I was twenty minutes late to work today because of an extra long commute. Not because of traffic – there’s no traffic out in my neck of the woods. A tree sugeon was operating on a tree down across the road, and I had to wait. I love country living.

I’ve been tapped to direct and play the title role in a 1-act rock opera featuring the music of the Athens based wondergroup the Dictatortots. As a 6 foot 2 inch straight man, the band thinks I’m the perfect person to play the role of “a homosexual leprechaun who discovers the wider world”.

Here’s a nice story about my Waiting for Godot that appeared in the Athens papers last week.

The play… the play went very well. I’ve been recovering all day, and will be recovering all week, I’m sure. I’m going away to the Georgia Mountains to a nice bed and breakfast to recover even more. My body is beaten – my part was very physical, my mind is drained. This was by far the hardest production I’ve been involved with, and I had to use every bit of willpower to hold it together. In the end, it was wonderful. The audiences (smaller than I’d hoped) were very supportive. I was given nothing but praise, as were my actors. It was a wild ride, though. Estragon and Vladimir took act two and ran it through a blender every night. While scraping out the script puree, they always left some in the pitcher, but somwhow it all came back together again on stage. I put three months into three performances. I’m very proud of what we’ve done, but it’ll be good to have my evenings back. I’m not unpacked from my move yet. I want to learn a ton of web technologies. I have plenty of reading to catch up on. I’ve only got six weeks, though, as auditions for my next project are the last two days in May. This time, instead of three performances and a $100 budget, I’ll have a two week run and over $2000 to play with. I’ll tell you what it is in a little while.

Offering another example of a dot com company falling over backwards to provide free services for users, namezero.com provides free registration of domain names (com, org, and/or net). The catch? Well, there’s at least two. First, the domain is actually registered under the name of the namezero folks, though you “retain the right, title and interest in and to the Namezero Domain name “. Second, the created page is really just a frameset with the top 90% pointing at your own content stored elsewhere and the bottom 10% a namezero navigation bar. For an example, you can look at this weblog at www.kestrelsnest.com. If you don’t mind that bar at the bottom of your pages, this might be a neat service. It has web-based and POP email (eric@kestrelsnest.com should get to me, though I haven’t tried to set that up yet) and easy to set up subdomains (again, a frameset with pointers. godot.kestrelsnest.com will take you to my Weblog for Godot , for example.). I’ve yet to find what their revenue source is. I imagine they’re planning on banner ads on the nav bar or something.

Hopped up on man gel: Time Magazine has a cover story about the upcoming availability of a testosterone gel, and the effects it may have on men and society. “‘What happens when men have higher levels than normal?’ asks James M. Dabbs, a psychology professor at Georgia State University. ‘They are just unmanageable.’ "

Opening night for Waiting for Godot. Three hours from now, it’ll start.

Steven Baum at Ethel the Blog is my new hero. He uncovered a company that sells CDs jam-packed with old-time radio shows, such as 220 episodes of the wonderful Goon Show on two CDs for only $35. Fantastic! In college, I produced (with much help from my friends) a live weekly radio drama show. Over four years we did Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , my own adaptation of The Hobbit , the BBC’s Lord of the Rings , Firesign Theater , and The Goon Show. All of them were great fun, but I really enjoyed being a Goon. I took Peter Seller’s parts and had a blast. I found a few scripts via interlibrary loan, and a British professor in the Math Department had his family send tapes from England for us to listen to. And now, for $35, I can have them all. I’m overjoyed! Thanks, Steven.

People with too much spare time who use that time to amuse me are wonderful people. Here’s photos from an Action Figure Block Party. Who knew Admiral Akbar was such a lush? Thanks to Pith & Vinegar for pointing this out.

I’ll be slack in updating this week, as my mind is singularly focused on my production of Waiting For Godot opening this weekend. That and work, which pays me so that I can enjoy doing the things that I like to do. So, watch your favorite weblog update notification service for update announcements. Of course, looking at me referrer logs, most of you already do that.