OF PENGUINS AND PASTA
There is irrevocable proof that the flying spaghetti monster created the world. Some people point to selective fossil evidence and then use fuzzy interpolation to explain gaps in the fossil record, some use fictitious supreme beings, and others claim some intelligent designer had created everything. I have factual proof that on every continent all that was created was touched by his noodly appendage. Others point to esoteric folklore to explain “their god” but the FSM has touched every continent and every culture leaving its mark with its noodly appendage. To clarify this overwhelming preponderance of evidence I shall break this down by continent to make it understandable to even the densest dogmatist. To start, I shall strike at the legendary home of the W.A.S.P., Europe.
Europe is the simplest example of the great work of the FSM. We can easily bear witness to the numerous pastas attributed to Italy. There one finds the origin of the contemporary name “Flying Spaghetti Monster” in the pasta called “spaghetti”. This long thin cylindrical pasta is not the only pasta on the menu; the types and shapes vary tremendously and the sauces that accompany them bring the selection to heavenly proportions. This is the most commonly cited example of evidence for FSM, but there is evidence implying the existence before Italy discovered pasta. Certain geographical features are even named after him. The Danube River is a perfect example – it is simply the old Hungarian term for “Da Noodle River”. Even the uppity French has unquestionable stone-age fossil evidence of His work in the “Acheulean Stone Twirling Spaghetti Fork” from Saint-Acheul, France, which has been dated approximately 1,000,000 to 300,000 BCE. From this we can gather unquestionable evidence of his hand in human cultures dating back as far as 1 million years.
Europe, while first discussed in this essay, is not the starting point of pastafarian history. Africa, the birthplace of humanity, is a continent that is only beginning to be discovered by pastafarian archeologists, and its potential for providing incontrovertible evidence of the Noodly One’s manipulations is only recently being realized. This minor oversight of the archeological community is exemplified by the presence of only two significant facts of historical record. The first being the presence of their own version of pasta, the Moroccan couscous, which was obviously manna from heaven and it’s abundance and shape is reflective of the environment that it is eaten in. Couscous is shaped in the likeness of sand, to match the sandy desert environment in which the early Moroccans lived. This is an example of how FSM is kind and understanding of the people in giving them a gift of pasta to which they can relate. Without an example of stringy spaghetti in the habitat, the people would not have known what to do with stringy noodles, so FSM shaped their pasta to match that of sand and instructed the locals to eat it. Now great sand dunes can be looked upon as manna from heaven in the form of huge piles of couscous. The second example is from ancient Egypt. Due to a mistake in the translations from the Rosetta Stone, the word for “reed” was substituted for “Megaghetti” (a large diameter form of spaghetti), thus the hieroglyphs were incorrectly interpreted as showing people gathering reeds instead of making huge bundles of megaghetti. The Phoenicians were attributed to have made reed boats to sail the seas, and everyone knows this is impossible. Anyone would know that megaghetti boats would self-seal in a pasty mass when it contacts the warm ocean waters, producing a leak proof, seaworthy vessel. It is through these original megaghetti boats that trade in the Mediterranean Sea was started. So we see from Africa FSM touched their desert people and started major trading empires. We shall go across the Atlantic to the New World Empires.
South America had great ancient civilizations. They had gold galore, they had yams, chocolate, potatoes, corn, cocaine, calendars that needed a leap day every few hundred years, extensive agriculture, and a huge bureaucracy. However, they lacked three important things required in any ancient civilization: they never utilized the wheel, they didn’t have horses, and they had no pasta. The shame of not being able to roll or ride was bad enough but to not eat pasta pulled at the very fabric of society. Both the Incas and the Aztecs tried to make up for these shortcomings. They conquered natives, they collected gold, they made temples, they pleaded to inferior gods, but nothing they tried worked. In desperation they started sacrificing humans to appease the inferior gods in hopes of gaining the great knowledge of noodles to guide them. This gambit was doomed to fail, and the arrival of Cortez hastened this failure. Some scholars claimed it was small pox that wiped out Montezuma’s armies, but that was not the case. Cortez brought not small pox, but a small tin of Spaghettios. Montezuma, realizing his own lack of Spaghettios, ordered his troops to fall upon their swords in shame. Ninety-seven percent of the population committed suicide, for their inability to attain enlightenment and noodles caused them desperation and abject shame. The other 3 percent were shameless cowards. Cortez, never one to shy away from credit, be it earned or no, claimed to have conquered the nation for Spain and gathered up the gold and sailed back. But it was a tin of Spaghettios that conquered the great Aztec Empire.
