KellanStec

In what year was Jesus born? Many would say somewhere around the year 0. It’s way more confusing than most people realize.

Well, there was no year 0, but the historical equivalent is AD 1. AD 1 immediately precedes 1 BC on the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Got it? Okay.

Now, once Jesus was born, the world did not begin using the AD years. The year was not calculated until AD 525, and was not widely adopted until the 8th century. Confused yet? Me too.

Okay, in the year 525, Dionysius Exiguus did come calculations to determine the number of years that had passed since the birth of Christ. I’m not sure how he got that number, and I don’t think anyone else is either. That’s not what I’m concerned with anyway.

We’re using the same system that Dionysius devised, so it’s safe to assume that Jesus was born somewhere around AD 1, right?

Let’s check the Bible.

We’ll look at the first Gospel, Matthew. In chapter 2, Matthew talks about the flight to Egypt to avoid Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

Then they [the Magi] had departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him.” Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night an departed for Egypt. He stayed there until the death of Herod, that what the Lord had said through the prophet [Hosea 11:1] might be fulfilled, “Out of Egypt I called my son.”
Matthew 2:13-15, NAB

The latest this could have taken place was in 4 BC, when Herod died. Dionysius was only four years off. This is, of course, assuming that the slaughter took place in Herod’s very last year. Still, not bad for calculating the date five centuries later.

I wonder what the other gospels say. None of the other gospels mention the slaughter of the innocents. Seems like a significant detail to omit. It doesn’t have any historical standing outside of Matthew either. It also bears a striking resemblance to Moses’ story (Exodus 1:15-16,22). Interesting, but we’ll ignore all that for now. The only other Gospel that says anything about the birth of Jesus is Luke. Chapter 2. We’re talking about the census here.

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that the whole world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria.
Luke 2:1-2, NAB

Okay, so when was Quirinius governor of Syria? It must have been somewhere around 6-4 BC.

Quirinius became governor in the year 6. See? I told you. I knew I–wait a minute. Does that mean AD 6? It does.

After the banishment of Herod Archelaus in 6, Iudaea Province (the conglomeration of Samaria, Judea and Idumea) came under direct Roman administration. One of Quirinius’ first duties was to carry out a census to assess the new province for tax purposes.

But that means…

The Bible is wrong? No, it can’t be! There must be a reason that there is a ten-year discrepancy between the only two existing accounts of Jesus’ birth–both of which seem to be (sort of) intertwined into (unverifiable) historical events.

Oh wait. I got it.

Time travel. It makes perfect sense now.

Who said the Back to the Future series was over? Excuse me while I write a script. Do you think I could get Lloyd?

Chances are good that a modern feminist chosen at random would have you believe that certain words in the English language are a derivation from the male root, and make it seem like women are inferior. Words like female and woman seem to be based off of a male root word, with a prefix to indicate the opposite sex.

In anthropology today, I was surprised to learn that this is not the case. We were discussing language, and my professor made a point to stop at this topic. She said that in “Ye Olde English”, man was simply used to indicate a person, regardless of gender. The word human has the root humus, which means earth. The word human means literally “earth person”. The respective words to indicate gender for male and female were werman and wifman. Man was gender neutral. Eventually, the wer prefix was dropped and man was then indication of masculinity. In case you were wondering, the word “wife” comes from the old word, wifman.

The possible reason for this is because England was a patriarchal, or male dominated society. Just because the meaning of a word was changed at some point in the history of a language, does this someone should be offended by its changed meaning? There are a number of other attributes to our language that are sexist. Example: Mother Nature. Vehicles are commonly referred to as female. They are not meant to be offensive. They aren’t meant to demean anybody. The words human and mankind were not meant to refer only to men. They refer to people. Should we alter major words in our language simply because someone is offended by their imagined meaning?

We have the words fireman, mailman, and milkman are called so because historically these jobs were done only by men. Should the language change because a few women choose an occupation that was largely occupied by men when the occupation was created? Some of these words have been changed to gender-neutral variants, such as firefighter and mail carrier. I’m wondering if anyone is offended by the homophonic word “mail”, and would have it changed to “postage”. There are derogatory terms used for men too, you know. Buddy, buster, stud, etc.

Changing words that are deemed offensive by a few people is absolutely ridiculous and excessive political correctness. If we eliminate every mention of men in our words, our language is left butchered. We get herstory instead of history. Disregard the fact that history has nothing to do with the pronon “his”. Vikings? What about the Viqueens?! Thomas Jefferdaughter!? This is incredibly stupid. It’s just like the people in Texas who wanted their official greeting changed from “hello” to “heaveno”. What on earth are they thinking?! Might as well eliminate the word hell from everything–like seasheavens.

