Pawprints From Space

As you may have gathered... assuming anyone is reading this... we have a few City elections coming up and thus silly season has begun. Silly season typically starts a month or two out from the election. It is safe to say we are there. We have mayoral candidates and their trusty sidekicks disrupting council meetings with schoolyard taunts regarding various aspects of male genitalia towards those who disagree with them. Followed a day or so later by a threat to file a complaint/lawsuit claiming other council members were in violation of open meetings laws when having a brief conversation prior to the official start of the meeting. So how does this person who feels so violated know what these other two were talking about? Unless he was standing right there. And by standing right there and not calling fellow council-folk to task on the spot (or at least reminding them with a gentle 'hey guys, not a good idea') does this not make him culpable? If not standing right there, eavesdropp...

You may not remember all the back and forth over whether the Hubble Telescope should be repaired or allowed to simply die... how it was too dangerous to send a repair team up to fix it, etc... Well if there was any doubt as to whether or not it was worth the risk, the new images released this week ought to put those doubts to rest. If you haven't seen them, check them out at the Hubble Web Site Of course this service mission is being billed as the last service mission to the telescope - partly because the shuttle fleet itself is being retired not too long from now. It was only fitting that the repair work be done this year - which in case you missed it - is the International Year of Astronomy. So called because this year marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's use of a telescope to view the night sky. Back then of course HE didn't have to worry about light pollution. Even though I live in small city Ohio and am surrounded by farm land it is still not possible to get far en...

The Mayor's race here is starting to get "interesting". Yesterday we learned that the opposition candidate (and by that I only mean the guy NOT currently in office) was served with a "cease and desist" order by the local NBC TV station because his YouTube campaign ad not only used copyrighted news broadcast footage without permission but it was altered in such a way as to change the meaning of the reporting. Funny that this bit of info did not make it into the local paper this morning. It was on the 6 p.m. news last night, plenty of time to make the press... Today the candidate called yet another press conference (he did that earlier in the week too, code enforcement issue) to rant about a company called Global Energy - a project that is admittedly on hold. I didn't see the entire report as of yet but from what I gathered the gentleman was casting aspersions over the fact that the City's has "dropped the ball" on this thing, that permits have e...