Weekly Whack: The Truth About Easter
The Truth About Easter
April 7, 1996

This Sunday, April 7th, was the first Sunday after the first full moon following the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. To anybody who is not Christian, this means absolutely nothing to you. But for those who are, you already know that this is when Easter, the most important Christian festival of the year, is celebrated. Easter, a holiday that can fall on any day between March 22 and April 25, can be a bit confusing with all its giant talking rabbits and multi-colored eggs taken from a wild acid trip gone bad. So to clear all the haze I reached for my 1984 set of World Book Encyclopedias that have been quenching my thirst for knowledge for well over a decade. After pondering why the letter C gets two separate encyclopedia volumes, while N and O have to share one, I finally reached for the E encyclopedia where I found some neato information about Easter (along with some tidbits about the eider duck).

Easter celebrates the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the founder of Christianity. A cool thing I noticed about Jesus is that all pronoun references to Jesus are capitalized. For example: "The Gospels tell that on the morning two days after Jesus' death His tomb was found empty. Soon, Jesus' followers began to see Him and talk with Him." Personally I think that is the greatest. If I ever got to the point in my life when people started capitalizing pronoun references to me, I think I would finally be self actualized. For example: "After Feff lost his job as a Las Vegas lounge singer, He was arrested for stealing His neighbor's horse." In fact, I did a little research, and the only people who have pronoun references to them capitalized are Jesus and Frank Sinatra. While I'm on the Jesus subject, the story goes that when Jesus died He went up to Heaven where He was seated at the right hand of His father, God. Isn't that nepotism? How do we know there wasn't some hard working guy in Heaven who deserved to be seated at the right hand of God more? Is all the world just one big family business? Does this mean that the only way we can get anywhere in the afterlife is if we marry into THE family? It kinda makes you think. And I always wondered if they had affirmative action in Heaven. Are there quotas for how many blacks and Mexicans have to get into Heaven? Are there lower standards for the admittance of minorities? Is there some eternal politically correct admission committee in Heaven that seeks to make Paradise more 'diverse'? Once again, it can't help but make you think.

Going back to Easter, I always wondered how eggs and rabbits got into the whole Easter tradition. Well my trusty encyclopedia supplied me with the shocking answer: "Eggs and rabbits are the only familiar symbols unrelated to the Easter story." So the two most highly recognizable symbols associated with Easter, have absolutely nothing to do with the true meaning of the holiday. So the Easter Bunny, dyed Easter eggs, Easter baskets, Easter egg hunts, and just about all familiar Easter traditions are nothing but a big farce. This makes me wonder how in the great telephone game of life did a holiday about the Resurrection of Jesus get transformed into a holiday about eggs and rabbits. I don't have all the answers, but me thinks it was started by someone a long time ago who had a lot of eggs, a lot of rabbits, and a lot of influence in the Christian church.

Talking about stuff that doesn't make sense, why are they called elevators and escalators, instead of de-elevators and de-escalators? Why is there a bias for going up? What is so good about going up? More of life occurs down than it does up. Everybody who goes up eventually has to come back down, but not everybody who comes down has to go back up. Plus, how come apples are always associated we having worms in them? In my eighteen years of existence I don't think I have ever seen a worm within ten yards of an apple. What member of the orange lobby made this nonsense up? And why is it called the graveyard shift? Graveyards aren't even open that late. Don't you find it a bit ironic that there isn't even someone working the graveyard shift at a graveyard? And what do you call someone working at a graveyard in the middle of the afternoon? Isn't he technically also working the graveyard shift? I don't know, it all kind of makes you think.

One last subject I want to touch on briefly this week is the Unabomber. After almost twenty years, the FBI finally caught the Unabomber. Many people wondered how come it took the Feds so long to get him. Well I know the reason. All the composite sketches of the Unabomber in the newspapers had him with a hood on. The guy probably only wore a hood once in his life. Everybody is out looking for any chump with a hood on, while the real Unabomber has his hair out blowing in the wind as he takes out corporate executives left and right. I'm no expert, but I don't think that whether someone is wearing a hood or not is that important to be included in a composite sketch. And was it me, or did the composite sketch of the Unabomber look a lot like Weird Al Yankovic? When I heard the FBI caught him, I was waiting to see some guy being brought out with a accordion singing 'Eat It'.

Well I think it is time to put this Whack to an end, so to conclude for this week, the Easter tradition is all scrambled; the seat at the left hand of God is reserved for Frank Sinatra; and Weird Al Yankovic would never hurt a fly.

For this week's special feature, we have Feff's top ten favorite parts of the chicken egg:

10. Dark layer
9. Inner thin white
8. Spongy layer
7. Outer shell membrane
6. Bloom
5. Air Cell
4. Germ
3. Mammillary layer
2. Vitelline membrane
1. Chalaza

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