I recently had the misfortune of seeing my grandfather kiss his fiancee. Have you ever seen this? I doubt it, because you weren’t at my house when it happened.

It had never occurred to me that I might ever be witness to such an act, until a few months ago, when my grandfather, back in California, announced he was getting married. My grandmother was furious.

Ha! I kid. She died a year ago. So it was perfectly reasonable for grandpa to get married … except that he’s my grandfather, and that’s not the sort of thing you want your grandfather doing. You want your grandfather to sit on the porch, doling out quarters and saying, “How’s school?” Maybe he can find some kind of hobby, like whittling, but you don’t want him DATING, for crying out loud. Dating is what young people do. Not ME, specifically, but other young people I know.

For me, part of the oddness of the situation was realizing that my grandfather had a girlfriend and I didn’t.

Now, don’t go thinking my 70-year-old grandfather has taken up with some 25-year-old girl who is only after his money. My grandfather has no money, evidenced by the fact that, as far as I can determine, he has worn the exact same pair of pants every day for his entire life. These pants are made of polyester and their color is best described as “brown,” although it is not a brown that I have ever seen occur naturally. The pants can be seen clearly in my parents’ wedding photos, and indeed there are certain cave paintings in the hills surrounding Lake Elsinore, Calif., in which these pants can also be seen.

I would also like to mention that in addition to the pants, I think my grandfather has also been bald all his life. Even in the photos of his first wedding, when he was 20, he already had very little hair on his head.

But despite the pants and the baldness and the ear hair and the eyeglasses which are older than his pants, my grandfather is probably the most kind-hearted, generous, respectable man I’ve ever known. Even great men who have traditionally earned respect, such as Abraham Lincoln and Dick Clark, would pale in comparison to my grandfather. And that, I suppose, is why a 70-year-old widow would want to marry him.

My grandfather’s new wife — “Grandma II,” as we call her — is named Margrit. You may think I have misspelled “Margaret,” but actually, Margrit is the one who has misspelled it. She’s from Switzerland, which is located in Sweden, and that’s how they do things over there.

One thing they do NOT do over there, evidently, is throw wadded-up wrapping paper at each other. I learned this when we had our huge family Gift Exchange and Wrapping Paper Fight on Christmas. The way this works is, everyone opens their presents, says “thank you,” then wads up the wrapping paper and throws it. Before long, the air is thick with wrapping paper, and everyone is involved, including infants and invalids. Margrit didn’t seem to notice the commotion until she got hit in the face with a ball of it. This particular ball had been thrown by the following person: me. The look on her face indicated that she did not consider this to be standard day-after-Christmas behavior. In fact, the look on her face indicated that she would have expected better behavior from felons, or monkeys. But it seemed to us that if she was going to be part of this family, she was going to have to get used to wrapping-paper fights.

Another thing she’ll have to get used to is the extremely casual and violent way we treat each other. The entire extended family has always been close. We get together at least once a month to celebrate whoever’s birthday it is, and we have dinner and cake and ice cream and of course a wrapping-paper fight. So we quite clearly love each other, but you might not know it from watching us. Unlike some families, aunts and uncles are not referred to by the youngsters as “Aunt Janna” or “Uncle Kenny.” It’s just “Janna” and “Kenny,” and in fact when we were young and Kenny was mean to us, we referred to him as “The Ogre.”

This may not sit well with Margrit, coming as she does from Denmark, in the Netherlands, where people are unfailingly polite to their elders and where disrespectful youths are punished by having to eat European food.

Yes, the very prim and proper Margrit no doubt finds our family odd and appalling, and I have not yet even TOUCHED the subject of belching. My brother’s wife, the diminutive and sweet Roni, can belch with such velocity that it will set your necktie on fire. I can only imagine what Margrit thinks of this, assuming she is still capable of coherent thought after experiencing it.

So anyway, it was weird to see grandpa kiss someone who wasn’t my grandmother, and it was even weirder to see him get married. But we’re all sure grandma, up there in heaven, approves of the whole thing. She wants grandpa to be happy, and she knew Margrit, and liked her. I’m sure she’s glad a good woman like Margrit gets to take care of grandpa, and I’m REALLY sure she’s glad someone ELSE has to wash that pair of pants from now on.

Like all major humanitarians, I spend a great deal of time thinking of ways to make life more productive, beneficial, and happy for all mankind. For example, I recently discovered that if you honk your horn frequently and at random, people will give you a lot of extra space. This is especially true if you are not driving a car.

So I was trying to think of what aspects of life could use a little improvement, and it hit me: the “Lighting the Way” campaign.

“Lighting the Way” is the name of the program wherein BYU wants everyone who goes to BYU, or who has ever gone to BYU, or who is familiar with the letters “BYU,” to donate money in order to facilitate the digging of more holes.

No, actually, the money would be used to send out more letters requesting that people send more money.

No, actually, the money would REALLY be used to make improvements on BYU campus over the next several years. Surely we as students can go along with this. It is obvious that certain things need to be fixed. For example, every freshman who has ever come to BYU has been told that if you run past the Brigham Young statue, it looks like he’s dancing. It is not currently possible to run past the statue, due to the library construction, but even if you could do it, you would discover that it doesn’t work. Brigham Young does NOT do the “funky chicken,” or any other kind of dance. This should be remedied, and I would not mind pitching in a few dollars in order to have the statue repaired in whatever way is necessary to make him dance again.

Also, the Harris Fine Arts Center was designed by lunatics who thought it would be funny to have rooms with similar numbers be at opposite ends of the building, and to have rooms that can only be entered after passing through long, Indiana Jones-esque tunnels. The HFAC should be remodeled, or perhaps just torn down, and I wouldn’t mind paying a few dollars for it.

Also, the sound system in the Cougareat is apparently broken, because the radio station is stuck on FM-100. (I can think of no other reason why FM-100 would always be playing. Surely it is not by choice.) I’ll pitch in 50 cents to buy a new tuning knob.

Also, due to a prank initiated by some high-ranking P.E. official, the towels they give you in the locker room are comically small, about the size of a washcloth. Surely we can all donate a few bucks to have the towels biggered.

My point is that we students probably wouldn’t mind paying a few dollars each to help improve BYU, if we thought the improvements would benefit us. But by and large, students are NOT donating much money. I’m not sure why, unless it’s because students don’t HAVE any money, what with the recent increase in prices at Movies 8.

So I’ve devised a way of getting more donations from students. Here’s what we do: Send an army of individuals door-to-door at all the student housing to hit people up for money directly. If you send young, handsome, charming people, students will gladly give them money.

Who do we send? The pest control missionaries. This would be easy. They only work during the summer, during which time they generally earn around $400,000 each, along with getting to live in a beautiful Southern California community, hang out with fun guys, and wear a pager! “Ha-ha, it’s fun!” is what the blank looks on their faces seem to say in those Daily Universe ads, and while I for one don’t believe it for a minute, it would appear that the individuals who sell pest control door-to-door at least enjoy the work, perhaps due to some kind of mind control. (I had trouble tracting on my mission, and that was when I BELIEVED in the product.)

So these guys are free for most of the year, and I’m sure they would enjoy another chance to go door-to-door for eight hours a day. How do we motivate them to do this? First thing, of course, is we hold a huge meeting where we provide free pizza. This will lure them in, and once we’ve got them, we’ll promise them huge rewards and bonuses for all the tracting they’re going to do. We won’t actually GIVE them these huge rewards and bonuses, but as pest control employees, they’ll be used to such tactics. And before you know it, we’ll have the several million dollars needed to clean the bodies out of the JKHB basement, or perhaps introduce 20th-century plumbing into the Smith Family Living Center.

This is my proposal. Thank you and good night.

As one of the nation’s foremost social psychologists, I would like to present a few of my major social theories. These theories were met with a great deal of enthusiasm when I presented them a few weeks ago at a conference held in the Smith Family Living Center, where I was in sociology class and leaned over and whispered them to my friend Rob.

My first theory (or, “Theory No. 1”) is as follows:

Most people are stupid.

By this I mean that a majority of people on the earth do a great many stupid things — enough stupid things to where you can no longer consider them “smart people who occasionally do stupid things,” but, rather, “stupid people.” I am referring to people who talk during movies, change lanes without signaling, and buy Spice Girls CDs. I am referring to people who write self-righteous letters to the editor decrying the self-righteousness of others. I am referring to people who automatically put an apostrophe in any word that ends with an “s.” (“Me and my friend’s took our car’s down to Las Vega’s.”) I am referring to people who stop in the middle of busy sidewalks and/or bookstores in order to have impromptu mission reunions. I am referring to people who insist on talking to strangers on airplanes and in doctors’ waiting rooms, even though the strangers obviously do not wish to talk to anyone. I am referring to people who have no problem taking up to 25 minutes of class time in order to discuss important issues such as Will there be extra credit available? and How many of the test questions will be multiple choice, and how many will be short-answer?

My second theory goes along with the first one. It states:

You can only be stupid for so long before everyone’s going to know about it.

The reason for this is stated in my Corollary to Theory No. 2:

Deep down inside, many stupid people have a secret, burning desire to let the whole world know that they are stupid

Case in point: a girl in my sociology class, who is the whole reason I presented these theories to my friend Rob in the first place. What this girl does is, she invades your personal space. The classroom is one of those theater-style rooms — no desks, just rows and rows of chairs attached to each other, so you’re pretty close to whoever’s next to you. This girl likes to sit with one leg crossed over the other, her foot dangling. This is fine, except that, as you know, you have to be careful in such settings, because you’re liable to accidentally kick the person next to you with your dangling foot. This girl, however, does not care about accidental kickage. I’ve sat next to her twice, and BOTH times, she has let her foot dangle there and kick me numerous times. My shin is developing a hard, reptilian shell in order to protect itself from the kicking of this girl. You would think that after kicking me once, she would notice that her foot is WELL into my territory, and move it back to her realm, maybe grunting a small apology. But no. Every time she kicks me, she looks down, sees that her foot is right in front of me, in MY space, and then she keeps it there.

OK, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That sounds pretty annoying, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid.” Well frankly, I don’t care much for your attitude, because here’s something else about this girl: She says random things out loud in a class full of strangers.

One on occasion, our classroom was quite cold. Actually, it’s been quite cold on many occasions, due to the apparent practice of only taking care of the new, expensive buildings and letting the old ones like the SFLC fall apart until they can come up with the money to tear them down and replace them with big holes. Anyway, it was really cold, and TWICE during our class, this girl said: “Brrr! It’s freezing!” She said this out loud to no one in particular, while the professor was lecturing. Who says “Brrr”? I mean, who actually says “Brrr,” besides comic strip characters? Also, I should mention that she pronounced “freezing” in three syllables — “fuh-ree-zing.”

I do not know this girl’s name; I suspect she may not have one. I have every reason to believe that she does not actually even exist, and is merely a figment of my imagination. And yet there she sits, day in and day out, kicking her foot obliviously and making random comments.

And yet, her random comments are not nearly as frequent or as random as those of a guy whom we have dubbed Loud Boy. Loud Boy usually sits a few rows behind me, and he always has a friend with him. And as is often the hobby of freshman guys, he likes to make sarcastic and “funny” (that is, “not funny”) comments about whatever the professor is teaching. But instead of whispering them to his friend, he says them in a relatively loud voice — loud enough for us to hear three rows in front of him, anyway.

Here’s an example. The other day the professor was talking about how the human body naturally needs a balanced diet, and how most of us would eat a balanced meal all the time if we could. Loud Boy said, “My brother wouldn’t!”

Many of his jokes are not even THAT funny.

Obviously, we wouldn’t mind Loud Boy if he would just whisper. Why doesn’t he whisper? Maybe he can’t whisper. Maybe he comes from a civilization where whispering has not yet been discovered, or where whispering is considered extremely rude, like in many foreign countries where they pick all these weird things to be offended by, like waving, or pointing, or squatting. Maybe he thinks he IS whispering. Whatever the case, it all brings me to Social Theory No. 3, which is:

I’ll usually just keep writing until they make me stop.

Valentine’s Day is a meaningless, silly holiday, even more so than Halloween, and it’s certainly not worth devoting an entire issue of a newspaper to it, but you will notice that this has not stopped us.

The only thing that would help Valentine’s Day be less meaningless and silly would be if it had to do with some important and powerful human emotion, like, I don’t know, love or something. But instead, it’s all about infatuation and lust and candy and flowers, and it’s odd and crazy, and the only reason we still celebrate it is that no guy wants to be the first one to actively object to it, for fear of getting whacked in the head by his girlfriend. So we keep going, taking part in a tradition with no meaning, and going through rituals for a person who, six months from now, may have filed a restraining order against us.

Love, though. THAT would be a great thing to pay tribute to with its own special holiday. Everyone needs food, water, shelter and love — love is the only non-tangible item on the list. Even people who seem not to need love — mean people, for example, and Al Gore — even these people, deep down, need love.

And I’m not just talking about romantic love. We all need the other kind of love, too, the kind friends and families have for each other.

Why is love so important? Because if you’re loved, that means you’re accepted. It means whoever it is that loves you, they don’t judge you unfairly, and they understand you, and they can relate to where you’re coming from. It means while they want the best for you, they’re not going to force you to change into how they want you to be. It means you already ARE the way they want you to be.

Being loved means there’s a person to whom you are important. It means someone thinks about you when you’re not together, and they try to find ways to ensure your happiness when you are. It means if you were in trouble or distress, the person who loves you would try to help you out — or, at the very least, stay with you until help arrived.

But being loved is not the best thing about love. No, the best thing is loving someone else. When we love someone — really, truly love them, not the juvenile stuff we tend to get involved in — we are content to do everything in the world for them, just because it makes them happy. Getting anything in return is irrelevant. It’s not a factor. We do it because seeing them happy makes us happy, and for no other reason. When we love someone, we will sometimes go to extreme lengths just to be with them. Even if they don’t love us — yet — we still like to be around them, emitting love rays that will hopefully affect them and make them reciprocate.

Love feeds on itself. When someone loves us, it makes us love not only them, but other people too. We go around spreading love, because we know from personal experience how great love feels.

No matter how many times a relationship turns sour, most of us will never entirely give up on finding love. Because ultimately, we have faith that when we finally do find it, it will be so wonderful that all the garbage we had to sort through will seem worthwhile.

