Who gets hate mail from 3rd graders? This is who.

Vis a vis my previous post about the day that Pluto got moved to the baby table, here is an interview Jon Stewart did with Neil deGrasse Tyson, the one who put the nail in Pluto's planetary coffin.

The Guy Who Did Pluto In

Pretty damn funny.

Pluto's Raw Deal

Speaking about space travel . . .Now I don’t know too much about Pluto. I’m no expert or anything but I will tell you this. I’ve taken a shine to Pluto. My son likes Pluto, ergo I like Pluto. And what’s not to like? It’s tiny, and freezing cold and oh-so-far away from our dear planet. It’s got a great name that rolls trippingly off the tongue. Pluto is a damn crowd pleaser. Even Aldrin agreed when we saw him this weekend.

So why’d they de-frock it, I want to know.

Honestly, I’m peeved about what seems to me a rather sudden and reckless decision to cut Pluto off the planet circuit. I mean, who gets to decide that? NASA? Planetary specialists? Don’t we get a vote? I grew up with Pluto and I’m sentimental about it. My son has plans to start a restaurant on Pluto one day. I don’t like to hear his dreams of becoming a outer-planetary conquistador/ entrepreneur diminished by Pluto’s de-frocking.

I mean, I went to special lengths to find Primo a solar system-themed lunchbox for the first day of Kindergarten, and when I bring it home and scrutinize it, guess who’s conspicuously absent?

You better believe Mars is there, because hey, everyone loves Mars. And Venus, sure – she’s not going anywhere. Saturn's a shoe-in. Who gets kicked off the planetary team? The underdog, of course. Typical.

In our house, under my watch, Pluto always counts. If you agree, you may enjoy this T-shirt, (thanks M, devoted follower, for the tip).

Nobody puts Pluo in the corner.

At least, that’s what I say.

The Buzz on Buzz

This weekend we met Buzz Aldrin. That’s right, the astronaut. Pretty frickin’ cool. He was giving a talk and then signing his new book Look to the Stars at the best children’s bookstore in the universe, Books of Wonder. I love Books of Wonder more than I feel is normal (but not more than is merited).

First, it carries an incredibly impressive array of kids’ books; all the standards, for sure – there’s a whole section including everything Sendak ever wrote and/ or illustrated, and more Eric Carle than you thought imaginable – and then all these fantastic indie books you would never find and Barnes and Nobles, like this really innovative and fun book we found, What’s Wrong With This Book? And one of my favorites Roger, the Jolly Pirate (both of which I bought during their crazy annual 75%-off-great-books sale).

The second reason I love Books of Wonder is that inside this incomparable book sanctuary is the Cupcake Café. Now, I have a longstanding love affair with the Cupcake Café which started about 20 years ago when my aunt had me go over to their little shop on 9^th Ave to pick up a birthday cake which was covered with sunflowers that rivaled Van Gogh’s. The cupcakes are far from the city’s best (I could start a whole blog devoted just to that subject) but they are stunning. And they are also cupcakes. Cupcakes are like pizza – even when it’s not so great, it’s pretty great. Notice I did not say the same about sex. Not-so-great sex is really not so great.

Back to Buzz Aldrin. Primo has been fascinated with outer space of late, particularly Pluto. So we hit BOW, where after 15 minutes of squatting in a tiny corner of the room where we could in no way see Buzz much less hear him clearly, we opted to just eat a cupcake and wait to get our book signed.

We ate cupcakes. Read Adam Rex’s Pssst (genius) The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, The Circus is Coming by Hilary Knight, Mummy Never Told Me by Babette Cole (love her but thought it was going to be about Halloween mummies and found it freaked me out a bit) and a hundred other books. We finally went up to Buzz Aldrin who is a funny and dapper white-haired man with a lot more vigor than I’ve got and a great booming voice. Primo was too shy so I told Buzz about his dream of starting a restaurant on Pluto.

“Its cooooold on Pluto,” he laughed. How could you not like the guy?

Then on the way home in the car– after Shake Shack Burgers and romping around the Madison Square Park – the kids were yelling and hitting each other and demanding shit like they were the Kind of Queen of England and David looked at me in a very beleaguered way and said:

“I don’t get it. I work all week and then devote my entire weekend to providing these children with leisure and

pleasure ----“

He couldn’t finish because I burst out laughing. He’s totally right. We bust our asses night and day to not only care for but enrich and divert these little suckers and this is the thanks we get? But the idea of children having leisure, man, that cracked me up, Leisure from what? Those long days of picking berries til their little fingerpads are raw? Selling matches on the street, barefoot?

Leisure! I’m still laughing/

What do you want to be when you grow up?

By the time I was my Seconda’s age, my mother had drummed it into my head that there was only one appropriate response to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and that was “Physician.” Not even “doctor,” mind you, since I guess that’s too broad a term, under whose umbrella might fall (God forbid!) getting a Ph.D. No, I was going to be a “physician.” We all see how fruitful my mother’s programming was. I literally cannot tell you the difference between a liver and a kidney, except that you have two kidneys so they probably aren’t as important.

Because I am nothing like my mother (please see “You sound like your mother”), I have never given the children the slightest hint as to what I’d like to see them doing twenty, thirty years down the line. (Except of course, that I expect them to be living next door to me, and that’s a deal-breaker, non-negotiable). In fact, one of my favorite things to hear them talk about is their delightfully half-baked, wildly improbable future employment trajectory. I think my kids would write their generation’s “What Color is Your Parachute?”

So it gives me extreme pleasure to announce to you their most recent career aspirations. And since everything sounds a little more impressive in haiku form, I have masterfully modified their quotes to fit.

Primo, the entrepreneur

When I grow up I
Will open a restaurant
On Pluto -“Moonies.”

Seconda, the hedonist

When I grow up, I
Am going to eat gum and
Have an elephant.

And you, readers? What were your most deeply-felt or hare-brained career aspirations as a kid?