SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

That's right -- my friend Chris told me about it. I must confess I wouldn't know a Millie Jackson song if I heard it.

madartista said:

I'm practically masterbating over here

You gotta love a woman who's brave enough to use this as her album cover:

WTF?

Holy shit! This news changes absolutely nothing in my life!

2the9s said:

Death Threats from Beyond the MOOOOONNNNN

SlamGlam said:

Oh man... don't tell me we have to start bombing pluto also.

News > health & science
Pluto responds: 'Planets have feelings, too'
By Pluto
Originally published August 24, 2006, 5:34 PM EDT
OUTER BELT OF SOLAR SYSTEM // What did I do to deserve this?

There I was, minding my own business, orbiting the Sun just like all the others. I got my little bit of atmosphere going, got a lot of ice. I was cool. I stayed out of everybody else's way, sometimes way out.





Then some eggheads on that uppity third rock -- they think they're so hot because they have "life" -- went and decided I'm not a planet anymore. What's up with that? My life is hard enough as it is.

First of all, it takes forever for me to do a lap around the Sun, and it gets really lonely out here. They tell me that part of the reason I'm not a planet anymore is that some of the time I sneak inside my buddy Neptune's orbit. What do they expect? I need somebody to talk to out here sometimes. And don't get me started about that mass of junk they call Charon that is supposedly my partner in non-planethood; Charon is dead to me.

Then there's my name. Let me say I was happy enough without anyone else giving me a name. For millions of years, maybe even billions -- time sort of has no meaning out here -- I liked to think of myself as Lex, except for a very brief period of experimentation and confusion when I thought I was Sophia. But that's a long story, and Uranus promised never to talk about it.

Anyway, Lex was short, snappy and just tough-sounding enough to keep unwanted visitors away. I felt like a growling dog with that name, not that I had any idea what a dog was then. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So then those numbskulls on Earth finally figure out I'm here, and start calling me Pluto. I had mixed feelings; I liked Lex, but I also heard through the microwaves passing by that Pluto was a god of "Death" over there. I barely knew what "life" was, but I knew Death kicked life's butt all year long (and the years are really long here).

But I nearly fell out of my orbit when I found out a pet dog -- not even a real dog but a cartoon dog -- gets to be called Pluto on their planet. Suddenly Pluto was something cute and cuddly and not tough or threatening at all.

It's bad enough when you're the smallest guy on the playground. With the cartoon dog thing, everyone was making fun of me, even Uranus. I was humiliated. Planets have feelings, too, you know.

So you can imagine how I'm taking this planet thing. Neptune, which used to hang out with me to try to look cool by association, won't even talk to me anymore. I can't take it. The Solar System is the only family I've got.

So for all you Earthlings reading this, I, Pluto, am taking a stand. I'm here. I'm a sphere. Get used to it.

--As told to Sun reporter Gady A. Epstein

coolcat said:

i'm sure the guvment will get there before they get to the gulf coast

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

I love that woman!

The anchorman on NBC Nightly News just said Pluto is still a planet--it's just been demoted to dwarf planet status.




(NY Times article explaining the difference between planet & dwarf planet:

http://www.nytimes.com/20...r=homepage )
[Edited 8/24/06 16:20pm]

SupaFunkyOrgangrinderSexy said:

I've heard of her, and probably have heard her, but I wouldn't actually know that's who I'm listening to.

I went home for lunch today and was reading the latest issue of Spin. They had a spread on the 50 worst albums covers of all time -- and guess what made the list! LOL!

SlamGlam said:

LMFAO!!

I have mixed feelings about this. Yes, I recognize that having feelings about this either way qualifies me as a massive geek, but I'm comfortable in that role.

I like the new symmetry of the 8 major planets: 4 rocky inner ones (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) and 4 gas giants outside (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) separated by the Asteroid Belt. I like that the ruling makes planetary status difficult to attain- I guess I'm an astronomical snob that way. Demoting planets isn't unprecedented either: the asteroid Ceres was demoted back in the 1800s before being reconsidered recently for an upgrade back to planetary status. Simply put, Pluto is rather freakish.

