They may not be the first all-girl band of hard-rockin' babes from Okinawa Japan to grace the stage at Amoeba Music in San Francisco but hear me now, believe me later when I say that the Stereopony live instore performance going down at 6pm next Monday night, April 9th, is going to be an affair to remember!

Having made their major debut in 2008, Stereopony has gained a great deal of notoriety by having their songs featured as themes for various commercials, television shows and anime series, most notably their fifth single "Tsukiakari no Michishirube" doing double time as the opener for Darker Than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini. Employing catchy melodic rock hooks reminiscent of the whole high school à la Brat Pack zeitgeist met with more than a dash of mid-to-late 1990's pop-punk angst (i.e. their live sets sometimes reveal a Green Day cover) it's impossible to imagine a

Check out the video below for "Hanbunko" to see what all the fuss is about and don't forget to grab a copy of Stereopony's latest release, More! More!! More!!!, when you drop by for the live Stereopony in-store performance at Amoeba Music's SF location on Monday, April 9th. That's right folks, Amoeba Music is the place to see live music, why? Because it's always fab and always free of charge, no tickets required; did it on'em.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the demotion of Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet." 

PLUTO



Pluto was first discovered in 1930. Part of the reason it was accepted as a planet was due to the fact that despite some behavior not fitting a proper planet it was assumed to be larger than Mercury unti l1978, when its moon, Charon, was discovered, revealing that the mass of Pluto was much smaller than had been thought... roughly a twentieth the mass of Mercury. Two more orbiting objects, Nix and Hydra, were discovered in 2005. S/2011 P 1 (aka P4) was discovered in 2011. 



Reaction to Pluto's re-designation was controversial, especially among young nerds who failed to see how going from the smallest planet in the solar system to largest known object in the Kuiper Belt could be viewed as a positive move. The New Mexico House of Representatives and Illinois State Senate passed ridiculous anti-scientific resolutions to continue recognizing Pluto as a planet.

PLUTONIC CARTOONS




Of the Trans-Neptunian Dwarf Objects, Pluto remains the most popular, if not the largest. In animation it's appeared in Cowboy Bebop, Futurama, Galaxy Express 999, Roughnecks -Starship Troopers Chronicles, Space Battleship Yamato, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, Super Dimensional Fortress Macross and The Magic School Bus.

A lot of people come up to me and say, "Love the blog, especially the ones about moons, planets and dwarf planets in film, music, video games, &c... so why haven't you done one on Mars?" Actually, no one said that and I just never did one until now because I figured it would be too much work. However, it turned out to be pretty manageable, so here we go on this, the two year anniversary of the discovery of water on Mars. So, the good news for me was that although Martians show up all over the place in films, mainly as invaders, we rarely ever see the planet or culture itself. This is primarily about Mars in film, not Martians.


O MIGHTY MARS!
Mars is named after the Roman god of war. He was the sun of Juno and Jupiter. He started out as a god of fertility, vegetation, cattle, fields, boundaries and farmers. Over time, he became the most prominent of the martial gods. As the father of Rome's founder, Romulus, he is the ancestor of all Romans.


BACKWARDS SIGNIFIER OF FIRE AND FLOW
Easily visible to the naked eye and recognizable for its reddish color, the planet named after the Roman god was an object of study and speculation for ancient Babylonians, Chinese, Dogon, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, and Mayan astronomers. To the Egyptians, the planet was Horus the Red, the backward traveler. To the Dogon, it was Yapunu toll, the planet of menstruation. To the Chinese, it was ruled by fire.

With Tron – Legacy, the sequel to a movie about video games, scheduled to open in theaters this coming December and Tron – Evolution, a video game based on a sequel of a movie about a video game scheduled for release in November, now seems like a perfect time to look at the Ouroboros-like nature of film and video games and film.

     

In the early 1980s, Hollywood still sometimes made films that weren’t re-makes, adaptations or sequels and before there were movies adapted from video and computer games, there were movies about video and computer games. Tron (1982) was the granddaddy of them all. The Wizard (1989), WarGames (1983), Joysticks (1983), Cloak and Dagger (1984) and The Last Starfighter (1984) soon followed.