Genesis 8: Noah Lands the Ark

This photographic evidence of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat has silenced all doubters of the story of the Great Flood.

On July 17 the ark bottomed out on Mount Ararat in northwestern Turkey. With nowhere else to go, Noah and his family and the animals waited. On October 1, other mountaintops started to appear. Sensing progress in the recession of the flood, Noah sprang into action and after forty days he started sending birds out to look for dry land. One of the birds, a dove, returned after a week with a freshly plucked olive leaf in its beak, which was nothing short of miraculous itself, since olive trees typically take more than 47 days to grow, much less to sprout leaves. A week later he released the dove again and it never returned, which was risky, since the only other dove in the world was still on the ark, thus risking extinction of the species, which would have earned Noah the eternal gratitude of New Yorkers who get pelted with their excretions to this day. Somehow, that dove eventually found the other one.

God then said to the 601-year-old captain, “Get out of the ark! The land is dry already! Bring your wife, your sons and their wives!”

“You didn’t tell me to bring their wives, Lord.”

“But you did, right?”

“Well, yeah, I took that liberty. I mean, I have three sons and only two sheep, so…”

“All right, all right… I get it. I figured you’d have brought their wives as a matter of course,” sayeth the Lord. “Every man who’s old enough will have a wife. If I had a grown son who wasn’t married, I’d have to wonder about him.”

“I should think so,” said Noah.

“Clear those animals out of there, too, Cap’n. Tell them to go forth and multiply.” So Noah strolled up and down the ark’s three decks, chasing all the birds and beasts out, hoping that the lions wouldn’t attack the only two antelopes as soon as they were on dry land, and that the buffalo, penguins and kangaroos would somehow figure out how to get back to their respective continents. All creatures appeared to have filed out of the ark, so Noah gave the ark a once-over to make sure all were gone. He noticed in the bottom of a pen two snakes that hadn’t budged.

“What are you doing?” asked Noah. “Why aren’t you going forth and multiplying?”

“Well, Cap’n,” said the snakes, “we’re adders.”

After clearing the misunderstanding with the snakes up, Noah realized he must make a sacrifice to God, because that’s what you do. So Noah brought the two unicorns, who were ritually clean, and sacrificed them as burnt offerings on an altar he had made for the Lord. When the Lord smelled this barbecue, He felt so good that He promised never to kill all of humanity and all the animals again, no matter how bad they got, figuring that humans were probably smart enough to do that themselves.

How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon? Silly question, isn’t it? You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right? That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy. Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow. You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true. The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma. (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar . I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.) The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years. The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits. One f...

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”. It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice. Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes. I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult? Yes… and no. The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult. It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser . Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word. One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats? If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.” Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right. Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s. In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats? The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style. Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice. But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too. When that happened, you’d ju...

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