So, it’s been a busy month, and I haven’t really been around ye olde blog much lately.  For which, I’m terribly sorry, and can say only in my defense that lately my life has been a parade of angst worthy of Spiderman, and that I have recently been caught up full-time in the struggle to save Pluto, a battle which, alas, has now been downgraded from planet to “Trans-Neptunian Object” which is, in my professional opinion as a guy who once spent a week as a physics major, unremittingly lame.  So yes, according to science, Pluto is in fact not a planet, but rather a cartoon dog who hangs around with Mickey Mouse.

            And what about that song we all learned in grade school about the nine planets?  This is as bad as the time the Soviet Union fell apart the week after I learned the “All the Countries in Eurasia” Song.  You can’t just take the ending off and think it’s still going to work.  No, we’re going to have to write an entirely new song about our celestial hood.  I would recommend putting it to the tune of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” or possibly that song by that guy who’s way too hung up on the idea of having a nameless horse.

            Really, I think I feel for a lot of people here when I say that I feel like Captain Picard did in that episode where the Cardassian asked him how many lights there were.  Because, you know, if they really wanted to get rid of Pluto, they’d just build a Death Star and blow it up like civilized people, but instead, they’re taking the sissy way out and calling in the lawyers.

            The thing that really makes me so angry about the whole “demoting Pluto” thing is how many people seem to be taking it as a major success against the forces of evil.  “Finally,” they say in the papers, “Pluto never deserved to be a planet in the first place!”  Like they used to lie awake at night fretting about it, “Noooo, Pluto, you’re not a planet, damn you!”  before going out beneath the cold and terrible night sky to shake their myriad astronomer fists and gnash their many pointed teeth at the erstwhile planet.  I know, what with its eccentric orbit and binary moon of death, Pluto is kind of the black sheep of the solar system, but hey, who among us isn’t a little bit eccentric themselves, venturing now and then from the plane of the solar elliptic which so many others rigidly adhere to?

            The other possible option going into all this, of course, was to promote the other three things larger than Pluto to full planet status.  Though astronomers want us to believe that this was shot down because it would have resulted in a total of twelve planets (Oh Noes!) the truth is that they couldn’t live with the fact that one of them was already named Xena, and if there’s one thing your scientifical types can’t stand, its planets named after warrior princesses (this is, incidentally, why Planet She-Ra and Planet Wonder Woman never really made the cut either).

            I guess the thing that makes me mad about the whole tawdry affair is that Pluto is simply so totally freakin’ sweet.  I mean, I could understand wanting to demote it if its name was Planet Goofy, but Pluto?  Dude, he was the god of the underworld, and the last thing you want to do is incur his wrath.  In other languages, it gets even better; in Japan, Pluto is called “The Star King of the Dead” while in Vietnam, it is known as “The Guardian of Hell” which is totally sweet.

            Personally, I think that if we were going to get rid of a planet, we ought to have gone with Uranus, because for one thing, I always got in trouble in science class for laughing about it when we studied the solar system, and also because really, do we need to have an entire world named after the Roman god of the butt anyway?  What about in like, 500 years when people live on planets?  Telling people you live on Pluto would be totally sweet, telling people you’re from Uranus would just be embarrassing.

            Also, if it is indeed true as many scientists believe, that Pluto is home to a race of funguous crustacean interdimensional death beasts, and they get word of what we’ve done to their world, I for one am not going to be the one to call them on it when they come to Earth looking for answers.