Vacations can become trips.

Ya know, running from a wildfire in the middle fo the desert has a way of putting you life in perspecitve. Oh what, you didn’t hear?

Saturday afternoon last, after an evening and morning of amazing music and friends in the high desert east of Bend Oregon, I had the unusual privelidge of out-runnig a wildfire that threatened to burninate most of my posessions, other peoples possessions, the music station and pretty much the entire amazing copse of trees under which our little festivities were camped.  Packing my camp as fast as I could while watchign the trees torch one after the other and starting to feel the heat from a hundred feet away, I started to think, ya know, my current issues kind of pale in comparison to this situatiuon.

Just as an aside, have you ever seen a tree torch?  It is amazing, watching a tree that is 60-70 feet high burn ALL of its needles off in jsut a few seconds, making a sound like a roaring train and blasting a mushroom cloud of black smoke hundreds of feet into the air.  The fact that 700 degree flaming apocalypse was marching its way steadily around our camp notwithstanding, of course.

Anyway, this is a thank you to those who pulled our car, now fully laden with consumables meant to be used over the course of the next three days, off of the sandbar that high-centered it and made me have premonitions of firey doom for Death Of Bugs (Duncfo’s car).  You guys are killer.

To those of you who I saw out there, I know that we had to cut short our yearly convival, but It was amazing to see all of you, as usual.  Hopefully we can get together again this summer in an impromptu meeting and party for a night.

Three Times In 15 Minutes

Today something happened to me, three times in fifteen minutes, that makes me question the precision of the Washington State Department Of Motor Vehicles’ visual acuity testing.

Now I walk.  A lot.  I walk everywhere.  This is due to the fact that cars hate me, and recently the car that I have been driving was sold as scrap to a junkyard who was more than willing to accept it as the sub-par example of automotive and mechanical engineering that is an American car.   It’s transmission ate itself like a gerbil who has been living to long in an unkept glass-walled hell and decided to deprive itself of its means of locomotion.  So yeah.  Walking is kind of my thing again.

Something that most Americans don’t understand is that when you walk places, you have to cross the roads 90% of people in this country drive their cars on and take for granted.  While these are simply a little-thought about means of conveyance for drivers, for those of us who have to brave their expanse, they become a flat version of that ditch full of human killing machines people have to cross to win American Gladiators, only without the pads.  Such was the case when I attempted to cross them today.

When stepping into the street after having patiently waited for the little blue man on the sign to tell me it was safe – he is a liar, just so you know – the people coming around the corner, with me in plain sight wearing a bright red shirt, decide that instead of looking in the intersection to make sure that there is no one crossing under conditions that make it perfectly legal for them to do so they are going to continue to text their friends while putting on their makeup and floor it, swerving around the corner and missing me by about three inches.  Close enough that their bumper extensions brushed against my leg.

Yeah.

I almost died.

My favorite part is that when I did my citizenly duty and offered one of my fingers in greeting they slowed down and looked at me like I had done something wrong.

This scenario was repeated – three times in fifteen minutes – as I ran my errands.  The person who decided that I was merely a road-bump in an intersection through which he was turning left in light traffic as a personal favorite, as he had the audacity to actually blow a horn that was intensely emasculating (for him) at me while screaming out his window for me to get out of his way, little blue man on the sign be damned. Naturally this had the opposite effect and made me stop dead in the middle of the street, right in front of his car, again proffering my finger in salutation.  This guy then veered around me and went on to narrowly avoid rear-ending a little tiny car and run a red light getting onto the freeway.

Winners, these people in Salmon Creek.

For the third incident there is little to tell, aside from the fact that the driver was a little tiny blond girl of no more than 18 who was driving an H2, and by driving I mean blasting at about 60 miles per hour down a 35 mph street while at once barely being able to see over the dashboard, talking on her phone and bopping up and down to the shitty pop music emanating from speakers; deafness that her daddy was obviously paying for.  She ran a red light at this sped in order to nearly kill me.  I took solace in the fact that she was going to marry some rich dude and live her life in an unhappy, upper-crust social hell while flaunting money that isn’t hers.

