Stop and Smell the Corpses

This is a corpse flower, a titan arum, at the Milwaukee Public Museum. It's claim to fame, aside from being probably one of the very very few in America, is that not only does it take six years from seed to bloom, but when it blooms it smells like... you guessed it, a corpse. A corpse that you can smell from miles away.

The article The webcam

Poor Pluto...

I was reading an FAQ about the MESSENGER, the spacecraft currently buzzing by Mercury right now, and I got a little sad...

"9. How big is Mercury?
Mercury’s diameter is 4,880 kilometers (3,032 miles), roughly 38 percent of Earth’s diameter. Mercury is the smallest planet in the solar system. For comparison: If Earth were the size of a baseball, Mercury would be the size of a golf ball." (emphasis added.)

It was weird seeing Mercury mentioned as the smallest planet. Don't worry Pluto, you'll always be the 9th planet to me.