I Have To Share This, Though Not Really Comedy

So I recently made a post about Pluto not really being a planet even though it still totally is.

Well some crazy bitch from LiveJournal – LAURELE, let's not quibble over how famous you want to become, dear – decided to reply to my blog. Apparently she runs a journal dedicated entirely to the status of Pluto as a planet. I assume she trolls through Blogger searches every day looking for "Pluto + Planet," because I have no idea who the fuck she is and she clearly is unaware that this is a comedy blog (which speaks either quite highly of her stupidity or quite poorly of my level of hilarity [That's absolute magnitude • comedy, for you astronomy nerds.])

If I may, such that everyone see this and understand the precarious nature of Pluto as a planet, I will now post said reply here in it's entirety (in bold) with my own added annotations.


Actually, Pluto IS a planet. Wasn't my whole point that it was? What are you arguing again?
The whole question depends on how one defines planet, and this is still very much up for debate. Fine, I didn't actually mention this, as it's implicit in my stating that the IAU just changed the definition. The IAU definition was adopted by only four percent of its members, most of whom are not planetary scientists. And yet it was still officially adopted by everyone who bothered to vote. It was rejected by hundreds of professional astronomers in a petition led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. And yet this has nothing to do with the people who actually voted.

Stern and like-minded scientists favor a broad planet definition in which a planet is defined as any non-self-luminous spheroidal body orbiting a star. The problem the IAU had with this definition is that it forces the inclusion of current dwarf planets, moons, and various other large masses. By that definition, Pluto is very much a planet. This was kind of my argument already. We can distinguish between types of planets through use of subcategories such as terrestrial planets, gas giants, ice giants, dwarf planets, etc. This is actually exactly what I facetiously proposed.

The requirement that an object clear its neighborhood to be considered a planet was arbitrarily imposed by this tiny percent of the IAU (read: "Everyone who voted in a close decision between an okay definition and a shitty one.") and is not accepted by Stern and many other scientists as a necessary condition for planethood. Seriously? Are you like married to this Stern guy? I get that he's the foremost Pluto-fangirl but Christ, you talk about him like he's, well, Christ.

However, a logical solution would be to establish dwarf planets as a subclass of planets (This is exactly what I'm saying it already is. Hence the second word in "dwarf planet." Seriously, how does someone manage to grasp a basic understanding of planetary classification systems and somehow manage to avoid an understanding of sarcasm?)that are spherical but do not gravitationally dominate their orbits. That would satisfy both dynamical and geophysical criteria.

Thank you, you crazy, crazy bitch. Honestly, I usually find space-nerd chicks pretty hot. I'm probably the only kid who had a basic understanding of relativistic time dilation by age 4. No kidding.

Still, I gotta say I also like my crazy bitches with more of a sense of humor than an actual moon rock. So, dear Laurele, I sincerely hope that the International Astronomical Union makes a bold announcement in the near future, that not only is a dwarf planet officially (and not just obviously) a type of planet, but that following their immediate study the first core samples of Plutonian surface ice are to be transported directly into your reproductive orifice, as you clearly have a massive hard-on for Pluto.


[Editor's Note: Don't fuck with me on astronomy. If we're going to call it anything, Pluto is technically the progenitor of a separate subset of dwarf planets, the Plutinoids, bodies with icy cores that can be spheroidal at lower masses than terrestrial or gaseous planets. So fuck you, Pluto. Fuck all the non-Ferris-cored Trans-Neptunian Objects who think they can muscle their way into planethood by puttin' on airs. You're like the asshole who goes to the gym and gets ripped by pumping heavy weights but can't lift a damned couch because he didn't do any cardio or strength training. You're all surface and all for show. You got no heart, Pluto.]