Mormons have some kind of list of which houses NOT to stop at; they will pass you by when they are out doing their missionary thing.
From the corner window, I saw two young guys in the white shirts and the ties walking up the block towards my sidewalk. Then they passed by and went up to the next house.
I assume it’s because I engaged the last pair of Mormon missionaries with questions: why no one ever told them the truth about old Joe Smith who was a conman arrested twice in New York before he invented Mormonism, why a supposed divinely-inspired text would be full of untruths about Native Americans, how old Joe Smith’s doctrine of religious polygamy was an attempt to bamboozle people who thought he was immoral for marrying several young girls …
I also assume they reported my questions back to their mission leader and he (well, it would be a he, wouldn’t it, knowing Mormon views of women in leadership) must have put my address on a no-go list to avoid the chance that I might contaminate the faith of a future Mormon.
Poor kids. They are lied to their whole lives. Poor me, I missed my chance to enlighten a couple of ‘em.
LOL They absolutely do X your house. My dad was a shift worker and they once woke him up about 30 minutes after he’d gone to bed. He answered the door, naked as the day he was born and furious, and threatened to strangle them all with their ties. They never ever returned–and my parents lived in that house for 25 years.
oh lord what a great story! Glad I wasn’t there to see it, though 🍑
Piling on:
I lived for a while in a communal household with a bunch of people who rescued animals, and for a while we had this incredibly sweet Burmese python named Dolores that we were caring for. She rebounded from neglect very quickly and was basically a joyful and energetic bundle of sunshine, but she’d had mites and they were hard to get rid of. Treatment includes coating the snake with olive oil and waiting an hour, which causes the mites to suffocate. Now, it’s not a good idea to put an eleven-foot long greased snake into a glass habitat, so the best bet was to hold her for the hour. This was a formidable task, as Dolores weighed almost seventy pounds, but as i am a robust and muscular individual i stripped down to my underpants, picked up Dolores, and went about my business in a very slippery and greasy way (i was test-fitting new fangs for halloween).
Which was when the mormons stopped by. My housemates had seen them from the front windows, which was why they insisted i answer the door.
Me, befanged, mohawked, tattooed, pierced, greased, naked except for a ripped and sagging pair of drawers and an enthusiastic and friendly seventy-pound oily snake: hi!
Dolores, who was really having such an awesome day: new friends? yes? hello? you have treats?
Mormons: sorry wrong house. (they actually turned whiter i did not think that would have been possible)
Me (to housemates): keep an eye out for the assembly of god folks, okay? we might as well do this right.
One of my SCA buddies was dressed to go to an event when the Mormons knocked. He answered the door in his black, hooded cloak, long knife strapped on, and then looked back and called, “Brothers! The sacrifices have arrived!”
As you might imagine, those were the last Mormons he ever saw at that house.
My mother had VERY bad post partum depression when I was a baby, almost crippling her. My father, seeing this, took me and my older sister on a walk (well, strollers count when you’re wee) and gave mum strict instructions to Get Some Sleep.
It’s a quiet, still Saturday morning. She’s just drifting off.
And there’s a knock.
It’s the jehovahs witnesses.
The door swings open and they are greeted with a haggard, six foot woman, decked out in piercings and half insane from post partum depression and sleep deprivation.
Mum has no recollection of what she said to them. None whatsoever. All she remembers to this day is the red mist dying down from behind her eyes as the witnesses vault the hedge in their desperate flight.
They never set foot on our doorstep again.
My spouse just used to answer the door holding some of his (decorative) blade weapons; but I prefer the story of his friend who decided to engage missionaries in theological debate. Their bible was very small, so he got out a magnifying glass to read it on his doorstep; and it was a sunny day; and next thing he knew the book was smouldering and his visitors were leaving very hastily. He figured they went back and told their brethren that bibles burst into flame at the touch of a Catholic.
I’m working on something that at this point is somewhere between short story and novella, about a thinly-veiled Disney park analogue where it turns out there is a demon trapped under the park, and I couldn’t resist throwing in a reference to the Hatbox Ghost in one of the characters’ litany of Park Ghost Stories.
I. NEED. THIS. STORY. NOW.
(Or whenever you finish it no pressure you are an artist and you work at your own pace and I appreciate everything you contribute goodbye)
LOL I appreciate your understanding! I figure I can share a bit.
Here’s the semi-reference in question (I’ll be redacting the actual Disney names later but for now it’s easier to keep them). Our protagonist is having dinner with someone who works in marketing for the Disney dining program.
***
I stared at him. “There are real ghost stories about the Haunted Mansion?”
He nodded. “There’s one. The Fishbowl Ghost.”
“The what.”
“If you watch old promo videos for the park from before it opened, you can see footage of the mansion.” He dug at a bit of steak stuck in a tooth. “There’s three ghosts in a row emerging from a pond. One of them is covered in seaweed, like some kind of fifties horror creature, you know the type?”
“Sure.”
