-doggie-bags rule occurred in Las Vegas, where a lot of exceptions to a lot of rules take place. (I will never gamble, I will never spend less than $5 on a steak, I will never pay any amount of money to watch men painted blue do anything, etc.)

I was visiting my friend Pants (names have been changed), his wife Mrs. Pants, and the adorable Pants children, a family that has for some reason opted to live in the uninhabitable wasteland of Las Vegas. I should mention that this particular visit occurred in July, on the weekend that it was 116 degrees there. You are aware that I sometimes exaggerate for the sake of humor, as when I have mentioned that Freddie Prinze Jr. is the worst actor in the universe when in fact his worstness can only be proven for our specific planet and some of the moons of Jupiter. But I am not exaggerating when I report the temperature at 116 on the weekend I visited the Pants family. Young children, their constitutions still weak and unformed, were seen melting on the playgrounds. Black cars burst into flames. Religious leaders openly questioned their faith and urged all within the sound of their voices to beseech the pagan ice god for relief. It was a desperately miserable time to be alive. The mayor of Las Vegas surely will not be reelected if he allows weather like this to persist unabated.

As a result of the nightmarish weather, and in an effort to get this column back on approximately the same track it set out on, the Pantses and I spent all of our time indoors, mostly in restaurants. For dinner one night, we ate at the Claim Jumper. We do not have any Claim Jumpers around here — the Park City restaurant with that name is not part of the national chain — and boy, are we missing out. Evidently, the restaurant’s original plan was to attract giants, as everything is served in comically large portions that could never be ingested by an ordinary-sized individual. The guy who sued McDonald’s because he was fat, maybe. But not normal people.

After eating so much that we were sweating gravy, the Pantses and I had barely made a dent in our entrees. And then we realized we had neglected to save room for dessert. At Claim Jumper, the dessert you want is a special eclair that is the size of your head. It is served on ice cream and covered with chocolate syrup and whipped cream. Thousands have been killed by it.

Unable to pass up an opportunity to enjoy the head-sized eclair, we got one to go. We brought home our other leftover food, too. I had half a chicken-fried steak at midnight, and for breakfast the next morning we all ate the eclair. Surely you agree that life could not get any better than that.

It is Sept. 11, 2002. Neither I nor any of the other writers creating the deluge of commentary today have answers. Like the rest of you, we only have questions. Questions and the occasional brief flash of insight. Sometimes I think we are writing just to hear ourselves write.

A friend and I were sitting on a tram in Orlando this past April, moving from one part of the massive Walt Disney World complex to another. Near us was a family of people who spoke with New York accents.

I was intrigued. I’ve visited New York several times and love the city, as well as its oft-maligned people. And so I felt comfortable making conversation with the strangers next to me on the Disney World tram.

“What part of New York are you from?” I said to the person closest to me, a dark-haired woman in her 40s.

“Brooklyn,” she said, smiling. “Down here on vacation.”

“I love New York,” I said. “I go every year.”

“It’s a great place. Been through a hard time lately.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“My husband” — she gestured toward the robust man sitting across from her — “is a World Trade Center survivor. He worked for an insurance company in one of the towers.”

“Oh, my gosh,” I said. On paper, “Oh, my gosh” looks like a dumb thing to say. In context, I think it was OK. How else do you respond to something like that?

She continued with her story. You forgive someone foisting such a hugely personal experience upon you when it pertains to Sept. 11. That day made us all intimate friends.

She said:

“Some of his bosses were going golfing with clients that day. My husband hates to golf and isn’t very good at it, so he said he would skip it and go into the office like normal.

“They tried to talk him into golfing. Finally, he said if the weather was nice that day, he would golf. Otherwise, he would go to work.

“Thank God it was a nice day.”

She smiled at her husband, who was sitting across from her on the tram, who was out golfing on Sept. 11 instead of working at his desk. Now, he was laughing and joking with the other members of their group, enjoying a family vacation. He glanced over and smiled at us, maybe a little embarrassed at being the topic of discussion. He seemed to guess which anecdote his wife had been sharing; it bore the markings of a story she’d told over and over again since it happened.

What this family learned, and what I hope everyone learned, is that life is fragile and ought to be treasured. I don’t know what this husband and wife were like before Sept. 11, but I have to assume they now had a renewed love and appreciation for each other.

Is that my point, then? It feels like the answer to something. I’m just not sure what the question was.

In this day of financial misdealings and fallen heroes, a time when nothing seems certain and the Game Show Network is changing its programming schedule on almost a weekly basis, it is good to know that some things remain constant: PETA is still crazy. I believe this is due to undernourishment.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is re-launching its anti-dairy “Got Beer?” campaign, and according to a PETA press release, the group was hoping to hit Brigham Young University with the ads.

“Even one glass of milk supports animal abuse and harms your health, both of which are anathema to Mormon teachings,” said PETA Director of Vegan Outreach Bruce Friedrich in the press release. “If they are taking Mormon teachings seriously, drinking milk should be even less acceptable to BYU administrators than drinking beer.”

Yes, that’s what he said. He actually used the word “anathema.”

Oh, and he also implied that BYU administrators weren’t serious enough about Mormon teachings, else they would be opposed to dairy, too.

I called Friedrich to get clarification on this matter. He said: “Mormons care about compassion for animals and their own health. But LDS virtues related to health and compassion are tossed in the toilet by anyone who’s drinking dairy products. BYU administrators should be just as anti-dairy as they are anti-alcohol.”

It is true that Mormons have compassion for animals, insofar as we try to shoot them in the head and kill them quickly before cooking and devouring their flesh. But is it a stretch to say that, therefore, we shouldn’t drink milk?

