What am I doing up this early?

...Well, the pigs are happy, there's coffee brewin'...still feels strange to be up before ten (or, honestly, noon) on a Saturday.

Chemistry amusement: WOODRUFF, S.C. -- An experiment gone awry in a Spartanburg County classroom caused some scary moments Thursday morning, reported WYFF-TV in Spartanburg, S.C.

Spartanburg District 4 Superintendent Rallie Liston said that an instructor at Woodruff High School was trying to demonstrate the creation of sodium hydroxide when the sodium and water exploded in a dish. Yes, sodium + H20 = ☠, people.

Copy-editing amusement, file under "Spunky": DANBURY, Conn. -- The News-Times has apologized and fired a copy editor who put an offensive caption on its Web page under a photo of a girls' high school soccer team.

The Immaculate High School girls' team was celebrating a goal scored in a championship-clinching win Nov. 5. The newspaper's Web site published a photograph of the jubilant team, but said it was celebrating a teammate's decision to "come out of the closet as a lesbian."

"It was a flagrant, awful violation of every journalistic principle," said Paul Steinmetz, the paper's editor. "It's just embarrassing to us and untenable."

The copy editor, who was not identified, was "goofing around" and didn't realize the caption had gone online, Steinmetz said.

The bogus caption stayed on the Web page for a few hours on Sunday and received a few hundred hits, Steinmetz said. "We couldn't get it off the Web site as fast as we wanted to," he said.

Oh, the stories I could tell. And I still have a few hundred copies of the Spunky issue. ("Who? Who's Willie Nelson?")