Opening night was a smashing success. For a Thursday, the crowd was nice-sized, too… about 60 people, all told. I’ve grown to like my powdered wig, too. Why haven’t they ever come back into style?

Tonight’s opening night for School for Scandal. We run through Saturday at the Morton Theater here in Athens. The Morton has a long history, and is a fine place to perform. This play is particularly well-suited for the space. While looking for a link to the theater, I found this article which recently ran in The Flagpole about local theater.

Scientists at Sandia National Labratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico have simulated some of the effects of a neutron star. This appears to be an off-shoot of their fusion experiments. The photo shows the reactor in action, with arcs of electricity crossing over the surface of a pool of water. You can read more about the place here. When I was in school, I took a tour of the place. I volunteered to wear the radiation detection badge for the group, and was told during the briefing that I’d get back a full report on how much radiation we were exposed to. Seven years later, I’m still waiting…

The cat brought a live chipmunk into the house last night. Oh, the excitement! I’ve discovered that at 3:30 in the morning, my chipmunk-catching abilities aren’t what they ought to be. It’s still in there, locked in the most cluttered room I’ve got. When I got dressed for work, he was sitting in the windowsill sunning himself, but then chirped and ran off under some boxes.

You don’t need a physics degree to understand the humor here (especially in the “Exclusive features” section), but it might help. Acme Klein Bottles -- where yesterday’s future is here today!

A bear. An elephant. Knock-knock jokes. Need I say more? (Not for the easily offended.)

Bob Rivers’ Twisted Tunes is the nearest thing Weird Al has to competition. He’s added a bunch of songs since my last visit. I suggest “Dark Side of Naboo” just to hear Yoda’s rant at the end, but you’ll find many more quality songs here.

The apple sauce I had for breakfast gave me the urge to visit applesauce.com, where I found directions for making several variations of apple sauce plus recipes that use apple sauce. Several years ago, I got the idea to make apple butter. I went a bit overboard on the apples and ended up with several gallens of the stuff before I was done. The apartment had the wonderful smell of apples and cinnamon for weeks.

I wrote down below “Now that [Amazon.com is] associated with GiveQuick, all the more reason to stick with them.” I’m afraid I’ve got my charitable organizations messed up. I meant to say GreaterGood.com, who donates a percentage of your on-line purchases through a number of businesses (including Amazon) to charities. The current featured charity is the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, a group I support completely. I’ve edited the post below to correct my error.

From the BBC: _A dangerous new type of e-mail virus emerged on Tuesday which reveals the potential to wreak havoc on computers by simply looking at an e-mail. It breaks one of the long-standing rules that you have to open an e-mail attachment to become infected._ It’s easily stopped, but most users’ default settings in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer will let this slip right on through. Yowsers!