Episode Twenty-One

http://www.ndbag.com/story/comic/21.html

So Ndbag is telling us to beware of goblins bearing gifts. On the face of it, this is surprising; can he really be objecting to Pluto's relegation? It seems unlikely, but the very fact that he brings up the subject forces us to consider the proposition in an objective manner.

And as we do so, we realise his point. Despite its diminutive size, Pluto has long had a special place in the hearts of those who prided themselves on being able to remember the order of the planets. The reduction of the planetary family to eight members caused much trauma amongst those who suddenly found that the longest list they ever memorised has been reduced by 11%, a single element more than the colours of the rainbow. Mnemonics suddenly contained a redundant final word, resulting in the commitment to memory of a useless datum that is in the brain forever, thus reducing by one the number of digits of pi one can easily memorise.

But we must be objective. And with dispassionate consideration, we come to the ineluctable conclusion that Neptune is the outermost planet. A wonky orbit and relatively huge moon may add character, but they do nothing to confer any degree of planetness on what is, after all, one Kuiper belt object among millions.

Of course, thousands of years of recorded history have shown us that humanity is remarkably immune to logic when it puts its collective mind to it. However valid the arguments of the IAU, there are those who will go to their graves adamant that Pluto is a planet. This perceived duality is brought home to us in several ways over the course of today's episode.

First of all, of course, there's the nature of ZK himself. Is he a goblin? Is he a 'he'? Initially, we think that he is both. But consider this: does he not possess many of the qualities of Eris, the goddess of strife? Obviously I'm not suggesting that ZK is really a female deity, but the parallels are too obvious to ignore. And once we bear those parallels in mind, we recall that it was Eris who was indirectly responsible for the Trojan war. This give us another duality; ZK is both the instigator of the war, and the party that ends it. Eris started the events that led to the war by throwing an apple, and Odysseus ended it by rolling a horse. The thing that connects the two? Paris (or, in this case, Ndbag).

At this point, gentle reader, the more sensitive of you will be trembling in fear, lest the hamper of Troy be burnt to the ground. Let me assure you that our boogeyman is not suggesting that this will happen. There'll be no lunatic German 'archaeologist' dynamiting the hamper's walls and pretending to find the jewels of Mylene in the wreckage. No, friends, that would be stretching the parallels so far they'd enter hyperbolic space. And none of us wants that.

Besides, we have parallels aplenty to be going on with without worrying about the structural integrity of the hamper.

So we have ZK, both goblin and goddess. And in Eris, we have both goddess and recently-discovered dwarf planet. Which, I suppose, makes ZK both a goblin and a dwarf, a horrific hybrid if ever there was one. One must also remember that the reason that Eris was so disgruntled that she chucking golden apples in the first place was that she wasn't invited to a wedding, a fact that's strongly reminiscent of the tale of Sleeping Beauty, a fairy tale that was made into a film by Disney. Can it be coincidence that Disney also had a dog called Pluto? I think not. We have come full circle.