The police pumped blue-dyed water into knots of protesters, starkly marking them to make it easier for officers to make arrests.

When I went over to Crazy Henry's apartment this morning he opened the door and threw a cup of green paint on my shirt.
"What the hell did you do that for?" I asked him, exasperated beyond measure. "Is this oil based paint? How am I ever gonna get this out of my good cotton shirt? You birdbrain!" I was hot. Nearly foaming at the mouth. Crazy Henry just stood there, smiling serenely.
"Don't worry, friend" he said. "Green is the color of friendship and serenity, and I had to color code you as my friend with this indelible green paint as a sign of my affection and friendship."
"Funny way of showing you like me" I muttered darkly as I went into his kitchen to see if I could get some of the paint stain off. It proved impossible. 
"What's the meaning of all this . . . this color coding nonsense?" I demanded of him, after he gave me some fudge brownies and a glass of milk to calm me down.
"It's as simple as falling off a log" he said patiently. "I'm color coding every person I meet from now on. I got the idea from my pen pal Kim Jong Un; he's doing it to everybody in his country, and I thought it was a great idea to practice here."
"You mean the guy that sent you the sack of gold ingots?" I asked, suddenly forgetting my grudge against Crazy Henry. He had really gotten a burlap sack full of gold ingots from Jong the Strong. Crazy Henry and I had used the gold to go on some pretty hilarious adventures. 
"He send you any more gold ingots?" I asked hopefully.
"No" said Crazy Henry. "He sent me these little cans of paint to splash on people. There's red, yellow, green, and blue. I'm gonna go out right now and start color coding people in the neighborhood. Wanna come along?" 
This is not a good idea, warned my common sense; but before I could give it any thought I blurted out "Okay, let's make like a tree and leave!"
So Crazy Henry started color coding everyone he met that day. Green was for personal friends. Red was for strangers. He splashed yellow on every child he met. And the blue was reserved for Hollywood celebrities -- of which there were quite a few wandering around the neighborhood. Crazy Henry painted Arnold Schwarzenegger blue; he painted Tom Hanks blue; he got Jack Nicholson to agree to let his nose be painted blue. He painted the backside of Kirsten Dunst blue, and Mindy Caling got a blue dot on her forehead. 
"How is it possible these big time stars are here all of a sudden" I finally asked, bewildered.
"Oh, Jong the Strong told them all to be here today so I could paint them" replied Crazy Henry nonchalantly. "He's always doing nice things like that for me."
Crazy Henry did not get arrested that day -- which is what disturbs me even more than Tom Hanks asking me for bus fare to the train station. I'm becoming more and more convinced that Crazy Henry has figured out a way to pull apart reality and then reassemble it according to his own world view. He's turning into that kid on the old Twilight episode who could wish for anything to happen and it did. I expect to wake up any day now as a jack-in-the-box. 

but the Spirit of the Lord was with him, insomuch that they could not hit him with their stones neither with their arrows.

...   but the Spirit of the Lord was with him, insomuch that they could not hit him with their stones neither with their arrows.
Helaman 16:2

Stones and arrows shot at me

will not stop fidelity

to the Gospel truths I know

that I cherish here below.

Perfect, I am not a bit --

 Lord, accept me with some grit!

NEW DELHI — Nearly two million people risk statelessness and detention after they were left off the final version of a registry of Indian citizens, part of a controversial exercise to identify suspected illegal migrants in the northeastern state of Assam.

The zebras had to be counted, and verified -- that much was certain. Higher authorities than myself decided that a world wide census must be taken, and taken soon. The situation was getting out of hand. Incidents were being reported everywhere. So measures had to be taken. This much was obvious to even the lowest cretin among us. And there were many cretins among us; they were good workers; obedient, docile, and willing to get their hands dirty at all times. 
We were also blessed with a large body of clerks keen to rise in the ranks and become media influencers. They scrupled at nothing when it came to enumerating and discriminating. They used trained algorithms to sniff out the imposters and troublemakers -- and these were the zebras that we needed to discover quickly and remove, before the recurring incidents became more frequent and widespread. 
As it turned out, it was all rather simple. The zebras peacefully gathered, were tallied, and it was quickly discovered that there were over two million of them that were not zebras at all. They failed to pass the zebra test that our perceptive clerks had devised. Plus they did not have the proper hoof prints. There's a subtle difference between the hoof prints of loyal zebras and those who are an unwholesome influence on the herd. I confess that I myself do not know how to make that determination, but we have an elite cadre of dedicated experts who do it all day long -- blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs.
For their own good, the non-zebras were swiftly taken from their own herds; otherwise the real zebras would have torn them hoof from hoof, so high had feelings become among the loyalist zebras. 
We were gentle and generous with the outcasts -- no one can say we were not!
They were shipped off to certain islands in the Aleutian Sea, where wooden barracks had been prepared for them. And to tide them over the harsh polar winter we provided bales of sawdust and tubs of mineral oil. 
That they were all dead by the next spring is no fault of ours. They obviously lacked the organizational skills to pull together and form a more perfect union. 