Anyway, the entire episode made me wonder how it is that these people are allowed to drive cars.  I have little doubt that these are the same people who smack their kids in public and talk on their cell-phones while standing in line ANYWHERE.  They all smoke Crack.  Something, something has to make these people completely unaware of their surroundings while simultaneously turning them into narcisitic A-holes.   Maybe they really didnt see me in the middle of the open road, but their violent outbursts and selfish assertations about right-of-way are unforgivable and unexplainable.

I’m going to start carrying a bat and tapping out their taillights when they do this.

Flowers are trying to kill me.

When I wake up in the morning, I can tell immediately that something is wrong.  While I can open my eyes, they dont do so to the regular limits, instead stopping roughly two-thirds of the way open, lending me a slight image of Manchurian heritage.  It is usually at this point that I utter a small string of profanity adn make a beeline for the bathroom, where there are pills taht make it so that I can open my eyes and exist without nose tissue for more than 5 minutes.

You see, the flowers are trying to kill me.

Ordinarily when people see spring begin, with its increase in sunshine and decrease in ass-cold, they are happy.  “Look at the pretty flowers” they say as huge splashes of color paint every corner of our little eden here in the Pacific North West.  And indeed it is pretty, unless you have to go out into it.

What that neat coloration and blooming greenery mean to me is doom.  Evey time a slight spring breeze blows ever so slightly through the rampaging flowers, I can see the clouds of wind-borne pollen making a beeline for my nose.  When I smell flowers, it does not make my brain think “aww, how pretty.”  Instead it makes my body think that there is something invading my systems and decides that my body should try to kill me, resulting in my walking around feeling as if my face is trying to detach itself from my head, propelled by the pressure  of the goo steadily filling every cavity above my neck.

So this is for you, ye multi-colored and nice smelling harbingers of sinotic doom:  I hate you.  I hate you with the flaming passion of a thousand flaming suns.  If it were up to me I would pave this city under a blanket of Agent Orange and Roundup, decomposing you and your anaphalaxis-inducing brethren to pulp and laughing as you rotted.

Then I would probably go blow my nose.

Turning the corner

There is something about this time of year in the Northwest.  Mother Nature knows that the horror of the Rose Festival is over, that its swarms of miscreant children and obese mothers and incorrectly dressed hipsters have retired to their respective places of comfort and the Canadians can rest assured that their coasts are now safe again from the tyranny of…..  well no one, really, and decides to make its move.

All of a sudden the days end with sunlight.  As I sit here in my open window, chilled by a breeze generated when the sun is no longer heating the air and the only light comes from that reflected off the nitrogen in the  stratosphere, I realize that summer is on it’s way.  It has been a long, hard, often cold soak here in the Northwest and we have all felt its depression, but now that is about to change.  You can tell this is happening in many different ways. Customers are smiling, which does little to curb the desire to hit them.  Girls are wearing less and less on an almost daily basis, making one wonder if one really runs out of clothes if one halves the amount worn a a daily basis.  People are running on the streets again, something that is at once good to see and a total annoyance when one decides to actually walk on the sidewalk.  The beauty and olfactory delight that are flowers is out in full force, blowing their yearly allotment of allergy-inducing pollen all over unsuspecting passers-by.  But the best part is the sun.

I read somewhere that the Human body can produce enough Vitamin D in 2 hours of direct sunlight to supply itself for 2 weeks.  I don’t know if this is true, but if that is the case I have received my yearly dose in the last couple of days (which is kind of  a bad thing since too much Vitamin D is toxic… in a carcinogenic sense).  You see, in the great northwest, we are also the soggy northwest.  Last year we had 293 days categorized as some kind of cloudy.

As an side, I should point out that there are differing types of cloudy, something those of you used to sunlight and pleasant weather probably don’t realize.  Since we see clouds pretty much every day, we have thought up terms like “some clouds,” “some sun,” “occasionally cloudy,” and other such gems.  To simply say that all but 2 months of the year are going to be “cloudy” would be to drive the inhabitants of this area to madness.  This rule also applies to terms used to describe rainfall amounts, and all of it makes one wonder how it is that the weather forcasters here can be so wrong all the time.