(PETA’s opposition to milk-drinking, by the way, has to do with the conditions in which dairy cows are kept, and how the milkers’ hands are often cold, and how the cows’ teat regions are always tender and sore after a vigorous milking. Also, I guess probably a lot of cows get killed at some point. The press release says, “Many male calves are crammed into tiny veal crates,” and then I can’t read the rest because I started drooling on the paper because I was thinking about veal parmigiana at Macaroni Grill.)

Anyway, I wanted to know how BYU administrators felt about the suggestion that their tacit approval of milk indicates a lack of devotion to the teachings of Mormonism. BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins gave this statement: “While drinking alcohol is something that is prohibited by our religious principles, the drinking of milk is a personal choice.” Asked whether she, as a BYU administrator, takes Mormon teachings seriously, she said, “I do, and I also drink milk.” Surely such a profound contradiction will cause PETA representatives’ heads to explode, pelting bystanders with tofu-based shrapnel.

Then there is the issue of running “Got Beer?” ads in BYU’s student paper, The Daily Universe (motto: “Snider-Free Since 1999”). Friedrich told me, “We’ve never been turned down, even with our most controversial ads, by a student paper. I can’t imagine they would turn down the ad.”

Well, one thing BYU specializes in is doing things you can’t imagine anyone doing. The Universe has rejected the ad, citing university policy not to promote or endorse things (such as alcohol) that are contrary to LDS Church doctrine.

The PETA press release says, “Unlike beer drinking, dairy consumption … hurts animals.” I suppose alcohol consumption doesn’t hurt animals, unless you get drunk and kick your dog, or if you’re playing a drinking game where every time someone takes a drink, you have to break a swan’s neck. So animals are mostly safe from beer. But I believe I have heard stories, unsubtantiated though they may be, that occasionally PEOPLE are harmed by the effects of alcohol. It sounds crazy, I know, and I realize our priority should be animals, not humans. But it’s something to think about this morning as you drink your ill-gotten milk, poured over your oat-murdering cereal.

[ The lead to this column sat in my file for a few weeks before I found a good way to use it. The PETA thing fell into my lap, and it seemed like a thing that could be accurately described as remaining constant in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours.

My last column before Sept. 11 last year was about PETA, too.

A friend of mine told me a story in which beer did result in animals being harmed, contrary to what PETA said. Her dad was driving drunk when he ran into a truck carrying some cows, which escaped from the smashed truck and were subsequently shot by a state trooper who couldn’t figure out any other way of controlling them. But the story seemed more shocking than funny, so I didn’t use it.

Bruce Friedrich was very nice on the phone, and he had a sense of humor, too. He was trying to send me some information but couldn’t get his fax machine to work properly. I said, “Try hitting it. You’re not opposed to cruelty to fax machines, are you?” And he chuckled and said, “Oh, no, I’m gonna beat the crap out of it.” His only mistake in regards to PETA and BYU was trying to come into this closed environment unprepared, and in choosing his words poorly. And you know how I am about not letting people get by with poorly chosen words. ]

There is a new picture of me at the top of this column. The old picture was taken in 1998, and it doesn’t accurately reflect the way I look now. I know this because a couple months ago I was reviewing a play when, during intermission, a woman asked if I was Eric Snider, and when I told her I was, she said she recognized me from my column and added, “You’ve gained weight since that picture was taken.” Apparently, the fact that I write reviews of local theater productions gives strangers license to tell me I’m fat.

So I had a new picture taken for this column, and coincidentally it was taken on my birthday. Later in the day, I had another picture taken of me. I was at McGrath’s Fishhouse in Orem for dinner, not because I like seafood, which I don’t, but because at McGrath’s they have this big stupid hat in the shape of a fish that they put on birthday people’s heads. Then they take a Polaroid picture of you wearing the hat, and you get to keep the picture. (You don’t get to keep the hat, unfortunately.)

Last year, my friends Luscious Malone and Tanny Tantan (names have been changed) dragged me to McGrath’s for my birthday dinner, despite the fact that I don’t like fish, and also despite the fact that it was a Sunday and I didn’t want to go out. They forced me to go because THEY like the place, and because they knew about the big stupid fish hat; that’s the sort of friends they are. And the result was this fantastic picture of me wearing the fish, smiling in an adorably cheesy manner. It’s one of the few good pictures ever taken of me.

So this year, I wanted to go back and get a new picture, to see if maybe I could top last year’s. Only this time, somehow the waiter taking the picture caught me off guard, and I wasn’t posed yet, so the picture is this horrible, horrible thing where I look like I weigh 1,000 pounds, with a huge double chin and big, floppy man bosoms. I mean, I’m no prize, but I generally look better than this photo would indicate. My greatest fear is that I will turn up missing and this will be the photo of me they show on the news because it’s the most recent one available. “Snider is described as being fat and grotesque, with enormous, gelatinous nungas,” they would say, especially on Fox. On the way out of the restaurant, my friend Jamal who I was with tripped and fell off the curb, which gave me something to laugh about and distracted me from the awful photo, and I guess what else are friends for?

A few days later, I saw a picture that I had forgotten existed. It’s from when several of us had a party to watch and make fun of Mariah Carey’s film “Glitter.” We decided we ought to dress up in white-trashy clothes, just to make a party out of it, and I wore a pair of Daisy Duke shorts and a T-shirt that had been altered so as to have no sleeves and to come down only to the middle of my belly. (It barely covered my gargantuan he-boobs.) Someone snapped a photo of this, and then I made the mistake of looking at it last week. What gets into us when we’re watching Mariah Carey’s “Glitter”?