There have also been movements to change feminine words that contain imaginary male roots. Womyn is the proposed new spelling of woman, since woman is sexist. If arbitrarily removing vague masculine references from a language isn’t sexist, I don’t know what is. I thought the goal of feminists was to eliminate sexism? The fact is, women and men are different. You can’t alter a language to change that. Men are, in general, more muscular than women. But, there are some women who are stronger than most men. Women are, in general, better at child rearing than men. However, I know of a few men who are better at caring for their child than their wife. That’s reality; it just has to be dealt with.

Besides, there are more pressing issues in women’s rights. In Muslim countries, women are commonly flogged for showing an inch too much skin. They are not allowed to operate automobiles. There is no reason why a woman in the United States should be complaining about their oppression. Granted, there are cases where this does not apply, but the general rule of thumb* is that a feminist is full of herself.

So let’s laugh about it. Offended by those wicked men? Smile. Remember what Stephen Colbert once said, “If we all stopped talking about racism, wouldn’t racism just go away?” When you get pissy because you think something is racist or sexist, you are labeling what’s racist and sexist. Sometimes someone is purposefully sexist, and if you complain you are giving them instructions on how to offend. It’s not always that big of a deal. I will close with a joke that you’ve probably already heard to lighten your spirits. Don’t lie, you know it’s hilarious.

What do you say to a woman with two black eyes? Nothing, you told the bitch twice already.

* About the rule of thumb: what you’ve heard is false. Its origin never had anything to do with domestic assault, and the first recorded case referencing the phrase to domestic violence was in 1976.

The bulk of yesterday was spent by me hating April Fools ‘ Day. I could hardly read the news on digg without suspecting every story to be a joke. I’m happy to say that I didn’t have any pranks pulled on me, and I didn’t pull any on anyone else. It continued like this until I turned on the television to watch Adult Swim, like I do every Sunday.

A few weeks ago, Adult Swim began running television advertisements for the television premiere of their new movie (!), Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters. Why? “Because we’re fucking crazy,” they say. The internet schedule verified this; a two-hour block was reserved for the premiere.

Well, the date was April 1st. I knew this had to be a prank. But, they did it. I turned on the TV and there it was: the entire movie was playing. It was in the bottom left corner of the screen and the size of a postage stamp. It has no sound over the normal programming.

I start giggling. Then an enormous advertisement slides in to inform me that I am watching the new movie. It covers nearly half the screen. By this point I’ve lost it. Adult Swim made April Fools ‘ Day worth it.

Last year, Adult Swim aired anime with engrish subtitles and inserted fart noises randomly. But nothing tops this prank. They advertised for it, and they actually did it. It’s way too damn small to see, but they really did air the movie. Absolutely hilarious.

After they did that, I was hoping the awful Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job episode that aired on the Fix last Friday was a prank. It wasn’t. That was the worst episode ever. Maybe that was the joke.

Since when was it the government’s responsibility to legislate astronomy? Yesterday, Wired posted an article about a Republican representative form New Mexico named Joni Marie Gutierrez who proposed a bill to make Pluto a planet “as [it] passes overhead through New Mexico’s excellent night skies”. The absurd notion that New Mexico has its own sky through which an object 3.5 billion miles can pass coupled with the fact that it can’t be seen by 99% of the New Mexico population makes Gutierrez look all the more ridiculous until you consider that she is passing this bill through legislation. The bill also declares March 13 to be “Pluto Planet Day”.

She appeals to emotion, saying that “We always took a lot of pride in the fact that [Clyde Tombaugh, a New Mexico native] discovered Pluto…When they declared it a dwarf planet, we took it as a personal affront.” Well, aside from the fact that passing a bill solely to make people feel proud is never a good idea, it is not the government’s job to decide what a planet is and what is not. Leave astronomy to the astronomers. I didn’t really know how to respond to this, so I am going to give seven reasons why Pluto should not be considered a planet.

