PLUTO DESPONDENT AFTER DOWNGRADE, SAYS SPACE SHRINK

Rejected planet Pluto appears to be growing more despondent since its summary dismissal by a world scientific body; "May even be considering planetary suicide," says astropsychologist...

Imagine how you'd feel if you'd been nothing special all those billions of years since the beginning of the universe, just an unrecognized blob with no special status in space, then all at once in what is for some reason called 1930 you're a planet, named after the Greek god of wealth, or death, depending - whatever 'Greek, ' 'god,' 'wealth' or 'death' mean, but still - and your picture is in all the science books on that little blue blur of a planet where for 75 years or so you're everybody's little planet-friend out there on the edge of their solar system, your image there on all the sky charts and zooming around in all the planetariums, right up there among the stars, and then one day in what is called 2006, after a meeting of academics BAM, you're nobody-- even worse, you never were anybody, just a mistake, a wannabe, the laughingstock of a solar system... You might just drift off in search of a more hospitable solar system, one that respects the efforts of its members...

"Being abruptly stripped of your astronomic status that way by a scientific body on a blue dot of a planet much closer to the sun can actually be quite traumatic, even for a fringe body in solar orbit," says astrological psychologist Stella Parseck. "And then on top of that to be called a dwarf-- that could easily push a small, unwanted planet over the edge. Though no one knows about these things, really, I'm definitely getting far-out vibrations that Pluto could, in the shock of rejection, do the unthinkable and seek another orbit, which as we all know would be tantamount to planetary suicide-- heading for the great beyond, in earthly terms. Pluto might be much happier afterward, perhaps orbiting a distant sun surrounded by more friendly planets populated by more amenable academicians, but of course when we speak of the stars we can never be certain, can we..."