Who Mourns for Pluto?

Today in Prague, The International Astronomical Union (IAU)
voted to remove Pluto from the list of planets in this solar
system. Ok...besides me, these are probably the most serious
geeks on the planet. I spit on them...patooy! My whole life, I
have known that there are nine planets. Not 8, not 13 (as was
tossed around in the past couple of weeks)...9.


In school we were learned how to memorize the planets. There
are several variations of this, but I learned:

MY - MERCURY
VERY - VENUS
EDUCATED - EARTH
MOTHER - MARS
JUST - JUPITER
SERVED - SATURN
US - URANUS
NINE - NEPTUNE
PICKLES - PLUTO

Now how right is that? In this day of political correctness what
will school kids learn now? My Very....Served Us NACHOS????
That's just wrong. Tradition be damned I suppose. Pluto was
just out there, minding it's own business...ok WAY out there,
but all alone just the same, when here come these geeks in
Prague who want to screw things up. Of course small solar
system modeling companies around the world are rejoicing.
I mean, before this, how many solar system models did schools
need? I suppose teachers could just break Pluto off the model
and all would be well, but people always need the bestest and
newest.


Of course, one of the most painful parts of this whole story is
that Lynn and I have actually used the telescope that discoverd
Pluto over 75 years ago. It was discovered at the Lowell
Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona in 1930. Although Lowell
himself didn't discover it, his observatory did...and this was
seen as redemption (at least by me) for his goofy claims that
there were canals on Mars. (Ah...now you know who this guy
is). Basically he was a nut...but he left behind a cool observatory,
and in 1995 Lynn and I got to see Mars through this telescope.
By the way, the Observatory (www.lowell.edu) must be in denial
regarding the demotion of Pluto since there's no mention of
the decsion on their website.


So there you go...Pluto demoted to status of "Dwarf Planet".
(By the way...they don't like being called dwarves...call them
"Little Planets") Millions if not billions of school children will
be learning about Nachos instead of Pickles (Taco Bell rejoices,
Vlasic weeps) and a major tourist attraction in Northern Arizona
(no, not the Grand Canyon) loses some of it's notoriety. I've
never owned my own dog, but if I ever did...I wanted to name
it Pluto. I still can, but in years to come, how popular a name
will it be? After all, who names their dogs Ceres or UB313?
(also dwarf...I mean little...planets) Unfortunately that's all
Pluto will be known as from now on. How sad.