We’re just back from a showing of Home Alone with our granddaughter. It was hilarious. But I’m thinking much more of the audience that were there with us in the tiny theater. There were several little kids who were about our granddaughter’s age, and they had already met this morning during an activity in which at least two of them had created stuffed baby elk — which, of course, they brought along to watch the movie with them. They had all seen Home Alone before, and the atmosphere was not exactly restrained. So there were lots of loud spoilers, vocal commentary, and shrieks of delighted hilarity. That made the movie even better.
On Thanksgiving Day, we took her to see Moana 2. She loved it. I have to admit, though, that my wife and I didn’t think that the sequel was as good as the first Moana.
The merry madcaps over at the Peterson Obsession Board continue to amuse. As evidence of the contempt in which, according to the Obsession Board, the folks at Scripture Central hold me and all my works (including the Interpreter Foundation), they’re currently pointing to the relatively recent 54-minute video from Scripture Central entitled “The Witnesses of the Book of Mormon Documentary | A Marvelous Work Episode 5.”
The savants over at the Obsession Board are confident that probably nobody at Scripture Central watched the Interpreter film Witnesses, and this newer video proves to the satisfaction of the Obsession Board — their standard of proof isn’t very high — that, in the view of those at Scripture Central, Witnesses was incompetently done and grossly inadequate. That, they say, is why Scripture Central is effectively trying to “wallpaper” over Witnesses by simply replacing it, acting as if it never existed.
Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with “The Witnesses of the Book of Mormon Documentary | A Marvelous Work Episode 5”? Well, I can help: Scripture Central flew me back east for its filming and interviewed me for it, on camera, in and around Palmyra, New York; the former Harmony, Pennsylvania; and Kirtland, Ohio. (We spent about a week together. Between takes, of course, I suppose that they were probably hitting me, mocking me, and spitting at me. I must have suppressed the memory.) The Scripture Central video calls the attention of its viewers to Witnesses at least twice in its first five minutes, including its introduction of me as executive producer of a full-length feature film on the people that The Witnesses of the Book of Mormon Documentary | A Marvelous Work Episode 5 will shortly be discussing. This is perhaps not altogether surprising, given the fact that Scott Christopher, Scripture Central’s on-camera host for their video series, portrayed one of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon in the Interpreter Foundation’s docudrama sequel to Witnesses, which is entitled Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon. Plainly, you see, Interpreter and Scripture Central represent mutually exclusive sets, walled off from each other by, if not outright mutual hostility, at least deep disdain on Scripture Central’s part.
I’ll give you one more (probably redundant) example of the antics over at the Obsession Board: Yesterday, having just announced the online publication on Thursday of a chapter from a previously published Interpreter book, I made the following observation:
Incidentally, it was his belated discovery of (I think) last week’s installment of our book chapter reprint series — a series that has been going each and every week for at least two or three years now — that led one vigilant observer over on the Peterson Obsession Board to report to his associates there with breathless enthusiasm that the obviously failing Interpreter Foundation, finally (as long prophesied) on its last legs, has now been reduced merely to recycling old materials.
What’s really happening, of course, is that, once our book publications have had a reasonably lengthy chance to find their market and more or less recoup their costs, we make their contents available online, at no charge. We’re not in this for the money, after all. As do those who write for us, we want these books and these articles to reach (and to benefit) as large an audience as they can. So it’s always been our intention to, eventually, put all or almost all of what we do online, for free. Doing so is not, alas, evidence of our approaching demise.
A leading member of the Obsession Board’s zany pseudonymous cast — his moniker is (significantly?) close to “dumb-dud” — is now rising to his colleague’s defense, maintaining that Interpreter’s weekly online posting of reprinted book chapters on Thursdays somehow invalidates my oft-repeated observation that Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship has been publishing an unbroken series of new articles every Friday since 2012 — unless, of course, I’m disingenuously claiming reprinted book chapters as new journal articles. (As of yesterday, at least one new article has been published in our journal every single Friday for six hundred and forty consecutive weeks.) His logic is impeccable, of course. In much the same way that someone’s supposedly passionate devotion to Monday night football is disproven by his repeated Thursday golf games, or that a woman’s allegedly faithful attendance at Sunday church services is called into serious question by her volunteering at a soup kitchen on Tuesday mornings. Maybe, though, not quite in the same way that being tall is incompatible with being an engineer. Or that the color green cannot coexist with the quality of being round.
I once toyed (at least a quarter seriously) with compiling a logic handbook on the common “practical fallacies” or “informal fallacies.” My idea was that I would populate it entirely with real-life examples culled from a monthly anti-Mormon “newspaper” that I received for many years. Published by Utah Missions, Inc., a small “ministry” that was based in Marlow, Oklahoma, The Utah Evangel was an absolutely delightful treasure trove of such material. The Peterson Obsession Board isn’t even remotely as funny, but it would still be possible, if I chose, to devote a substantial portion of this blog to responding to its incomprehension, its consistently hostile spin, its unsleeping malice, and, very often, its sheer mendacity. I don’t choose to do so. Sometimes, though, I simply can’t resist the temptation to have a little fun at their expense. For which I offer my apologies.
Posted from Park City, Utah
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