(Roughly) Daily

From Foreign Policy, “Even Better Than the Real Thing: The 10 best fake Twitter feeds on global politics.”

@KermlinRussia

The bizarro-world Dmitry Medvedev (in Russian)

“Governors need to have more children so that the country will have more successful young entrepreneurs.”

As we grab our laughs in 140-character hunks, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that news flew (by radio and cable) around the world that astronomer Clyde Tombaugh had discovered (what was then considered) the ninth planet in our solar system.  The Lowell Observatory, Tombaugh’s site, had naming rights– and received over 1,000 recommendations.  They finally settled on “Pluto,” the suggestion of an eleven-year-old school girl from Oxford, Venetia Burney, who proposed the name of the god of the underworld (as appropriate to such a cold, dark place) to her grandfather, Falconer Madan, Librarian at the Bodleian Library; Madan passed it on to Professor Herbert Hall Turner, who in turn cabled it to colleagues in the U.S.  It was formally adopted on March 24…  each member of the Observatory staff voted on a list of three finalists:  Minerva (which was already the name of an asteroid), Cronus (which suffered for being the nominee of the unpopular astronomer Thomas Jefferson Jackson See), and Pluto. Pluto received every vote.

 Clyde Tombaugh (source)

 Venetia Burney (source)

 Pluto (source)