{"id":1346,"date":"2011-01-27T12:33:26","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T18:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/?p=1346"},"modified":"2011-01-27T12:33:26","modified_gmt":"2011-01-27T18:33:26","slug":"the-far-side-of-the-solar-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/2011\/01\/the-far-side-of-the-solar-system\/","title":{"rendered":"The Far Side of the Solar System"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tuesday, 25 January 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

A few years ago, my wife found The Far Side Gallery 3<\/em> on sale at the local Goodwill. She wisely decided to buy it. Within the month, she also found The Far Side Gallery 1<\/em>. I think this was back in early 2008.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I just have to mention that these are just about the funniest comics I have ever read. For a few years in the late 1990s, my wife and I subscribed to the newspaper, and I always turned to the comics section. Turns out, that’s a big waste of time, since there really aren’t any funny comics. I mean, Peanuts was cute and sometimes it made me laugh. And (verrry rarely) I would get a laugh out of Ziggy. But most of that other garbage was just that. I couldn’t figure out how the comic creators had managed to get themselves published in major newspapers considering how un-comedic their ‘comics’ were.<\/p>\n

Oh well. The only thing we use newspaper for now is to line the floor under the litter box.<\/p>\n

Anyway, today I received The Far Side Gallery 4<\/em> and Gallery 5<\/em> in the mail via Amazon. Apart from Dilbert and Peanuts, the Far Side<\/a> is the only comic strip worth reading. And, evidently, owning.<\/p>\n

Wednesday, 26 January 2011<\/strong><\/p>\n

Today I gave my second speech in the Toastmasters’ Club.<\/p>\n

The format was a little different this time. Instead of the usual one hour meeting during the lunch hour, we held a two hour speech-a-thon at the end of the day. There were eleven assigned speeches, and mine was tenth in line.<\/p>\n

The title of my speech was “What Happened to Pluto?” I covered three main points:<\/p>\n

1) How did Pluto change during the first 80 years after we discovered it?<\/p>\n

2) What unusual characteristics does Pluto have?<\/p>\n

3) What, exactly, does the word “planet” mean, and why doesn’t Pluto qualify?<\/p>\n

For the first item, I gave a brief history of Pluto and how our increasing knowledge of that world meant a gradual decrease in its known mass. For the second item, I explained Pluto’s weird orbit and how similar in size it is to Charon<\/a>. For the third item, I discussed the IAU’s 2006<\/a> “clarification” of the word “planet” and why that spelled downsizing for Pluto.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tuesday, 25 January 2011 A few years ago, my wife found The Far Side Gallery 3 on sale at the local Goodwill. She wisely decided to buy it. Within the month, she also found The Far Side Gallery 1. I think this was back in early 2008. Anyway, I just have to mention that these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1353,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions\/1353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zimmerscope.com\/Verbisaurus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}