Well, life has been interesting. We are juggling Seporah and Felicity, watching movies, and playing Super Mario Brothers 3. Yeah, the one for the ORIGINAL Nintendo. Märia is playing the cow, and I am playing the diaper changer and toddler wrangler. Busy busy busy.

The movies we have seen in the last month... :

Meet the Robinsons - very good, a must see for parents and children alike.
Stardust - something of a modern fairy tale. Not modern as in set in the modern day, but modern as in not all fairys and dragons and wizards. It is a story with real meat; it has substance. As I have said before, I am far from a professional reviewer. =)
Hairspray - I actually didn't see it, but Märia laughed all the way through it. =)
My Super Ex-Girlfriend - Highly irreverent. Very very funny at parts, but the sexual humor went over the top at times.
Ratatouille - Best animated movie I have seen in a long long time. I don't know how the pulled off making a movie about rats and frenchmen that I liked, but they did! The rat wants to be a chef and he finds a talentless dish boy to help him do it. And everyone is Jewish =).
The Jane Austen Book Club - Another I didn't see. Märia made it 15 minutes into it, and turned it off. I'll take that as a "don't watch this film".

We are also watching Heroes, although we always seem to be a couple of weeks late. Well, not quite true. Märia always seems to be 2 weeks late, and I tend to be 1 week late. =) Not quite as good as Season 1, but not is all yet lost. The writer's strike will probably do it though.


So, what we've been reading. Well, this will actually just focus on what I've been reading. I just finished Invasive Procedure by Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston. As far as I can tell (and I would know), this is OSC's first collaborative work. I know Aaron Johnston from his funny church articles on Nauvoo.com (an OSC domain). Basically he talks about all those things we don't talk about, like screaming babies in sacrament meeting and how we should all have little eject buttons in front of us to eject someone embarrassing themselves or us in fast and testimony meeting. So Invasive Procedure is a thriller about crazy radical genetic scientists who learn to create a virus that replaces bad cells with good cells. I am no professional reviewer, so just trust me when I say I enjoyed it. It is a good book if you are interested in genetic engineering and elite military teams that train constantly in biosuits so that they are ready to hit hot zones, kill the bad guys and neutralize viruses and other biohazards. Fun thriller, but nothing to spin your mind around.

So you want to turn your world upside down? Read The 5000 Year Leap by W. Cleon Skousen. This book will totally change how you think of America and what we are here for, how we were founded and why. Full disclosure: Skousen was a mormon and taught at BYU for years and years as a religion and history teacher. Don't let that scare you away if you aren't mormon. This book has NOTHING to do with a religion in particular, and only a little bit to do with religion in general. It is about the founding of our nation. From the back cover:

The Five Thousand Year Leap tells of the 28 fundamental beliefs of the Founding Fathers which they said must be understood and perpetuated by every people who desired peace, prosperity, and freedom. These beliefs have made possible more progress in 200 years than was made previously in over 5,000 years.

These fundamental beliefs are shockingly unpolitically correct, but this book shows "political correctness" in its true light and history. It was a creation by communism. If you disagreed with the government, you were sent to reeducation camps until your thoughts were politically correct. But now, instead of using camps, we use tenure, shame, and other social pressures to brutalize people into ACTING politically correct regardless of what they know to be right. Funny how shame has fallen so out of favor with regards to children out of wedlock or divorced people (who deserve shame for making marriage so much harder on the rest of us) but we can shame a person for driving an SUV or praying publicly without worrying about the PC police. I completely rewatched all the debates after reading this book. And the choice is absolutely simple. We need a statesman who says he will get out of our way, not tells us what he will do for us. The 5000 Year Leap grounds your being in what government's real job is. It isn't to provide for us, or take care of us, or be the net to catch us. Ron Paul wants to get the Federal Government out of our business. I will write a long post on him later, but I am about to post some Seporah vids, and one has a Ron Paul reference, so I wanted to get that out there. Märia is still somewhat politically apathetic, but less so than she has been. =)Um, anything else? OH yeah, Super Mario Brothers 3. We will probably beat it tomorrow. Still just as fun over the last 2 weeks as it was 15 years ago. Luigi stinks! (Märia plays luigi) =)