Contrast all this with another friend of mine, Chad, who lives in Boston and recently decided he should be a model because a woman at the mall told him he should. Most of us make it a habit not to take advice from strangers, especially people at the mall, but not Chad. He immediately contacted an acquaintance who had connections in the modeling world, and next thing you know he’s getting some shots taken to put in his portfolio. He called me beforehand because he was nervous, and I couldn’t figure out what he was nervous about. It’s not like an audition, where you might screw up your lines. For a photo shoot, you’re showing up basically with your face. If you forget your face at home, yeah, I guess you’re hosed. But otherwise, it seems like it ought to be smooth sailing. I think Chad wished I could have related better, but I’ve never been able to understand the problems of the cute.

And what’s funny is, the woman who told me I had gained weight was, herself, rather fat. Go figure.

There is a lot of unrest and discontent in the world, and in Utah, too. Let us pause a moment and examine some conflicts that have been on my mind recently, in the hopes that getting them out in the open will cause them to fester and become infected. No, wait, to heal, that’s what I meant. Cause them to heal.

Tom Green vs. decency

This week noted local polygamist Tom Green was sentenced to five years to life for marrying a 13-year-old girl in 1986 (a girl who is now a woman who doesn’t see herself as a victim, by the way). I am as tired of making jokes about polygamy as you are of reading them, but let me make this point: Why are there no good-looking polygamists? Does a life of gingham and farm work not attract people with high cheekbones and svelte figures? Or are the good-looking people being ruined by it, going into their first marriage looking like Tom Cruise and coming out of their seventh looking like Tommy Lee Jones?

Also, let me add that while Tom Green has said he married 13-year-old Linda because God gave her to him, it should be noted that Tom Green is a raving lunatic. He’d have to be, to intentionally spend time with a teen-age girl. Think about it. It would be like living at the mall.

Baseball players vs. America

The players of Major League Baseball almost went on strike this week. It would have been the ninth strike since 1972, when players stopped work to demand uglier uniforms. Those demands were met, and hideous uniforms prevailed throughout the 1970s and ’80s. Then, America stopped caring about baseball, coincidentally right around the time the players started making salaries in the billions and striking every other year.

Many of the sport’s remaining 11 fans have vowed they will not return to it if the players strike again, and it is sad to see an American pastime become so tainted by greed and immaturity. But you know who would suffer most in the event of a strike? The steroid industry. Goodness, haven’t those people been through enough already?

Orem residents vs. noise

Last week, a loud-ish concert at UVSC prompted many nearby residents to complain to police, and also to shout at the kids to get off their lawn, and also to say that if the ball landed in their yard, it was theirs now. Then they ate some soup and were in bed by 9.

No, in fairness, the outdoor concert apparently was rather loud, and some of the artists used some naughty language. And it came at a good time, too, because Orem residents were just about to run out of things to complain about.

Chevy vs. Ford

I don’t understand the rivalry between the people who drive Ford trucks and the people who drive Chevy trucks. Judging from the bumper stickers and other insignia one sees on their vehicles, these groups apparently have a hatred for each other that borders on the Middle Eastern.

What puzzles me is that as far as I can tell, Chevy owners and Ford owners are exactly alike, what with the mullets and the blue jeans and the trashy, big-haired women hanging off their tattooed arms. So why the animosity? Did I miss some great falling-out between them, where the Chevy owners invaded Poland, or the Ford owners bombed Pearl Harbor, or whatever? All I know is, possessing decals of a little boy urinating on a Ford logo, or going around saying, “I’d rather push a Ford than drive a Chevy,” demonstrates that as far as passions go, you have selected a rather silly one. But hey, whatever makes you happy and full of hate.

Several of my friends have recently moved to Los Angeles to become actors and waiters and hobos, leaving me with fewer options for lunch partners. As a result, I have taken to eating lunch alone and reading a book while I do. My lack of nearby friends has forced me into a life of literacy. Surely you weep with me over this tragic turn of events.

Lunch, to me, is a social thing. I love eating, but I hardly care where it takes place. It’s all about the companionship, the camaraderie, the being picky about menu terminology. (How can anyone use “encrusted” in a positive sense?) The other night I was eating with one of my remaining friends and telling him stories about another friend. Each of those stories, I realized, had taken place at a restaurant. And now I was sitting at another restaurant, retelling them. The movie about my life will have a lot of characters called “WAITER,” that’s for sure.

When I eat alone, I generally avoid sit-down restaurants. The look of pity in hostesses’ eyes when you say, “One, please” has driven lesser men than me to suicide. So on a recent afternoon, I found myself at Arby’s, enjoying a hearty turkey sandwich and reading a pleasant novel.

Over the sound system, I heard old rock ‘n’ roll playing. How did Arby’s decide to play oldies as opposed to some other genre of music? I didn’t see any connection. Since Arby’s is a roast beef establishment with Western roots, I could have understood country music. I couldn’t have forgiven it, of course, as I cannot forgive playing country music anywhere, under any circumstances, except possibly at a hanging. But at least I could have understood the connection. Oldies, though? It didn’t make sense.

I heard the Beatles sing “I Saw Her Standing There,” which begins this way: “She was just 17/You know what I mean.”

Yes, Paul, I know what you mean. You mean that she was not of legal age, and yet you were leering at her when you saw her standing there. Charming.

I continued to enjoy my lunch as I sat in a booth next to the window, through which a multitude of sunlight was streaming. It was a nice day, and I was having a quiet, contemplative lunch away from anyone I knew, several hundred miles away from my best friends, and a few miles away from my second-tier friends who couldn’t go to lunch today.

And then, without warning, I reached my breaking point. I heard a song called “Vacation,” whose chorus went: “V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N in the summer sun.” Subsequent searches on the Internet revealed that the artist was Connie Francis and that the song peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard charts in 1962. This song, 40 years old and growing older by the minute, had reached forward through time to irritate me beyond all comprehension.

