Bryce Moore's Blog, page 52

Where’s the Outrage?

I’m more than a little puzzled by the significant lack of any sort of real response on social media today. I woke up to the headlines of Russia rolling into Ukraine, and I’ve been reading the updates as the day has unfolded: attacks on sites across Ukraine, military coming in on three sides of the country, planes and helicopters being shot down, missile strikes being videoed.

A couple of my friends have posted something about these events on Facebook, but by and large my feed is filled with the same memes and chatter that they’re filled with every day. On the one hand, I’m not really expecting the world to stop these days whenever any one thing happens, but there’s a big difference between “unanimous outrage” and “a couple of mentions.” I remember when an event like the attacks in Paris caused everyone and their brother to change their profile picture to the French flag. Now a European country literally is invaded by another, and we’re talking about cat memes?

This isn’t to shame all the people who are posting anything other than outrage, but rather just to question what changed? My guess (and it’s only a guess) boils down to a few things:

General social media outrage fatigue. Since the election of 2020 and the events of COVID since then, people are just tired of saying anything at all of substance on Facebook. It’s easier to just ignore anything that might be remotely controversial.There’s been a slow build up to the invasion. We’ve been hearing for weeks that Russia was likely going to do this, and now (surprise surprise) they actually did. So the shock is missing that comes with an attack out of the blue.Americans just aren’t as familiar with/sympathetic to Ukraine. It was behind the Iron Curtain back in the day, and they don’t feel the same connection to it that they feel with more well known countries like Paris. (Speaking as the husband of a Slovak, which shares a border with Ukraine, I am anything but unconcerned about today’s invasion.)People are somehow worried about causing a ruckus on Facebook. Yes, you’d think “invading a nation” would be something we can all agree is a bad thing. However, since just a day or two ago, some called Putin’s moves “genius” and “wonderful,” apparently that isn’t a unified sentiment, after all.

When I was growing up, I was fairly convinced we were going to have World War III in the not too distant future. I was worried about being drafted when it happened, and I was worried about nuclear strikes on America. So maybe this resonates with me more than it does with people who didn’t grow up in that environment? I really hope somehow this situation doesn’t deteriorate further, but I’m also not sure simple sanctions are going to do the trick. That’s what happened back with Crimea, and here we are with a worse situation on our hands.

I don’t know. I’m not an expert in geopolitics. All I know is I’m concerned, and I’m worried the seeming lack of concern being voiced by others will only make things worse. Hopefully I’m wrong.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Temperature Free Fall

I just got back from a brief walk outside. It’s 60 degrees at the moment, which for Maine is pretty darned incredible for February 23rd. I was out in short sleeves, and it felt lovely. Of course, tonight it’s supposed to get down to 9 degrees. A 51 degree drop in about 12 hours. And as nice as 60 degrees feels when you’re used to temperatures in the teens, that brief respite can make the return to normal feel that much colder.

Another issue with temperatures like this? We’ve got a fair bit of snow on the ground. When it gets warm, snow melts. If you’re a fan of winter, that in and of itself is an issue, but even if you aren’t, you have to remember that what melts can also freeze. This morning I had to walk down a hill just off campus. It hasn’t been kept clear over the winter, and so between the freezing raining last night and the melt off this morning, it’s a miracle I was able to make my way down that hill without breaking something. I was literally ice skating downhill at points, unable to stop and just hoping I kept my balance.

Tonight, when all that runoff completely freezes again on that hill? Let’s just say I don’t think I’ll be using it anytime soon. Thankfully my driveway is clear, so I don’t think I’ll have that issue this time. (There have been some winters where my driveway turns into a skating rink.)

Personally, for as nice as it felt to have it be so warm on my walk today, I’d rather it stay around 20 degrees the whole winter. Cold enough that the snow doesn’t go anywhere and that any precipitation comes as snow, but not so cold that your forehead complains. It’s the yo-yoing back and forth that I really don’t like. And freezing rain is terrible. It leads to car crashes and downed power lines.

Thankfully, we’re supposed to get another 6 inches or so of snow on Friday, so we’ll at least have a bit of the wintry atmosphere back in its proper place in two days. (Except now some of that snow will be covering glare ice, so you’ll never know which footstep you take will be good, and which footstep will make you want to fall down.)

