PBS affiliate in Utah, that is. For the last half-century or so, Utah's two biggest universities have hosted two independent PBS stations: KUED 7 (University of Utah) and KBYU 11 (Brigham Young University). For the last half-century or so, KBYU played second-string to KUED, carrying the same programming a month after KUED.

While it was nice to have a "backup" channel if you missed a show the first time around, KBYU couldn't help diluting KUED's audience and ratings, and dividing loyalties especially during membership drives.

KUED's launch of the Create subchannel (7.4) eliminated any problem of catching reruns of the DIY shows. And then last year, both stations arrived at a win-win resolution that was a huge win for KUED. On July 2, KBYU dropped its PBS affiliation and shifted its satellite channel, BYUtv, over to the primary OTA broadcast channel.

BYU Broadcasting announced plans to consolidate its television operations, BYUtv, KBYU Channel Eleven and BYUtv International, into one nationwide television network. Similarly, BYU Broadcasting said it plans to consolidate its radio operations, BYUradio (on SiriusXM Satellite Radio) and KBYU-FM/Classical 89, into a single radio network.

But listeners to Utah's last classical radio station proved to be a scrappy bunch. They weren't going down without a fight. And they won. Earlier this year, BYU Broadcasting purchased KUMT-FM (107.9) to host BYUradio,

preserving [the only] over-the-air classical music station in Utah. Classical 89 will continue to operate on its current frequency at 89.1 and 89.5 (Southern Utah County) on the FM dial.

So make that a win-win-win.

Labels: business, BYU, radio, television, utah

Labels: utah, weather

Utah's hot, dry summers are not kind to flies, mosquitoes, and other annoying insects. The combination of heat, low humidity, and ultraviolet light (the average July UV index in Salt Lake City is 10; in New York it's 6) is as lethal as DDT.

And at 4700 feet in elevation, summer mornings can be quite cool, even when the temperature reaches 100 degrees (Fahrenheit) in the late afternoon. I can open the door and windows and let the warm air out and the cool air in without ushering in a bunch of uninvited guests.

Conditions get wet and cool enough in the spring and fall to bring out the bugs in annoying numbers. Even during the summer, a couple will find their way in and spend the day banging off the glass and buzzing me, no matter how wide open the windows (wasps seem particularly stupid in this regard).

We're talking bugs with a serious death wish. They're like, "C'mon, Darwin, give me some of that natural selection!"

Splat. Wish granted.

I tried traditional fly paper and caught one fly in an entire month. Maybe they've evolved an aversion to the stuff. But as I said, not really worth spending a lot of time and money on. Still, a couple of flies droning around the room are like little kids running up and down the aisle during a cross-country flight.

I'm pretty sure fly paper--well, duct tape--would work on them. As it turns out, fly paper, like duct tape, is the right idea. It only needs a little tweak.

A $6 pack of Catchmaster "Bug & Fly Clear Window Traps" did the trick. You place a plastic sheet of the stuff it in a corner of a sun-facing window (or any window where you observe bugs congregating). Stick it to the window and peel off the protective backing, exposing a film of transparent goo.

I was amazed at how quickly it worked. An hour later, flying annoyances gone. Or rather, permanently stuck. That's how long it took them to randomly wander into an insect version of the La Brea Tar Pits. I resisted tenting my fingers like Mr. Burns and cackling as the parasites went to meet their maker.

But I've got no sympathy for flies. Spiders, on the other hand, I respect. They're cold-blooded (literally) predators, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend (as long as they don't crawl on me).

It got me thinking that what we have here is the making of a cool science project. Leave a strip up for the whole summer and you'll end up with a veritable insect abattoir, including the teeny-tiny no-see-'ums you never guessed were there. You could stick traps all over the place and see what you collect where and how many over a span of time.

The downside is grossing out the teacher. But in truth, it's not any more disgusting than butterfly collecting. It's just that the little critters look so disgusting.

Okay, make that a big upside for the average kid.

Labels: appliances, science, technology, utah, weather

One nice thing about living in the high desert is that while summer daytime temperatures can climb to 100 degrees (Fahrenheit), they often sink to a comfortable 65-70 degrees at night. Except then the problem is getting the hot air out and the cool air in.

Building codes in the U.S. stipulate wall and ceiling insulation ratings but rarely Whole House Mechanical Ventilation. And in an apartment (especially a forty-year-old one)? Fuhgeddaboudit. Unfortunately, because ventilating an apartment would be easy.

(The air conditioner and refrigerator in mine are as old as the apartment; the hermetically sealed compressor pioneered by General Electric is an amazingly rugged piece of machinery. But they are power hogs.)

When I was a kid back in the prehistoric times, my dad installed a WHMV system in our big baby boomer house. That plus tons of insulation in the attic made a huge difference, and was orders of magnitude cheaper than central air conditioning.

My solution has always been to buy a box fan and attach screws to mount it in the window. The first one was the best, with metal blades that were quiet and didn't turn too fast. They've been plastic ever since and noisier. But the last two really disappointed.

My previous Aerospeed fan wasn't unbearably loud but became steadily unbalanced (like a wobbly wheel). I started hearing what I thought was outside helicopter traffic (not that unusual where I live). It was the fan putting on a convincing ventriloquism act.

Its replacement, an inexpensive Lasko B20301, was well-rated on Walmart. That thing is a screamer, a turboprop ready to take off. I'm sure it'd be fine in a barn or a 2000 square foot house. It was too loud even from the bedroom.

So it was time to get a purpose-built window fan. The top-selling twin fan on Amazon is the Holmes HAWF2021. But the bad reviews (always read those) consistently mentioned the noise, and that made me nervous. I didn't feel like rolling the dice again.

In the reviews, somebody recommended the HDX FW23-A1 as the superior choice. HDX is Home Depot's store brand. Having decided I couldn't live with the Lasko, I took a closer look at the Home Depot listing.


Several reviews mentioned how quiet it was. That sold me. I trundled down to the local Home Depot and picked one up. It truly is the quietest fan I've had so far, and just ten bucks more than the Holmes. Plus, the airflow can be reversed with the flick of a switch.

Granted, it won't blow a gale through your living room; more like a gentle breeze. And in reverse, it's better than the air conditioner.

The accordion expander needs work. You have to play tug-of-war to get it out as far as in the picture. I wish they'd enclosed more than one of the Lego-like expansion "feet" instead. But the gap was easily filled by a piece of foam board.