1. Pluto does not have a central nervous system. It is a ball of frozen water and methane billions of miles away. It cannot feel pain, love, or any emotion whatsoever. Its feelings will not be hurt if we make it a dwarf planet. This sounds silly, but it seems to me that all the groups created on Facebook somehow think that removing planetary status deals a devastating blow to Pluto’s self-esteem. Emotional appeal is never a good reason to make something a scientific truth.
2. Pluto does not orbit in the ecliptic plane. Every other planet orbits in this plane. Pluto is inclined by as much as 17°. This means at perihelion, Pluto is about 8 Astronomical Units above the plane. This is absurdly divergent from the other planets.
3. Pluto has a highly elliptical orbit. Well, all planets have an elliptical orbit, but Pluto’s is abnormally high. This puts Pluto closer to the sun than Neptune for part of its year. 8th or 9th planet? Make up your mind, Pluto!
4. Pluto is tiny. At 2/3 the size of the moon, why should we even consider this a planet? There are numerous other Jovian moons that are quite a bit larger than Pluto as well.
5. Incretio ad absurdum. This is a Latin derivation that I made up, which means increasing to absurdity. The definition of planet that allowed Pluto to become a planet in the first place could potentially be applied to dozens of bodies in the solar system not currently considered planets. In fact, we already have discovered a few, and one of them is larger than Pluto–Eris.
6. Why aren’t Ceres and Eris planets? I think if this question is asked in an astronomy class, there should be a better answer than “The public is afraid of change.”
7. It’s a ball of ice. Pluto would be the first planet to melt into liquid if it were brought closer to the sun. If it were orbiting closer to the sun, we would probably call it a comet. It would have a tail just like all other comets.

Pluto’s planetary status has been questioned by science for years, so this is nothing new. Finally, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to include the three following criteria in a formal definition of a planet:

• The body must orbit the sun and have a diameter of 2000 km.
• The body must keep its shape stable due to its own gravity.
• The body must be dominant in its immediate neighborhood.

These make sense to me. Of course, there were other things defined, such as what exactly constitutes “dominance”, but that’s not the point. These guidelines were designed to create more order in the naming of solar system objects. It’s great that the Pluto debate is sparking an interest in the public for science, but nostalgia does not make a science. If we start identifying remote snowballs smaller than our Moon with unconventional orbits as planets, then before you know it, lozenge-shaped lumps of iron will want to be planets, too. What’s next? A Voyager heat shield? Wow, that reductio ad absurdum is actually pretty funny.

If people want to form a close emotional relationship to a ball of ice billions of miles away, that’s fine with me. But some people expect the scientific community to gratify their fixation by distorting the definition of a planet into something that includes Pluto, purely for emotional and nostalgic reasons. Sorry, it does not work that way.

Yes, I know it’s Monday. Yesterday was the debut of a Dutch gym’s invitation to exercise in the nude. About a dozen middle-aged to elderly men showed up for the event of the hundred who signed up. The Netherlands are known for their comfortable standards on nether regions (get it?), but this may be a bit too much. I really hope they have rules about cleaning the exercise equipment that contact the more sickening body parts, such as exercise bikes.

Nude exercisers were required to put towels down on weight machines, use disposable seat covers while riding bikes and disinfect the equipment.

Thank FSM. I am glad to see a towel underneath the biker on the right.

Aside from the palpable hygiene concerns, we can see how hilarious this truly is. All we have to do is read a few of the nudist’s quotes, and ensue in laughter. “There are things that you like to do, and for a nudist, it just feels better to do them with your clothes off,” said Ron, who drove for more than an hour to bike naked. “You feel more free.” I wonder if he drove to the gym while naked.

While we are talking about naked people–or at least people exposing parts of their body which society deems indecent–I should mention the mother and daughter who were apparently* banned from Disneyland for life. You might not want to click if your boss/souse/parent doesn’t like you looking at bare breasts, less the nipple of course. Yes, I know I posted a picture of two naked men above, but you took that risk visiting my site. I’m unpredictable. Anyway, what they did was have a shirt with holes from which their breasts “peek”. Then they used the exposed breast as the flesh part of Mickey and Minnie’s face, adding eyes, nose, and mouth.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think using a pair of human breasts to create the likeness of Mickey and Minnie mouse is creative. And also pretty damn sexy. But much too sexy for the fragile little minds that wander Disneyland! These kids are walking around all day looking for a Disney character to grab or get their picture taken with. And these women are trying to scar them for life. If the shitty music being played all day doesn’t give the kid brain damage, a partial human breast surely will. I wonder how many kids actually realized that these weren’t mice, but actual breasts. My guess is not too many, but I guess it’s just another example of adults reading too much into what children are thinking.

*As I was doing some browsing for more information, I noticed a larger image. That isn’t Disneyland, that’s Bourbon Street–Mardi Gras. Well, that takes out all the fun. Don’t read the last three sentences if you’d like to still think the picture was taken at Disneyland.