Xena: You can’t get to here from there.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has found the “tenth planet” which is being called “Xena,” for the warrior princess, no doubt. NASA says that Xena is only slightly larger than Pluto, has a longer tail than Mickey Mouse and talks only slightly more intelligible than Donald Duck. The space agency is not speaking about what they found up in Uranus.
Seriously though, Hubble showed Xena as having a diameter of 1,490 miles, give or take 60 miles, which is about 70-some-odd miles more than Pluto. Xena, according to NASA, is about 10 billion miles from Earth with its diameter being about half the width of the United States. It is bright and thought by scientists to be one of the most reflective objects in the solar system. NASA said the bright reflectivity of Xena could be because of “fresh methane frost on its surface.” And you know what that means? Yep, cows have been there breaking wind. Which could have caused an ice age. Don’t ask me how because I just made that up.
Other interesting facts about Xena include:
On May 6, 1997, according to Wikipedia, Lucy Lawless who played Xena Warrior Princess exposed her breasts (resulting from a wardrobe malfunction–yeah, we’ve heard that one before) while singing the U.S. national anthem at a National Hockey League game in Anaheim, Calif. between the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim and the Detroit Red Wings. Lawless later said in “Newsweek:” “I was mortified … It was quite a bit more exposure than I want.”
Speaking of interesting Xena facts, a nice woman I dated once named Marilyn Rucker has a great song called: “If I could be like Xena.”
“If I could be like Xena
A feisty warrior princess
I’d scream my ululations
While I slice and dice and minces”
When I say I dated her once, I mean one time. We were in Addison, Texas, and we went to see “Enemy Mine” at the movies. A summary of the 1985 movie starring Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett Jr.:
“A soldier from Earth crash-lands on an alien world after sustaining battle damage. Eventually he encounters another survivor, but from the enemy species he was fighting; they band together to survive on this hostile world. In the end the human finds himself caring for his enemy in a completely unexpected way.”
I can’t remember if they landed on Xena.
Marilyn, who now lives in Austin, reminded me by e-mail that we went to see some sci-fi movie. Then I later regained some of my memory and recalled it was “Enemy Mine.” As I was writing this, I was having trouble accessing Marilyn’s Web site. I have provided the link with the hope that you can check it out. She really writes some hysterically funny songs.