The one disadvantage is that, unlike my old box fan kludges, when the HDX FW23-A1 isn't on it doesn't let much air through, which minimizes passive airflow. But that also means you don't have to hastily remove it with every change of the weather.

Labels: appliances, economics, utah, weather

Tuesday night when I went to bed, Mia Love was trailing Doug Owens in Utah's fourth district congressional race. When I woke up Wednesday morning, she'd become the first ever black Republican woman in Congress.

From Utah, no less (according to the 2010 census, 1.1 percent black).


Love's political career began as mayor of Saratoga Springs, a town of 21,100 located at the northwest tip of Utah Lake. She came to national attention in 2012, when she addressed the Republican National Convention.

That year, despite the Utah legislature's best gerrymandering efforts, Love ran against political veteran Jim Matheson (son of the late Democratic governor) and lost.

After serving six terms, Matheson retired this year and passed the torch to Owens (like Matheson, the scion of an established political family). Owens did his level best to present himself as the most just-like-you family guy in Utah.

But the second time was the charm for Love. Republicans won by the expected landslides in Utah's other three districts. For the first time in decades, the Republican party holds all of the federal offices and the governorship.

Drawing in much of liberal (relatively speaking) Salt Lake City, the fourth remains Utah's only competitive district. So Love can expect a scrappy fight every two years.

Though that wasn't Utah's only political first Tuesday night. At the state level, Democrat Sandra Hollins was elected Utah's first ever black woman legislator.

Labels: politics, utah

The nyokai (女怪) is the guardian born shortly before the kirin and destined to watch over him.

When the capital of Japan was moved to Kyoto in the late 8th century, the streets were laid out in a grid pattern.


Incidentally, so were the blocks in Salt Lake City. The thinking of city planners 1000 years apart reveals curious similarities, such as housing the seat of government at the north end of the city and the wide streets. The streets in Salt Lake City were wide enough for a wagon and team of oxen to turn around.

Labels: 12 kingdoms, geography, poseidon, utah

Everybody is familiar with the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) crowd. Until recently, I hadn't heard of their kissing cousins, "CAVE people" (Citizens Against Virtually Everything). Explains Wikipedia:

While the NIMBY phenomenon is typically related to development issues, CAVE people, as the name implies, oppose virtually everything. This may manifest itself in opposition to changes in public policy questions as varied as tax levies, sewer rates, public transportation routes, parking regulations and municipal mergers or annexations.

Apparently, CAVE people have showed up to to whine about the proposed expansion of University Mall in Orem, Utah. Val Hale at the Provo Daily Herald issues them a warning:

Just as detractors in Provo made the fatal and costly mistake of driving the mall to Orem in the late '60s, Orem has a small number of naysayers who are fighting this latest attempt to upgrade the mall. I like to refer to these people as CAVE people (Citizens Against Virtually Everything).

I can't see any harm in an upgrade as South Orem has been one big splat of commercial (retail/professional) development for the past quarter century. I also don't care because I avoid malls. I prefer big box stores like Walmart to the rat's maze that is a mall.

If they want a righteous cause, the CAVE people should channel their energies into removing the blight in downtown Orem left over from the housing bubble. It's an absurdly out-of-scale, mixed-use condo project that got half-finished before the funding dried up.

Unlike the mall, which is more or less an architectural fit for the neighborhood, "Midtown Village" sticks out like a sore thumb, two ugly lumps three times taller than anything for a mile around. I say, either lop off the top four stories or knock the whole thing down.

James Roh/Daily Herald

Besides, the surface streets couldn't support the traffic. Center Street has only four lanes to I-15. Expanding it to six would require knocking down the north end of Mountain View High School. It makes me wonder why a building permit was ever granted.

But such was the irrationality of the exuberance. University Parkway (1300 South), which goes by the mall, has six lanes, as does 800 North, making them far more logical locations for strip malls, big box stores, office plazas, and high-density housing.

Incidentally, if you follow the first link about the mall, you will see that this is something the Woodburys are doing. The rich, real-estate Woodburys. Alas, not related to me. Well, we're all related, but not closely enough to count.

Labels: business, geography, politics, utah

So I stood in line for an hour to add a purely symbolic +1 to the vote totals. Chaffetz (House), Hatch (Senate) and Herbert (governor) won by ginormous margins. And every news organization on the planet gave Romney the state the microsecond the polls closed.

Of course, nobody moves to Utah County for the political drama. Jim Matheson squeaked by Mia Love in the 4th district, which made me laugh. Every ten years, the Utah legislature does its level best to gerrymander Salt Lake's liberal precincts out of existence.

They stab it with their steely knives,
but they just can't kill the beast.

One of my fantasy constitutional amendments would require that House districts be apportioned based on the local and existing political boundaries. Salt Lake County is going to vote democratic. It just elected a democratic mayor (again). Live with it, guys.

Nationally, social conservatives were very often their own worst enemy, and that includes Romney, who couldn't quite flip the flop. I'm hoping that this election will invigorate fiscal conservatives and economic libertarians, happy to leave such matters to the states.

Labels: politics, utah

In Utah's senate race, I voted for Mike Lee. I liked Bob Bennett--if Obama had embraced the actually bipartisan Wyden-Bennett plan, his party might have fared better--but the attitude that politicians, themselves the offspring of politicians, have a "right" to a seat is repugnant.

Of course, that's also true of Mike Lee (son of former Solicitor General Rex Lee), though at this point nobody's saying it was owed him.

True, Bob Bennett never claimed that, and seemed genuinely hurt by the rejection, but a lot of status quo establishment types sure did. Those foolish children disrespecting their wise elders. Well, that's democracy for you. The political mop is often as messy as the mess its cleaning up.

What makes a democratic system rugged is that it's self-correcting, not that it never makes mistakes. And incidentally, it's advise and consent, not a gladiatorial thumbs up or thumbs down. Short of felonious behavior, presidents (of either party) should get the cabinet officers they want.

That's what elections are for. By the way, if you can't stand the biennial electioneering ad onslaught, come here to Utah County. The fights are in the primaries and things calm down afterward. I'm all for gerrymandering reform, but some districts will always be solidly red or blue.

I voted the Libertarian ticket for governor. A futile gesture, but here in the third district, Utah's gubernatorial race was the only boorish one on the ballot. The Republican Herbert has governed well enough that he wasn't going to lose in any case, so only a temporary pox on their houses.

