The dwarf planet formerly known as Xena has been renamed Eris, and it’s companion has been named Dysnomia, and Phil finds something funny: a guy who thinks renaming planets after discord and strife is a moonbat plot to mock the Bush administration. Seriously.
He’s nuts. War and chaos don’t come to anyone’s mind when they hear the name GW Bush. We all know the real devious reasons for juggling the names around.
- It’s an anti-feminist plot to deprive that famous female historical figure and butt-kicking lesbian, Xena the Warrior-Princess, of her due honor.
- It’s a feminist plot to punish Xena for making those horribly uncomfortable leather bustiers popular.
- It’s a Discordian conspiracy to destroy Christianity. Hail Eris!
- Look at that name, “Eris”. It makes no sense. But it’s “Sire” spelled backwards…obviously, the British Royal Family is behind it, and we all know that they are up to no good, those shape-shifting reptoid bastards.
- Alternatively, it’s a typo: it’s supposed to be “Bris.” It’s a Jewish feminist conspiracy, and they decided that a butt-kicking lesbian warrior wasn’t aggressive enough, so they went to something more likely to strike fear in men’s hearts.
- It’s a coded message from the Democrats. No more Floridas, no more Ohios—they’re calling in Electoral Reform International Services.
- Aww, heck, forget the secret conspiracy stories. This is an organization under the Bush administration, after all…somebody screwed up and accidentally typed random letters into a form. Has anyone seen Deutsch lately?
- They were going to name the two bodies Eros and Dysmenorrhea, but those two just didn’t get along, so they picked the next best names.
- The REAL answer, the one we should worry about, is that all this shuffling about and renaming and categorizing of planets is an anti-evolutionist conspiracy. We now have dwarf planets; soon they’ll unveil pygmy planets, and then we’ll have the cosmic version of an irrefutable creationist argument, and we’ll be doomed.
Confirming the last possibility, we have the fact that this goon is so stupid, he thinks Kent Hovind makes a good scientific argument.
Gah, my reflexes are good. I put the beverage away before reading, therefore sparing my keyboard.
Love to see conspiricies’r’us
Don’t forget, I’m a shapeshifting reptoid bastard, too.
When I read what the new name was I burst into a guffaw. All Hail Discordia!
Jokes aside, that man isn’t just a moonbat, he’s of “4-day Time-cube” caliber.
I like that Dysnomia (lawlessness) is apparently named to obliquely refer to Xena, who was played by Lucy Lawless.
The POEE genuinely expresses thanks to PZ Myers for the press time and propagandal linkage.
Hail Eris! All hail Discordia, indeed.
Oh… I’m loving this. I really am.
Don’t forget Xenu!
Tom Cruise paid $50,000 for this bit of info. SUCKA!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu
Oh, just forgot. If it appears to be a discordian conspiracy then it most likely is a work of the Illuminati. Why do you think there are so many strange symbols on your dollar bills?
That’s Free Mason imagery. Not Illuminati.
This is fucking awesome. The only problem is, I don’t see any obvious way to tie UB313 to either 5 or 23. Maybe Eris is going to shuffle the planets around a bit for a laugh.
War and chaos don’t come to anyone’s mind when they hear the name GW Bush.
Huh? They sure come to my mind. Let’s see. Let’s try it:
My therapist: “George Bush. First things that come to your mind?”
Me: “War… Chaos… Economic ruin… A spectacularly vapid political environment in which you can claim the Ba’ath party is in bed with the Islamists without being laughed out of the room and/or sent to a mental hospital… $50 to fill a moped…”
My therapist: “Are you done?”
Me: “… Connecticut and Texas, lead levels in the drinking water thereof… The utter collapse of even the remotest chance of the term ‘democracy’ being anything better than a bitter joke anywhere within several thousand kilometers of Baghdad… ”
My therapist: “I think that’s all we have time for today…”
Me: “… Is our children learning? Well? Is they?…”
My therapist: “Nurse, bring the tranks.”
Me: “… More and more of our imports come from overseas…”
Nurse: “Isn’t he allergic?”
Me: “… Pretzels. Pretzels can save us…”
My therapist: “They’re for me.”
…
Oh. Wait. I get it. That was sarcasm, wasn’t it?
Carry on, then.
By the way, UB313 isn’t shaped like an apple by any chance?