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Caring about Arbitrary Things

It’s the 22nd day of the 2nd month of the 22 year of this millennium. It’s also a Tuesday. And while part of me can see why this seems like a particularly cooler day than any other day, another part of me is kind of baffled why it should feel that way. Was this always a thing, or did it just wait until Facebook, so people could post about “today is a day that will never happen again for the next buhzillion years, because __________”?

It’s funny: there are some things that I end up doing that make no sense to the rational part of me at all. Knocking on wood to “ward off bad luck,” for example. Somehow I got in the habit that I need to knock on wood (typically my head) whenever I say something I want to happen, just so I don’t “jinx it.” On the one hand, I guess if I really believed in jinxing things, then maybe this makes sense. Except I knock on wood when I’m watching DVR’ed sports games.

Why in the world do I do that?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that jinxing things is possible. So do I somehow believe that the universe doesn’t just rearrange itself based on the random things I happen to say at any one point in time, but it will wait to see what I say in the future, and then go back to rearrange itself in the past to mess up whatever it was that I didn’t want to mess up. That makes total sense, right?

If I really did have this power, imagine the sorts of ways I could use it to my advantage. World leaders would just have to manipulate me to the point that I don’t want something to happen that they actually DO want to happen, and then as long as they can get me to say that thing, and then not be able to knock on my head, then voila! It would happen. While I wouldn’t be able to place bets around the skill myself (since I’d have to really not want whatever it was to happen, or else it wouldn’t work.), my friends could easily do it. Bet against my favorite team, and then watch the game with me, get me to say something, and then keep me from knocking on wood.

It’s preposterous. I know it. Everyone else knows it. And yet I continue to do it. This despite the fact that I like to think of myself as sane, and not too egotistical. So I guess the conclusion I should draw from this is that I should give a break to people who want to get really excited about a bunch of numbers in an arbitrary calendar system lining up in a certain way.

Happy 2-22-22 Tuesday, everybody!

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Your Daily Dose of Doofus

You would think, after more than 40 years of experience on this earth, that I would generally be with it when it comes to basic mechanical devices. I know my way around computers pretty well. I can tinker around with most things and get them to work. I’d like to think I’m capable of doing basic things like, say, replacing windshield wipers on my car. Right?

Due to an overzealous ice scraping incident, my old wipers were giving me trouble. The rubber had separated from the end of one of them, and it looked like a rat tail moving back and forth across my windshield. No problem! I ordered some replacements, and they came yesterday. When I took them out, I was surprised to see they were yellow, for some reason. “Maybe it’s supposed to look more high tech,” I thought to myself.

I followed the instructions and successfully had them on my Prius in about 2 minutes. I tried them out as soon as I drove off. Instead of really wiping, they generally just smeared the wiper fluid across my windshield. “Must be because it’s too cold out, and the . . . wiper fluid froze.” Sure. It made sense. Or maybe wipers need to soak in a bit of liquid before they really get going.

Well, this morning it was raining (boo!), so I had a new chance to try out the wipers. They . . . really did a poor job. I had a hard time seeing through the glass, it was so smeary. Needless to say, I was really dejected. I’d thrown out my old wipers, so now I had nothing and would have to make a trip to the store. Strangely, a yellow leaf had gotten stuck underneath one of them. Maybe that was what was . . .

That’s when I realized that it’s February in Maine, and any leaf that somehow managed to be anywhere right now, definitely wouldn’t be yellow. And actually, weren’t those wiper blades yellow? Could they be falling off somehow? Maybe they were defective.

I pulled over to the side of the road, got out, and inspected them.

After I removed the yellow protective covers from them, the wipers worked like a charm.

So here’s your helpful PSA for the day: wipers don’t work nearly as well if you try to use them with plastic over the actual blades.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Drivers License Tests

After a fair number of COVID-related (and other) delays, Tomas is finally facing down the bane of many a teenager’s existence: the drivers license test. And as I’ve been getting him ready for the thing, I’ve (naturally) reflected back on what I can remember of when I got my license. While I might like to pretend it wasn’t that long ago, it was actually 27 years, so . . . yeah.

