ThatCaribbeanBitch

Content Warnings: Religion, food, symbolic cannibalism, symbolic gore, penis mention, Blasphemy, SO MUCH BLASPHEMY, weapons, war mention.  Mind the warnings and your health always comes first. Its a HILARIOUS story, I promise.

As always, all the names have been changed to protect people’s identities.  This is a long one, so Press J now if you want to skip it.

When my dad was a young man and still a practicing catholic, he participated in a small church communion that nearly got him and six other people excommunicated.

Father Patrick ran a small church outside of California Polytechnical and tended to be… rather more liberal in his interpretations of scripture than most of the church was, which made him something of a hit with the local students and liberally-inclined populace.  Pat went to all manner of civil demonstrations, condemned the shit out of the vietnam war and the politics that lead to it and so on.  In January of 1969 a series of incidents lead him to start exploring “nontraditional” means of holding Mass as a means of reaching out to his community and exploring his own faith, which ultimately culminated in the 1969 Easter Mass Incident.

For those of you who weren’t raised catholic, Communion is this ritual where you become one with Jesus by eating a really horrible bland wafer cookie and taking a shot of wine (called hosts), which then *literally* become the flesh and blood of jesus in your mouth, allowing him to become one with you.  It’s big McFucking deal, and you have the opportunity to take communion at every mass.  All this had to be explained to me second-hand because after this and Dad’s 51 days in the army, Dad decided he wouldn’t inflict religion on any children he might have in the future.

*

“Hey dad,” Six-year old me asked the first time he told me this story after my practicing friends were talking about getting wine at church. “Isn’t that cannibalism?”

“We’re getting to that.”  He waved.

*

The First Incident in January when, due to a serious cock-up by the church, all the hosts Father Pat received were moldering and spoiled and probably would have killed someone if he’d actually fed anyone them.  But it was the first mass of the year, when a peak number of people came in after vowing to got to church more for new year’s.  He couldn’t NOT have communion.

“I’ll bake.” offered Maria, the parish secretary and probably the best baker in the county. “So we have hosts.  Jesus will understand.”

Father Patrick, not one to pass up the chance at Maria’s cooking, immediately agreed.

A Host is supposed to be composed solely of unleavened wheat flour and water, which is why they taste terrible.  It’s a theological point of some importance relating to Exodus or something but Maria had an important theological counterpoint: Jesus both divine and loves all his children, ergo, Jesus would neither be a nasty bland cracker nor want his children to suffer as such and so instead, she made Mexican wedding cookies.

They were a SPECTACULAR hit.  Many praises were heaped upon father patrick for the Much Better Wafers and that they’d be sure to show up next week as long as Maria kept making them.  Father Patrick figuring that hey, anything that gets people in the doors is good and really, if it was turning into Jesus once inside the parishioner, did it really matter what the wafers were made of?  So he continued to let Maria bake the Hosts, and encouraged her to try out new flavors, like nutmeg and cinnamon.

This went on swimmingly for a few weeks until The Bishop showed up for a surprise visit the same week Maria decided to experiment with rainbow sprinkles.

Dad remembers hearing the bishop through the windows roaring “THE HOLY BODY OF CHRIST DOES! NOT! CONTAIN! RAINBOW! SPRINKLES!”

The matter went clean up to The Archbishop, who decided that while Pat was probably right to not feed spoiled hosts to his parish, he should attend some remedial classes to remember what Communion was all about, so that if it happened again, he’s come up with a more suitable substitute.

Father Patrick returned in late March, full of spite and some fascinating new ideas.

*

“Is this where the Cannibalism happens?” Six-year-old me asked, eager to get to the good parts.

*

At his remedial classes, the teacher had stressed the importance of transubstantiation, aka “That bit where the wafer and wine, Actually, Literally, become the flesh of Jesus Christ and we expect you to swallow.”  Also on the syllabus was understanding the importance of Christ’s suffering and sacrifice.

“So, I was thinking about Easter Service.”  Said father Patrick one afternoon while dad was doing his computer science homework at the church because his dorm was a barely-standing fire hazard and the library was where you went to have sex.

“Well, we do re-enactments for christmas.  Why not on easter?  Why not re-enact the crucifixion of Christ right here? Make it real for everyone.  Trauma’s great for bonding a community together.”

“Who’s playing Jesus?” asked Maria, always one for a good laugh.

“That’s the thing- A Host, it doesn’t look much like flesh, right?  Doesn’t look like much of anything, really.  Not great for reinforcing one’s belief.