Anyway, I was in and out in ten minutes (the touch screens worked fine). I got home and glanced across the street and said, "That's a funny looking dog."

It wasn't a dog. It was a sheep. Two sheep. A ewe and lamb, I surmised. I did a double-take. And then did another one. A guy--straight out of central casting, barrel chest and bib overalls and all--comes around the fourplex kitty-corner mine and waves his hat and shouts, "Git on home!"

He had a dog with him. The dog's attitude was, "Good grief, this is embarrassing. Your problem, bud, not mine."

Now, I live in a working-class neighborhood that's mostly fourplexes and condos, with a few single family homes mixed in, abutting strip malls and two highly-trafficked roads on the south and west. Not sheep farm country.

I've noticed a horse paddock in a residential neighborhood a couple of blocks west of State Street--some sort of grandfathered zoning variance for agricultural property. So maybe somebody around here keeps sheep. Or a 4-H exhibition at the nearby elementary school went awry.

And in fine Wallace and Gromit fashion, two sheep made a bolt for freedom!

The sheep trotted nonchalantly into the back yard directly across from my place. Farmer Joe ran after them and they nonchalantly trotted back and then disappeared behind another fourplex. I waited for a couple of minutes but didn't see them again, so they must have headed west.

Those sheep would not be shepherded! I'm sure that's a metaphor for something.

Labels: politics, utah

Okay, time to put on your Mad Men thinking caps. This is (really, no kidding) a junk mail postcard that was sent to "current resident" (that's me!) by a venerable Utah institution. (Hey, I only wish I got more junk mail like this.)

It's a decade old by now (I stumbled across it cleaning out old archives), so keep that in mind when answering the following questions:

• Trick question: What venerable Utah institution?

• Bonus points: What's the winsome lass selling?

Before getting to the answer, some ruminating. Although men are stereotyped as the targets of "suggestive" material, especially in the (mainstream) print media, you are far more likely to find (mostly) unclad women in fashion/glamor magazines.

This particular piece of junk mail was certainly not aimed at me.

Many years ago, I was a very green missionary sitting in the venerable Fuji Bank in a Tokyo suburb getting my cash card account opened (Japanese banks don't do personal checks), casually flipping through the equivalent of Good Housekeeping while I waited.

And, bingo! There was a similar ad. Only without the demure Photoshopping (if you know what I mean).

A few months later, a Japanese businessman stopped by the missionary apartment and invited us all out to dinner (this was the Senzoku apartment, so there were six elders). He was a member and had just opened a restaurant in Salt Lake City.

After dinner, we stopped by a cozy little place not far from the church for dessert. There, on the second floor, about a dozen feet away from our table, adorning at least half of the wall, was a backlit, life-sized poster of an attractive young woman in a swing.

Wearing nothing but a smile.

Our benefactor took absolutely no note of it. So the rest of us pretended not to too. Because, you know, that would be rude. (Again, this was a perfectly respectable establishment in the perfectly respectable part of town).

And finally the answer: the venerable Utah institution is ZCMI, which used to be owned by the Mormon church. The trick in the question is that ZCMI was sold to May's a little over a decade ago (now it's Macy's). Here's the ad copy:

Experience Magic by Prescriptives, an extraordinary new concept that optically transforms the skin. Introducing the Concealing Wands--customized special effects tools that instantly retouch dark circles, breakouts, broken capillaries and other imperfections to optically airbrush the skin.

Well, ugh. I'll flip the card over and gaze at the winsome lass instead.

Labels: business, lds, pop culture, sex, utah

I was reading this entertainingly nasty review of the Twilight series by Christine Seifert, which introduces the wonderfully precise term: "abstinence porn." And I had an epiphany.

Granted, Seifert takes the standard lit. crit. line, namely way overreacting to the horror, the horror of conservative mores invading the hallowed ground of pop culture (which has always been as reliable "real" as a Ken Burns documentary, right?), not to mention treating such frivolities so deadly serious to begin with.

I enjoy taking pop culture too seriously too—but with tongue firmly wedged in cheek. Lefty academics treating bad genre fiction as a poisoner of tender young minds and a threat to civilization is no different than the religious right getting riled up about sex education and evolution (at least the religious right is ideologically consistent about policing thought).

Besides, as Moriah Jovan points out, every time the literary critics pull on their scorn-laden boots and resolve to squish the paleo-romance genre to death once and for all, it just pops out someplace else under a new, superficially politically-correct guise (such as yaoi).

I mean, geez, people, can't you just laugh about it? Because I laugh more at critics wringing their hands about how "worrisome" and "disturbing" Twilight is, and how it's going to "undermine feminist sensibilities." Not to mention the annoying habit—again, usually expected from the right—of using "porn" to describe anything you don't like that's somehow related to sex.

Though I'll have to plead hypocrisy here too, because I rather like "abstinence porn" as a genre description, and see no problem in exploring and exploiting it the best I can. In any case, I would respectfully submit that when it comes to messing around without "crossing the line," a good Mormon like Stephenie Meyer knows what the heck she's talking about.

Unlike Seifert's aforementioned essay, in which she is surprised at "how successful this new genre is. Twilight actually convinces us that self-denial is hot." (I glean from the tone that this is a bad thing.) What's more surprising is how clueless the writer—a professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City—is. Talk about fish discovering water last.

And when are we going to finally bury this hoary, pedantic insistence that if a given demographic enjoys a given genre of entertainment, then ipso facto they must desire what's represented in that entertainment in real life? I hope nobody takes the fact that I like Bruce Willis actioners to mean that I'm longing to get shot up by a bunch of Eastern European terrorists.

As my sister Kate puts it, "I can't think of anything dumber than telling a teenage girl that she should stop adoring Edward." Twilight, after all, turns on the fantasy of the

romantic other who totally understands us and totally wants us and never wants to leave us and is always there for us and knows what is best for us . . . [In real life,] this type of relationship would get very tedious very fast, but I think it is unfair to get after women who voice it.

While Seifert's analysis turns hilarious when she notes a fan's "salient" (albeit "subconscious") "understanding of the theme Meyer has been establishing: that sex is dangerous and men must control themselves." A subconscious understanding? I'd call it FREAKING OBVIOUS! Getting teenage boys to corral their sexual impulses is what makes civilization function.

