Don't Let Your Sun Go Round on Me

Friday would be the 537th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus if he wasn't dead and rotting in hell as he had the nerve to prove you can't take the Bible literally. (Fortunately no one takes the Bible literally today--after all, Catholics formally apologized for the trial of Galileo in 2000, although many think that was just a Y2K glitch on John Paul II's part.) And no, the church didn't hate him because he was a quadrilingual polyglot (after all that would just be a lucky priest's good afternoon with three altar boys). They hated him for saying the earth wasn't the center of the universe, sure (take that 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5, and Ecclesiastes 1:5), but he also had the nerve to suggest there's stuff called evidence and it can be used to prove things. Luckily no one is like that anymore--I mean it's not like only 39% of Americans believe in the theory of evolution or anything. Of course, making Copernicus the center of this entry would probably perturb him--even during his lifetime his own public persona kept shifting, as the spelling of his name constantly changed, to the point where if he were a dog he would make the noise "woof woof" in English but "hoang hoang" in Thai, not that he ever went there for Thai stick or that sex tour. When he asked you to check out his telescope, he really meant it.