Now that I think of it, maybe a holiday devoted to the celebration of love wouldn’t work. By its very nature, true love is an ongoing process, a way of life, not something you can squeeze down into one day. If you can celebrate it in one day, it’s probably not love.

No, the only way it would work is if we had a whole season devoted to love. If we had not just a day, but several weeks where we were supposed to show love for others. If we could let this true love — this selfless, honorable, deep, charitable love — manifest itself in all our actions for an entire “Love Season,” THEN we’d have ourselves a holiday that would really mean something.

But wait. We already have that holiday.

It’s called Christmas.

Never mind about Cupid. The REAL god of love is another God altogether.

Let’s not forget what real love is, and who taught us about it.

The BYU Theater Department is currently performing William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” and I think I speak for us all when I say, “Forsooth! what doth yon bequiddle?”

Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m going to make a bunch of cheap jokes about Shakespeare, just because he’s very popular among snooty people and therefore seems like the kind of icon I would target with my unique and award-winning brand of humor and sarcasm. Well, frankly, your hasty and superficial judgments make me choke on my own bile, and I demand an apology.

Far be it from me to make fun of Shakespeare. What is there to make fun of? The fact that he wrote long, odd plays in which every single major character either goes crazy, dies, or goes crazy and THEN dies? Or maybe the fact that his plays contain many dirty Elizabethan jokes that make snooty English teachers gush about what a comic genius he was, but that if YOU were to tell them, would get you kicked out of school, particularly if you tried to tell them in The Daily Universe, which I am not even going to try? Or maybe you think I should joke about how Shakespeare would frequently have his characters stand onstage and babble on and on about stuff for half an act or so, at which point some designated stagehand would have to make loud noises in order to wake the audience from its deep slumber. Or how sometimes the stagehand himself would fall asleep during the speech, and the audience would wind up staying the night, or how sometimes even the actors would fall asleep, including the one who was talking:

“To be, or not to be — that is the quesZZX-XXXZ-ZZZ-ZZZZzzzx.”

Well, I’m not going to make those jokes, because there are bigger fish to drop from the frying pan into the fire. For example, there is the issue of people who can’t shut up and who need to be hit in the head with bricks. I watched “Romeo and Juliet” on its opening night and was disturbed throughout most of the play by several people behind me who kept talking, despite the fact that I kept turning around and glaring quite specifically at them. They surely cannot have mistaken my glare for a smile, for my glare is unmistakable. Often, even when I AM smiling, people think I am glaring. And surely they cannot have been at a loss to explain WHY I was glaring at them, unless they’re not only stupid but UNAWARE that they’re stupid.

But the talkers were not as bad as the candy eaters, whom I have considered taking legal action against. It is hard to imagine, but these people smuggled some candy into the Pardoe Theatre and began eating it after intermission. I do not know what kind of candy it was, but from the way it sounded, I would guess it was a bag of Skittles in which each Skittle was individually wrapped in the loudest celophane known to man. These people even had cans of soda (or “pop,” as some have incorrectly called it) (and no, I’m not going to get into THAT).

I don’t wish to come across as a high-class snob, but who raised these people? Hyenas? How poorly bred do you have to be to NOT know that you don’t talk during a play, and that you do NOT bring candy and drinks into the theater? I realize that at the movies, food is OK, and that at home, even talking might be OK. But in the theater, where people are doing plays, you shut up, and you go hungry. The only exception would be if you are a shrew and must eat your body weight in food every hour or else you will die. And I cannot think of an exception for the talking thing.

Come on, kids. Do you HAVE to talk? I know the play is boring. I know that, thanks to the weird quasi-British accent that Shakespearian actors feel compelled to use, you can’t understand half the words that come out of their mouths, and that even if you can make out all the words, you often still don’t actually know what they’re talking about. I know all this. I experienced all this. And yet — I managed to be quiet the entire time. Fancy that! I actually shut up and watched the play, with nothing but an Altoid to tide me over. The only time I said a word was when I leaned over and quietly pointed out to my date that Mercutio was still breathing very heavily, despite the fact that he was dead. But no one could hear this except my date. You kids didn’t hear it. Even if I had said it loudly enough, I doubt you could have heard anything over the din caused by the candy wrappers.

I would also like to discuss a similar experience I had when I tried to watch “Oedipus Rex” at International Cinema last week. Most people go to International Cinema solely because they have to, of course, which means they often do not appreciate the fine art being shown. “Oedipus Rex” is a particularly fine piece of art about a man who accidentally marries his own mother, which, as you can imagine, is a highly embarrassing predicament. “Whoops!” is probably all I would be able to think of saying, were I in that situation. (Also: “Sorry!”)

But despite the important themes of family and love being portrayed artfully (i.e., weirdly) on the screen, many people were talking during the film, and occasionally even laughing, even at the very serious and moving part where Oedipus’s mother/wife hangs herself and Oedipus stabs out his own eyes with a pin. “That should solve everything!” is probably what he was thinking, and I can see (get it?!) his logic.

My proposal for solving this epidemic of inappropriate talking is the same as my proposal for dealing with a lot of unpleasant things: poison darts. One dart to the neck, and Mr. Loud-Pants is out for the night. Try it, it’s fun! Thank you.

I’ve started working out. This is because I am out of shape. Well, that’s not to say I don’t HAVE a shape, which of course I do. I’m sort of amoeba-shaped, with odds and ends floating around in random directions. But it’s not the sort of shape a person deliberately tries to get himself into. It’s the kind of shape you see in an inkblot test, or at the scene of an accident.

The reason I’m trying to get in shape is that I’ve realized how important physical appearance is. If you examine most of your top Hollywood stars with high-powered binoculars, you’ll find that they are in excellent physical condition, and that they don’t appreciate being stared at so closely. Oh sure, there are exceptions. Some celebrities are ugly. For example, Tommy Lee Jones possesses, at last count, only one eyebrow, which extends all the way across his forehead, and in fact circumnavigates his entire skull. And yet this man has been the star of several very popular movies, including “Men in Black,” in which he was less attractive than many of the aliens.

But for the rest of us, we need to look good, not just if we want to be motion picture stars, but also if we want the opposite sex to find us attractive. Of course, women have a bigger issue with this than men do. Women will go on crash diets and lapse into deep depression if they so much as SEE another woman who weighs less than they do, whereas a man can be the fattest, awfullest thing in the world and yet still wear tiny bathing suits at the beach and prance around like Michael Flatley, Lord of the Dance.

Anyway, looks are very important, particularly in college. Having a pleasant personality and a nice sense of humor does not count for squat, as you know if you have ever been young. And so I’m working out in the weight room. I don’t want to get huge — just a little muscle tone, flatten the ol’ stomach a bit, get me one of those cute rear ends you hear so much about. (Heaven help the man who doesn’t have a cute rear end.)

This is not my first foray into the world of weight-lifting. I took a weight-lifting class a couple years ago, back when you actually had to do some kind of physical activity to meet your P.E. requirements for graduation, unlike now, where you just have to sign up for HePe 129 and then come back at the end of the semester to collect your A.

No, back then you had to take a class or two, and so I took weight-lifting. The problem was, I got stuck with a personal trainer named “Biff” (real name: I don’t remember), who would show up every day with a new way of killing me. I grew to dread the class, and I quit going (my standard method of dealing with unpleasant college classes), and I wound up with virtually no physical improvement whatsoever, although if there were a muscle representing my ability to postpone the inevitable, it would be huge.

This time, it’s different. Biff is gone, having been sent back to his home planet. So it’s just me and a bunch of sweaty guys in a weight room. I am intimidated by the sweaty guys. This is because I have almost no idea what I am doing. I know some basic weight-lifting maneuvers, but there are some pieces of equipment in that weight room that could not be more foreign to me if they came directly from Neptune. They’re all variations on the same motifs: a bench, a bar, some weights. They just rearrange them and change their shapes, leaving me to figure out what you’re supposed to do with them. I have a fear of sitting on a little bench with the bar in one hand, only to learn that you’re supposed to STAND UP on the bench and lift the bar with your ankle. The sweaty guys would laugh at me, and it would become apparent that I was a novice. Then they would beat me up.

I try to reassure myself with the self-deception that nobody else knows what they’re doing either, but that doesn’t work because it is obvious that they DO know what they’re doing. I can tell by how much weight they can lift. This is another source of intimidation for me. Currently, three weeks into my program, these guys could lift more weight with their eyelashes than I could with a forklift. These are guys who played sports in high school while I was writing irresponsible editorials for the school newspaper (“Why I Think the Principal Once Killed a Guy”). They have a huge head-start on me.

Anyway, I try to ignore my fear, and I go about my routine. This is my system: I stand in a neutral position in the middle of the weight room and identify a part of my body that does not hurt. Then I hurt it. When it is good and hurt, I pick another body part and move on. Eventually, my entire body, including my elbows and my hair, is in deep pain, and I know that I am finished for the day. I limp back to the locker room and try not to convey in my body language the fact that I feel as though I have just been hit by a train, because I know the sweaty guys would pounce on me if they knew. They can smell weakness.

I never discuss my specific regimen with people because I don’t know enough about the subject. My observation has been that most other people don’t know much about it either, but that doesn’t stop them from talking about it. (This is true of many subjects.) If I mention to another guy that I am doing squats in my program, he will tell me that squats are bad for your back or your knees or something, and that if you squat too much your kidneys will pop out. I will take his word for it and follow his recommendation, which is to do leg extensions and toe presses instead, only when I mention that to someone else, he will tell me what a moron the first guy was, and how if I want strong legs, I should do leg curls, or leg benches, or pressed leg bench curls, or whatever. Again, since I know virtually nothing about the human body except how to make my ears wiggle, I cannot respond to these conflicting reports. All I can do is smile and grunt and say “dude” and try to maintain good rapport with the sweaty guys.

And so it goes. I continue, three days a week, making my body hurt in the weight room and then making it hurt even more by walking up the 12,829 steps from the Smith Fieldhouse to the main part of campus. But it will all pay off. Soon I’ll be in shape. I’ll be buff. I’ll be one of the sweaty guys. Young punks will be intimidated by me, and I’ll frighten them to the point of tears with my manliness.

Now if only my hair weren’t so dorky looking….

As of two weeks ago, I have sworn off all fat and have gone on a diet. In a related news item, Little Caesar’s stock has dropped sharply every day for the last two weeks.

Believe me, you and the good folks at Little Caesar’s are not as shocked about this as my body is. My fat cells had pretty much taken over, running my body in a ruthless reign of terror, making the other cells do all the work and leaving them free to sit around all day, smoking cigars and swearing. But now, thanks to the diet, my fat cells’ days are numbered. Of course, I hate to call it a “diet.” I prefer to call it a “change in eating habits,” because “diet” sounds so womany. Men don’t go on diets. Men mostly just go around being fat, particularly after they get married. I suspect this is why so many married men go everywhere — school, work, job interviews, funerals — wearing sweatpants: because their regular pants can now contain only approximately one of their legs, instead of the usual two.

At any rate, since I am not married and therefore cannot afford the luxury of being fat, I have decided to go on this diet, or whatever you want to call it. I mean, it’s not like I’m enormously fat. I’m maybe 15 pounds overweight, and very out of shape, and my cardiovascular fitness is so low that I cannot even hiccup without fear of my lungs collapsing. But I’d like to improve myself a bit.

The reason I’ve put it off for so long is that I love to eat, especially items from the “garbage” food group. In my heyday, I could eat two foot-long Subway sandwiches, an entire large pizza, a truckload of saltines, and a gallon of lard, straight from the carton. I could eat most people under the table, and then eat the table. I’d go for weeks at a time eating nothing but Oreos, and after the initial sugar rush, all my major motor functions would start to slow down, including the ability to say several of the consonants, and I’d walk around in a sugar-induced stupor, drooling. (It was during this time that I produced some of my best columns, by the way.) I didn’t care about fat in those days. Why, I once ate a million grams of fat in one sitting, and then washed it down with a jug of bacon grease. Those were the days, my friend, when I figured I’d rather be chubby and happy than thin and cranky.

Those days are over.

I have decided that I would much rather be thin and cranky than fat and unmarried. Not only am I lifting weights — no point in being hungry unless you can be sore, too — but I also eat very little fat, and the fat that I do eat is only allowed to be ingested in the form of foods that I don’t like. Any food/science/nutrition major (I’m sure there must be SOME) can tell you that fat only makes you fatter if it tastes good. Bad-tasting fat is harmless. It is a well-known fact, for example, that one carrot has over 1,000 grams of fat and won’t hurt you any, whereas one Twinkie has only 10 grams, and yet can make you fatter merely by being in the same room as it.

So I eat a lot of fruit now, and no-fat snacks such as pretzels, yogurt, and Styrofoam. I also — and this goes back to the whole “womany” issue again — am trying that Slim-Fast stuff. I am aware that Slim-Fast is a “quick fix,” and that as soon as you quit using it, the weight you’ve lost leaps back onto your body like fleas on a trucker. But what’s so bad about quick fixes? Was not this country founded on quick fixes? Sure, signing the Declaration of Independence may have TEMPORARILY freed us from British rule, but the fact that the Spice Girls have a movie coming out IN THIS COUNTRY is a clear indication that that freedom didn’t last.

And besides, along with using the Slim-Fast, I’m also eating sensibly. It’s a near-perfect system, really, marred only by the fact that Slim-Fast tastes like mud. Imagine putting one drop of chocolate syrup in a tall, cold glass of bathwater, and you’d have something that tastes approximately 10 times better than Slim-Fast. Of course, I’ve only tried the alleged “chocolate” variety; if Slim-Fast has another product that actually tastes good, rather than just CLAIMING to taste good, they are perfectly welcome to send me a free case of it, care of this newspaper.

I’m also following the advice of many medical professionals, which is to drink eight glasses of water a day. The logic here seems to be that you will not be eating much if you are in the bathroom most of the day.

The reason I am discussing this here is to apologize to my friends, many of whom I once had food-based relationships with, but with whom I can no longer associate. Please don’t be offended if you invite me to lunch at Pizza Hut and I decline, or if 99-cent Whoppers no longer appeal to me. Please don’t think that I’ve stopped loving you, just because I can’t go to the Shoney’s all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet anymore. Just know that I’m trying to create a new, slimmer Eric D. Snider, and that we’ll all be grateful when it’s over. Now pass the Styrofoam.

