"Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right"

Yesterday, the Society of Notheists at Purdue University held a Pastafarian Preaching Day in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day. The purpose of having such a day is to illustrate how stupid it sounds when you encounter people like that of ANY religion and how we must always consider the validity of the beliefs being espoused by even the most sane and attractive crew of scurvy buccaneers you may come across.

It just so happened, as we were planning on having our preaching day, we discovered two very important facts:

1. Talk Like a Pirate Day was on a Saturday this year...which was an incredible bummer.
2. Gene Levy Brother Jed was making his annual visit to Purdue the day before.

In the effort to make the day as awesome as possible, we decided that our Pastafarian Preaching needed to occur in tandem with the visit by our equally furry-eyebrowed, twice as hilarious arch villian.

The days passed and Jen decided that this day must be documented with the latest in high tech devicery...a video camera. She managed to rent one from our school library and then discovered, to her chagrin, there were no storage media included with said camera. Unfettered and still heartened from the amazingness of the day, it was decided that, as we were to be on our way to campus that morning, we would stop and purchase an SD card to store the videos on so we could be in our appointed spots at 8:50 with plenty of time to set up.

And so we sallied forth that glorious Friday morning dressed in full pirate regalia (or in my case, a bandanna, eyepatch, and jeans), we crossed campus facing the jeers and chortles of our passing fellow students and made our way to the local campus bookstore to find out that the place didn't open until 9.

After we set down, we were able to have a brave soul run back and acquire our sorely needed storage medium. One of the hallmarks, every year, of this event, as I see it, is when we pull out the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti monster and preach from it. It is superbly well written and infinitely hilarious. Last year, when I did it, by the end, I was surrounded by people in bathing suits bowing down to me. It was absolutely glorious.

During a passing period, it was insisted that I repeat my performance this year...where it would be recorded for posterity. I pulled out my best preacher's voice and laid it on thick. A beautiful piece of work for everyone who walked past.

Afterward, I went to go get a drink of water and came back to a puzzled-looking Jen fiddling with the camera.

"Do you think it might be possible for you to do it again later? I don't think it recorded."

My heart sank. I had class all day and I was only really supposed to be around until 10:45 so I could properly prepare for the math class I teach at 11:30.

In between classes, I learned that a news van had stopped by, Brother Jed had finally showed up, and I was missing all of it. On the other hand, I taught about quadratics and completing the square, so not all was lost.

Luckily I had an hour between my last two classes and I was able to stop by, listen to Brother Jed make a fool of himself, and ride the Boilermaker Special.

The highlight for me, amazingly enough, occurred in this small span of time between classes. We had just exited the Boilermaker Special and moved back to watch Brother Jed and his fantastic pimp cane.

When suddenly, we noticed two men clad in spiffy shirt and tie ensembles.

YES. The Mormons had come to campus the same day...and they disliked this detestable man as much as we did. Finding common ground and coming to some sort of unholy temporary truce, we took on Brother Jed together!

Far be it for me to ever say anything nice about the Mormons as a whole, but the two guys we were with that day were incredibly nice, down to Earth people.

All in all, a very good Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Also, Re: Desperado
Salma Hayak causes traffic accidents. RAmen.

PS: Check out Politics and Pucks for even MORE blogging on this event!