have y’all ever had communion bread that was just so….nasty? like i know we have to suffer as christians, but do we really need to have whole wheat bread as the body of christ?
my old church used hawaiian bread. my standards are high
Some old housemates of mine were Syrian Orthodox. At their church different members of the church took turns baking the bread that would be consecrated for the Eucharist. This was all well and good until one woman baked raisin bread. This led to the memorable occasion of a rather flustered priest, who had not seen the bread until that moment, declaring, “This – except for the raisins – is the Body of Christ.”
i just remembered this story my dad told me one time, about abraham lincoln
a guy challenged abe to a duel once. lincoln very much did not want to duel this cat.
so lincoln agreed, on the condition he got to choose the weapon. maybe that was how it generally went in 19th century dueling culture, i have no idea.
the guy said “sure”
lincoln said, “ok. broadswords.”
so that poor would-be opponent shows up on the day of the would-be duel, and abe is outside, doing, like, some quick sword warmups.
now, back in lincoln’s day, he was, as any american schoolchild can tell you, the tallest fucking dude on the entire fucking planet, so please try to even imagine the majestic reach of this stovepiped giant’s condor-like wingspan.
(wingspan plus broadsword.)
abe’s enemy takes one look at this, does some quick mental calculations on his own arm length (mortal, human), turns around and goes home.
the best part is that, as i remember it, lincoln of course had no fucking idea how to swordfight. it was the 1800s. we had guns. he’d just been, like, waving this giant sword around haphazardly, whacking at tree limbs, making his arms look as big as possible because he knew this joker could see him, and he knew that guy didn’t know that lincoln didn’t know what the hell to do with a broadsword.
anyway, i don’t actually know if that story is true or not but i really really hope it is. i would love to know that the president who defeated the confederacy was also fucking hilarious.
PLOT TWIST: the real version is considerably funnier
This is great and I just wanna add that the rules of early 19th century American gentleman’s duels did in fact state that whoever offered the challenge of a duel did not choose the weapons that would be used. The challenger would demand a duel and the challengee would have to accept or face considerable dishonor, but the challengee was permitted (nay, required) to select the weapon, date, and time. Duels were typically scheduled for two weeks from whenever the challenge was issued in the hopes that relatives would be able to sort out the issue in the meantime and then the duel could be honorably cancelled.
wait so like i get that it was a Matter of Utmost Grave Importance to these dudes
but you are in fact telling me that an early nineteenth century American gentleman could be challenged to a duel and, in accordance with the culture of the time, technically he could be like “fuck it let’s have a pillow fight” and the other guy would have to accept
oh my god why did anybody ever kill anybody
what a profound and tragic failure of imagination
“the terms of the duel are a dance-off. bring your sickest moves, cad”
“meet me outside town, exactly 500 years from today. hope you like fighting a fucking skeleton”
have i told you guys about the time that i classically conditioned my kindergarten class
I got like 4 anons asking about this so I guess I didn’t:
omg. okay, so basically, I was a “gifted kid” which was code for fucken nerd ass bitch, so i would constantly just stare off into space during class while everyone else was tryna figure out what the fuck our teacher was tryna say. Anyway, I was learning about chemistry and biology outside of school(i know what a fucking nerd amirite ladies), and my dad got me a book that talked about all these famous psychological experiments.
So chapter one was, would you have guessed it, Pavlov’s dog. I thought it my be fun to try something to that extent with my classmates. Now, keep in mind, being a nerdy ass brown kid in a school full of white ppl meant that I wasn’t exactly popular, and no one really talked to me in class or cared what I was doing.
Everyday, at 9:45 am, our teacher would announce that it was snacktime, and everyone would fucking sprint to their cubbies to grab their lunchboxes like it was the goddamn hunger games. Kindergarten kids didn’t really have a concept of time, so i used this to my advantage. At 9:45 as my teacher would walk up to announce snacktime, I would knock on my desk really quickly three times. It was rly subtle, and I wasn’t sure that it would work.
So after two or three weeks, I decided to have some fun. Thirty minutes after school began at like 8:30 or something, I tapped knocked on the desk. Half the class turned their heads and looked straight at the cubbies. 3 boys got up and were about to run to get their lunchbox. One girls stomach started growling REALLY loudly. The teacher had to take 5 minutes to get everyone to calm down and one kid started crying because he thought it was snacktime and he was so shocked and destroyed.