The song enraged me. It was frivolous, light and stupid, with lyrics about “doing the mashed potato to a jukebox tune” and making out at a drive-in movie. We don’t have jukeboxes any more, nor the mashed potato, nor drive-ins. We still have making out, but I think it’s dirtier now than it was then. This song, a crumbling fossil from a bygone era, might as well have been in a museum, perhaps the same one where they keep Connie Francis.

Why did the song anger me so? Was it because it featured spelling, which I have great disdain for in any song because it suggests we wouldn’t know which word was meant otherwise? (“Oh, ‘vacation’! I thought she was saying ‘Vacate! Shun!'”) Was it because I’m not a student anymore and songs about summer vacation have no meaning for me? Or was I just upset that the people in the song, surrounded by friends and merriment, seemed to be having a better time than I was, eating alone at Arby’s? Whatever the reason, I figure it was the book’s fault, so I’ve stopped reading.

It is my theory that no matter how cool your parents are, or how different they seem from the stereotypical parents, eventually everyone’s parents become exactly like everyone else’s.

When I was young, my parents were hip. They were nice to my friends, and my friends thought they were “groovy,” or whatever slang we used in the 1980s. I was always proud of Mom and Dad’s youthfulness and congeniality.

Now they are older, though I suppose that is true of most of us. There is gray in their hair and their steps are not as springy. They have more girth than they once did (though I suppose that is also true of most of us). They creak when they walk, which is good, because that sound is often the only thing frightening off the vultures and other carrion-feeders that circle overhead. Sometimes my siblings and I push Mom and Dad down, just to see if they can get up again.

But it’s more than just their chronological aging. Their attitudes seem more parenty now, too. They remind me of the befuddled middle-aged mothers and fathers you see in sitcoms, the kind who only eat vanilla ice cream and go to bed at 10 p.m. and view all electronic devices with suspicion.

In other words, they remind me of how my grandparents — THEIR parents — were when I was a kid.

The first time I noticed it was on my birthday last year, when Mom and Dad called to wish me a happy one. First Mom got on the phone and asked a bunch of questions — how’s work, how’s the house, am I seeing anyone, etc. Then Dad came on and asked the exact same questions, as if reading from a parenting script. I thought they were playing good cop/bad cop, trying to trip me up in my story, and that later they would compare notes. (“He told you work was ‘fine’? He told me work was ‘OK’!”) If this line of redundant questioning is not stereotypical parent behavior, I don’t know what is.

The older we both get, the less I have in common with Dad. We do not watch the same movies — I watch everything; he watches nothing — nor read the same books nor eat at the same restaurants. The last time I was home, I told my parents I wanted to take them out to the dining establishment of their choice. They chose Coco’s, a chain of eateries in California that is on the same level as Village Inn or Dee’s — good enough food, but hardly something you look forward to. Yet there we were, on a semi-special occasion, eating diner steak and having key lime pie for dessert. The fact that I’m even mentioning this is probably itself a source of division between my parents and me; they will surely not see what I find funny about it, and like most aspects of my life, they will look at this column with bemusement and bewilderment.

So the last time I talked to Dad, I discovered something we can relate to each other on: money. My parents bought a new house the same time I did, so we had much to discuss. Interest rates, mortgage payments, equity loans — we could have gone on for hours. I told him how much credit card debt I had accumulated, and I believe he was genuinely impressed that one person could spend that much without the aid of a wife or children.

Not long ago, Mom sent me an e-mail to which I did not immediately respond. The next day, she sent it again, saying she wasn’t sure it had really gone the first time. Translation? “You MUST not have gotten it, because if you had, SURELY you would have replied to your poor old gray-headed mother immediately.” This is Motherhood with a capital M.

And yet, for all our differences, I hesitate to say I don’t understand my parents, or that they don’t understand me. We do understand each other — or we grasp the basics, anyway. I know what makes them tick, even if some of their specific behavior puzzles me, and they know more about my inner workings than most people do. Maybe we don’t relate to each other very well. But since when is that a requirement for loving someone? I love my parents dearly, and I’ll be sad when the buzzards finally carry them off.

Let’s talk about the conscience, a fascinating part of the human psyche. It separates us from the animals, who do not have feelings of regret or guilt, or feelings of any kind, really, which is why they don’t complain when you kick them.

My conscience, whose name is Conscience, is an imperious, condescending being who lives in the back of my brain. He hates his neighbors, Frivolity and Gluttony, who cause him no end of trouble. Conscience is Mr. Wilson to Frivolity and Gluttony’s Dennis the Menace. Conscience is always making irate phone calls to me on the order of, “Have you seen the credit card bills from Frivolity’s last trip to New York?” and “Look what Gluttony did to that buffet table!”

The thing is, Conscience has only himself to blame, because he is often lazy in his duties, not joining the discussion until I am well into the planning stages. For example, a few weeks ago I was at Wal-Mart when I realized I needed some Chapstick. I located the Chapstick display, found what I needed, and was walking toward the checkout when it occurred to me: This Chapstick is tiny and this store is huge. I could very easily slip it into my pocket with my left hand, buy my other items with my right hand (I’m ambidextrous), and leave without paying for the Chapstick. In all likelihood, I would not be caught. Why don’t I do that…?

Then Conscience came running up, breathless, and said, “Wait, what? What are you thinking about doing?” I explained it to him, and with great incredulity, he said, “No, you can’t steal the Chapstick, you moron. It’s WRONG, remember?” And I realized, oh, yeah, stealing is WRONG. So I didn’t do it. But how did I get so far in the thought process before Conscience showed up? Was he out battling Lust or Pride, or was he just sitting in the back of my mind, reading a magazine?

Then there’s the time my sister was in a car accident that was not her fault, for which she received a handsome insurance settlement and some additional money for medical bills. In all, she came out ahead of the game by quite a wide margin. So I began to wish someone would crash into my car — not causing me any permanent or unbearably painful injury, but enough to where I’d need some medical attention and, thus, some pain-and-suffering money from the at-fault party. And of course they’d need to total my car, too, which shouldn’t be hard, because it’s a Hyundai. You can total a Hyundai just by slamming the door.

