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But have you checked out our new Esoteric Book Club? First pick is Robert Anton Wilson's Quantum Psychology. Participate here!

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Readers, you may recall June’s announcement that Pluto had been reclassified from a “dwarf-planet” to a…”plutoid”, a status it shares with Eris, which gave rise to all this confusion in the first place.  (Really.)

A third…non-planet (?) has been granted this dubious honour, and with it, receives a new name: Continue reading »

Kids, when I was your age, Pluto was a planet, but in 2006 the International Astronomical Union unfairly stripped Pluto of its planetary dignity and reclassified it as “dwarf planet”. Following that, the American Dialect Society voted “Plutoed” as the word of the year. (Ha, ha.)

In 2007 Pluto was further demoted when it was discovered that fellow “dwarf planet” Eris outranks it in mass, effectively confirming that Pluto was not even the biggest little planet.

Today’s news reveals that Pluto’s “non-planet status” (!) has prompted the creation of a new word: plutoid.

The cheeky BBC writes: Continue reading »

This weekend vote for your top two favourite Erisian Haiku poets on Plutonica.net.

The entries received are below, and the voting buttons are on the right side bar. Vote for your favourite poet by name by whatever criteria strikes your fancy (Eris is a goddess of chaos after all).

Voting will continue all weekend, with the winner to be announced on Monday morning.

Below are the entries, alphabetical by first name: Continue reading »

Last year for Agnostica Plutonica.net ran a contest where subscribers could win an Agnostica box. This time we’re running an Erisian Haiku Contest for Eris Day and the prize is Kaostar!, a written by Francis Breakspear.

Eris Day

Eris is the Greek goddess of chaos and discord. Today, she’s mostly remembered as the goddess who tossed the golden apple into a party she was not invited to which ultimately instigated the Trojan War. Discordians, by and large, take a decidedly lighter view of her than the ancient Greeks, and revel in her mischief. The Principia Discordia is her primary text.

Eris Day was declared to be May 23rd by Discordians as Continue reading »

I was putting together a timeline for another essay when something occurred to me. Various religions that started as fringe have grown and expanded over the years, many becoming legitimate in the eyes of the mainstream (or at least, approaching legitimacy), but somewhere along the line we seem to have run out of steam. Continue reading »