One of life’s mysteries, I guess.

Anyway, the sunshine here has been amazing.  We have the kind of sunlight that blasts down through skies nearly devoid of humidity or obstruction and due to the earths tilt comes from nearly perpendicular to the ground i a way that makes one swear that it is focused.  This has the result of sun that will sear our melanin-deprived skin in minutes if unchecked and usually means that for the month of July there is a distinctively ruddy glow to the NW as people try to tan, but end up looking like the fabled crab-people.  Likewise we are prone to wear sunglasses if the clouds are thin enough to let in even a little sunlight, so squinting beneath the lenses of Raybans when exposed to direct light from the sky is the norm.  Despite this, if there is even the slightest threat that our local hydrogen-bomb-in-the-sky is going to make an appearance people throng to the beaches, the pools and rivers, the lawns and pretty much any other place they can find in order to manufacture as much Vitamin D as possible.  We love the sun when we can get it, and we have been getting it in spades lately.

Indeed I am getting the fact that we are turning the corner.  While we still have about a month of times when showers come from nowhere and the occasional rainbow makes us smile, soon there will be nothing but 2 months of uninterrupted sunlight and 80-100 degree temperatures.

Two whole months, then the cycle begins again.

See? I told you.

Those of you who know me or have read my blog enough to understand, know that I have a small problem with cars. Actually, the problem is not so much small, as really freaking huge and annoying. You see, if you were to put me and a car in a cage match, me on one side with my tools, mechanical know-how and an endearing desire for the car to be pretty and well maintained and the car on the other with a pocket full of hate and an over-arching desire to see me have an aneurysm, the car will usually come out on top; not in a mechanically sound way, mind you, but in a Jeremy-just-had-an-aneurysm kind of way. You see, cars hate me.

Its true.

Not only have cars in my past caught on fire, had wheels fall off while in motion, suddenly screech to a halt in the middle of traffic, fill up with newspaper (best.prank.ever.), suddenly create a military-grade smoke-screen on the highway and otherwise piss me off, but they have all done so at the least appropriate moment, i.e. just when I am at a point where I cant afford to work on them and was relying on them to do something for me. These are the things that I get i return for doing a diligent job of preventative maintenance, repair and overall being nice to my automobiles; spite, flames and refusal to cooperate. It kind of runs parallel to my relationships with women over the years, in fact… minus the torque wrenches.

In this particular case, while merrily driving down the road, sporting new shades and basking in the glow of a job interview well done, I obey the traffic laws and stop at a stop light. Sounds normal, right?

Not so much.

When the light turns green I depress the gas pedal to the normal level and nothing happens. I continue pressing until the pedal is at the floor and the engine is revved almost to red-line and the car begins to roll (mind you this is not under its own power, but simply due to gravity and a fortunately mild slope). So I park it in a parking lot into which the vehicle happens to have enough inertia to coast. I try cycling through the gears:

Reverse: works like a charm

Neutral: kind of hard to screw up

OVERDRIVE (I always feel that word should be put in all capital letters… don’t know why): just like neutral.

Drive: just like overdrive.

First Gear: more like “no gear”

Indeed as soon as the vehicle shifts out of reverse it stays in neutral the entire time, never even engaging the gears needed to propel the car forward. I guess I should just be happy that it is all in one piece (except for the 5 dollar piece in the tranny that is going to cost more than the GDP of Nigeria to fish out from my American made pile of automotive boondoggle and replace) and not on fire (yet).

The best part is that once the streets clear the police are going to have to contend with a large Ford F-150 slowly driving up the road, 4-ways flashing and being trailed by a white Ford Taurus, 3-ways flashing (I am missing the entire assembly for one of my flashers… not the bulb, but the entire plastic enclosure) and driving the 2 miles to the transmission shop….

In reverse.

On Roses and Carnies, Pt. One.