But no one would run into me. I was driving flawlessly — had to make sure there was no chance of the accident being my fault — and the bad drivers around me were somehow missing me. I’d come upon the scene of an accident and think, “Wow, that could have been me. If only I’d left the house sooner…!”

And so I began to wonder how I could cause an accident while still making it technically the other driver’s fault. That’s when Conscience FINALLY came in. I don’t know where he’d been, but he sure was livid when he heard what I’d been discussing behind his back. “They have a name for what you’re planning,” Conscience said to me as he glared at Greed and Manipulation, who shuffled their feet and looked at the floor. “It’s called INSURANCE FRAUD. You would GO TO JAIL.” And I thought, oh, yeah, you’re right. Never mind, then.

The trouble with ethics is that some things are only wrong MOST of the time. If I had needed to steal that Chapstick to feed my sister’s starving family, for example, I would have felt OK about it. In theory, stealing is wrong. In theory. In theory, democracy works. And then Nikki McKibbin makes it to the final four in “American Idol” and we realize democracy is a failure. Lots of things work “in theory.”

All of which is my way of explaining, Your Honor, that I didn’t REALIZE I had slipped the Chapstick into my pocket. I was planning to pay for it, I swear. Believe me, my conscience would never let me lie to you.

It is time to recap the summer blockbuster season and make note of the films that busted our blocks during this hot, sweaty, magical time of year.

You probably thought summer began on June 21, but man, are you dumb. It actually started April 19, when “The Scorpion King” stormed into theaters and began beating patrons about the head with a wooden club. The hero of this movie was wrestling star The Rock, who gave probably the best performance by a wrestler since Hulk Hogan in “Mr. Nanny.”

“Scorpion King” was quickly followed by “Jason X,” which was part 10 in the “Friday the 13th” series of movies about a misunderstood fellow named Jason. Jason loves to kill people. He is different from, say, the Scorpion King because, um, Jason wears a mask.

But the summer REALLY began on May 3, a good six weeks before summer began, with “Spider-Man,” about a freakish boy who gets bitten by a radioactive spider and promptly falls over dead.

No, actually, he inherits all the relative strength of that spider, similar to how people who get bitten by toddlers develop all the powers of a toddler, with the crawling and the drooling and the what-have-you.

It was just two weeks after that when “Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones; We Enjoy … Punctuation!” was released and hated by millions of “Star Wars” fans, who made their displeasure known to series creator George Lucas by watching the film only 11 times instead of 20.

Were there scintillating, thought-provoking dramas this summer, too? Of course not!

Oh, wait, yes there were. Huh. That’s strange. Anyway, “Road to Perdition” was good, and so was “Insomnia,” about a guy named Al Pacino who can’t sleep. Maybe he should have watched “Unfaithful,” which was dull and morally ambiguous and had a French guy in it, which made it hard to take it seriously, with the beret and the cheese-eating and the what-have-you.

The summer would not be complete without some spy movies, and hot Hollywood couple Matt Damon and Ben Affleck each had one. Damon’s was “The Bourne Identity,” about a man who doesn’t know who he is; Affleck appeared in “The Sum of All Fears,” about a man who thinks he’s Harrison Ford.

Meanwhile, the real Harrison Ford starred in “K-19: The Widowmaker,” a jolly little comedy about an elfish man who lives at the South Pole and makes widows.

And war! We all love a good war movie. “Windtalkers” wasn’t one, but hoo-boy, if it had been, we sure would have watched it!

Summer is also a time for talking animals, both in the cinema and in real life, if you know where to look. This year, “Scooby-Doo,” “Men in Black II,” “The Powerpuff Girls Movie,” “Stuart Little 2: Electric Boogaloo” and “The Country Bears” all featured animals who possessed the amazing power of speech. That is more than I can say for “XXX,” which featured Vin Diesel.

Speaking of children’s movies, Adam Sandler had one, called “Mr. Deeds,” about a man who tried to make a movie without a screenplay. Sandler’s fellow “Saturday Night Live” graduate, Dana Carvey, tried the same thing, with “Master of Disguise,” which was so bad it received not a single positive review in all of America, and therefore grossed $13 million its first weekend. If you made a movie that was hated by every single person in the world, that movie would still gross at least half a million dollars, which is at least a dozen years’ salary for most normal people. Is it any wonder we love Hollywood?

Actual news item scooped by City Weekly last week: Two Japanese exchange students visiting Utah were accidentally placed with a polygamist family. The girls, unfamiliar with American culture, apparently did not notice anything unusual.

