Planet Fitness not an Official Planet

Portland, Maine, April 2, 2008 – In an unexpected press release this morning, scientists at the National Convention of Scientific Science Dudes announced that Planet Fitness is not actually a true planet.

“Wow. I never actually went there, so I always thought it was a planet,” Astronomer Lucky Stars said. “First Pluto, now Planet Fitness. The next thing you know we are going to discover that Planet Hollywood isn’t a planet either, just another over-hyped, over-priced, tacky tourist trap run by a bunch of B-list actors.”

Planet Fitness has officially been downsized to a dwarf gym.

The tough decision made this week at the convention comes after a multiyear search for a scientific definition of the word “planet.” The term never had an official meaning before, but its casual definition known to most people was “a big round thing that has a bunch of things flying around it.”

According to the new definition, a full-fledged planet is an object that orbits the sun and is large enough to have become round due to the force of its own gravity. In addition, a planet has to dominate the neighborhood around its orbit.

Planet Fitness has been demoted because it does not dominate its neighborhood, which has been recently dominated by new kid on the block, Whole Foods.

In addition, bodies that dominate their neighborhoods, “sweep up” asteroids, comets, and other debris, clearing a path along their orbits. By contrast, Planet Fitness sweeps up gaggles of 100-pound high school girls who fear gaining weight, high school boys who think these girls are too fat, and hundreds of disgruntled office workers who can’t afford the Bay Club and are doomed to wait hours for an available elliptical machine.

Whole Foods is awaiting planet status, as it sweeps up asteroids, comets and other debris including families who wear matching boat shoes and laugh when their receipts total over $400, and idiots who leave their shopping carts in the middle of the aisle while going back for that $4 organic lime from Mexico that they forgot the first time they went through produce.

If Whole Foods is classified a planet at the next convention, this would mean that neighbor Planet Dog would more than likely become just another prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects.

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