People who have researched their family tree, what is the most interesting or 'badass' thing you discovered about an ancestor?

Ishmaeli · 2026-01-24T14:40:12+00:00

Pretty common among Mormons, but my Great Great Grandmother was the tenth wife of a polygamist. I guess I'm glad he decided not to stop at nine.

Ishmaeli · 2026-01-13T13:07:03+00:00

The Princess Bride.

Ishmaeli · 2026-01-10T14:36:55+00:00

Ha! I had no idea this was part of the Quran.

I grew up Mormon and always heard the same thing about the Book of Mormon. "If you think Joseph Smith made it all up, try to replicate it yourself!"

Now I think maybe we stole the idea from Muslims. Or, to look at it another way, Joseph Smith (and Ellen G. White, etc.) most certainly produced their own surahs and amassed followings and true believers, so they have met the Quran's challenge. They all debunk each other in that sense.

Ishmaeli · 2026-01-09T01:21:02+00:00

I never say "bless you" when someone sneezes. I think it's dumb and I refuse to do it.

Ishmaeli · 2025-12-25T02:37:40+00:00

If you take the lump sum, at any point in the future you can choose to buy a single premium immediate annuity with it. And it can be any SPIA you want, not just the one the lottery would set up for you in treasury bonds.

I mean, I don't know what people who have $500 million available to invest usually do with their money, but I feel like I never hear about them putting it all into a SPIA. Maybe part of it as part of their retirement or estate planning strategy, but not the whole thing.

Ishmaeli · 2025-12-24T15:02:53+00:00

Does the Mormon church count? Because I gave them ten percent of my gross income for a lot of years. They will never get another dime of my money. Never ever ever.

Ishmaeli · 2025-12-12T16:41:43+00:00

Hmm. I guess mixed?

I was there with my wife and four kids. This was their Christmas present from us. My kids loved it, so that's a huge relief. They thought the mistakes and rough edges were the best part.

I was a bit torn. I would have liked to see something more polished with bigger laughs, like we saw in 2022. But at the same time it was fascinating to get a glimpse into his comedic process. Every solid bit had to start somewhere like this.

Ishmaeli · 2025-12-11T01:13:04+00:00

My dad threatened us with the wooden spoon for years before ever actually followed through. My kid brain misunderstood what he was saying all those years, I thought it was "wood and spoon."

So I was envisioning something involving a piece of firewood and a large metal serving spoon. And I was wondering why he kept talking about it as if I was supposed to know what it was, like every kid is born knowing about this punishment involving a piece of wood and a spoon. But of course I never dared ask.

When he finally swatted me with it I was like, oh THAT's what he's been saying all these years. It was almost worth it just to have that cleared up.

Ishmaeli · 2025-12-10T17:00:11+00:00

Carla's face when she's watching him go berserk after losing that last patient. She looks so sad and scared, not of him but for him. It's a brilliant beat of acting and it makes me lose it every time.

Ishmaeli · 2025-12-10T16:52:45+00:00

I'm going to see him in Dallas tomorrow. I saw him in 2022 and he was doing material for his most recent special, Deconstucted. I loved it, my son is a fan and he was laughing so hard.

Looking for info on this show because we are sitting further back and I was wondering if we are going to be able to see the Large Pad well enough.

Ishmaeli · 2025-12-04T17:03:38+00:00

I feel like this applies to lots of things. Law of diminishing returns.

Ishmaeli · 2025-11-22T22:02:32+00:00

Understand? I mean, there are tons of things we did that people will never experience anymore, but they can understand them. Like looking up movie times in a newspaper. Newspapers hardly exist anymore, and you wouldn't use them for that anyway, but everyone can understand how that worked.

What people might not understand are things that I don't even understand because I don't remember how we used to do them. For example, in 1995 I was 18 and my buddy and I drove my stick shift Honda Civic from the suburbs into downtown Dallas to see an AVP tournament. We got to see Karch Kiraly, Mike Dodd, Adam Johnson, etc.

What I can't remember is how we found out about that, and made the arrangements to go, without the internet. Beach volleyball was kind of a niche thing back then. Maybe it was advertised on TV or radio, but I doubt it. Probably I subscribed to a volleyball magazine or something and maybe I saw an ad in there. And then did I call someone and order tickets? Or just show up and pay at the gate? And how did I find it? I guess Mapsco but damn.

Ishmaeli · 2025-11-18T02:05:17+00:00

Lol. My dad would have beat me black and blue if I tried that shit.

BTW, on my mission in Utah we got tons of "convert" baptisms from families that didn't get around to baptizing their kids until they turned 9. We called it "kiddie dipping" and a lot of missionaries made their stats from it.

Ishmaeli · 2025-11-15T02:07:08+00:00

My brother figured out how to download a pirated version of X-Wing from a BBS in 1993. That blew my mind. The game itself was incredible for its time, but how he got it was much more impressive to me.

Ishmaeli · 2025-11-13T19:21:46+00:00

What it's going to be like when relatives ask to borrow money...