Which makes some teenage girls smarter than some college professors. You know all that fuddy-duddy stuff about chivalry and honor—Who cannot rule himself, how should he rule others?—gee, I have no idea why anybody would be attracted to stuff like that nowadays in a romance novel. Cue Meat Loaf singing "Paradise by the dashboard light."

And then (as Kate helpfully suggests), "I would do anything for love" (the same couple twenty years later).

That once married, Bella turns out to be really into rough sex is the icing on the cake. Didn't Nancy Friday cover this ground, oh, about forty years ago? It's the "hip" Meyer versus her "stuffy" critics. Her skills as a writer aside, I'm cottoning to the idea that Meyer understands women—perhaps especially Mormon women—a whole lot better than her oh-so-progressive critics.

In short, abstinence porn pretends to be celebrating chastity while reveling in carnality. But I believe that Mormon theology supports the contention—in contradiction to the Gnostic heresies—that within proper constraints, carnality deserves being reveled in. It's a fine line, but the struggle to tiptoe down those fine lines is at the heart of dramatic conflict.

To be sure, it's not the thing itself, but the contradictions inherent in the oxymoron that ultimately make the story compelling. And here I return to the point I originally intended to make, which is that Mormon culture provides one of the few contemporary American settings (aside from the Amish) where "abstinence porn" plots actually prove plausible.

Hawt Mormon romance abstinence porn—maybe that's the literary ticket to breakout publishing success!

Related posts

Defining "abstinence porn"
Selling the sizzle

Labels: criticism, deep thoughts, lds, meyer, sex, twilight, utah, writing

Introduction

If there is a genre of literature unique to Mormon letters in terms of the church’s social culture (as opposed to being unique, say, in terms of its theology), it is the missionary memoir—the autobiographical account of the two years a young Mormon man (and the occasional woman) spends spreading the message of the church in distant lands.

For a kid from Provo, Utah, that “distant land” may well turn out to be Los Angeles. For a kid from upstate New York, it was Tokyo, Japan. This is certainly not to say that the narratives penned by ministers of other faiths possess less literary merit or a less interesting perspective. The Mormon missionary memoir measures itself only against its own historical standard: always the same, only different.

The typical missionary hails from North America and the suburban middle class, begins his service at the age of nineteen, and sallies forth with a thin comprehension of his religion (but making up for it with zeal to spare). In the end, he’s been there and done that with the rest of his peer group, been subject to the same institutional regimes and regimens, has dealt with the same heroes and jerks.

And yet the inescapable mystery remains—that these identical pressures and deformations, punishments and rewards, produce such wildly different products at the end of the spiritual assembly line.

The majority, to be sure, are spared any true physical hardships or trials of the soul. They carry purse and scrip and wear shoes made for walking. They are weekend warriors in a lay army. The work is the kind that prepares a young mind for the challenges of the post-industrial world: long, dull hours of often purposely pointless effort interrupted by occasional moments of inexplicable wonder and discovery.

These moments can propel them into the shocking embrace of a world completely different from everything they thought they knew. It can shake the complacency out of them, and a good complacency-shaking is what the average teenager needs.

This is not, of course, the stated purpose of the program—the stated purpose being Preaching the Gospel and Saving Souls. Alas, as a purely evangelical enterprise, the missionary program hardly constitutes the most efficient use of the church’s resources. The number of graduates from the Missionary Training Center has more than tripled since I spent my two months there—evidence of enormous success, one would think—except that baptisms per missionary have dropped by half over the same time period (and continue to fall).

And, as I illustrate in the largely autobiographical account that follows, those baptisms have only an abstract statistical relationship to the official membership numbers the church publishes.

Hence the admonition that “every young man” should serve a mission was, for a time, qualified to mean not every young man (and you slackers know who you are).

Similar and understandable objections are raised by professional soldiers when presented with proposals to reintroduce the draft—not to better fight wars, but in the pursuit of high-minded goals of social engineering.

But when it turned out that the slackers knew exactly who they were, and there were a lot of them, the church reversed course once again and declared that the admonition henceforth applied to every young man and woman. And shaved a year or two off the minimum qualifying age to encourage their parents to kick them out of the house and into the arms of their ecclesiastical leaders.

The mission was thus rechristened the church’s retention tool of choice. And why not? We are an imperfect species, and the modern church remains in short supply of what universal conscription supplies a nation in times of crisis (an organized religion, by definition, being constantly in a time of crisis): a common cause and a shared experience that bridges the social fault lines.

All politics is local, Tip O’Neil observed, and that is especially true of religious politics. A geographically concentrated church can only achieve “worldwide” status by uprooting its youth and sending them abroad—as metaphysical pirates, scavengers, and ambassadors of good (and bad) will—so that they will bring home with them a more expansive sense of the world “out there.”

Self-funded and run and staffed by rank amateurs, the missionary program is not sustainable as a proselytizing organization. But compromises must be made, and without the draw of a universal, shared (and occasionally exotic) experience, there soon wouldn’t be anybody left to spend two years even pretending to proselytize.

It is especially important for young men, who are provided by modern society with little in the way of canonized “coming of age” ceremonies. (Which is why I find it difficult to disparage missionary farewells and homecomings, their silly and self-aggrandizing tendencies notwithstanding.)

The exponential expansion of the number of missionaries means there is a lot more pretending going on these days (about what all these missionaries are actually going to accomplish). And, by force of circumstance, also a lot less lying about what teenagers are actually capable of when it comes to recruiting converts.

The rise and fall of the Tokyo South Mission (itself a Buddhist metaphor for the fleeting nature of things) set in motion a reactionary but rational response that, decades after the fact, still outlaws anything resembling “catch sales” street proselyting techniques.

At some point in the final decades of the twentieth century, the church was finally forced to abandon (without ever admitting it) the long-held triumphalist fantasy of becoming something other than an oddball fringe offshoot of Christianity.

This was the dazed and confused end of an era, when a naive teenager from upstate New York could mingle with the saints and sinners (meaning the saints and sinners found among his fellow missionaries) without anybody asking what in the world he was doing there or what he hoped to accomplish.

So I remain grateful for those two years when The Powers That Be shrugged at my real reasons—because I was supposed to, because it was what all my friends at church were doing, because I’d never honestly considered the alternatives, or, for that matter, deeply questioned any aspect of my religious life—and said, “Fine, if that’s what you want to do. Maybe it’ll do you some good.”

Well, it did. But not in the way I expected or the way they intended.