JAPANESE HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER: Class, we are excited to welcome back to our midst Junko and Kiko, who have spent exciting month in Utah of America. Please regard as girls tell story of visit.
JUNKO: Thank you, honorable teacher. Kiko and I had much exciting time in Utah, living with most interesting family.
KIKO: America perception of Japanese is we are efficient, but Junko and I see Americans are more efficient. Family we stay with have three mothers!
JUNKO: Many babies. Many, many babies.
KIKO: Family is very nice. They are member of Reformed Church of the Mormons of the Latter-day of the Many Wives. We go to church with family on Sunday. Family take up whole row in church!
JUNKO: So many babies.
KIKO: Mother Number One, who we call Momma LaRue, is first mother of family. Other mothers are Momma NorDeen and Momma LeDawn. Momma LaRae is oldest; she is almost 20!
JUNKO: Momma LeDawn is younger than myself. She is like little sister to me, and I am honorable auntie to her six children.
KIKO: American household so confusing! Many children in American house all the time, because American family do not send children to school.
JUNKO: American mothers teach children at home because of bleed-heart liberal propaganda in public schools.
KIKO: That is what honorable father of family, Poppa Vern, tell us. He is nice man. He flirt with Junko!
JUNKO: He make me blush when he say I should be fourth momma! I tell him I shamefully cannot do such, for my name have only one capital letter.
KIKO: I tell her to spell name capital J-U-N capital K-O.
JUNKO: Always with joking, Kiko is!
KIKO: Poppa Vern let us help with family business. We call unknown persons on telephone and ask to buy magazines we selling. Some persons do not have manners and say words of filth and hang up telephone before Kiko and I finished talking.
JUNKO: But other persons say we speak best English they ever hear from telemarketer.
KIKO: We do not know what “telemarketer” is, but we glad to help Poppa Vern make money to feed enormous family.
JUNKO: So many babies….
KIKO: While we visit, exciting event happen with American Federal Bureau of Investigation. Many American men and women with guns kick down door and take Poppa Vern away from us.
JUNKO: He have many guns and items for war, which he say are necessary because we must take rights back from government.
KIKO: He say Charlton Heston is his president, and he hate evil man called Clin-tahn.
JUNKO: We hate Clin-tahn, too. Bad man take away Poppa Vern’s rights!
KIKO: Now Poppa Vern in unsanitary American jail. He angry to be taken away from his three mommas.
JUNKO: But he still make jokes. He tell me, “Kiko” — he always call me “Kiko” — “Kiko, call Godzilla and have him step on American prison to release me!”
KIKO: “Or call Japanese businessman father and tell him send one billion dollars, because Japanese have all money,” he say.
JUNKO: Poppa Vern always funny, even when American FBI dragging him from house while mommas sobbing.
KIKO: We are impressed with American life. Americans very resourceful, have many children, have many guns, have many children with guns.
JUNKO: Is no shame to lose Great War to America. America great!

We Utah County residents love movies. We like them on our own terms, though. We’ll only watch them if they’re cheap and clean. Well, unless they’re really popular. Then we’ll watch them no matter what. But we’ll walk out halfway through!

For evidence of the “cheap” thing, let us examine Movies 8, from a distance and with protective eyewear. To watch a film there, you must pay $1.50. This is not a lot of money; many local residents save that much simply by undertipping the server every time they eat out. But you get what you pay for at Movies 8. The projection technology is not state-of-the-art — sometimes employees just stand at the front and act out the movie — and there are always a lot of teen-agers there, being loud and teen-agey.

But despite the conditions, Movies 8 is always packed. Why? Because it is cheap. On Tuesdays, when all showings are only 50 cents, Movies 8 is even more packed. Even terrible movies that no one wants to see are sold out, which must send the wrong message to the filmmakers. For example, Freddie Prinze Jr. thinks he’s popular, and it’s Provo’s fault!

What I don’t get is that there are people — actual people whom YOU MIGHT KNOW — who will wait until Tuesday to see a movie because they save $1 that way. I have to assume they’re looking at it in terms of percentages. Fifty cents instead of $1.50 is a savings of 66 percent. If movies cost $1,000 and you found a way to get in for only $333, then yeah, you’d probably do it.

But we’re talking about figures of less than $2 here. I honestly believe that if movies were a nickel six days a week and a penny on Tuesdays, a lot of people in Utah County would wait until Tuesday to go to the movies. And then they would walk out anyway, because they were offended by the content, because they didn’t bother to do any homework before paying their hard-earned penny to see a film.

Which brings us to the other way we prefer movies on our own terms, which is that we like to edit the #*@& out of them.

Since 1998, there has been controversy surrounding Utah County businesses such as Clean Flicks that will charge you a small fee for cleaning up your videotapes. Is this legal? Is it ethical? Does a movie that was dumb anyway become less dumb when you’ve cut the swearing out of it? So far, everyone who has spoken on the subject has been wrong.

First, the filmmakers. They say cutting the naughty bits out of their movies violates their artistic integrity. Poppycock, I say, twice; poppycock! These people have no problem with their movies being edited for TV or airlines. What’s the difference? They make money from that. The only problem they REALLY have with us editing videos is that they’re not getting any money out of it.

Second, the consumers. They say they won’t stand for filth and obscenity, and they have the right to edit their own personal copies of movies however they see fit. This is true. However, buying a movie and then having someone edit it only sends one message to the filmmaker: Someone bought my movie! Buy a movie and then edit it, burn it, stomp on it or eat it — you’ve still bought the movie and put a few more dollars in the pocket of the monster we call “Hollywood,” which will use the money to kill puppies and provide schoolchildren with crack and all those other things “Hollywood” does.

We’re not very consistent with the editing, anyway. When local companies edit “Titanic,” they remove the nude scene and the sex scene, but they leave in the frozen corpses bobbing in the water. They also leave in Billy Zane’s laughable performance as Kate Winslet’s fiance. But I guess we all have different ideas of what constitutes “obscenity,” don’t we?

In 2003, Utah Valley State College’s athletic teams will begin playing NCAA Division I competition, putting it in the same league as BYU and other real, live schools. If you’re like me, you consider this big news, because you didn’t know UVSC even had athletic teams.

But this is ignorant of you and me. Of course UVSC has athletic teams. What, you think people go there for academic reasons?

But again, we must stop making cracks like that. Though I have long been at the forefront in making fun of UVSC, I fear the time may have come that we shall have to start taking the school seriously.

First it became a state college instead of a community college. Then they began hiring professors instead of hobos. Then they started giving graduates diplomas instead of Chili’s gift certificates. Now, apparently, they will play at the top level of NCAA athletics, competing against other colleges rather than high schools and scout troops.

