Almost exactly five years ago, I called your attention here to a brouhaha in the small town of Kanab, Utah, over the adoption by the city council of a non-binding resolution defining the family as "one man, one woman" with a "full quiver" of children. A few months later, Laura and I visited Kanab (a town founded by Mormon polygamists), where we were pleased to see many businesses opposing the resolution with "Everyone Welcome Here!" stickers in their windows.

I wish I'd known sooner, but I've just learned that there's a documentary out about the whole controversy:

Natural Family Values

I can't vouch for the quality, not having seen it yet, but you can be sure I'm ordering a copy and will watch it with interest.

I note also that major funding for Natural Family Values was provided by the B.W. Bastian Foundation, an organization that supports issues of LGBT equality.

The B.W. Bastian in question is my former boss Bruce Bastian, co-founder of WordPerfect Corporation. I like what he's been doing with his fortune in the days since WordPerfect Ruled The Earth. Another documentary that Bastian produced is 8: The Mormon Proposition, which I watched recently. It's an investigation into how the LDS Church secretly led the successful effort to pass Proposition 8 in California, which outlawed gay marriage, and, more generally, into the hideous ways gays have been treated by the Church. It's an excellent film, and is available to stream from Netflix, but be sure to have a box of Kleenex and a punching bag handy when you watch it.

I want to say more about 8, but I'm still trying to calibrate the shotgun blast that post will be.

Sorting through piles and piles and piles of old stuff as we packed, I found a poignantly evocative photocopy I thought had been lost to the mists of time. It went back to 1992 or so, when, as you may know, I was developer on the WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS team. You may not realize this, children, but the word-processor market used to be rather more hotly contended than it is today,

We were right to feel the pressure. Not only was Microsoft poised to soon crush us in the marketplace—aided and abetted by our own failure to get a decent Windows product out in timely fashion—but those Redmondites were nasty pieces of work. It was with delighted horror one day that out of our fax machine scrolled a fourth-or-more generation photocopy, transmitted from an anonymous source. Soon a copy of the WordPerfect Fanatic Point-and-Shoot Program ad, with its chiaroscuroed Cary Grant still, was tacked up in every office in our building.

So, this memento of a time when Microsoft might actually have been a little frightened of a wretch like me. Sometimes it does a body proud to be a marked man.

asphalteden jogged free a brief memory that hadn't surfaced for some time, so I thought I'd rescue it from the comments section of another entry and put it here, front and center.

I was a developer on WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS back in the early 90s, and I still can't forgive Microsoft for the fake ad they faxed us once that had a picture of Cary Grant running from a plane in North by Northwest and announced the "WP Developer Point-and-Shoot" program, whereby consumers could receive a free copy of Word by delivering a dead WordPerfect developer to Redmond, no questions asked. Okay, it was funny. But still.

Hey there, all you WordPerfect users aspiring to write short fiction! For you maligned folks and you folks only, I've added a new feature to my inexplicably popular manuscript formatting instructions.

I created a set of WordPerfect templates and macros that let you easily create a properly formatted short story manuscript and update the word count as you type with a simple keyboard shortcut.

Downloading, installation, and usage instructions here.

(For you eager users of Microsoft Word, I'll get to you soon. I'm far more comfortable in WordPerfect, which I've been using faithfully ever since version 4.0 for DOS, and even so, the programming and page-building took quite a bit longer than I expected.)