Bryce Moore's Blog, page 321

High School Music

I don't have a ton of time today, but I wanted to mention some thoughts that came to mind last night. Denisa and I took the kids out to a concert at our local high school. Four groups performed: the jazz band, a fiddle group, an a capella group, and a womens chorus. First of all, if any of my faithful readers out there were in any of the groups (I knew three or four people in them), allow me to say you did a fantastic job. I was really interested to see just how good the music program in my s...

A Tribute to Denisa

Well, the time has come. March Madness is over, and it's time to take stock of how my blog bracket did this year. I'm pleased to say that I had the best participation ever: 8 people filled out brackets, including myself. What were the final standings?

8th--Sabrina
7th--Kevin (Not your year this go 'round. My condolences.)
6th--My brother, Joel
5th--Whitley, a friend from the mission
4th--Steve, a cousin
3rd--Ted, another cousin
2nd--ME

And in first place, none other than . . . my wife. That's right, ...

Astronomy

This past Friday, I took TRC out to our university's observatory, where the first Friday of every month, an astronomy professor takes whoever shows up on a tour of the night sky, using the university's pretty darn nice telescope. All of this, free of charge? Sign me up. It was a tad brisk outside that night--we were glad we wore our coats--but the sky was clear and we saw quite the show. Nebulae, galaxies, globular clusters (which sounds like a candy bar), binary stars, Mars, and our personal...

What I'm Going to Do with My Weekend

It's General Conference weekend, which means that there will be ten hours of speeches by Mormon leaders on a variety of religious topics. This happens twice a year (once in April, once in October). It's broken up into five 2 hour meetings. Back when I was growing up, you had to go to a Mormon meeting house to watch these. Now, it's on BYUTV on most satellite packages, and it's also online here, with video in English, Portuguese, ASL, French and Spanish, and audio streams in 68 languages. Let ...

Movie Review: The Soloist

Sometimes a movie tries to do to much. Tries to be bigger than it really should be. The Soloist is an excellent example of this. On the surface, it should be great. Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey, Jr.? Great, right? Wrong. The movie about a mentally imbalanced celloist and the reporter who discovers him and brings him to the attention of a city ends up feeling pretentious and too darn long. It's almost 2 hours, and it maybe had an hour and a half of good material in there. Perhaps if they'd gon...

In Which I Take a Stand on the Best Cartoon of the 80s

Because yesterday's post inspired so much love and happiness in the hearts of all my readers, I thought I'd follow it up with something much more likely to cause people to become bitter and angry.

Transformers was the best cartoon of the 80s, hands down. Take your GI Joe, your He-Man, your Thundercats, your Voltron, and throw 'em out the window. Autobots vs. Decepticons, baby. It's all about the Energon.

Oh yeah.

In Which I Take a Stand on the Health Care Thing

Okay people. Listen up. I've debated getting into this publicly, because it's very clear that there are a lot of feelings involved in this health care thing, and I try my best not to hurt other people's feelings. That said, people won't shut up about it, and there comes a point when I've had enough--where enough people are talking about something, that I feel a public response by Yours Truly is justified.

It's gotten to that point with health care.

A bit of history about me and my political vie...

Book Review: Under the Dome

Under the Dome by Stephen King


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I had a personal connection to this book, since the setting could have been swapped (more or less) with my current hometown. For all I know, it was based on my current hometown. In any case, it was fun to see many familiar places, phrases and inside references made throughout the book. As for the book itself, I couldn't put it down. Literally. I lost sleep over this book, and I blazed through its 1068 pages in three days or so. One of the ...

Elkanah Oakes

Last Thursday my mom was in town, and she took us out to dinner for DKC's birthday. We went to a place nearby (great Italian food!) that also had a huge wall-sized map of the area, dating back to 1861. The food was a while in coming, so to pass the time, I got up to look at the map. After a bit of studying, I discovered that it not only had individual houses on it, but it had MY house on it--along with who owned it. This was pretty exciting for me. When we bought the house, we were told it wa...

Thoughts on Lost

Figured I'd take a minute to pontificate on Lost. I'll avoid spoilers here, in case any of you are behind on the season. DKC and I have been watching each week, and I've really been pleased with the season. One of the things I think stands out particularly with this series is that, while people talk about all the mysteries and plot twists of the story, the writers recognize that what really engages people are the characters. If you have characters that people can relate to and care about, the...