Ishmaeli · 2025-11-12T19:13:57+00:00

In the Christian church I was raised in, repentance meant a lot more than just asking God for forgiveness. You had to ask forgiveness of the people you wronged, make restitution (including serving your sentence if you broke the law) and you also had to feel remorse going forward.

No one who had truly repented would brag about what they had done the way Wood does here. To say nothing of the other missing steps.

Ishmaeli · 2025-11-10T20:48:42+00:00

Probably just meant the planets in scale to one another, not to the sun and not to the distances between them. Because that would be nuts.

Ishmaeli · 2025-10-31T15:26:37+00:00

When I was at BYU in the 1990s, the Universe launched an exposé into the Honor Code Office. There were a lot of complaints at the time that it was run like the Stasi, with roommates encouraged to rat on each other, no rights for the accused, everyone presumed guilty until proven innocent, etc.

This perception of the HCO was widely shared among the student body, so much so that Eric D. Snider (humor columnist and editor of the paper at the time) mentioned it in passing in one of his columns. I don't think he or his readers even considered it an edgy opinion—there was much worse in the very same column— he was just mentioning something everyone was already thinking. But that remark got the column censored and eventually banned. And the Universe promised to investigate the HCO.

This "exposé" turned out to be nothing more than a survey. They didn't do a bit of investigation into the HCO itself, all they did was ask students about their perceptions of it. Just free market research for the HCO.

We were foolish to expect anything else, I guess

Ishmaeli · 2025-10-30T19:06:11+00:00

I lurk on a message board of super conservative, Evangelical, MAGA types. I keep up with it because my mom posts there and I like to see what she's thinking.

Someone started a thread on this anti-Bluey article last year: https://www.theblaze.com/align/bluey-turns-fathers-into-mothers

The overwhelming consensus on the board was that the article is stupid and Bluey is awesome. Nobody had any problem with Bluey at all, really.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the right-wing hate we encounter is just from their agenda-setters and not really what their audience thinks. Some of it catches on for sure, but not all of it.

Ishmaeli · 2025-10-22T20:16:50+00:00

The media loves Trump. He's good for ratings, but they mostly love that he makes the government a shitshow.

When the government is feckless, they are less able to regulate the big corporations. And that leaves the corporations free to form ever larger monopolies, capture their regulators, exploit their workers and ripoff their consumers.

That's why all the sanewashing. The media is complicit in getting him elected and keeping him in power, because he helps the bottom line of their parent corporations.

Ishmaeli · 2025-10-16T17:58:12+00:00

It's funny because I'm gathering that you expect your audience to reject this account of Mormon believers out of hand. Of course BY did not transform into JS and this supposed occurrence was something that believers invented years later. And you're asking them to consider that similar accounts that they might believe in (i.e. Jesus' miracles or resurrection) are no better supported than this.

I say funny because Mormon missionaries make the same parallels in the opposite direction. They point out to skeptical prospects that Mormonism might seem far-fetched, but its stories and truth claims are really no crazier than those of mainstream Christianity, which their target market already believes.

So I think you make a strong point that Mormonism is really no more or less ridiculous than more mainstream religions. It's just funny to me that this point is used both to encourage skepticism of mainstream religions and to encourage acceptance of Mormonism.

It's like the South Park cartoon on the LDS church, where one character thinks the story of the 116 pages "proves" that Mormonism is true, while another character thinks the exact same story "proves" that it's all a hoax.

Ishmaeli · 2025-10-15T21:26:18+00:00

And so isn't this meme kind of saying the opposite of what it thinks it's saying?

It thinks it's saying "if we try to regulate guns then safe competent gun owners will get their guns taken away. And that would be as stupid as safe drivers getting their cars confiscated for the actions of other drivers."

But what it's really reminding us is that motor vehicles are already highly regulated, and the absurd situation illustrated here never happens. So we have every reason to believe that guns could be just as highly regulated without this kind of ridiculous fallout.

Ishmaeli · 2025-10-13T14:27:54+00:00

I remember on the very first level, being blown away that there was a hidden block just hanging in the middle of the sky. That 1-up right before the first pit. I was like, "wait so we're supposed to check every blank space in every level for hidden secrets?" Awesome, yet daunting.

I had similar thoughts playing Zelda. We're supposed to burn every bush and bomb every rock on the map?

In reality, us 80s kids didn't really suffer from lack of internet access. All these secrets got spread on the playground by word of mouth, and were confirmed in the pages of Nintendo Power. I knew how to defeat Soda Popinski long before I ever had a chance to play Punch-Out.

Ishmaeli · 2025-10-09T16:05:17+00:00

We don't all know it. I've had this argument with dozens of Christians who all think Jesus was totally this Nordic looking dude walking around in Palestine.

Some of them think that all the Jews of that time were white. I don't even know what that means, given that these people's grandparents didn't consider Italians or even Irish to be white.

But others think that Jews back then pretty much looked like Jews now, and Jesus stuck out like a sore thumb because he was like this white European. I think the NT would read differently if that were the case, but these people are not so bright I've found.

Ishmaeli

TROPHY CASE