Today I walked around one of the greatest spectacles of Portland’s cultural parade. This mass accumulation of Portland’s vibrant if sometimes off-the-wall but usually just mildly annoying culture is the Main Drag of the Rose Festival. This is the place where a county fair and all of its awesomeness meets the big city with all of its pretense and oddity (and in portland oddity is kind of the name of the game).

It is truly a place of magic and worry.

The first thing that I notice, that anyone should be able to notice, is the smell. For some reason the faintest aroma of feet wafts gently through the concourse, hardly even there, but so in just high enough a concentration that it tugs at the back of your consciousness. It reminds me of an old amusement park I went to as a kid in Utah, whose fun-house made kids TAKE OFF THEIR SHOES before entering, virtually guaranteeing the transmission of various diseases through the population of the wasatch basin, but I have the feeling that every single fair and amusement park in the world has this smell. I have no idea where it comes from, though its locus is usually situated around the “fun house,” a term used loosely unless you are the mullet-endowed child of any of the groups I will be detailing later.

Of course the people are the real attraction here. From the Carnies to the tourists to the people who came from god-knows-where, nary a moment goes by when on does not want to throw themselves off the sea-wall to be swallowed peacefully by the mercury-encrusted waters of the Willamette. Here are a few of my favorites:

-Carnies: I know this is a gimme, but I have to talk about them. For some reason the age of the Carnies at the Rose Festival varies greatly, but they all look the same. Steve Buscemi after a week-long crack-fueld bender with the members of the Rolling Stones AND Marilyn Manson looks positively Kate Hudson-esque compared to the horrifying complexion and skeletal looks of these peddlers of oversized plush toys. Indeed the very fact that one of these people tried to sell me something made me crack up laughing, right in the guys face.

It kind of made me feel bad, but at the same time laughing at someone who is obviously anchored in place by his proximity to his meth pipe is not nearly as dangerous as laughing at Skeletor himself.
I think I can handle it.

Couple these people with the rides that they are operating and you have the perfect blend of people who you wouldn’t want to trust your kids with (but do) and rides that you would never want to put you kids on (but do). That brings me to!..

-The Rides: Imagine, for a second, 12th century dirt-farmers in early Europe. These people have barely seen metal in their lives, much less complex hydraulic machinery. I have no doubt in my mind that they could create rides with more structural integrity and safety features than the ones on the waterfront. I have a hard time getting on a ride when DUCT TAPE is holding one of the hydraulic hoses onto an arm that is going to spin me and those around me high over the Canadian ships below. Not only is hot, toxic fluid spraying all over the riders (all of whom payed one billion dollars to ride that particular death-coaster) generally a bad thing, but if you read yesterdays post you will know that the Canadian ships are ships in name alone and are thus very, very far below the ride.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea of children being spun in what is essentially an industrial centrifuge until they regurgitate the pure, pink-dyed sugar that their parents have been feeding them all over the place, creating situation where the ride looks, from afar, like some kind of psychedelic garden sprinkler is completely awesome in every way. I just hate to think of someone I know on one of thee rides when it blasts off into orbit because the carny accidentally spilled some crack into its fuel tank.

I will say that probably me favorite part of the entire experience is the people that inhabit this festival. I have trouble knowing ho to make this list cohesive, so Ill just list them out, as I am apt to do.

-HAMBEASTS. As anyone who has ever been to a fair anywhere ever, the gigantic people who attend them materialize out of thin air (see what I did there? Thin air? genius). Walking past the stands full of Caramel-dipped apples (one of my favorite things in the entire world), deep-fried Twinkies, snickers bars, apples, lard, elephants, cholesterol, or anything else that you can put in a deep-fryer; cotton candy, raw sugar, fat injections, microwave pizzas topped with pepperoni-like substances, mushrooms picked two years ago and stored on top of someone’s fridge, and cheese that was scraped off the runways at the local airport and painted white, abnormally long whips of licorice and just for fun, a back-street-boy worth of popcorn in any of five hundred different flavors it is not hard to understand where the girth of these individuals comes from (though it is hard to imagine that it happened in one day). These are the people who are not allowed to ride the rides; a situation where their overwhelming size actually works in their favor. Instead they are left to drift through the crowds, small planetoids of American gluttony orbited by constellations of …

-Children. Everywhere. Constantly. I am not sure where all of them actually come from. Do people really have groups of children jsut so they can cut a mullett in their head and pout them in a shirt with (I poop you not) a freaking confederate flag? Are they walking billboards of American ignorance? It would seem.