“Second one is hauling a sea monster’s tail behind him.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a third one that’s got no head, but he’s carrying a head in a fishbowl in front of him.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“Right? Anyway, the fishbowl ghost shows up in the promo footage, but isn’t in the ride itself. It never was. There’s footage of opening day and it’s clearly not there.”
“So they took it out before the ride was opened – they do stuff like that, right?”
“Well, yeah, that’s the real story. The rumor is that he comes and goes as he wants – you can see the fishbowl ghost on amateur footage of the park sometimes. Like, even as late as last year someone posted some video taken on the ride that showed him. Sometimes he just pops up.”
“That’s gotta be a shop though, right? CGI?”
“I mean, I don’t know if anyone cares enough to prove it is or it isn’t. Disney ghosts should be fun anyway, you know? There’s nothing truly menacing about a mannequin that comes and goes.”
I thought about this. “There….there isn’t?”
“Nah. The harder you try to make people buy a mannequin as reality, the less people even do. Everything in this park is a soft sell, and that’s why.”
this administration is pulling back ALLL the regulations. buckle up, everybody.
As with many of his more insidious actions as president, there’s a Russia connection. As the Washington Post points out, until recently, 95 percent of asbestos used in the United States came from Brazil, while the rest came from Russia. But the South American nation recently banned the mining and sale of the toxic substance, opening the door for Russia to fill the gap, which will be even larger if the U.S. resumes using the carcinogen in building materials. Russian asbestos manufacturers are thrilled. In July, the Russian company Uralasbest posted an image of its asbestos packaging, which features a smirking President Trump.
Ford, when asked about this research during the news
conference, said his number 1 concern when drafting this legislation was
responsibility.
“I think people in Ontario are mature enough, they’re mature enough to know when they’ve had one too many,” he said.
“I have all the confidence that the people in Ontario can be responsible beer drinkers.”
Your 👏 own 👏 shithead 👏 brother 👏 had 👏 multiple 👏 DUI’s 👏
Also I don’t want $1 beer, I want kids in my province to get accurate and up-to-date sex ed, and basic income studies to not get cancelled midway through and city councilor seats to not be eliminated just after the election for them begins.
Saudis aren’t just tweeting threats to 9/11 Canada btw, they’re recalling ambassdors, calling foreign students back, suspending flights and commercial ties, really going crazy on Canada.
“I absolutely cannot believe the Saudi-Canada spat has become a two-day story, but it has and it threatens to go on a lot longer than that. In case you missed it, on Friday Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland offered up the most anodyne, milquetoast statement of concern over Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women’s rights activists–said treatment being to toss them in a hole until hopefully everybody forgets they were ever allowed out in public. In response, the Saudi government has hadwhat international relations scholars define as a “massive shit fit.” So far, it has:
suspended all new commercial ties between the two countries
suspended all cultural exchange programs between the two countries, including withdrawing Saudi nationals who were attending Canadian colleges and universities
kicked the Canadian ambassador out of the kingdom
recalled its own ambassador from Canada
suspended direct flights between the two countries
unleashed its army of internet trolls (you know, the ones who are supposed to be rooting out extremism online) to tweet about the horrors of Canada’s treatment of the Quebecois and First Nations peoples (that this is a fair criticism doesn’t make it any less disingenuous)
This is all pretty batshit. The Saudis pulled their ambassador out of Sweden in 2015 over Swedish criticisms of their human rights record, but that whole affair took a lot longer to escalate and the Saudis only turned it up to 11 after Sweden backed out of an arms deal between the two countries. In this case Canada did…pretty much nothing, apart from offering the same lame, toothless expressions of concern that Western countries have always offered to try to paper over their inexcusable relationships with a ridiculously repressive, human rights-deficient totalitarian monarchy like Saudi Arabia. The Obama administration said worse about the Saudis, and the Obama administration was nauseatingly solicitous of Riyadh most of the time.
But that’s what this is about, really. Where Obama was nauseatingly solicitous of the Saudis, Trump generally behaves like he’s trying to get King Salman to adopt him. There is no action the Saudis can take that is too grotesque to cause Donald Trump to change his mind about them, and they know it. So they’re acting like it. They don’t even have to tolerate mild empty criticism from the West any more, and flipping out on Canada, of all places, is a nearly cost-free way for them to show it, both to the West and to the domestic audience.
The Trump administration couldn’t even muster a half-hearted statement of support for Canada here, for the simple reason that the man running it likes the Saudi Arabia and the Saudi monarchs a whole lot more than he likes Canada or Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.”
God what a blessed plane crash it would be, the House of Saud and the Trumps burning to Hell together
They (the Saudis) were also in the middle of buying military
vehicles from us, and I’ve heard at least one person suggest this whole thing
is because they suddenly decided they needed back out of the deal and this was
the excuse. (Roughly the equivalent of Henry VIII suddenly wanting out of an
alliance and insisting Anne of Cleves was horribly ugly and the marriage needed
to be annulled on the grounds of non-consummation?)
Mooncustafer 