I Invented a Cosmology and All I Got for It Was This Lousy Public Execution

Friday is the 408th anniversary of a very bad day for Giordano Bruno. After all, few of us have had a day that means nine days later you're dragged into the town square, naked, your tongue in a gag, only to be burned at the stake. (The church likes its heretics well-done, it turns out.) It was embarrassing enough to be naked in the town square with a gag in my mouth, but that was in my impetuous youth and I simply trusted the wrong people (they said they were a frat but turned out to be gypsies). Poor Bruno, instead, messed with the Roman Catholic church (much scarier than Ryan Church, as the Mets will learn), and to top it off, denied the virginity of Mary. You call the church's mom a whore, you're just asking for it. He didn't even wait for the seventeenth century to do that and in the sweet sixteenth century, the Church was all about the Inquisition. Hold an erroneous opinion about Christ--perhaps suggest the Canaan wedding wine he created from water was plonk--and there'd be hell to pay. In a heavenly, Catholic, painful way, of course.