There are a boatload of characters that live in Rich County, Utah.
One of them is Gary Ogilvie.
If you were to see him at church or waiting in line for a raspberry shake at one of the fast food joints by Bear Lake, you’d just see a pleasant, mild-mannered gentleman.
But Gary has quite the past.
He’s been a police officer down on the Wasatch Front, a sheriff in Rich County, a Utah highway patrol officer, an internal affairs investigator for the Utah Department of Corrections, and an adult probation and parole supervisor. And a miner and many other things.
And, boy, does he have some stories.
Most with him wearing the badge, but others when he wasn’t wearing the badge. For example, Gary was himself hauled in by the cops when he was a teen.
Gary wrote many of his stories down in a journal, and I had the privilege of reading them one day a year or two ago. They were fabulous. Some were funny, some shocking, some poignant.
The good news for you is that Gary has recorded a number of them on YouTube. He did this for his grandkids, but you and I get to benefit.
If you enjoy real life cop stories, many with a humorous twist, and good-humored narrators, then you’re going to love listening to Grandpa O’s Stories over on YouTube.
In fact, I don’t think you’ll be able to listen to just one.
My bet is you’ll want to hear the next and the next.
If you love funny, feel-good movies, today’s you’re lucky day.
Because I’m going to tell you about one that will help brighten your Christmas season.
The movie is The Man Who Invented Christmas.
It’s about Charles Dickens, the author of A Christmas Carol.
Now some of you might already be groaning. Please, no, not another story about Scrooge.
I felt the same way. I haven’t enjoyed a movie about Scrooge for a long time. No, not even the one featuring Scrooge McDuck.
So I didn’t want to watch this, but I kept hearing so many good reviews, I finally caved and gave it a shot. I’m so happy I did.
This delightful movie reinvigorates the story with a whole new twist because it’s not about Scrooge. Not directly.
Instead, it’s about Charles Dickens. It’s 1843 and Dickens is suffering financial hardship because his last three books bombed in the marketplace. He determines to write a new book and publish it himself to restore his finances. That book is A Christmas Carol.
Dickens needs to finish it in six weeks so it can be ready for Christmas. That’s difficult enough, but will anyone read it? His friends and publishers keep telling him that the book will be a failure because, at the time, many thought Christmas irrelevant and didn’t celebrate it. Furthermore, the story isn’t developing as it should.
Now the movie does take some dramatic license, but, by the end, I think you’ll agree the message of Scrooge is never more poignant. I watched the final scene with Scrooge multiple times and thought about it for days afterwards.
If you want to laugh, be inspired, and feel the spirit of Christmas, I think you’ll love this movie.
There’s nothing quite like the laughter and fun a good family or party game creates. And we discovered two games this summer that have brought hours of pleasure.
The first is Just One. It’s for 3 to 7 players and takes about 20 minutes to finish.
Now, I was skeptical of this game at first because it’s a cooperative party game.
I mean, come on. Cooperation?
No teams?
No competition?
What were we going to do—hold hands and sing Kumbaya?
I was fully expecting to be bored out of my mind. Boy, was I wrong. There was suspense, laughter, and loads of fun.
There are 13 rounds in each game. In each round, one player blindly selects the number of a word on one of the game cards. The other players each write a one word clue to help that player guess the word. However, if two or more players write down the same word, they have to remove that clue.
So you’re trying to come up with one-word clues the others won’t that still help the guessing player. Some clues lead the guessing player off onto funny tangents. Others are just funny. And then there’s the suspense of whether someone else wrote your word and whether the player will be able to guess it from the clues that are left.
Your goal is to guess all 13 words selected. And there’s a little score card that ranks what it means if you get 13, 12, 11, etc.
As an aside, it’s crazy to me that the score card provided motivation. But it did. It was a delightful little brain hack.
One Word is a quick, fun game. We’ve played it with a few as 3 and as many 8 players and had a ball each time. We are so happy to have it in the family game closet.
The next is Fish Bowl. It’s for 4+ players. What this game does is take favorites like Taboo, One Word, and charades and mixes them together in a competitive game between two teams.
Here’s how you play it. Each person writes up 5 to 7 different words or phrases on separate slips of paper, folds the papers, and puts them in a bowl. Then you do 3 rounds.