[Written for The Daily Universe for January 12, 1998; re-submitted with slight modifications for March 16, 1998; not published either time]

BYU singles wards are better than regular wards out in the real world for the following two reasons:

1. No crying babies. (Plenty of babes who cry, but no crying babies.)

2. Gospel Doctrine classes actually teach doctrines of the gospel.

I learned to appreciate item No. 2 when I went home to California over Christmas break. In the Gospel Doctrine class there, we were discussing D&C 138 (or, as it is commonly called, “D&C 138”). Early on, one class member spent several minutes talking about how her brother had been visited several times by their dead mother, and how she had explained what it was like in the hereafter: trees and flowers, and everybody’s really nice, and you can get Ben & Jerry’s for only a nickel, and there’s always a place to park, and they play FM-100 over the sound system 24 hours a day just like in the Cougareat.

While this woman was going on and on about her mother’s supposed visitations, it occurred to me that even if all this IS true, there isn’t much point in mentioning it except to show off to the other class members (“MY dead mom visits my brother, and YOURS doesn’t, so nyah nyah nyah”), because it doesn’t add any new perspective to anything, nor is it particularly inspiring. Also, if it’s true, it’s probably too sacred to be discussing it in Sunday School, where people like me can make fun of it.

Later in the lesson, the teacher asked, “What do we know about the division in the spirit world?” It’s a simple question, and one that missionaries discuss amongst each other constantly. According to the way these terms are used in common missionary parlance, “paradise” consists of those people who were good, whereas “spirit prison” consists of those people who were rude to missionaries. (This theory presents a problem in some areas. For example, in Chile, where no person has ever been rude to a missionary, and where the capital city of Santiago now has 30 missions just in the downtown area, and where the fire hydrants are constantly running so that, to save time, investigators can be baptized as they walk down the street — in Chile, missionaries are at a loss to explain WHO will be in spirit prison.)

Anyway, back to Sunday School. The question was about how the spirit world is divided, and in response to that question, the same woman as before raised her hand. She launched into another fireside talk about the order in which you meet people when you cross over into the spirit world, and how it’s a lot like Munchkinland, in that people sing you along your way and show you where to go, and there’s candy canes and lollipops and stuff. All of this, she said, is true regardless of whether you were good or bad before you died. Most of what she was saying had no basis in verifiable fact, but she was sold on it because her brother had told her, and he’s in a stake presidency, which makes it true, and he heard it from his bishop, which makes it even truer.

I have only two objections to this story:

1. It didn’t answer the question.

2. Even if it HAD answered the question, it still wouldn’t be true.

Let’s look at this logically. If you were evil and wicked in this life, full of hate and bitterness, and you went around kicking dogs and beating people with sticks, then you are probably going to “spirit prison.” (If you ever said “no” to a missionary, then you can bet on it.) (If you also beat that missionary with a stick, then you can bet double on it.) And even if all your family and friends — also dog-kickers and with-sticks-people-beaters — are there, they are probably not going to be happy about it. I don’t think it’s going to be such a jolly, Chuck E. Cheese-esque affair.

So what did the teacher have to say about all this? He said, “Well, I’m in no position to comment on that.” And I thought, “Neither was she, but that didn’t stop her.” And no one said anything, and that’s exactly my point. In a BYU ward, there would have been dozens of people ready to swoop upon this woman and point out that most of what she said could not be proven by the scriptures to be true OR false, and so it therefore shouldn’t have been said at all without clearly identifying it as personal opinion. Perhaps this woman would have been tarred and feathered, too.

In a BYU ward, you have a high concentration of returned missionaries, most of whom, despite dressing and talking exactly alike (“Fetch, dude!”), are often very different from each other. For example, if someone says something that is contrary to something Elder Bruce R. McConkie once wrote, there will be a group that will reject that person and point out what Elder McConkie said about it, and they will assume that the matter is therefore closed. “Elder McConkie wrote more books than any other general authority; therefore his opinions are more valid than anyone else’s,” that seems to be these people’s position.

On the other side, you have people who got tired of having to explain Elder McConkie’s blunt and occasionally puzzling statements to investigators and trouble-making less-active members, and so they finally decided to simply reject everything Elder McConkie said, including statements as seemingly harmless as “The sun rises in the east” and “Please pass the salt.” (“That was only his opinion,” these people will say defensively.)

On yet a third side, you will have people who chuckle and say, “We’re getting into some pretty deep doctrine here. I don’t think it’s necessary to my salvation for me to know that.” These people will even say this during the announcements at the beginning of class, and when roll is being taken. These are people who, when they were missionaries, read the LaVell Edwards biography during their personal study time, and whose idea of a heavy gospel conversation is an exchange of J. Golden Kimball stories and a round of “Church Film Trivia” (“Which sister missionary in ‘On the Way Home’ is prettier?”) (Answer: The blonde one.)

And so this goes on for a while, and eventually you’ve gained either a stronger testimony of something, or a headache. Hopefully it’s the former, but if there had been any screaming babies, you can bet it would have been the latter.

(Editor’s Note: The following article is a PARODY. None of the events described actually happened, at least not in the manner described. So put the phone down and relax.)

CRIMINAL NAUGHTINESS
A 21-year-old male student phoned University Police on Wednesday and said numerous men had exposed themselves to him. The student was in the men’s locker room shower when the incident occurred.

Two 19-year-old female students were arrested Monday for stopping, between classes, in the middle of the sidewalk between the JKHB and the library construction pit. Pedestrian traffic was tied up for several minutes as the two women, who reportedly are roommates anyway, stood there and yammered about how some guy in their ward was going to ask one of them out, or something. The suspects were charged with Criminal Dawdling. Police are urging students to keep it movin’.

MISCHIEVOUS PRANKERY
An 18-year-old female student was caught leaving the magazine area of the bookstore with a magazine in her hand. She claimed she was merely going to a register to purchase the magazine; however, police doubted her story, since the bookstore has never actually sold a magazine in its entire history. Instead, students sit on the floor and read them, like it’s some kind of library.

A 23-year-old female student living in Wymount Terrace reported Tuesday evening that there was a man in her apartment. The man was her husband. The incident is under investigation. Police are urging students not to get married.

PRANKISH MISCHIEFERY
Eight one-dollar bills were stolen from the cash register in the Porter Rockwell Museum and Shootin’ Gallery gift shop sometime Monday morning. The dollar bills are valued at approximately $1 apiece.

Two 23-year-old female students were taken to the McDonald McHealth Center this week after calling University Police on three separate occasions claiming to have seen the Three Nephites, John the Revelator, and Hugh Nibley. Doctors determined that the students were fresh off their missions and not quite grounded in reality again yet. The doctors wrote them a prescription to watch “Tommy Boy” and sent them home.

SUSPICIOUS SUSPICIOUSNESS
Police discovered a 29-year-old male sitting in a parked car in the Martin Harris Lost & Found parking lot. It was determined that he was the same individual who had been seen parking there previously. The incident is under investigation.

A 22-year-old female student reported Sunday that she thought was being stalked. The same male suspect had come to her house frequently, always uninvited, since the beginning of the semester, and had always tried to engage her in conversation, despite her firm declarations that she did not wish to speak with him. Police investigation revealed that the suspect was the victim’s home teacher. He was arrested and charged with Zealous Duty-Doing.

Two 18-year-old male students were jogging at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday when they reportedly saw a man walking. The man appeared to be about 60 years old, and he allegedly had a dog, on a leash, with him. The man did not approach the students. The incident is under investigation.

VEHICULAR WACKINESS
An 87-year-old student was driving her Cadillac Aircraft Carrier on East Campus Drive near the J. Golden Kimball Center for Religious Swearing Wednesday morning when she struck a bicyclist. The car suffered scratches and dents to the left front fender area, totalling approximately $900 in damages. The bicycle was severely damaged, with both rims being bent beyond repair, the crossbar broken in half, and the handlebars ripped off. Total damage is estimated at $400. The bicyclist, a 19-year-old male student, was found several blocks away, on the roof of LeMar’s. He was referred to the Honor Code Council.

On Tuesday, several students were caught walking slowly and nonchalantly into a crosswalk, despite seeing quite clearly that cars were coming from both directions and would have to brake to avoid hitting them. The students were taken into the woods and shot.

BAD CRIMINAL EVIL STUFF
A 19-year-old female student was studying at the library Thursday evening when a male suspect hurried past her and stole her backpack. She phoned police, but they were unable to locate the suspect. The victim describes him as “tall, with dark wavy hair, gorgeous blue eyes, strong, masculine jaw, the chiseled physique of a swimmer or Greek god, and a butt you could die for,” and then she has to lie down for a while. If anyone knows the whereabouts of the suspect, the victim is requesting his phone number.

A female suspect approached a 21-year-old male student, whom she did not know, and kissed him full on the lips before running away. The victim refused to call police or press charges.

LEWDNESS CONDUCTED LEWDLY BY LEWD PEOPLE
An 18-year-old female student reported seeing a man wearing almost no clothing Monday night on campus. She described him as “exceptionally tall.” Police arrived and determined that the suspect was actually the Indian statue west of the library. The Indian statue was arrested, but the student could not be found to press charges. Police found her several minutes later, asking the man, woman and child holding hands outside of the SFLC why they weren’t wearing jackets.

A 22-year-old male student reported Thursday that as he walked past the full-length mirror in his bedroom after taking a shower, he exposed himself to himself. He is pressing charges.

An 18-year-old male student was caught viewing pornography on the Internet on a library computer Friday. He was referred to the Honor Code Council. Later the same day, he was caught viewing the same pornographic material, only this time in a Calvin Klein advertisement in a Rolling Stone magazine in the BYU Bookstore. No action was taken.

CONTENTIOUS DOMESTIC DISPUTATIONS
Three male students, ages 21-23, called University Police Tuesday night to report that their roommate, a 21-year-old male student, was destroying their couch with a hatchet. Police arrived at the scene and questioned the couch-destroyer. He reportedly said that he was “sick and tired” of coming home every night to find at least one of his roommates making out with the “girl du jour” on the couch, and was therefore trying to get rid of the couch once and for all. Police found the roommates an alternate place to make out until the couch could be replaced.

THEFT, SHMEFT
A 21-year-old male student reported Saturday that his bicycle had been stolen from a bike rack outside of the Stephen E. Robinson & Gerald N. Lund Building for People That Everyone Thinks Are General Authorities Because They Write a Lot of Books. The student told police that the bike, which was a brand-new $2,000 Schwinn Kanab, had not been locked up. Police informed him that it served him right. No further investigation is being made.

[ Just as with my “Letter to the Editor” column, I wanted to do a once-and-for-all parody of “Police Beat,” a weekly Daily Universe column listing all the major crimes committed on campus that week. This column was just about as popular as the “Letter to the Editor” one, which is my other favorite.

The day after this ran, I got a phone call from Elder Richard G. Scott’s secretary, calling to make her own complaints, and not in behalf of the apostle. (See the comments after the Halloween column to see what else she didn’t like.) In this column, she didn’t like the part about the sister missionaries who kept seeing the Three Nephites. “I don’t think we should make light of the Three Nephites,” she said. I pointed out that I wasn’t making light of them, but of people who claim to see them all the time. She was not moved.

After it was too late, I thought of another funny name for a campus building: The Paul H. Dunn Center for Creative Writing. Man, that would have been GREAT. And of course the joke was on me when Gerald N. Lund actually DID become a general authority a few years after this column was published.

There was some uncomfortable behind-the-scenes drama with this one. After I’d written it but a few days before it was printed, a BYU student was raped just south of campus while jogging at night. The rapist was caught, but everyone was on high alert now, and some of the fictional items I’d written for the column — which is about near crimes and almost incidents — didn’t seem so funny anymore.

I removed one item entirely and reworded a few others. The 19-year-old female student whose backpack was stolen in the library was originally out walking after dark when it happened, but a woman walking alone after dark didn’t sit well anymore. The two 19-year-old males who were jogging when they saw a man? That was originally: “A 19-year-old female student was jogging at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday when she reportedly saw a man walking. The man did not approach the student. The incident is under investigation.” This was a perfect example of what I was trying to make fun of — suspicion, paranoia, making mountains out of molehills — but of course it was too close to reality now. So I changed the single woman to two men and made the man very old and gave him a dog to emphasize his harmlessness.

The day the column ran, Daily Universe staff adviser (and my No. 1 advocate) John Gholdston got a call from BYU President Merrill J. Bateman. Seems Bateman didn’t like the line where the 20 guys exposed themselves to another guy in the locker room shower. “That’s just not funny” is what Bateman said, but I don’t think unfunny writing was his major beef. (“That’s just not funny” would later appear as a quote on the back of my first Snide Remarks book, attributed to “a BYU faculty member.”)

Gholdston said Bateman’s main thing since he’d arrived at BYU had been that The Universe look professional. No silliness, no sophomoric stuff, nothing you wouldn’t find in a professional paper. Some people in the department didn’t care much for the column either.

Fearing the column might get axed, I put a page on my website the next day asking people to e-mail me their support if they wanted “Snide Remarks” to continue. (I noted in my journal that I’d been getting more than 50 hits a day on my site, which I was very proud of! Ah, the early days of the Internet….) I very quickly got a few dozen responses, including one that had 26 “signatures” on it, from the chemical engineering seniors. I sent everything to Gholdston, and he sent it to the department higher-ups. But problems with Bateman and the administration continued the next semester… ]

It’s Christmastime. How do I know? You can feel it in the air. People smile more, they’re nicer, they’re more polite, as they push and shove their way out of the Marriott Center after Devotionals and Firesides, like there’s a poison gas leak or something.

Christmas is a season of giving and sharing, particularly when it comes to illnesses. If only peace on earth and goodwill toward men were as contagious as a cold! Then the world would be a magical place, full of pixies and elves and candy canes, and houses would be made of gumdrops and taffy, and the streets would be paved with, I don’t know, some kind of good thing, or whatever.

The Christmas season means traditions, and lots of ’em. Traditions are important to us as a people, because without them, a lot of things wouldn’t be around. Bob Hope, for example. If you have ever seen one of those holiday specials on TV where he goes to entertain servicemen, you have noticed that he is a very good comedian except for one major flaw: He’s not funny. But we would all feel bad if we went up to Bob Hope and said, “Bob Hope, you are not funny, and, having been born after 1950, we are not aware of a time when you ever were funny.” It’s just sort of a tradition that we let him stay around.

So anyway, there are a lot of traditions that pertain specifically to Christmas that perpetuate things that probably don’t need to be perpetuated. Some of them affect my life personally, which is why I even care enough to mention them.

