That’s right, today is the most boring and unbelievable of the Christian holidays, when we’re supposed to be all reverent because people claim some dude came back from the dead a long time ago, on a date almost incomprehensibly difficult to calculate because it has something to do with the moon. We celebrate this unlikely event by wearing fancy clothes and going to church and making our children chase eggs, none of which is particularly pleasant or entertaining, or possessing any special appeal to anyone.
Until now.
This day is about some guy resurrecting, and now a lot of loony people want him to resurrect a second time. No one ever seems to ask whether we want some manic charismatic rabbi from the ancient Roman empire to come back and tell us what to do. What we need is some kind of Jesus repellent. Something that would totally repulse some sanctimonious geezer with a purity fetish.
Oglaf has come up with the celebration to drive religious redeemers away (totally not safe for work). As a bonus, it should also work on Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and other such obnoxious proselytizing intruders. It probably wouldn’t work on Ted Cruz, but then no method is perfectly fool-proof.
Stop reading now. You need to practice the Redeemer-repelling ritual.
Is masturbation an acceptable substitute?
Ask yourself: Would Jesus be embarrassed and leave if he walked in on me doing it? And if he would, you’re doing the right thing. Heterosexual sex, gay sex, masturbation, mime, air guitar, picking your nose — go for it!
original Catholics usurped the traditional holiday to celebrate the return of spring (with rabbits and eggs) and transformed rebirth of spring into rebirth of Jebus. Decorating eggs was long celebrated before Jebus showed up, so the early Xians adopted the ritual to absorb the traditional, pagans, into the fold. Rather than celebrate the equinox directly, they came up with this complicated moonage calculation to determine the date, Over which there is still dispute: The Eastern Orthodox CC and the R.CC usually differ by about a week on to celebrate Easter.
ugh
[don’t take any of that screed seriously, it’s my feeble coping mechanism]
Now this is a tradition I can get behind. Or on top of.
Oh, Ēostre, the real deal, that’s fun. Easter, not so much. However, the people Mister works with declared they wanted the day off, so he’s home today! And, he’s still in bed. Hmmm….
Happy Fuckweek, everyone!
This coming week also means the annual pedantic and pathetic christian blathering, “April 1st is atheists’ day”. They are about as orginal at insults as a creationist is at arguments. Considering when easter comes every year, a counterargument could easily be made.
Also, March 31st is International Transgender Day of Visibility. I had only just started transitioning last year and didn’t do anything, but this time it’s worth celebrating. Does that count as “redeemer repellent”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Transgender_Day_of_Visibility
http://www.transstudent.org/tdov
I have roundly celebrated Easter Sunday by getting up and going to work.
OK, I actually forgot, until someone reminded me.
I really don’t get what the big deal is, a guy calls out of work, claiming to be dead, so he could have a longer holiday weekend and everyone starts celebrating that slacking off.
“Hey, I can’t come into work today, I died. I’ll be better on Monday” and now there’s a grand festival about it, one hijacked from spring celebrations.
I’ll have to check the URL later, I’m at work and the site is filtered.
The mildly deranged penguin was going to build a Dyson Sphere-sized chocolate bunny, but then discovered Dyson Spheres are hollow. So this year it’ll be the usual again, a supervolanco-sized chocolate and cheese fondue. With strawberries, albeit of a fairly normal size.
blf
chocolate and cheese in the same fondue pot?
how does that work?
chigau, Usually it’s chocolate in the pot, and you dip in chunks of cheese and/or fruits.
I’d try that.
I love Good Friday – killing a god is always nice, knocking off a chunk of Jehovah is sweet revenge. But the prophesied three days and three nights isn’t up ’til Monday evening, so I don’t get what the Christian folks are all on about.
Well, Menyambal, Monday is a workday. ;)
Taking that hour or so on Wednesday, then wanting Friday, *then* wanting Monday wouldn’t be acceptable to employers.
@Menyambal, well in the UK, as well as Good Friday being a Bank holiday, so is Easter Monday, so that means Good Friday, Saturday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday off with pay on the Bank Holidays for the average full time worker.
Of course it won’t work on Cruz. For him, you need a wooden stake, some garlic, and, just to be safe, a silver bullet.
Once a year, Easter Sunday, I know there is a god because I awaken to the presence of a huge resurrection. Or I just might have a prostate problem.
PZ@1,……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..OK, “Went for it” Redeemers repelled… After looking further at Oglaf, I think I have to go repel the Redeemers more. Keeping this “up” all week could get exhausting.
For Cruz and his daddy you might need a gatling gun loaded with wooden stakes coated with garlic. They both look kind of undead to me. Save the silver bullets for werewolves.
Last part of my comment @18 was for Larry@16. Was so busy repelling the Redeemers, forgot to add that.
How can an event primarily associated with conspicuous consumption of chocolate possibly be considered the most boring Christian holiday? Especially when it’s not only a Christian holiday but also a pagan celebration of the coming of spring and increased fertility?????