Out of nowhere, raw poultry parts blanketed a block in Brooklyn — and then they were gone.

There's all this talk going around about chicken parts, but nobody is doing anything about it. Well, that's not how I roll. I don't talk about chicken parts, I DO something about it. I built a chicken skin dirigible. 
As everybody knows, there's chicken parts all over the streets of Brooklyn -- put there by mob bosses who want to distract the DA's office from what's happening down at the docks. So I went to Brooklyn in a pedicab and collected a thousand yards of chicken skin in less than an hour. I brought it home and sewed it up into an airtight bag, which I proceeded to fill with helium. Of course I didn't do all the stitching myself -- I had help from the Oswego Macaroni Club. Much appreciated, girls.
I set sail for Macao, across the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean, with a crew of intrepid lipids. They are a cutthroat lot, so the first thing I did was show them who was boss by tossing a dozen or so overboard for insubordination when they sneezed without permission. That whipped them into shape toot sweet. Once we landed in Macao I traded in antique seltzer bottles for a season, then converted my profits into strips of candy buttons and flew my chicken skin dirigible off into the clouds over Tibet. Half the crew froze to death as we passed the summit of Mount Everest. The rest deserted when we landed in Spittal an der Drau near the Austrian border. The craven marmosets. 
I was forced to shanghai the Vienna Boys Choir en masse in order to sail back to Brooklyn for chicken skin repairs. But when I got there the chicken parts that once blanketed the roads in such abundance had mysteriously disappeared. Some said the government had sent them to detention centers in Texas; others said the chicken parts had come alive again and walked back to the Tyson plant in Poughkeepsie. Me, I think the rats ate 'em all up. The upshot is I'm stranded now in Brooklyn. Puberty has broken out amongst the crew, so I quarantined them. The next move is up to my arch nemesis, who goes by the name of 'The Nematode.' In the meantime I'll keep my powder dry and my cakes moist. 

Google researchers uncover 2-year iPhone hack tied to malicious websites

"I'm going off the grid!" declared Crazy Henry a while back, when we were out back at his place cracking open butternuts with a hammer. He wanted to make a butternut cake for his Aunt Smedley's birthday.
"Nobody can go completely off the grid -- it's impossible. You have to have some contact with the outside infrastructure and communications or you'll get mummified or something" I told him decisively. 
"We shall see what we shall see" he replied enigmatically. "I'm through letting all those darn hackers and viruses steal my personal info and mess up my online solitaire games. I'm going to end it by hook or by crook!" He gave some butternuts a vicious whack with the hammer, smashing them into paste. 
"Indeed we shall" was all I said in return; I can be just as enigmatic as Crazy Henry, when I want to be.
So we finished up cracking open the butternuts and then went inside. Crazy Henry is a really good cook, when he makes the effort, and that day he outdid himself -- the butternut cake came out of the oven smelling like a little piece of heaven itself. He also made some butternut cookie dough, and we baked those up after the cake and feasted on them with ice cold milk -- man, we were living the high life!
"Now just how are you gonna fall off the grid?" I asked him, after we had polished off the last of the cookies. 
"Actions speak louder than words" he said as he went into his bedroom. He came back out with his pc, keyboard and all, and tossed it right out the kitchen window into the dumpster below. It made a satisfying cartoon crash sound, with tinkles and muffled implosions. Then he fished his smartphone out of his pocket and put it in the food processor with a cup of canola oil and turned it on. The racket was horrible, but in less than a minute he had cell phone salad dressing. He poured the mess down the sink and turned on the garbage disposal. He sat down  with a satisfied smirk on his face, so I had to needle him.
"Don't you pay all your bills automatically online with your bank?" I asked him derisively. "They can always track you that way."
"By gadfrey, you're right!" he gasped. "Let's get to the bank, quick, before it closes!"
Crazy Henry spent the rest of that day unplugging from the grid, or trying to. He even disconnected his doorbell.
The next day I drove him down to the bus station. He was joining a nudist colony up in Canada.
"That's going off the grid with a vengeance!" he crowed gaily as he boarded the bus for Toronto and points west. I didn't hold my breath. Crazy Henry's inspirations and tantrums last about as long as an igloo inside a sauna.
True to form, he was back at my place two months later -- looking all hangdog.
"They kicked me out" he said. "Because I had too much body fat."
I comforted him with a trip to Aamodt's Apple Orchard, for the last of their apple cider donuts -- you can't get those anyplace else as good, believe me. 
Crazy Henry cheered up again pretty quick. When I ran into him down at the rubber mallet store he told me he was going to work for his Aunt Smedley, the mayor of our town.
"What?" I exclaimed. "Get out! That's great, man. What is she gonna have you doing?"
"I'm her new IT consultant" he said proudly.
I could only stare at him for a moment.
"But, but . . . I thought you were through with the internet and all that stuff!" I finally sputtered in surprise.
"Oh, I am" he said, a faint green glow flickering in the back of his eyes. "I am. I'm gonna learn how to make a computer virus so pickin' strong it will wipe out every algorithm and cyberlink for the next twenty years . . . "  He walked out the door with his sack of new rubber mallets without another word. I could only shake my head.
Look out, world. Hell hath no fury like a nudist scorned. 