First, there’s the tradition of Complaining About the Cold Weather in Utah. My fellow Southern Californians and I like to perpetuate this one, and it just makes Utahns hate us more, which is unfortunate, especially around the holidays, when we should be loving and not hating. I have no problem with Utahns as a people, although I should mention that the next time I hear a Utahn refer to the world outside of Utah as “the mission field,” I will most likely strike that Utahn in the face.

No, it is just the weather here that I don’t like. And it’s not that I don’t like snow, either, because I love skiing and various other manly snow-related endeavors. I like snow. I like the ocean too, but I wouldn’t want to live in it. I like for it to stay where it belongs, and when I want to frolic in it, I go to where it is. I wish the snow would be as considerate as the ocean.

Sometimes you run into somebody from Alaska, which is located in Canada, where it is very cold 11 1/2 months out of the year. These people will brag about how back home, when it got up to 55 degrees, they took off their shirts and went swimming! To those people I say: Ha ha! You are freaks. Just because 55 is less cold than it usually is where you live doesn’t mean that 55 degrees is hot. You have got your sense of reality all mixed up, probably from eating too much whale blubber.

(Blubber. Maybe the streets would be paved with blubber.)

Anyway, another important Christmas tradition is Arguing Over Which Songs Are Appropriate to Sing in Sacrament Meeting. The real rule is that if a song doesn’t relate specifically to the gospel, or, even more specifically, to the Savior, it’s not appropriate for sacrament meeting. This means “Silent Night” is OK; “Frosty the Snowman” is not. It’s a simple rule to understand, and yet, as with so many other rules that are simple to understand, many people don’t understand it.

Every year, you’ll hear of some group singing that “Carol of the Bells” song. This is the one where the singers try to imitate the sound of Christmas bells. It starts with some women singing (and I am paraphrasing here), “La la THE BELLS! La la THE BELLS! La la THE BELLS! La la THE BELLS!” And then some men say, “Ding… Dong… Ding… Dong,” and then everyone is going, “Merry, merry, merry, merry ding-dong, merry, merry, merry, merry ding-dong.” It’s a cool song, but it has nothing to do with anything even remotely religious, and yet it gets sung in wards all over the country, and perhaps even in Alaska.

It’s ironic that the purpose of sacrament meeting EVERY SINGLE WEEK is to remember the Savior, and yet during the time of year when He should be remembered the most, sacrament meeting gets filled with songs that having nothing to do with Him. Of course, many of the TALKS throughout the whole year are irrelevant. You’re especially used to hearing nothing about the Savior if you go to a lot of missionary farewells, where the purpose is for the family to congratulate themselves and revere their son or daughter who is going away, and maybe, if there’s time between anecdotes about how young Chad was always kind to his sisters and treated neighborhood pets with respect, say something about the gospel. If there’s time.

Oh, and be sure to encourage the congregation to skip Sunday School and go to your Open House, too, where they’ll be expected to eat from the vegetable tray and give you some money, sort of to congratulate you for having a child worth sending on a mission.

It would appear that I have gotten away from my thesis, which is that missionary farewells are stupid. No, wait, that’s not it. My topic was Christmas traditions, and frankly, I’ve gotten so far off track now that I don’t even feel like trying to get back again. I’ll fire up a flare; you send for help. Merry Christmas.

Surely you are aware that International Cinema played host last week to one of the masterpieces of modern filmmaking, a movie so astounding in its beauty and magnificence that audiences and critics alike have embraced it to their bosoms and are giving it wet, sloppy kisses of affection. The movie? “Air Force One.”

Wait a minute.

(Eric does mild research, checks facts, returns to computer.)

Sorry. Replace the words “International Cinema” with “Varsity Theater.” International Cinema was apparently showing some long movie about Shakespeare, or something.

But back to “Air Force One.” If you have not seen this movie, you have probably at least seen the line for it, which currently stretches around the Earth several times and is one of the few man-made objects visible from the moon. Some of the people in line for “Air Force One” originally got in line for “Jerry Maguire” and are still there. In fact, I believe the line has been cursed, like the ancient Israelites, to the effect that they will not be permitted to reach the ticket window until all the people who originally formed the line have died. It is interesting that people will show up LATE for a Devotional at which an Apostle is speaking (and then leave during the closing prayer), and yet they will get in line four hours EARLY just to buy tickets to a movie. I can understand this, though, because “Air Force One” was originally rated R, so everyone is eager to see the edited version and encourage the filmmakers to continue making more R-rated movies just like it.

I saw “Air Force One” last Tuesday, and as far as I could tell, it was an action-packed thrill-ride. It’s difficult to know for sure, though, because I think some of the action-packing and thrill-riding took place on the bottom half of the screen, which of course is invisible in the Varsity Theater unless you are exceptionally tall. And if you are exceptionally tall, you are no doubt sitting directly in front of me, becoming part of the action as you block my view and cause me to wonder why Harrison Ford is speaking to a huge head. (“Mr. President, we’ve got to stop the terrorists!” “Not until someone gets all this hair out of my way!”)

The best thing about this movie was Harrison Ford (real name: Han Solo), who is very cool and a friend to all the ladies. He is infinitely cooler than, say, Kenneth Branagh (real name: Pansy Boy), who could NEVER play the president because he’s too much of a pansy boy. Can you imagine Branagh in “Air Force One”? He would have been in the escape pod, crying like a baby, within ten seconds of the terrorists taking over, sticking around only long enough to receive a Dutch-rub and a noogie from the bad guys. Oh, and probably a swirly.

So it’s a good thing that someone cool, like Harrison Ford (real name: Indiana Jones) played the president. I think he’s even cooler than the real president, Bill Clinton (real name: Jimmy Carter). Picture Clinton hanging from a bungee cord attached to a helicopter. Now picture his puffy body bouncing off the ground like a skipping stone. Now picture the helicopter being dragged to earth and bursting into flames. Now apologize for thinking such rude things about our president.

I was recently thinking quite seriously about the issue of presidential coolness, because I often ponder deeply many important political and social issues. For example: Will I be able to write enough to fill up my column this week? The answer this time was “probably not,” and so I began thinking that Harrison Ford should really BE the president. You know that great speech he gives at the beginning of “Air Force One,” about how America isn’t going to put up with terrorists anymore, so they’d better start watching their backs? When was the last time Clinton, or any president, took a stand like that? When was the last time you saw Clinton fight Stormtroopers, or rescue a princess, or find the Ark of the Covenant? If Clinton were “The Fugitive,” running from the law after being accused of killing his wife, he’d never convince anyone that he didn’t do it. The biggest stand Clinton can ever take with any degree of authority is whether to get barbecue sauce or honey mustard with his McNuggets (answer: one of each, and he uses his finger to wipe up the remainder when he’s done dipping).

My point? I like movies.

(Editor’s Note: We regret that we even need to do this, but we would like to state up front that this column is SATIRE. Eric D. Snider doesn’t really think most of the things he says here. We’re not entirely sure what he does think, but it’s not this. Got it?)

To the editor:

I am writing because I am shocked and dismayed at the lack of good taste you showed in running an advertisement in Thursday’s paper for a video store that is known to carry R-rated movies. Isn’t this the Lord’s University? I thought I was safe from such purveyors of smut when I moved to BYU from Kuna, Idaho. I guess I was wrong.

I also think it is outrageous that people think caffeine shouldn’t be sold on campus. There has never been any official Church doctrine saying we can’t drink caffeine. So why doesn’t the bookstore sell Jolt Cola, Mountain Dew, or pure, crystalized caffeine, the kind you can smoke? These people need to chill out and stop acting “holier-than-thou,” and stop making up doctrines that the Brethren haven’t declared. This is a university, not a seminary.

And speaking of BYU policies, how can BYU show R-rated movies in the Varsity Theater, and yet refuse to show naked people carved in stone in the Museum of Art? If something is artistic, then it cannot possibly be pornographic. How can people get “turned on” by a work of art? That’s just sick, if you ask me.

When I was a missionary in Gomorrah, France, we went to the Museum of Nudity every other P-day, and it was always a beautiful, uplifting experience. My mission president encouraged us to go there. The only part of it I couldn’t condone was any work of art depicting homosexuals, or painted by homosexuals, or with any pink or lavender in it, which of course are the colors worn by homosexual gangs, as prophecied in “Odd Prophecies Spoken by General Authorities’ Relatives, Volume 3,” which I have never actually read, but which I saw quoted in an anti-Mormon pamphlet once. Homosexuals should be rounded up and shot like dogs, even if they’re only homosexuals in thought and not in deed — in fact, if they even have FRIENDS who are guys, or if they liked “In & Out,” that’s close enough, shoot ’em. Any man who wants to have a celestial marriage should only associate with women, and no men at all, and anyone who thinks otherwise obviously must be a homosexual himself, or else he would get himself in line with the Brethren’s thinking.

Sure, modesty is important. But even still, people shouldn’t get so worked up over whether or not students’ shorts are the right length. One’s spirituality is not determined by the length of one’s shorts. It is determined by the amount of facial hair a person has, and of course they should have none, at least not if they want to have a temple recommend, because none of the Brethren have facial hair, and we’re supposed to be emulating them in every way, except when it comes to living in Utah, because everyone knows that Salt Lake City will eventually become the most wicked city in the world, thanks largely to all the “Utah Mormons” who are corrupting it. To prove this point, I would like to share the following obscure quote from a member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy who died in 1871 and who said this while he was under heavy anesthesia: “Somebody get these spiders off of me!”

I’m a member of the LDS Church in good standing, but I don’t see why LeMar’s shouldn’t be allowed to have nude dancers if they want to. I won’t go see them, of course, but there are people who would want to, and anything people want to be able to do, there should be an opportunity for them to do it. Who are we to judge? We should be less judgmental, and allow purveyors of smut to operate here if they want to. I thought I would be safe from such narrow-mindedness when I moved here from Bangladesh, but I guess I was wrong.

I would like to point out also that there has never been any official Church doctrine saying we can’t whack off our fingers with hatchets. So why doesn’t the bookstore sell hatchets? I would like some answers, and I would like them now. If someone thinks we shouldn’t be whacking off our fingers with hatchets, then I hear there are plenty of spaces open at Berkeley. Take your radical ideas someplace else, and I’ll pray for your soul.

And while I’m on the subject, the other day I was walking into the bookstore, and the person who walked in ahead of me allowed the door to swing closed behind him, rather than giving it that half-push that you’re supposed to do to make it easier for the person coming in after you. Sure, both of my arms work fine, and I’m in good health, and I wasn’t carrying any packages. But that’s beside the point. Don’t the scriptures say to “open thy doors for thy brethren”? No, they don’t, but that’s exactly my point. This person wasn’t being very Christ-like, and to that I say shame on you, sir. I thought when I moved to BYU from off the surface of the moon that people would be nicer and more door-opening-er, but I guess I was mistaken. I am ashamed to call myself a BYU student today. Tomorrow, I may feel differently.

Unless you are a stick-in-the-mud or a communist, you will no doubt be celebrating Halloween this Friday. Halloween is a marvelous holiday with a long, sentimental history, but I fear that with the over-commercialization and the hustle-and-bustle of the season, people may forget the true meaning of the day.

No, sorry, forgive me, I have no idea what I’m talking about. Every year people complain about the roots of Halloween — how it used to be a Druid holiday, or a Celtic cult day, or Charles Manson’s birthday, or whatever — and see that as good reason for not celebrating it, as if the mere fact that Oct. 31 USED to be a pagan holiday automatically ruins it for all other purposes. If we follow this logic, then Christmas should be moved away from Dec. 25, and the stock market should be closed every Friday (Black or otherwise).

I see no problem with Halloween. Trick-or-treating seems like a relatively harmless activity, except of course for the malicious pranks that teen-agers pull that often result in injury and death, and except of course also for the madmen who put poison and razor blades in candy. Aside from these things, though, trick-or-treating seems perfectly safe and sane, except of course again for kids who go dressed as black cats or Darth Vader or Robert Smith from The Cure who get hit by cars because the drivers don’t see them.

Generally speaking, I think the most evil things about Halloween are the people who give out lousy candy to trick-or-treaters. You know who I’m talking about; perhaps, through some cruel twist of nature due to pre-mortal unrighteousness on your part, you actually ARE one of those people. I’m talking about people who give out apples, and pennies and nickels, and that awful hard candy from Mexico that the kids sell while you’re waiting to cross the border from Tijuana back into California. These people should turn off their lights, lock their gates, and put a sign on the fence saying, “We’re jerks, and we hate kids, and we think fruit is candy, and we’re jerks. Oh, and we hate kids.”

The worst thing anyone ever gave out was a toothbrush. At first I thought this couldn’t be a very common occurrence, but then, after asking the reporters in the newsroom, I learned that Chumbawamba is currently No. 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and that a good episode of “Seinfeld” was on TV (the one where Jerry can’t remember his girlfriend’s name, and he thinks maybe it’s “Gipple”). After a few more questions, I determined that indeed, many people were victims of random toothbrushings during their childhood trick-or-treat days.

What could possibly be going through someone’s mind that would make them give out dental hygiene products? Do they think they’re being cute? Do they think they’re doing kids a favor? And how do we know these toothbrushes haven’t already been used, anyway? Suffice it to say that handing out toothbrushes to trick-or-treaters is the worst crime ever perpetrated against humanity, and I include the “Batman & Robin” movie in that statement.

The cause of this lousy candy problem is that we have lost touch with the roots of Halloween. Oh sure, we TALK about “trick-or-treating” — but do we really think about what that means? If someone fails to give us a treat, do we realize that we are now both legally empowered and socially obligated to play a trick on them? My friends, I fear we do not. I fear that we say “trick or treat” over and over again so much that its repetition has lessened its meaning.

I am encouraging two things here: One, start trick-or-treating again. Some grown-up may have told you that you were too old for it now that you’re in college, but, like most grown-ups, they were lying.

And two: Do the tricks. If someone gives you something stupid — loose change, fruit, dental floss, anything with coconut — feel free to start a fire. You’ll be glad you did.

I really need to get some sleep.

See, I quit sleeping several months ago, mainly because there’s just so much hanging around I have to do. I have all these friends, and my friends are always wanting to go out and do stuff, and I can’t say no to my friends, and — oh, all right, I don’t have any friends. I eat saltines and sit in front of the TV until 2 a.m. Satisfied?

