Praise Be to the Noodly Appendage

While browsing YouTube (a video sharing site) and looking for travel videos of Hamburg, I came across this small gem. (You have to sign up for the site, but it is free and there really are some interesting videos linked at YouTube.)

Now, I had just seen a reference earlier in the week to a Noodly Appendage on the Leo German<>English dictionary site. I wasn't quite sure what was being referred to. Sometimes, later in the Leo entries (after someone's obscure question about split infinitives or the correct use of the genitive after some archaic preposition has been answered) -- well, sometimes people tend to get a bit . . . off track . . . on Leo. I enjoy reading the Leo forums -- and even participate sometimes -- because the people active on that site speak German and English, are interested in languages, share cultural experiences with each other, etc. But, like any group of eggheads, they (we?) can go off on tangents occasionally.

So, when someone mentioned "FSM" and "Noodly Appendages" in his post, I just breezed over it, chalked it up to someone enjoying too much coffee (or some stronger beverage), and continued to read more about the dative being the death of the German genitive, or some such topic.

Now, I find this video.... Still, didn't have a clue what it was about -- but, now I had seen two references to spaghetti in one week -- and each from a very different source. My curiosity was piqued. (And I was getting hungry.)

A bit of googling and I find that it all leads back to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Wikipedia says: "The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the subject of a satirical religion created by Bobby Henderson in 2005 to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution."

Reading through the site, I see Bobby Henderson and I have a bit in common. He's not a fan of ID. (ID in this case being the theory of "Intelligent Design/Bearded Man Created Everything", not the product available in Juicy, Millenium, Pleasure, Sensation, Cream and Glide). And he has a sense of humor about religion that may upset younger viewers.

Two of my favorite parts of the site:

WHY YOU SHOULD CONVERT TO FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTERISM

• Flimsy moral standards.
• Every friday is a relgious holiday. If your work/school objects to that, demand your religious beliefs are respected and threaten to call the ACLU.
• Our heaven is WAY better. We've got a Stripper Factory AND a Beer Volcano.

and

• You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.

Bobby's point being: if you feel compelled to present ID to the country's schoolchildren, alongside (or, FSM forbid, instead of) the rational, scientific theory of evolution, then you MUST also include the Pastafarians' view of the world.

AMEN -- and pass the Parmesan (or my new favorite, Grana Padano)!

-T