If Seminary Videos Were Awesome

Remember Seminary videos? The variable-quality, often cheesy and yet oddly endearing clips they used to show during class to illustrate a scripture or spiritual message?

Good times there. But, thought I...what if we could have videos like that...but awesome. And so I took it upon myself to find those videos, and I now present my findings to you.

McNaughton Has Done It Again!

Well folks, the satirical genius is back at the canvas and he really did it this time. Inspired by his new-found fame, this latest work Wake Up America is obviously reaching out to a younger demographic.

"The kids love this stuff, right?"

In the usual McNaughton fashion of fine detail, he includes dictators, autocrats, and David Cameron all standing behind Obama on stage. Here he is obviously poking fun at claims by the far right that Obama is in cahoots with dictators, autocrats, and...umm... David Cameron.

In the foreground, the people are all in chains, including McNaughton's famous Forgotten Man, who seems to have shrunk over time (or McNaughton learned how to paint perspective).

I think he's trying to make up for his last over-the-top painting to which Brett referred in his post on McNaughton, and Casey fixed in his.

The one thing that confuses me, however, is the rooster in the foreground hanging out next to the Forgotten Man. What are we, farmers?

Spanish Civil War

Españolito que vienes

al mundo te guarde Dios.

Una de las dos Españas

ha de helarte el corazón.

-Antonio Machado

This beautiful and sad poem (that is, this second half of it which I intend to address) was written by Antonio Machado regarding the state of Spain in the early 20th Century. My rough translation:

Baby Spaniard who is coming
to the world, God keep you.
One of the two Spains
will surely freeze your heart.

History lesson! Learning from the past! Or something!

Don't you love inflammatory political internet comments? I love them.

A fun little link showed up on my Facebook feed today. (Actually--wait, how many of my blog posts start this way? Good heavens, I think I have a Facebook addiction...) That link leads to this cartoon.

Now, we here at Expert Textperts have had a few choice things to say about the 2012 election, and I don't feel like this particular cartoon is any more or less of a valid commentary on things as anything we might have written. In fact, the cartoon itself isn't what caught my eye about this particular link.

No, it was the comments at the bottom.

The Avengers is Darker Than You Think

Note: this post discusses plot points of The Avengers, so if you're sensitive to spoilers you may not want to read it until you've watched the movie. Although frankly it's not the Sixth Sense; if you can't guess how it's going to end from the very beginning you probably haven't watched many movies.


By now most of you have seen or plan to see the latest superhero juggernaut, Marvel's The Avengers presented by Marvel. With the upcoming Batman (volume 3, issue 3) and Spider Man (volume 2, issue 1) movies, we're probably entering the pinnacle of the Hollywood Superhero Era. Eventually audiences will tire of endless comic book sequels and reboots (right? RIGHT?) and Hollywood will move on to the next big thing, but for now superheroes (or enhanced individuals, as they prefer to be called) own the day. Incidentally, the next trend has already begun: board games and childhood toys! Somewhere a self-loathing screenwriter is struggling to build a narrative around Hungry Hungry Hippos, which can't possibly be worst than the upcoming B*****Shi* movie (note: the title of this film has been redacted because the editors feel that acknowledging its existence will only encourage it). Personally I'm waiting for Ticket to Ride, a story of violence and ruthlessness set at the peak of the Gilded Age.

Starring Daniel Day-Lewis as Jay Gould.

Live From the Midst of a Devastating Brainstorm

While my fellow bloggers have been publishing some fascinating and well-written stuff, I've been suffering from blogger's block, which is like writer's block with more Google image searching. So, in the interesting of fulfilling my insatiable thirst for pageviews keeping readers informed (shut up, we do have readers -- hi mom), here are some of ideas I've been bouncing around:

Adam vs. Eve: Idealism vs. Realism

I have pondered in the last day or two about Idealism and Realism, two very old and different philosophies that shape us, our education and our society (I blame this entirely on my History and Philosophy of Education class).

Idealism, perhaps the easier to define simply, is mind over matter. It is the theory that any endeavor can be taken on and accomplished so long as you believe it can. The reality of an idealist is one of perfect order: truth can be understood because it is universal and the values of the idealist are absolute.

Of course it's coming back! via

Pioneer Story: A Short Play

So again, I had an assignment to work on an adaptation to produce a play. We could take a poem or prose to write a 5 to 8 minute play. I decided to take a story from Joanna Brooks's recent memoir Book of Mormon Girl. This is probably the closest I will ever come to writing something remotely resembling fan fiction. I do not know Dr. Brooks nor did I receive permission from her to adapt the story. I was simply touched by what she wrote and wanted to work with some themes that I found particularly striking in her experience dressing the body of her deceased grandmother. I hope on the off chance that Joanna Brooks finds out about this that it will not disappoint or disgruntle her. I'm also hoping that if you're reading this that you won't be disappointed or disgruntled. Without further ado, here is my adaptation entitled Pioneer Story.

Scene: A mortuary dressing room in Southern California. Everything inside is pink, from the seashell pink wallpaper to the mauve couch to the pink box of pink tissues resting on the faux mahogany sidetable. The room is illuminated by internal lighting; however, there should also be a sense of the afternoon sun shining through the windows. At center stage there is a gurney. A small body, covered by a white drape, rests on the gurney. A door opens and a woman enters the room as a man hold the door opened for her. She takes in the room and the body before returning to the presence of the man. She provides an appreciative nod which he returns before leaving.

The woman is in her mid-30s. She is pregnant, 2^nd trimester. In addition to an expectable grief, she carries measures of both composure and trepidation. After engaging with situation of being in the room, she removes herself partly by pulling out a cell phone.

Memorial

It's been nearly two months since I wrote "Towards a Mormon Male Sexuality, Part I." I have not forgotten that I have wanted to write Part II, and I intend to do that soon. But the whole grad school thing has necessitated other demands--particularly in the requirement to write other things like 3 separate 15 page papers in 2 weeks on top of other reading and writing assignments. I keep telling myself, one more month and 75 pages to write left.

Point is, most of what I send my time writing is not necessarily blog worthy. But luckily that somewhat changed this week. In one of my classes, we received a challenge: write a 5 minute play only using the dialogue from a page out of the yellow pages. Remember the yellow pages? They're still a thing.

So yeah, I started thinking that I would write a funny comedy about two secretaries working for a superhero or a supervillian: the banality of office work juxtaposed against the grandiosity of comic book heroics. Trite, I know; but it was a 5 minute play, tropes felt fine. Somehow that whole idea fell away and instead I was thinking of Joan of Arc and Antigone. Also, it's kinda hard to write 5 minutes worth of dialogue from on piece of paper, so I ended up writing Eugene O'Neill-esque stage directions. The stage directions are more beautiful to me than what I necessarily crafted with the dialogue; but the images definitely stemmed from the dialogue. Hope you enjoy the story play I have entitled Memorial:

Sneak Preview of Jon McNaughton's Latest

I know we've been a little hard on acclaimed LDS artist/political theorist Jon McNaughton in the past, but I am pleased to announce that we have made our peace and have, in fact, been granted a sneak preview of his latest work, an update to the acclaimed "One Nation Under Socialism." Fans of McNaughton are aware of his practice of embedding deep symbolism and metaphor in his art, and in that spirit he has added additional symbols to One Nation for your contemplation and enjoyment. See if you can spot them all!

We proudly present, "One Godless Futureless Miserable Nation Under Evil Profane Vampiric Communist Socialism"