What do the Grand Canyon, the Mormon Tabernacle, and Lindsay Lohan Have in Common?

Downtown Salt Lake City is bought and paid for by the Mormon Church. Well, not all of it, but a great deal of the interior part of the city is covered by places of worship, church offices, and a disproportionate amount of religious statues.

That said, I must say I like what they've done with the place.

Salt Lake City is an interesting area, with older rundown buildings blending seamlessly with a new modern vibe. Ron and Polly, two of my mother's best friends and my tour guides for the town, drive me past the football stadium where the Utah Utes play football, by three or four hundred statues (seriously, if you value your legacy, do something important in Utah), and down to Temple Square.

Temple Square is the headquarters for the LDS Church and an incredibly popular tourist destination. According to Wikipedia (or as I like to call it, "the lazy man's Lexis-Nexis"), Temple Square attracts around five million tourists per year, narrowly edging out such ballyhooed attractions as Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon, and Lindsay Lohan's bedroom.

The ten acre lot is swarming with conveniently attractive tour guides eager to share the history of the Church, but Ron and Polly choose to keep the experience relatively secular. Many of the buildings are architecturally stunning, with stained glass windows that would make Rome envious, but my favorite building is the Salt Lake Tabernacle.

The Tabernacle is the home of the world-renowned Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Polly mentions that the choir will be giving a performance on Sunday morning and seems slightly irked when I mention that the performance lines up rather unfortunately parallel to the first set of football games. Ron, on the other hand, seems to find this to be a valid assertion.

The tabernacle is known world-wide (or at least now by people who read this blog) for it's virtually perfect acoustics. To demonstrate the power of said acoustics, one of the conveniently attractive tour guides stands at the front of the gigantic building, speaks to us in the back without the aid of a microphone, and proceeds to tear a piece of paper down the middle.

Not only can I hear the paper tear, but it sounds like the rip is being brought to me by Dolby Digital surround sound.

"Wow," I comment to Ron. "This would be a really bad place to go to church if you happened to have gas."

Polly gives me a look like I just mentioned football again.

It is at this point that I realize that talking about farts in a perfectly acoustic religious establishment is not a whole lot better than actually carrying out the deed. Still, the conveniently attractive tour guides don't seem to mind; I'm pretty sure they're banned from frowning.