Anyway, when I finally do go to sleep, I want to SLEEP. I don’t want to be interrupted. I don’t want people talking to me. I want to SLEEP.

This, unfortunately, is often not possible. For example last winter I was sick. I had this enormous head cold, and my cranium had swelled to the size of a beach ball, and my brain was floating, and most of the time I couldn’t breathe or even think. As a result, I had a difficult time getting to sleep. Once I did doze off, living as I do with other people, something would usually wake me up.

I remember one morning, I was awakened by a phone call. After getting rid of the person, I tried to go back to sleep, only to discover that in my left ear, I could distinctly hear the beating of my own heart. Somehow the fluids that were squishing around in my skull had positioned themselves so as to cause my heartbeat to reverberate in my left ear, and not only could I hear it, but it was keeping me awake. (“Come on, heart, keep it down, I’m trying to sleep!”) My first thought was that I had killed someone and buried them under the floorboards, and that I was now hearing their heart beat, like in that Edgar Allan Poe story. I quickly scanned my memory and determined that I had not killed anyone.

I then tried to rearrange my ear fluids to make the sound go away. I tried Q-Tips, an unbent paper clip, and good old-fashioned whacking myself in the side of the head. Nothing helped. So I tried to make my heart stop beating. I learned that this is not a good thing to try to do. “Let your heart keep on beating no matter what” is the lesson I learned. Approximately three days later, I fell asleep.

It was a miserable experience, being sick, but there are those who would not be able to relate to that. I am speaking specifically of my mother. I don’t wish to air my family’s dirty psychoses in public, but my mom enjoys being sick. She gets to lie in bed, everyone waits on her hand and foot, and she can sleep all she wants. She loves it.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but my mom especially loves being in the hospital. She considers the greatest travesty of modern medicine to be the fact that, due to insurance regulations, women giving birth are often being dressed and rushed out the door even before the umbilical cord is cut. When my mom had her children, it was customary for a new mother to stay in the hospital six to eight months. My grandmother was in the hospital until my mom entered grade school. In the days of the Old West, after a woman had a child she was sealed away in an airtight container and put on a shelf for the rest of her life. Or at least that’s how my mom tells it.

I think my mom should read the book I read a few years ago, entitled “Big Bird’s Jealous.” This was a “Sesame Street” story wherein either Bert or Ernie, whichever one is short and red, got sick, thus causing Big Bird to get jealous, because everyone was paying so much attention to Bert/Ernie. So Big Bird decided to pretend to be sick so that everyone would pay attention to him/her, which everyone did, only then, Big Bird got sick for real, and his/her eventual conclusion was that being sick is not very much fun. Duh. If your children need a book to tell them that, your children have some serious problems that cannot, I assure you, be solved by “Sesame Street,” or by any other program from the Children’s Television Workshop, for that matter. And I include “Electric Company” in this statement.

Nonetheless, my mom likes to be sick, and who are we to stop her?

When I was a freshman, I lived at Deseret Towers (“Where the Leaders of Tomorrow are Having Water Fights Today”), and I was constantly being woken up. A major contributing factor to this problem was the group of foreign exchange students from Mexico who lived in the room next to mine and who often invited several thousand of their friends over for parties (or, as they say in Mexico, “siestas”). They would stay up until all hours of the night singing and laughing and shouting in Spanish, and since the walls in DT are not made of cinderblock, as they appear, but rather of sturdy posterboard, I could hear everything. The fact that it was all in Spanish made it even more annoying, because I think if someone is going to keep me awake, they should at least have the courtesy to do it in a language I can understand.

I was also woken up frequently by the sound of people whistling in the DT hallways as they were getting ready for school. I don’t think people should whistle. Whistling is basically your way of saying, “Here’s the song that’s been stuck in my head all day; I’d like for it to be stuck in yours, too.”

And with that, I bid you farewell. I’ve got to go to slezzZ-Zzx-nxZJ;-zxXZZxz.

In case you were wondering why The Daily Universe is so huge today, it’s because there are 17 blank pages scattered throughout it on which you are supposed to write your own news.

Just kidding. Actually, it’s because this was Homecoming Week, and there’s a lot going on. Specifically, there are 432 Homecoming Dances scheduled for this weekend, at least one of which you are required to attend if you desire to continue as a student here.

I went to Homecoming once, when I was a freshman. It seems like only freshmen and seniors really, really want to go to Homecoming. The freshmen do it because it reminds them so much of a high school prom, except that no one drinks afterward, and the seniors do it because they realize they’ll be graduating soon and haven’t gone since they were freshmen. The in-between classes don’t seem to care, except for the people who have boyfriends or girlfriends, who see it as another chance to trot out their companion like a trophy and show people that yes, in fact, they are Seeing Someone.

What was I saying? Oh, yeah. I was a freshman, and I didn’t have any money, so I wasn’t going to go. But then I overheard this really pretty girl in my ward talking about how she’d like to go but hadn’t been asked. I figured if she was THAT desperate to go, she might even be willing to go with ME. It was a risk, but I was daring in those days, because I was young.

I considered the various ways I could ask her. Anywhere else, of course, this wouldn’t have been a factor. In a normal society, people ask other people to dances merely by, well, ASKING them. But for some reason, at BYU, you have to do something clever. For example, a guy might bake a cake with a note inside of it. When the girl eats the cake and reads the note, which says, “Will you go with me to Homecoming?”, she responds to the invitation by, say, setting the guy’s bed on fire. Then, to indicate that he received her acceptance message, he has to use computer-hacking techniques to erase all electronic evidence of her identity. She responds to this by maiming one of his family members. And it escalates like that. Only at BYU does asking someone on a date require careful planning, extensive props and, occasionally, pyrotechnic devices. The number of fingers lost and eyes poked out prior to Preference and Homecoming dances, due to creative asking methods, is probably enough to create several new people.

Anyway, I wound up just asking this girl, and she said yes, despite my non-creative invitation. Everything was going fine, up until the point that we actually left on the date.

See, we made the mistake of going to Mullboons for dinner. If you have not been to Mullboons, by all means, make a point of going sometime soon. But for heaven’s sake, don’t go on an empty stomach, because there’s no way you can afford to actually EAT there. Everyone in my group had chicken cordon bleu (French for “chicken with blue corduroys”), which was the cheapest thing on the menu, and the bill still came to — and I am not exaggerating here — seven million dollars.

Well, OK, perhaps I am exaggerating somewhat. The point is, it was very expensive, and I had not planned on it being so much. I was a freshman; I had never been anywhere. I assumed that all restaurants, including classy ones like Mullboons and Chili’s, had 99-cent Value Menus. When it was all over, I had no money left. Nothing. Not even a dollar. This, I reasoned, would be OK. We already had our tickets to the dance at the Springville Art Museum (which seems like a very odd place to hold a dance, by the way, almost as odd as holding sacrament meeting in the Varsity Theatre), and so I didn’t figure I’d need anymore money.

But as we were driving to the dance, my date turned to me and said, “So when should we have our pictures taken — right when we get there, or at the end?” Apparently, in an attempt to make this as much like a high school prom as possible, there were professional photographers there whom you could pay money to and they would take your picture. This was news to me, but it was apparently a big deal to my date. I figured now was the time to be honest and admit that dinner had cost a bit more than I expected and that I was out of money.

“Whenever you want,” I said, ignoring the aforementioned impulse to be honest.

We got there and had a swell ol’ time. We danced like crazy maniac lunatics to the fast songs by Erasure and New Order (no other fast artists were played), and we danced all slow and romantic-like to the songs by Chicago and whoever sang “Lady in Red” (no other slow artists were played).

I thought I was off the hook. It was 11:55, and there was only five minutes left before they would kick us out of the museum and send us home. My date had apparently forgotten all about pictures, what with being so caught up in the magic of the evening and the soothing voice of Peter Cetera. I thought I would get away with it.

Then, as we were strolling around the museum, we happened to walk past the room where they were taking pictures. She stopped, whirled around, faced me, and gasped, “Pictures! We still have to take pictures!”

I knew these alleged pictures had been important to her when she had first brought it up in the car. But now I could see just how much her heart was set on it. Her eyes were alight with anticipation, and her face was aglow with excitement. My brain was aterrified with terror. It was time to face the music (Get it?! We were at a dance!), and I finally told her the truth.

“I think they’ve stopped taking pictures for the evening,” I said.

She didn’t buy it. She could see them still taking pictures. And so now I had to tell her the REAL truth.

“Due to a genetic anomaly, I cannot be photographed,” I said.

She bought this even less.

“My religious upbringing causes me to believe that if a camera takes my picture, it will steal my soul as well.”

She was growing weary of my dawdling.

“I just spent my last $45 on dinner, and now I’m broke, and so the best I can do is draw a picture of you on a napkin.”

She believed this, and she understood, and she never spoke to me again.

So let this be a lesson to you, my friends. Homecoming, while full of excitement and tradition and dancing Cougarettes, can also be costly. Be careful which dances you go to, and be careful where you eat. You’re constructing memories that will last you for eternity, if not longer. Make sure they’re memories you can afford.

At the very least, make sure to bring along Dad’s credit card. It’s everywhere you want to be.

In my ongoing quest to bother people on the telephone, I recently called several consumer hotlines. These are the 1-800 numbers on the labels of many products that you can call if you have questions or comments. I wondered if they would take me seriously if all my questions and comments were dumb.

My conclusion? Oh my, yes.

* * *

Lever Bros., makers of Lever 2000 soap and Snuggle fabric softener.

ERIC: The Lever 2000 soap — where does that name come from? The “Lever” and the “2000” part.

LEVER: The manufacturer of the soap is Lever Bros.

ERIC: Oh, I see, it’s somebody’s name?

LEVER: Right.

ERIC: And what about the “2000”?

LEVER: They say there’s over 2000 body parts.

ERIC: Really. Two thousand body parts?

LEVER: Yes.

ERIC: Do you have a list of them?

LEVER: No.

* * *

I called again and talked to someone else:

ERIC: Do you folks do the Snuggle fabric softener?

OTHER LEVER: Yes, we do, we are the manufacturers of that.

ERIC: OK, the Snuggle Bear that’s in the commercials: Do a lot of people hate that thing?

OTHER LEVER: No, actually a lot of people love it. They call and ask how they can purchase them.

ERIC: Really? People want to buy the Snuggle Bear?

OTHER LEVER: Right, yep.

ERIC: Can you?

OTHER LEVER: Well, there are promotions that go on occasionally. My question is, you ask if people hate the bear — do you love it or hate it?

ERIC: Well, see, I don’t like him, just because he’s so cute and he’s got that voice. It’s kind of annoying.

OTHER LEVER: I’ll share your comments.

ERIC: I’ve heard a lot of comedians make fun of it, like they want to put the bear in the dryer and turn it on.

OTHER LEVER: But that’s good in a way, because at least they remember the product.

ERIC: At least they remember it. Even if they hate it.

OTHER LEVER: I’ll let them know what you’re saying. You’re saying you don’t like the commercials.

ERIC: I don’t like the bear. The bear’s just too cute.

OTHER LEVER: OK, I’ll put that down.

ERIC: The fabric softener works fine. I just don’t like the bear.

OTHER LEVER: Let me put that… (typing) “Does not like the bear in the Snuggle commercials. It’s too cute.” I put that down. I want you to know that your call’s important to us, because we share all comments with marketing. They want to know how people feel about ads and everything.

ERIC: I don’t know if a teddy bear works, because bears are already snuggly. Maybe if they tried to take something that’s not always snuggly and make it SEEM snuggly, like a moose, or something. That might be a little more different, but a bear’s just so generic. You know, a stuffed teddy bear. Of COURSE that’s snuggly. Try a moose or a badger or something.

OTHER LEVER: I’ll put that in the report.

* * *

Listerine

LISTERINE: … When Listerine was first used, it wasn’t available over the counter. They used it in operating rooms to kill germs.

ERIC: Really? Well who decided you could put it in your mouth?

LISTERINE: I guess eventually they were testing the product and found it was to people’s advantage to use it as a mouth rinse to kill the germs…

ERIC: I just think they would have had to change something. I mean, Pine-Sol kills germs, but you wouldn’t want to put it in your mouth.

LISTERINE: (laughs)

ERIC: Which brings me to my other question. You’ve got Listerine, and then you’ve got the minty Listerine, and neither one of them tastes very good. And I wonder if the company has tried to come up with any flavors that taste good as well as killing the germs that can cause bad breath.

LISTERINE: You don’t think the Cool Mint or the Fresh Burst taste good?

ERIC: Oh, no, no, no. Still tastes too Listerine-y. I’d use it more if there were something that tasted better. I don’t know if it’s possible, but maybe a bubblegum, or a mint ‘n’ chip, or something.

* * *

Doritos

ERIC: The current commercials they have for the Doritos talk about how they’re really loud…?

DORITOS: Right.

ERIC: I don’t like loud food very much. It can be annoying to the people around you, like if you’re trying to eat it at the movies or something.

DORITOS: Right.

ERIC: So I wondered, does this bother people? Does this turn people off to the product because they don’t like loud food?

DORITOS: I have absolutely no idea.

ERIC: People haven’t called?

DORITOS: No. Normally I’ve heard from people who say they just don’t like the commercials, but until you said that, it never occurred to me that eating Doritos was noisy.

ERIC: Yeah, well, the commercials are right. The Doritos are noisy. It’s just that I prefer my food a little bit quieter.

* * *

Nabisco (specifically, the Oreo division)

ERIC: First of all, where does the name come from?

OREO: We don’t really have a specific definition. There are three theories about where the name came from. It was maybe chosen for its melod- melod– I’m sorry — melodic combination of sounds — “Oreo.”

ERIC: Melodic combination of sounds. That makes sense. (slowly) “Oooorrreeeoooo.”

OREO: Also, there’s another theory that it’s based on the French word for “gold.” Or, it’s based on a Greek word for “mountain,” because the original shape of the cookie was hill-shaped, before they flattened it out.

ERIC: How long before a bag of Oreos goes stale? Like if you have a bag or Oreos just sitting out. Because there are so many preservatives in them.

OREO: Right. They’ll last about four to six months.

ERIC: Have the Oreo people ever considered selling just the creme part in the middle, without the cookie?

OREO: We’ve had a lot of people suggest that, but the marketing people just don’t think there’s a high enough demand for it.

ERIC: What about TripleStuf?

OREO: Again, I don’t know.

