Day 5, the final day of my vacation, was all about energy. Specifically the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and its associated bus tour.

Coop had found the Department of Energy's Public Bus Tour of Oak Ridge National Laboratories online and became determined that we should partake. A 3-hour tour of the Manhattan Project sites for the bargain price of only $5. How could I refuse?

The AMSE itself isn't very entertaining. Its displays are text-heavy, so the experience is more like walking through a textbook than visiting bits of history. The bus tour picks up the pieces. The tour visits the Oak Ridge "Secret City" sites Y-12 National Security Complex, the X-10 graphite reactor, the abandoned Bethel Valley Church, and the site of the former K-25 gaseous diffusion plant. If that sounds kind of cool, it's because it is.

The highlight of the tour is X-10, the world's first nuclear reactor designed for continuous operation. The reactor was added to the National Registrar of Historic Landmarks in 1966, only three years after it was decommissioned. Hard to believe that a giant pile of inert carbon was instrumental in ending World War II.

It was purely by accident that Coop and I later in the day passed the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant south of Knoxville. It turns out that Watts Bar contains the most recent nuclear power generator to come online in the United States. From the country's oldest to newest reactors in one afternoon? What a vacation!

Find more info on the American Museum of Science and Energy at amse.org.

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Batman isn't the only one in Gotham City with cool toys.

In "The Three Eccentrics" (Batman #21, 1944), Penguin uses a miniaturized motion picture camera hidden in the handle of his umbrella to spy on the safe of the world's richest man. Penguin's scheme is well described. Less clear is how Penguin's mark got to be the world's richest man when he's stupid enough to keep all his money inside a safe in plain sight of a first floor window.

Miniaturized cameras were hidden in the handles of canes as early as the 1920s, so Penguin's technology in this issue isn't as outlandish as, say, a bat-shaped propeller airplane that can hover in one place on autopilot. In comics the villains tend to be more realistic than the heroes. If your hero is a millionaire who dresses like a bat to fight crime in his free time, I guess they'd have to be.

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I suspect that I first met Judge Dredd when he and Batman shared an adventure in 1991's Judgement on Gotham comic book. Dredd, a character appearing regularly in British comics, was a tough cop struggling to maintain order in a post-apocalyptic future that is equal parts terrifying, satirical, and absurd. Dredd and Batman both share a righteous morality, a utility belt of awesome technology, and a complete lack of any sense of humor, but the two are on opposite ends of the empathy spectrum. Naturally, I was instantly enchanted.

One afternoon in late June 1995, I rode with my friend Mark in his antique truck to the Northlake 8 AMC movie theater in Tucker, GA to buy advance tickets for opening night for the Sylvester Stallone Judge Dredd film. I was a bouncing bundle of pure enthusiasm, and something about that experience in my history has always stuck in my memory. Sorry to say, my memory has lasted far longer than my enthusiasm did. The movie sets and costumes looked good, but beyond the surface, it just didn't turn out to have much to do with the character of Judge Dredd.

After all these years, I felt I owed it to the character to give his new movie, cleverly titled Dredd, a fair shake. I'm pleased to say that the new Dredd movie treats the lawman better this time around. I was the only person in the building at yesterday's 4:30 showing at Newnan's Carmike 10 theater, and I can tell you that 100% of the audience was enthusiastically entertained. I even applauded appreciatively when Karl Urban as Dredd finally yelled "I am the law" the proper way: with his helmet on.

The movie is a small, day-in-the-life action story about what it must be like to be the toughest cop in a very violent world. The limited scope of the story is far more suited to the absurdist crime-story millieu historically associated with the characters than its big-budget predecessor. And though the limited budget did result in more limited costuming and visual effects (no robots or flying cars!), it added to a more claustrophobic environment which should be expected in Mega-City One, population 800 million.

The film may not have restored the lost enthusiasm of my youth, but I did enjoy it and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who likes gory, stylish action films about foreign comic book characters. You know who you are.

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We have some new across-the-street neighbors. Yesterday as I was walking the dogs, their toddler ignored her father's shouts and began stumbling her way across the lawn to reach my poodles. When daddy finally caught up to his little girl -- right by the street, I might add -- I jokingly asked if he needed to borrow one of my leashes. He didn't seem to think that was too funny. Some people can't take a joke.