Unspeakable Things

 And many of them saw and heard unspeakable things, which are not lawful to be written.

3 Nephi 26:18

Unspeakable, the things that God can share with faithful Saint;

 visions that would make ungodly fellows weep and faint.

The Lord of Hosts is mightier than man can ever know;

the Son of God is far beyond our learning weak and slow.

And yet they condescend to open wide our eyes the most

whenever we will seek the presence of the Holy Ghost.

Vast panoramas hover just beyond my mortal ken,

available to me and mine when God has spoke "Amen."

Should You Take Your Shoes Off at Home?

When the world wide Revolution came at long last, it wasn't what anybody had been expecting or hoping for. In fact, it was downright ridiculous and trivial.
What finally happened across the globe was that people got sick and tired of the inequalities of wealth and poverty, which was anticipated -- but instead of rounding up the bankers, industrialists, and millionaires, and then shooting them and making off with all their wealth, the great mass of people simply threw away all their own cash, all their coins, all their bitcoin accounts, all their precious jewels and gold and silver ingots. Fort Knox was stormed like the Bastille, but not one red cent was kept by anyone. Nope. It was all destroyed and deleted like trash. Stocks and bonds were confiscated and cut up into paper dolls. Those who held on to their conventional wealth were put on pumice rafts and set adrift in the Indian Ocean, never to be seen again.
What took the place of money, what the vast mob world wide decided simultaneously to do, was make shoes the only viable currency on the planet -- in perpetuity. 
A car now costs a pair of penny loafers, used or new -- doesn't matter. A modest 3 bedroom house can run into several pairs of jogging shoes. Depending on location. I recently took a month-long cruise of Norwegian fjords for a pair of huaraches. Smaller purchases can be made with sandals, flip flops, slippers, or even shoe laces (if they're brand new.)
There was some talk of allowing socks into the currency pool, but the thought of handling someone's dirty tube socks for a bag of potato chips made every cashier in the world scream with dismay -- so it was eventually dropped.
And while the New System has done away with much of the old inequality and unfairness, it's not quite perfect.
First of all, there were all those silly women who had stockpiled shoes over the years in their closets. They came out as the billionaires of the New Order. The smart ones set up footwear banks and immediately began making loans.
And cowboy boots unaccountably became worth more than anything Nike could offer. So all those down at the heel Texas and Montana roustabouts who had been digging ditches all their lives suddenly became power players on the world scene. Most of 'em moved to the Riviera in France and got themselves a chateau full of original Picassos. 
Naturally there was a run on every thrift store in existence, with deadly riots breaking out all over the place. But it only lasted a few hours before national governments called out the military to quell the mobs -- and who do you think wound up with most of the shoes from those gutted thrift stores? You guessed it -- the generals. No surprise there. All regular retail shoe stores were quarantined by the government, then burned to the ground -- or in the case of big box stores actually bombed out of existence with nuclear strikes.
 But on the whole, the New Order is working pretty well. No more homeless people on the streets; food is abundant; and global warming has completely vanished -- in fact the planet is entering a new Little Ice Age. Just how all this is related to footwear beats me with a stick -- but it's best not to question the status quo too much. Outspoken critics of the New Regime have been found dead, with rubber galoshes crammed into their mouths. 
My advice to the rising generation is "Don't take any wooden clogs."

