The Flying Spaghetti Monster
November 24, 2007
Many a morning I have spent at Burgerville eating my sausage bagel, drinking my diet coke, and reading the local Daily News paper. Today I was perusing through the different sections (I usually end up reading the Sports section) and found an interesting article on religion and science from the Associated Press called “Faith & Noodles” by Justin Pope.
The article explained how a mock-religious deity called the Flying Spaghetti Monster has grown in pop culture and made its way on the agenda of the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting.
The whole idea of this religious deity began in 2005 when intelligent design (creationism) was being debated by a Kansas school board as something that should be taught in public school sciences classes along with the theory of evolution.
“An Oregon State physics graduate named Bobby Henderson stepped into the debate by sending a letter to the Kansas School Board. With tongue in cheek, he purported to speak for 10 million followers of a being called the Flying Spaghetti Monster — and demanded equal time for their views.
“We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it,” Henderson wrote. As for scientific evidence to the contrary, “what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage.”
The whole point is that there is no more scientific basis for intelligent design than there is for the idea of a creature made of pasta who created the universe.
“The only reasonable solution is to put nothing into sciences classes but the best available science.”
What truly caught my interest in the article was the irony of how this mock-religion has truly become a religion of its own. With the help of the Internet the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has litterally spread around the world and found its way into online chat rooms, college campuses, and even on the docket of the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting.
The article raised some interesting questions:
“What defines a religion? Does it require a genuine theological belief? Or simply a set of rituals and a community joining together as a way of signaling their cultural alliances to others?
“In short, is an anti-religion like Flying Spaghetti Monsterism actually a religion?”
So what do you think…What constitutes a religion? A cult? Science? Do you find the whole idea behind the Flying Spaghetti Monster funny? Disappointing? Philosophically interesting? Or do you find it just plain stupid?
No Sophomore Slump
November 23, 2007
My daughter Sydney has been pretty busy in what is her sophomore year at Washington State University. Sydney is not only going to school full time, but is competing on the WSU Crew squad, and has put together a huge charity project for orphans in Malawi Africa. After a tough freshman year where life away from home was a tough adjustment, Sydney took it upon herself to not have a sophomore slump.
Sydney began her college transformation by taking on a tough summer of work painting homes to earn money towards college. Syd was only the second female to make it through an entire summer with her painting company. In fact, she did so well that they promoted her to crew foreman and offered her a possible position within the company. Painting houses all summer was a difficult job. Sydney worked 12 hour days, six days a week. When painting the houses the crew uses rollers and brushes…not spray! You can imagine how sore her legs, back, shoulders, and arms were those first couple of weeks. In fact, I told Syd not to accept the job when she applied because I didn’t believe she could handle it and make it through an entire summer. That was a challenge to Syd, and she was not about to have anyone tell her she couldn’t do something.
Not only was Sydney working her painting job six days a week, but she also worked Sundays as a waitress at a local establishment. Needless to say, Syd was ready to go back to college just so she could relax.
Did I say relax?
Once Sydney got back to WSU she decided to try out for the Women’s Crew team as a walk on. Syd had this idea the previous year, but thought better of it. This time, Syd was feeling good about herself and decided to take on the challenge.
Syd went to rowing tryouts and found herself not only competing to make a spot, but did so well that they placed her on the first novice boat (essentially the Junior Varsity team). This means that she will get to go on the road and compete with other colleges around the Pac10. The funny thing is that Syd is the smallest rower on the team. She is small enough to be a coxswain (the person who steers the boat), but strong enough (probably all that summer painting) to be a rower. Practices are early in the morning every day of the week.
In the classroom Sydney is excelling as well. One of her professors, Andrew Appleton (director of Global Studies), presented to his class a need in Malawi Africa where he had just spent some time. Malawi is a landlocked country on the south eastern area of Africa where the AIDS epidemic has hit the population hard. There are thousands of children who have been orphaned due to loosing parents from AIDS. These children are in desperate need for many things, one of them being simple things such as shirts.