First District: Senzoku

Chapter 1. Lost in the Works

Elder Thomas Thackeray pressed the glowing button. Nothing happened. He stared at the strange Japanese writing and wondered what to do next. He was supposed to buy a 270 yen ticket. But the machine had all his change and he still didn’t have a ticket. So he hit it. Hard.

There he was, an American in an off-the-rack, three-piece suit, beating up on a ticket machine in Shinjuku station. But the people standing in the line behind him seemed to approve.

He was winding up for another try when the machine surrendered with a metallic thunk. The copper and silver coins jangled down into the smooth metal tray.

Thackeray scooped up the coins and shoved them into the adjacent machine, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Elder Patrick shepherding the rest of the missionaries down the staircase to the subway platform.

“Wait!” he shouted. He punched the button. The ticket spit out into his hand. He sprinted to the turnstiles and stumbled down the steps to the platform.

Subway cars waited on each side of the platform, pneumatic doors gaping wide open. Thackeray froze. WHICH ONE?

He ran down the platform, searching frantically for the navy-blue suits and pale Caucasian faces. A bell clanged loudly above his head. The conductors blew their whistles. Red running lights flickered to green. The doors hissed shut.

“WAIT!” He held out his arms as if he could bring the trains to a halt through shear force of will. The couplers pulled tight with a dull thud. The cars rolled away from the platform.

“Wait—” he said again, his voice fading to a taut whisper.

Thackeray paced the platform in a daze. For an hour he watched the subways come and go. But after each arrival and departure, after the crowds dispersed, he was still alone.

Finally he walked back up the stairway to the concourse. “I should have gone with Elder Carpenter,” he muttered to himself. Carpenter had carted the luggage back to the mission home in the mission van. Two new missionaries went with him.

He looked up and stopped. A policeman was standing in his path. “Excuse me,” he said, backing up a step. The policeman frowned and said something. Thackeray shook his head and the policeman repeated himself.

Thackeray concluded he was asking for his passport. He produced it from his suit coat pocket. The policeman snapped open the booklet, peered at Thackeray, then at the photograph in the passport.

“Nyu Yoku desu ne!” The policeman raised an eyebrow and said something Thackeray took as a reference to New York City. He wasn’t from New York City but figured the best tactic was to agree with whatever the cop said.

“Can I help?” said a voice in heavily-accented English.

“I think I’m lost.” Thackeray didn’t know who had spoken to him, but the English was gracious music to his ears. A college student walked up and introduced himself. He and the policeman exchanged a few words.

“Where you going?” the student asked.

“I’m not sure. I think—I think maybe I have something—” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the envelope Elder Patrick had given him at the airport. “Will this do?”

The two Japanese men examined the return address on the envelope. The policeman’s eyes lit up. “Ah! Hiro desu.”

He knows the address,” the student explained. “It’s not far from here.”

The policeman sketched a map on the back of the envelope. He traced over the coarsely drawn lines with his pen as he spoke.

“Go through the turnstiles over there,” translated the student, pointing. “And take the right subway. Hiro is the seventh stop. Go up the stairs and left. About a hundred meters down the street.”

Thackeray didn’t stop to think why the subway to Hiro was in a completely different direction than where he’d last seen Elder Patrick. All he knew was that he could get from here to there. The icy desperation in his gut began to melt.

“The policeman will change the ticket,” said the student.

Thackeray turned to thank him but he was already gone, lost in the crowds.

“Come, come,” said the policeman, assuming an impatient, official tone. He approached the ticket taker sitting in the booth between the entry and exit turnstiles and spoke briefly. He turned and snapped his fingers. Thackeray held out the ticket. The ticket taker marked it with a transfer stamp and handed it back.

“Uh, domo arigato.” Thackeray stuck out his hand, then corrected himself and bowed. The officer grinned and nodded in return.

Thackeray pushed through the turnstiles and walked down the stairs to the subway platform.

Hiro was the seventh stop, just as the student had promised. The station name was written in bold romaji letters on backlit signs along the station wall.

Up on the street, the city was dark and quiet. It was past ten at night. Thackeray vaguely remembered eating breakfast in the Missionary Training Center in Provo twenty hours before. But he wasn’t tired. He set off down the sidewalk.

The mission home was an office building, five stories of gray metal and tinted glass that glistened in the rain-streaked darkness like black, polished granite. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” Thackeray read aloud. The lettering was etched into the glass above the entranceway. He walked up the short flight of steps to the landing and pulled on the door handle.

It didn’t budge. The door was locked. He pushed. Definitely locked. Had they forgotten about him altogether?

“Hey! Anybody home?”

Thackeray paced back and forth on the narrow landing. He felt stupid, the same way he’d felt his first month in the MTC. Boy, was he glad that was over. Eight weeks memorizing discussions and cramming vocabulary lists. By the halfway point, four groups of Japan-bound missionaries had come in behind him. At least they knew less than he did. By the time he left he was an old sage. Knew everything about the MTC, everything about Japan. Or so he thought.

Now he didn’t know a thing. He was losing IQ points by the minute. He stepped down to the sidewalk and stared up at the obsidian-like glass.

A man strode down the sidewalk. He was wearing a bowler hat and a charcoal gray overcoat. Even more unusual, he was a good two or three inches taller than the missionary. He touched the rim of his hat as he passed.

“Good evening,” he said in a clipped British accent.

“Good ev— Hey, wait!” Thackeray ran down the sidewalk after him.

“What is it?”

“I—I think I’m lost.”

“So where do you want to be?”

“The Tokyo South Mission?” It was as much a plea as a statement.

“South?” The man chuckled. “You definitely are lost. You found the right place on the wrong side of town. These are the offices of the Tokyo North Mission.”

“Tokyo North—”

“Yes. President Atkinson’s children attend my school.” The man asked, slightly puzzled, “How did you get here in the first place?”

Thackeray handed him the envelope.

“Ah, yes. That’s the address. Do you have anything else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, there might be something in this envelope.”

“I guess,” said Thackeray. He’d only looked inside the envelope to get traveling money. Dumb and dumber.

The man sorted through the contents: a letter of greeting from the mission president, a handful of proselyting leaflets, and several thousand-yen notes. The man pulled out one of the leaflets and turned it so the light from the street lamp fell on the paper.

“There you go.” He pointed at two telephone numbers and a small map printed on the back of one of the leaflets. “Those are probably the phones at your office. Give them a ring. They should be able to help.” He handed the envelope and leaflet back to the missionary. “Good luck, eh?” he said, waving off. “If you get lost again, find a koban—a police box—and give that slip of paper to an officer.”