Realizing that I had basically dog trained the whole class, I burst out laughing so hard I fell out of my chair and cut my head on the tile floor and got sent home early because I was laughing so hard they thought I had a concussion or something. When I explained what happened to my dad he left the room, but I could hear him losing it in the hallway.
So everytime now that I learn about classical conditioning in my Neuroscience classes, I have to fight to keep a straight face
One day, that “secret family recipe” will just be that recipe their ancestor looked up online years ago and everybody liked.
I found out one of my family’s “secret recipes” is on the back of the pudding box. Uncle Rich bakes up some lies.
While researching his book The Nordic Cookbook, chef Magnus Nilsson found that every family in Sweden has a special, unique family recipe for pickled herring passed down secretly from generation to generation. He got about 200 of these. They were all exactly the same. He traced the origin point back to a popular cookbook published in the late 1960s. I think the moral of that story is everyone’s grandma is a liar.
Guys, I can top this.
It’s time for the tale of Great-Grandma’s Macaroni and Cheese.
My Great-Grandma Mary was famous in her family for her macaroni and cheese. By all accounts it was an amazing mac and cheese- a baked casserole-style concoction of perfectly cooked elbow noodles and creamy, lusciously cheesy sauce. Because Dad loved it so much, it was always, without fail, sitting bubbling and golden in the dish set out on the dinner table just as he and his family arrived for visits, a testament to grandmotherly love and culinary mastery.
Fast-forward a couple dozen years.
My mother had never made macaroni and cheese. At the time she married my dad, she was a very good cook. She’d been cooking since she was about six or seven and had outstripped both her parents’ abilities in most areas. So when Dad started raving about Great-Grandma Mary’s macaroni and cheese, she did what any loving newlywed would do: she attempted to make macaroni and cheese.
According to all reports, it was an unmitigated disaster.
The sauce broke. The noodles turned to mush. The entire concoction was, in a word, inedible. Dad took one bite and spit it out. Horrified that her husband would do such a thing. Mom took a bite- and spat it out. It was vile. Mortified, Mom threw out the remains and vowed to obtain Great-Grandma Mary’s secret recipe.
Not long afterwards, they went and visited Great-Grandma for the holidays. As usual, there was the macaroni and cheese, laid out in golden splendor upon the dinner table when they arrived. Mom was finally able to sample the famous macaroni and cheese and pronounced it quite as good as Dad’s stories made it out to be.
After dinner, she cornered Great-Grandma Mary and spilled the whole debacle about her failed attempts to recreate Dad’s favorite dish, and begged Great-Grandma Mary to share her secret.
Great-Grandma Mary smiled and brought her and my father into the kitchen. Rather than reaching for a cookbook of family culinary wisdom, or into the pantry for a secret ingredient, she went to the freezer, opened it, and, as Dad looked on in horror, drew out a family-sized box of Stouffer’s frozen macaroni and cheese.
“I have a casserole dish just this size,” she said. “I just pop it in there, sprinkle a little extra cheese on top, and nobody knows the difference.”
You would have thought someone had just stolen Dad’s teddy bear.
To this day, nearly twenty-seven years later, we still refer to Stouffer’s as ‘Great-Grandma’s Macaroni and Cheese’.
wait. wait wait. they let you play with liquid nitrogen?
okay. here is a HILARIOUS thing you can do with liquid nitrogen and 1 or 2 bottles of shaving cream.
okay so step one is you dunk the shaving cream into the liquid nitrogen. completely submerge it and let it freeze. the shaving cream i mean. then take out the shaving cream. you probably don’t need me to tell you this but for other people, you want to use tongs and safety gloves so you don’t lose a hand or two doing this. now you have frozen shaving cream. what do you do with frozen shaving cream? well, first you have to peel off the canister so you have just the shaving cream floating free. you had to freeze it first so that it wouldn’t explode when you do this part. now you have a frozen brick (or two if you did two) of shaving cream. so what do we do now?
we put that shit inside someone’s car we hate and/or love to prank on.
as it warms, it will gradually expand to fill the entire vehicle.
Steel Phoenix Studios 