I got my test on my first try. We had to drive a fair distance to get to the testing spot. I don’t remember that much of the actual test. I knew friends of mine had failed on their first try (or two), and I knew I didn’t want to be one of them. I was confident about most things, except for parallel parking. I also remember they had me parallel park between two cones, as opposed to between actual cars.

Of course, these days I still have enough trouble parallel parking that I will actively look for anywhere else to park before I resort to giving those skills another test. I hate the pressure around parallel parking. Making people behind me on the street wait (and watch) as I fumble my way through it. It’s not that I can’t do it–but it can take two tries, and that’s enough to make me not want to do it if at all possible.

I get that one of the main reasons to test parallel parking is to show the tester that you’re able to put the car where you want it to go. I also get that (at least where I typically drive) there aren’t that many places around that require me to put that skill into practice, so it’s no big surprise that when I’m asked to actually do the thing, I still struggle to do it. If I parallel parked all the time, I’m sure I’d (eventually) get better at it.

In any case, I wondered if any of you had any interesting stories around drivers tests. Mine is so boring. (I came. I drove. I passed.) No accidents. No near misses. No nothing. But surely some people out there had something with more pizzaz happen. So . . . care to share?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Power of Quackery

The psychology class keeps chugging along, and I keep finding new and interesting things to think about. (Which makes me think if I’d taken an intro to psychology class during my undergraduate career, I might have ended up a psychology major instead of a linguistics major. Maybe I’m just a sucker for interesting things . . .) For our next class, we read up on the proper use of case studies and the way they inevitably get abused.

I’m (fairly) sure you all know what a case study is: an in-depth analysis of a single person’s experiences with something. In an ideal world, case studies suggest areas for further investigation. Simply knowing that one person had a certain experience is no reason to conclude that single experience is properly understood, and that the conclusions it raises should be applied to everyone.

However, that’s often what people end up doing, day after day, when they look at their own experiences and decide they can reach all sorts of conclusions about How Life Is. A simple example: there was a local restaurant in town that I’d heard good things about from many different people. I hadn’t had a chance to make it there, but one Chester Greenwood Day they were offering free samples of soup. I tried one, and it was one of the worst soups I’ve ever had. So despite the fact that many other people had gone and enjoyed the restaurant, I never went back. That one experience was all I needed to know it was bad.

I fall into the same hole when I’m looking at online reviews of something I’m thinking about buying. I can see that 10,000 people gave something 5 stars, but I also see that 50 people gave it one star, and that they wrote long reviews about how awful it was. A lot of the time, those few in-depth bad reviews are enough to keep me from pulling the trigger, despite the fact that the vast majority of people disagree. (Well, that and the knowledge that sometimes those reviews are falsified . . .)

People fall for this trap when looking at science, as well. The vast majority of scientific data will say one thing, but a few outliers will say something else, and some end up giving that small slice much more credence than the rest, just because it agrees with what they want to believe anyway.

When these small outliers are deliberate, the text defines them as quackery, and it makes a point of showing just how easy it is to fall for it, especially when it’s somehow connected to a trusted source. (The example it uses is one where Oprah Winfrey used one of her shows to highlight an “alternative medicine” approach to treating cancer. After the show aired, a fan wrote to her, gushing about how wonderful it was, and how she’d decided to stop her doctor’s suggested cancer treatment to follow this new approach instead. Winfrey tried to convince her otherwise, but too late. She stopped treatment, and then she died soon after.

The fact is, it’s not that difficult to fine “case studies” that prove just about anything you want to prove, and many have started to criticize science, saying “they always end up contradicting themselves anyway, so why should I listen?” But in the end, I believe informed decisions are the best decisions, and that relies on the information being correct. When science ends up being wrong about something, it says so. Publicly. And just because it was wrong doesn’t mean it was deceitful. It was using the best data available to make the best conclusions possible. Sometimes that pans out; sometimes it doesn’t.

But friends don’t let friends fall victim to quackery.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

A Superb Super Bowl

I realize the Super Bowl isn’t for everyone. And honestly, I am far from a raging NFL fan. Often, the Super Bowl is the only game I watch each year. (I’m a much bigger college football fan, although even then, I typically just watch BYU games and leave the rest alone–even the national championship and bowl games.) But I do watch the Super Bowl each year, mainly because of all the trappings around it. I enjoy seeing what commercials they come up with, I like critiquing the half time show, and I cross my fingers that the game is actually a good one.

