The words of moron

There's a phrase from this week's Sunday School reading that makes me giggle every time I read it. If you're even half as immature as me, you'll probably laugh too. It's from Moroni 9:7--"According to the knowledge which I have received from Amoron..."

Pretty funny, huh? What could be less valuable than knowledge received from a moron? Except, the more I think about it, that's basically what many of my weekly Blog About Something Only Tangentially Related to the Upcoming Sunday School Lesson (or BASOTRUSSL) posts are.

The BASOTRUSSLs basically fall into one of three categories. Two of the three involve me writing about something I experience or observe, and somehow connecting it to the lesson material. The first category are posts that actually make sense, and offer some type of insight into my life or the scripture block, or both. Here's a good example. And here's another and another and another. The second are the posts where the connection is extremely tenuous, the ones I wrote mainly because I'm committed to doing this every week. Check out my "share' em/Sherem" post to see what I mean.

Then there's the third category: the posts where I interpret the scriptures in a strange way, mainly for comic effect. This practice started years ago, long before I was a blogger, when I discovered humorous ways to misinterpret a few Book of Mormon passages. I wrote about these verses here and here.

I've reached new levels of borderline blasphemy in 2012. The new interpretations for scripture blocks I've conjured up this year include:

--Ancient prophets claiming the University of Utah and Ute fans are evil.

--The Hunger Games movie is based on the story of Enos.

--Parallels abound between the people of Zeniff and last spring's Jazz-Spurs playoff series (including a great zinger about Tony Parker's philandering ways).

--Christ's visit to the Americas was laced with Halloween imagery.

--Isaiah foresaw the modern day rise of eReaders and the scourge of Nicholas Sparks.

--A portion of Nephi's narrative mirrors a typical YSA ward experience--but only if you read it backward.

--Just last week, I showed how a Weezer song reveals the identity of the Three Nephites.

--Most surprising of all, Alma's discourse to the poor Zoramites is actually pro-Obama, socialist propaganda.

I am aware that men should not propagate their own private interpretations of the scriptures (see 2 Pet. 1:19-21). I cannot stress this enough--when you read my blog, all the "knowledge" you receive comes from a moron! I'm merely a jester, writing these posts for entertainment. I don't believe these interpretations, and neither should you. I will continue posting BASOTRUSSLs, but you shouldn't take much if anything of what you read here seriously.

Are we clear on this? Good. But if not, two of the next three lessons after this mention a man named Nimrod...

Three-zer

I totally know how Dan Brown feels now. I've cracked the code of one of the biggest mysteries in all of scripture (well, part of it anyway): I know who the Three Nephites are! And the answers were found in, of all places, a classic Weezer song!

But let me back up for a minute. For the uninitiated, the Three Nephites are some of the most prominent figures in Mormon folklore. Some brief background: after his resurrection, Jesus Christ appeared to the people in the Americas and called twelve disciples to lead His church there, just as He had done in Jerusalem (see 3 Ne. 11:18-22; 12:1). Later on, he asked these twelve men what their greatest desire was. Nine said they wanted to die and go to heaven once they reached a certain age; the other three wished to remain on the earth until the Second Coming, working all the while to bring as many souls as possible to Christ (see 3 Ne. 28:1-8). (If you're just interested in the doctrinal basis of the Three Nephites story and not the sensationalistic aspects, make sure to check out the scripture block and study guide material for this week's Sunday School lesson.)

The wishes were granted, and now these Three Nephites roam the earth, performing good deeds and then vanishing into thin air (at least according to the numerous legends that have been told and retold for over 100 years). The most common tall tales involve a mysterious hitchhiker issuing warnings about the importance of food storage, or sister missionaries being protected from serial killers (interestingly, one of the few common story types that has all three wanderers appearing together).

The identity of these three selfless servants was not revealed in the scriptures (see 3 Ne. 28:25), but as I mentioned above, I figured out who they are--and I owe it all to alt rock legends Weezer. It turns out that their song "My Name Is Jonas" (the first track from their first album) has all the clues needed to figure out the names of those who wished to stay behind.



The first one is easy. The names of the twelve are given in 3 Nephi 19:4, and one of them was--you guessed it--Jonas. Lest you think it's just a coincidence, listen closely to the lyrics in the first verse. "Thanks for all you've shown us/This is how we feel" is clearly Jonas and Co. making their request to live on Earth until the world ends. And "We've all left the den/Let me tell you 'bout it" is undoubtedly Jonas describing the persecutions he and his brethren endured, including being cast into dens of wild beasts (see 3 Ne. 28:22; 4 Ne. 1:33).