Jack Ma, once proponent of 12-hour workdays, now foresees 12-hour workweeks

I got to work on a Monday morning at 9, like always; but when I tried to leave at 5 my boss blocked the doorway, arms akimbo, and told me I'd have to stay and continue working late into the night and then would be allowed to sleep on top of my desk.
"That's outrageous" I said to him, feeling sick to my stomach; I had known something was up when the corporate big wigs came snooping around earlier in the week, looking as sour as snakes in vinegar. The scuttlebutt was that profits were down and that the unlucky ones would have to double down at their work or be laid off. 
"Can't be helped" my boss replied stoically. "Go back to your desk and run some inventory checks and then write up five thousand words on the coal industry in Greenland. Have it on my desk by two this morning."
"But I can do all that at home on my laptop" I spluttered.
For answer my boss put a black vinyl collar around my neck, which immediately began to buzz and vibrate.
"If you attempt to walk out that door without my permission that 'employee motivator' around your scrawny neck will emit a series of pencil thin laser beams to sever your head." he said grimly.
What could I do? I went back to my desk and did the work he had commanded me to do, then folded up my coat as a pillow while I slept on my desk.
The next morning the boss brought me hot chocolate and a stale donut sprinkled with powdered sugar for breakfast. 
"Can I go home today like usual?" I asked timidly.
"No" he said, not unkindly. "You'll be required to stay here for the next thirty-five years; then we'll take off the collar around your neck and give you forty acres and a mule."
The first ten years weren't so bad -- I got three meals every day, mostly beans and Irish soda bread with an occasional stalk of celery, and each December my boss took away my old clothes and gave me a new set of clothes, made from bright and shiny blue nylon. I learned how to bathe out of the sink in the men's room. And I grew a long bushy beard.
But in my eleventh year at work I noticed that I was the only one who had to stay overnight. Everyone else in the office walked out the door blithely right at 5 and came back the next day at 9. And there was nobody in the office but me, and the boss, during the weekends and on holidays. I tried asking my co-workers about this in the break room, but they just put brown paper sacks over their heads and hurried away -- often running into the wall. One other thing I noticed -- the boss had the same kind of black vinyl collar around his neck as I did. So he was a captive, too. That's when I decided that I would escape, no matter what.
One evening after everyone was gone I noticed the boss standing just inside the door, cleaning his nails with a pen knife. Silently I glided up to him, then pushed him through the door. His collar glowed a bright red, he gave a scream, and then his head rolled off his neck in a welter of blood.
 I felt no compassion for him. He had it coming. My own collar continued to buzz and vibrate, so I knew it was not yet disarmed. I went into the office of the boss and tore the place apart looking for the controls to my collar. I found a panel of blinking lights and metal toggles under his desk calendar, so I took a chance by flipping each toggle until all the blinking lights went dead -- and my collar became still. Gingerly I used a pair of scissors to cut it in half. I was clear at last!
The breeze out on the street was cool and clean. I greedily filled my lungs a dozen times, reveling in my escape. But the moths -- the moths were everywhere. I didn't remember there being so many of them at night. They fluttered around the streetlights by the hundreds, and they covered every lighted window, crawling blindly around in erratic circles. Then they began landing on me, their wings creating a wild scented breeze that lifted me up beyond the buildings and bore me away to a lake surrounded by pine trees and full of cattails and grunting bull frogs. The moths landed me on top of a great hollow log, and that is where I live to this day -- being worshipped by the local natives as a deity of the lake; they bring me baked meats and ripened fruit each day, and in return I do not enslave them but simply command them to dance all night and keep their hair combed. 

The people of the earth are all our Father's children

President Gordon B. Hinckley

We must never forget that we live in a world of great diversity. The people of the earth are all our Father’s children and are of many and varied religious persuasions. We must cultivate tolerance and appreciation and respect one another. We have differences of doctrine. This need not bring about animosity or any kind of holier-than-thou attitude.

President Gordon B. Hinckley 

There is no animosity when in Christ's full embrace;

we must regard each other with great tolerance and grace.