“Where’s a phone?”

“There’s a cafe up the street.”

“Thank you!” said Thackeray. The Englishman waved back without turning around.

The cafe was closed. A single bulb burned in an overhead fixture. An old woman, wearing a pleated white smock over a faded kimono, was meticulously sweeping the floor in the warm, yellow light. She looked up with squinted eyes when Thackeray rapped on the colored panes.

She opened the door a crack and peered out.

“Denwa?” said Thackeray. At least he remember the word for telephone.

The cleaning woman slowly opened the door and stepped back into the middle of the room, giving him a wide berth. She pointed at a pay phone in a small nook behind the cash register. There was a single slot on the top of the phone, a large “10” stamped into the chrome. Thackeray dug into his pockets and pulled out several coins, but he had none in a 10 yen denomination.

“Uh, sumimasen? Excuse me?” He held up one of the silver coins and pointed at the phone. The woman took the coin and walked over to the cash register and scooped out ten copper coins. Thackeray nodded and returned to the phone.

The phone at the other end of the line rang once.

“Hello?”

“Hello? Who is this? Thackeray—is that you!? Where are you!?”

“A cafe about a block from the North Mission in Hiro.”

“WHAT!”

“Uh, that was the address on the envelope I got at the airport.”

“THAT’S OLD STATIONERY!” wailed Elder Patrick.

“Oh.”

“You found our address, didn’t you?”

“Well, there was this leaflet in the envelope and—”

The phone clicked and went dead. The dial tone hummed.

“Hello?”

Thackeray pushed another coin into the slot. He dialed the mission home number. Busy. He looked at the leaflet and dialed the second number. The phone rang several times.

“Hello!” wheezed Patrick, having sprinted from the clerk’s office back to the secretary’s office. “Listen, Thackeray Choro, how many ju-en do you have? That’s those ten yen coins.”

“Ju-ens? Oh, eight.”

“Put them all in.”

Thackeray slipped the coins into the slot. The receiver clicked as each coin rattled down through the mechanism.

“Listen,” Patrick went on. “Can you remember how you got to Hiro from Shinjuku?”

“Shinjuku?”

“The place you got lost.”

“Oh, I think so.”

“Go back to Shinjuku and get on the Keio train, outbound. That’s the one on the right going down the stairs from the ticket machines.”

“How do I know when to get off?”

“Just ask someone,” said the exasperated Patrick. “Just ask, Fuchu desu ka? That’s where you want to go. Fuchu.”

“Right.”

“You got that? If you get lost again, call!”

The line went dead. Thackeray hung up the phone. Three coins rattled down into the coin return slot. He picked them up and turned to leave.

“Domo arigato,” he said, bowing. The woman smiled, likely in relief at his imminent departure, and bowed in return.

The Shinjuku-bound subway was more crowded than the one to Hiro. A pack of teenagers wearing copycat James Dean leather jackets milled together at the far end of the car. They were surprisingly unintimidating.

The train jerked forward. Thackeray grabbed a strap. A girl with blue and red hair held onto the strap next to him. Unique, he thought. It was all unique. He was from upstate New York. He’d never been on subway before. He’d never been lost before. He’d always known where he was going. Until now.

The train pulled into a station. Thackeray glanced out the window to check the destination sign, but it flashed by too fast. I missed it! he thought. He leaned over the seats and craned his head to look down the platform. Was this stop five or stop six? It couldn’t be stop seven—could it? The girl with the rainbow hair eyed him curiously. He looked at the open subway doors and back at the girl. He took a deep breath.

“Is this Shinjuku?”

“Chigaimasu.”

What does that mean? The bell clanged. He stepped towards the door.

The girl grabbed his arm. “No! No!”

“The next one?”

She nodded. When the subway arrived in Shinjuku, the girl touched him on the shoulder. “Shinjuku desu,” she said.

“Domo arigato,” said Thackeray. He wanted to say more but didn’t know how.

He found his way back to the concourse, back to where he’d started. He was no longer afraid of the city. In fact, he was enjoying himself and was sorry that the adventure would have to end. He bought a 270 yen ticket and walked down to the Keio line platform. The train arrived several minutes later.

“At least I know my way around Shinjuku Station,” he told himself as he found an open seat.

At the next station a young boy, no older than fourteen, boarded the train and slid into a seat across the aisle from him. The boy wore a dark blue suit that Thackeray recognized as a school uniform. He held a small black leather attaché case on his lap. The salaryman training started early.

The train pulled into a station. Thackeray turned around to see the destination sign. When he turned back, the boy blurted out, “Are you American?”

Thackeray nodded.

“Where are you from?” The boy strained at each word, but his accent was better than the college student’s.

“New York.”

“New York City?” said the boy with wide eyes.

“No.” Thackeray laughed. “Upstate. Uh, the country—” He gestured with his hands trying to mime the word.

“Oh. Inaka,” said the boy.

“Yes. Hai. Inaka desu.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a missionary. Senkyoshi desu.” Thackeray handed him a leaflet.

The boy took it eagerly. “I don’t know Morumon Kyokai,” he said, studying the small map on the leaflet. “You going here?”

“Yes.”

“Lots of Americans here.”

“Yeah. There probably are.”

The train slowed as it approached a station, the sharp hiss and squeal of the air brakes. The boy jumped up and stood by the exit doors. “Can I keep?” he asked, holding up the leaflet.

“Sure.”

The train shuddered to a stop. The doors hissed open.

“Fuchu wa tsugi no tsugi. Next after next.” The boy hopped down onto the platform and scooted away into the night.

Thackeray listened carefully as the train coasted into Fuchu station. “Fuchu de-gozaimasu, Fuchu de-gozaimasu,” the conductor’s voice squawked over the loudspeakers.

Thackeray stood by the door as the boy had. The train stopped. He stepped out into the cold night air. As he walked down the short flight of stairs from the platform, he could see Elder Patrick and another missionary waiting next to the turnstiles. He handed his ticket to the ticket taker and joined them.

“Well, tell me, Thackeray,” said Elder Patrick. “What was it like getting lost in the biggest flippin’ city in the world?”

He shrugged. “Not so bad, I guess.” He glanced back over his shoulder at the empty station platform. He could still feel where the girl with the rainbow hair had grabbed his arm.

