Recognition for Our Noodly Friend
PASTAFARIANISM ā also known as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Feedback, 6 August 2005) ā has gained some very serious recognition. On 17 September, the Committee on Culture, Science and Education of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe issued a sober report on efforts to promote creationism in European schools. It concludes: āIf we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights which are a key concern of the Council of Europeā¦ The war on the theory of evolution and on its proponents most often originates in forms of religious extremism which are closely allied to extreme right-wing political movementsā¦ some advocates of strict creationism are out to replace democracy by theocracy.ā
And what do we find halfway through the report (which you can read at ) but a tribute to Our Noodly Friend. āIn order to show the illogicality of teaching intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution, a movement has, ironically, developed in the United Statesā¦ According to Pastafarianism, an invisible and omniscient being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe in one day. The supporters of Pastafarianism are demanding the same place in the school curricula as intelligent design.ā
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āFlicking through the Early Learning Centreās toy catalogue, Rob Buckland noticed one of the items came āWith batteries free of chargeā. āWouldnāt they be a bit useless?ā Buckland asksā
Noodly joy was, however, dampened by the following sentences: āPastafarianism is a parodyā¦ Full of irony, this pseudo-religion is setting a trend and the cult is spreading.ā Pastafarians have responded on that they āobject to the terms āparodyā, āpseudo-religionā and ācult'ā, but they note optimistically that the first step towards mainstream recognition is recognition as a ājokeā.
DESPITE obviously being fully occupied every minute of the working day, Ben Hasset was inspired by Feedbackās report of the vagaries of Microsoft Outlookās calendar (4 August and 1 September) to book himself a meeting for Monday 2 April 1601. He immediately received a warning that he was 21,206 weeks late for it.
Feedback has tried it too and is now being nagged for being thousands of weeks late for the first performance of William Shakespeareās play The Tempest, on Tuesday 1 November 1611. Unfortunately, patrons will not be admitted after the interval.
BUSY as we are with messages about typos and misspellings (3 November), we have only just dug out a message sent by Perry Bebbington in April, when it was widely reported that to send marketing messages to suitably equipped phones belonging to people passing by two of its branches. āI canāt wait to get one of these messages and I will certainly be going into the bank when I do,ā Bebbington wrote, āalthough possibly not for the purpose the bank intends.ā
The story has moved on, and it seems distinctly possible that some people had the same idea, which was to ālet the bank know in no uncertain terms how much I disapprove of this intrusion into my privacyā. In October a carefully worded HSBC statement that it was only a trial: āWe did look at the results and it is not being taken forward. It didnāt prove commercially viable.ā
It must be feared, however, that others will launch similar trials and tribulations. Feedback most certainly would not suggest that readers exploit the various ā such as that made famous when Paris Hiltonās address book was extracted from her phone ā to annoy those others right back. We can only recommend our own practice of obtaining the cheapest and most low-tech cellphone available ā and weāre considering keeping it in a small, lead-lined biscuit tin for added safety.
LONDONās late paper, the Evening Standard, reported on 21 September that Transport for London had installed in its Hounslow bus depot lamps powered by solar cells with an output of 700 watts per hour. David Phillips, who spotted this, interprets this interesting number as a rate of acceleration of energy output. For readers who donāt do unit conversion as a hobby: 1 watt is 1 joule per second, so 1 watt per second is 1 joule per second per second, and 1 watt per hour is 1 joule per second per hour.
If output accelerates at 700 joules per second per hour, Phillips calculates, just 136 of these wondrous devices could meet the UKās entire target for renewable energy production by the year 2020.
FINALLY, this weekās award for the invention of the most unconvincing scientific name goes to Yoplait elivaĆ©, which, as Christopher Davidson discovered, tells us on its : āYoplait elivaĆ© is a smooth, delicious 98 per cent fat free yogurt with a unique blend of probiotic cultures, including digestivus culturusĀ, Acidophilus and Casei. Yoplait elivaĆ© has been specifically designed to naturally help maintain inner digestive health.ā