Respecting all opinions, we can still be faithful saints;

refusing to spread rumors or to propagate complaints.

Appreciate the beauty of diversity, my friend,

to avoid arriving at a spiritual dead end.

********************************************

An email response to the above verse from an old friend who is a retired Institute teacher:

Great analysis and poetry!  Thanks for sharing.  I trust that your and GBH’s comments don’t mean that we shouldn’t be a bit cautious and NOT fully embrace what others are believing and practicing. For example, Islam’s book defines any and all non-Muslims as infidels and thus worthy of extermination.   I don’t want to be anywhere near a Muslim fanatic who is carrying a knife, gun, or bomb.  Neither am I willing to board an airplane which has a Muslim woman wearing a full hajib and who has somehow been given a “pass” by TSA because she is “special.”  And no, I don’t wish to shake hands with LGBTQ+ folks. Well, maybe if I can wear rubber gloves. Yes, be kind and gracious, but there’s no need to embrace others’ doctrines, belief, and practices.  Perhaps a meal when they’re sick, or a card for a birthday.  Be kind and pleasant, but know the boundaries.

LRC

The Food Shelf

I went down to the food shelf for to get a loaf of bread;

the month had not yet ended and my finances were dead.

They kindly gave me cans of beans and lots of mac & cheese,

bags of corn meal flour, bottled honey from the bees.

With grateful heart I took it home to make some modest feasts,

and that is when I noticed there were also little beasts.

Beetles in the flour and evidence of microbes live

in my bulging cans of beans -- was this a bunch of jive?

I checked the expiration dates of all this charity;

all of them had run out long before two-thousand-three.

But beggars can't be choosers -- so I've heard it often spoke.

And so I'm eating maggots while I try hard not to choke!

Remnants of a supernova were found in Antarctic snow. The space dust could be 20 million years old.

When I was a kid I read with horror the theory of one space scientist who said that moon dust was so deep that any craft landing on the moon would sink into the deep dust and never be heard from again. Men trapped a mile down in gray sterile moon dust -- that image stayed with me and grew like a mental parasite until we finally landed on the moon and blew that accursed egghead's theory to smithereens.
Just a few years ago I was idly clicking on 'random article' on Wikipedia to see what would come up and I got 'cosmic dust.' The article said millions of tons of cosmic dust enter the earth's atmosphere every day. And once again my imagination went into overdrive. Looking up at the dusty blue sky, I began to choke on space dust. Probably radioactive dust settling in my lungs from a long-ago supernova across the galaxy somewhere. What if a dust storm of cosmic dust were heading towards the earth right this instant? We'd be engulfed, smothered with microscopic interstellar motes. A horrible way to go. I stopped sleeping nights, sitting outside in a lawn chair awaiting the inevitable inky black cloud blocking out the stars as a prelude to blanketing the earth. I probably should have gone to see a shrink, but instead I began writing vers libre to combat my anxiety. It seems to have worked. 

But today I'm in trouble again with space dust, because I became so cock-a-hoop about mastering my fears of it that I began studying the language of space dust and soon learned what the particles were telling each other. Their lingo, by the way, is based on the same algorithms that control the Riemann Hypothesis. 
Turns out cosmic dust is really the precursor of meteor mites -- small intergalactic nits that can take over a planet in a matter of days, sucking it dry and leaving behind a lifeless husk. They drift from galaxy to galaxy, sending the dust ahead of them to scout out virgin territory for their predations. The stardust that has been inundating our planet for centuries and managed to enter every nook and cranny of our ecosystem has sent back its report to the meteor mites, and they are on their way here. The dust knows that I know what they've been up to, and they want to shut me up, permanently, before I can expose them -- which would allow the Earth to prepare for their arrival.
So I'm on the lam, hiding out in dumpsters and discarded telephone booths in old hotels. When you read this, if you read this, for pete's sake contact the nearest NASA office. At this late date we've only got 72 more hours before the meteor mites arrive. The only way to stop them is with good old American know-how, and flypaper; put enough of that in orbit and they'll never reach our planet. 
If I don't make it out alive, tell Halle Berry I love her . . . 