“U” is the 21st letter of the alphabet, “B”, the 2nd, and 21 and 2 is…
Now everyone will think I named my cat after a planet. Scheiss…
Eris rolled a golden apple into a wedding. The wedding turned violent.
Clearly, Eris represents the liberal conspiracy to destroy the Sacrement of Marriage. It’s just too simple.
Eris will always be Xena in my heart.
I got to read this late today, but I could not help laughing out loud (to everybody’s consternation at the workplace) when I read PZ’s take on the renaming.
The New York Times reported today that the dwarf planet formerly known as Xena has been re-christened ‘Eris’. Quoting NYT:
Hmmm… I have known about Ares, the God of War (Come on, I used to love ‘Xena, the Warrior Princess’!), but I don’t recall hearing about Eris before. It is strange, on reflexion, how Eris, associated with strife, is closely homophonic to Eros, the God of Love! Those Greek mythologists had a sense of humor!
By the way, did anyone notice that Dr. Brown’s description above about Eris – causes strife by causing arguments among men, by making them think their opinions are right and everyone else’s is wrong – fits ever so nicely to Organized Religion?
Ah, but Eris’s actions also led to an unnecessary military adventure which lasted far longer than expected at great loss of life on both sides and economic disaster for the invaders. Clearly Eris represents the Bush administration’s foreign policy.
Plainly, the queen of the dwarf planets has been named for everybody’s favorite heiress, Paris.
Oh wow, this guy is nuts.
I’d post something on his site, but realized that it would be like shouting at a brick wall. A wall with bricks made of stupid held together with mortar made of crazy.
Another planet named after a cartoon character, Eris throws her apple on The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy…
Being very familiar w/Greek mythos, I’d not heard the name Dysnomia before. So I looked it up. To much hilarity, I might add:
“Dysnomia is a marked difficulty in remembering names or recalling words needed for oral or written language. Memory Disabilities People with memory disabilities may have difficulty with short-term memory. They have trouble remembering names, numbers, facts and even what they did a few minutes ago. These memory difficulties present significant problems in academic study. Such a person might study hard for a test or exam and think they know the material extremely well, but could wake on the morning of the test to realise it is all forgotten.”
I found this incredibly amusing, but maybe that’s just me.
“Dysnomia”? They really could have come up with something snappier – it sounds exactly like a disability. “Poena”, perhaps, or “Libitina”. Why, for that matter, the switch from Roman names to Greek?
The Pluto Formerly Known as Planet [now, #134340]: ‘I am not a number — I am a free planette!’
I’m just surprised the fundies haven’t weighed in to decry the naming of planets after pagan gods.
Death to the evil idolatrous astronomers! Onward to Planet Jesus!
Didn’t you know? You’re living on Planet Jesus, you fool!
All your planets are belong to us!
This guy really takes the cake, literally a rabid id creationist of the most dishonest and reprehensible sort. He recently blogged a feeble attempt to discredit “evolution.” The crux of the matter revolves around the recent discovery and description of an early lobe-finned fish. Janitch makes reference to a news item that reports on an article in Biology Letters entitled “Oldest coelacanth, from the Early Devonian of Australia” by Johanson, et al. In order to make clear the implications of this important fossil find the article’s abstract is presented in full below:
Now, understanding what’s said here does not take much in the way of gray matter. The fossil record is inherently spotty and incomplete. Hey, we’re constantly discovering new forms of ancient life and it seems at an accelerating pace as our base of knowledge increases and new recovery techniques are employed. There are “gaps in the fossil record,” but these gaps are constantly being filled with new discoveries that are fully in accord with expectations. We also now have powerful genetic databases that allow us to extrapolate when evolutionary divergences took place in the past. What the above abstract clearly states is that until the recent discovery described in the article was made there was a gap between the time when lobe-finned fishes were inferred by genetic evidence to have made there first appearance (~410-415 Myr ago) and when they first appear in the fossil record (~385-390 Myr ago). Well, lo and behold, the new specimen dated between 407-409 Myr ago beautifully fills in that gap and shows how predictive a science paleontology really is! In the real world this study once again gives powerful evidence for the validity of evolution as the motive force in the history of life on earth.
But how does Janitch totally misconstrue and misinterpret all of this? Below is his take on the issue verbatim from his blog
What? What is this nut job talking about? Does anything more have to be done to show how utterly ignorant these idiots are?
Well, at least he got to use a Xena reference in a way (lawlessness, Lucy Lawless…).