I am walking patiently in a straight line down the main concourse, looking sternly at carnies and dubiously at the “Five Thousand Mile-An-Hour Death Loop Of Dragon-Tastic Fun-Ness” when a group of these tiny but militant miscreants literally pushes me sideways in their rush to induce vomiting on said “Five Thousand Mile-An-Hour Death Loop of Dragon-Tastic Funn-Ness.” They obviously had no idea that I have no problem what so ever shoving a kid off the seawall into the side of one of the navy ships parked there. I look around for the parents of these savages only to see a gaggle of adults feasting on deep-fried who-knows and looking at me like I should have not been in their kids way, having no idea that I have no problem whatsoever pushing one of their kids off the seawall into…well…you get the picture.

As an aside I have to give the carnies some credit here. Had I been one of them, twacked out of my gourd or not, I would seriously deplete the population of screaming children in every town I worked in. They don’t. I don’t know how, but they don’t. It’s amazing.

Anyway the highlight of my afternoon came from watching teenagers with those shoes that have wheels in the soles try to use them on the “grass” of the concourse. As this amalgamation of mud, clay, cast-off deep-fried foods, pigeon shit, sprinkler-heads and giant metal stakes holding the guy-wires for the rides ceased being fluffy OR soft after day one of the festival, it afforded nary a soft surface for the children as their wheely-shoes dug furrows in the ground and sent them flying in a textbook example of Newton’s first law. Brilliant.
End Part One

The interplay between these people, who are rarely seen in the city limits and almost never in downtown-proper and the hipster/granola/hippie crowd that flows through Portland on a daily basis will be the subject of part two of this thrilling account of danger and harried unease. Stay tuned!

Debacle of Roses and the Canadian Navy.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!

It’s Rose festival time here in the Rose city. For those of you who are not familliar with Portland’s traditions (and you should be… we are a strange breed), the Rose Festival is SeaFair, Fleet-Week, the County Fair and a Macy’s “lets kill as many plants as possible and drag them through downtown in a blinding rain so the masses can catch pneumonia while listening to 7,274,194,534 bands play Louie louie” parade all wrapped into one, with the deep-fried Twinkies and enormous people who eat them included. This festival also heralds the beginning of a week of traffic snarls begging reference to New York or LA, a fair full of the tweaker-tastic-est carnies ever to grace the face of a rickety ferris-wheel and a parade of naval might and innocence. It is going to be the point of many blogs this week, so stay tuned.

I began my introspection about my feelings toward this festival when I was sitting in the first of many traffic incidents that surround the Rose Debacle. Indeed, as I was sitting on an on ramp for I-5 I was thinking to myself that it looked like there was a hydrant busted near the river, as I saw a plume of water blasting into the sky. As my trusty steed inched along behind the strangest looking person I have seen in traffic in a long while (a feat considering the people who live in this city) I soon came to realize that this plume of water was accompanying a knife-edged prow and rather large gun, all floating down the river to the groovy soundtrack provided by Felix Da Housecat and my radio.

In reality, this plume of water was one of Portland’s old-timey fireboats. It is tradition here for them to accompany the ships of two separate countries navies up the river, announcing their arrival by rocketing fountains of water hundreds of feet into the air, vaporizing it into a pretty veil which is caught by the wind and blown over the crowds who have gathered to watch the procession. This is very pretty, and when lue and red dye isadded to the water it is all very patriotic, but it also has the effect of blanketing them with Mercury and biologically-poisoned Willamette River water from which it is not safe to pull fish for eating.

Once this Hazmat shooting patriot-fest has passed the drawbridges which make our city proud, the ship that it is leading comes into view.