ERIC: Do you eat a lot of Oreos?

OREO: Who, me? Oh, yeah. I love Oreos.

ERIC: Me too. Although when I eat them, the black stuff from the cookie collects in the corners of my mouth. Do you have that problem?

OREO: No, I just dip them in milk and just gulp ’em down.

ERIC: Oh yeah, the milk.

* * *

Procter and Gamble (specifically, Nine Lives cat food)

ERIC: How do you determine if cats like a certain kind of food? Because you know, cats can be very finicky.

NINE LIVES: They do testing on that in shelters, with animals.

ERIC: So they do tests on animals.

NINE LIVES: Well —

ERIC: You don’t ever have people eat it, do you?

NINE LIVES: No, no, no, no. I have seen people eat the dog biscuits, though. They’re made of grain.

ERIC: I wonder if they’re any good.

NINE LIVES: I don’t think they have much of a taste. I think they’re pretty bland.

ERIC: I guess they wouldn’t be bad for you. Have you ever thought of encouraging that, as a selling point? You can buy the dog biscuits for your dog and then have one for yourself? Help owners bond with their dogs.

NINE LIVES: The product would go twice as fast that way.

ERIC: Maybe add some flavor, like bubblegum or mint ‘n’ chip.

* * *

Post cereal

ERIC: I was curious about the Grape Nuts. How do they get the name Grape Nuts?

POST: There’s a story behind that. The story involves the actual maker of the Grape Nuts, who was —

ERIC: Freddy Post?

POST: Not Freddy Post.

ERIC: Wasn’t there a Freddy Post in history?

POST: No, sir.

(A little later in the conversation:)

ERIC: How many bowls would be OK for someone to eat in a day?

POST: Hmm. That’s all based on your consumption. If you take a look on the bottom of the box, in the nutritional information, there’s a daily value — that’s what you should be basing it on.

ERIC: I just wonder, if you ate too much, would it be bad? Because I like to have four or five bowls sometimes. Would that be bad? Could you have too much?

POST: Unfortunately we don’t have that information available. Although that’s a very good question. Myself, I eat a lot of cereal too.

ERIC: What kind do you like?

POST: I like the Banana Nut Crunch, Cranberry Crunch, the Golden Crisp.

ERIC: I like the Fruity Pebbles.

POST: There’s a wide selection that I like, but my best is the Banana Nut Crunch.

ERIC: I haven’t tried that.

POST: Oh, man, that is great.

ERIC: Do the Post people who work on the Fruity Pebbles and the sugar cereals, are they in competition with the people who work on the more legitimate cereals like Grape Nuts? Are there arguments in the cafeteria, or fights at the company picnic?

POST: Not at all. We pull together as a team.

(And a little later…)

ERIC: When I was a kid, I ate a lot of the Fruity Pebbles and Cocoa Pebbles, and sometimes I’d have like five bowls of that in the morning, and then I’d be hyper until about 3 in the afternoon. And then I’d take a nap for about three hours. So I don’t think that was very healthy.

POST: Well, I wouldn’t have any information in regards to the cereal actually making that happen. You may have to consult a physician about that.

ERIC: Well, it’s so much sugar. I mean, to make that “part of a balanced breakfast,” you’d have to have like a whole loaf of toast to balance it out. And I’d just eat the cereal and go nuts the rest of the day.

POST: (as if he thinks I’m crazy) Oh, OK.

ERIC: The teachers used to call my parents and ask why I was eating so much cereal. I’d be hyper all day, and then come down about 3. I’d take a nap for a few hours, and then wake up with this awful headache and swear I’d never do it again, but then I’d wake up the next day and do it all over. It was a downward spiral.

POST: I’m sorry to hear that, sir.

ERIC: Oh, it’s OK now. I just have the Grape Nuts now.

POST: Oh, good.

One of the perks of being a Daily Universe editor is that you get lots of free stuff. For example, last week I got a fake hand in the mail from someone promoting a haunted house. The letter said, “We didn’t want you to hear about us second-hand.” I spent most of the afternoon laughing at THAT, let me tell you.

Another nice free thing I got recently was a chance to cover the Sunday morning session of general conference for The Daily Universe. I got a press pass, and a good seat in the southwest corner of the Tabernacle balcony (right next to the choir), and even a free lunch from the church’s public relations department. It was a really nice experience, even better than getting a severed hand in the mail.

Since you probably weren’t there, I’ve compiled a minute-by-minute journal of what happened in the Tabernacle before and during the Sunday morning session.

8:40 a.m. — After driving for a very, very long time on what’s left of I-15, as well as numerous vaguely marked detour routes, I arrive at the tabernacle. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is rehearsing for the “Music and the Spoken Word” broadcast that will begin at 9:30. The Tabernacle is beginning to fill up, but is still rather empty. There are several Men in Suits milling around, doing pre-conference stuff.

8:42 — A lady in a bright-colored dress fills several plastic cups with water and puts them on a shelf under the podium.

8:50 — A Man in a Suit down on the floor speaks into his pen. I cannot determine whether this is an official Man in a Suit or just a man in a suit, nor can I ascertain why he is speaking into his pen. Whatever the reason, it looks odd.

8:55 — A KBYU video person videotapes another fellow’s back. I assume this was to check light levels or something like that, but perhaps it was related to the pen incident.

8:57 — A Man in a Suit uses a ruler to ensure the microphone is exactly the right height above the podium. It is. The Man is pleased.

9:01 — Mormon Tabernacle Choir conductor Jerald Ottley has the choir practice a song they’ll be singing in the afternoon session. He wants them to do a “modulation after verse two,” which turns out to mean that they change keys. They make it sound beautiful.

9:04 — Craig Jessop, the other conductor, becomes engaged in a deep discussion with the choir concerning an A-vs.-A-flat issue in “Press Forward, Saints.” A-flat turns out to be right, and they make it sound beautiful.

9:16 — Well, well, well, who should arrive in the balcony directly across from me but the extremely eligible bachelor and football player Steve Young. He is with a friend, or perhaps a brother; at any rate, it’s not a girlfriend.

9:17 — Elders Neal A. Maxwell and M. Russell Ballard walk up the steps past the choir seats so they can talk to Steve Young and his friend. Elder Maxwell hugs Steve Young. Following that, Steve Young goes back to his seat and graciously signs a couple of autographs.

9:26 — The lights come up and a hush falls on the now-packed Tabernacle as the First Presidency walks in. They shake hands with the Apostles, and President Hinckley motions for the audience to sit down.

9:28 — Lloyd Newell, the famous voice of “Music and the Spoken Word” and general conference, goes to the podium to explain to the audience that the broadcast is about to begin. He mentions that this is the 3,555th consecutive weekly broadcast of the show.

9:30 — A hand from down below the conductor’s stand gives a “5-4-3-2-1” count, and right on cue, the choir starts singing. It’s EXACTLY 9:30, not a second before or after.

9:59 — The broadcast goes over flawlessly, as far as I can tell. When it ends, everyone — including the general authorities — stands up to stretch their legs for one minute.

10:00 — At exactly 10:00 general conference starts. We try to follow the example of the brethren in so many other ways; why, oh why can’t we start meetings on time like they do?

10:10 — I notice the aforementioned Steve Young looks cramped. He’s a broad-shouldered fellow, you know, and they pack ’em in pretty tight on those benches.

10:45 — Steve Young listens attentively.

10:53 — As the choir finishes singing the third verse of a hymn, President Hinckley, prepares to stand up. When the choir goes on with a fourth verse, he smiles sheepishly and laughs about it with Presidents Monson and Faust. When the song really does end, he looks at his counselors mischievously for a moment before standing up and going to the podium. It is one of the funny, human moments that makes President Hinckley so well-loved.

10:54 — The choir and congregation stand and sing “Redeemer of Israel.” Steve Young stands straight with excellent posture, his suit coat buttoned and his hands behind his back. He doesn’t know all the words to all the verses, but neither does anyone else.

11:00 — While Elder Harold G. Hillam of the Seventy is speaking, the plastic-protected documents he is displaying reflect the spotlights in a strange way. A 30-foot patch of reflected light can now be seen on the ceiling, and it moves every time Elder Hillam moves the plastic. I am mesmerized by the light.

11:46 — While discussing the Sabbath, President Hinckley mentions that it has unfortunately become “a day of … football on television.” Steve Young does not flinch.

11:57 — Conference ends — three minutes early. (Why, oh why can’t we be like the brethren?) The general authorities greet their wives, who are seated in a special section immediately to the general authorities’ left. They also shake hands and say hello to a lot of strangers who have come up to them. Steve Young does the same thing as he leaves.

I know we should try to be happy with ourselves and not try to be something we’re not, but I spend most of my time wishing I were a superhero.

This is mostly because I covet the ability to fly, because if I could fly, I could avoid nearly every unpleasant part of my life, simply by taking to the air. Whatever the unpleasant thing was, it would soon be but a speck on the ground as I soared up to the highest heights, floating on the breezes without a care in the world — unless the unpleasant thing was inside a building, in which case I would just have to hover near the ceiling until the unpleasant thing went away. Which it probably wouldn’t.

This column is actually about superheroes, but let me mention one time I wished I could fly. It was last week, and I was looking for a classroom in the Harris Fine Arts Center. Anytime I look for a classroom in the HFAC, my efforts are thwarted by the fact that the HFAC was designed by crazy people. In the HFAC, rooms are not arranged in an orderly, numerical pattern, such as those found in even your most rudimentary hospitals and prisons. No sir or madam, rooms in the HFAC are arranged in a completely random manner, so that a person can never find the same room twice.

In a normal building, you would expect rooms B-257 and B-258 to be right next next to each other, but in the HFAC, they may be in different wings, on different floors, and perhaps even in different buildings at different universities. Some rooms, I’m convinced, aren’t even THERE some of the time, much like the mythical city of Brigadoon. This is why people who have classes in the HFAC tend to have ALL their classes there: They know if they ever leave, they may return to find that the whole BUILDING is gone. It’s also why HFAC people wander around singing out loud all the time. (Actually, I guess that has nothing to do with it. I just wanted to see if you had noticed it, too.)

Anyway, I was wandering through the HFAC when I ran into a guy we’ll call Willis. Willis was, at one time, my good friend and roommate, until he got really serious with his girlfriend and turned into someone else. Mr. I Don’t Care About Anyone Except My Girlfriend was his new name, and he certainly lived up to it. He would come home late at night and tell me all about his girlfriend, whom we’ll call Tootie. He would go on about how he had the biggest problems in the whole world, and how he had been so insensitive as to accidentally forget their seven-week anniversary, and how Tootie was just so swell. Whatever problems I had were irrelevant.

WILLIS: And right now she’s got this huge bunion on her foot, and she has to wear special padding in her shoe just so she can walk comfortably.
ME: I read in the paper today that my entire family was killed in a boat explosion.
WILLIS: I’m going to get together a collection to help Tootie have her bunion removed.
ME: Also, I will be dead in a matter of seconds, due mainly to the wolverine that has attached itself to my neck.
WILLIS: I’m considering having my own foot amputated and surgically re-attached to her leg to replace the bad one.
ME: (falls over, dead, as the wolverine scurries off)

(The preceeding dramatization was based on fact and in no way exaggerated.)

Anyway, I had been avoiding Willis ever since he married Tootie last December, because I couldn’t think of anything to say to him. Now, though, we were walking toward each other in the HFAC hallway, with no one else around, and I couldn’t think of any plausible way of not seeing him. But if I had been a superhero with the ability to fly, I could have been out of there in a flash.

At this point in the column, I had two long paragraphs philosophizing about why superheroes are important to our society. It had to do with escapism and the pressures of trying to live out “The American Dream.” Frankly, I’m embarrassed I even wrote it, although it did contain an amusing reference to other countries’ “Dreams,” like “The Iraqi Dream” and “The Norwegian Dream” (“Not freezing to death”). But I won’t subject you to it. That’s not the issue anyway. The issue is that superheroes are cool.

My favorite show as a kid was “The Superfriends,” because it had a whole Pantheon of superheroes, all working together, despite the fact that Superman could easily have done all the work himself, and could, for that matter, have killed all the other Superfriends with his bare hands. (Do you suppose this was ever a point of contention? Bring up that topic when you discuss this column with your friends later.)

My favorite Superfriends were the Wonder Twins: Zan and Jaina and their space monkey, Gleek. But they were always transforming into something that was only indirectly related to what they were trying to do. Like instead of just turning into two 50-foot dinosaurs and stomping on the bad guys, they would turn into a flying walrus and a bucket of ice.

I think if they’re going to be abstract, they should be really abstract. Instead of turning into animals and various physical states of water, they should turn into concepts. “Shape of… existentialism!” “Form of… the broken dreams of the lower middle class!” “Shape of… Thursday!” And so on.

As you know, their Wonder Twin powers were activated by touching their fists together. I recall one episode where they were tied up several feet apart and couldn’t quite get their fists to touch, so Gleek got right up between them and put his nose between their fists, and it fit the gap just perfectly. But this raises a number of scientific questions, none of which were addressed in the show. For one thing, do ALL twins have these special powers? Also, can a monkey’s nose conduct Wonder Twin powers? I will grant you that it was a space monkey, but I am still skeptical as to the conductive powers of a nose.

But this is all beside the point. Actually, it’s nowhere near the point. The point is that I wish I could fly, because that would be really cool. And I’d never have to talk to Willis again.

This was the first of my Monday Daily Universe columns to go under the title “Snide Remarks.” I was worried the column wouldn’t go over very well, consisting as it does of parts of three columns sort of slapped together in a hasty fashion. But folks seemed to like it, and I realized yet again that I can slack off and still amuse at least a few people. This is important to know in my line of work (i.e., slacker).

Willis and Tootie are the same couple referred to in the first verse of “Since My Best Friend Got Engaged” (although the second verse certainly applied to them too). They were also the subject of the Garrens sketch “Some Friend You Are”; notice that some dialogue in this column is similar to the dialogue in that sketch.

This column was also among the first to show the pathos that underlies so much of comedy. If you strip away all the goofiness of the article, what’s left? You have a guy whose friendship failed and who now wants to avoid all his problems, but who can think of no practical way of doing this, so he resorts to fantasies about flying. It’s sad, really, just like a lot of comedy. Sorry to depress you.

If you’ve watched TV for longer than ten seconds, you’ve no doubt seen commercials for psychic hotlines. These things are very expensive, but they get you by offering free minutes. You can call and get a little sample, and hopefully you’ll be hooked and keep calling back.

