The Last Supper
Posted on May 20, 2011 by Leslie Blythe 1 comment
May 21st Doomsday will be SO much more fun if you have a shirt to go with it! Get your Judgement Day 2011 shirts now before it’s too late!
So, basically, if your caught wearing one of these shirts on Sunday, you’ve gone to hell in a hand basket, because you are a heathen and were not swooped up to heaven and saved by Jesus.
At least, that’s according to Harold Camping, a California pastor and owner of Family Radio, a religious broadcasting network. He claims that his precise mathematical calculations, based on the date when God created the Earth, Jesus’ crucifixion, and other variables, revealed to him that May 21, 2011 is It: Judgment Day. These Biblical clues are so specific that Camping assures his flock not only of the date, but also of the time: around 6 p.m. This way they can be sure not to be in the bathroom when Jesus gets here.
The May 21 date isn’t observed by all Christians, but those who follow Camping are so convinced that many have sold their possessions or are spending the last of their money so they can pack light for the trip up to Heaven. One man interviewed by NPR’s All Things Considered said he’d quit his job, sold his house, and is spending his last days on this terrestrial plane handing out pamphlets and encouraging sinners to repent. “I’m separated as a result of a difference of belief. My wife got sick of me,” he said. I’m sick of you too Mr. Camping! Your poor wife!
So I guess tomorrow will be something like the Last Supper, but you’ll have to eat the early-bird special because the world is ending at 6PM!
Riddles in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper were the basis for the plot of the best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, but why hasn’t anyone cracked the code of what food was served at the legendary dinner party?
New research by John Varriano suggests that the meal being consumed was neither bread nor pascal lamb, as once thought. Instead, he writes in a new article in Gastronomica that the 1997 cleaning and restoration of the fresco revealed plates of grilled eel garnished with orange slices. Above is a detail of the section of the painting in question (with my best effort to identify and highlight the dish).
Pairing fish with oranges was trendy at the time The Last Supper was painted, according to Varriano, who notes that a recipe for grilled eel appears in Platina’s On Right Pleasure and Good Health, an influential Renaissance cookbook. He also loosely ties the choice of the dish to Leonardo’s own grocery lists, preserved from 1400s, which indicate he shopped for “peppered bread, eels, and apricots” at least a dozen times.
My grocery lists are a tad different from Leonardo’s. I can say with all certainty that eels and apricots have never appeared on mine!
