Rantings of Stu

I remember once when I was having a LAN party. A friend of mine suffers from eczema… as does one of my nieces. Now, at the time when my niece was about 5 years old, she was at my house during one of my LAN parties when she stated to my daughter out loud, “I have eczema,” pronounced “egzema” (short e on the second one).

My all-too-serious friend responded, “It’s eck-zEEma!” They argued back and forth in a rather hostile manner.

Life’s just too short to argue about which pronunciation is correct (they both are according to Webster’s Dictionary). The good news? The rest of us can laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Thanks to Buck and Clark for helping desensitize me to the seriousness of the world. They may very well have added a good decade to my life! And I gotta put a plug in for Randy. His incredibly laid back demeanor probably added a whole extra year on top of the decade.

Great, now I’m gonna get harrassed for not thanking somebody. THANKS TO EVERYBODY FOR WHATEVER!!! Bah! That angry rant probably took a year off my life!

There’s been a lot of quite unnecessary hoopla over Larry Miller’s canceling of Brokeback Mountain.

Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is. Larry Miller is a business owner, and last I checked this was still the United States of America. Miller can show or not show whatever movies he darn well feels like.

However, some people have decided that it is a big deal, and Mormons are taking criticism as a result.

Heath Ledger made an ambiguous comparison of Miller’s pulling the movie to racism. Then, what most news outlets failed to report, Ledger proceeded to bash Mormons.

“Personally, I don’t think the movie is [controversial], but I think maybe the Mormons in Utah do,” Ledger said.

That’s a perfectly innocent sounding statement, and he could have stopped right there. After all it’s true that most “Mormons in Utah” might find a public display of homosexuality on the big screen controversial. After all, “Utah Mormons” believe that homosexuality is a sin. A movie promoting homosexuality would be controversial.

But Ledger went on to say things along the line of, “If Utah Mormons don’t like it, then that’s their problem.” That’s not an exact quote. But it’s along those lines.

But that is minor compared to what MSNBC’s Keith Olberman said, mentioning that he could “sniff bigotry from approximately 2,000 miles away.” That comment in itself shows his own bigotry.

But maybe this is all good. Perhaps Mormons have had it too easy for too long. Maybe it’s time we have some serious international criticism to test our mettle and dedication to what we believe.

I can only hope that Mormons are ready for something like this. Note that I’m not saying or predicting that Mormons are going to get the hammer from the rest of the world. Just that I think it might be time for us to be tested.

Our prophet, Gordon B. Hinckley, has said publicly that “…we’re not weird.” I respectfully disagree, while at the same time understanding that his statement was not in the context that I am using it here.

But the fact is we ARE weird. Weird in that we do not hold to the beliefs of the world or the Christian faiths. We are members of the one true church in the world, headed by none other than Jesus himself, the very god who came to Earth out of Nazareth.

We are members of the one church led by Him whom so many others claim to follow. As the minority, that makes us weird. Let our weirdness be tested! Let the world criticize our weirdness! I’m ready for it. Bring it on. As long as I don’t have to make a thousands of miles trip through unknown lands by foot.

During a visit to the mental asylum, a visitor asked the Director what the criterion was which defined whether or not a patient should be institutionalized.

“Well,” said the Director,” we fill up a bathtub then we offer a teaspoon, a teacup and a bucket to the patient and ask him or her to empty the bathtub.”

“Oh, I understand,” said the visitor. “A normal person would use the bucket because it’s bigger than the spoon or the teacup.”

“No,” said the Director, “a normal person would pull the plug. Do you want a bed near the window?”