 

Tokyo South will be republished on this blog at a later date. 

Labels: ebooks, japan, japanese culture, kindle, lds, peaks island press, publishing, religion, tokyo south, utah

In chapter 17 of Angel Falling Softly, Milada and Kamilla walk into a bar. It is kind of a joke.

They had to buy a four-dollar membership to get in the door--the product of some strange nexus between state liquor laws and the teetotaling Mormon population.

This remnant of 19th century "blue laws" has long irked the tourism industry here in Utah, so much so that the Mormon governor (Huntsman, who recently resigned to become ambassador to China) pushed hard for repeal. On 1 July 2009, it was finally put out of its misery.

Also gone is an actual physical barrier. A provision in the old law forbade bartenders from directly serving customers, and running down the middle of the bar in every bar was a partition fondly known as the "Zion Curtain." In the novel I pretended it wasn't there because even in a story about vampires, reality can be stranger than fiction.

The distinctions between a "social club" (a bar), a "dining club" (50 percent of receipts from food) and a restaurant (70 percent of receipts from food) remain, along with restrictions on when alcohol can be served, (10:00 AM or noon to midnight or 1:00 AM) and whether minors can be admitted unaccompanied by an adult.

But the more things change, the more other things remain the same. In chapter 22 of Angel Falling Softly, Milada "savored a respectable 1993 Merlot and watched the quiet neighborhood dramas play out in the driveways and front lawns," and muses to herself that "obtaining the Merlot had approximated a visit to a twenties-era speakeasy."

In fact, "packaged liquor, wine, and heavy beer [over 3.2 percent]" will continue to be sold only in duly licensed state liquor stores. Utah's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control boasts that Salt Lake City "offers a world class wine selection at four specialty wine stores."

Count 'em, four! (There are 37 "full service" liquor stores state-wide.) But the legislature did agree that wine bottles no longer needed to carry the official Utah tax stamp (which had to be tediously pasted on every single bottle sold), as the smuggling of bottled wine into Utah was pretty much determined to be a nonexistent crime.

Labels: angel falling softly, angel notes, lds, politics, utah

Over at the Gene Expression blog, Razib points to a study by Benjamin Edelman (Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School) that examines subscriptions to online adult entertainment sites on a per thousand people, per thousand home Internet users, and per thousand home broadband users basis.

Utah tops every list.

There are several more variables that Edelman hints at but doesn't consider directly. First is the "private" (or "secret") nature of online subscriptions, making them easier to hide from a spouse or parents than a magazine or DVD. In other words, morality should always be considered in the context of propriety when analyzing religious behavior.

The more Mormons in one's general vicinity, the greater the incentive for a Mormon seeking out-of-the-mainstream diversions to practice discretion. I'll bet that the only Mormons who ever bought one of those glossy sex books at the Orem Barnes & Noble were from Salt Lake City (if they ever sold any).

Equally important is the extent to which local anti-porn laws are enforced. Even though these cases rarely prevail in court, the willingness to charge brick & mortar rental outfits creates a powerful economic disincentive. Greencine, for example, won't ship porn DVDs to Utah zip codes. This increases the attractiveness of online offerings.

As James Taranto notes:

Local laws and mores make retail porn less available in conservative areas--which might also account for their greater consumption of porn online, which gives at least the illusion of privacy.

And a commenter at Gene Expression observes:

I drive through Oklahoma to Texas often and have noticed that there are no porn outfits on I-35 or I-44. This contrasts Texas where porn stores on highways are relatively common. In this study, Oklahoma has higher porn subscription than Texas.

As a general rule, squeezing the balloon in one place makes it blow up elsewhere. But from Edelman's analysis, we don't know how big the total balloon (rental + cable/satellite + periodicals + live entertainment) is. Small behavioral movements among sinners seeking legal alternatives would bias the tiny sample sizes.

To start with, I'd suggest that Edelman regress Greencine's list of restricted zip codes against his data.

The fact that the Idaho ranks near the bottom in Edelman's study confirms this. Idaho is basically Utah with fewer blue laws and polygamists (but more survivalist nutjobs waiting for the coming apocalypse). And Alaska? Hardly any Mormons there, but a big retail supply and demand problem.

However, the popular perception that Edelman is onto something might explain why Mormon church leaders are so obsessed with the subject. Though this obsession has also made online porn the current "sin of choice" among Mormons, the confession of which being used (as a moral "theory of everything") to absolve all others.

Labels: lds, religion, science, sex, social studies, utah

If you've ever--you know, accidentally--happened to watch some anime porn (even of the R-rated variety: I recommend I Dream of Mimi), you might find this illustration of the moral and legal perils involved and the editorial fictions invented by importers to ameliorate them amusing.


To better understand what a "figurine" is, go here and click around (at your own NSFW peril).

Of course, there's the irony that characters somebody drew having "sex" are considered more "dangerous" to our moral health than actual human beings pretending to be underage and having sex (American Pie). You can even garner yourself an Oscar for doing so!

Regardless of what the Supreme Court said, anime importers follow the "stagecoach rule" in this regard. "First Amendment" rights are even hazier in Canada, which is also DVD region 1. And just to be safe, outfits like Greencine won't send "porn" to Utah and a couple of other states.

I once came across a hentai tape at a Hollywood Video here in Utah County (it wasn't half bad). The same store also had a copy of In the Realm of the Senses (meh), so it was probably part of the startup stock, and the owners had no idea it was there.

Until the irate parent stormed in, I suppose. Is that why Netflix doesn't ship I Dream of Mimi anymore? They do ship In the Realm of the Senses, which is about a billion times more explicit. Go figure.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for Kodomo no Jikan (haven't seen it, don't want to). The teacher/student romance typically involves a female high school student, and it is ubiquitous enough to constitute a standard girl's comics genre (and is often quite explicit).

The flipside is the "harem" genre featuring a prepubescent boy surrounded by developmentally precocious teenage (and often older) girls, such as the enormously popular Negima! and the just plain creepy Please Teacher, Happy Lesson and Mouse.

To sum up Negima! Imagine that Harry Potter as a nerdy ten-year-old and Hermione as a spunky, resourceful sixteen-year-old, and she and her coed classmates at Hogwarts have a habit of "accidentally" getting undressed around him. Oh, and they share a dorm room.