On the other hand, I liked Pluto (even though it ranked only 7th on my list of the former 9), and I embraced its freakishness. Sometimes it was the 8th planet from the sun, but usually it was the outermost planet. It also feels like part of my childhood has been stripped away with its demotion. And although I may be an astronomical snob, I was jumping up and down like a kid last week at the prospect of there being 12 planets (even though when I later found out 2 of them were going to be Ceres and Charon, I thought it was kind of whack).

And oh yeah, here's a thread I started last month related to the subject: http://www.prince.org/msg/100/196432

Moonbeam said:

But what about the Queeper Belt?

Bye bye, Pluto.

From yahoo:

Dinky Pluto loses its status as planet

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Pluto, beloved by some as a cosmic underdog but scorned by astronomers who considered it too dinky and distant, was unceremoniously stripped of its status as a planet Thursday.
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The International Astronomical Union, dramatically reversing course just a week after floating the idea of reaffirming Pluto's planethood and adding three new planets to Earth's neighborhood, downgraded the ninth rock from the sun in historic new galactic guidelines.

The shift will have the world's teachers scrambling to alter lesson plans just as schools open for the fall term.

"It will all take some explanation, but it is really just a reclassification and I can't see that it will cause any problems," said Neil Crumpton, who teaches science at a high school north of London. "Science is an evolving subject and always will be."

Powerful new telescopes, experts said, are changing the way they size up the mysteries of the solar system and beyond. But the scientists at the conference showed a soft side, waving plush toys of the Walt Disney character Pluto the dog — and insisting that Pluto's spirit will live on in the exciting discoveries yet to come.

"The word 'planet' and the idea of planets can be emotional because they're something we learn as children," said Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped hammer out the new definition.

"This is really all about science, which is all about getting new facts," he said. "Science has marched on. ... Many more Plutos wait to be discovered."

Pluto, a planet since 1930, got the boot because it didn't meet the new rules, which say a planet not only must orbit the sun and be large enough to assume a nearly round shape, but must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit." That disqualifies Pluto, whose oblong orbit overlaps Neptune's, downsizing the solar system to eight planets from the traditional nine.

Astronomers have labored without a universal definition of a planet since well before the time of Copernicus, who proved that the Earth revolves around the sun, and the experts gathered in Prague burst into applause when the guidelines were passed.

Predictably, Pluto's demotion provoked plenty of wistful nostalgia.

"It's disappointing in a way, and confusing," said Patricia Tombaugh, the 93-year-old widow of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.

"I don't know just how you handle it. It kind of sounds like I just lost my job," she said from Las Cruces, N.M. "But I understand science is not something that just sits there. It goes on. Clyde finally said before he died, 'It's there. Whatever it is. It is there.'"

The decision by the IAU, the official arbiter of heavenly objects, restricts membership in the elite cosmic club to the eight classical planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Pluto and objects like it will be known as "dwarf planets," which raised some thorny questions about semantics: If a raincoat is still a coat, and a cell phone is still a phone, why isn't a dwarf planet still a planet?

NASA said Pluto's downgrade would not affect its $700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.

But mission head Alan Stern said he was "embarrassed" by Pluto's undoing and predicted that Thursday's vote would not end the debate. Although 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations attended the conference, only about 300 showed up to vote.

"It's a sloppy definition. It's bad science," he said. "It ain't over."

Under the new rules, two of the three objects that came tantalizingly close to planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed "Xena." The third object, Pluto's largest moon, Charon, isn't in line for any special designation.

Brown, whose Xena find rekindled calls for Pluto's demise because it showed it isn't nearly as unique as it once seemed, waxed philosophical.

"Eight is enough," he said, jokingly adding: "I may go down in history as the guy who killed Pluto."

Demoting the icy orb named for the Roman god of the underworld isn't personal — it's just business — said Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of the PBS show "Star Gazer."

"It's like an amicable divorce," he said. "The legal status has changed but the person really hasn't. It's just single again."

GangstaFam said:

That separates the planetary regions of the solar system from the Oort cloud.

Moonbeam said:

I was just teasing you about your pronunciation.

GangstaFam said:

It just sounds way cooler that way.

FUCK THAT...IT'S A PLANET.

SlamGlam said:

the gods of the underworld are going to be mad. real mad.

Presidents, astronomy, the alphabet and geography in one article!
[Edited 8/24/06 17:59pm]

Moonbeam said:

It really doesn't.

Here's a cute article.