The other two are a little trickier, but if you dissect the second verse you can figure it out. The speaker says his name is Wepeel, and he refers to his brother. There were several sets of brothers among the twelve. Nephi and Timothy (Jonas was the son of one of them, though the sentence structure of 3 Ne. 19:4 makes it difficult to figure out which is his daddy), along with Mathoni and Mathonihah, are explicitly identified as brothers. I think it's safe to infer that Kumen and Kumenonhi were brothers, based on their similar names, and the fact that church leadership has been quite nepotistic from the beginning.

So which brother pair is it? None of them are named Wepeel. Well, what's something that "we peel?" Onions! There are are a couple of guys whose name sounds like onion, but not Nephi and Timothy--they're out of the running. To narrow it down further--Wepeel is actually Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo. There's only one set of brothers whose names look like variants of Cuomo, and that's Kumen and Kumenonhi. But what about the line that mentions Math--isn't that a point in favor of Mathoni? Well, that same line mentions swearing, something that these super-righteous men would have nothing to do with. To further solidify my argument--that last link indicates that Wepeel was also the name of Cuomo's childhood sled, a Rosebud for a new generation. Well check out this picture--yes, that's a sled being pulled by dogs in the Kumen region of Slovenia. Case closed.

So there you have it. Jonas, Kumen and Kumenonhi are the Three Nephites. "But hold the phone," says the one person who is actually fact-checking this investigation. "There are two men named Jonas among the twelve chosen by Jesus. How do you know you have the right one?" Back to the first verse we go! "Just like Grandma made?" Who's going to be referring to their grandma, some Jonas that we know nothing about, or the Jonas whose grandma was the wife of the great prophet Nephi (the father of Timothy and the other Nephi)? That's what I thought. The song ends with Jonas and the two K brothers singing "The workers are going home," as by this point they must clearly be looking forward to the Second Coming and their inevitable "twinkling" (see 3 Ne. 28:8).

So there you have it. We now know who the Three Nephites are. Well, not really. We only know their names, and they probably go by different monikers now. And we have no idea what they look like, or where they are. But I have faith that they're out there, somewhere, helping people. They're definitely "still makin' noise, makin' noise!"

I was gonna write, but...

One of my pet peeves is when people apologize for not blogging. Lines like "sorry I haven't been good at blogging lately" or "I've been too busy to blog for a while" at the beginning of a post annoy me. Everyone's busy; like everything else you just have to make time for blogging if you want to do it. Just blog or don't blog, it's not that big of a deal. None of the blogs I frequent charge a monthly subscription fee or anything, so it's not like you owe me anything.

Of course, this means I also hold a certain amount of self-loathing, because I've done the same thing on more than one occasion on my old blog. But I've been trying to quit, and haven't really had this issue since starting this blog last year. I have been guilty of a similar offense, though--promising a blog post (either here, or on my Facebook fan page, or just promising myself) on a certain topic or by a certain time, and then not delivering. And guess what? I'm doing that again today.

I had plans for a more meaningful post this week, but I procrastinated, and now I'm going out of town this weekend, so this is all you get. I'm not going to apologize, though, because if you read this post at all it shouldn't take you more than two minutes. Plus, I'm in good company--even the prophet Nephi once admitted to not getting around to "blogging" something he should have (see 3 Nephi 23:7-12). (Aside: if we visited the olden days when giving feedback involved engraving on metal blog plates, I bet we wouldn't complain so much about blogs that make you type a CAPTCHA before leaving a comment.)

To learn more about Nephi's embarrassment and other, more important things, check out the study guide for this week's Sunday School lesson. And I'll be back with a more engrossing post next week. Or not. It is just a blog, after all.

Casting bread upon the storm waters

I had a semi-ambitious idea for this week's Sunday School blog, but I had to abandon it once Hurricane Sandy hit. Fortunately, the Frankenstorm's only impact on me was having to work some overtime, helping people whose flight plans were disrupted. And there are thousands of people whose problems are much worse than those of stranded travelers or overworked airline employees. If you'd like to help them, here's a great way to do it and even get something for yourself in return.

(As always, even though I work for JetBlue, and the company would certainly approve of me promoting our recovery efforts in this space, I am solely responsible for the content of this blog.)

So, rather than write my own blog post, I'm going to use someone else's work. Over a decade ago, I was introduced to "The Sugar Beet," a website that was basically the Mormon version of "The Onion." Most of the fake news stories were just okay at best, but there was one piece--an account of an event that created a small scale version of hurricane-like havoc--that I still consider one of the funniest things I've ever read. The site no longer exists (though it appears it was briefly resurrected as a blog), and I can't find any record of this particular article online, but luckily I had the foresight to print a copy back in July 2002, and I've typed it up below. (I chose to feature this today because part of this week's Sunday School lesson is on the sacrament.)


