I didn't take Pluto's recent demotion from planetary status personally. I do wonder, though, why I ever bothered to learn anything when I was young.

It all started with the brontosaurus. Remember him? Gigantic bronto, lumbering through prehistoric bulrushes at the edge of a Pleistocene lake, a dim-witted but powerful plant-eater. Fred Flintstone slid down his back in the opening credits every week. I loved that big, friendly dinosaur.

Turns out, I'm the fossil. Hearing me mention the brontosaurus some years back, my eight-year old son wheeled about, fixed me with a disappointed gaze and announced professorially that, "Dad, there is no such thing as a brontosaurus. Othniel Charles Marsh, who invented the name, mixed up the bones of two different dinosaurs he had dug up. The real name is apatosaurus." "Since when," I asked. "Since, like, 1975," he repliedcorrectly, it turns out. Why didn't I get the memo?

Paleontology isn't the only field where my knowledge has browned and died. "Hawaii," my second son explained, "was pretty much hijacked into statehood by American pineapple plantation owners, with a little help from a shipload of United States Marines. Queen Lili'uokalani was under house arrest when she wrote Aloha Oe. Didn't you learn this in school?" No, I did not. When I was a schoolboy, we were taught that the Queen and her subjects loved democracy and freedom and admired the United States so much that they requested admittance to the union, a wish graciously granted by President Grover Cleveland and the Congress. Seriously, that was in our textbooks.

I sympathize deeply with Alice's Red Queen who despaired that "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." My kids never tire of spinning me on the mental hamster wheel. So now I learn that Hernn Corts and his small band of conquistadors did notcontrary to all I'd been told beforeconquer Mexico with ease because the Aztecs were awed into submission by the sight of dazzlingly white men astride horses, acknowledging the invaders as gods. Instead, by the time the Spanish arrived in Montezuma's capital, smallpox and other novel diseases carried into the New World by the Europeans had already decimated the population, rendering it unable to resist. Socrates instructs that there is no more important undertaking than the pursuit of truth. But honestly, is anybody better off knowing that Montezuma likely spent his last days doubled-over with the dysentery with

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