Friday, August 25, 2006

Pluto

So Pluto is no longer a planet; it's a planette.

I'm glad. It never really seemed like a planet. It was always more like an isolated convenience store on the far outskirts of 29 Palms.

I was never that comfortable with Uranus and Neptune either. The former was not discovered until 1781, and the latter in 1846. I don't trust anything discovered in modern times, except Spandex.

Why can't we just go back to the pre-Copernican universe? Things were better then, because the earth was at the center of everything, as it appears to be when you stand outside at night, and there were seven planets, which is the right number, and only four elements, conveniently arranged into two pairs of opposites.

The planets were the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. It was an arrangement that made astrology a lot easier.

The elements were earth and air, fire and water. No periodic table to memorize, and they contributed to a nice, neat, symmetrical/astrological way of looking at things as well.

In those days, when the king died his son became king. You didn't have to worry about some guy from Texas stealing the election.

I suppose the heliocentric universe and representative democracy wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't got hydrogen bombs along with them. And there's no going back, so welcome to Uranus.

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