New career path: trampolinist

So I'm working on a little political analysis to post, but in the meantime, blow your mind with this:

(Also, hit the mute button if you're not a fan of the lewd hip-hop music. Not kidding.)

Technology Sunday!

I'll start with this:
• The LDS Church authorities have been pretty strict in the past about cameras in their services. But what about taking video of little Bryghtyn giving a primary talk using the smartphone? Snapping pics of newly minted sister missionary Chastidee giving a farewell talk? Just asking.

• After four months of iPhone 3GS usage, here is my short list of must-have third-party apps:
TweetDeck -- Twitter client
Facebook -- Better than the full browser version
Photogene -- Photoshop for the iPhone (Though the newly released official Photoshop app ain't half bad.)
Shazam -- Wikipedia says: "The 'acoustic fingerprints' used by Shazam are based on spectrograms that have been generalized to a group of peak intensity frequencies." All I know is that I hold it up during a song and it tells me what it is.
Mocha VNC -- You're not going to play Call of Duty 4 with it, but VNC over the iPhone is still nifty when you need to access the Big Iron.
Glyder -- Beautiful, relaxing, challenging game in which you fly around on steampunk wings.

• I'm fiddling around with a few other apps, including "augmented reality" releases Layar and Wikitude that use the camera to show you additional information when you point it at something or show you where people are tweeting from. They're novel for sure, but I'm not sure that I'm going to be using them regularly.

• The Large Hedron Collider (aka we'll all be eating black holes for breakfast) gets colder than deep space to prep for relaunch. Of course, it's entirely possible that those pesky Higgs Boson particles don't want to be discovered. Jerks.

And if none of that stuff is interesting, check the sweet, sweet photo set of Barack Obama in 1980.

It's Shiny/Depressing Graphic Friday!

Where does your money go? Where does the Chinese investment money go? Its best if you have a widescreen monitor. A big one. Click on it for the massive version.

Image appears to be copyrighted, though the website at the bottom defaults to a placeholder site.

The panic has that all taken care of

Swine-flu infested members of the jury, I give you Utah County Commission agenda No. 5!

APPROVE AND AUTHORIZE THE COMMISSION CHAIR TO SIGN THE GRANT AGREEMENT WITH THE UTAH DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH FOR THE PUBLIC HEALTH PANDEMIC (H1N1) INFLUENZA VACCINATION CAMPAIGN

Whatever grant money they get should be given back. Exhibit A:

Clearly the public is well aware that a vaccine exists and is available. The health department even had to bring in more. Getting a grant and/or doling out matching funds for something that is already taken care of is the very definition of waste. Well, this is technically the definition of waste, but you know what I mean.

We just got trolled by a 6-year-old

I just want to say this about the kid who was hiding in a box in his attic while the nation waited for his dad's homemade dirigible to land in the Colorado desert to see if the 6-year-old was alive or had bailed out at 11,000 feet:

Well played, young man. Well played.

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And now on to more serious news. When is someone going to stop Big Postal? Rep. Jason Chaffetz has taken in at least $10,000 this election cycle from the good people at the post office because he sits as the ranking Republican on the Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia subcommittee.

I know exactly what you're thinking: How in the name of representatives who don't actually live in their district is Jason Chaffetz the ranking Republican of anything? Apparently it's not seniority related, as two other Republicans who have been around longer than him are also on the subcommittee but aren't ranking.

But I digress. Taking money from the very people you oversee? Doesn't sound very TakeBackWashington-y to me.

Mmmm, bullet-y

It's like Manifest Destiny. For guns.

It's Notebook Dump Thursday!

So once in a while you write the atta-boy stories where kids do something nifty and everyone feels good. Wednesday night, the eight-graders at the Reagan Academy in Springville hosted their second town hall meeting with political heavyweights. Last year it was McCain vs. Obama (their reps, anyway) and was pretty lively.

This year was a bit tougher. They started with Tim Bridgewater who spoke for McCain last year and is running for U.S. Senate against Bob Bennett in 2010. Mark Madsen is the area's state senator, so he was asked, and he recommended Mark Shurtleff who is the attorney general and also a candidate against Bennett.

The class landed Gov. Gary Herbert after many a phone call and the fact that his wife is a former Miss Springville, so hey, do a favor for the hometown kids, OK? You can read the story here.

But going through my notes this morning I found some hidden gems that may not be appropriate for a story about kids trying hard to be part of the process.

• Tim Bridgewater — in that awesome gravely voice — took direct aim at Bennett's age by saying that he wanted to help the three-term senator "stay home, retire and spend time with his (wait for it, waaaaaait for it) great-grandchildren." Oh no he didn't!

He also insisted that capitalism is a "moral system." Hate to break it to you, but economic models are neither moral nor immoral. The people within the systems are moral or immoral.

• Mark Shurtleff — in that lovable way he mixes campaign and work — keeps hammering on Bennett's role in the bank bailout while handing out his little honorary attorney general deputy pins to kids who can give him a quote, any quote, from Ronald Reagan.

Also lovable is the way he points out how the banks got themselves into trouble in the first place through "inefficiency and waste." He's right, except that it was exactly not that.

And if none of this interests you, feel free to join this Reddit discussion on which side of your spacebar is most worn out.

Yeah, well tweet you, too

You'd think someone who has been in the news business in Utah for more than a decade would remember not to pick October or April for Sunday shifts. But noooo.

So there I was on Sunday, trying to figure out a way to do a story on LDS General Conference. I've covered conference enough times to know the names of half the Seventy and you just never know what you're going to get. Could be a major announcement, could be a talk that lays down the celestial law. But often, conference speakers stick to general themes and there is a decided lack of "news."

That's tough slogging for reporters. So you start looking for the little things. In April, I wrote a follow-up piece about dogs taking the place of kids after it was mentioned by Dallin H. Oaks. This time, the #ldsconf on Twitter trended into most popular territory, and I found myself following those tweets more than watching conference.

Seemed like an interesting story, especially after one of the speakers compared wireless communications to prayer. So I wrote this story, which is headlined "LDS tweet about serving others."

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the train wreck, the 20-car-pileup, the Westie cornering two raccoons in a tree that is the WTF intersection of our old readers and young consumers of news!

We've had multiple calls and one irate older reader who came in today complaining about the use of "tweet" in the headline, as if the Herald were somehow demeaning the LDS Church and its members. (Which is hilarious because if you really want to read demeaning stuff about the church, everyone knows you just visit Warchol over at the Crawler.)

How in the name of all that is inky and tweety are we supposed to transition into the Digital Age if half our readers not only don't get it, but get angry about it?