In the case of the one I witnessed from my position on the parking lot that was I-5 at the time (presumably because the other drivers had died of heavy metal poisoning after ingesting some of the fireboat spray only minutes earlier), a massive, proud ship of the US Navy was being rotated and parallel parked by Tugs from the Port of Portland. This vessel was the USS Lake Champlain, a Ticonderoga Class AEGIS Guided-Missile Cruiser. It was festooned with all of its accouterments: guns raised high in the air, Torpedo launchers pointing ominously off the sides of the deck, flags speaking the cryptic language of sea-farers fluttering in the breeze, and decks lined with sailors in their dress whites interspersed with local politicians wanting to be seen actively encouraging our military. Painted its dark Haze-Grey color scheme and flying the largest American flag I have ever seen, it instantly projected the power and technological sophistication that was the US military. This was, however, not the best part. The best part was that you could almost see, despite the distance and residual ribbons of fireboat-effusions, the cringing faces and rapidly ablating masculinity of the Canadians.

Thats right, I said Canadians.

In what I can only consider a good-will gesture, a few of Canada’s brown-water fleet of warships (a term that I use, in this case, loosely) are invited every year to take part in the festivities (another term used loosely). These war ships are such in name alone, as their diminutive nature is dwarfed in the worst way by the smaller of the Cruisers brought in from the US navy. Indeed, these ships could pretty easily be picked up and placed on the helicopter landing deck of the nearest US War-Boat (one of the tugs was bigger). Painted the daintiest color of robyns-egg blue and mounting no guns larger than a 20mm BOFORS cannon, these vessels telegraph loudly their status as protectors of maple syrup, denim, great snowboarding, and not much else. I honestly felt bad for these men, doubtless proud as any sailor in any navy of any country of the world, to see their little blue boats silently harangued by the majesty and pageantry afforded the US men-of-war. I hope that their faith in socialized healthcare is enough to get them through the coming week of 8-year-olds asking “why is your ship not as big as that one” while standing on the rear (I hesitate to use the term “poop”) deck of their boat, in the shadow of the overhanging bow of the US cruiser-next-door.

I will say, however, that I feel bad for the men of the US ships as well. Not only are they about to be subjected to the hipster-chick culture of Portland women and their retarded actions during fleet-week, they are men used to plying the worlds oceans hunting pirates…or counting whales…

Or whatever they do.

I can’t imagine that they are very comfortable being cooped up in a smallish river, 100 miles inland from the nearest ocean, with no room to maneuver and no means of defense. Rumor has it one of them even hit a sandbar on the way up the river. They may feel uncomfortable about their claustrophobic lack of options, but they need not worry; the only thing they have to fear here is a determined Portland-hipster/hippie attack, and the best defense in this case is to toss some weed and a sixer of PBR off the back of the boat and watch them follow it over the seawall like so many dread-locked lemmings.

By this time I have passed the waterfront, heading up the industrial wasteland that is the 405 interchange, so I will digress. Though you should keep an eye on this bat channel as tomorrow I go for a stroll amongst the unwashed, usually rotund and often horrifyingly annoying masses that make up the bulk (heh heh heh) of Rose-Festival Main-Drag atendees.

* * *

(as an aside, I would like to point out that the Canadians actually have a rather large and capable Navy, full of high-tech toys (bought from us). This is a joke, so those of you who are Canadian that are going to read this (you know how you are): shut it.  Also: as far as ships colors are concerned, the Dredges of the US Army Corps of Engineers take the cake: their wallpaper is Paisley))

On Pluto

As many of you may have noted recently, I have been remiss in my duties as an active member of this thing called the Blog-o-cube. Or sphere. Or whatever. Recently this has been because I have been without a muse to drive my writing and recollection of the retarded nature of this planet. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that for some inexplicable reason logical though, considered action, understanding of consequences and increased WalMart gum-to_tooth ratio has broken out all over our world, but simply that I have taken a vacation to Seattle to visit my friends (who are awesome and only mildly bizarre) and escape the stupidity that this world has been flinging out in ever expanding circles of craptasticness. The really weird thing is that I found my muse in the form of a rad little blond who posed to me a question about Pluto, requiring an explanation under what I might consider ideal circumstances..

