Syndicated – Honk if you Love Pluto! Casual surveys such as this bumper sticker quote began springing up immediately following the International Astronomical Union’s decision to reverse itself when the definition of a ‘planet’ suddenly ousted Pluto. At the same time the bounds of our Solar System lurched significantly closer, it seems as if our imaginations about the boundlessness of space were suddenly more confined.
In 1930, the announcement of Pluto’s discovery was poetic and imaginative. Pluto was described as being, “black as coal, nearly dense as iron, [and] twice as dense as the heaviest earthly surface rocks.” Lofty names were suggested including that of the reigning King, the astronomer, Lowell, who located it, President Hoover and Minerva. The name of one of Saturn’s sons, Pluto, was the result.
The buzz and whir of telescopes and stunning calculations of mathematicians were set to play against the cold, dark night of space. From 1930, forward to our announcements of three new planets, Saturn, Uranus, Jupiter and Neptune collected a total of eighty-eight satellites and moons between them. Even Pluto gathered up Charon, Nix and Hydra as satellites. The frenzy and expansion of space was perfectly fitting.
The everyday man was encouraged to draw space in his imagination in his own likeness. No fantasy was too fantastic; Astrology proclaimed Pluto the mark of one’s inner truth or guidance. Pioneer 10 was designed to last for twenty-one months. It passed beyond Pluto’s orbit entering interstellar space eleven years after its launch. Defying its own design, its radio receiver crackled information back to Earth for nearly thirty years. Space was a thing of dreams and amazing facts and speeds and numbers and possibilities.
Pioneer 10 is now headed toward the constellation Taurus where it will pass the nearest star in that constellation in about two million years. The growth of a species depends on what room they have to grow. The energy created by the very idea that our Solar System was expanding still farther by the addition of three new Planets was electric in the minds of every net-surfer, space watcher movie-goer and day-dreamer. It seemed that the sky lifted; the rain storms in the day became smaller and more trivial and easier to bear.
The International Astrological Union announcement on a Friday that the following Monday would change the course of a thousand-thousand textbooks and the history of the future was humbling to conceive. The future’s potential would be greater than our own for we remembered when there were only nine planets! A greater Universe is exactly what civilizations and progress build for younger generations and we had done it in a weekend after 76 years since Pluto’s discovery and walking on the Moon and building space stations and crawling on Mars.
All those advances would seem like child’s play. Before we finished honeymooning the fantasies and re-writing the tasks we had in mind for the future generations, the same Union not only recalled the new wing of the Solar System, but their limitations ate into what we had long held dear. Pluto had suddenly been cast into the newly defined list of, “Dwarf Planets.” Inner truth and guidance be damned; a thousand-thousand textbooks would now be changed to reflect history filled with more hope and ambition than the future!
“Your Universe is smallish. We remember when there were nine planets.” And the future was boundless.
8.17 – In a heated and uneducated discussion about coffee, one of our
own Dinariusites referred to American Coffee as nothing more than “cups of colored water.” This off-handed slap in the face was tied in with her favoritism for Cuban Coffee and Cafe con Leche which are coffees made not with drip style grinds, but with espresso grinds.
Before we begin the in-your-face come back to this heathen’s comment, here’s an absolute perfect treat for you coffee lovers… We stumbled upon a mix of grinds that appeals to everyone who tries it, really. You’ll need a tablespoon of Maxwell House that we found in a green brick and a tablespoon of Pilon expresso coffee. The smooth brute that about 16oz of water yields through that mix is an eye-opening velvet-tongued cup ready for sugar, cream or nuthin’ at all…
Anyhow, what are cups of colored water throughout our lives anyway? Are they really things to be mocked and cast aside? Hardly – freeze the ones with an apple flavor and you get ice cubed popsicles like Mom used to make; wrap them for astronauts in aluminum foil and you get Capri Sun and who didn’t like that?; go on a road trip in the eighties and you brought Tang! Nature’s most bizarre DIY orange juice with an unmistakable flavor; “More Ovaltine, please!”; that killer jug with the happy mug – Kool Aid! oh yeah!; what of humming bird bird feeders filled with nothing more than water with sugar?
Not a culture in the World doesn’t celebrate some form of cocoa and/or caffine. A very nice and strange little website devoted entirely to FAQ’s about coffee and caffine is CoffeeFAQ.com Roasting enthusiasts have probably heard of SweetMaria’s.com It’s a funky little site that delivers a little too much information with very little visual appeal. No problem, the National Coffee Association has provided us with CoffeeScience.org
The science behind coffee is an overt attempt to justify why we drink so much of it. By ‘we,’ I refer to ‘humans.’ Coffee provides antioxidants, can be made into an energetic smoothie and seems to numb drinkers to pain as quoted here:
“Our recent research demonstrated that caffeine reduced the pain experienced during moderate-intensity cycling exercise,” explains Dr. Robert W. Motl, Director of the Exercise Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Also, your ‘cup of colored water’ can possibly protect against Type 2 diabetes! I mean, really, the list just goes on. For a drink that’s typically 98% water, any form of it has amazing effects on this magnificant species. That is, until you try to quit it; headaches from caffeine withdraw are mean and nasty things that only coffee can relieve.
The praise of computer users alone should be enough to humble our verbose little drip-coffee pooh-pooh’er. Musing of an espresso maker at the Text Analysis Developers Alliance; a coffee brewing computer by German computer and coffee lover, Rene G.; many tips on avoiding spy trouble where coffee and computers converge by IronGeek; Esther and Dory at the LinuxCaffe in Toronto.
Socially, coffee and tea are the civil things to do. Despite differences in people and cultures, everyone can come together over a cup of coffee putting judgments and reservations aside, if briefly. Hazelnut, chocolate, and vanilla flavors asail the senses and stomp out most of what separates cultures. That’s only to be exected, after all, aren’t we homo sapiens just big bags of colored water?
Only after the third revision do we hear what great pun Bluetooth’s creators enjoyed. Danish King, Harald Blåtand inadvertently loaned his initials to the Bluetooth logo. Where Blåtand negotiated between warring parties, Bluetooth negotiates between otherwise incompatible devices with no shared standard other than the Bluetooth standard. Harald Blåtand was remarkably advanced, eh? Hardly. Many sources put his birth in the year 911!
an ear piece to work in Hong Kong as well as Miami, Florida. Microchips of assigned devices are immediately recognized on set-up.
The clever chasers at 
