Sunday Appropriate Movies

1. The Best Two Years:Two pairs of Mormon missionaries from America live in a beaten-up apartment in the Dutch city of Haarlem. Their personalities are distinctly different. Appropriately, the most responsible one, Elder Johnson, is the District Leader and oversees their efforts. His companion, the vain Elder Van Pelt, seeks to become the assistant to the mission president (the top post available) as soon as possible, and he receives letters from three girlfriends he left behind. The capable Elder Rogers has become disillusioned and inattentive to his duties ever since a previous missionary companion returned to America, looked up and married Elder Roger's girlfriend. As a result he is simply marking time until he returns home in a few weeks time. The three meet Elder Roger's new companion, Elder Calhoun, in the train station.

This new elder is a nerdy but enthusiastic "greenie" that has just arrived from the Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Utah. Unfortunately his training did not give him much fluency in the Dutch language, but as luck would have it, the first person he approaches to proselytize is a fellow American named Kyle. In the weeks that come, Elder Johnson and Van Pelt increasingly irritate each other while in contrast Elder Rogers and Calhoun begin to relate in a positive fashion as they teach Kyle about the Mormon faith.

This movie is one of my all time favs. It is SO funny and really sweet.




2. The R.M.:Jared Phelps (Kirby Heyborne) has completed two years of full-time missionary service for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His mission president has promised him that he will be blessed for his service, and he thinks he has it all worked out. His girlfriend has waited for him. His boss promised that he could have his old job back, and he has already sent his application to BYU. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. His girlfriend dumps him. His losses his job, and he isn't accepted to BYU. Then, it gets even worse, and he has to decide if choosing the right is worth all the trouble.

3. Work and The Glory: The new york times bestselling books are now a three part movie series!! The movies are great, (tho one of them is rated PG-13) they teach you alot about the pioneers, and are lots of fun. They follow the Steed family as they meet the prophet Joseph Smith and become converted, and all the trials they faced from the many mobs.

4. One Night With The King: "One Night With The King" chronicles the life of the young Jewish girl, Hadassah, who goes on to become the Biblical Esther, the Queen of Persia, and saves the Jewish nation from annihilation at the hands of its arch enemy while winning the heart of the fiercely handsome King Xerxes.

5. 17 miracles: As part of the Willie Handcart Company, Levi Savage (Jasen Wade) feared that leaving late in the season would lead to despair and death. What he came to find out is that for every tragedy, there is a multitude of miracles.

Levi Savage kept meticulous records as he made his journey west toward the Salt Lake Valley. Many of the unbelievable miracles showcased in 17 Miracles come directly from Levi's first hand journal entries.

Based on unbelievable actual events, and brought to you by filmmaker T.C. Christensen (Praise to the Man, The Work and the Glory), 17 Miracles will open your eyes to the stories of the Mormon Pioneers as you have never seen them before. Something extraordinary is about to happen.

Acceptance

Have you ever been to a party where everyone is all excited to start this movie but then you realize that it's a bad one. You can either make a wrong choice, stay and watch, go home, or ask the host if it would be ok if they could please change the movie. I've been there. But I've also been the host, where we were going to watch the edited version of Blind Side and one of my friends wasn't allowed to see it. I felt really annoyed and convinced her to call her parents, and they agreed to let her see it. Afterward I felt really awful because I've been in that circumstance when, sure, i was allowed to see it, but I didn't really want to. So lets all be accepting and when someone asks us to change a movie or song, lets do it. If we don't we basically throw them out of our home because they can't stay or we make them compromise their standards. To be a good friend is to be understanding. And since many of us have been there before it's really no big deal. We''l be blessed to have a better time with a better movie and have a friendship strengthened and that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Confessoin time

So, not everyone is perfect, I admit, far be it from me to claim that I am so. Especially since I (ahem) might have ignored my own advice on movies. Yah, hee hee hee, not that smart of me. So my dad bought Little Red Riding Hood yesterday (the new one) and we were going to watch it on Clearplay (the movie is rated PG-13 but this edits is down to PG) so I justified it thinking, oh it'll be edited, I'm sure it'll be just fine. Yahhh, it wasn't. You see the first sign was that the trailer was creepy, the cover of the movie looked creepy, all the actor's had been in questionable movies, people who saw it said it was creepy. And unfortunately clearplay cannot take away Creepy. Anyways, this movie was STRANGE. I cannot emphasis it enough. Do not see it! And I'll even be helpful and tell you that Valerie (little red riding hood) gets with Peter, instead of Henry, the guy she's suppose to marry, and the wolf is her father. This movie is way to creepy, violent,dark and disturbing!! I would not recomend it.