Moving north to North America we see the Native American civilizations that had been touched by Him. The most glaring evidence of His influence is the Aspen tree. This tree has its name, “Aspen”, derived from the Ojibwa (a.k.a. Chippewa) term “Aspe” meaning “Tree of gods that gives noodles, grows straight and tall, and rustles in the wind like the noodly appendages of The Great Flying One” (a minor side note; the Ojibwa were very good at shortening phrases into simple words). The truth provided by this tree of gods is self-evident in that the Aspen has an inner bark that can be removed, cut into strips, and boiled into an edible noodly dish. This was very good when served with pemmican balls made of venison. This is very close to spaghetti and meatballs. While some scholars claim it was convergent evolution, we know it was designed by FSM. The early colonial culture was inspired by the gifts FSM gave including the gift of pasta. This is clearly expressed in the children’s song lyric of “Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. “Macaroni”, a simple coincidental rhyming word? I think not! It is a historical fact. The revolutionary Charles Kraft started supplying the colonists with boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese to spite the English who were insisting everyone eat biscuits and jam. The use of Macaroni was a way for early colonists to thumb their noses at King George through their dinner plates. Flying Spaghetti Monster left his mark on Native American culture and helped the American Revolution strike a blow for democracy against tyranny. We now can move to another English colony, Australia.
Australia is a relatively newly discovered continent. It was left untouched by Europeans until very recently in human history. The clearest example of the guiding noodly appendage of FSM is the kangaroo. These spry little marsupials have witnessed the great one and are working their way towards enlightenment. The little joeys realize that to fly like FSM is the first step to godliness. So the joeys jump, trying to remain airborne for as long as possible in an attempt at flying. They spend their days meditatively trying to jump high enough to become airborne and fly like the great one. A group of older transcendental kangaroos (and one tigger, a cat-like creature with tops made of rubber and bottoms of springs) have accomplished this and meditatively levitated through the air like FSM. This meditative spell was promptly broken by the arrival of Japanese tourists snapping pictures of flying kangaroos led by a tigger. To reward the kangaroos for their faith the FSM arranged for the tourists to be eaten by Godzilla upon returning to Japan. The unintended consequence was that it also ruined their film so the photo evidence of flying kangaroos being led by a tigger is lost to humanity. Otherwise there is only minor circumstantial evidence of His work in Australia. Most notable among this evidence is that the trees in the fairly lifeless outback are often referred to singularly as a “stringy bark” implying they pop up like FSM flying upside down, which incidentally is why Australia is called “down under”.
While Australia is replete with circumstantial evidence of FSM, you need only travel to the north to discover evidence of a more concrete nature. China has the oldest fossilized noodles in the world. The archeological community discovered an upturned bowl of noodles that had been fossilized over the last 4000 years, making them the oldest noodles in the world. There were reports of seven bowls of fossilized noodles dating back to 8000 B.C. discovered in southern Yangtze Province, but those were looted and served as “extra crunchy fried noodles” to the lunch crowd at “City Wok” in South Park, Colorado for $3.95 plus tax. Any noodles left over were devoured by a corpulent nine-year old boy of foul demeanor and temperament. Thus, the validity of this finding cannot be verified. This is just another case of how looting of antiquities causes their loss to the scientific community as a whole. Other evidence in Asia is the variations of noodles available. One can find short crisp noodles served as chow mien noodles in china, Pad Thai noodles in Thailand, and Ramen noodles in Japan, just to name a few. So noodles are an important part of the diet of Asia. In contrast we will proceed to the last continent, Antarctica.
Antarctica, the cursed, is the continent that is the Pastafarian equivalent to Christianity’s Hell. The beer volcano froze over millennia ago, the strippers wear big bulky parkas and snow pants, and the place is covered in ice and snow. The only native inhabitants are the ones cursed by Him. He has cast out those who have forsaken Him, the penguins. The short stout penguins are the direct descendants of the original midget. The midget got mad at FSM for making him short and out of anger cursed The Great One loudly and profanely. In retaliation, the vengeful FSM cast the reject to the coldest part of the world, and morphed the degenerate into a penguin. The penguin is the opposite of all that is godly. It has wings, but cannot fly. It has flippers instead of hands, so is unable to pick up noodles. It eats naught but fish, which makes nasty fishy meatballs. He created a land that is incapable of growing anything worthy of pasta creation; krill, the only thing the penguins have to make noodles from, tastes disgusting. Thus Antarctica is the land of rejected creations. Learning from this mistake, the next thing He made after the midget was a dwarf, which turned out pretty hilarious when it got drunk from the volcano and started simultaneously swearing at and hitting on the strippers. So the FSM kept dwarfs as an amusing distraction. He was so distracted he forgot the next thing on his to-do list, “make penguin-eating sharks.”
So we can see by the preponderance of evidence that it is beyond a shadow of a doubt that The Great Flying Spaghetti Monster created everything in the world and has influenced evolution throughout all of history. It has been shown that his noodly appendage has touched every continent and every civilization around the globe. This evidence has been carefully cataloged by the scribes assigned to the great pirate sailing vessels as they journey around the world gathering archaeological evidence of the great one. The only continent they avoid is Antarctica, and that is because they know not to go there; Shackleton brought back records of what the ungrateful penguins tried to do to him and his crew when stranded there. This evidence spans the globe, made manifest in the chow mien noodles of China, the aspen noodles of Nebraska, the flying kangaroos of Australia, and the great megaghetti boats of the ancient Phoenicians. This should settle all debates over the influence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.