Professor Appleton was hoping that some of his students would take this issue head on, and Sydney took this as another challenge.
Sydney has been working on a campaign called “Take your shirt off for Malawi”. The idea is to collect as many shirts as possible and ship them to an orphanage in Malawi Africa. The idea seems simple enough, but to make it happen a lot of things must come together.
Now Sydney had to figure out how to market the idea, collect the product, move the product, and finance the whole thing.
Syd began making phone calls and meeting with the right people. With the guidance of Professor Appleton, Sydney and an expanding group of students began spreading the word throughout campus. Syd was able to get the on campus shipping department to offer their services for free. They agreed to pack, shrink wrap, and ship all t-shirts collected.
Syd was also able to get the on campus news station to cover the campaign, get a web developer to make a website, and was able to get a commercial shot to promote the campaign that was played during halftime during the last WSU home football game (check it out by clicking play below).
Many positive things have happened for Syd her sophomore year, and it is only Thanks Giving weekend. So what’s the difference this year compared to last…Syd has taken charge of her education. It’s simple, you can either be a spectator in life waiting for things to happen, or you can take on life’s challenges and get right in the middle of the action.
I’m so proud of you Syd.
Why Pizza is the Best Food Ever
November 11, 2007
This weekend my daughter Paytyn had a soccer tournament up in Seattle. The tournament was at a soccer haven called Starfire. This complex has four turf fields that are all lighted (including a stadim field), four more grass fields, two indoor fields, a pro shop, game room, and a pizzaria/pub with four flat screen televisions with all the weekend football and soccer games. After the first game on Friday we had dinner at the on site pizzaria. Because we were there the following afternoon we again had pizza for lunch. Later that Saturday night the girls had a league soccer match at Seattle Pacific University. While the game was coming to an end one of the parents said that they were ordering pizza for the team and picking it up and bringing it back to the hotel. This made it three meals in a row of nothing but pizza. Needless to say, my whife and kids were sick and tired of consuming pizza…However, not I.
When I was a child my parents spoiled me with love, attention, and plenty of homemade meals. Yes, many times those meals consisted of macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, soup, and frozen dinners, but my mom also put together some awesome homespun dinners. Fast food really wasn’t part of our typical diet until my teens. In fact, making a trip to McDonalds or another fast food joint would have been a treat or a reason of necessity. Then one evening my cousin Carl came to visit us from California. To celebrate we went out for pizza at a local pizza parlor in town.
Pizza was never a meal in my early youth that I was too interested in. My parents would order a combination pizza or Hawaiian pizza. These flavors never really turned me on. My dad also liked the occasional shrimp or hamburger and onion pizzas, but they just simply made me turn a shy eye…or maybe my stomach turn. This is where my cousin Carl comes into the picture. When we went to pizza with Carl that night my parents ordered their typical fare, but my cousin ordered pepperoni as the topping on his pizza. What happened next changed my life…cousin Carl offered me a piece of his pepperoni pizza.
Today pizza is my favorite food…pepperoni pizza to be specific. I would have to admit that my family eats pizza at least once a week. Than again, we eat other fast foods probably even more. But pizza has a special place in my heart, not to mention my stomach.
Pizza and party are almost synonymous. Almost every birthday I’ve ever had has been celebrated with pizza. Even the night before my wedding was celebrated at a pizza parlor. If you were to put together a sports banquet, where would it be celebrated? At a pizza parlor. Pizza was even my wife’s last meal before giving birth to our daughter Sophia (it’s great for inducing labor).
So what exactly is pizza? Literally translated, the word pizza means pie. American pizza has a round crust that is made with a yeasty dough covered with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese and other ingredients, such as peppers, onions, Italian sausage, mushrooms, anchovies or of course pepperoni.
