The BBC has two stories up about Nick Park: Aardman Animations - the creators of hit clay characters Wallace and Gromit - has signed up to a five-film deal with Hollywood director Steven Spielberg and With three Oscars, four Baftas, a CBE and a Steven Spielberg deal under his belt, there’s no doubting Nick Park is a man of talent. Of the five upcoming films,no mention is made of a Wallace and Gromit full-length movie, but Chicken Run sounds wonderful nonetheless.

I went grocery shopping with Kim Basinger on Saturday. Athens has a new natural food store (named EarthFare) that is fantastic. When I was there this weekend, Ms. Basinger (born and raised here in Athens) was doing some shopping herself. Then we checked out side by side. Ooh, the excitement! For all you guys who got here by searching for “shopping with Kim Bassinger”, welcome to Kestrel’s Nest! Sorry, no prOn.

Happy Day-after-Halloween, everyone! Today’s the day to go buy lots of candy at low, low discount prices. If you like candy corn, anyway.

The Semantic Rhyming Dictionary: you want rhyming words? They’ve got you’re rhyming words right there! I had to write a series of limmericks for a board meeting presentation tonight (sometimes it’s fun to be on a board of directors), and this tool helped me tremendously. Like when I needed several rhyming words for “questions”.

Steven over at Ethyl the Blog wrote a bit about Harpo Marx on Tuesday. The play I’m directing next summer, The Man Who Came to Dinner, has a character based on Harpo and many others based on his social circle. The show’s not until July, but I’m really starting to get into it.

Lunch has been over for three hours now, but I can’t stop thinking about how good that fresh bananna pudding was. Still warm, it was the perfect companion for the bar-b-que sandwich I had.

My college roommate (one of them, anyway), Phil “dE Cat with Grape Jelly” Jones has put some of his artwork online. We both started out in physics, but he realized one semester that it wasn’t right for him. Unfortunately, it was mid-semester and he couldn’t do much about it right then. So, while I wrote my lab reports, he made wonderful drawings and paintings. In the middle of the night, we’d run through campus, me to turn in assignments and he to hang his works on random walls.

Look what you can do with Elmer’s Glue! When I was a kid (not that long ago), all we did with Elmers glue was glue paper together and put it on our hands and let it dry. Who knew you could paint with it? Of course, when we wanted to paint something, we used the big plastic tubs of tempara paint.

The Astronomy Cafe is the web site for the astronomically disadvantaged, featuring “Ask the Astronomer”, “Ask the Space Scientist”, and lots of desription, pictures, and movies. And even though we al know that in space, no one can hear you scream, the Cafe has a section of space sounds.

A state-of-the-art optical observatory that produces images which are sharper and far more detailed than those obtained from the Hubble Space Telescope is scheduled for construction atop the Magdalena Mountains in central New Mexico. The university I attended has pulled off another coup in the Astrophysical world. Long a Mecca for radio astronomers, Socorro will soon be known for its optical observatory as well. One of these days I ought to put my astrophysics degree to use, I suppose…