Last night’s was fun from the beginning to the end, despite the fact that I literally didn’t care who won, so long as it was a close game. (That meant that I was largely rooting for Cincinnati the whole time, because underdog.) The game itself was really compelling, with the outcome in question all the way to the end of the fourth quarter. (Well, almost.) There were some great plays, some questionable calls, and more than enough to really keep me watching the whole time.

It helped that the halftime show was really well done. The last one I really remember is Lady Gaga’s performance in 2017, and if I can’t remember the halftime show, then in my book it pretty much failed. The Weeknd? Shakira? Maroon 5? Timberlake? They’re all generally a blur to me. Yes, this could be due to the fact that I’m not as squarely in the age demographic for those artists, but I’m also not a huge rap-o-phile. Yet I recognized most of the songs, and it was full of spectacle.

The ads were also entertaining. It’s interesting to me how many of them end of getting very different reactions from people. For example, I thought the Dolly Parton ad was disappointing. She so often speaks out for important causes, to have her instead participate in a spoof of those causes was a bad match for me. But the floating QR code was right up my alley. Memorable, and it even got me to immediately do something in response to it. (I don’t remember ever watching an ad and then suddenly going to buy some Pringles, for example.) $15 in free money? Sure, I’m game, even if it meant I had to sign up for a service.

Other ads I liked included the Disney+ goats, the Uber Eats “don’t eat diapers and other stuff” ad, the Toyota ad that featured the skiing brothers (though random that it was about Toyota), and the Alexa mindreader ad.

On the other hand, I didn’t care for the Google camera ad (the pictures they showed that were bad were mostly poorly lit, while the improved pictures all had wonderful lighting, so I felt it didn’t really show anything) and the Schwarzenegger Zeud ad (no.) But those were the only ones that really stood out to me as bad (other than the Dolly one).

So all-in-all, I was entertained for the whole time last night. What about you–what did you think?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Olympics: Yay or Neigh?

The Olympics are back. Again. It feels like we just had them, because we pretty much did. (Hard to believe this used to be the norm: having the summer and winter Olympics back to back. The new way is much better.)

My family and I are watching them quite a bit, but I’ve seen just about no chatter about them online anywhere. I have my own theories about why that’s happening, but I’m curious to see what other people think as well. I’ll run down the possibilities:

The fact that the Olympics are taking place in China is a big turn off for some. There are the political ramifications and the human rights issues, and people don’t want to support something they don’t think should be happening where it’s happening.With COVID happening, people just don’t care about the Olympics. There are much more important things to focus on, like Russia possibly invading Ukraine and breaking the whole world.People are burned out over the Olympics. It was too soon to bring them back, and so they just don’t care all that much.

Personally, I think the main reason Olympics coverage isn’t doing so hot in the US can be laid at the feet of NBC and they way they’ve continually handled them. I really (really) dislike the America-first message of their shows, and the huge amount of pressure and “importance” they seem to want to place on these athletes. They constantly seem to be more interested in an individual story than in covering the excitement of the games.

The Super Bowl’s on Sunday. Imagine if its coverage was like the Olympics. Instead of celebrating an awesome play, they tell us the back story of the wide receiver. Then they go on and on about the coach and cut away to people’s families huddled in front of the TV in their living rooms. They cut away from the action in the middle of the first quarter and jump over to tell us what’s happening in golf right then. We see a few highlights of that, and then someone in the studio shows us all what a “football” is and talks about its history. They come back to the game just in time for the halftime show, which they show in its entirety without any commentary at all.

And on and on it goes.

These days, I’d really like NBC to give up it’s insistence on trying to build a Big Audience, and instead just let us easily choose what sports we want to watch, when we want to watch them. Yes, it’s somewhat possible to do that now, but through my YouTubeTV account, it’s very hard to actually figure out what event I’m going to see. Perhaps it’s better on the NBC app, but what’s up with that? They’re holding the Olympics hostage so they can sell us their new whatever?

Ugh.

