Outa-space

I would know more about the planets if they had had school at night when I was a kid. What with all the time I spent staring outside through the windows and up at the sky, you have to figure I would have learned something about the planets that revolve around us, or we revolve around, however that works.  

I guarantee you, there are third graders who know more about the stars and planets than I do.  Which is fine by me.  As long as I know the moon is not made of green cheese and no cow can jump over it, I'm just fine.  (The way to figure what sort of arc a steer or bull would need to use to jump over the moon can be figured out by using Cowculus.)

But it was interesting to pick up the paper the other day and read that NASA says they have discovered an unprecedented number of planets beyond our solar system. There are 1,284 new little worlds out there orbiting around the stars.

And each of them has a cable company, a phone company, and two political parties vying for power.

One of these items is the space telescope
with a price of $225 million.  The other
is a air ionizer for your home...price is
$225.  Please choose wisely

They call these distant points "exoplanets" and they were discovered by peeping through NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which has been up there circling around since 2009...on your dime, I might add.

"When NASA decided to build and launch the Kepler Space Telescope, we did not know if exoplanets — especially small, rocky exoplanets — were common or rare in the galaxy," says Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. "We now know that exoplanets are common, that most stars in our galaxy have planetary systems, and that a reasonable fraction of the stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets."

If I ever go back on the radio, I might use the fake name "Rocky Exoplanet." 

All this stuff going on millions and millions of miles away, and all I want is to take a boat ride to Cuba to see a 1953 Plymouth in action.