Monday, Aug. 21, 2006 | The Pluto Files I HAVE been marveling all weekend about the fact that some astronomers want to take the definition of a planet back to 1846, the year Neptune was discovered. That, basically, would be the effect of declaring Pluto "not a planet." It would mean that the last thing that was a planet dates to before Abe Lincoln. But more than that, I've been tripping out on the jackass editorial from The New York Times last week. Here is what the Voice of God had to say: "Pluto, discovered in 1930, never deserved to be called a planet. It is far smaller than first thought, smaller in fact than our own moon. Its orbit is more elliptical and tilted in a different plane than those of the other planets, and its icy, rocky body is more like a comet’s core. If Pluto were discovered today, it seems highly unlikely that anyone would consider it a planet. But Pluto has emotional partisans who resent anyone picking on the puniest planet, so efforts to demote it invariably meet resistance." Ah yes, it would appear that a Times editorial writer just happens to be an expert on planetary science. I am sure if he has a map of Africa for the days when he's a geography expert, it's the kind that says "unexplored" across half of it. Then the piece goes on about how ridiculous it is for astronomers to be going through the bother of making new classifications and categories (something that you really need to do when you find out, after lots of work, that we have half a million things orbiting the Sun): "When the astronomical union votes on the matter next week, it ought to reject the new definition and summon the courage to scratch Pluto from the list of planets." I mean, gee whiz guys. Go get an astrology reading! You will get the picture -- you don't fuck with Pluto! You will find out that Pluto is the planet of evolution, and what you are doing, basically, is denying just precisely that. (By the way, I just checked and Pluto is exactly square the natal Sun of The New York Times, to the degree.) It's the equivalent of fundamentalist Christians claiming the dinosaurs lived 7,000 years ago (right around when the Grand Canyon was formed) to match the creation myth in the Bible. What next? We should dump the "theory" of evolution because it has too many contradictions and suggests that Adolph Ochs, your great publisher from the turn of the century, descended from the apes? I have been a loyal reader of your newspaper since I was a teenager. I've read some bad editorials on your pages and I've read really some good ones. My Aunt Josie, who never got out of grade school, learned to read, I mean really read, by studying the Times every day. I still love you for publishing the Pentagon Papers. I deeply appreciate that you put my journalism career on the map. Hey, you guys even did an editorial about one of my articles! We go back a heck of a long way. So pardon me for calling names, it's not my usual style, but I never dreamed in all my life that the anonymous, esteemed writers of your editorials, who come from places like Harvard and Columbia universities and NYU would come up with something so boldly asinine...so witlessly ignorant...so astronomically arrogant...so lost on the 44th floor behind 12 security checkpoints...as this. Here's another quote, it's just so damned precious, I can't get over it: "Under the new definition, a planet would be any celestial body that orbits around a star and is large enough for its own gravity to pull it into a spherical shape. That definition would produce an ugly porridge of 12 old and new planets, with dozens more on the way." An ugly porridge? Ummm...porridge? Don't you mean plum pudding? Even if we just go out to Neptune, we're still left with a toasted, crater-pitted chunk of stone, an ammonia bomb with a rock in the middle, a water-covered rock with the rest covered by 7-Elevens, a big desert where something horrid went down a few eons ago, a blob of gas with 93 moons buzzing around it that wobbles the Sun, and three more blobs of gas that you couldn't walk around on if you were Apollo himself. Talk about a bunch of choices that would blow the mind of any kid playing "one of these things doesn't belong here" on Sesame Street. Given all this, the cute little Pluto/Charon system is a nice addition to the collection. They conclude: "All this just to keep Pluto as a planet. Whatever merit the new definition may have scientifically, it is an abomination culturally." An abomination? Oy God. You must mean...like Jackie Robinson. So, yes, the solution is...we not only go back to the horse and buggy days, when astronomers peered into one end of the telescope and out the other, scribbling with a quill pen, donning mutton chops, eating mutton chops for that matter, and puffing on pipes...when they would have laughed hysterically at you if, visiting from the future, you described the Hubble Space Telescope...no, not just that...we stop progress altogether. I'll have more to say as the week moves along, and we'll be watching developments in Prague closely with Google News Alerts perked up as the vote on the status of Pluto approaches. But for now, I leave it to you: Saturn and Neptune are mere days away from exact opposition. What does that say for the established order?