Category: Culture

  • Are Mormons too conforming and uniform?

    I’m way behind the times, I know. But as you know, I’ve been getting my house in order. When I watched the recent  “Rock Center: Mormon in America”  they asked if our strict code of conduct meant we were too uniform and conforming. I liked how it was answered by the wife in the family…

  • Information Pollution

    Driving down the road one day, I was thinking of things to use in a story when a billboard caught my attention. It had nothing of real use to me, but now my thoughts were on what kind of events radio stations put on and who goes there and why. My mind had gone completely…

  • Fiber arts in world building

    I like to knit. It does a lot of things for me. I decided to take it up instead of doing Mahjong or Solitaire or other memory/puzzle games that I used to “defrag” my brain. That way, I’d be increasing a useful skill, and milestones would be things that I could actually use myself or…

  • Introducing Dinner and Movie: Alice in Wonderland

    My husband Vladimir and I like movies. A lot. We like them for their stories and also for the fact that they are a great visual art form. Through Geekatplay Studio, we’ve started doing reviews. We like to eat too. In fact, Vladimir was once a trained chef. He’s still trained, but doesn’t do it…

  • The Killers Concert

     I’d said right after the concert was done that I would blog about it, so my oldest daughter has been waiting for this post. So I guess I must. It isn’t that I don’t want to write about it. It is just that I have had second thoughts about how much I want to say.…

  • Who gets to define bad science?

    If you know me, you know I’m religious. A faithful Mormon to be exact. And you know that I’m skeptical. There is a church in the area I live that has a sign with sayings posted on it. This week, the quote is “The real opium of the masses is bad science.” Hmmmm. That could…

  • First impressions of a really new school

    So after some inspiration from my sister, Tonya, I enrolled my eleven year old daughter into a charter school. Her friend situation at the other school wasn’t the best, and I felt lukewarm about both the teachers and the principal who seemed less supportive of the accelerated program my daughter was in. Since I’d come…

  • New Orleans

    The city that never sleeps. I’d forgotten about that little tag. We got in on Sunday night at 10, worried about finding a decent place to eat. We shouldn’t have. We got out of the hotel room on Royal Street and the city was as busy as if it were day. It turned out that…

  • George Bernard Shaw quote

    I follow John Cusack, an actor I’ve loved since I was fifteen, on Twitter. He tends to tweet a lot of quotes, to the point that this morning I complained that his massive amounts of tweets had drowned out my real posse, a bunch of writers mostly and some other friends and my sister (none…

  • A bad trip

    On the way home from my book club tonight, I saw an advertisement for Impact Training. Oh man, did that bring back some memories. I’m not sure whether to be thankful or angry. You see, my parents did this, way back in the mid eighties, when it was but a young company on the crest…