In which the pond embraces durum wheat and its regular Monday serve of an Oreo ...

Callooh, callay, o frabjous day, the pond chortled in its joy, it's frumious Oreo whiffling away day... but first a little detour ...

Anybody who watches Colbert will have come across the late night Catholic show host joking about, and talking to his god, regarding the Catholic church's stance on gluten in its transubstantive wafers.

Well it's as good as any way to stay in touch with the absurdities of Catholic theological debates, though the Daily Beast's Candida Moss also has a fun piece, Why Is the Vatican So Obsessed with Gluten.

It's probably easier to work out why the Vatican is obsessed with (metaphorical, but if you believe the transubstantive gibberish, also actual) cannibalism than with gluten ... it's what the ancient pagans used to do when they danced around the flickering light in the cave, taking on the spirits and powers of the animals they devoured. Want intelligence? Why not chow down on Einstein's brain?

Now the pond has a certified, tested, medically approved, patented, hard core coeliac in the house. This isn't some Newtown or Fitzroy dandy or fop getting the News Corp reptiles agitated ... a whiff of gluten in the system is emergency-room life threatening...

Yet if this coeliac happened to be a believer, the result would be a painful exile, as Candida Moss noted:“unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). Even to ancient audiences this sounded a bit like cannibalism.

A bit? Eating human flesh and blood is straight out cannibalism, even if you throw in a little tasty Holy Ghost as a sweetener.

The coeliac in the house is a fierce atheist, but still it rankles. What if there was a sudden desire to switch and come in from the cold?

The coeliac has an explanation.

Pasta.

All those bloody Italians in Rome know you can only make decent pasta with hard-core durum wheat. It's just pasta bigotry at work, dressed up with metaphysical hokum.

In her piece, Moss spends some time with an Anglican pastor who points out many other nonsensical matters - as if anyone had the first clue what form of wheat and bread might have been precisely devoured in biblical times, and the bizarre way that the Vatican isn't troubled by GM:

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Vatican's stand on gluten, then, is not that it takes a position on the properties of bread, but that it hasn’t worried more about the effects of genetic modification of wheat. The reason seems to be the way culture and pastoral goals intersect: gluten is hot-topic that is both a serious medical concern and a cultural fad. The Church wants to be pastoral, but it does not want to compromise a religious mystery for a health-food trend. In the meantime, though, the equally important questions raised by genetically engineered foodstuffs fly somewhat under the radar. In this case, one might wonder if the Church is attending to cultural developments more than scientific ones.

The pond only notes all this yet again (the routine has been rehearsed a number of times) in anticipation that some reptile would yet again talk about the way that Christianity was the foundation stone of western civilisation, perhaps so the pond could repeat again how profoundly fucked that foundation stone is to anyone remotely connected to rationality and wanting to forsake cannibalism as a lifestyle choice for cultists ...

Naturally it being Monday and Oreo day, the pond had high hopes ... though once again the coeliac just had to look on, mouth slavering at the prospect of a tasty treat and a warning that Xmas is just around the corner ...

Forget your human flesh and blood wafer, it's on with the Oreo ...

How they whimper and plead and yowl at their loss ...

Back in your cages coeliacs - sign the pathetic petition here if you like - for only Xians and Catholics and devotees of Western civilisation know how to eat and digest their Monday Oreo treat ...

Oh dear, this is turning into a bitter Monday, a day of disappointments ...

Sure there's bizarre talk of Putin as a somewhat gallant defender of Western civilisation, and the ashes of sterile communism, but the pond senses that the Oreo is on the turn and things might get a little sticky for Vlad the impaler ...

Dear sweet long absent lord, the Oreo does her very best to build up Vlad as the long suffering sacrificial persecuted lamb, a companion of the Donald in restoring greatness and durum wheat to the West, and then at the very end, she throws him under the MH17 bus?

The pond was greatly confused. Everything else was allowed - murdering journalists, murdering or jailing dissidents, revelling in corruption of the most fetid kind, brutalising and bashing minorities - but shooting down a plane with Australians in it was a step too far?

What next? Perhaps it's just time for Rowe cartoon, celebrating the new Lady Macbeth, gaining a few moments of US cable news fame celebrated by the Murdochians, using ABC content to sell ads, yet still going about her business as usual ... even as the deal totters and the poor buggers stay stuck ...(with more Rowe here).

And for those who missed it, here's Colbert for wheat-lovers ...