Kentucky mom who helped search for missing persons has vanished (New York Post)

(Dedicated to Jackie Salo)

I have disappeared gradually since taking early retirement five years ago, until today I have vanished completely -- without a trace.
It started small, with a drop box installed in the lobby of my senior apartment building; instead of visiting the office to give them my check each month I dropped my rent into the box -- thus missing out on my monthly conversation with the lady behind the Plexiglas window at the office. I never knew her name but she was friendly and somewhat inquisitive. She'd ask me how I was doing and I'd usually say "Oh, fair to middling." She'd comment on the weather, and I'd agree with her most of the time -- but always in a tone that indicated I reserved the right to think independently about the weather anytime I wanted. So I fell off the face of the earth, as far as that lady behind the Plexiglas is concerned.
Then all my mail came addressed to 'Resident.' Even my bills; some kind of postal conspiracy there, I'm thinkin'. I wrote to my Congressman about it but never heard back. Why am I not surprised?
I get so sleepy nowadays that when I want to go out for game night in the community room or go visit a neighbor with some cornbread I just made I fall asleep in my recliner instead, and when I wake up it's the middle of the night. So I just go back to bed, and never go out anymore except for groceries and postage stamps. And I haven't really been hungry or wanted to write a letter in a long time.
When I call my children all I get is their voicemail. They never return my calls anymore. 
The finches have stopped coming to my thistle sock on the patio.
I saw my picture on a tattered piece of paper taped to a streetlight pole; it said I was missing and last seen wearing a Santa Claus suit back in November. I called the number on the poster to report myself as not missing at all, but the number was to an insurance agency that was only interested in selling me car insurance. And I don't drive anymore. 
This morning I looked in the mirror and the man looking back has no distinct features whatsoever. It could be anyone, or no one. Now I long to go live with owls and bats; people are a distasteful distraction. Somehow they have disappeared me, and I'm not that bitter about it. I don't even wonder whatever became of me. I am satisfied to be nothing more than a puddle of melted influence. 

Brazil rejects G-7 Amazon aid citing its lack of involvement in decision to grant it

People are always trying to give me money, and I just don't want it. Like the other day, I was just walking down the street, minding my own business, when this guy with a foreign accent accosts me, grabbing my shirt and shouting in my face "You must take zis million dollars in zee bag! I beg of you, do it!"
"Not for all the tea in China!" I replied hotly. "You've got your nerve, coming up to a complete stranger and threatening him with a bunch of money. This is America, pal -- we don't cotton to things like that!" I pushed him away and continued down the street, ignoring his howls of misery and rage.
Not a day goes by that I don't find stacks of rubles or rupees or renminbi on my front porch each morning. I've had caskets of jewels thrown through my living room window. Big black pearls dropped down my chimney. Gold Krugerrands stuck to my sidewalk with superglue. Sheesh! It's enough to make a guy go cuckoo. Naturally I burn it all in my backyard, in a bonfire. For which I always get a permit first. I'm no scofflaw. 
Now when these crazy people offer me FOOD, that's a different matter. I'm very open to that. No prejudice against it atoll. 
Fer instance a man came to my door last week with
 a savory steak and kidney pie. He was dressed all in tweed and wore one of those deerstalker caps Sherlock Holmes is always pictured with.
"Care for some steak and kidney pie, old boy?" he asked me in an impeccable Oxford accent.
"Cheerio, old bean!" I replied, taking the goodies from him and inviting him in for a piece.
"Thenk yew, no" he said. "I must toddle off to the Club, dontcha know. Rugby scrummage and all that rot."
"Tallyho!" I waved to his back as he tried not to step on the Krugerrands still glued on my sidewalk.
An old woman brings me a demijohn of birch beer once in a while. She just shows up out of the blue, knocks on my door, and leaves the jug, flying off on the stalk of a sunflower like a fairy tale witch.
The German ambassador drops off liverwurst and the Thai cultural attache brings me salted duck eggs with heaps of sticky rice.
I don't really know why they do this for me -- I'm just assuming it has something to do with my sparkling personality and artistic genius. 
But I give fair warning: The next person who tries to fob blue chip stock off on me is going to get a sock on the beezer . . .  

The poison of flattery

Therefore he did flatter them, and also Kishkumen, that if they would place him in the judgment-seat he would grant unto those who belonged to his band that they should be placed in power and authority among the people . . . 
Helaman 2:5

Beware the plaudits of the world,

of scheming men who dare

to flatter those they would exploit

with nothing but hot air.

Tis flummery that often sends

us on a wild goose chase,

looking for an easy fix

or for a cozy place.

Seek for power to do good,

to serve your fellow man.