Going into the games, Mikaela Shiffrin was held up as this unstoppable force. “She will likely win 5 gold medals. Count ’em: five!” Coverage of the giant slalom was all focused on her, with some mention of Petra Vlhova (from Slovakia!) as the person who might foil our fair heroine. And then . . . Mikaela wiped out on like the fifth turn, and the coverage was forced to hem and haw their way, trying to justify what happened. Then last night, Mikaela fell down again in the slalom. It was so upsetting for NBC’s coverage, that they completely changed sports.

And Mikaela? She sat down on the course after she fell, and stayed there for 20 minutes. And then when she came down, NBC shoved a camera in her face and asked her to detail what went wrong and why. You can watch her reevaluate her life decisions LIVE! ON CAMERA!

You want to know what happened? She fell down. Twice. It happens. The fact that she fell down in the Olympics doesn’t invalidate her being an awesome skier. And she shouldn’t be made to feel like a failure, especially when she’s got 3 more events to race.

I might be biased (spoiler: I am), but I was really happy to see Petra win Slovakia’s first alpine medal, and have it be gold. It was just a great story that naturally arose from the way the event played out. She went into the second run back by .72 seconds, which is a big chunk of change in the slalom. She came from eighth place to win it all. Drama, without any need to tell us why it’s dramatic.

One of my current favorite events is the biathlon. I don’t know anything about the skiers. I don’t really have a dog in the fight in terms of me caring who wins. But to see all those Nordic skiers go out and race their hearts out, and then have the drama of watching them shoot for 20 different targets . . . it’s fantastic. And I don’t need NBC to tell me the back history of everyone’s grandmother and the time they got their first puppy.

But NBC does all of that every. single. Olympics. I keep tuning in, but the way I do it now is to generally avoid watching them live. I watch them delayed, so I can skip all the ads and skip all the sob stories. I watch the events I want, even though it takes some effort to find them. What would be super helpful for me would be if NBC were to provide a site where they said “Watch this event, it ended up really good.” Don’t spoil the outcome. Just tell me it’s particularly noteworthy.

Somehow, I doubt that’s going to happen.

Anyway. That’s my take on the Olympics. How about you: are you watching? Why or why not?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve posted the entirety of my book ICHABOD in installments, and I’m now putting up chapters from PAWN OF THE DEAD, another of my unreleased books. Where else are you going to get the undead and muppets all in the same YA package? Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking this PERFECT PLACE TO DIE Amazon link. It will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Yes, Church Leaders Make Mistakes. Sometimes Big Ones

Sigh. Yet again, someone from my church is making waves in the news for saying something stupid. This time, it’s a member of the General Young Men’s presidency, who gave a talk the other day covering a wide range of topics. The talk was Zoomed, and the Zoom recording made its way to the interwebs, and . . . it blew up from there. The part that’s receiving the most attention is when he started to try and defend why there was a priesthood ban for Black members of the church until 1978. Maybe not defend it so much as deflect the issue.

“Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe instead of saying why did the Blacks have to wait until 1978, maybe what we should be asking is, “Why did the whites and other races have to wait until 1829?””

That . . . is problematic on a variety of levels. Part of me feels like it’s so problematic, no one should need to outline why it’s problematic. But since apparently some people don’t see it as problematic, I’ll do it anyway:

It’s a generally cavalier attitude to have about something that was deeply hurtful for decades and decades to a whole group of people. To dismiss that hurt in such a flippant way (and to do it in such dehumanizing terms–“the Blacks”) is appalling.It’s historically inaccurate. When Joseph Smith led the church, Black members were allowed to have the priesthood. This is indisputable. It’s only when Brigham Young took over the reins that the priesthood ban grew into what lasted until 1978. So the question is actually “Why were Black members allowed to have the priesthood, and then told they couldn’t anymore?”It brushes aside the real problems with that ban, saying essentially that “it wasn’t in God’s timeline” for people of all races to have the priesthood. His talk goes on to touch on other hot button topics in the same manner, dismissing critiques of the church by deflecting with (attempted?) humor time and time again. Whether it’s the way women are treated in the church, or the way the church views other religions. (He says other churches are just “playing religion.” Sort of like kids play house when they’re little. How in the world someone can’t see that would be insulting to the billions of religious people across the world . . . )

I’m sure I’m missing some problems with it, but I’m also short on time, and there’s a lot I want to say. In the end, this sort of thinking isn’t unique to Wilcox. These are sentiments that have been repeated again and again throughout the church. (Not that all church members believe them, but many do.)