Yes, my friends, maybe the days of blithely mocking UVSC are over. In the past, we have considered a UVSC athletic event to be on the same level of legitimacy as a same-sex wedding, or a little girl’s tea party to which her dollies are invited — you know, you’d attend if there was nothing else going on, but it’s not like you’ll take it seriously or anything. All that could change now. If UVSC successfully makes the leap from NJCAA Region 18 to NCAA Division I-A, it will be the first school ever to do so without most of its students knowing what those letters stand for.

But enough jokes about UVSC! Come on, people, this is serious business. To be eligible for NCAA Division I play, UVSC must choose another sport to add to the 13 it already has, three of which, technically, are board games. It has come down to men’s volleyball or wrestling, the dilemma being that volleyball would attract mostly out-of-state students, while wrestling is boring.

The other dilemma is how to come up with the additional budget necessary to compete in Division I. UVSC’s sports budget is $1.4 million now, but must be at $2 million by the end of the six-year provisional period. That additional $600,000 will go toward “upgrading” the teams to NCAA status. For example, members of the basketball team will ultimately need to wear traditional shirt-and-shorts uniforms, rather than the overalls and straw hats they wear now. Also, the unripe cantaloupes swiped from Farmer Johnson’s melon patch will be replaced with regulation basketballs.

You can see why I’m worried. Though I grudgingly admit in my more unguarded moments that UVSC has been a legitimate institution of higher learning for a couple years now, I have refused to acknowledge it publicly. With this advance in athletics, though, I may be forced to.

But first, I need to unload this last pile of jokes, which is a list of courses offered at UVSC:

– Parking
– Sheepdip from Shinola: How to Tell the Difference
– The Science of Bongs
– Washing Machines: Unlocking the Mystery
– Underpants Studies
– Long Division
– Noises a Doggie Makes
– The Bazooka Joe Comic as Literature
– Figuring out the Long, Difficult Words in Your BYU Rejection Letter

Go Wolverines!

We have more than our share of community theater in Utah County, and our love for the arts is admirable. Unfortunately, some of the theater is very, very bad, and I fear our love for the arts goes unrequited, and perhaps we are no longer loving the arts so much as stalking them.

A few months ago I saw a play in which a man pretends to be a famous rock star so he can defraud some people in a small town. It is a wacky farce, which in the playwright’s mind meant that nothing had to make sense. The con man, for instance, was knocked unconscious twice in the play, once by a plunger, and once by an oil-painting canvas. I suppose an actual punch in the face would have killed him, as his skull is apparently made of gelatin.

This play also had one of those semi-deaf old-man characters who hear things incorrectly and overreact to them. Someone would say, “That’s a nice tie,” and he would freak out and say, “Mice?! Where are there mice?!” as he jumped onto a chair and looked around frantically. In real life, of course, if you believe someone has told you something unusual or impossible, you say, “What?” or “You’re crazy!” before devoting your full energy to reacting to it.

But this unrealistic character made me think of two fun new characters. First is the Guy Who Hears Things Really Wrong. You say, “Pass the salt, Grandpa,” and he replies, “What? My hair’s on fire?!” Or if you say, “That’s a nice tie,” he says, “The world is ending?! Oh, no!!!”

My other new character is the Guy Who Hears Things in Yiddish. When you say, “Look at that gorgeous house,” he says, “‘Shmorgeous shmouse?’ What’s a ‘shmorgeous shmouse’?” Or if you ask, “Where’s the bathroom?,” he replies, “‘Shmathroom’? What’s a ‘shmathroom’?”

So I ruminated upon the occasionally dreadful state of theater, and then I realized: Maybe we don’t deserve good theater.

This occurred to me while watching “Children of Eden” at the SCERA Shell the other night. A man in the audience answered his cellphone during the show and then talked on it for about a minute, casually, before hanging up. I don’t know this man or his background, but clearly he is the stupidest man in the world. He must be, if he thinks it’s OK to talk on his phone during a play. What puzzled me is how someone as stupid as he must be is able to dress himself and go outside and be part of society. Shouldn’t he be in a zoo or an institution, being studied by scientists? But maybe the phone call was urgent. Maybe it was the lost and found, letting him know they’d found his 11 missing chromosomes.

Then there are the people who watch the show but miss the point. “Children of Eden” uses biblical figures and basic Bible stories to depict greater allegorical messages. It is not to be taken literally, much less as doctrine. Yet here was a woman during intermission saying, in a very smarmy voice, “I didn’t realize Adam hit his children.” She was referring to the part of the play where Cain, about to go nuts and do some killin’, gets slapped by Adam.

Well. I didn’t know God sang baritone, either, but there it is, right there in the show. Right there in the show whose printed program, I guess, says, “Book by God; music and lyrics by the Bible.” This is theater, people, not Sunday School. You can tell because everyone’s awake. (Unless you’re at the Hale, that is, where a woman sat in the very front row and slept through all of “Phantom,” despite the show being interesting and loud. Her husband was with her, and I thought: Sir, if your wife is in a coma, leave her at home, or at least out in the car.)

Also during “Children of Eden,” when performers came onstage in animal costumes to get on the Ark, people in the audience would say out loud which animal it was. This is because when you have a thought, it is best to vocalize it. No one will ever know you recognized the peacocks unless you say, “Peacocks!”

So maybe the bad theater is our punishment for being bad audiences when we have good theater. It’s all karma, you know, or possibly shmarma. Now if you’ll excuse me, my hair is on fire.

In the LDS Church, there is a program called home teaching, wherein two gentlemen are assigned to be your friends for an hour or so each month. During that hour, you may ask these fellows, who are indeed your bosom chums, for assistance or guidance in any matter. The hour is concluded with hearty well-wishes and slaps on the back and assurances that you may call upon these men at any time for help or counsel, after which they leave and you neither see nor hear from them again until a month has passed, at which point the exercise is repeated.

