"...it left Earth at the fastest launch speed ever recorded for a man-made object."

Whoa.

It is planned for New Horizons to fly within 10,000 km (6,200 mi) of Pluto in 2015.

Yeah, this might not be such a great idea...

Yuggoth... is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system... There are mighty cities on Yuggoth—great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone... The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples... The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges—things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids—ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen...
—H. P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"

It is planned for New Horizons to fly within 10,000 km (6,200 mi) of Pluto in 2015.

So Pluto has until 2015 to get its shit together and start acting a little planetary.

This mission was sort of spun off from a scrapped project called Pluto Express. I have heard that when the earlier mission was being planned, NASA sent an official letter to Clyde Tombaugh asking permission to explore "his" planet, which I thought was an unusually touching gesture for a large government agency. I'm glad he didn't have to see its demotion from planetary status.

The weirdest thing about that tracker is that it's currently showing New Horizons currently getting slowly closer to the Earth while it gets farther away from the sun. I know it's because of planetary orbits and such, but still weird.

It wasn't demoted! It was never a conventional planet in the first place! I think it's awesome that it was the first discovery of the TNOs/KBOs, which is something the ancients never dreamed of, and if anything Tombaugh can be seen as having opened up an entirely new planetary field.

The only thing we're sure of is that we probably haven't found the weirdest one yet.

As for NH, it's headed away from the Sun, osf. It's Earth that's currently catching up (same principle as when planets like Mars go retrograde). Obviously during the course of a year the Earth has a direction that is sometimes opposite of the NH trajectory and sometimes aligned (briefly, in both cases, exactly).

if anything Tombaugh can be seen as having opened up an entirely new planetary field
Yes! I think that's a good way to look at it.

Hurry up!