Exactly! I wish they had the rest of the planets, but I'm guessing that they chose Jupiter (biggest, most popular, most exotic planet other than Earth) and Pluto (because it was in the news a lot back then). Maybe they thought Uranus and Neptune would be too boring, since there isn't much to see there that's interesting (other than the Great Blue Spot).
How about a different random fact: I started working on a fanfic on November 1 last year, and have not missed a day of adding to it since then (just finished adding another 25,582 words in April, for Camp NaNoWriMo). It's a very long project that outgrew the original intention. I expect it to take a couple of years to finish.
I wrote a fanfic and posted it in the appropriate forum here. Fortunately, it has since vanished into the ether and I didn't keep a copy, so no one will ever have to read it again.
Actually, that's kind of too bad. I wrote a fanfic for my high school science fiction literature class on paper but I did transfer it to my old Apple IIc. All of it...the paper and information, is all gone and I wish I could go back and read it. Oh, it would be horrible, but I wish I could at least take a look at my old work.
After my story is finished, edited, proofread, etc. it will be posted online. Mind you, that won't be soon. And it's not going to be until it's done. It's so annoying when people don't finish the stories they start - get a reader hooked, and suddenly there's no more story.
As a kid, I did a lot of theater, which all began, when my 8th grade English teacher assigned us to read aloud our reports, and mine were deliberately... eccentric. She entered me in a series of about 4 state wide literature recitals that year. Having never done them before, all four times I placed 1st or 2nd for my category, through a loophole, because the gist was that each speech had to be from an established piece of literature. So the kids usually read from preselected monologues The stuff my teacher wanted me to do was mostly from more comedic Mark Twain excerpts (Which in hindsight were good choices mind you) I tried that stuff, but being so young, & new at it, I just never really connected with the material, such that I could perform it. After finding out that the only stipulation for the material was that it had to be from legitimate literature, I basically told the teacher, "Look, if you want me to try this, you're going to have to let me find some material I can connect with, or it's never going come out naturally" She hesitantly agreed, making sure to emphasize that it had to be from legitimate literature, and if it wasn't from preselected monologues etc... I'd have to supply the source text. So I went out & bought Bill Cosby's book "Himself" Which was simply a random collection of his standup routines, rearranged & edited to fill book pages, & I basically put on what was probably the best Bill Cosby impersonation a 13 year old kid ever did, & the crowd ate it up. I was a crafty little shit lol Kind of a bittersweet memory now, given what's become of that man
I also wrote a fanfic. Two, actually, though one I never finished. Maybe I'll return to it; reviewers keep begging me to. Writing fanfiction was exactly like having sex for the first time: fun and pleasurable while simultaneously embarrassing and awkward. Both my fanfics are on fanfiction.net, and both got a lot of good reviews (I think because I have a basic grasp of the English language). If you want, you can slog through the hundreds of thousands of fanfics to see if you can find mine. Also, Chrome browser spellcheck recognizes "fanfic" but not "fanfiction". Just thought I'd share.
When I was 16, over 30 years ago (Yeesh) I took a real looking toy musket cap gun, that my dad had gotten in the Alamo gift shop, and unwittingly walked that son of a gun, fully visible, right through the front door of my high school, strolled on down to the auditorium, and dropped it off with all the other props, for the school musical Oklahoma. (Granted, I was early & the halls were still mostly empty) About 20-30 minutes later, the vice principal came to my class, whispered with my teacher a second or two, they brought me just outside of the classroom door, and he asked, very conversationally, "This is going to sound weird, but one of the faculty said they saw you carrying a rifle into school today?" I said "Oh that? Yeaaaah, that's just a toy I brought in to use as a prop for the school musical" The VP said "OOOHHHH!..... Well, that makes sense". You know what happened after that? N o t h i n g. We had a good laugh, he told me to check with them next time, & I went back to class. The end. For those of you keeping score at home... This is the world we USE to live in.
Yep, I'd have gotten trouble for some of the theatre props I used to carry around in public (guns, knives, swords, an axe). But I was in charge of borrowing, making, and buying props, and since I didn't drive, I'd have to tote this stuff around on the bus. That was back in the '80s, when you could still do stuff like that and nobody assumed you were about to commit mass murder. No cop ever stopped me, although the head of the college Board of Directors did wonder why I was running off with one of the college's mesh garbage cans (we needed one for a production of West Side Story; it called for that specific style of garbage can and the college was the only place I knew of that had one that was portable and lightweight enough to use in a dance/fight scene). I told him that I had written permission to borrow it for the duration of the play (rehearsal time plus performances and a little leeway to let me bring it back); everything was documented and they would have it back a day or two after the show closed. So he said okay, went to his car, and I took the garbage can home with me on the bus.
