I remember several years ago that Pluto was voted off of the planetary scale. I am sure the old fellow was quite put out. After being invented by some earthling almost 80 years ago, he had been sitting prettily—and perhaps quite coolly—out some several billion miles away as a planet. “It was an honor,” he once told me, “to be labeled as one and run with ‘big boys’ like ol’ Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and to be able to flirt with Venus” because he was considered a planet.
Actually, I think flirting with Venus got him in trouble. There he was winking his cold blue eyes at her and that whippersnapper Mercury—you need to watch those young fleet-of-foot fellows—became a little heated under the collar. “He left a memo at the Astronomers’ Club—that’s where the astronauts, scientists, and astro-physicists hang out while they’re waiting for an amateur astronomer to discover a new star for them to name,” an anonymous source at the College of Space and Stuff (alright, so it was the janitor’s assistant) told the unassociated press, “saying, ‘If this schmuck is not off my block by the time it takes me to take a spin around the sun, I’ll…’” And he never finished his threat because he was already around the sun for the another spin.
The astronomers—they’re excitable people. You report an asteroid descending towards the earth or tell them that some solar flares are jumping off the sun again, and you’ll have them scrambling for their calculators, gazing through their telescopes and writing down equations and counter-equations a mathematician can’t even fathom. Next thing you’ll know there’s a state of emergency and they will devise someway of throwing the earth in reverse to barely dodge a Hollywood apocalypse. They really are quaint old sorts who take their jobs quite seriously.
Anyhow, as I was saying, the astronomers gather for a convention and named it something important like, the 2006 International Convention of Astronomers for the Determination and Termination of Pluto as a Planet (ICADTPP). They sent an invitation to Pluto so that he could defend himself, but Pluto was too far away to hear and missed his queue. Regardless, between coffee breaks, someone—it was the janitor’s assistant again—made a motion to impeach Pluto as a planet.
The reasons were quite ludicrous. They said he was smaller than earth. Of course, that got Mars upset and he turned red. Venus didn’t care because she said she wasn’t small but “petite.” Mercury did not comment. However, to calm the raging god of war, who appeared to be blowing a blood vessel, they—that’s the janitor and his assistant—said that the other “smaller” planets would be grandfathered in. Therefore they wrote three volumes of footnotes with calculation and diagrams and statistics to make their claim look too complicated to be wrong. (It convinced me!)
Throughout all of this, Pluto had still not made his appearance. It’s hard to blame him since the messenger thought some other large floating rock was Pluto and gave that fellow the message.
The five scientists present—the rest were lounging at the hotel’s pool or were visiting the various clubs and other landmarks—thought it would be a good prank to pull on Pluto. So they agreed. And Pluto was ousted.
Of course, Venus wrote her dear John letter. “How would it look,” she said, “for a girl like me to be dating some overgrown asteroid or dwarf planet? I ask you.” She was never a very sensitive woman. In fact, she might have been once a New Yorker. For she always says what she thinks, or feels, and gets away with murder.
