Posthumously Baptize any Jews Lately?

As you, my loyal 3 readers, know I am in Salt Lake City right now for the American Society of Human Genetics meeting. We had a few hours to look around the city today and I wandered around, eventually coming across Temple Square. I went on the tour, conducted by two very nice women from the Phillipines. In fact for some reason all the tour guides were female. I'm fairly sure this was not by chance, as all of the travelling missionary Mormons are male, something I never really thought of until today.

They presented a very nice picture of the Mormon faith, including a 10 minute movie of Jesus healing some Native Americans in 34 AD (when they believe Jesus visited the North American continent to set up a church). Jesus was very white looking. All-in-all the tour was nice. There was actually a very pretty room painted with planets and stars with a statue of Jesus in the middle. The art was very not accurate (apparently earth is right next to something resembling saturn), but it was cool to look at.

By the end all of this niceness got to me and I bacame very angry at their practice of posthumous baptisms of non-Mormons. I did not know who to ask about this as everyone I went up to greeted me with a smile that was kind of eerie. There are even articles in the local Salt Lake City papers of this practice, going as far to say that Jews had been baptized in the same group as Adolf Hitler. Apparently the Mormon church said they had stopped doing this, but the article said diferently. I am not sure who was right and I wish that I had found the right person to talk to about this.

If I am wrong about this, and someone is in the know, please post here and tell me. I am going to try my best to find out if this practice is real. If it is, it stands against everything my fellow Jews have fought for to get to where we are as a people today. While I am not a "Super Jew", I still very strongly believe that a person's faith and relationship with God is their own business and other humans should not be involved with it unless the person is willing (informed consent anyone?). If a person died a Jew, they obviously wanted to be a Jew and worship God as a Jew. Not have someone yank their spirituality away from them after passing on.

I highly doubt that the Mormons would like it if another faith did something involving their spirituality after they could say nothing about it.

Anyway, thanks for the ranting time. I guess that's what these blogs are for... ranting and writing stuff down so you have an account of it. It's a great idea.

Greetings from the Great Salt Lake

Well, I'm here in Salt Lake City for he annual American Soceity of Human Genetics conference. It is a beautiful place, however I guess due to jet lag I can't really sleep right now.

The trip started off crappy cause I lost my CD wallet with a bunch of movies and music in it on the flight. If anyone finds a grey CD wallet with some Buffy and Angel DVDs they're mine!

SLC is nesteled in a valley with mountains all around. The Great Salt Lake is both gigantic and salty. I can tell its gigantic because from the plane, well, it was big. I can tell it's salty becuase there were deposits of salt all over the land on the sides of the freeway. Pretty cool.

Iget to stay in a Hilton. Pretty nice, and there's a cool clock that I can plug my cd player into, so I can hear my own music in the room. Nice touch Hilton. I was also pleasantly surprised there are no pictures of Paris Hilton anywhere in the establishment. Probably the only place on earth where you can avoid that person is in Hilton hotels. How ironic, and not Alanis Morrisette style ironic. Actual irony here at the Hilton hotels!

Anyway, I'm going to try to get back to sleep.

Cheerio-

Yaspan's Music Reviews - Coldplay (X&Y)

This finally came in from the library (Nashville has a GREAT public library, you can check out almost any CD out there. They have about 14,000 or something like that, all requestable over the web). The little bits of Coldplay I've heard are not really my cup of tea, but Coldplay is getting so much press I figured I'd check it out. Plus every time I look at a music player in a promo shot (like an mp3 player) it's playing Coldplay for some reason (see pics). Or looking at them together, it might just be that Coldplay has some sort of deal with XM Satellite Radio. Anyway, I just wondered why they were always playing this band.

Anyway, on to the (very) short review. It's a very dreamy, relaxing sound they have going on X & Y. I haven't heard any other of their albums so I can't compare, but this one sounds like a cross between Vangelis (Chariots of Fire, Blade Runner movie scores) and U2. I read that the singer and Gwynneth named their kid Apple. If they had twins, would the other one be named Jack? Sauce? Pie? Orange? I'd vote for Rhubarb myself. That's a cool name. A friend of mine told me he wanted to name his kid Cilantro. Cilantro Pandey. That's a damn cool name.

Marios a plenty!

Luckily for you I photoshopped out the naked Mario. Gotta keep the blog suitable for the youth.

Southernisms #1 - Noodling

Ever stuck your hand in goo and then shoved it into a cave tryig to get a fish to bite it? Well, me neither. From the Wikipedia site on Noodling -

"To begin, a noodler goes underwater to depths ranging from only a few feet to up to twenty feet. Placing his hand inside a discovered catfish hole, a noodler uses his arm as bait to entice the fish. If all goes as planned, the catfish will swim forward and latch onto the fisherman's hand and arm."

Free iPod shuffle

https://promo.schwabon.com/AD046/AD046Home.asp?campaign=ccip05&mp=ccip05g4x1

You can sign up for this credit card and make one purchase and you'll get a free iPod shuffle...

UFO Sightings Near You

The power of burred vision and Google maps are now one! Check to see if there was a UFO sighting near you. Surprisingly, there was only one sighting last month in New Mexico...

http://www.ufomaps.com/

What is this?

What is this? I got it in the package for an ebay auction. It is obviously patriotic, but what is the blue blob? The little blobs sticking out of the edges sort of look like states, but the one that might be Florida resembles an appendix more than anything else. Any and all suggestions as to just what the blue blob is would be greatly appreciated!

Some ones that come to mind:
1) Southeastern USA
2) Rorschach ink blot
3) Ketchup dripped on a flag and then photoshopped to be blue
4) Malformed body appendages

Yaspan's Movie Reviews - The Fly 2!

The Fly 2! I watched this movie today with Eric Stoltz as the genetically afflicted insect-man-boy and Daphne Zuniga (from Spaceballs) as his love interest. Surprisingly, it wasn't bad until the trite ending. However it did have its share of cool bad-horror-movie staples... the woman alone in the lab with the thing, lots of screaming, an evil corporation, and some obligatory gross fly vomit scenes. Best was the guy who gets his fingers ripped off and then shows it to the camera, screaming. Pretty cool though. There were about 10 screenwriters, but one of them was Frank Darabont, who later went on to do The Shawshank Redemption.

Of course it's going to be compared to the 1986 remake of The Fly starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, and in terms of the prior movie, this one isn't too good. Not too good at all. But if you are hankering to watch a movie with fly vomit, you really don't have much of a choice now do you?

Now that I've figured out how to add images from the web...

Here's a fun one...

So if we start breeding pirates, the temperatures will go down. Also, parrots will have something useful to do with their lives.

Well, I'm sick

Yay, I'm sick. What a yukky feeling. However, I get to watch bad movies like Human Nature, about feral man-beasts and women with too much body hair that can sing (http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60022936&trkid=189530). It was a "Netflix Recommendation" and since I never tried one, I thought I might as well give it a try. They rhymed something with "follicles". That's all I'll really say.

There are other advantages to being sick. One is that if someone is mean to you, you can threaten to cough on them. I never do it, but it's fun in my head to play out the scenario.

Me: Stop being mean or I'll cough on you with my GERMS
Howard Hughes: AARRGGHH!!! Where's the Kleenex boxes?