Actually, if Rowling's Hermione had been more like this Hermione, I might have stayed interested in the books. Stupid "fan service" aside, Negima! takes some interesting plot turns and is far less annoying than Ken Akamatsu's big harem hit, Love Hina.

But as I argue at length here, I've concluded that the Freudian subtext is really all about family formation (and the lack thereof).

Labels: anime, deep thoughts, moral outrage, netflix, politics, sex, utah

A year or so ago I lauded the Utah County DMV as "the friendliest and most efficient arm of government I regularly come into contact with." My brother suggested I try registering my car online next time. Well, I did, and talk about quick and easy! Utah does a dang good job at this type of thing. If you want to make government truly efficient, make it small, fast, simple, and local. My election day message.

Oh, I voted on one of those evil Diebold machines. Very nice, actually. For philosophical, psychological and scientific purposes, though, I'd like it to print out a human-readable, machine-scannable ballot that could be statistically sampled against the end results as a matter of course, and rescanned in the case of a recount. Dropping a ballot into a box is much more satisfying than just pressing a touch screen.

Labels: politics, technology, utah

Forty-one years ago today, the Supreme Court unanimously handed down the "Loving Decision." Mildred and Richard Perry Loving had been charged under Virginia's "Racial Integrity Act," banning interracial marriages. The Loving v. Virginia ruling declared such laws unconstitutional.

A decade later, the Mormon church finally got around to lifting its own ban on ordaining black men of African descent. Nevertheless, it took at least another decade (if even then) for the church to muffle its quasi-official imprecations of interracial marriages (never codified, but "frowned upon").

In The Path of Dreams, these lingering prejudices contribute to the long estrangement between Elly's mother and grandfather. As her Aunt June explains,

The proclamation about blacks and the priesthood had just come out and not everybody was comfortable with the fact of a racially-integrated church. Scratch the surface of any Utah ward and you'll find a redneck or two.

Don't ask me to explain, comprehend, or defend it. As David Knowlton writes, the whole thing "deserves to go into the dustbin of LDS teaching," much like the ugly relationship between the Southern Baptist Convention and slavery. As June says, "People change. That's what's important."

Labels: lds, path notes, path of dreams, social studies, utah

When I say that The Path of Dreams belongs in part to the "home literature" genre, I'm referring to Orson F. Whitney's original defense (made back in 1888) of fiction written specifically for the spiritual and moral edification of the religious community.

I see "home literature" as a direct extension of the stories I once wrote for The New Era. Or to be more precise, the kind of stories I would write if I didn't have to deal with Correlation, but without altering the overall approach or underlying intent.

In other words, taking Chris Bigelow's definition of "provocative, unconventional, yet ultimately faith-affirming stories that yield new insights into Mormon culture and humanity" (which I am totally on board with), here I would exclude from those first two adjective anything violating theological or moral standards.

Now, Whitney more specifically challenged writers to

Make books yourselves that shall not only be a credit to you and to the land and people that produced you, but likewise a boon and benefaction to mankind.

The second clause in that sentence sets the bar far higher than the humble target I'm shooting at here. Namely, to remain faithful to the objectives of "home literature"--fiction that remains entirely within the community of believers--yet at the same time wedges into the niche occupied by the modern, secular, genre romance.

The two would obviously seem incompatible from the start. As explained by the Harlequin writer's guidelines:

We want to see an emphasis on the physical relationship developing between the couple: fully described love scenes along with a high level of fantasy, playfulness and eroticism are needed.

Hard to accomplish--and keep the protagonists temple recommend worthy--when marriage is the goal the plot leads up to. In The Path of Dreams, I came up with a clever (I think) end-run around this problem, though not one that could be deployed formulaically.

Moreover, by inserting a pivot point into the story--the marriage halfway through--those moral constraints (against romanticizing premarital sex) could be set aside for the remainder of the story.

A second reason is that, taking Austen as the classic romance template, by the time the engagement arrived with the certainty of marriage in the historical romance, the social structure of the lovers' lives thenceforth was determined. This is definitely not the case in a BYU romance (to take one sub-sub-genre).

Erica Friedman points out the problem of "stories end[ing] where they should begin." That is, they end with declarations of love and the decision to marry (or the marriage itself), when "what comes next" is really more interesting.

With the plot centered around the marital pivot point, the narrative will veer from strict romance to what I might call "family formation melodrama." The challenge, then, is to keep a firm grasp of the erotic thread and not turn into a dreary soap or one of those painfully unfunny sit-coms about what is in actuality an intolerably dysfunctional marriage.

Of course, we citizens of Utah County know that Mormons happily read (gentile) romance novels and attend R-rated movies at pretty much the same rates as the rest of suburban America. Whether such a genre with a "Mormon" label on the cover could survive that cognitive disconnect is another question.

Labels: books, BYU, lds, path notes, path of dreams, utah

I've been in a jury pool twice: a federal felony case and a civil tort case. At least in Utah, you don't have to show up unless there's an actual trial (they give you a number to call the night before). That doesn't mean you'll actually serve, though.

The federal case involved drugs and weapons possession (the courtroom looked like a set from Law & Order). The judge had a sense of humor and moved things along at a brisk clip. All the peremptory challenges were done in open court. The people excluded were related to the prosecution or defense or had been involved in similar cases before (victim, witness, juror). After that, the jury was picked in order and was seated by 11 AM. The guy next to me was the last alternate. He sighed heavily.

I knew five minutes after looking at the jury questionnaire for the personal injury case that the plaintiff's lawyers weren't going to pick me. Half the questions had to do with whether I supported tort reform and how much: "Yes," and "A lot." I'd like to see the regression analysis done on that questionnaire. For example, it asked what your favorite TV shows were. The most interesting questions was, on a sliding scale: "I control events -- Events control me." Who checks the latter?

In this rinky-dink, fender-bender case (nobody even hobbled into the courtroom on crutches), following the questionnaire came five freaking hours of jury selection. The jury wasn't seated until 2 PM. Of course I wasn't chosen. (I'm free! I'm free!) I shudder to imagine what goes on in big personal injury/class action cases.

Multiply this by thousands of courtrooms across the nation, and I sat there and watched the national productivity circling the drain. I appreciate the idealism of trial-by-jury, but in actual practice it's an awfully wasteful system, and its flaws only encourage bad lawyering and dumb trials. Jurors are more like naive politicians who are handpicked and then intensely lobbied for hours and hours before voting on a bill that none of them really understands.

Labels: law, politics, social studies, utah