Sideswipe: Exemptions during Lent

Lent is the 40-day period leading up to Easter, meant for abstinence and penitence, observed in the Catholic Church. The current rules for Lent are that Catholics age 14 and up must abstain from meat on fast days (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) and all Fridays during Lent. There is an exception for chronically ill and pregnant or nursing mothers. That's why churches have fish fries on Fridays and how McDonald's came to serve the Fillet-O-Fish. Fish is not considered to be meat. But over the history of the Catholic Church, the question of what is meat and what isn't has been asked again and again. The original idea was to avoid basic livestock meat like beef, pork, and poultry. The rules for eating wild animals came up over time as Catholicism spread to different parts of the world, and local bishops made rulings that had little to do with biology, but a lot to do with the foods local people depended on. The reasoning for each animal varied. In Canada, beaver is classified as a fish for the purposes of Lent because it is an aquatic animal. In the southern US, alligator is considered a fish for the same reason. And in Central and South America, capybara is okay to eat during Lent, and has even become a traditional Lenten dish, because the animal spends so much time in lakes and rivers. (Via Neatorama)

Save 20c a litre on petrol

David Baker of Glenfield writes: "9am Saturday, 5th March. Two stations on the same corner Taharoto Rd, Milford ... 95 petrol is 313.9 at Zed. Bad enough. But 333.9 at BP. Shurely theresh shome mishtake there!"

Mother doesn't believe her daughter is being shelled

The idea of a family division because some members are being duped or radicalised by false information is a sad reality, even in Ukraine. Oleksandra and her four rescue dogs have been sheltering in the bathroom of her flat in Kharkiv since the Russian invasion began. This from the BBC: "The 25-year-old has been speaking regularly to her mother, who lives in Moscow. But in these conversations, and even after sending videos from her heavily bombarded hometown, Oleksandra is unable to convince her mother about the danger she is in. 'I didn't want to scare my parents, but I started telling them directly that civilians and children are dying,' she says. 'But even though they worry about me, they still say it probably happens only by accident, that the Russian army would never target civilians. That it's Ukrainians who're killing their own people.'"

Hey dude!

According to Mental Floss, the word dude has been around for quite a while. "In the 1880s, the word dude had a negative, mocking ring to it. A dude was a dandy, someone very particular about clothes, looks, and mannerisms, who affected a sort of exaggerated, high-class British persona. As one Brit noted in 1886, 'Our novels establish a false ideal in the American imagination, and the result is that mysterious being The Dude.' To those out west, it became a word for clueless city-dwellers of all kinds (hence, the dude ranch, for tourists). By the turn of the century, it had come to mean any guy, usually a pretty cool one."