Raising consciousness, one colander at a time

Austria has a reasonable requirement that driving license photos show the person's face without cluttering adornment — which seems fair enough, given that it will be used as ID. Unfortunately, they have an exemption for "confessional reasons", whatever that means, which is apparently that having a superstition allows you to wear whatever the heck you want in your ID photo.

So Niko Alm tested that by donning special headgear — a colander — and insisting that it was a symbol of his religion, Pastafarianism. They conceded it, and now he's driving around with a wacky photo on his license.

The only thing that wasn't fairly done here is that the authorities required that he submit to a psychological evaluation to determine if he was sane enough to drive. Do they do that to every person who insists on wearing a yamulke or turban or hijab or pope hat or squid on their head? I think they should.

Well, except for the squid. That's perfectly normal.

More like this

[On Oct 03 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] Glenn Reynolds writes: I agree that Mr. Lambert's "payback for Bellesiles" angle is pretty obvious. Your allegation is false.
The big number theory class has moved on to prime factorizations and the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. As it happens, though, I've already done a post on that subject.
I'm incredibly busy right now adjusting to my new job and my new commute, which is leaving me less time than usual for blogging. So I'm going to raid the archives, and bring back some interesting things that appeared on the old Blogger blog, but were never posted here.
[On Oct 03 2002 I posted this to firearmsregprof.] Norman Heath writes: