In July, 1999, twenty-one relatively young people with nothing better to do decided to try writing novels in a month. Six of them actually did it. Eight years later, in November, 2006, nearly 13,000 crossed that same finish line (almost 80,000 gave it a shot.) Last year (2006) the participants logged a total of over 982,000,000 words — the expectation is that we’ll break 1,000,000,000 this year. I’ll be contributing my 50,000 this year, as I did in 2004, 2005, and 2006. (Promo: You can do it too!)

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[edit: VoteGopher has updated the page I referenced -- see my comment]

So, various spiffy people in the wider blogosphere have been talking about how great this site is. The idea is that all the editors of the site have to take a vow of non-partisanship (presumably this applies to their editorial practices only, and not the rest of their lives) and so the information presented about each candidate and his/her stand on the issues won’t be biased. Anyone who’s tried to live with someone who’s passionate about their particular candidate will understand why this might be appealing — my senior year of college, I lived in a dorm in which, at least by October, everyone was vocally in favor of Bush, Gore, or Nader; I’m not sure I was ever able to get any actual information out of anyone.

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I’ll admit it, going on vacation put me seriously behind on my reading, especially of all the columnists out there (I will be very sorry when my NY Times archive/TimesSelect access goes away — it’s enough to make a girl enroll in grad school, just to retain the free access for a few more years.) Anyway, I’m a bit late in noticing the following quote:

Still, when the United States was seriously inconvenienced by our commitment to freedom of religion, we found means to handle Mormon polygamy.

That was William F. Buckley, Jr., in his August 25th column. His general point was that British society needs to find a way of responding to the increasingly vocal (and growing) immigrant Muslim population in the UK — that’s the only Mormon mention in the piece (the Queen gets far more attention.)

My take? Okay, yeah, figuring out how to cope with change is important for any society, and when lots of changes are happening, it’s obviously a more urgent matter. Duh.

But, umm, are we really that great of an example of how to deal with change? Excluding pre-1847 persecution for the moment: is disenfranchisement, wholesale asset seizure, and widespread imprisonment really the greatest model for adaptation to cultural challenge? Is the general historical lesson of pre-1890 Mormon polygamy really “phew, we got those Mormons to cooperate, eventually”? And, because maybe this isn’t an interesting enough question yet, how about “should Mormons look to the Utah Territory period as a positive example of how to treat newcomers in our own societies?” Or maybe we’re just on every commentator’s lips right now, even when they’re not thinking about hit-piece films or presidential candidates, and this was a really bad example to use?

Anyway, my little sister hates it when I try to start this kind of conversation with her, so: what do you all think?

So. Until August 14th or so, I’d never been to Salt Lake City before. My dad took me on a driving trip all over the Southwest when I was about 15, but he did his best to avoid populated Mormony areas; when I was about 22 I went on a family trip where the motel was on the Utah side but the casino was on the Nevada side, and that’s about it.

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If you nose around the BYU Radio website for a while, you’ll come across a fun little page, with a rather straight-forward title: the Top Talks list, which shows you the most popular Church talks (mostly BYU devotionals) offered for download on the site. There’s both a list for the week so far (the top three as of 3pm EST today were by John Bytheway, President Kimball, and Elder Bednar,) and for all time* (the top three, again as of 3pm EST, were by Elder Bednar, John Bytheway, and Elder Holland.)

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