What if, instead, we- and I mean you, Maria, I can’t cook to save my life- make a man-sized loaf of bread, maybe in the shape of a T, and we have some of the boys dress up as romans and whip the bread and we pour the wine on so it’s bleeding and them- then we make a big wooden cross and actually nail the bread to it with, I don’t know, railroad spikes, more wine all over. And we raise the cross, all while telling the story of the crucifixion.”

He paused to take a drink, Maria slowly crumpling onto the floor in horrified laughter and Dad now thoroughly distracted from his homework.

“Then we lower the cross, and invite everyone who wants to take communion up to tear a hunk of Jesus off.  Just descend into his corpse like vultures.  I think that’d really be a good bonding experience for the church.”  he nodded thoughtfully.  “The hard, part, I suppose, will be finding enough romans.”

“I WANNA BE LONGINUS.” bellowed my father, barreling into the room.

And so, the plan was hatched.  Dad hit up every other guy in the Church and eventually rounded up four more romans, three of them from the Education Department of Cal Poly, and one guy from Chemistry, who just liked to watch things burn.

This, being a play, naturally meant that there was a rehearsal, and test Bread jesus.  Maria had decided that if they were going to start being extra-literal, she needed to make the most lifelike Bread jesus possible, and made a distressingly buff and human-proportioned Jesus by Advanced bread-braiding, complete with plaited hair, quail’s-egg-and-raisin eyes, bready muscle groups, and an eight-pack because why not make the lord completely shredded?*  She also made the important theological decision that since Jesus loves everyone and was happy to die in spite of all his suffering, he should be smiling, and had a toothy corn-kernel smile.  He was Wonderful and Terrifying all at once.

“Maria,” asked Father Patrick after a few minutes of delighted and horrified cooing over Jesus’ toothy grin and abdominals. “Why is he wearing a tea-towel?

“Well, he’s the Son of God. A Man.  With all that entails.”  She said, pointedly staring at Father Patrick while everyone stared at the suspiciously lumpy tea-towel.  “And he might have… burnt, slightly.”

Everyone nodded and agreed that the tea-towel was the best course of action.  The rehearsal goes splendidly and everyone agrees that this is the most delicious Jesus they’ve ever had.

*

Easter Sunday arrives and the Church is PACKED, from the more lapsed Catholics showing up for a high holiday, parents visiting for spring break and a whole horde of newcomers who had gotten wind that something was up and they ought to come.

Dad is a lanky as hell 21-year old composed mostly of technical jargon and acne but he is STOKED to be playing Longinus, the roman that speared Jesus on the cross, because he gets to do the BEST technical effect in the whole parade.  Since he came in at the end me missed a good portion of the sermon, but did hear the “oooh” from the crowd as the massive cross was dragged in by the other Romans, followed by horrified gasps and high screams and a discernible “What the FUCK” as they brought in Bread Jesus 2.0, whipping him enthusiastically, and hammering him into the cross, the sound of wine splashing onto the floor loud in the terrified silence of that Parishioners.

Finally Father Patrick gets to the part about Longinus, and Dad comes sprinting down the aisle as hard as he can, because in order for Bread Jesus to be seen by everyone, his middle had to be about 10 feet off the ground, so Dad had to run, shrieking latin curses,  down the length of the church, with a big honking spear and take a flying leap at Jesus in order to spear him in the gut.

Please take moment to imagine you are some normal god-fearing catholic who has decided to visit little bobby or maybe patricia at college and you’re all going to church together like a nice family and this Fucking madman has decided to go all Silence of the Lambs on mass and now there’s some sort of underfed translucently pale man in ill-fitting Roman armor and cape flying at a horrifying glutinous effigy of your lord and savior, with an actual fucking spear, screaming like a madman.  Don’t you feel yourself drawing closer to God already? Defensively, perhaps, like an octopus trying to ooze itself into a crevice against the horrors of the ocean.

However, two things happen that were not planned on

1. Dad misses.  In his defense, Bread Jesus is close to but not quite the size of a man- more like the size of a doughy teenager, and his middle is a small target 10 feet up in the air and dad is has a computer science minor, not an athletics scholarship.  He misses by about 8 inches and instead very solidly stabs Bread Jesus right through the groin, leaving a big hole in Maria’s tea-towel and the spear jutting out at a decidedly… attentive angle, as Bread Jesus’s Bread Dick drops to the floor with a splat.  Nobody notices this, however because

2. In rehearsal, Dad had managed to get the spear right in jesus’s navel but neither Father Patrick nor the other romans could get the wine up there to make his middle appropriately bloodied.  

Maria come up with the Genius solution that since wine is made of grapes and Jam is made of grapes, she could make a jelly-filled Jesus for Dad to stab.  There was a normal-sized test loaf and when dad stabbed it on the table, it had a nicely gooey dribbling effect.