Round 1 is like Taboo, where you can describe, but can’t say or act out the word or phrase on the paper. You select a team to go first. One person on the team selects the papers from the bowl and then tries to describe the word or phrase. The team has 30-45 seconds (you decide) to guess as many of the words as possible. When the time is up, it’s the other team’s turn. Back and forth you go, selecting a new team member each turn to give the clues, until there are no more slips of paper in the bowl. Then you count the number of slips each team got and move to round 2.
In round two, you put all of the slips of paper back into the bowl. The team that went second in the first round starts this one. This time the person giving clues gets to share one word. That’s it. And the team has to guess it. Again, the team has 30-45 seconds to guess as many as they can. Then it goes to the next team. And you switch back and forth just like you did in round 1, and when the slips of paper are gone, each team counts up their score.
In round 3, you put all of the slips of paper back into the bowl. The time the person giving the clues has to act them out. No words allowed. You run this round just like you did the first two with 30-45 second turns, switching back and forth between the teams until all the papers are gone. At that point, the teams total their scores for this round and then for all 3 rounds together to see which team won.
If you don’t want to use paper, you can play a version online.
Either way, it’s another fast, fun game. In fact, we played it last night. And laughed and laughed when one daughter was trying to get the other to guess “sling” and nailed her teammate in the head trying to act out a rock hitting Goliath. Movies are great. But sometimes what you need is some delightful game fun. And I’m betting you’ll love these.
Nellie and I stumbled onto a new TV series that we are really enjoying. It’s made us laugh, think, and feel. It’s called The Chosen and is based on the life of Jesus Christ, but it’s not like any Jesus series I’ve seen before.
Now I have to admit that when I first saw ads for this, I wasn’t interested. It’s not that I don’t like videos about scriptures. There are some I love. It’s just that the purpose of so many of them is to illustrate a scripture instead of tell a story. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that when I’m looking for a drama, I want to watch a drama.
But this series is different. They have taken a historical fiction approach, which means that while they adhere as closely to the facts as we know them, they don’t limit the story to those facts. And so they imagine people, events, and motives that are plausible, and then tell a story. A great example of this type of storytelling is Gerald N. Lund’s bestselling The Work and The Glory series about a family in the early 1800s who join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Or Michael Shaara’s bestselling The Killer Angels about the battle of Gettysburg in the United States Civil War.
The Chosen focuses on stories about characters surrounding Jesus and those who plausibly could have met him. It also imagines Jesus as more than a sober Lord. He laughs, jokes, engages with children. It is a reimagining of the familiar that makes the story fresh again and leaves you wondering and pondering.
It’s created by Dallas Jenkins, an evangelical Christian, and produced and distributed by VidAngel Studios, run by Latter-day Saints. And their love of and delight in the subject show. I can’t wait to see the next episode. You can watch it right now for free. Go to the VidAngel site or to https://studios.vidangel.com/the-chosen/. Or you can watch it on YouTube with ads.
If you like religious fiction, if you like a good drama, if you’re interested in knowing more about the life and times of Jesus Christ, then I think you’ll love this.
I just finished Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire by Bret Baier. It’s a New York Times bestseller that takes you into the world of Ronald Reagan, his rise to power in politics, and his role in ending the Cold War. And it does in a personable way with gentle humor throughout.
I enjoyed the fascinating behind-the-scene insights about the personalities involved and the clarity about what really happened. And how the book brings Reagan to life, as if he’s almost there. Along the way you’ll also get insight into Mikhail Gorbachev, the assassination attempt on Reagan, and more.
Baier is the chief political anchor for Fox News. In 2001, he became the station’s chief Pentagon correspondent and ended up traveling to Afghanistan 11 times and Iraq 13 times. In 2007, he became the station’s chief correspondent to the White House. More importantly, Baier seems to be one of the few journalists these days who is simply trying to get and report facts instead of spin. And that’s exactly what he’s done here.
If you like biographies or history, if you want to know how the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. stepped back from decades of mutually assured destruction, if you want to get a view into how diplomacy is done, then I think you’ll love this book. And you’ll probably love it even more if you can listen to the audio book version, read by Baier himself, which also includes a recording of Reagan’s speech to the students at Moscow State University. I listened to it via the Overdrive account my public library provides. Baier’s reading was terrific.
