After receiving an e-mail from Mr. Jablome, and exchanging a few more,
he wrote and said that he will be submitting the following article to
The Onion, a newspaper published in Denver, Colorado. I thought you all
might like a preview. (As I told him, I’m not technically a professor,
but he quoted "artistic license", as I was a Visiting Assistant
Professor at ASU from Fall 2000-Spring 2001.)

     — Christopher Heckman

e-mail begins here:
———————————————————————————————-

Prof. Heckman,

Here’s the article I’m sending to the Onion. Thanx for suggesting I
look
up A.P. on Wikipedia.

     – H.wood.

————————————————–

"Apples Now Comparable to Oranges"
Internet "Crank" Responsible

by Heywood Jablome

DENVER, CO. Remember the saying "You can’t compare apples with
oranges?" Well,
it’s not true any more, thanks to one "Archimedes Plutonium".

"Archimedes Plutonium" is the pseudonym of Ludwig Poehlmann, born in
1950, in
Germany, and who has moved around the world and lived in Australia,
Colorado,
and South Dakota. Mr. Plutonium, as he prefers to be called,
accomplished this
by his submission to Wikipedia which re-defined an apple as a
"spherical fruit
which is usually the color of orange."

"I never liked that old saying about apples and oranges," Mr. Plutonium

explained in his submission. "But then I realized that ancient grocers
had
simply defined an apple the wrong way. Once I found the right
definition, well,
everything came together.

"I will be the most famous person in Grocery Theory, a hundred years
from
now," he added. (Mr. Plutonium is evidently unfamiliar with the term
‘biology’.) "Horace Banana will be one of a thousand people who you
will never
hear of again."

"Grocery theory" is only one subject that Mr. Plutonium will leave his
mark
on. He has new theories for physics, mathematics, and chemistry, which
he has
also submitted to Wikipedia.

One submission refered to a ‘quake’ [sic] by the name of Chris Heckman.
This
reporter decided to track down this ‘quake’, who turned out to be
Professor
Christopher Heckman, teaching at Arizona State University. I asked the
good
professor  about his opinion of Mr. Plutonium. He replied, via e-mail,
"Perhaps
you should check Wikipedia for yourself."

It was a good thing I did, because this is the source of information
available
with the fewest mistakes per article, even beating out the Encyclopedia

Britannica. Any source which was less credible would have raised doubts
in my
mind as to the facts it contained.

Mr. Plutonium claims to have obtained a mathematics degree at the
University
of Cincinnati in th elate 1960s and done graduate work at a university
in Utah.
He then moved inexplicably to Australia, where he became a professional
tutor,
joined the Navy (and was discharged with a Section 8, for mental
unfitness),
and moved back to the United States, when he inexplicably made money
off the
stock market. The past twenty years he has posted to the Internet under
the
names of "Ludwig Plutonium" and "Archimedes Plutonium". His current
whereabouts
could not be determined, as he refused to respond to this reporter’s
e-mails.

– H.J.