Well I made it back from a fun family trip to Utah. I see that the comments are hanging up forever with Blogger still so my first order of business is to find a new home for my blog. I expect to have www.newcoolthang.com up and running by this weekend. More on that to come.

As for my trip — In addition to immensely enjoyable visits with family and friends I also spent Saturday up in Logan at the SMPT conference and met bloggernacle regulars Jim Faulconer, Rosalynde Welch, and Blake Ostler – all of whom were even more interesting and charming in person than they are in writing.

I made it back to BYU on Tuesday and saw how truly ugly the campus is for the first time. Man, Clark was right about the architecture there. Those building from the 60s and 70s could hardly be uglier. Brother Brigham must be annoyed to no end. I mean this is the man that built the gorgeous Salt Lake Temple and the lovely and newly restored BY Academy. Yet the main campus of the University in his name is as ugly as sin. Thankfully the Maeser building is still beautiful and the new buildings under construction seem to have aesthetics in mind — I have to credit current decision makers for that. But as for the rest of the place… Yikes! That’s what happens when utility is taken too far and beauty is ignored too much I guess. And those unfortunate architechtural decisions are now too expensive to quickly undo (hence the Provo temple still stands).

God certainly didn’t ignore beauty when he made Utah, though. That place is gorgeous from the North to the South. Of course the natural beauty only serves to emphasize how ugly and austere the campus architecture is. But then the same could be said for Interstate 15 from Provo to Ogden… talk about a concerted effort to ugly up a beautiful place with obnoxious billboards, etc. Maybe I have been reading too much Nibley, but the guy is definitely right about this subject. Is it just me?