Daily Archives: August 24, 2006

Facebook Status Listlog

Since summer is nearing its end, I decided now would be a fun time for a Facebook status listlog:

  • August is MOVING!!
  • Kate is cleaning out her aviator of a summer’s worth of crap.
  • Jason is announcing that the part tonight will be fucking crazy!!
  • Tym is on campus all day.
  • Sarah is listening to the clock tick.
  • Cary is thinking of converting to Federerism.
  • Matthew is going to be at work when his room assignment info goes online.
  • Paige is missing her lovelys from school <3.
  • Gina is missing her B______ 0:).
  • Heather is counting the hours until she’s done with camp.
  • Arash is is en route to baltimore via Raleigh, NC and a 311 concert.
  • Ingrid is drinking espresso at Bully Blend’s.. w/ Jack Billion! (he’s at a different table) it’s a small world.
  • Keshav is watching Zoey 101, hoping that Joycs (the puppy) will get a good home as she has been returned.
  • Ethan is has eaten all the blackberry pie.
  • Jeff is excited for Donatos.
  • Terrence is remodeling.
  • Cameron is sitting in CCJ 201.
  • Stevie is exhausted.
  • Tiffany is finally over the flu… looking forward to going back to hopkins!
  • Bill is looking forward to making it back to Hopkins to chill with all you cool people.
  • Shana is not looking forward to Friday. :(.
  • Jessica is wanting to go home sleep, eat, talk to the fam and see Brian.
  • Sean is remembered well at the Chelsea Hotel.
  • Mike is a driver not a thinker.
  • Shawn is concerned about Mother Nature. Mother! Nature!
  • Ashley is listening to KMEL online cuz she misses the Bay.
  • James is praying for daylight…of August 27th.
  • Clara is probably still doing laundry.
  • Winnie is debating the pros and cons of ethnic studies and theatre.
  • Roy is done looking for a supplier.
  • Christine is content after eating at the House of Chicken and Waffles.
  • Jude is sucking in his gut.
  • Ashley is thinking of Anna’s sweet lips…
  • Elizabeth is in London.

There are a few gems in there, but none are as brilliant as mine:

  • Shawn is a motherfucking snake on a motherfucking plane.

Pluto Demoted

It is so official: Pluto is not a planet. Take that, you pluto-loving sons of bitches.

Funnily enough, in that op-ed Tom Kreider admits: “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.” The defender of Pluto says it more eloquently than I how that other proposed definition, scientifically and aesthetically, isn’t worth a Vice President (which itself isn’t worth a warm bucket of spit).

And I’ll quote the op-ed again to illustrate why Pluto shouldn’t be a planet: “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.”

The anthropomorphization in the article was starting to piss me off, though. Come on! Pluto is a fucking chunk of ice in space! It doesn’t have feelings! It doesn’t care if we humans categorize it as a planet or not.

Here’s the new definition of planet for the more scientifically minded: “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.” Pluto will now be categorized as a “dwarf planet.”

Ooh yeah, I am gloating now. For a long time (compared to my relatively short life so far), I have said Pluto is not a planet. Vindication at last!