I Pluto

MY love for our picked-on ninth planet is deeply, perhaps embarrassingly, personal.

I took my first public stand on Pluto’s taxonomical fate when I addressed the Forum on Outer Planetary Exploration in 2001 (don’t ask why a cartoonist was addressing astronomers — it’s a long story).

I informed the assembled scientists that, first of all, no way was I or anyone else about to un-memorize anything we’d already been forced to learn in elementary school. More important, I felt sure that, as former children, we all instinctively respected the principle: no do-overs.

Planets, like Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life, and you can’t blithely oust them no matter how eccentric, skewed or unqualified they may prove to be. If they could kick out Pluto, I warned, they could do it to anything, or anyone.

I admit: it’s a highly emotional issue and maybe I got carried away in the heat of debate.

Even I was a little abashed last week when the International Astronomical Union tried to protect Pluto’s status by proposing an absurdly broad definition of planethood that encompasses moons, asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects — in other words, pretty much any half-formed hunk of frozen crud that can pull itself together into a ball long enough to get photographed by the Hubble.

For longtime Pluto partisans, there was something almost punitive about this proposal: happy now?

I guess I always knew, in my heart, that Pluto didn’t “belong.” Pluto is idiosyncratic — neither a dull, domestic terrestrial planet nor a surly, vainglorious gas giant. It’s mostly ice. It’s smaller than our own Moon, and has an orbit so eccentric that it spends 20 years of its 248-year revolutionary period inside Neptune’s orbit. It’s tilted at a crazy 17-degree angle to the ecliptic, and its satellite, Charon, is so disproportionately large that it’s been called a double planet.

Pluto is what my old astronomy textbook rather judgmentally called a “deviant,” and I’ve always felt a little defensive on its behalf.

I’ve long regarded Saturn’s misty tantalizing moon Titan as the Homecoming Queen of the solar system, courted and fawned over, stringing us along with teasing glimpses under her atmosphere, while Pluto was more like the chubby Goth chick who wrote weird poems about dead birds and never talked to anybody. Still, I just can’t stand by and watch as the solar system’s Fat Girl gets pushed down into ever-more ignominious substrata of social ostracism.

All I really wanted was a little velvet-rope treatment for Pluto. I didn’t expect them to throw open the doors to all this Kuiper Belt riffraff.

It’s like that point when your party’s grown out of control and you look around and ask: Who are these people? Sedna? Xena? Ceres? Ceres is an asteroid, for God’s sake. Why not just make 1997 XF11 or Greenland or Harriet Meiers a planet?

And I am second to no one in my respect for Charon, but come on: it’s obviously Pluto’s moon.

Now they’re proposing to designate it a “large companion,” which sounds like the sort of euphemistic legal status the court might grant to Oliver Hardy and can’t be doing Charon’s self-esteem one bit of good. “Longtime companion” would have been more dignified and validating.

The solar system is a mess.

The situation this seems most similar to is the inextricably tangled social nightmare that is inviting people to your wedding. You truly want to invite your distant and eccentric but dear old friend Pluto, but this necessarily means inviting his horrible girlfriend, too, plus then maybe you’re obliged to invite all the other people you were both friends with in college, friends he’s still in contact with who will be offended if he’s invited and they’re not but who, frankly, are now boring people with whom you no longer have anything in common.

Some would suggest we just have to be harsh about this and not invite any of them, Pluto included. But these people are forgetting that we already sent Pluto an invitation, 76 years ago. Pluto has rented a tuxedo.

The astronomical union is to vote on Pluto tomorrow. But even as astronomers squabble, I remain confident that this whole wonky state of affairs will not be permanent. Eventually we’ll get it all sorted out.

For the record, I would accept a separate (but equal!) class of dwarves or planetoids, including Sedna and Xena. After all, the childhood mnemonic is easily amended: My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, Sans Xenophobia.

But what I really wish is that we’d just grandfather Pluto in and then close all the loopholes. Let’s do it, not for scientific reasons, but for sentimental ones.

As a friend of mine at NASA said, “It would prove our humanity to let Pluto stay in.” It would be like that moment when the doorman is about to escort you out of a private party where you don’t, arguably, belong, but then someone who knows you taps him on the shoulder and says, “Wait a minute, I know this guy. He’s O.K..”