Entertaiment

You should know that it’s not my fault I haven’t weighed in on Conference until now. I blame Julius Caesar and his monumental effort to get all his generals to their weekly poker games on time, which ultimately led to the invention of Thursday. And since my column is published on the first and third Thursdays of the month, I’m only now saying my piece on the excitement and entertainment that was General Conference. I’m frankly fed up with ancient Roman dictators complicating my life.

(Editor’s Note: Our research department has determined that DeNae shamelessly made up every single word vis a vis Julius Caesar and his poker buddies. The fact is that when they were not stomping all over less important continents, Caesar’s generals routinely played Go Fish,’ explaining Caesar’s now-famous query, “Any twos, Brut?”)

(Editor’s Note, the Second: Further research has now revealed that DeNae made up the previous Editor’s Note, leading us to reconsider her contribution to this magazine or at least reassign her to the aforementioned research department, which would totally serve her right.)

Now, if the editors are finished with their notes, here are a few thoughts on General Conference:

First, I was delighted with the announcement of two new temples in Cedar City, Utah, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This means we will now have a temple in one of the most decadent, carnal, idolatrous cities in the world, and another one in Brazil.

Ha, Cedar Citizens, I kid! I’m just relieved that you no longer have to drive all the way to St. George to attend the temple. Those 40 minutes each way were understandably a real hardship. I should know. I live in the valley just west of the Salt Lake valley, where, at last count, there were 6,379 temples. And sometimes, if we hit traffic on I-15 or the line for life-sustaining Diet Coke goes too long at the McDonald’s drive-up, it can take up to half an hour to get to one of those temples! This explains why, no matter what session we’re hoping to make, 93% of us will fly into the chapel, out of breath and hyped up on newly-sanctioned caffeinated soda, just as the session closes. Everyone who got into that session did so because they were aiming for the one just before it.

Second, we received an update on the accelerated young marriage program, also known as the lowered mission age initiative. Now that kids can serve missions at ages 18 or 19, the Church’s current missionary force of 65,634 is expected to bingluple in the next six months, a mathematical statistic so astonishing it almost makes you wonder if the author just threw a bunch of letters together and called it a multiplier.’

(Editor’s Note, Mark III: She did.)

This has required the creation of scores of new missions, as well as the leveling of most of Brigham Young University to expand the Missionary Training Center. This latter effort met with no resistance, since at last count there were exactly eleven freshmen registered for BYU’s 2013 fall semester, all of whom deferred enrollment until after their missions.

There was a somewhat alarming moment when President Monson’s talk on obedience was interrupted by a Utah County fire marshal investigating an 80-year old arson case that had, according to the file, really annoyed residents of Vivian Park back in the day.’ The marshal was prepared to make an example of the Prophet, rake him over the coals, as it were, when-and we should all reflect on this and choose our actions accordingly-he was suddenly turned into a pillar of salt. The fire marshal, I mean.

Live and learn, brothers and sisters.

For myself, I was delighted that once again Elder Jeffrey R. Holland gave a talk meant just for me. I don’t know what you all did to stave off the boredom while he and I chatted through the television, but it sure was nice to have a little one-on-one with an apostle. I’m given to understand that President Uchtdorf also spoke to me, but through a scheduling snafu, he inadvertently delivered his talk during the Priesthood session. I could easily have tuned into KBYU and watched it live had it not been for two things: One, I was at Leatherby’s Celestial Kingdom of Ice Cream at the time, and two, KBYU is now a group powder room for sister missionaries.

All told, it was a wonderful and much-needed weekend, stuffed to the gills with encouragement, insight, and white-knuckle tension as President Uchtdorf read a list of a hundred thousand new General Authorities, all of whom had names like Josefrachtius Fa’alunbladter.’

I couldn’t have asked for a better conference if I had scripted the whole thing myself.

(Editor’s Note, That’s It: DeNae has officially been put on notice for playing fast and loose with the facts in this report. And if she doesn’t apologize to Elder Fa’alunbladter for misspelling his first name, we’ll see to it that her Leatherby’s 50% discount press card is revoked with prejudice.)

(DeNae’s Note: To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as a 50% discount press card to Leatherby’s, but I’m repenting anyway, just in case. These Meridian editors don’t mess around.)