You're joking, right?

October 02, 2005

One of my favorite things about Conference is the really lame commercials they play right before and after sessions. Some of my current favorites include:

"FHE on DVD"--Now you don't have to spend any effort to have family time. Hey, you don't even have to talk to each other at all!

"You've waited two long years for it. You've waited long enough"--"It" is Richard Paul Evans' new book. Yeah, since two years is such a long, long time for writing and publishing a new book, especially one of such obvious quality.

"LDS Realtors.Com"--Making it even easier to avoid getting to know people of other faiths, no matter where you go.

Oh, and I love the fact that just after hearing talks about staying out of debt and living moderately we get all the commercials for things like the "collectors' editions" of books like Lectures on Faith that cost 4 times as much as a simple paperback would...

Comments

Cicada said…

Not to argue one of your points, but I'm going to argue one of your points. ldsrealtors.com is a really good thing. You see, it's not that you only want to know someone of your faith, but it's that an LDS realtor will know your housing needs better than a non-LDS realtor. I'll just give one example of ward shopping. Okay, so maybe you're not supposed to do it, but it still happens. Try and explain to a non-LDS realtor that you have to live east of a certain street because you don't want to be in a certain ward. Your realtor will tell you to live where you want and go to whatever ward you won't. They just don't get it.

My dad is a realtor and I was working for him last summer. He had a lot of business referred to him from ldsrealtors.com, and he was able to help his clients know where their meeting houses were, introduce them to their bishoprics, and give them info on their move that non-LDS realtors wouldn't have been able to.

So I guess that's it. Oh, and there was this one commercial between sessions for the place where I work. I was flipping the channel away when I realized that I had heard that obnoxious music coming from the video room at work for the past month. So I flipped back and watched the commercial. Only it was making fun of people who've been in college for more than a "normal" amount of time. So I hung my head in shame.

10/02/2005 10:12 PM

Cicada said…

(First paragraph, 117th word: want, not won't)

10/02/2005 10:15 PM

JB said…

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

10/03/2005 11:49 AM

JB said…

wonder if the church's stance will ever change so we can go to whatever ward we please. That'd be nice. People do it with where they move anyway.

And there's gotta be a way to do something about a crappy and/or psycho bishop. It's only happened to me once, but I know they're out there.

Seriously, what do you do when your bishop is a total wack-job? At the time I had this bishop, he'd just gotten chosen as the bishop and I was moving out of the ward in a month or two, so I figured it didn't matter too much. But I was really sad for everyone who had to be "under" him for longer than I did.

Then there are really gross/creepy bishops who molest little kids and other such garbage. If a bishop gives you the creeps but he didn't at the time the ward okayed his position, what can you do about it? There's gotta be something.

10/03/2005 1:28 PM

ambrosia ananas said…

Cice: You know, I realize there are valid reasons for avoiding certain wards. However, I think that generally ward shopping isn't a productive way to build the Church. If we all just stuck to the "good" wards, there would be much less growth. Time and effort can improve any ward. I'm thinking both of my former stake president's talk and my own current ward. When FSP was in the perfect ward and the ward boundaries were redone, putting him in a more questionable ward. By the time he moved out, the new ward was just as amazing as the old one had been. Current ward: I'd heard from Melyngoch and from Duchess that it was cliquey and suboptimal and the bishop, while well-meaning, was not always so great at dealing with anormal situations. I was more than a little worried about moving in. I was absolutely distraught when I discovered the ward I was growing to love was, in fact, not mine--I'd been going to a different ward that met at the same time and in the same building as mine. Whether there's been a huge turnover since Melyngoch and Duchess left the ward, I don't know. But I do know the people I've interacted with have been friendly and welcoming. It's a good ward.

JB: Re problem bishops, you can contact the stake president if there are serious concerns. If the concerns aren't enough to warrant contacting the stake president, well, it's your choice how to handle it. My family had a couple of problem-bishop years. Nearly half the ward stopped attending. I wished that my family would move wards (I was in college by this time). My mom's ultimate decision, though, was that she wasn't going to let this bishop ruin her testimony or prevent her from coming to church to worship Christ.

Foxy: Yeah, I hated most of those, too. The other one that really grated on my nerves was the commercial that talked for five minutes about the joy of families and seeing one's grandchildren, etc., just to conclude on a window pitch. For crying out loud, having this company's windows is *not* going to bring anyone's family closer. The sort of emotional manipulation the company is attempting makes me want to go throw bricks through their shiny glass panes.

10/04/2005 12:04 PM