Wedgie Document

[Chimaera]

the Planetarium of Good Hope

For some reason this conjours up a delightful image of the FSM reaching out with his noodly appendage and, with infinite delicacy, placing each of those tiny lights in the sky for us.

How much better than the absurd suggestion that the stars are perfectly arranged into the well known and loved constellations by pure chance. I mean. Ursa Major, Orion, Cassiopeia -- design or what. What is the probability that the pole star would end up exactly where it is by a purely random process? Sheesh. My money is on His noodly appendage.

[Griffin]

the Planetarium of Good Hope

For some reason this conjours up a delightful image of the FSM reaching out with his noodly appendage and, with infinite delicacy, placing each of those tiny lights in the sky for us.

I believe Nathaniel Winter-Wartson once proposed that those same stars were in fact little sparkly warts.

[Alpaca]

Nathaniel has been added to the document.

Chimaera, that is an excellent theory. Where would you like it put within the document?

We still need more scientists.

[teripie]

Oh, I love it. Little sparkily warts. Make more sense than a bunch of giant fireballs, much like our sun. Isn't it silly to think that there is another sun out there? Just look in the sky, you only see one right?

[Alpaca]

And what's with this whole "Ball of gas" idea? It's obviously the light of the eternal pasta.

[Chimaera]

Chimaera, that is an excellent theory. Where would you like it put within the document?

May need some more work before I submit it to Nature. Or I could try submitting it to the Institue for Creation Research -- do you think they would smell a rat?

Nice of you to suggest including in the Wedgie doc -- not sure where it should go.

[Chimaera]

Ball of gas

Ball of meat, surely.

[Griffin]

Nathaniel has been added to the document..

Nathaniel is delighted. He may plan some more lectures or recommend some of his earlier publications.

[Chimaera]

I have been fooling around with the original Wedge document and I'm not sure if the result is problematic from a copyright perspective or if it is amusing. Here's a taster:

The proposition that food is a divine gift from God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including party politics, flavoured condoms, free sex, and the invention of spaghetti.

Yet a little over ten years ago, this nutritional idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern domestic science. Debunking the traditional recipes of both God and man, thinkers such as William Dembski, Groucho Marx, and Clement Freud portrayed pasta dishes not as moral and spiritual beings, but as foodstuffs which inhabited a universe ruled by purely personal tastes and whose very flavors and ingredients were dictated by the unbending forces of economy, available raw materials, and Italian peasant traditions. This reductionist conception of pasta eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from drive-in restaurants and banks to soap opera.

Is it legal and/or of any interest for me to post more?

[Alpaca]

As far as I know, the Wedge strategy is not copyright. Furthermore, even if it was, this would fall under "parody," and would be exempt from copyright infringement prosecution.

As for the actual content, it's simply brilliant. Write s'more! I'll integrate it.

[Chimaera]

Still a bit rough, but here's the next three paragraphs:

The cultural consequences of this triumph of reductionism were devastating. Reductionists denied the link between diet and morality, claiming that only books dictate our behaviour, beliefs, and cooking techniques. This “nouvel cuisineâ€￾ morality was uncritically adopted by much of the social sciences, and it still undergirds much of modern dianetics, creation science, psychic research and television evangelism.

Reductionists also undermined personal responsibility by asserting that human thoughts and behaviors are dictated exclusively by what we read in old books. The results can be seen in modern approaches to criminal justice, product marketing, and librarianship. In the reductionist scheme of things, everyone is the victim of a dietary error made by the first humans and no one can be held accountable for his or her consumption of unhealthy fast foods.

Finally, reductionism spawned a virulent strain of utopianism. Thinking they could engineer the perfect meal through the use of a best-selling book, reductionist reformers advocated coercive programs in which celebrity chefs falsely promised to recreate the divine being on earth.

[darren996]

Still a bit rough, but here's the next three paragraphs:

The cultural consequences of this triumph of reductionism were devastating...

That's fabulous!

[Alpaca]

Excellent. I'll integrate it with the rest of the intro soon-ish.

Okay, everybody. The introduction has just about enough content to be done, with only a little polishing left over. Next, we need to fill in the other sections.

[Chimaera]

Sorry -- this completes the intro from the original:

FSM's Center for the Renewal of Science and Cuisine seeks nothing less than the overthrow of reductionism and its culinary legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the fringe sciences and those from astrology and the hermeneutic sciences, the Center explores how new developments in psephology, semiotics and spoon bending raise serious doubts about nouvel cuisine and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of pasta based dishes. The Center awards fellowships for research (whether original or not), holds conferences, and briefs policymakers about the benefits of alcoholic refreshment whilst mountaineering and exciting opportunities as a factory worker in the afterlife.

The Center is directed by FSM Senior Fellow Dr. Alpaca Linguini. An Associate Professor of Philology at New Dworkin College, Dr. Linguini holds a Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Scientology from Oxbridge University. He formerly worked as a geomancer.

BTW, I was not requesting that this lot be incorporated -- only thought it might amuse.

[darren996]

It's genius. I have tears in my eyes...