However, this time the loaf was torso-sized, still hot from the oven and upright, so when dad speared the very end of the loaf, all the steam-pressured jam had collected at the bottom and a spray of lukewarm smuckers exploded out from bread jesus, turning the first three pews into a splash zone of symbolic entrails.

There was  a hot, sticky minute of complete silence in the church after that. 

Then, Father Patrick indicated it was time for the cross to be lowered, and continued on with the normal preparations of the Host, he himself covered in hot smuckers, as though nothing particularly ordinary was occuring, quietly kicking the bread-dick under the altar. At the end of it all, Father Patrick and invited everyone up with the Last Oration:

“Thou, O God, has kindly allowed us to have a part in this Holy Sacrifice; for this we give Thee thanks. Accept it now to Thy glory and be ever mindful of our weakness. Amen.”

…And everybody came up, shuffling like terrified zombies, pinching off tiny bits at first but then the madness took them and they began tearing apart bread jesus by the handful, weeping as they partook, scattered prayers and begging for forgiveness.  The whole congregation was kneeling about the altar, tearful and united in their guilt and their need for God.

*

“IS CHURCH ALWAYS LIKE THAT?” six-year-old me asked, absolutely stoked.  I’d convert on the spot if I got a show like that.

“No, it’s normally bland wafers and lots of chanting in latin.”

“Well that’s boring as hell.” I remember muttering and Dad snorting the coffee he was drinking out of his nose.

*

As people filed silently out of the Church to a gloriously sunny California afternoon, faces wan and smeared with wine and jam, Father patrick turned to Maria and asked “You don’t think that was too much, do you?”

“No.”  Said Maria with a sarcastic deadpan so intense it was hard to tell from sincerity.

It was the exact same tone she used when the Archbishop and Six other high clergy showed up, clutching a letter someone had written, Livid and almost foaming at the mouth, demanding to know if such blasphemy had transpired.

“No.  That’s crazy.”  She said, staring down the archbishop like he was an idiot.

“Such imaginations some people have!” Said Father Patrick, much less convincingly.

“And you-  you didn’t…  Spear an effigy of our lord and savior?”  the archbishop demanded of my father.

“Do I look like I can jump that high?”  Dad asked, having in the interim been drafted for 51 days then nearly died of pneumonia from it, and therefore no longer afraid of the Church, the Law or God.

Somewhat relieved that he’d only received the extremely detailed ramblings of a doddering parishioner, the Archbishop sat down and complemented Maria on her most excellent Mexican Wedding Cookies, may he please have another plate for his nerves? Perhaps the ones with sprinkles?

Dad went on to help build the internet, Father Patrick converted to Buddhism and Maria became a Nun.

*For those of you wondering, Jesus was made of Challah.

So you know how in Shrek 2 during the most amazing cover of all time Mongo was born?

Yeah. Well, I was curious to see how long it would take to actually bake, cool, decorate, and make alive a Mongo in real life. Would Shrek and Gingy have enough time to save Fiona from Prince Charming and the Fairy Godmother with Mongo at their side?

Here’s how I figured it out.

So Shrek is originally seven feet tall.

But when he takes the Happily Ever After potion, he shrinks a bit. Let’s say… a foot. Shrek is now six feet tall. That’s a good, measurable number. I drew it out in proportion to Mongo here:

So from his shoulder to his mouth, Mongo is about six feet (I added a bit extra here because Shrek is bent over a little because giant gingerbread monster footsteps can be jarring and you need to brace your body for impact). Now, I couldn’t find a full body picture or character model of Mongo, but I could find one of Gingy. They do have the same proportions.

Here’s the model I used. He’s a bit bent, but I made do. Using MS Paint again, I measured about six feet on this model if it were Mongo sized.

Now using the line tool, I measured the space between the two lines and made new lines according to where the space ended. Here’s the final result:

So this is about 12 lines worth of space. The top of his head didn’t make it another six feet, so let’s say it’s three feet. Plug 12.5 and 6 into the calculator in and…

Mongo is 75 feet tall. Add that to your fan wikis.

Now let’s look at Gingy’s size. We need to know how many Gingies make a Mongo. Looking at the picture again, Gingy is a little smaller than Shrek’s head.

So if we look up the size of the average head, we get…

About nine inches. Let’s just say nine. Nine inches is 0.75 feet.

It takes 100 Gingies to make one Mongo. Assuming Gingy is the same size as an average gingerbread man that Muffin Man makes, let’s assume further and say he’s an average gingerbread man.

