First a few words about myself. I’m an only child, although my mom’s two Maltese dogs probably qualify as half-brothers. I did pretty normal things growing up—played hours of King’s Quest IV, went to Cotillion, got paid for getting good grades, and spent summers with my grandparents in Pennsylvania—and my parents never worried about me. Until I asked a Mormon girl to prom. (more…)

Cast:
Adam (roommate)—studious and most likely to become rich
Seth (roommate)—engaged, with a tendency to swear
Nephi (roommate)—likes to remind people that he’s the ward mission leader
Abe (roommate)—the ladies find his rippling biceps irresistible
Me (Greg)—lapsed Quaker
Melanie—fiancé, dedicated to stopping Seth’s swearing habit
Floyd—eats everyone’s food and always leaves after midnight

Acknowledgments: I’d like to thank my new roommate for writing this for me. Maybe I’ll write my own post next week. (more…)

I recently had to think about this because its what my dad kept asking me over and over again when I called him up to sheepishly ask for a small loan. It’s been an expensive month—had to pay an early termination fee on my lease and a security deposit on my spot in the Oasis, and then some college buddies were meeting up in Vegas over Memorial Day where Luck, like my ex-girlfriend, was not being much of a lady. So when my 1993 Ford Taurus started having troubles with the transmission, I didn’t have the extra six hundred bucks to make sure that I could get to work every day. (more…)

Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics started circulating in my office about a month ago, and last Friday it was finally my turn to read it while everyone else covered phones, coffee, and crises. The fact that it took a whole month to get to me represents its own economic analysis of my relative worth in the office; I’m also the last to know about left-over food from office lunches. And that’s just the point I want to make about Freakonomics: once you read this book, you’ll start wondering if everything in your life can be explained by economics. (more…)

The point of this post is that it’s none of your business what I am. Banner of Heaven has recently treated its readers to several public discussions of very private matters. I don’t intend any specific criticism of my co-bloggers (<cough> Aaron and Miranda) but I’d like our readers to know that not everyone on this blog sits around thinking “How can I rile people up today,” or “How can I further sensationalize people’s personal lives.” I don’t care what you are—straight, gay, bi, swinger, self-lover, asexual, hell, you can be into handcuffs and trapezes—I don’t want to hear about it. I’ll go one up on that—I think it’s in bad taste. (more…)

SEPTIMUS H CONFIRMED LIVING AND IN HIS RIGHT MIND
E-mail assures concerned friends and co-bloggers that the man alone has not left us bereft. (more…)

It’s not what you think it is. No boogers. This is just the most dorky thing I did in high school. (more…)

I like playing tricks on people. When I was little, I’d put my dad’s 100% Columbian ground coffee in my mom’s decaf container and hide under the kitchen table until she started yelling. The bad thing about being an only child is that you don’t have anyone else to blame things on, but not getting my allowance a few weeks in a row was worth getting away with a few tricks. (more…)

My Mormon girlfriend has a celebrity crush. This guy has been part of her life for longer than me, so I don’t see grounds for being threatened by him yet. But he does have two things on me: he’s also Mormon, and he wears eyeliner. (more…)

I’ve just been over to the upper end of the bloggernacle and found the discussion over there very helpful. I make crap zilch at my job, but I’m going to make a donation to your church’s humanitarian fund this Sunday. It seems like the right thing to do. But I want to do more than that. (more…)

It’s with a little chagrin that I take up Microsoft Word and pound out some thoughts tonight. The fact that I’m sitting in my ergonomic computer chair with Abe and Adam still playing Halo well within hearing distance (whoever said Mormons don’t swear?) means that I’m not wading through toxic flood waters doing more than just looking out for number one. I haven’t stopped thinking about what’s going on down there but my innate ineptitude with any sort of bureaucracy has given me acid reflux whenever I go onto www.redcross.org or www.fema.gov. I’ve gotten as far as registering as a volunteer with the VolunteerMatch link from the Red Cross homepage, but whenever I filled in any parameters for volunteering, I would click “search” and two seconds later read, “No Matches Found In Your Area.” Do you ever get the feeling that you’re driving about 15 miles an hour on a utility road paralleling a very fast interstate where important people driving V-8 engines are speeding off to where everyone else is going, and you want to be going faster, but somehow you missed the on-ramp that everyone else found miles back, and so now you’re stuck on this bumpy road with your grandma’s 1939 Model T? That’s my life. You wouldn’t guess it to see what a charismatic, intelligent guy I am, but I’m hands down the most embarrassing person you ever saw trying to keep track of anything more complicated than paying for a subscription to Nature Conservancy. And even then I miss the annual subscription renewal notice and have to talk to some very polite woman who calls to say, “Were you considering getting another 12 months of the world-class environmental publication,” but whose cotton-candy tone of voice actually says, “You idiot, we go through this every year.”

But that’s not what I want to write about. (more…)

I, Greg Fox, a founding blogger of Banner of Heaven, motion to ban DKL from this site effective as soon as we reach consensus about it. Let it be swift, let it be clean, let it be unmistakable. (more…)

Mormons have a game they like to play. You might know the rules, so feel free to play along. It goes like this:

“Did you know there are twenty BYU alumni active in the NFL?”
“Name them.”
“Ty Detmer, Atlanta Falcons; Doug Jolley, New York Jets; Reno Mahe, the Eagles; Ryan Denney, defensive end for the Buffalo Bills—“
“You’re forgetting Jim McMahon.”
“Idiot, he’s not Mormon, he just played for BYU. And he’s not active.” (more…)

I’m a Bible School graduate. It’s the one thing in my life that I’ve done consistently, and believe me, the chicks are always impressed when I whip out the minor prophets without pausing for breath. BAM, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah. It works every time. (more…)

I’m Naomi Frandsen, and I created the character of Greg Fox. I want to apologize for being stupid enough not to see the stupid parts of what we did, for being insensitive enough not to understand how people would really feel when they found out what was going on, and for being presumptuous enough to think that an explanation is the same thing as an apology. I think I am starting to see that one of the things that continues to cause the most hurt and anger is the fact that we didn’t see from the beginning and we’ve continued not to see that what we did was wrong. (more…)

Julia broke up with me. She dropped the “I’ve been wanting to tell you” line last night when she came over for pie with the folks. I don’t blame her. She left her family party bursting with 63 relatives playing 12 simultaneous games of Killer Uno and stuffing themselves comatose with 17 different kinds of pie to come over to an empty, coldish house where my mom served freaking sweet potato pie on antique china plates, which she then proceeded to tell Julia about for 45 minutes, culminating in how her great-great-great-great-grand-uncle fought with Washington and that’s how she got to be the president of the local chapter of the DAR. (more…)

I’ll give you five seconds to guess where I’m posting from. Onetwothreefourfive. Time’s up, suckah. (more…)