Pluto the planet, 76, died Thursday in Prague, Czech Republic, when it was killed by the International Astronomical Union -- separated from the eight "classical planets" and lumped in with two similarly sized "dwarf planets."
In 1930, a private astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, discovered the frozen mass and designated it Planet X. It soon orbited into the stratosphere's most exclusive club as the ninth planet. An English schoolgirl, Venetia Burney, 11, named the newest planet Pluto after the mythological lord of the underworld.
(Well, in the Roman pantheon, anyway- they were just ripping off the Greeks anyway...)
Then Disney names his lamest character after Pluto. Starring in such gay-porn sounding cartoon classics as Bone Trouble, T-Bone for Two, Squatter's Rights, Bone Bandit and In Dutch (I'm not making these titles up, people!), Pluto is the stupid dog of Disney's pantheon of retarded animals. That's right, the smart one is Goofy... Goofy. Go figure.
So now all of the pointy-headed geeks have decided to revoke Pluto's full-planet status. We are now to refer to it as a "dwarf planet," which incidently seems quite crass and politcally incorrect. Haven't we hurt Pluto enough already? Do we have to relegate the poor rock to the back of the bus?
So who makes out on this change in status? The International Astronomical Union gets 5 minutes of fame for voting Pluto off of the solar system. Text book publishers will make a few greenbacks selling updated school books. Evangelistic bible-beaters will use this news as proof that scientists don't know what they hell they're talking about. Pastafarians will yammer about Pluto being "touched by His noodly appendage". Otherwise, at the end of the day it just doesn't make a bit of difference, does it?
Now I guess we stop calling Austrailia a continent...
No offense to Oz, but using the IAU's oh-so-logical arguments, it's just a frigging island after all.
Amazing, Out-
No comments:
Post a Comment