And shun all snow jobs constantly,

which are the devil's plan.

Do Plants Have Something to Say? (NYT)

I am turning into a rutabaga. The process began three weeks ago, when I noticed tiny green leaves growing out of my ears. I tried cleaning them out with a cotton swab but it didn't help. When tiny rootlets began sprouting on the bottom of my feet, making it difficult to walk, I hobbled over to the clinic to let the medicos have a gander at me. 
The doctor told me that people turn into plants all the time, but it's hushed up because of the damn Chinese. I didn't really follow his reasoning, but I decided there was only one way to handle the situation: I would embrace my rutabaganess, not fear it.
I have given up my apartment for a large clay pot that gets plenty of sun on my daughter's patio. She waters me every day and we have pleasant conversations on the weather and the best way to cook beef heart; I always liked it fried with lots of onions, but she uses it to make beef stew. Somehow, that seems like cheating. 
I actually don't eat meat anymore -- or anything else, for that matter. I get all the nutrition I need from sunlight and from minerals in the soil. Miracle-Gro is really delicious!
And I have started dialogues with the sunflowers and sumac bushes in my daughter's yard. Their language is deep and mysterious, full of ambiguity and brazen inconsequence. It's never been written down, that I know of, and so they often speak of past deeds and like to repeat long convoluted genealogies by rote that frankly bore me to tears. But when I can get them away from their myths and family trees their talk can be quite interesting. 
Plants have no conception of death. None at all. And I find that as I settle more deeply into my clay pot I, too, no longer either fear death or even believe in it. After all, a plant has no soul, and so I am no longer concerned about what will happen to mine. Instead I warm myself on these cool fall nights by thinking of the time, in several more months, when my daughter will pluck me up, rinse me off, dice me, boil me, mash me, and serve me with plenty of butter to her family for Thanksgiving. I will have fulfilled my purpose and nourished my family -- and that is all there is to my existence. It's a beautiful concept I could wish more people would embrace. 

Environmentalists filmed Iran’s vanishing cheetahs. Now they could be executed for spying. (WaPo)

I always suspected that talking cheetahs were running things over at the legislature in Saint Paul. My suspicions were confirmed when I turned my place into an Airbnb last year and talking cheetahs started renting it on a monthly basis while the legislature was in session. They were lobbyists, for the most part.
"Hi, I'm Fred" said one talking cheetah as he held out a paw to me. "I'm working to help deer multiply so much that we can hunt them right here in the streets of the city."
His toothy grin and cheerful honesty almost won me over. But I noticed flakes of dried blood on his paw and remembered that all of his kind are cold blooded killers. Predators without mercy or conscience. And they are running things in the state capital. So I said nothing in return and coldly took his money.
I have to admit that these terrible creatures always paid their money in advance and never gave me a bit of trouble. Oh sure, I had to change their sheets all the time -- since none of them are housebroken -- but I'd raised eight children in my time and so I was used to that kind of thing. For breakfast they always wanted the same thing -- raw beef liver with great slabs of salt pork, washed down with tomato juice. They were always asking after my grandchildren, wanting to meet them and play with them. But I knew what they were up to -- first a smile; then a caress; then a snarl; and then a meal. So I claimed that they were all camping in Wyoming. That's the thing about talking cheetahs; you can divert their insatiable blood lust pretty easily. 
When the legislature finally went into recess (after the talking cheetahs had chased the last human survivors out of the building) my Airbnb business slacked off some. Until the dancing capybaras had a convention in town -- then I made a killing by renting out my place to them, and introducing them to my talking cheetah friends down at the country club. 

The corruptness of their law

For behold, Nephi had spoken unto them concerning the corruptness of their law . . . 

Helaman 8:3

The law of man is oft corrupt

and leads to 'justice' too abrupt.

And so the wise and humble seek

the law of God that prophets speak.

When man-made laws have gone berserk

the Gospel law clears off the murk.

Heaven's mandate cannot cease

until the world has come to peace.

“Did I put spice in here?” she whispered to herself in Spanish.