I found this snip from this recipe by the Food Network. Since Gingy is nine inches tall, we need to tweak this a bit.

If my calculations are correct and I’m not a fool, each batch makes four cookies. We would need 25 batches to make a Mongo. That’s 75 cups flour, 25 teaspoons baking soda, 18 ¾ teaspoons ground cinnamon and ground ginger, 12 ½ teaspoons ground allspice, ground cloves, and salt, 6 ¼ teaspoon milled black pepper (for whatever reason), 25 sticks of butter, 6 ¼ cups of room temperature vegetable shortening, 12 ½ cups packed light brown sugar, 16 2/3 cups of molasses, and 25 large eggs! Jesus, now the Muffin Man’s in crippling debt. And that’s just the cookie part!

Assuming this humble, gentle soul makes his own icing, he would need 25 pounds of confectioners’ sugar, 50 tablespoons of dried egg-white powder he would have to dry himself, and 150 tablespoons of water. I feel so sorry for this man.

Not to mention, Far Far Away can’t possibly sell gumdrops that big, so he’d have to melt them down, build a giant bowl of some sort, wait for them to solidify, take them out as to not damage them, and sprinkle sugar on them before animating his giant, expensive monster.

The melting point of gumdrops, I could not find. But I assume they have a slightly higher melting point than, say syrup sap. And it might also stick horrifically to any pan. So we need an open flame, like a bonfire, and we need it hot enough to melt the gumdrops inside of a big enough bowl. Something like pictured here from Little House In The Big Woods:

So we would need one or two of these set up. Thankfully, our boy Muffin Man lives in a place with quite a few trees. 

They are a little ways off, though. Chopping one down, getting chains to propel the pot up, and starting a dangerously hot fire as well as stirring quite close to it would take for ever. And melting that many gumdrops would take forever. So would cooling them.

Now onto the actual bake time. Shrek does take place in what I presume to be Midevil Germany, judging by the architecture, clothing, and art style in the books. Though it has many modern conveniences, such as fast food and concert lighting/sound systems.

So I assume that even a somewhat seemingly poor/lower middle class single baker dude can afford a good oven. Let’s say this type of oven.

Now this is a pretty small oven. How could Muffins possibly create a 75-foot gingerbread man with this small of an oven? It’s impossible. He would have to bake him piece by piece, then somehow paste him all together. And he wouldn’t see a single penny of his back breaking work! Shrek never paid him, and Mongo ended up a soggy mess in the bottom of a river anyway, so all of that time, energy, money, work was all for nothing!

And no, I’m not acknowledging Shrek The 3rd.

Anyway suppose he did paste Mongo piece by piece. How long would it take for him to bake each piece? Let’s look at his model again.

Splitting up the model into head, upper torso, mid torso, left and right arm/hand/leg/shin/foot, and lower torso, we get something like this:

These can sit in the oven more easily. If we break it in half it would be easier.

There we go. If we make twice the amount of icing we need, then we can paste him back together, like Humpty Dumpty.

Wait…

It’s almost as if Dreamworks wanted someone to do this. Huh.

Anyway, going back to the Food Network recipe. How long does it take for a Mongo to cook? According to the article, it’s about ten minutes. So let’s just say ten minutes. Multiply that by 25, you’ve got 250 minutes in the oven, or a little over four hours to bake an entire Mongo.

It takes 5 minutes to cool a batch. so that’s 150 minutes, or a little over two hours. That’s six hours to bake and cool a Mongo.

So about saving Fiona…

It’s not happening. An oven like the one Muffins has cannot be hot enough to bake it and make it cook enough to not burn nor be raw in enough time to still get to the castle and save Fiona. Especially after mixing each batch, making the giant gumdrops, icing gluing, giving life, baking time, and cooling time. Just by estimating, mixing all that stuff together could take, like, an hour at the most. Plus the gumdrop issue; I wouldn’t be surprised if it took two and a half hours. Don’t forget giving Mongo life. I would expect another two and a half hours since an electric spark of Mary Shelly proportions can be made in a somewhat modern home with the right equipment, but Muffins probably has to make/go out to get the right equipment. (That’s how I remember Mongo being alive correct me if I’m wrong).

Add all of that up, and that’s 12 hours.

TWELVE HOURS.

That’s over 202 times of playing Shrek’s cover of “I Need A Hero.” That’s like playing Shrek 2 in full over eight times. Basically, Fiona is doomed and Shrek should have used a carriage ordering service.

Apparently if you put a red band on a male red wing blackbird his harem size can double

OUR LOWER BACKS ARE STRUCTURALLY FUCKED FROM MAKING A SHITTY TRANSITION TO BEING BIPEDS