Cracked Up

Kids, I have to inform you,
blow by blow,
that the earth is
completely cracked,
in case you didn't already know.

This is short but is about all I can come up with, having come across a humorous article on cracked.com by freelance writer Danny Gallagher entitled 5 Delicious Animals You Can Eat During Lent.

He writes humorously about the Catholic Church's ruling, in earlier years, that parishioners were not to eat meat on Fridays (this changed some years back). Also that in order to not overload church members with undue hardship of too much  "personal sacrifice" during Lent, (the prupose of Lent, one would think), Bishops in various locales made the following exceptions:

In the late 1600's, a monastery in France allowed the eating of puffins, as "their habitat was as much acquatic as terrestrial".

A New Orleans archbishop in this age of emails has declared the alligator an allowed exemption, considering it in this context to be a fish. Good grief.

Michigan Catholics have apparently been eating muskrats on Friday for years, since 
 a missionary in the 1800's allowed parishioners to devour them "because they didn't have much else to eat". Sounds like a good reason to me.

OMG, in the Great Canadian North, apparently our totem animal - the beaver - is allowed to be eaten during Lent, even though salmon and trout are plentiful.

This one takes the cake: In Ireland, parishioners are allowed to eat CORNED BEEF, their traditional St Patrick's Day meal, because the saint's day is in the middle of Lent.

I rest my case. It isn't the earth that is cracked. it's the people who live on it. 
Cackle.

posted for Fireblossom Friday's challenge over at Real Toads: the crack in everything. I didn't have to go far to find an example :) Thanks, Shay. Cracked is definitely familiar territory for me!