I didn't hear a cat purr until I was 12. I was really sad and crying in a chair, my Grandmother had just died and the cat got on my lap, I sat and petted it over and over and then it purred. I was scared, I thought the cat was sick. I told my dad the cat is making odd noises, he touched the cat and said, it is purring. It is content. We always had dogs and I never really was around cats. From then on I was a cat lover
After finally bother to look up what they are, it turns out that yes, I do enjoy piña coladas and getting caught in the rain.
After living my whole life in the "Sunshine State" I'm finding that I'm starting to enjoy rainy days more. Maybe I should move to Seattle.
Random fact: I ran for class president in my senior year of high school, just because I wanted to be a spoiler. I've always hated the 2 party duopoly, & our school imitated it perfectly, by having the same 2 people jockey for offices, the entire time. One was the captain of the cheerleading squad (We'll call her Miss Popularity) & the other was "Community organizer" guy, handsome, persuasive, track/gymnastics/swimming athlete. (We'll call him Mr. Prom King) I however, was none of those things. I was the wiseass, who hung around the band room with the potheads, or showed up being a ham in the school plays. I & a friend conned the staff into letting us read the daily AM announcements, over the PA, which much to their dismay, we turned into a comedy act, & the only reason they didn't kick us off, was because the students loved it enough to keep petitioning for us, & we never really cross the line. Me & him secretly organized the theft of the school mascot (A great story for another time) I wasn't popular (Too fucking ASD to be social enough for that) but people knew who I was, & I calculated that I had just enough name value to make waves at least once. That was my only goal, to upset the cart, this last time. I got along fine with Mr. Prom King & Miss Popularity ordinarily, as was my S.O.P. trying to just get along with everybody, make 'em laugh, even though they all thought I was weird, but the 2 of them? fucking despised one another. It was just ripe for the plucking lol I ran a shock & awe campaign, reminiscent of a flashy third party upset. Think Ross Perot, & it was around that time. The national climate was clamoring for 3rd party, & I was playing to that. I just did it like any other show, which neither of them could do. I didn't play their game of being social gods. I made them play mine, & they stumbled through it badly. Nobody was ready for it. The stump speeches, the debates, the rallies. I just blasted through there like I was playing Howard Stern in a movie, & everybody ate it up, no matter how empty it all truly was. I'd have the crowds roaring, & just flooded the place with propaganda, cuz I thought it was funny. As time went on, it became painfully obvious that the faculty disapproved of me making it a farce, and that kids might vote for me just for the chaos. Only one teacher ever commented on my campaign to me, & he was the 70 year old social studies teacher, (Who had once been the civics teacher) He complimented me on it, & that meant a lot to me, because he was otherwise one of the meanest teachers in the whole school, & hadn't ever even spoken to me before that. That let me know I was having an impact all the way up to the top. They made a big deal about school elections. They considered it educational. They'd publicize it for weeks, up to the day. Then they'd take students out of class & teachers would escort them to actual old skool voting booths, with levers and whatnot, & make it like a real election, but not this time. This time they stopped playing up the election. They cancelled some of our speeches, & rallies, for "Reasons". They pushed back the election day a couple times, until generally, everybody had forgotten about it. Then one day, I came in & some kid told me "Today is election day. You have to go down to the auditorium during your lunch hour to vote". It was the perfect sabotage, because as I said, I'm not social really. My appeal was to the mob, not the individual voters, & now the candidates had to rally in the final hour, person by person. In the end, voter turn out went down from like 80 or 90% the previous year, to like 20%. The cheerleader beat me by like a couple dozen votes or some shit lol. I spent weeks after that with kids asking me when the election was going to be. It was the single most fulfilling & educational life experience I'd ever gotten in 12 years of public school, because I managed to shake the system up so much, that it drew grown adult faculty members to corruption, & the funniest part of all, what they couldn't know, is that no matter how shallow my campaign might have looked, if I had gotten elected, I'd have tried to do a good job. I mean it's a stupid student body position. How hard could it have really been? They just didn't want me to have it, so ultimately though they got the last word, I got all the amusement from it that I had wanted, because it outed them. That lesson has shaped my perspective of the political landscape ever since. If teachers can't be trusted with their own students, what does that say about the real electoral process?