Two Deacons Collide During Administering of Sacrament
By Benson Dastrup

CHICAGO, IL--Local deacon Sammy Thomas collided with Rich Larsen while passing the sacrament on Sunday in the Chicago Hyde Park Ward. Larsen, who had traveled from Utah to visit his sister, was thrown to the ground, spilling the contents of his tray. It wasn't immediately clear what caused the accident, but Larsen blamed Thomas for not following the new Standard Sacrament Protocol, or SSP.

Sacrament passing routes have traditionally been created on an ad hoc basis, making it very difficult to keep track of competing methods and regional variations. The SSP was published last year by the Orem Utah East Stake in an attempt to establish an industry standard. The code fully utilizes all the latest passing and formation technologies and was designed to be extremely cheap to implement. Despite initial skepticism, the SSP was widely adopted along the Wasatch Front last fall.

[The article even included an awesome multi-color diagram of the SSP, including a "grassy knoll" at the top, just behind the organ. Alas, my copy is in black and white.]

Larsen, who participated in his home quorum's Subcommittee on Safety and Reverence, said, "The SSP was supposed to prevent exactly this type of accident." When asked why he thought the standards had been largely ignored outside of Utah, Larsen threw up his hands. "I just don't get it. Maybe something like this has to happen to get people to wake up."

Enough bread remained after the incident to complete the ordinance without a second prayer, but an awkward moment followed the collision when two-year-old Timmy Cannon shoved three fistfuls of bread into his mouth from the floor. It was decided after consulting the Bishop's Handbook that Timmy was not in need of any medical attention.

Eerie similarities

Halloween is less than a week away! Like many of my favorite shows, I plan to use the holiday as a crutch for one episode/post per year. Since the bulk of my posts are BASOTRUSSLs (Blog About Something Only Tangentially Related to the Upcoming Sunday School Lesson), that means I get to shoehorn some spooky into the scriptures every October.

This Sunday we're covering 3 Nephi, chapters 17 through 19. Here's the link to the study guide material. Without further ado, here are the top 10 Halloween connections I could force from that scripture block, listed from most tenuous to least (though the level of irreverence/sacrilege varies widely):

10) Frequent use of the word "which" (see 3 Ne. 17:15; 18:10-11, 27-28; 19:32-34, etc.--about once every six verses on average). Remember, I said we're starting with the least tenuous.

9) Spooky imagery such as the gates of hell (see 3 Ne. 18:13), referring to people as "souls" (see 3 Ne. 17:25), and frequent mentions of the Spirit or the Holy "Ghost."

8) Bobbing for apples is almost like a secular version of baptism by immersion (see 3 Ne. 19:10-13).

7) Halloween is awesome for both adults and children (see all of 3 Nephi 17).

6) Hordes of maimed and leprous and withered people (see 3 Ne. 17:7-9)...sounds like one of those zombie marathons.

5) Speaking of zombies--Nephi's brother Timothy rose from the dead! (See 3 Ne. 19:4.)

4) Starting "before it was yet dark" and continuing throughout the night, many people basically went house to house, giving the same message over and over (see 3 Ne. 19:2-3).

3) The leaders of the community distributed small pieces of free food, and the people ate until they were full (see 3 Ne. 18:3-5).

2) At one point it seemed like the Nephites were all dressed like ghosts--their "whiteness...did exceed all the whiteness...there could be nothing on earth so white as the whiteness thereof" (3 Ne. 19:25). The study guide page linked to above suggests reading chapter 17 aloud. After you've done that, do the same with this verse too--I've long thought it's one of the strangest sounding passages to read out loud. And finally...

1) Many people sacrificed throughout the night in order to be in the right spot when Jesus appeared--just like Linus's devotion to the Great Pumpkin (see 3 Ne. 19:3). When you wait on the Lord, though, you get much more than a bag of rocks.

Happy Halloween from Tales of Hofmann!

Yours sincerely, wasting away

I'm pretty sure my first experiences with mortality came from playing Oregon Trail in my elementary school computer lab. I loved firing up the old Apple IIe, choosing which of my friends would be traveling the trail with me, and hoping we would make it to Oregon but not caring if we didn't. Because if we didn't, that would mean I'd get to laugh at the thought of my pals dying of cholera or snake bite or because they didn't like the wild fruit I found, plus I got to write silly things on the tombstones.

By the time I attended my first funeral, just before I turned 11, death was not a fearful or even a particularly sad thing for me. My faith in my religion's teachings about the afterlife played a major role in this attitude, but Oregon Trail may have played just as big a part. On the Trail, death just meant a chance to write a funny epitaph, then immediately start a new game. Life goes on.

