Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Pluto we hardly knew ya

Okay, what else are they going to change their minds about? It appears the International Astronomical Union (I bet the hotel doesn’t have to hire extra security when this convention comes to town) has decided to strip Pluto of its status as a planet. I wouldn’t worry about the little fella getting his feelings hurt. It is 2.66 billion miles from the Earth to Pluto. The scientists aren’t willing to pay the extra postage for next day delivery, so by the time he finds out we will all have been reincarnated so many times it won’t matter.
It seems this group of telescope nerds has decided Pluto does not fit into the new definition of what a planet is. The definition, as quoted by CNN on their website, goes like this: “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." This can either be a planet or that overweight bully you had to contend with in sixth grade.
I bet these scientists had no idea how far reaching the ramifications of this decision would be. First of all people of all ages will have to expunge from their minds that handy little mnemonic device: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizza pies. This taught us the order of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto). Now all of us who learned this so many years ago will be left hanging. My very educated mother just served us nine…nine…nine what?!? The sentence doesn’t end! My wife suggested a new sentence: My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles. I guess this will work. It puts the planets in the right order and it is also much easier to fit into the household budget. Nine pizzas would cost around fifty dollars, even with a coupon. But you can feed the entire population of Roswell, New Mexico (little green men included) Ramen noodles for about six dollars and fifty-seven cents.
Someone else who will have extra work is the highway department of Kansas. There are signs placed outside Burdett touting itself as the boyhood home of Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the planet Pluto. The state is now going to have to remove those signs. They could update them but having a sign which says “Burdett, Kansas – The boyhood home of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of a great big rock which used to be called a planet but isn’t any more” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Plus it would cost too much to make a sign big enough to say all that. The conspiracy theorists in Kansas will probably say if the guy who discovered the planet came from California or New York they would have left it a planet. But, since it was puny Kansas they just don’t care. I guess we don’t have a strong enough Famous Kansan Lobby in the ol’ International Astronomical Union.
Come to think it of these space guys keep changing their minds on things. A few years back we had to change how we pronounced the names of things. Halley’s Comet went from a “long a” sound to “short a” sound. The seventh planet from the Sun was pronounced “your anus” and now we are supposed to say “urine us.” Both pronunciations invoke large amounts of tittering in fifth grade classrooms, but then again so does the word “tittering.”
I’m not sure this is a precedent we should be happy about. The names of the planets were things we learned early in our educational lives. There was even a “School House Rock” song. Kids will now question so many other things. Maybe conjunctions don’t function to link words and phrases. Maybe laws are not made from cute little scrolls of paper laboriously climbing the steps of Congress.
What we all need to learn from Pluto’s demotion is nothing is beyond question. Will the medical profession figure out sitting in a tiny room for an hour wearing only a paper robe is not a good idea? Will politicians realize they are in office to make life better for others, not just themselves? Will the people of France finally realize Jerry Lewis isn’t funny? I don’t think we will suddenly find out the world is flat or Pamela Anderson is a better novelist than William Faulkner (it would be more of a shock to find out Pamela Anderson is flat), but we may be surprised one day to learn when a tree falls in the woods and there is no one around to listen it makes the sound of one hand clapping.

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