The first introduction to pizza in the United States is said to have come from an Italian immigrant named Gennaro Lombardi. He opened a small grocery store in New York City’s “Little Italy”. An employee of his (Antonio Totonno Pero) began making pizza as an item to sell at Lombardi’s store. It became one of the most popular items sold at the store, so much so that he opened the first American pizzeria in 1905 on Spring Street named “Lombardi’s”. Totonno opened his own pizzeria on Coney Island in 1924. Other pizzerias opened up around the United States, but its popularity was limited to mostly Italians immigrants.
Pizza finally crossed cultures within the Unites States when soldiers brought the idea back from Italy at the end of World War II. American soldiers ate the dish up during their Italian campaign and brought their appreciation for the dish back home. The singer Dean Martin’s famous 1953 song “Amore” later cemented pizza’s rising popularity with its opening line “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore”.
The term pizza parlor replaced pizzeria when the California restaurant chain Shakey’s Pizza opened up in 1954. Pizza Hut was also founded this same year in Wichita Kansas. Eventually Round Table Pizza made its debut and later home delivery chains like Domino’s, Little Caesar’s, and Papa John’s shifted the emphasis away from dine in pizza parlors towards eating freshly baked pizza at home. Even Pizza Hut and local pizza parlors have shifted there emphasis toward home delivery.
Why pizza is the best food ever!
Taste
Now I know that taste is personal, but there isn’t any other food that makes my mouth water like pizza. For some people it might be chocolate or maybe some other food, but my happy food is pizza.
Easy to make
Pizza is also a fairly simple item to make. Find your favorite crust recipe and the rest is simply picking out whatever topping you like. You can also simply buy pre made crusts or use French bread or beagles to hold your toppings.
Variety
Is there any other food that has as many varieties that pizza provides? You can literraly place any topping on a pizza and it would still be a pizza. Not to mention there are deep dish pizzas, New York style pizzas, California pizzas, Sicilian style pizza, crisp crust, and Calizone (omelet) style pizzas.
Delivery
What other food can you have delivered for you almost anywhere within the United States? Some delivery places are even open till the wee hours of the night making pizza a perfect late night snack.
Frozen pizza
Is there a better frozen food? I’ve tried many different frozen dinners and other entrees, but none of them have ever compared to the quality of a good frozen pizza.
Leftovers
My family has a tendency to keep leftover dinners in our fridge, but none of them ever get eaten. Pizza, on the other hand, always makes a second trip for a good meal. In fact, I love cold pizza for breakfast the next day!
Price
Pizza is one of those meals I can literally feed my entire family of four kids for twenty dollars or less. Pizza parlors always have certain days of the week where you can get a lot of pizza for little money and pizza coupons are as easy to find as are pizza parlors themselves.
Safe bet
If you were ever in a small town as a visitor and needed to find somewhere to go out to eat, pizza is by far your safest bet. Even bad pizza is edible. Although, the gourmet hamburger restaurant chain Red Robin once served a pizza on their menu that was pretty god-awful.
Family
Pizza is also a meal that brings the family together. Weather it’s dine-in, carryout, or delivery, pizza has a way of getting the family to gather. Not a small feat in the 21st century.
Best selling author Eric Shlosser began his book “Fast Food Nation” talking about the United States’ top-secret underground military base at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. He reported how Domino’s Pizza makes deliveries almost every night to this military base where deadly force is authorized on any intruders. Eric Shlosser writes:
“And should Armageddon come, should a foreign enemy someday shower the United States with nuclear warheads, laying waste to the whole continent, entombed within Cheyenne Mountain, along with the high-tech marvels, the pale blue jumpsuits, comic books, and Bibles, future archeologists may find other clues to the nature of our civilization—Big King wrappers, hardened crusts of Cheesy Bread, Barbeque Wing bones, and the red, white, and blue of a Domino’s pizza box.”