I wanted to try the free minutes. Couldn’t hurt, right? I learned that the free minutes are legitimate, but it’s up to you to hang up when you hear the beep telling you your time’s up. If you don’t, they start charging you, and if necessary, they’ll send guys to your house to collect the money.

The hotline I called offered three free minutes each time you call. A good 90 seconds of that was taken up with being on hold and then having my psychic ask for my name and address so they could send me junk mail. (I gave them your address, so be watching for it.)

I talked to three different psychics, and I occasionally told some half-truths (and lies) in order to prove their non-psychic natures. Here are some snippets from the conversations, with my lies clearly marked.

SANDRA: Is there anything in particular you’d like me to focus on in this reading, Eric?

ERIC: Yeah, actually, I’m wondering what’s up with me in my love life. I’m not seeing anyone right now, and I’m getting to the point where I’d like to be getting married. I’m wondering if you see anything ahead for me.

SANDRA: OK, do me a favor, while I’m focusing, could you say your first name for me three times?

ERIC: Say my first name for you?

SANDRA: Mm-hmm.

ERIC: Eric, Eric, Eric.

SANDRA: I see you dealing with a lot of people who are incompatible with you. There are people and relationships out there, they’re just very incompatible with you. I’d almost say you’re in the wrong place.

ERIC: Riiiight. (I hear the beep.) Sorry, gotta go.

…

ERIC: My name’s Eric.

LITA: What’s your last name?

ERIC: Snider.

LITA: I think that I talked to you before, didn’t I?

ERIC: No, it was Sandra I talked to last time.

LITA: Oh, your name sounded familiar. (Great psychic work!) Did you have a problem that’s sort of on your mind tonight?

ERIC: Well, yes. I’m sort of at a crossroads in my life, I think. (beep) Was that my time up already? When do the three minutes start? I’m supposed to get three minutes free.

LITA: You’re supposed to get five minutes free. (She’s wrong. It’s three.)

ERIC: Is it five? Well, I heard a beep.

LITA: If you heard a beep, that means your time is up. (“If” I heard a beep? Come on, Lita, you’re the psychic — did I hear a beep or not?) Did you call 1-900-737-7793?

ERIC: No, it was 1-900-370-4892. (Poor Lita’s batting zero tonight.)

…

LITA: I think a turbulent time is about to come to an end.

ERIC: That’s good to know. Hey, can you communicate with deceased people?

LITA: Who, me? No. Have you had someone come to you after they had passed away?

ERIC: No, it’s just that my grandma died a few months ago, and I was wondering how she’s doing.

…

LITA: I think you’re about to have a realization of a sought-after prize or goal. Something you’ve been looking forward to. A goal, or something?

ERIC: Well, I’m about to get married. (Not true.)

LITA: That sounds like it, then!

ERIC: Wow. You must be psychic.

…

LITA: I’ve had tarot card readings for myself, and this may sound strange, but I put them under my pillow.

ERIC: Does the tarot card fairy come and take them?

LITA: No, I wrap them in a silk scarf. It’s supposed to help protect them.

ERIC: I have a scarf, but it’s a cotton-poly blend. (I guess it’s more of a bandana, really.) Will that work?

LITA: I don’t think that would work.

…

LITA: There’s some sort of a trial or a choice involved with your wedding.

ERIC: Well, her parents aren’t too keen on the whole thing.

LITA: Uh-oh. There’s your trial, I guess.

…

ERIC: I had something that was concerning me that I wanted to ask somebody about.

RON: Can I ask what you do for a living before we start?

ERIC: Oh, sure, I work for a newspaper.

RON: You seemed like an intelligent man.

ERIC: Thanks. (Finally, they got something right!)

RON: Are you college-educated? (Not a very bold “psychic” statement to make, since nearly everyone in the newspaper business has been to college.)

ERIC: Yeah, I’m in college right now. … Here’s the thing I’m worried about, and being, as you say, an intellectual sort of person, I’m kind of embarrassed to be worried about this, but it seems like there’s a guy following me. I walk to work, and I walk home, and it seems like there’s always this guy following me. Do you see anything about that? (None of this is true.)

RON: As you know, Eric, there are 78 tarot cards in the tarot deck… (I didn’t know that, actually). There are nine divisions… (blah blah blah; he goes on and on).

ERIC: Are you gonna use the cards?

RON: Do you want me to?

ERIC: Well, I just wondered if you can help me figure out who the guy is or what he wants.

RON: I’m picking up that there are other things you’re worried about.

ERIC: Other things? Well…

RON: How’s the love life?

ERIC: The love life’s pretty good. (Lie.) I’ve just ended a relationship, but I feel pretty good about it. (Not true.)

RON: Did you care for this woman?

ERIC: I did, but I don’t think she cared for me very much.

RON: Was she a little cold to you?

ERIC: She was. She could be a little bit cold sometimes.

RON: OK, I want you to sit back and relax, and let the cards answer your–

That’s where I hung up, because the time was up, and because I didn’t want to get the tarot cards involved.

So I guess by now it should be apparent that these hotlines are a waste of money. But it probably doesn’t take a psychic to figure that out.

Can we stop the TV bashing already? Not since Jimmy Carter has a mostly good thing gotten so little respect.

Now, I whole-heartedly agree that watching television for hours upon hours is probably not a good idea, simply because it’s such a passive activity and long exposure may dull the brain. But let’s acknowledge that doing anything for hours upon hours is probably not a good idea for the same reason: The brain gets bored after a while and shuts off. It’s the same whether you’re watching six hours of television or listening to a six-hour symphony.

The key, as with so many things, is moderation.

There are two prevailing attitudes among the “TV-is-bad” people, and they both have serious flaws.

First is the notion that all television is bad, period. These are the people who promote the annual “Turn off the TV Week,” when people are encouraged to leave the set alone for seven days. I saw a quote from one of the organizers of this campaign where she said that “99 percent of television programming is worthless.”

This is ironic, because in order to determine this accurately, she would have to have watched every single program on television. Evidently she, a woman who hates television, has been watching more of it than anyone else.

Obviously she didn’t really do that. She probably based her sweeping generalization primarily on the lame sitcoms she’s seen — “Who’s the Boss?,” “Married with Children,” “The Facts of Life,” for example. These shows and those like them were formulaic, generic and cheap, their soundtracks riddled with the braying sound of false pre-recorded laughter. I don’t blame her for not liking them, but I do take issue with her bold statement that “99 percent” of television is bad.

The main alternative people propose to watching television is reading books. But let’s face facts here: Your average newly-released book is no better than your average current television program. What do you see at the top of the best-seller lists? Romance novels, tell-all biographies, collections of comic strips. This is better than television? Books can also get away with more swearing, sex and violence than network television can.

So what we really mean when we say, “Read a book instead of watching TV” is “Read a ‘classic novel’ instead of watching TV.” You know, “Wuthering Heights” and “Huckleberry Finn” and “Great Expectations.” Which means we’re really talking about a list of maybe a few hundred books out of the hundreds of thousands that have ever been published.

Surely, out of the hundreds of thousands of hours of TV shows that have been broadcast over the last 50 years, we could find at least a few hundred programs that were thought-provoking, entertaining and uplifting. The “read a book” argument is not a valid one. Being printed on a page rather than broadcast on a screen does not automatically make something better.

The other argument against television is worse, I think, because it is maddeningly pompous and condescending. It’s the one we hear frequently at church, and it goes like this:

“Not all TV is bad. There are some very good educational programs, and it’s a good source of news, and of course it’s nice to be able to watch General Conference.”

These people are implying, if not saying outright, that the only good thing about television is its educational and spiritual value — that everything else is not worth watching. These people are kidding themselves.

Obviously, television is a tool that can be used for good, and the church has done quite a bit to harness its powers for the betterment of the saints. But let’s not pretend that General Conference broadcasts are the only reason God allowed television to be invented.

We all know the mind needs to relax now and then. We need to have entertainment. Do I need to drag out the quotes from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young about “unstringing the bow,” and “if you’re merry, dance?” Please don’t make me.

What, then, is wrong with watching a TV show that is not educational, not spiritual, and doesn’t teach a valuable life lesson — but that is really funny, exciting, interesting or in some other way entertaining? As long as the show doesn’t appeal to your baser instincts, then nothing is wrong with it.

Does it require a lot of you? Do you have to think a lot? Does it make you a better person? No, but that’s the point. People need to relax, to forget the hassles and stresses of everyday life. That’s what television is really for — the educational stuff is just icing on the cake. A

gain, I’m not saying that sitting in front of the tube for hours on end is a good idea, and it’s certainly true that some programs are morally inappropriate in their subject matter. But watching a couple of fun, entertaining programs a day shouldn’t make anyone feel guilty. Laughing is uplifting and therapeutic. A show that gets your adrenaline flowing can fill you with energy. You can come out of it not brain-dead, but quite the opposite: rejuvenated, a little happier, and ready to deal with life.

Now rock and roll music, on the other hand….

(An account of a young journalist’s experience at the Saturday morning session of General Conference.)

9:13 — I find Door 4 of the Tabernacle (the press entrance), show my press credentials, three forms of ID and a major credit card, and am at last admitted into the building and sent up to the south-west balcony, where they put journalists. The floor of the Tabernacle is crawling with Men in Suits with walkie-talkies, checking things out.

9:14 — The Mormon Youth Chorus has just finished rehearsing, and the director is giving last-minute instructions. “Once conference begins, we do NOT whisper to our friends!” he says. “And you must try with all your greatest effort to STAY AWAKE!” The choir giggles at this, but they soon learn the importance of the counsel.

9:25 — One of the Men in Suits vigorously shakes the railing next to the speakers’ podium. It’s pretty loose, but the issue is not addressed any further.

9:26 — I notice the secret staircase and door for the General Authorities to exit through. From the speaker’s standpoint, it is to the right, between the panelled wall the podium is part of and the last row of Seventy chairs.

9:29 — A young photojournalist emerges from the secret staircase after having apparently roamed the underground labyrinth. A Man in a Suit stops him, and I can see from the photographer’s hand gestures that he was hoping to get some pictures from the vantage point of where the Seventies sit. This is against the rules, and everyone in the press knows it, except, apparently, for this guy. The Man in a Suit motions for another Man in a Suit to come over and help, and the photographer makes the same gestures, only with more passion. He is finally escorted back whence he came. The growing crowd and many conference officials who are buzzing around are largely oblivious to the drama.

9:33 — I talk to the female reporter from Ricks. She’s nice, though not the slightest bit interested in anything I have to say, even when I point out the photographer/Man in Suit struggle unfolding below us.

9:35 — A Man in a Suit sprays the TelePrompTer glass with some kind of hi-tech Windex.

9:36 — The press kits arrive, including transcripts of all the talks that are to be given, so that we can read along with them in our books and avoid misquoting the General Authorities.

9:39 — The first Apostles to sit down in their seats are Elder L. Tom Perry and President Boyd K. Packer. A few Seventies have sneaked in unnoticed by this time. The remaining General Authorities, except for the First Presidency, arrive within the next 10 minutes.

9:54 — Presidents Gordon B. Hinckley, Thomas S. Monson and James E. Faust walk in, in that order. We discover that the lights had not been as bright as they could have been, because they suddenly become so. The audience, almost full now, stands up and becomes hushed. Even the unfeeling journalists pause for a moment from whatever it is they were pretending to do. The First Presidency shakes hands with all the Apostles, and President Hinckley motions for everyone to sit. They do and start talking again.

10:00 — General Conference starts, the only meeting in the church that I am aware of that starts on time. I am still concerned about that loose railing next to the podium. Those of us in the Tabernacle do not hear Lloyd Newell’s voice-over (“This is the 167th annual World General Conference…), but we do hear the organ music that the folks at home hear as background.

10:06 — The security guards (Men in Suits with walkie-talkies) do not close their eyes during the prayer. They do sing the hymns, though.

10:15 — When President Hinckley mentions that temples are to be built in New Mexico and Brazil, a buzz of excitement ripples through the congregation. The journalists are glad to have something cool to write about, and the pens move furiously, but we’re given a press release in a few minutes anyway.

10:25 — During the sustainings, President Faust leans over to President Hinckley and apparently cracks a joke, probably about the long list of names. Both laugh.

10:29-10:44 — President Packer speaks. Everytime he says a word that is different from our transcripts, the journalists make a note of it. He doesn’t stray very much.

10:45-10:50 — Elder Neal A. Maxwell, whose chemotherapy treatments for his leukemia have resulted in his being bald, speaks. It is a short talk, but full of emotion and spirit. Everyone who speaks or prays after him refers to it. He seems remarkably high-spirited and happy.

10:50-10:56 — The choir and congregation sing “Praise to the Man.” Elder Maxwell slips out unnoticed.

10:56 — Sister Patricia P. Pinegar, general president of the Primary, comes to the podium to give her talk. A low note on the organ is for some reason still playing. The organist tries frantically to make it stop. Sister Pinegar ignores it and begins speaking. Finally the organist turns off the whole organ. Her back is to me, but I’m sure she is blushing.

10:56-11:08 — Sister Pinegar gives her talk. We have apparently been given an early draft of it, because the way she delivers it bears only passing resemblance to the words we have in front of us. It necessitates actually taking notes, much to the consternation of the journalists who hadn’t planned on doing any real work today.

11:47-11:52 — The choir sings a lovely rendition of “Beautiful Savior.” President Hinckley turns around in his seat to watch the choir for some of the time, much to the photographers’ delight. He seems to be in deep contemplation.

11:54 — The closing prayer ends, and conference is over — six minutes early, which is something else that separates it from most other meetings in the church.

It is perhaps unfortunate that I grew up in a family with no real strong Easter traditions. Oh sure, we’d decorate the Easter eggs with toxic store-bought dye, and we’d wake up Easter morning to find baskets containing about three pieces of candy and 7,000 strands of that annoying plastic “grass,” which my mom would wind up pulling out of the vacuum cleaner every day until Halloween, and we’d have ham for dinner, but that’s about it. I certainly understood and appreciated the religious significance of Easter, but tradition-wise, it didn’t hold much for me.

What this means is that I have few vivid Easter memories, particularly since I’ve been away from home and am doing even less in the tradition department.

