Planets

Along with JonBenet Ramesy, the only thing on anybody's mind these days is planets. Apparently we have some new planets, although they aren't the ones I would want to flee to when life on Earth becomes intolerable. I would rather live on Callisto, which looks like it is sick.

Astronomers were so short-sighted in the nineteenth century. You would think when Uranus and Neptune were discovered, they would all think, "Gee, lots of other planets are right around the corner. We had better husband our best names and not waste them all on tiny specks." Here are some very important Roman gods whose names have been wasted on crap:

Asteroids:
Juno
Cybele
Metis
Pallas and Minerva
Proserpina
Eos
Bacchus
Ceres (now a planet, which goes to show that it will all work out in the end.)
Heracles

Symbols of non-planets:
Apollo/Sol
Diana/Luna
Gaia
Vulcan (Vulcan is a planet that doesn't exist.)

That's why the only name left for this new, left-over planet is Xena. Honestly. That might even be worse than Sedna, which was named after an Eskimo god. If we had only saved our names, these planets could be called something decent. But we wasted them on lame-0 asteroids. Now the only thing to do is to blow these planets up. We have the technology, we just need to put it to use. It will save us grief, in the long run.

Update!!!!
Some people would say this article was a gaffe, because I wrote it the day before Pluto became Not A Planet (and so did Ceres, Charon and Xena). I say no, I got it in just on time. I got to expose you to my Important Ideas at the last possible moment before they became useless. Now I have the cachet of having been there. If I had kept my theories about planets to myself until Pluto was out of the woods, they would be dead weight now. As it is, they're down on paper, the time stamp is plain for all to see, and nobody can take that away from me, not even the International Astonomers Union.