This made me realize that I have yet to really go into my feelings on the issue of Pluto, so I will do this for you know (Yes, I do know that this is old news and yes, I do realize that I am bludgeoning a terminally deceased equine here, but still; I thought I would make my feelings known to the faceless masses. Deal with it. Also: I spelled bludgeoning correctly the first time I spelled it. Go Me.)

A little back-story to make my rant a little less improvisational and let those of you who are not up on current planetary classifications understand what the heck I’m talking about.

Pluto’s designation as a planet, held as a massive aspect of humanities understanding of its neighborhood since 1930, was revoked when a bunch of stodgy old scientists belonging to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to reclassify exactly what a planet is. This debate was ignited in 1996 when Eris was found, an object actually larger than Pluto out in what is referred to the Kuiper Belt (a vast field of rocky and icy debris left over form the creation of our solar system that encircles the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune). The Kuiper belt holds many large bodies, many of which have their own moons, making Pluto’s classification under the new guidelines shaky. Just what are these new guidelines, you may ask?

Glad you did. Here they are:

-Planets must Orbit the sun (No crap, really?)

-Planets must have sufficient mass to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium (basically their gravity must be great enough to lump all the “stuff” that makes them up into a nearly round shape.)

This is one which I have trouble with.

So basically these people are saying that in order for a planet to be a planet, it has to be basically round. Okay, Ill bite; why is this a necessity? Granted, anything large enough to accomplish this will be readily identifiable as “not some random chunk of rock just flew in from Ontario and wants to join the big-boys club” and thus should not be placed in the same group as such; but I think it is a little presumptuous and hasty for one group of people to tell us that a planet has to be round, no matter what.

-Planets must have “Cleared the Neighbourhood around their orbit.” (First, note the spelling of neighbourhood; yeah, British. This means that the gravity of the planet is such that it has either absorbed or expelled all other like-sized bodies, save for it’s own moons, from its orbital domain)

Here is the crux of the argument. Pluto lives in the Kuiper Belt. This is an orbital domain that is full of rocky and icy bodies, large and small. At least one of the bodies out there is larger than PLuto, and many of them have their own moons. They all orbit the sun and they all are round. Unfortunately, they all live in the same place, pass very near to each other, and thus do not meet the required condition of having cleared out their orbital path. This is like saying that the hambeast in the scooter at WinCo is not defined as conditionally fat by some old schmuck (despite her round size and orbiting and also-round children) because her repulsive force is not such that it expels the other shoppers in the canned meats aisle. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to create a new classification of “lesser obese” for this person, a classification that flies in the face of everyone else’s identification as freaking fat, simply because there is another, slightly more rubinesque person on a scooter somewhere in the store.

In case you are wondering, I did in fact just use a fat joke to illustrate my point about planetary classification. Comedy is not always pretty, people

Moving on, the main thrust of my problem with what the IAU did is that Pluto has been a part of common, everyday life for school children, dreamers, scientists and everyone else for nigh under eighty years. It has been something that has fascinated people for decades; that little ball of methane ice out there on the fringes of the solar system, taking in sunlight that is millions of times less than what we get and defining the boundary between our space and real, deep space the little blond muse in Seattle so eloquently and correctly said, it is the pizza in the story.

Ordinarily I am all for standardization in science. Indeed, it is the very basis of scientific endeavor that there be rules, categories, classifications and various and sundry other things with which to organize and understand our world. That being said, such classifications are purely a human construct, something that we have used to understand the universe around us. Is it not so outlandish to think that for this once, maybe, we can use our power over these categories to continue having a pizza in our mnemonic?

I call for the IAU to continue its classification program, but I also call for National Geographic to put Pluto back on its map of the Solar System and for bodies like the IAU to allow poor little Pluto to regain its rightful place as the little planet that could; the little ball of ice on the terminus of our rather small neighborhood in space and allow school children the world over to be able to see it for what it was.