I only have one real college Easter memory, and it’s Easter 1993. I was a freshman living in Deseret Towers (motto: “Enjoy the Convenience of Our Two Elevators, One of Which is Not Working”), and as such I did a lot of freshman-type things. I ran past the statue of Brigham Young to see if there really is an optical illusion of him wiggling his legs (answer: no); I helped fill a friend’s dorm room from floor to ceiling with crumpled-up newspaper; I successfully dared a guy to run around naked on another floor of the dorm. I was gloriously and unabashedly a freshman.

Unfortunately, being a freshman also meant not having any money, so I never got a haircut. Haircuts cost money, you know. But around springtime, I was getting desperate, and I learned of a fellow who lived one floor above me who said he would cut people’s hair. We’ll call him Bob (not his real name), and while I didn’t really know him, I agreed to let him cut my hair. This turned out to be the worst decision that anyone has ever made in the history of mankind.

There were many warning signs that I should have seen. First of all, it was a warm spring day, so Bob chose to take his shirt off when he cut my hair. Never go to a shirtless barber, that’s my new haircut rule.

Second, I observed that Bob had a Band-Aid on one of his fingers, having recently cut himself with his own scissors. Never go to a shirtless barber who cuts his own fingers, that’s the corollary to my haircut rule.

When it was all over, my head looked like it had been attacked by something. I left. I didn’t know what to do. I wandered the gray city streets, stumbling from alley to alley, a hat on my head and a coat pulled up over my face. I searched for meaning in my life. I had some ice cream. Finally I decided: I would shave my head and start over! It would be like repentance. You make a mistake, it screws everything up, you repent and SWISH! The slate is wiped clean, and you begin anew.

My head would be like my soul, damaged by the careless haircutting of sin, and then washed clean by the clippers of repentance and the sideburn trimmers of forgiveness. My head would be a new man.

Excited over my new-found optimism, I hurried back to the dorms and asked Bob if I could borrow his clippers. He probably wondered what for, but I didn’t give him time to ask many questions. I enlisted the aid of my friends, who, as good friends always are, were more than willing to help me on the long, painful road back to full fellowship in the world of hair. They took turns shaving various parts of my skull, until we had developed quite a nice Mohawk.

Then we had an idea: Let’s keep the Mohawk for a while and frighten people with it. I thought this was a fine idea. We cleaned it up and made it look nice, and then we dressed me up in a leather jacket, no shirt, blue jeans, and some cool-looking little round glasses. We called the girls’ dorm and told them to come downstairs and see me. They gave me the sort of squeal-filled shock/admiration that freshman men so desperately covet. It was GREAT.

There was talk of leaving the Mohawk, at least for a couple days. But aside from the whole Honor Code thing, the next day was Sunday, and it was Easter, and I was speaking in Sacrament Meeting. So we shaved the whole head and made me look at least somewhat presentable. I have this widow’s peak which normally makes me look like I’m going bald, but when my head is shaved, it just looks like a cool V down my forehead.

This all has little to do with Easter, except that it happened at Eastertime, but it also provides a weird parable about repentance. In the interest of convenience and taking the easy way out, I made a serious error in judgment and let some bozo cut my hair, knowing full well what the consequences might be. And sure enough, I regretted it. I looked and felt foolish, moreso than usual, and I felt like everyone in the world was looking at me, like everyone knew what I had done. But then I overcame the problem by starting over again. I shaved my head, getting rid of all evidence of the mistake, and within a few months, my hair was back to normal. Today you wouldn’t know that the bad haircut had ever happened, except that I keep talking about it.

I won’t try to turn this into a New Era article by stretching the religious parallels any further. Let’s just say I felt better that Easter with no hair than I would have felt with damaged hair, and the basket of candy and plastic grass my mom sent me made everything allllll better.

I hate to be one of the people on this page [the editorial page] who do nothing but whine and complain about how others behave, but I’m tired of the freaks.

When I say freaks, I’m talking about people who have chosen a subject, usually from pop culture, and have made it their number one priority, their very reason for living. The Internet was built for these people. (Imagine – you can obsess about your favorite thing without facing the burdensome tasks of GOING OUTSIDE or TALKING TO PEOPLE!) Anything you are remotely interested in, you can bet there are a thousand individuals who are so interested in it that they have devoted their lives to it.

You know which subjects attract these fanatics. “Star Trek,” in all its incarnations. “Star Wars.” “The X-Files.” Football, baseball, and basketball. Politics. Various rock groups. Monty Python. These are all fine things, but only when they are put in perspective. Not one of them is worthy of as much time and attention as some people devote to them, nor should they be emphasized to the exclusion of other things. Most of them shouldn’t even be taken seriously!

I heard about a group of a thousand people who waited all night to buy “Star Wars” tickets. Just as the box office opened, a group of 50 guys muscled their way to the front, bought up all the tickets, and then began scalping them at outrageous prices to the fans who had been waiting all night. Someone described this as a “tragedy.” But I think the real tragedy was that there were a thousand people waiting all night to buy tickets to a MOVIE! A movie they’d already SEEN!

Speaking of “Star Wars,” the guy next to me when I saw it reacted to each new special effect the way most of us would react if a new volume of scripture were released detailing the date and time of the Second Coming. He would say, out loud (which is irritating enough when you’re trying to watch a movie), “That’s new! That is totally new!” I thought his heart was going to explode when Jabba the Hutt showed up.

Some people were furious when BYU got dissed by the Bowl Alliance. I saw someone pounding the floor in anger. I asked him why he was so upset. He said BYU was losing several million dollars. I said the money wouldn’t have gone to him anyway. He was unimpressed.

Not sure if you’re a freak? Read on.

• Have you ever gone to a movie dressed as one of its characters?
• Have you ever seen a single movie in the theater more than 10 times?
• Do you quote movie lines out loud with the characters?
• Have you ever gone into deep depression over a sports team’s loss, or have you ever screamed at the television set while a loss was taking place?
• Have you ever skipped out on church to watch sports on TV?
• Have you selected one aspect of church doctrine and made it your “pet,” placing more emphasis on it than anything else? (Word of Wisdom, Sabbath behavior, and temple attendance are common selections.)
• Do you own a laser-disc copy of the director’s cut of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”?
• Did you go into deep despair when Bob Dole lost the election, cursing and gnashing your teeth and quickly accumulating a food storage because the loss was clearly a sign of the impending End of the World?
• Do you find Internet providers who only give you 20 hours a month to be inadequate?
• Is there a TV show that you tape AND watch simultaneously?

It would be impossible to have any romantic inclinations whatsoever on Valentine’s Day if one did not know the full history of it — the same as no one enjoys Thanksgiving without hearing about Pilgrims.

Therefore, in order to encourage knowledge and appreciation for this fascinating holiday, here is a basic history of Valentine’s Day.

There were two third-century Catholic priests named Valentine, at least one of whom may not have actually existed. Both were supposedly martyred in Rome during the Christian persecutions by Emperor Claudius II Gothicus. They were made saints at some point later on, and their saints’ day was declared Feb. 14.

The selection of Feb. 14 seems to have been an attempt to clean up a somewhat rowdy Roman holiday, Lupercalia, which was celebrated on Feb. 15. Lupercalia was a festival of fertility during which the ancient Romans sacrificed goats and dogs and then ran through the streets, whipping women with the animals’ skins. Such lashings were supposed to ensure fertility and easy childbirth for the women who received them, although we’d like to hear the women’s point of view on the matter.

The two (or possibly one) Saint Valentines may have been named the patron saints of love because of legends surrounding them. During times of war, when marriages were prohibited, one of the Valentines may have performed marriage ceremonies in secret.

Aside from this, there was no obvious connection between the two Saint Valentines and the way we currently celebrate Valentine’s Day. Connection or no connection, though, people began celebrating St. Valentine’s Day as a “lovers’ festival” in about the fourteenth century.

Sometime around 1500, people began making paper valentines; by 1800, hand-painted copper plates were produced to meet the high demand. Today, many thousands of valentines are produced each year.

Cupid comes from an entirely different source, the ancient Roman collection of gods. He was the god of love, in all its forms; he was the counterpart of the Greek god Eros. Cupid was the son of Mercury and Venus and was usually portrayed as a chubby, winged infant who caused people to fall in love by shooting them with arrows. Some tales depicted Cupid as uncaring and flaky, but he was usually considered to be magnanimous and kind.

Valentine’s Day has crept up on us yet again. You will no doubt see other articles in this very newspaper talking about the history of the holiday, but they are probably deceptive, saying that it has to do with old Catholic saints and Roman gods, or something of that nature. Actually, Valentine’s Day was started by merchandisers who wanted yet another reason to make people have to buy stuff. It is similar to the way the turkey industry lobbied to make Thanksgiving a holiday.

But I am not here just to make unsubstantiated claims about beloved societal icons. No sir or madam, I am also here to discuss my proposal for seriously re-vamping Valentine’s Day.

The reason Valentine’s Day needs changing is the same reason a baby needs changing: It stinks, and it nauseates people. Valentine’s Day widens the already-large gap between those with relationships and those without them, because people who have significant others merely become more smug about it on Valentine’s Day. They mention, ever-so-slyly, to their friends that they will be busy this Friday evening — “It’s Valentine’s Day, after all.” Enough said. We all KNOW you have a girlfriend; there’s no need to go into further detail. OF COURSE you’ll be with her on Friday, and not just because it’s Valentine’s Day, but because it’s a day, period, and you’re with her EVERY DAY OF THE FREAKING YEAR! Do people who already spend every waking hour together, as well as some non-waking ones, need another excuse to hang all over each other? Speaking as one who has had to witness the slobbering far too often, I must say that I think not.

Obviously, I am one of the cold, embittered persons who does not have a significant other. I don’t even have an insignificant other. I don’t have any kind of other. Valentine’s Day, therefore, doesn’t mean squat to me, pardon the euphemism. It’s not even like Christmas, where if you don’t celebrate it you can at least appreciate the ideals of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. Valentine’s Day doesn’t have any ideals attached to it, except the florists’ and heart-shaped candy box manufacturers’ notions that they would like to make more money.

When we were in elementary school, Valentine’s Day was so much simpler. All it meant was that we got another in-class party, to go with the 58 other parties we already had. And there were no feelings of isolation or loneliness, because EVERYBODY had to give EVERYBODY ELSE a valentine. Even kids who normally spent most of their time with their heads in toilets receiving swirlies from the cool kids got valentines from the whole class. Mom would buy a package of 30 valentines at the supermarket, and they had Smurfs or Snoopy or Looney Tunes on them, and they said stupid things like, “Valentine, you’re grr-rr-rreat!” with a picture of a tiger, and you would scribble your signature like an author signing books at B. Dalton’s, and distribute them to everyone regardless of race, creed, color or swirly history. Life was beautiful and peaceful and everyone loved each other, at least superficially and for one day, which was enough to keep the swirly kids from turning to the dark side.

Later, things got complicated. Once, when I was in high school, I happened to have a girlfriend when Feb. 14 rolled around. I gave her a stuffed bunny rabbit; she gave me a stuffed monkey. She put a little cardigan sweater and fake eyeglasses on the monkey and declared that she now thought it looked like me.

The relationship progressed steadily downhill from there.

My friends, I propose a hearkening back to the old days, back to when Valentine’s Day was simple and meaningless. It’s still meaningless, of course, but some people (again, mostly florists) have attached false meaning to it. We need to go back to when it was just another dumb, harmless holiday, a time to express insincere emotions and strengthen generic friendships.

Here’s my proposal. Let’s expand the elementary school philosophy to the university level. Next Valentine’s Day, everyone needs to bring 30,000 valentines — one for every student at BYU. To be extra nice, bring some for your professors. Spread a little Valentine’s Day joy.

Oh, and be sure to include some of those heart-shaped candies that say “Be Mine” and “You’re the One” — you know, the ones that taste like Tums. It’s just not Valentine’s Day without them.

Journalists are extremely unpopular. They are almost as unpopular as lawyers, which is not fair, considering lawyers get paid obscene amounts of money, thus compensating them for the abuse they must endure, whereas journalists have been known to quit their jobs and go on welfare in order to make more money.

I generally defend journalists and the media when I am witness to an attack on them, but sometimes I too must shake my head and say, “Why are we so lame?”

The particular lame quality with which I am currently frustrated is the tendency to make a big deal out of things simply because there are celebrities involved. I am not talking about the paparazzi shows like “Entertainment Tonight” and “Extra,” where the pseudo-journalists spend their time stalking celebrities and reporting on the most mundane aspects of their lives, perhaps as an attempt to cover the fact that they have no lives themselves. No, I am talking about mainstream news media who think that something is more noteworthy if a famous person is connected.

The most recent example of this media trend is the case of Bill Cosby’s son, Ennis. As you know, he was killed by an as-yet unidentified man during an apparent robbery attempt. Now, I am of course very sad for the Cosby family. Like most Americans, I’ve always liked Bill Cosby and considered him to be very talented and funny. And I hope they catch the man who killed Cosby’s son (where was O.J. that night, anyway?). But hasn’t the media beaten this horse long enough? Ennis Cosby was only the SON of a celebrity, and the media has still gone nuts with it.

Many people are killed every day. The fact that it was Cosby’s son makes it SLIGHTLY more interesting, but not as interesting as the newspeople seem to think it is. I have heard or read something about it literally every day since it happened.

My grandmother died a few days after Ennis Cosby. She was not murdered in cold blood; she died after a ten-year struggle with poor health, including several strokes. She was not a celebrity; she was a grandma. Ennis Cosby overcame dyslexia and had a promising future; my grandma raised six children, supported her husband with his small business in our town, was a faithful member of the LDS church, and for the last ten years managed to enjoy life without the use of her right arm or leg. Which of these two deaths was more “important” is relative. In Bill Cosby’s eyes, I’m sure Ennis was more important than my grandmother, and I know Ennis’s death didn’t particularly matter to me. In God’s eyes, they were equal. God was no more upset by the trials and tribulations of one than he was the other.

The point is, whenever anyone dies, no matter how famous or “important” they are, it only directly affects a handful of people — friends and family, mostly. Others may feel sorrow over the loss, but their lives are not significantly changed by it. So why do we insist upon making certain individuals’ deaths more noteworthy than others’? Every person’s death is sad to those who loved him or her. Ultimately, the death of Ennis Cosby, son of a celebrity, does not affect the world any more than the death of Joanna Merrifield, grandmother of a BYU student. We should remember that all life is valuable, all life is sacred, and all people are important.