When I was young, my mother taught me to remember the planets using:
Mary’s Violet Eyes Make John Stay Up Nights.
I asked where Pluto fit into that sentence. She thought for a second and said “Period!” 
I’m happy with the decision. The solar system feels a bit less crowded today, don’t you think? I think the teeth-gnashing was to be expected, and will die down quite swiftly. Sentimentality should have no place in science.
But my view of the universe has changed! It’s hard to take. I can handle the discovery of new planets…that’s increasing our knowledge of the universe. But downgrading one? It’s realizing that science makes mistakes, and I’m sorry, but if pi turns out to have an end I’m going to have to go lie down.
Now I can see why Corpurnicus and Galileo and all them were labeled as heretics. It’s hard wrapping your mind around something that was drilled into your head from third grade science is now wrong.
Give me a couple of days, okay? I need to mourn the passing of Pluto from the ranks of Planets. 
Won’t you all please think of the Palanians! With Pluto demoted to “dwarf planet,” where will they live in our solar system? These are methane breathers who live near absolute zero, and now we have no appropriate terrestrial-grade planets of the right frigid temperature for them to dwell on!
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos.
I find it very distubing that They can just… deplanetize a planet.
Well, they did planetize it in the first place.
It’s kinda like the old Bill Cosby routine. When he used to tell his kids: “I brought you in this world, and I can take you out!”
No need to be so melodramatic. Nothing about our knowledge of Pluto or science has changed at all. We’re just calling it something different. It’s not like we discovered Pluto is made of Jello or something. Whether it’s a planet or KBO or dwarf planet doesn’t change the fact that it’s still Pluto, and still mysterious and awesome. I’ve been a big fan of Pluto since 3rd grade when I did a report on it, while everyone else chose easy popular planets. I’m absolutely psyched about the New Horizons mission. It just works better that it’s not a planet. Instead of being the small fry, it’s one of the biggest things in its own domain, the Kuiper Belt. It belongs with its own kind!
Ditto. I always thought of the planets in our system as something special. I think they’re going to find dozens if not hundreds of bodies in hydrostatic equilibrium in the Kuiper belt in the next few decades. It kind of dulls the concept of a planet if you ask me.
And why do people need a mnemonic to remember 8 planets? I remembered 9 when I was 5 or 6 years old without a nmemonic. I could probably list them in order of size when I was 7 or 8. Sure, I’ve always been an astronomy geek, but there really isn’t that much to memorize in this case.
Well, crud. They removed the dwarf planets from the list since I made the mnemonic. But AFAIK it’s still okay for both planets and dwarf planets.
Ironically, it’s starting to look like this might be the best answer. I was reading an article where an astronomer was objecting to the definition, and he was saying that the requirement about “clearing the neighborhood of its orbit” is patently absurd, because there are asteroids all throughout the solar system, including some near Earth (Cruithne, anyone?), so you really can’t say that any planet has “cleared its neighborhood.” It looks like they were grasping for some reason why Pluto and Ceres shouldn’t be planets, and that was the best they could do.
Really, I wouldn’t mind so much, except that they seem to be insisting that dwarf planets are not planets. Think about that for a second. Would you say that your cellular phone is not a phone? Would you say that a toy poodle is not a poodle? So why are they insisting that a dwarf planet is not a planet? It just seems so… mean-spirited.
Am I the only one thinking that this is *really *gonna piss off the Astrologers?
Oooh, angry Astrologers backed by a legion of wrathful Scorpios who no longer have an associated planet. It’d make for a marvellous book concept. I can just imagine the bit where they storm the world’s great observatories … and their brutal terrorist acts with incense and aromatherapy.
But it seems to me that Cruithne and the various other asteroids are in some sort of orbital linkage with the planets, whereas the same can’t be said of Pluto and the other Kuiper belt objects, much like Ceres and the rest of the asteroid belt.
Well, because of this, I’m adding a new promise to my 2028 Presidential campaign: To restore Pluto’s true “planet” status. I’ll do this by tasking NASA to attach huge rockets to the other “dwarf planets,” and slamming them into Pluto to correct it’s orbit, and add a bit of mass to it. The traditionalists come away happy, and I don’t undermine astrophysics by arbitarily rewriting scientific definitions…I’ll do it by arbitarily rewriting the universe.
This project will also take care of my “Make Work” and nuclear disarmament plans, I think.
Remember—Vote for Ranchoth in '28: “Don’t Neglect Ecology, Dominate It.”
James
Simply
Never
Much
Understood
Mindless
Violent
Exercise
Which is the how we were taught at school with Pretty sandwiched between never and much
Well i sure screwed up that coding :smack:
“I’m tellin’ ya’–Pluto should be right there, but all I read on the sensors is Trans-Neptunian debris…I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
“If you only knew the POWER of the IAU!”
There is precedent for this, though. They deplanetized a whole mess of planets back in the 19th century. (And back then they didn’t even have nuclear weapons or anything like that, either.)
Why? Just because Texas is a planet (well, thinks it is, anyway…) all other new States have to be planets, as well? 
More seriously, add me to the “Pluto should never have been a planet” crowd. Justice is served (even if it’s with a side dish of some extremely unclear reasoning :smack: )
OK, so let’s fuck 'em in a way they don’t enjoy. I can offer an ex-bf who would have bored a mink…
I’m naming my next dwarf in RPG’s Pluto. Or maybe I’ll make twins: Pluto and Charon.
My Very Excellent Man Just Showed Us Non-Pluto
I’ve always just remembered M.VEM JSUN’P. It’s weird, yes, but it works pretty well for me. And it’s pretty much the same now: M’VEM JSUN.