So the moral of this little story is that the tips I give really are helpful and can save you from tough choices and creepy movies that give you nightmares. Make a good choice and follow the tips given for entertainment because they really do work, I have given evidence it works and proof of what happens if you don't follow the tips. So just follow them and you will be one happy bisect.

I got some new books

These are some books that I bought yesterday that have passed the book test!

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austin

Catherine grows up to be a passably pretty girl and is invited to spend a few weeks in Bath with a family friend. While there she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to visit their family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Austen amuses herself and us as Catherine, a great reader of Gothic romances, allows her imagination to run wild, finding dreadful portents in the most wonderfully prosaic events. But Austen is after something more than mere parody; she uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of "horrid" novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society, for nothing Catherine imagines could possibly rival the hypocrisy she experiences at the hands of her supposed friends. In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen's novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, 19th-century British style.


The secrets of the immortal Nicholas Flamel: The Alchemyst by Michael Scott

Twin 15-year-old siblings Sophie and Josh Newman take summer jobs in San Francisco across the street from one another: she at a coffee shop, he at a bookstore owned by Nick and Perry Fleming. In the vey first chapter, armed goons garbed in black with "dead-looking skin and... marble eyes" (actually Golems) storm the bookshop, take Perry hostage and swipe a rare Book (but not before Josh snatches its two most important pages). The stolen volume is the Codex, an ancient text of magical wisdom. Nick Fleming is really Nicholas Flamel, the 14th-century alchemist who could turn base metal into gold, and make a potion that ensures immortality. Sophie and Josh learn that they are mentioned in the Codex's prophecies: "The two that are one will come either to save or to destroy the world." Mayhem ensues, as Irish author Scott draws on a wide knowledge of world mythology to stage a battle between the Dark Elders and their hired gun—Dr. John Dee—against the forces of good, led by Flamel and the twins (Sophie's powers are "awakened" by the goddess Hekate, who'd been living in an elaborate treehouse north of San Francisco). Not only do they need the Codex back to stop Dee and company, but the immortality potion must be brewed afresh every month. Time is running out, literally, for the Flamels.

The pharaoh's Daughter by N.C. Allen

Isabelle Webb launches a new adventure as she pursues a steamship en route to Egypt carrying two young stowaways: her teenaged ward, Sally Rhodes, and an unlucky girl named Alice Bilbey. Arriving in Suez, Isabelle and her companions recover the girls and unexpectedly encounter Isabelle's own guardian from her youth, Genevieve Montgomery. Isabelle and her friends decide to join up with Genevieve upon discovering that she is funding an expedition to a burial site near Luxor with an entourage of Egyptology experts. Unaware that their nemesis, Thaddeus Sparks, is also in Egypt as part of a jewel-hunting cadre, Isabelle's group joins the expedition under ominous signs: a prophetic warning from a stranger, threats along the Nile River, and birthmarks that burn when the rare Jewel of Zeus is nearby. At the excavation site, a cave rumored to be the tomb of a pharaoh's disgraced daughter. Tension builds when several newcomers arrive. And as circumstances shift with the sands, Isabelle finds that some of the royal treasure in the ruthless pharaoh's desert was buried for lethal reasons.

See, you can find clean books at the bookstore, silly's!! :0)

Things to beware of at the book store

Soo... Today I went to Barnes and Nobles to find some good books to read and whilst browsing I was mortified by the fact that only three genre's were present: Apocalyptic, Vampire romance, and Paranormal. Erg.. I am so over the Hunger Games theme. Really, we get it, I could probably tell you the story line of every apocalyptic book in that library. Oh no, the world is ending, it's not a good one, only the main character can restore order. The main character meets up with some peeps and falls in love. Oh no some one dies and they keep being attacked as they try to take down the reigning government. More people die, a love triangle forms, and the main defeats all. The end. Except for it's not. Because there are so many books of that genre and they're all violence. My advice, stay AWAY from them, like 12 feet. They may seem like the only thing there, but nay, you are incorrect. Cuz I found some that aren't doomsday.