My college dorm room ceiling was a mosaic of many Domino’s pizza box tops collected throughout my freshman year. This memorial became part of one of the best years of my life and truly gave clues to the nature of college dorm life. Since that fateful day when my cousin Carl introduced me to a pepperoni topped pizza, pizza has been a significant part of my diet. One average slice of cheese pizza has 290 calories, 39 grams of carbohydrates, 15 grams of protein, and 9 grams of fat. When adding toppings you can make your pizza healthy or downright fattening. You can even add toppings to make your pizza a dessert. Whether it’s breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, desert, parties, delivery, carryout, dine-in, frozen, by the slice, deep dish, thin crust, folded, super markets, small pizzerias, large restaurant chains, malls, movie theaters, home, college, industry, office buildings, and military fortresses…pizza is simply unsurpassed in the American food empire.
No Monkeying Around
November 7, 2007
This past month my six-year-old daughter Sophia broke her arm.
So how did it happen?
She fell off the Monkey Bars at school.
Did you know that according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) that more than 53,000 children are treated each year for injuries suffered on school playgrounds?
Most of the playground injuries that were treated in emergency rooms (i.e., an estimated 29,680 injuries) were associated with the use of monkey bars. According to a 1999 article in the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics , playground equipment resulted in more than 200,000 injures in a four year span in the early 1990s; 88% of these injuries were attributable to monkey bars and the like. The article concluded that:
- a significant proportion (25%) of monkey bar injuries required hospitalization;
- most of the injuries (92%) required surgery;
- the surface below the equipment had no influence on the type or severity of the injury;
- younger children are more likely to sustain long-bone fractures than are older children; and
- adult supervision does not influence the injury pattern.
Every one of these conclusions fit my daughter’s experience. In the study, investigators searched an emergency department’s records to find all children injured while playing on monkey bars or jungle gyms during a two-year period. They also surveyed the children’s parents or guardians, asking them to recall where the injury occurred (school playground, public playground, child care, home), type of surface below the equipment (sand, wood chips, grass, concrete) and whether an adult was supervising.
Researchers identified 204 children ages 20 months to 12 years who were injured. Fifty-six percent were male and the median age of those injured was 6 years of age…the same age as my daughter Sophia.
In a Canadian study in the November 1997 issue of the Canadian Hospitals Injury Reporting and Prevention Program (CHIRPP) News, Analyst Janet Brown of the Child Injury Division found that 10% of all injuries sustained by children between the ages of five and nine are related to playground equipment. So does that mean that I feel our elementary schools in Kelso should ban monkey bars?
A year ago in Gloucester, VA, this is what exactly was being discussed. According to the Daily Press , school officials and some parents were wrestling with the idea after a string of monkey bar related injuries.
Opinions swing both ways regarding this issue. Many feel that we are becoming too soft and are taking away too much from out kids. But others feel that the numbers stated above must be given attention.
What about law suits? The studies above showed that even if supervision was present and the ground was soft that it didn’t change the outcome. This would fall under “Personal Injury Law” where one would have to show negligence. Just as the studies show, Sophie was under adult supervision and the ground underneath was bark chips.
There had been a trend where monkey bars were disappearing from playgrounds across the nation. Monkey bars and jungle gyms have seemed to make their way back, but there is growing concern that something needs to happen again.
So how do I feel?
Kids need to be kids! I love my daughter and feel terrible that she has to go through this. In fact, Sophie had to miss her last three soccer games which was the most upsetting part for her outside of the actual accident itself. However, I can’t imagine keeping my kids from playing, running, or climbing because of what might happen. Six-year-olds need to run and play. Yes, they need to be given safe areas to do so while under the guidance of their parents or adult supervision, but they need to play.
My kids don’t go out with people I don’t know. In fact, I believe parents need to take a stronger roll in their children’s lives. But holding kids back, or worse yet coddling kids, is not the way to go. I say let Sophia play. However, please don’t monkey around next time, and please don’t miss that last monkey bar.
