Comments on: Percy, Percy, me

By: Phillip Helbig

Phillip Helbig — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:15:14 +0000

@24: Somewhere on the blogosphere, I ran into a YouTube clip of Hitchcock on Cavett. Don’t remember why. Hilarious. Maybe the same interview, I don’t know.

By: icemith

icemith — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:10:06 +0000

Well then, what about Dork Vader? (But don’t let him hear you refer to him as that!!!)

Ivan.

By: Nyetwerke

Nyetwerke — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 02:42:06 +0000

Flaming saganaki? Whooopah!

By: MadSciKat =^..^=

MadSciKat =^..^= — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:05:45 +0000

I Lowell’d.

@QuietDesperation: Alfred Hitchcock to Dick Cavett in a TV interview: “Puns are the highest form of literature.”

By: katwagner

katwagner — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:56:19 +0000

Dorks will save the world. And the universe, prolly.

Pun ishment is fun, by the way.

By: Mark Derail

Mark Derail — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:49:57 +0000

Saw it yesterday, didn’t get it, moved on within a minute.
Saw it again today, got it right away – by sounding it out – within a minute.

24 hours !?! Or just 2 minutes, one per day?

Came looking for an update on that “slow comet” story I read on BoingBoing and Gizmodo…

By: QuietDesperation

QuietDesperation — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:56:38 +0000

“Puns are the highest form of humor.”—attributed to various people.

Yeah, various dorks.

Ha!

By: QuietDesperation

QuietDesperation — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 14:56:15 +0000

@4 As little as I like geek and nerd, I can ignore them as an unfortunate aspect of our culture, but dork is not good, dude. Dork in general use implies stupidity and is similar to twit.

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 13:35:16 +0000

@5. Digital Atheist : LOL. (I like puns too, they’re punny.)

@3. Chris L. Says:

He also had some silly ideas (not as silly as Hoagland’s) about Mars as I recall. As Sagan put it “all in all, he believed too much.”

Not so silly in the context of the time given the technology and ideas of the time, methinks. No spaceprobes had yet ventured that far and strained eyes at their limits were easy prey to imagination and an optical illusion of “channels” mistranslated and shifting markings they thought might be vegetation rather than shifting russet sands.

Plus Lowell’s imaginative – if plausible for the time – ideas helped inspire H.G. Well’s original 898 War of the Worlds novel founding a genre of Science Fiction.

Plus Lowell led the search for Pluto and helped give it its name and symbol.

Click on my name for Lowell’s wiki-link.

*****

“No one would have dreamed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
- Opening sentence of HG. Wells ‘War of the Worlds’, 1898.
(Yes, sentence – & some folks think I write too long sentences with repetition and excessive adverbs! )

“Nor was it generally understood that since Mars is older than our Earth, … it necessarily follows that it is not only more distant from life’s beginning but nearer its end. [Actually, Mars & Earth are the same age we know today - Well's was using an old idea of Kant's Nebular hypotheis for explaining our solar systems evolution -Ed.]
- Page 4, ‘The War of the World’s’, H.G. Wells, 1898, Aerie books 1987 for my edition.

“The chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one he
said!”
- Line from Jeff Wayne’s Musical version of ‘War of the Worlds’,
performed 1978.

[Actually, we now know the odds against are many orders of magnitude
higher - try a couple of billion trillion more like! Unless, that is those Martians are derived from us in the distant future when that planet has been terraformed and colonised.. - MTU.]

By: Joel

Joel — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:13:11 +0000

@15. JB: Personally, this was always one of my favourites: http://tcritic.com/archives/new-from-tdigger-chairman-meaow/

By: JB of Brisbane

JB of Brisbane — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:41:33 +0000

I prefer the T-shirt I saw advertised somewhere that had an artwork of Mao Tse Tung (or is it Mao Zedong?) captioned underneath, “LMAO”.
(No copyright infringement intended).

By: Georg

Georg — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:31:23 +0000

Ell was the son of the martian astronaut All, stranded on earth.
He lived in Friedenau Germany as a private Astronomer and
later (after martian invasion) became Governor over German
States in Europe, until he resigned to protest against the colonial
attitude of martian politics with respect to earthlings.
His fate was documented by Kurd Lasswitz in “Auf zwei Planeten”,
(Kurd Lasswitz, Two Planets, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets )

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:07:01 +0000

Hmm, I typically just lurk but I had to comment. I must be a bit geeky, I got it in a couple seconds. *blink*

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:33:09 +0000

@Ken
Nice one!

By: VinceRN

VinceRN — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 03:39:16 +0000

Facepalm. Add me to the “it took me 10 minutes” club. Embarrassing as it’s so obvious once you get there.

By: John Sandlin

John Sandlin — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 02:06:45 +0000

So how many Billions is a Saganaki?

jbs

By: Autumn

Autumn — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 01:06:24 +0000

I thought that saganaki was fried cheese served flambe.
Still appropriate.

By: BJN

BJN — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:33:59 +0000

How is LOL “Hellenic”? Perhaps if Percy discovered Plato…

By: Digital Atheist

Digital Atheist — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:49:31 +0000

Yes… just a case misspelling. I was too busy nottrying to shoot my ownself for typing it, or in this case typoing it.

By: Ken

Ken — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:46:11 +0000

Wikipedia says a “saganaki” is a “little frying pan”. So they were actually serving spicy fried astrophysicist!

@Digital Atheist: I can only find a biochemist named Eisenberg. Perhaps you meant Heisenberg; I’m uncertain.

By: Larian LeQuella

Larian LeQuella — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:35:40 +0000

If you guys are dorks, that makes me one too. I think I will count you as good company.

By: Daffy

Daffy — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:28:11 +0000

“Puns are the highest form of humor.”—attributed to various people.

By: Digital Atheist

Digital Atheist — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:59:35 +0000

Now that was a Lowell blow Phil. After a dose of humor like that I can say that my Plait is Phil’d. I hope you are not having your sense of humor Savaged by that Adam Mythbuster.

Yes, I know… bad puns… the lowest form of life… err… humor to be found, and I realize that it is probably a Ceres mistake for a blog like this, but I hope you’ll forgive me the Eros of my ways.

Now, I think I will flee before Europa me and toss me out the door.

Oh, and don’t strand me in the middle of the ocean on an Eisenberg, if you please.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:00:26 +0000

Dork Matter – Substance that causes geeks to gather in clumps at parties.

Dork Energy – Strange force that causes normal people to be repelled from geeks at parties.

By: Chris L.

Chris L. — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:30:07 +0000

He also had some silly ideas (not as silly as Hoagland’s) about Mars as I recall. As Sagan put it “all in all, he believed too much.”