(Dedicated to James Wagner)

Both my grandmothers died a long time ago; they went mad in shoddy nursing homes after they had thrown away their glasses and lost their dentures. They basically starved themselves to death, stubbornly and silently and myopically. As did my mother and father, in their turn, twenty some odd years ago.
 They cooked and ate their food, even during their prime, in a heavy and cheerless manner; at times parsimoniously out of necessity, and at other times simply out of dullness or exhaustion.
And so I grew into a man who also plodded through most meals as a gluttonous chore. 
This morning, for instance, I was prepared to eat leftover vegetable soup from last Friday with a bit of leftover fruit cobbler that is mostly zucchini subsidized with too much brown sugar. While I read a book -- Fred Kaplan's 'Dickens: A Biography.' But I read an online story in the New York Times first, about an 'abuela,' a grandmother, who cooks for her grandsons who play on MLB teams. She cooks red beans in sofrito with shredded goat meat in adobe sauce, along with piles of saffron rice. Suddenly I wanted a grandma meal like that, not the congealed remains of last week. So I threw out my stale fruit cobbler and watery soup, and began a pot of black beans with tomatoes, full of tenderly fried bits of salt pork and chopped scallions and seasoned with cayenne pepper, brown sugar, and cumin. I put a cup of rice in the rice cooker, along with a diced red potato and a tablespoon of butter. Of course I'm making too much of it for just myself, so when I am finished eating -- which I will do out on my patio admiring the volunteer sunflowers the birds have planted for me among the rocks -- I will fill a plastic container to the brim with the leftovers and go door to door here in my senior citizens apartment building offering it to the first old lady who wants it. They are all old ladies on my floor -- there are no men at all. And I'll flirt with them, just a bit. 
This is no longer going to be a meal -- it's a celebration. 

Troubled by the generosity of words . . .

. . . for I have been somewhat troubled in mind because of the generosity and the greatness of the words of thy brother Ammon . . . 
Alma 22:3

Words of idle, hollow boast

do not have the Holy Ghost.

Trite and shameless is the speech

of those who think that they can preach

with swelling words, all multiplied,

when their sick souls are filled with pride.

The great words spoke by prophets true

are generous, and noble too.

O may my mouth take Sabbath rest

until with inspiration blessed! 

In the days of yore a king decided to restrict

In the days of yore a king decided to restrict

trading with all nations that with his will did conflict.

He sent his regal word to merchants who had set up shop

in foreign nations that their trading had to really stop.

Not only that, but then the king commanded that a wall

be built around his kingdom -- to be sixty-five feet tall.

He built it out of concrete and he capped it with rough slate,

but somehow he forgot to have them put in one small gate.

Now the king sits all alone; his subjects all have gone

to countries where they're free to work and not feel like a pawn.

O monarchs of the modern world, let this a lesson be:

Allegiance that may be well bought still shuns stupidity.

Federal judges received a link to an anti-Semitic blog post. It came from the Justice Department. (WaPo)

I was eating a toasted bagel with cream cheese when the SWAT team smashed down the front door, threw me on the floor, and put some kind of plastic binders around my wrists.
This has been happening so often lately that I wasn't really surprised or upset. The best way to handle these things is to stay calm and go along with the gag.
"What is it this time?" I asked quietly.
The leader, in a black balaclava mask, who I'm pretty sure has been the one leading the raids on my house for the past year, replied in a not unfriendly tone "We just need to round up all the scallions you're harboring in your refrigerator. Won't take but a minute."
"Sure thing" I said. "I just bought some so they're actually still in the sink -- I haven't rinsed them off yet."
"Got it" he said. "Thanks for being so cooperative."
"Always glad to oblige" I replied, with as much sincerity as I could muster. 
They were gone a few minutes later and outside of some chaffing on my wrists from the plastic bands I was none the worse for wear. Well, there's the busted front door of course -- but my homeowners insurance covers that.
My neighbor, an old lady who crochets tea cozies, was not so fortunate. The SWAT team broke down her door next and instead of submitting tamely she began yelling at the top of her lungs that her rights were being trampled on and that they would have to pry her scallions out of her cold dead hands. They hustled her off in a black SUV and then set fire to her house. I'm pretty sure the old lady had some kind of death wish -- maybe she was tired of living in a house crammed with unwanted tea cozies. 
The next day my scallions were actually returned to me by the same guy in the black balaclava mask who led the raid on my house.
"These aren't the kind of scallions we're looking for" he told me as he handed them back to me in a plastic bag. They were pretty wilted, but I didn't complain. "Sorry for the inconvenience" he continued. "There's a new strain of scallions out there that have infiltrated grocery stores all over the country -- we can't take any chances. Better safe than sorry. They're the ones giving good scallions a bad name."
"No need to explain to me" I assured him. "Some of my best friends are scallions."