☿ Of all the planets in the Solar System, Mercury is the closest to our Sun. They take vacations together, finish each other’s sentences and remember one another’s birthdays.
☿ Mercury’s pronouns are it and its.
☿ The satellite Solar Flair was sent to Mercury in 1999 to take detailed photographs of the tiny planet. Sadly, by the time the satellite returned to Earth in 2012, Kodak had declared bankruptcy and the Solar Flair‘s photos could not be developed.
☿ So this is the best photograph that astronomers now have of Mercury:
☿ The surface of Mercury is composed mostly of dust and lint. Camping out on Mercury would feel like sleeping on a 200,000-volt electric blanket but, on the upside, with hardly any bedbugs.
☿ Mercury’s unusually large iron core comprises nearly 60% of the planet’s mass, whereas Earth’s nickel-iron core constitutes only 32% of our planet’s mass, and my muscular core makes up less than 2% of my mass, especially after I’ve polished off a bag of Cheetos.
☿ The diameter of Mercury at its equator is 3,032 miles, the equivalent of 53,360 football fields. Despite Mercury’s enormous number of football fields, the sport never took hold there and the planet’s last football game was played in 1981. Fans complained that it was so hot on Mercury’s equator, it made their beers boil.
☿ Miami Dolphins 1970s running back Mercury Morris was not born on Mercury but in the much cooler city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Morris did play six games on the planet, running for 192 yards and scoring a touchdown and two pounds of cocaine.
☿ Mercury is so hot that people used to fill thermometers with it, to tell us how hot it was outside. That was a few decades before we discovered how poisonous it is inside.
☿ Mercury is the only planet in the Solar System that does not have a running feud with Beyoncé or Jay-Z.
☿ Mercury was discovered thousands of years ago by three merchants who happened to be on their way to deliver gifts to Baby Jesus. The group noticed a star just above the horizon at sunrise and sunset each day and named it Mercury because, well, they were merchants. After following the star for seven days, it dawned on them that they were just going around in circles, so the trio gave up and returned to their homeland. Thus it was that Baby Jesus would receive gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh but nothing from Amazon.
☿ Mercury hurtles through space at 112,000 miles/hour, faster than any other planet and almost 15 times Superman’s top speed. If Mercury were a racehorse, it would finish the Kentucky Derby in 4/100ths of a second — but you try getting it into the starting gate.
☿ I wrote this joke for Michael Che: A woman who weighs 135 pounds on Earth would only weigh 51 pounds on Mercury, if she told the truth on both planets.
☿ I told you, you’re supposed to imagine Michael Che doing that joke, don’t blame me.
☿ Film characters inspired by Mercury include Ford Lincoln Mercury, the earnest young postman played by Larenz Tate in 1997’s The Postman with Kevin Costner, and if there’s another one, it escapes me.
☿ Mercury orbits the Sun once every 88 days, in peculiar synchrony with the rate at which Donald Trump or someone in the Trump Organization commits a felony.
☿ In six billion years, give or take, our Sun will exhaust the last dregs of its hydrogen fuel and, as it does, its margins will expand and swallow up the inner planets, starting with Mercury. If Mercury knew that its destiny was to be the iron-rich amuse-bouche for the Sun’s red-giant feast, it might well use its great speed to escape to a more respectful star system, one where jokes like these would be decried as anti-planetary.
