Touched By His Noodly Appendage

What with the sort of legislation that's being shovelled hand over fist through the Senate in ten-minute windows of opportunity whenever the country's looking in the other direction (a favourite trick; ever wondered why the Bakhtiari family got so suddenly deported in the small, dark hours following the tsunami? Tidal wave, horse race, it's all good) with no possibility of any effective opposition, it's obviously only a matter of time until, following Dubya's lead, we find creationism being compulsorily taught in schools under its spinny new name Intelligent Design, on the grounds that 'different beliefs' should be given equal air time.

That the most powerful man in the world doesn't understand the difference between belief and empirical evidence is something upon which perhaps we ought not dwell too long. But salvation is at hand (I'm sorry, I would have liked to put that another way) in the form of a third possibility that we had not even counted upon (ten points if you recognise this phrase), for there is a brave new religion afoot: Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, a.k.a. Pastafarianism.

No doubt the faithful deplore Pastafarianism as an attack on their religion as such. It's not, of course; it's an attack on the blithe disregard for the doctrine of the separation of powers in particular, and on institutionalised imbecility in general.

The central tenet of Pastafarianism is that the world was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster (see picture above). But this is silly, since everyone knows that the world was in fact created by an elegant, self-possessed, in-your-face tortoiseshell cat. She's got the whole wide world in her paws.