Compare it with Whitsun, which is also a bank holiday in the UK, but which is not only not connected with any culinary or confectionary delicacies, but is so unremarkable that only a fraction of the population has the faintest idea why it is a holiday at all.
(I had to look it up: apparently it’s “the Christian festival of Pentecost, the seventh Sunday after Easter, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s disciples“
…mmm, chocolate fundu.
Menyambi — Easy. Sunday is the day the Sun god rises, not Monday (Moon Day). If π can be 3, then Friday to Sunday can be 3 days. It’s all about Sun god magic, not math.
The only good part of Easter: hot cross buns. I do not understand why bakeries only make them on this day, but it’s probably a good thing for someone avoiding sugar, eggs, and milk.
That’s by far the funniest Oglaf I’ve read in months.
Also, it’s International Whisk(e)y Day.
Easter is a religious holiday? I grew up knowing it as being about eating chocolate bunnies and eggs.
My wife got me some dark chocolate truffles, but wasn’t able to help repel Redeemers. The teenager left for the day, so it’s better than it could be. I’m going to go celebrate Whisky day with a dram of Irish, then re-read all those helpful explanations about three days. Sláinte!
blf, speaking of Dyson spheres, eggs (and, by association, chickens) and reproduction, Dyson suggested an intrasystem von Neumann machine called a star chicken (the name suggested by his audience, not Dyson himself).
If you reprogram them to make chocolate, you would eventually get almost an asteroid belt’s worth of chocolate, timed to rain down from the sky at Easter.
It would initially look like a miracle. Before the biosphere drowns in chocolate.
I’m actually slightly upset, I used to get witnesses at the door and I’d do the worst thing possible to them, I talked religion.
The local outfit had severe attrition from that, to the point where they started sending elders, losing them by attrition as well. They then sent groups of two or more.
birgerjohansson, I’m not sure the biosphere would suffocate, we’re talking around 4% of the moon. Add in waste, such as iron, gold and other useless heavy metals, rare earth elements, etc, that’s really not a whole lot of chocolate in the end. ;)
I guess we’d have to leave that waste up there, where it’d be out of the way.
The question I’ve always had was whether Jesus and Lazarus ended up with a persistent body-odor problem after being dead for three days. I mean, three days dead in a warm climate? Also what did they do for bloating?
“Heterosexual sex, gay sex, masturbation, mime, air guitar, picking your nose — go for it!”
Does it only work if you do them all at once? Does he come back if you forget one? Can I pay some heterosexuals to do that bit for me, or will the golden Redeemer know and visit again?
‘m not sure I’d agree that Easter is the “most boring” Christian tradition. It is the only one that features zombies.
“And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.”
Easter eggs? An abomination unto the cocoa bean. Cheap sugary trash wrapped in a micron thickness of garish foil. Chocolate should come in plain, dark and serious blocks tastefully covered in simple white wrapping with a discreet crown logo of some despotic old world company on it.
My mother still had the skills of painting the shells of hard boiled eggs like her family did in her youth. I should get back to it one day.
Now, now, Lofty. You can get perfectly good chocolate in egg form. But you’re right about the wrapping. I am not fond of the residue left by the yearly easter and christmas binges. There is also the issue of efficiency: the time spent unwrapping increases dramatically per unit chocolate. As it stands, packages of wafers (bite size, no loss from crumbling from breaking pieces apart), bars or bricks would be preferable.
With regard to the chocolate Dyson-sphere: why stick to the original plan? Process a few extra solar systems and make it solid. Colonists can eat their way inside and then shape their world from there as they see fit. It’ll be like dwarf fortress, only far more delicious and with fewer tantrums because it’s impossible to get depressed inside a chocolate ball large enough to form a gravity well.
Lastly, I have to disagree with the egghunt sentiment from the original post. ‘Making your kids chase eggs’ can be great fun for everyone involved as long as you keep it in the family. Having the entire county in a stampede would seem unwise at the best of times.
Hmm, that’s a notion for carbon star cores. Cool them down, recycle the hydrogen, oxygen and carbon into immense blocks of chocolate.
While heat death of the universe may occur a bit earlier, it’d be a tasty way to go.
Sinning is the only way to keep Zombie Jesus away.
http://files.explosm.net/comics/Kris/easter11.png
Of course this is a boring holiday, because by Christian standards, it is the most important holiday. Without the resurrection, Jesus is just some dude who said some stuff. (Also, without the resurrection, it’s a lot harder to nick off the pagans who already believed in other resurrected gods.)
I admit I rather like knowing how Catholic Easter is calculated: first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. I have a fondness for complicated systems.
I’ve got that one covered, latsot. :)
komarov
True dat. But it takes loads less effort to wander over to the safe and hack off another chunk of Ur chocolate with the broad axe.