(By the way, I made the above tombstone at this cool site. I love the Internet!)

Although I don't fear death, over the last week or two a number of things have happeend that have made me feel old.

--For months, my mom has told me my deodorant makes me smell like an old man. It never bothered me. But when the same criticism comes from Schmidt...well, that hurts.

--I've been growing my beard out for Halloween. It's been a little over three months since my last shave, the longest my facial hair has ever been. It's also coming in with better thickness and consistency than past beard attempts...but there are also a few white hairs scattered throughout. (My costume will end up being mustache-only, but I'll post some beard pics here before I shave it off.)

--I went to a YSA dance on Monday night. I certainly wasn't the only emeritus YSA in attendance, and I still had fun, but I did stop dancing for a while and talked to a fellow "oldie" about how there was too much Black Eyed Peas, Ke$ha, etc., being played and not nearly enough Spice Girls or Third Eye Blind. I also needed the break because my stamina isn't nearly what it was during my dancing days in high school and college, but I'm pretty sure that has much more to do with me being in terrible shape than my age.

--The other day at dinner group, the girl who was hosting said "You've got to listen to this weird song that just came on my Halloween Pandora station!" The song in question turned out to be the "funny farm" song. (Was this the first mainstream example of autotuning? Hmm...) Now, that song is much older than me, but since none of the girls at dinner (average age around 27) had heard it, I felt like it must be a tune from "my" era.

--Finally, Saturday is my half-birthday. I am now 32.5 years old. Exactly halfway to the standard retirement age. And if my retirement savings in the next 32.5 years equal what I saved in the first 32.5...I'm pretty much screwed.

Luckily, just when I needed it most, Oregon Trail came through for me again. In case you didn't know, I Tweet for JetBlue Airways (and in case I haven't made it clear before, my personal blog/Twitter feed/Facebook page are just that--personal, as in, not affiliated with JetBlue). A few days ago a customer Tweeted about us and made an OT reference that my "old" coworkers didn't get. Fortunately, I was around to reply. Here's the exchange:

If you don't get my joke, then you're either old, or missed out on an important part of childhood. One of my favorite games has once again made me feel young, and helped me stave off worrying about death or even retirement, at least for another week.

The scriptures have helped, too. This week's Sunday School lesson covers the version of the Sermon on the Mount that Jesus gave to the Nephites after resurrection. The Lord knows, age is just a number--"Old things are done away, and all things have become new" (3 Ne. 12:47). He also knew that saving for retirement isn't really a big deal, teaching that we should lay up treasures in heaven rather than on earth, and to take no thought about food or clothing (see 3 Ne. 13:19-32). So I guess I'm doing all right.

Ok, I'm being slightly facetious. It is important to be prepared and responsible in temporal matters. But whether I die "young" or live to retirement age, and whether my retirement home is in the Willamette Valley, or on the funny farm, or even just livin' on a prayer (you know, because I'm halfway there), it doesn't matter. I know I will die someday, and I'm all right with that. Because there is life after death. And because it will give me one last chance to say something funny.

Na-na na-na na-na nuh, Batpod!

One of my very first posts on this blog was dedicated to how awful Joel Schumacher's Batman & Robin is. If a couple of paragraphs didn't convince you then, maybe this will--I recently made a guest appearance on the "Good Word From Bad Movies" podcast (the reason for this post's title; sorry if you were looking for info on the Caped Crusader's cool motorcycle), where my friends Billy and Andrew watch terrible movies, then make fun of them while simultaneously relating them to gospel principles. It's kind of like an aural version of my BASOTRUSSL posts.

There was so much stuff to mock in B&R that the podcast has been broken up into three parts. The link for part 1 is here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. Altogether it's 117 minutes of comedy gold. (That's just 8 minutes shorter than the movie itself.) We review the plot in the first two parts (can't really call it a "summary" when it's that long), then get more into the "Good Word" in the final installment.

There are plenty of jokes peppered throughout, the most common themes being pizza, bad Arnold impressions and even worse Mr. Freeze puns, and (surprisingly) Hitler. We recorded in early September but the episodes were just posted over the last week, so there are some dated references to the Olympics and such, but if you think I'm funny then you'll probably really enjoy these. At any rate, they hopefully won't leave you as bored as the supervillain pictured below.

I had a ton of fun recording these (thanks Andrew and Billy!) and hope to use podcasts more in the future as a way to entertain the masses and show off my wit. In the meantime, now that I've ripped on Batman &Robin in writing and with audio, I need to decide which medium to use next. Maybe a diorama...