The Mormon Candy Grab Game

The local paper here in southern Utah had a whole section of Friday's edition devoted to the Latter Day Saints General Conference, held annually in Salt Lake City. This boring charade of forced piety dominates the airwaves of the Beehive State for two whole days of droning homilies and starchy overwrought reverence peppered with the same shopworn expressions and familiar phrases that church leadership has used for over 150 years now. The flowery sentiment and bold sense of missionary purpose infused into an LDS conference is, to me, a smarmy melding of the glib sunshine and hokey warmth of a Hallmark greeting card with the cloying pseudo-heavenly language of the King James Bible and, its direct imitator, the hocus-pocus thunder and lightning prose of Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon. Ward Cleaver meets Moses at the mall.

One of the features I found most interesting in this special section of the Daily Spectrum was a game for the Mormon children called Conference Candy Grab. These are the instructions:

Try playing Conference Candy Grab with your children while listening to General Conference

Kids, when you hear any of the words listed on the Candy Grab card spoken during conference, cross out that word. When you have X-ed out a line horizontally, vertically or diagonally, you win!

Now grab that candy for JAY-ZUSS cheerun'!!! Oh lard----kin I git a witness?

A friend in Salt Lake City, who knows the person who places the liquor orders for the state run alcohol beverage outlets, said they always have a huge spike in the sale of very high end vodkas in SLC during the LDS conference. The kind of vodka no one can smell on your breath.

Whatever gets you through I guess, Candy Grab or vodka, it's all about latching on to eternal salvation dudes. BURP! Easy & quick.