Presidential Campaign Issues

How are we supposed to figure out who to vote for since both candidates claim to be against the war? It was a lot more fun when we could argue about abortion and gun control.

-- Dalton Hammond

Olympic Ceremony Was Faked

I almost always never watch the stupid TV...maybe a half dozen golf tournaments per year and that's it.

So when all my friends and the rest of the entire world went ga-ga over the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics I figured maybe I missed something and decided to Google around and try to find a video replay.

Then I learned that much of the ballyhooed ceremony was faked. Fake fireworks, even fake singing by the little Chinese girl who was a last-minute substitute and lip-synced her performance.

They had the entire world fooled for a while...except me. -- Dalton Hammond

Pluto is becoming a Plutoid

In what I think is a major public relations coup a committee of The International Astronomical Union has decided to call these newly-discovered Pluto-sized asteroids "Plutoids".

You'll recall that a couple of years ago the same union of astronomers voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet and call it a Trans-Neptunian Dwarf Planet, as reported in my blog entry at

http://daltonhammond.blogspot.com/2006/09/is-pluto-planet.html

By naming all these other critters Plutoids the committee has raised little Pluto's esteem by naming a whole new asteroid classification after the former planet.

I'm so glad.

-- Dalton Hammond

Callisto Transits Jupiter

Sometimes you have to be at the right place in the Universe at the right time.

Early on the morning of August 4th, 2008 despite a thick summer haze I captured this fuzzy image of the great gas planet Jupiter just as the Jovian moon Callisto was crossing in front of the planet. The moon appears as a black dot at the upper right edge and the shadow of Callisto can be seen on the face of the planet just above the image of Callisto. The haze-bloated dot to the left of Jupiter is the moon Io and the moon Ganymede appears to the right of the planet. -- Dalton Hammond