Inside Tad's Mind

Amy and I were privledged to go see the "Broadway Across America" performance of the musical hit Wicked at the Capitol Theatre in Salt Lake last week. This is a charming retelling of the Frank Baum classic, The Wizard of Oz, that fills us in on the details of the relationship between Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, and Glinda, the good witch of the north. Like its inspiration, Wicked is a political satire masked as a fantasy musical. Where the original was a parody of government meddling with the prices of silver and gold. (Dorothy's slippers are silver in the book, and the name of the magical place, Oz, is the abbreviation for the word ounce.) In this telling of the story, the wizard isn't so wonderful. In fact, he makes up false enemies of Oz to build fear to make him appear "wonderful." Glinda is also not quite as "good" as her title would have her. Though she is not a bad witch, she is not completely innocent either. Elphaba is not wi...

There are several very successful people that I know that pay tithing. They are not LDS, so they don't pay their tithing to the LDS Church, but to other worthwhile charities. These people, and others that I don't know but have read about, all say that the act of paying their tithing, and of being charitable in general, are part of the reason that they are so successful. I have no reason to doubt them, so I accept what they say as true. And almost all practicing Mormons will "testify" that the law of tithing is true. They pay their tithing and have some anecdotal story to tell about how paying their tithing had some sort of mystical blessing effect that got them out of a jam. So the law of tithing, as taught by the LDS Church must be true, right? If tithing is a natural law (and Mormon theology says that it is) then there should be a metaphysical way of explaining it. (For those that don't know, metaphysics means the philosophical study of what is real.) Since tit...

The other day, someone asked me if I thought property taxes were still an appropriate way to fund education. Although I have an opinion on this question, I didn't respond. But the question started me thinking about how the current economic situation will affect education funding. About the only folks that haven't heard about the collapse of a housing bubble nationwide are folks living in caves in the Himalayas. Housing prices are falling in every market in the country, and the big question is how far will they fall. Some analysts believe the bubble started just after 2000-2001. One analyst I read recently says the "bubble" has been building since the Johnson administration, another says it started in the 40's. Here in Utah, prices have fallen at least 20%. Looking at the US Census Bureau's housing price data, it isn't hard to make a case that the numbers will fall quite a ways. Inflation adjusted median home price, nationwide, in 1940 was $30,600 (2000 dol...

The other day I was helping a friend with a school assignment. Sarah needed to find ten differences between the current economic situation and the Great Depression of the 1930's. It seems that questions like this one are cropping up a lot lately, and basicly ask, "Are we in, or are we headed for, another Great Depression?" As one poster put it, "When I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly, I get scared. When I listen to President Obama, I feel elated." We can chalk both the fright and the elation up to public speakers doing their jobs well. Limbaugh and O'Reilly are in the business of selling air time, and it just wouldn't work if they didn't provoke an emotional response. The President is in the business of leading the country; making people feel elated when the chips are down is a great skill to have. But can we rely on either source as an acurate indicator of where the economy is or where it is headed? I don't think so. It is much b...

Today at noon, Amy and I took five of our youngest children to an Ostara ritual at the South Valley Universal Unitarian Church in Cottonwood Heights. The festival and ritual of Ostara is a neoPagan ritual of Spring; it is a time of rebirth and rededication . The name ' Ostara ' comes from the high German, and is a cognate of the English word Eostre , which is the old and middle English origin of the word Easter. Ostara is anthroproporphized as a goddess. She is the goddes of dawn, the east, air, and of course Spring. In the early Anglo-Saxon calendars, the month we now call April was called Eostre - monath . It is from Ostara that the Christian Spring holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus derives its name. And it is Ostara that gives us Easter eggs and the Easter bunny... All ancient Pagan traditions related to the rebirth of Spring. The ritual of Ostara that we observed consisted of a ceremony of planting. All of the participants joined in a large circle. Ou...

The other day I was puttering around on Yahoo Answers Homeschool section. Someone had asked the perennial question "what are the disadvantages of homeschool?" As usually, the responses fell into two groups: the pro-homeschool group that could see no disadvantages in homeschool, and the anti-homeschool crowd (who generally haven't a clue what they are talking about) who could see no good. Naturally I had to post a response . I mean, hey, this is easy pickin's for best answer points. Then yesterday, I was reading a friend's blog, Jann's post discussed her conflict with the LDS Church's Young Men's and Young Women's programs. With the justaposition of the two, I felt it was time to write a blog entry about something that has gnawed at me for several years. Several years ago, I was asked to take the Young Women from our ward and their leaders to a Young Women's conference in the LDS Conference Center. Being neither young nor a woman, I was denied...

Another bill being considered by the Utah Legislature this year, SB-199, would require schools to provide equal access to all parent groups, and would bar schools from allowing access to parent groups that charge a mandatory fee for membership. (As last amended, the bill wouldn't exclude any group that would waive it's fee, but the Utah PTA says they'd have to amend their bylaws to waive their annual $5 dues.) The first question I have to ask about such a bill: Why is it necessary? Why is there a perception that the venerable PTA has a choke hold monopoly on some, if not all, of Utah's schools? And even if it does, why is that a bad thing? The second question I have to ask is what problem does paying dues present in allowing an organization like PTA or another parent group to have access to schools and other resources within a school? There is a lot of rhetoric in the media about how this is a revenge bill being pushed by the folks who lost the voucher battle last year....