Now, Wilcox has apologized for his statement, and I appreciate that:

“My dear friends, I made a serious mistake last night, and I am truly sorry. The illustration I attempted to use about the timing of the revelation on the priesthood for Black members was wrong. I’ve reviewed what I said and I recognize that what I hoped to express about trusting God’s timing did NOT come through as I intended. To those I offended, especially my dear Black friends, I offer my sincere apologies, and ask for your forgiveness. I am committed to do better.”

And BYU (where Wilcox teaches religion) issued a statement around it as well:

“We are deeply concerned with the words recently used by Dr. Brad Wilcox. We appreciate his sincere apology and believe he is committed to learn from this experience. BYU remains committed to upholding President Nelson’s charge to root out racism in our institutions. We are carrying out the guiding principles outlined by President Worthen in evaluating and implementing the recommendations provided by the Committee on Race, Equity and Belonging, including the creation of a new Office of Belonging.”

However, (and it’s a big however), this isn’t something Wilcox just said in an off-the-cuff remark. He’s been giving this exact talk for at least two years. There’s a YouTube video of him presenting it to the Lilburn Georgia Stake back in 2020. There’s some slight phrasing differences, but it’s the same message. It would be nice to have him recognize he’s been spreading this same thought for years, and if the thought is so concerning to BYU, one would think there would be repercussions beyond “we appreciate his sincere apology.” Can we somehow come up with something that will tell all the people who heard this talk and accepted it as doctrine that it was wrong wrong wrong?

Set all of that aside for a moment, because (believe it or not) it’s not really what I want to talk about today. What I’d like to focus on is why we as church members seem to be so fearful of admitting church leaders make mistakes. Sometimes big ones. (I mean, case in point: Brother Wilcox just made a pretty big, public mistake. Not nearly as big as denying the priesthood to an entire race for 100 years, but still damaging.)

I think somehow we’re afraid of letting our leaders be human. It’s easy for us to look back in the Bible and say prophets made mistakes. Just this week in Come Follow Me, we’re reading about Abraham going to Egypt and asking his wife not to tell anyone she’s his wife, because he was worried they’d want to kill him and take her. That’s . . . questionable, to say the least. Or we’ll read about Noah getting drunk and lying around naked, or Moses going against the word of God and being barred from entering the promised land. We’ll read about Saul persecuting the church, or Peter denying Christ three times. And we’ll come up with reasons for why those mistakes were justified, or we’ll reason them away in some other fashion.

But while we’re doing that, we’ll also talk about how we know church leaders and prophets aren’t infallible. How only one perfect person lived on earth, and that was Christ. But we seem to be very reluctant to admit church leaders could make big mistakes. There’s no way a latter-day prophet could have been racist, for example, despite being the product of a nation rife with slavery.

The church has been quite vocal recently about its desire to do away with racism, but then it’ll have incidents like this, where blatantly racist, insensitive things are not just being preached from the pulpit, they’re being preached by a BYU professor. And not just a BYU professor, but one of the main leaders for the Young Men’s organization in the church. When you have a thorny history of race relations, can you see how something like Wilcox’s speech could be more than just “he apologized, so it’s all okay now”?

I believe you can make big mistakes and still be a good person. (But that’s mainly because I think so many of us can and do make big mistakes.) “Good” is a very subjective term. You can be a founding father of America, and have been intrinsically part of the creation of a huge step forward in freedom, and yet also be a slaveholder who did very bad things. We can admire someone for the good they accomplished, while still recognizing the huge mistakes they made. Coming up with new and inventive ways of saying those mistakes weren’t actually mistakes . . . does what? How is that helpful for anyone?