Vampire Romance, really Stephanie Meyer, really? Why did you inflict this upon human kind? The Twilight saga was bad enough without you inspiring more books with the SAME storyline. I mean your probably a nice person and everything but have you looked around Barnes and nobles? There are cheap rip offs of your book EVERYWHERE!(well I guess not your book, but the book you copied your book from that I read and I know it's copied because the real story was published in 1995!). Yah, don't do these books. They are dark and creepy and make you less intelligent. Also romance books in general. Sure romance is lots of fun to read, but in moderation. If it gets to heavy just stop reading, it's not as hard as you think. The new section at barnes and nobles titled "romance" is one to be avoided. The entire storyline is romance, which gets old after a while and these books go a smidge to into detail.

Paranormal: Hey, wait, but I thought you once said you love fantasy. You see my friends I do, but at Barnes and Nobles they have created a whole new section called the paranormal section. In it holds the dark tales of wiches, vampires, werewolves, so on and so forth. The fiction section keeps the fantasy books safe and unblemished from the creepy paranormal books. I mean these books are so dark and strange that they had to make a new section for them. That should tell you something.

Ok then, what can I buy, since you've pretty much eliminated all my options? Well, listed in this blog are great books, do the tests to see if a book is good, there are other sections at barnes like the classics, history, the LDS section, teen fiction, regular fiction. This bookstore is huge and if you tell me you can't find anything, you are not trying hard enough.

Also a way nicer place to look for books is Deseret Books. It doesn't smell like coffee but fresh bread and you're more likely to make a good choice if you've got the prophet staring at you from the front page of his biography. Now I'm not saying all the books you get will be clean there (Twilight was once sold on those shelves before they came to there senses and made it go bye bye), you still need to do all the tests, but you have a better shot of getting cleaner books. Just look in the Fiction and Teen fiction sections.

Centeral Classics

A succesful society revolves around it's major classics. That's how it works in the economic world and it's how it run's in the social world. For instants a banker would center his work around a book by Warren Buffet, because Warren Buffet is a succesful billionaire. A nurse might center all she does around the autobiography of Mother Teressa; a teacher, Three cups of tea by Greg Mortenson. But what classics does America revolve around? Sadly ones that should be burned off the face of the planet. Books that are taught in schools EVERYWHERE. Books like Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, Fahrenheit 451, My Antonia, and Grapes of Wrath. Sure these novels are symbolic and whatnot but that doesn't mean that they should be our central classics. Plus, all the English teacher's HATE teaching them.

Also, all these books have one thing in common. They all involve affairs. Is it any wonder the divorce rate, teenage pregnancy, and the number of single mothers is sky rocketing? The books that teach our society have no place for marriage. They teach us to do as we please, we must follow our hearts, ya da ya. These books are a danger to society because a society cannot survive if it's primary groups are destroyed. And what is a primary group? Your family. With families falling apart and babies not born into a family, our society and economy are failing. Is it any wonder? The taxpayer's have to pay for all the single mother's and their children and what a load would be taken off the economy if we didn't need to.

The point of all this is that, I know we have to read these books- are graduating high school depends on it- but don't let them become your central classics. Because America, revolving around books that teach, lying, stealing, cheating, is failing. And you will fail too. Center your life around what is most important to you. Around books like the Bible, Book of Mormon, and Les Miserables. Let your classics be books that reflect your values and what you want to become. They should offer words of wisdom and comfort. The books I listed above (Bible,Book of Mormon, Les Miserables) are my central classics. What's yours?

25 things to do when the entertainment is Lacking

1. Hang out with a friend
2. Go outside and run around
3. Bake
4. Look at old journals
5. Read a book
6. Write a book
7. Go on facebook * in moderation
8. Take some pictures
9. Read scriptures
10. Sing
11. Walk your dog or beg for one
12. Clean room or house
13. Personal progress
14. College applications
15. ACT or SAT prep (never to young to start)
16. Study for upcoming school year
17. Excersize
18. Make some money
19. Swim
20. Sleep
21. Make a bracelet
22. Get a snow cone or make one
23. Go see a local play
24. Watch an old Disney movie
25. Go to Walmart and browse