The legislation of fruit, Boner Church, Xenu, and bazooka Vespa

Well, that was quite a snowstorm for North Carolina. Gosh, I really don't miss brushing ice off of my car and shovelling my driveway. Anyway, we should have some fun today: armed scooters, Scientology, a church that worships the phallus, and a Supreme Court case about tomatoes.


Scientology certainly has a unique reputation. Either it's a crazy cult, or a bunch of scammers... but I say "why can't it just be a cult of crazy scammers?" Xenu (sometimes known as Xemu because L. Ron Hubbard has horrible handwriting). The story goes that he was a galactic dictator who brought his people to Earth (the spaceships apparently resembled a DC-8) 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with nukes to solve an overpopulation problem. Their souls were collected, filled with disinformation, and let lose to cause havoc on Earth. Scientology fixes your woes by dealing with these "thetan" spirits.
Yeah. That's what the highest members of the Church of Scientology are taught, after handing over thousands of dollars. I don't even have to make fun of this one at all.

Xenu depicted in the 2005 South Park episode "Trapped in the Closet"

More religious fun! One of the medications I take lists "priapism" as a possible side effect, and anything that threatens my biological manhood certainly is worthy of respect. That's the only reason that the article in question caught my eye, but I thought it was funny once I read it. The St. Priapus Church is a religion that worships the phallus, founded in Canada in the 1980s. Though it has 11 centers in North America, most of its members seem to be homosexual or LGBT followers. No, I'm not posting a picture.

When it comes to military pursuits, the French are usually subject to jokes where they are depicted as cowardly or incompetent (or indeed, anything not related to wine, cheese, romance, or armpit hair). Though I know on a professional level this is not true, this doesn't mean I don't enjoy that joke about the Leclerc tank having two gears for forward and three for reverse (the transmissions actually have five and two, respectively). But I have to recognize the Vespa 150 TAP as a stroke of genius. It is a lightweight and highly mobile anti-tank platform, consisting of two Vespa scooters, developed in the late 1950s. One holds ammunition, the other mounts a 75mm M20 recoilless rifle (though isn't actually designed to be fired from it). It's a cheap platform that can be easily airdropped and sent zipping about, engaging enemy vehicles, which the French used to good effect in the Algerian War.

The natural extension of this would be to start mounting heavy machineguns onto Segways.

In Nix v. Hedden, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that a tomato was a vegetable. In this 1893 case, the plaintiffs were protesting the collection of duties (under a tariff act that collected a tax on vegetables, but not fruit), claiming the botanical definition of a tomato as a fruit because of the nature of its seed-bearing structure growing from the flowering part of a plant. However, the court rejected this, as common parlance and the typical lexicon of the time defined it as a vegetable (Justice Horace Gray's written opinion cited that it was eaten as an entree and not a dessert).

Also, today gets another bonus. The lead image of the JPEG article is a PNG. :P A bonus to the bonus: Satan messes with Dijkstra's Dining Philosophers Problem. Happy reading!