Had a decent tomato and feta panini at daughter’s college for brunch. Then a pre-dinner bottle of Sierra Nevada Tropical IPA, and some Ribera del Duero with dinner (lamb roast, of course). Washing it all down with a couple of fingers of rye now. It would’ve been nice to have a decent baguette with dinner, but otherwise it’s been a very good Yeaster.
Ah, yummy, yummy lamb! Or as I put it, the pork of the Middle East. ;)
I also love goat meat. I’ve put it in my pasta sauce many a time.
I spent a lot of quality time crouching over squat toilets in Turkey after eating what someone later told me was probably goat meat. Learned what that little plastic jug was for.
Not that that has stopped me from eating goat since.
It’s easy enough to figure out when Easter falls. It’s the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the Vernal Equinox.
As a perpetual bad influence on my nieces and nephews, I was sitting next to one of my grandnephews when his mother criticized the crowds at Catholic mass that morning, “Just because it’s a holiday. They never show up on regular Sundays.” I said, “Do they show up on other major holidays, like Halloween?” She sniffed, “There no comparison between Easter and Halloween!” I could see the glint in my grandnephew’s eyes (he’s 8) the moment his mother made her pronouncement. I said to him, “Well, on Easter …” He chimed in with, “There’s one guy back from the dead, but on Halloween there’s a lot of them back from the dead!”
It’s official: Halloween is better than Easter! (Good thing his mother didn’t hear our chat.
frog and whheydt
it’s not that easy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_full_moon
Celebrate Easter: fuck a rabbit.
Zeno
You should introduce the grandnephew to the Gospel of Luke.
Better than Buffy.
leftwingfox, there are precisely three chances of me fucking what I eat, slim, fat and none, save for my wife’s clam.
Something, courtesy of physiological issues is a rare “dish”.
But then, life sucks, but it beats the shit out of the alternative.
@birgerjohansson #26:
I hate to spoil a great idea by taking it to its logical extreme, but I’m going to do so anyway. ;-)
We wouldn’t drown in chocolate; we’d mostly burn up in carbon and water vapour. All that gravitational potential energy has to go somewhere, and it’ll all eventually end up as heat. If the chocolate asteroids are large enough to become chocolate meteorites, the kinetic energy of them is going to kill people and heat up the area around the strike site, starting fires. If the chocolate asteroids are small enough to burn up as meteors, they’ll dump the heat of re-rentry and most of their chemical energy into the atmosphere. It wouldn’t be pretty. It wouldn’t be edible.
Yum! Chocolate rain.
Atmospheric entry would indeed generate heat, melting the chocolate and the liquid would slow down enough to not burn up.
Of course, I’m operating upon the assumption that those chocolate asteroids are slowed down, placed in LEO, to be actually brought to earth in a usable form. ;)
[nitpick alert]
I’ve heard that, contrary to popular preconception, meteorites do not get hot falling through the atmosphere. That all the heat of atmospheric friction vaporizes the outer layer, which then carries away the heat. So the remnant that hits the earth can be handheld as soon as it lands, with no burns resulting. So chunks of chocolate falling as meteors will become chocolate dust. The bit that lands may have a soft outer layer from residual heating, but still have a basically solid chunk within.
[The Bad Astronomer often writes of meteor myths. The inspiration for this nitpick]
Well, technically, it’s the compression of the air by the meteor that heats the meteor.
With enough drag, one can deorbit without a flaming entry into the atmosphere. Spaceship One and two is a fine example of such a deorbiting technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne
wzrd1: if you’re in orbit, you’re going about 10x faster than Spaceship One’s top speed. Spaceship One never gets anywhere near orbital speed, so it doesn’t have orbital amounts of energy to dissipate into drag.
The chocolate dyson sphere on the other hand would be falling in at multiple km/s, so the surface would in part ablate away, and in part be burnt to a crisp. However, as long as it’s a thick enough layer, the stuff behind the front would be just gently melted and perfect for dipping fruit into.
True, but if one is deorbiting that much chocolate, one should also take good enough care to slow it to spaceship one’s lower velocity.
Besides, I’d just add a sugar ceramic coating on the ablating leading edge. ;)
Good idea! And inside the ceramic coating, we have a layer of sugar-based aerogel (yes, there is no air in space, but it would be porous and let air in) around the chocolate, so the diameter in relation to the mass is big enough to slow it down to safe speeds in the lower atmosphere. You don’t want a chocolate meteorite to crack your skull.
“And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.”
While shouting “Braaaains….”
In Gibson’s “Idoru”, the titular Japanese AI hijacks a chain of advanced 3D-printers and creates a whole lot of biological bodies for itself (or herself, since she is now feminine, with the biological bits and all).
I think this would be neat trick to pull for the Easter holiday of AD 2500. From silica to carbon, from inanimate to iife. The Christians would be unable to top that, Jesus having been carbon all along.