honey, pluto has gone to a better place.

i'm sorry to announce that pluto has been demoted. it is no longer a planet. of course, i will always think of it as a planet and there's nothing the world astronomical union of jerks can do about it.

the pluto is dead.
long live the pluto!!

i heart pluto

So I just read an hilarious op-ed in the Times about Pluto and its fight to remain a planet. I'll cut and paste because it made me really happy. I haven't been following the planet-hysteria lately - i just thought they were trying to figure out if Sedna and Xena were planets too. I didn't know they were trying to oust Pluto. Anyway, here goes.

I ♥ Pluto

By TIM KREIDER

Published: August 23, 2006

Charlestown, Md.

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..”

top three things you do not want to find on your carpet first thing on a monday morning:

3. barf (of the cat variety)

2. a dead mouse (of the feivel variety)

1. a barfed up dead mouse


You will all be happy to know that I awoke to numero dos this morning. When I first saw it on the carpet, I thought it was a hairball. I squinted at it, and then moved on to the bathroom. Promptly forgot about it until about five minutes later, when I looked at it again and realized that it was a baby mouse.

Thankfully, there was no blood. Because I could NOT have handled that so early in the morning.

So one of our cats is a killer. I'm going to guess it's not Obie.

this has been a test of the emergency broadcast system. we now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Hello. I'm trying to get back on this "blog" thing, but there has been a lot going on. We've been interviewing people at work to replace the many co-workers we've lost (may they rest in peace. or in medschool and on tour (Brazztree.com)), so I've been swamped trying to cram in all of THEIR work in addition to interviews and reading of applications.

Anyway, I just wanted to share some pictures of my cousin Rory, because it's been a while. There was talk of me finally meeting said cousin when I'm home next weekend, but they're going on vacation so I'm going to a friend's birthday party instead.












I've decided it is my mission whilst home to get all of my LA friends together so that they can be friends with each other. Mostly because my sister is now home with not a lot to do and my friends are good people and my sister is good people. so, you know, it makes sense.


here's a picture of ali. she's going to kill me. isn't she cute?!

Soooooo cute. Ali just graduated from college (Middlebury because she's smart too) and is now back at home for the summer, getting her legs, figuring out her next move. If only she didn't hate New York so much. Oh the adventures we'd have.

a day in the life

I believe that, because I haven't posted anything all week, I've lost the few loyal readers I had. Mom, Dad, come back to the blog. I'm sorry.

There's been many happenings that have kept me from, you know, narcissistically sharing my life with the unknown denizens of the internet. Mostly it's been the fact that Sheena has decided to move home to New Hampshire, and I've spent the last few weeks coming to terms with that. Some of you may know that Sheena and I were freshman year roomates in college. I still remember talking to her for the first time - I was sitting on my parents bed, my sister was staring at me expectantly, as Sheena and I figured out who would bring the stereo and who would bring the fridge (my stereo, her fridge). Toward the end of the conversation she said something was "wicked awesome". Now, growing up in Los Angeles, I had never ever in my life heard someone use that phrase. I hung up the phone in a daze, looked at my sister, and said "she said it was wicked awesome. is that a good thing?" Apparently it was, because we've been best friends ever since. And I'm not sure how I'll manage in the real world without her. Thankfully she has taught me many things - like how to properly mop a kitchen floor, clean a bathroom, and be married to someone. Ah my wife, how I will miss living with you. Check this girl out. Can you blame me for being too sad to post? I can't.


Luckily, I scored a room in Josh's apartment, and will move in next month. At least I will have the benefit of living with some of my other friends (a benefit that Sheena sadly does not share, although she gets to live with Hayley and the dude (scroll down to the video), so you know, it's not all bad). I'm sure I will document the process of throwing out half of my belongings so that I can fit in my new room. I will live an ascetic life. Yes. Also I will be going to IKEA soon. Anyone who wants to join is welcome.

Now I just have to learn to motivate myself to cook. Deliveries of meals will be appreciated. It's not that I can't cook - I can cook pretty well - it's just that Sheena can cook so much better than I can. But I digress.

This caught my eye this morning: A Corpse Flower is Blooming in the Botanical Gardens.

I feel like I read about this flower in A Series of Unfortunate Events or something. The flower smells like putrefying meat to attract very specific beetles and sweat bees. Talk about your awesome evolutionary tricks.

If only my nose were not as sensitive as it is (last night we took out the trash and a soy sauce marinade had leaked into the trash can. Faster than you can make a gagging noise, I had that trashcan filled with bleach and in the tub, filling with water. It's a gift, really), I would visit said flower. But, knowing myself and the fact that no one wants to accompany a friend to see a flower that smells like death, not to mention holding back my hair as I vomit all over said flower, I think I'll miss it this time. It's been 67 years since this flower bloomed in New York. I think I can wait another 67 years - by that time my nose probably won't work anymore. Also, it looks like a penis.

where am i again?

this morning, on my way to work, i looked over and saw a nice young man (in a button up shirt and tie, no less) reading Locke's Two Treatises of Government. ok, a little weird, but maybe he's into political science? i look directly to his left and i see this young lady reading Hobbes' Leviathan. i'm sorry. am i at vassar? is everyone taking political theory all at once?

Just thought it was a little weird.

Also, i made it in to work without fainting or vomiting. very exciting. huzzah!!

in addition, I now have a place to move when sheena makes the pilgrimage home. no more vain apartment searches when i should be doing work! i will soon be living on prospect park west with the lovely josh, sarah, and deirdre. huzzah!! well, not really "huzzah" because it's still horrible that she's leaving, but a small "thank god" that i actually have a place to live that i can afford and keep my cats.

the world in which we live in.

Today, on my walk to the subway, I heard a mockingbird singing the song of a car alarm.