Sunday in Outer Blogness: Funny Stories Edition!

As usual, we’ve had some fascinating political commentary this week in Outer Blogness, but — for fun — let’s start with the funny stories this week!

Eliza Snitch recounts the three part tale of bringing home R-Rated movies to her BYU apartment. In other Zoobie stories, j-dog is not impressed by his fellow Zoobies’ attempts at kewlness. In the “strange encounters with Mormon friends” department, Maureen’s household fended off a [facebook] intruder, and the follow-up to the “we’re moving because our neighbors have tattoos” story is strange enough that I hardly know what to make of it. This video of a guy telling a story about “Mormons an Oral Sex” is probably neither true nor safe for work, but it’s definitely good for a chuckle. Then, we’ve had some fun family adventures here at my parents house, what with my adorable niece demonstrating her command of logic, my son Nico learning to pray, and our failed attempt to take a good portrait of the lot of them. Of course the funniest story may be this cartoon Daniel made of his adventures volunteering for the “Australian Sex Party”.

And on that note, let’s move on to politics. The big story was the “Ground-Zero Mosque” and its implications for freedom of religion. John Stewart has two funny segments about it. Kent discusses the obvious parallel with neighborhood complaints about new Mormon temples. Lisa explains that it’s a question of fear.

But that mosque wasn’t the only discussion of rights and the US Constitution. Aaron reports on an interesting case of the CoJCoL-dS attempting to buy up public land that was traditionally used as a “free speech forum” near the Manti Pageant (didn’t they get this memo from Gary Lawrence?). Another conservative radio personality misrepresents how free speech works. Chris explains how the “Tea Party” is confused about being for or against the Constitution. (Actually, the disconnect with reality angle is why my favorite of these T-shirts is “Obama wants the government to take over Social Security — That’s why I’m voting Tea Party”.)

In gender studies, Jana recommends an intriguing Twitter experiment. Plus the faithful LDS blogs had some great discussion of women in the CoJCoL-dS, starting with fMh reposting Ezra Taft Benson’s “To the Mothers in Zion” fireside. Aerin provides a good wrap-up. Starfoxy’s piece on make-up was also interesting.

It looks like that new Mormon ad campaign and website is the gift that keeps on giving! Molly rounds up some of the discussion and adds some of her own (starting with the “If you have to tell people you’re normal, that’s a bad sign…” angle). Philomytha submitted a profile (as a cultural Mormon) and is still waiting for a response. Donna posted a funny profile (of someone else). I think my favorite profile, though, was the one Madame Curie wrote in three posts giving clear, concise, accurate answers to mormon.org’s set of missionary questions for the profiles to answer.

On the faithful side, Sunny argues that the Mormons themselves are not making a good impression. A good illustration of what he’s talking about may be the torch-and-pitchfork brigade that came after John Dehlin, nicely rounded-up and discussed by Andrew. A close second would be the new The Strengthening Church Members Committee blog, which is so bad that people can’t tell if it’s a parody or what, see Andrew again for the whole scoop.

It’s been a great week, hasn’t it? Now it’s time for me to go back to my vacationing-with-the-family. Happy Sunday!