I’m disappointed on a lot of different levels today. Disappointed that there’s yet another very public instance of someone in my church making a big blunder. Disappointed that the response feels so lukewarm, especially when it’s clear this wasn’t a one off event. Disappointed that so many, many members heard this same speech, and that it persisted this long in its same form. That no one thought to speak up and say, “This isn’t right.” Of course, I can understand why no one did. The church strongly frowns on its members criticizing people in leadership positions. But when those leaders are making such obvious errors, it shouldn’t take a leaked Zoom video to correct them. Not if we’re in a church that truly believes in rooting out racism.

Is Brad Wilcox racist? I have no idea. I don’t know him at all. But the attitude expressed in his talk is a very clear example of the sort of problematic approach to race many Americans (and church members) follow. It’s white privilege, plain and simple. His discussion of other religions is elitist and wrong. His dismissal of people with actual concerns about the church is actively damaging.

We make a big deal of our pioneer heritage. We celebrate it. Youth groups across the country even reenact it each summer. But at the same time we do that, we seem to want to ignore the big mistakes made by those same pioneers. To say “that was then, this is now,” as if we can sweep all of that under the rug and move on. But the more we sweep things under the rug without actively addressing it, the more those things fester, resulting in talks like the one we’re discussing today.

We want to say we’ve moved beyond it. The evidence says we definitely have not.

Tracking My Sleep

After I’ve been learning all this stuff about how important sleep is, I decided maybe I should start taking my sleep a little more seriously. I have an Apple Watch, and word on the street was that I could use it to track my sleep. I wasn’t ever doing it, mainly because the battery on that thing needs to be charged every night, so how in the world was I supposed to wear it at night and somehow keep it charged?

Two seconds of Googling showed me it charges in under two hours, so I can wear it at night and during the day, and then charge it for a couple of hours before I go to bed. So much for that excuse.

However, I also discovered that Apple’s native Sleep app only works on Watch series 3 and on. Mine is a series 2. While this does incentivize me to buy a new Apple Watch sooner rather than later, I wasn’t too keep on dropping another $400 just to track my sleep. So were there any free options available?

Yes there were.

Pillow tracks your sleep for nothing, though it has a subscription service that adds on bells and whistles like recording what you sound like when you sleep(?), analyzing your sleep patterns over time, and other stuff I haven’t really paid that much attention to. All I know is that I installed it, paid nothing, and I’ve already gotten an overview of how my sleep has been going for the past few nights.

In a revelation that should surprise no one, but did surprise me, I get significantly less sleep than I told myself I did. In my head, I went to bed around 10:30 and woke up at 6:30. 8 hours a night. See? I was fine. In practice, looking at the numbers, I start trying to go to sleep around 11, and I actually get to sleep around 11:30 or 12. (Though I think there’s a chance the app takes a bit of time to really be sure I’m asleep, I also think it’s probably closer to being right than I’d like it to be.) And while yes, I wake up around 6:20 (before my alarm goes off), I also wake up once or twice in the night. Which all means I usually get more like 6.5 hours of sleep.

(Rule of thumb: if you ever want to really know what you’re doing, track it. Track your calories. Track your exercise. Track your time. If you’re anything like me, it’s way too easy to give yourself the benefit of the doubt. A lot.)

So now that I know that, what do I want to do about it?

I’m going to continue tracking it, of course. In my experience, just by being more aware of how I’m doing in something makes me likelier to do better in it. (I improve in the things I consciously pay attention to. Go figure.) And I’m trying to get to bed at an earlier time each night. I’m not sure how well this is going to go, because I really prefer being up late, but I also prefer being healthy, so . . . yeah. I do think I’m improving already. My sleep totals for each night since I’ve been tracking?

7 hours 9 minutes (Friday night)6 hours 50 minutes (Saturday night)7 hours 20 minutes (Sunday night)5 hours 35 minutes (Monday night–this is where I had to admit I might have a problem)6 hours 57 minutes (Last night, when I had convinced myself to go to bed earlier)

So yes, this doesn’t look as bad as I had walked away thinking. (Second lesson: I’m often harder on myself than I ought to be), but that Monday night was the first real normal weekday night, and I’d thought I’d done really well. Whoops.

We’ll see how well I can stick with this, and if I can really improve how I’m doing. We’ll also see what sort of an impact that has on how I feel overall. That’s the ultimate goal, after all. Be healthier, but also feel healthier.

Wish me luck.

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