Or at least that’s how it sometimes turns out. In theory — and often in practice — it’s a wonderful program that helps a lot of people. But sometimes we religious folk aren’t so hot at making things work the way they should. And more often than not, I suspect it’s the home teachees, rather than the home teachers, who screw it up.

My roommate Raymond (names have been changed) and I had a visit from the occasional best friends in June, and we had a fine discussion about things like my being a movie critic, and what movies do I like, and could I get them some free tickets to some movies? They also presented a diverting sermon whose subject matter escapes me now. At the end, one of them offered a prayer, during which he forgot my roommate’s name. He said, “Bless Eric and … … … his roommate.” He struggled for many seconds, during which I thought it would be funny if I adopted a God-sounding voice and said, “His name is Raymond.” But two things I remember from my upbringing are that doing funny things during prayers is generally frowned upon, and impersonating God never ends well.

So I let him struggle, and he finally gave up and said “his roommate.” In a discussion some of us had later on, we determined this was better than guessing at the name and getting it wrong. I occasionally encountered this problem as an LDS missionary, meeting with and praying for a lot of people on a daily basis. You hate to get the name wrong, because then the wrong parties receive the blessings. You say “Johnson family” when you meant “Thompson family” and suddenly the Thompsons get nothing, while the Johnson family — whom you don’t even know, and who may be a family of pornographers — gets a load of blessings.

So that was June’s visit. By the time the end of July rolled around, circumstances had changed a bit. Raymond, my roommate, was dating a young lady seriously enough to have started attending a congregation for married people, so my home teachers had no jurisdiction over him anymore. And on this particular Sunday, my actual best friends Luscious Malone and Tanny Tantan were at my house, too busy reading Entertainment Weekly and watching the Food Network to be interested in hanging around for a visit from the ecclesiastical best friends.

And so the imminent arrival of the ecclesiastical best friends caused a flurry of activity, and my house became the site of a French farce. Doors opened and slammed as Luscious and Tanny scurried into another room to watch TV and read, while Raymond ducked into his quarters. Immediately, the first door opened because Luscious and Tanny had decided a larger room would be more comfortable for hiding — Luscious was making Anne Frank references by now — so they scampered down the hall. Tanny then darted back to the living room to retrieve his shoes and car keys, fearful any evidence that human beings other than me were present would result in the best friends demanding I produce them so they could be their best friends, too. I suppose he imagined the home teachers had robot spiders that would search the premises, like in “Minority Report.”

The visit went fine. I like my home teachers, as they are ordinary folks with a genuine interest in me (and, possibly, free movie tickets) — you know, the way it’s supposed to be. And if I’m not getting anything out of the visits, it’s probably because of all those doors slamming in the back of the house distracting me.

Sweet sassy molassy! It’s time for another installment of “Ask Eric Stuff.” This is a very popular feature — heavens, is it ever popular. We’ve had to hire a fictional secretary just to go through all the “Ask Eric Stuff” mail — in which ordinary people like you ask Eric stuff, and then he replies with some witty rejoinder or caustic remark, making you wonder why anyone would ever ask him a serious question in the first place.

You are thinking, “Can I, a regular Joe, also submit a question to ‘Ask Eric Stuff’?” The answer is yes, my friend. You can do it here [link outdated].

Dear Eric: Do people ever threaten your life? — Worry Worm Wendy
Dear WWW: So cold. So very, very cold.
Just kidding, I’m not really dying. Do people ever threaten my life? No, but John Birch Society members do.

Dear Eric: Why do people always call Freddie Prinze Jr. “Freddie PRINCE Jr.”? — I bet you won’t answer my question
Dear Lost a Bet: Because he stopped answering to “Hey, [expletive]head!”

Dear Eric: I’ll be leaving on a mission soon, any advice? — Dear Elder
Dear Dear Elder: Yes. Remember that sister missionaries aren’t whiny; they’re just more spiritual than you and can’t find a suitable way of expressing it.

Dear Eric: Why is my boss so mean? — Confused at Convergys
Dear Convergys: Because you’re always doing things like saying publicly that there are mean bosses at Convergys.

Dear Eric: If Bill Gates were to give you $10 million, would you stop writing your stupid column? — Bill Gates
Dear Billy: What? And pass up scintillating conversation like this?

Dear Eric: There’s this cute girl that I really like but she doesn’t even know I exist. What should I do? — Perplexed in Provo
Dear Perple: Start existing.

Dear Eric: What’s a good way to waste time at work but still look like you’re busy? — Goldbricker
Dear Goldy: Write a column where all you have to do is come up with smart-aleck answers to people’s questions.

Dear Eric: In what comic book issue of “Spider-Man” does Peter Parker turn to the Dark Side? — Spiderfan in Springville
Dear Spidey: It was series number you’re a nerd, issue number get a life.

Dear Eric: When is the world coming to an end? — Walter Mitty
Dear Walty: Dude, it was yesterday. You totally missed it. It ROCKED.

Dear Eric: Does it ever offend you when somebody you like or respect thinks that your writing bites? — Hard to Offend
Dear Hardy: Well, I wish Mom had found a nicer way of putting it than wrapping the newspaper in dog feces and setting it on fire in front of my house, and I wish my bishop had not urged the congregation from the pulpit to stone me to death, but no, I can usually deal with criticism.

Dear Eric: Why are guys so stupid sometimes? — Breaking Up With My Boyfriend
Dear Breaky: Because the rest of the time, they’re busy being idiotic.

Dear Eric: What’s the difference between a Mac and a PC? — Computer Scooter
Dear Scooty: Macs work 95 percent of the time and are compatible with 5 percent of the software; PCs are compatible with 95 percent of the software and work THIS IS BILL GATES. YOU HAVE PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION. THIS COLUMN WILL BE SHUT DOWN.