As much as I would love to take award winning photos, it sounds like too much work. This is just a hobby for me. I can give you 7 of Hondo's tips if you like.

1. you don't need a pricey camera to take awesome pictures. Then again, it can be like a Nando experience. If an expensive camera makes you feel good then maybe you'll get good pix. (don't bet on it).

2. 90% (maybe its more) is just showing up. Pros shoot a lot. I'm lucky if I take 1000 pix a year. Some folks do that in a weekend.

3. Landscape photos - these almost always look deflating when you get back home. Get something in the pic, something recognizable, near field to give it some scale. At least you'll have something else to look at.

4. There's only one kind of picture that is universally liked. It's the kind with people in it. You can shoot birds or lion or ants till the cows come home. get a live person in there once in a while to keep everyone awake. Take pictures of drunk people. There might even be money in that unless they're a Kennedy. You can't tell the difference with them.

5. elevation. Let's face it, the bulk of pix are taken standing up with the camera at or about shoulder height. Unless you are a dwarf or Yao, yours will look a lot like everyone elses. get a ladder, lie down, but do something to change the perspective. Some of the best selfies I've seen are from a deck chaise lounge...sure, its only feet or feet and a pool/drink/etc. But is certainly conveys a relaxed attitude.

6. Pros will tell you to catch the early sun or sunset...golden hours. Pfffft...there must be a photoshop filter for that sh!t!

7. One thing that you should absolutely, positively, stay away from is having your picture taken on a bareback horse. There's just no coming back from that.

Yup. Carl Sagan called it "celebration of ignorance". For some reason, the Republican Party has been increasingly welcoming this mindset more and more in the last decade or two with open arms.

What other country in the world would allow the chair of their legislative science committee to be an anti-science ignoramus? In 2013 the outgoing chair of the US Congressional Science Committee Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), has suggested that c*****e c****e is the product of a mass global conspiracy of scientists to obtain grant money. In 2011, he told National Journal he didn't believe c*****e c****e was man-made because "I don't think we can control what God controls. I'm really more fearful of freezing," Hall said. "And I don't have any science to prove that. But we have a lot of science that tells us {climate scientists are} not basing it on real scientific facts."

That puts him only slightly farther out in the twilight zone from incoming chair Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who chastised the "lap dog" media in 2009 for not questioning the scientific consensus on c*****e c****e enough.

Smith's vice chairman that year, Rep. James Sensebrenner (R-WI), decried c*****e c****e theory as a "massive international scientific fraud" and evidence of what he called "scientific f*****m." Another climate skeptic on the committee this year, Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), suggested in a hearing that "dinosaur flatulence" might explain historic warming patterns.

But no one has outdone the wackiest member of the science committee of all time, Rep Paul Broun (R-GA) who said, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.” Broun also believes that the world is less than 9,000 years old and was created in six literal days.

Is it any wonder why the US no longer leads the world in science and is viewed as a laughing stock?