While we're on the subject, I should mention that I used to think those child leashes were a modern invention. Maybe this is because they are surprisingly controversial. If you want to pick an argument in a room full of mothers, simply start a discussion about bottle feeding, vaccinations, or toddler leashes. Be sure to have an exit strategy planned first, because it's going to get ugly.

But watching Picnic earlier this month belied that belief. One brief shot lampoons the weary mother with two toddlers straining to run in opposite directions. The children are restrained only by, you guessed it, toddler leashes. That film was made in 1955, and the sight gag must have been already an established trope for it to be included as a bit of comic relief. After all, the film's setting is small-town Kansas, hardly the bleeding edge of society.

So just how long have people been tying rope to their children to keep them in tow? A quick Google search tells me that at least as early as the 18th century, children's fashion occasionally included "leading strings," or long cloth straps attached to the shoulders which served a similar purpose as today's toddler leash. Does that mean that a young George Washington was once led around by his father like a standard poodle? I cannot tell a lie: I like to think so.

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The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences has just released a 300-word report warning Georgia residents that there is very little that can be done to keep deer from eating their gardens. This is not news. Anyone who has read my extensive research on the subject will already know that deer will eat anything:

I was convinced that 1990 article for the school newspaper was going to get me beat up in high school. I didn't realize at the time that the only thing standing between me and an army of insatiably ravenous deer were teen-agers with guns. I'm sure we all feel much safer with that knowledge.

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News has been making the rounds that the Gettysburg National Military Park decided to pull a John Wilkes Booth bobble-head doll off of the shelf "after a reporter began making inquiries about them." Damn mainstream media and its "gotcha" questions!

Now the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum gift shop has also stopped selling their John Wilkes Booth bobble-head doll, which leads directly to the question, "why was the Lincoln Museum selling dolls of his assassin?" That would be like the Pearl Harbor monument selling Japanese Zero models. What? It does? Oh, well, never mind, then.

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One month ago today, my mother sprung into my room at the crack of noon and announced, "wake up! we're going someplace I've wanted to visit for years: Oakland Cemetery!" You can only imagine my delight.

An hour later we were standing in Atlanta's historic Oakland Cemetery, surrounded by dead people. The woman working the welcome center was wearing a sea foam green, Victorian-era crinoline dress as she discussed Civil War battlefields with a uniformed Atlanta police officer. It was a little surreal, like walking through a Tim Burton movie. I wasn't entirely sure I wasn't still dreaming.

Mom and I entertained ourselves with the $4 self-guided walking tour map. I initially made an effort to seek out all of the numbered "points of interest" on the map, but I soon discovered that the highlights on the map were easily noticeable without referencing the pamphlet. For example, the Confederate Obelisk, once the highest structure in the city, hardly needs to be on a map for it to be noticed.

The cemetery is chock full of interesting monuments in a stunningly diverse mixture of styles. I've been in a lot of cemeteries, but few are populated with so many distinctly unique monuments. Below is the Jewish section of the cemetery, where to no one's surprise, they don't waste much space. That's my mother, pondering whether the oldest graves are near the middle. We both hope so.

In some ways the cemetery feels more like a sculpture garden than a field full of corpses. These dead people had great taste, and I doubt that many people alive today would design such good looking final resting places. Certainly none of these statues were wearing wife-beaters and flip flops.

I should mention that shortly after we entered the cemetery, mother and I were passing the plot of former Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown when we encountered an aged, well-dressed mourner. The polite man had traveled from Scotland to lay flowers at the grave of his wife who had passed away a year earlier. He and my mother struck up a conversation about her family's Scottish ancestry (clan Napier) and accidentally discovered that one of my mother's relatives from Newnan had delivered the eulogy at the woman's funeral. Even without the internet, it's a small world after all.

Besides Governor Brown, the cemetery holds the remains of many notables, including Bobby Jones, Margaret Mitchell, and Maynard Jackson, among many others. But you don't have to have been famous to be buried here. In the South, we're so gracious we'll let in whoever wants in....

Even those damn Yankeys.

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From page 5 of the June 6, 1882, edition of Atlanta's The Weekly Constitution:

To prove that was no aberration, from page 3 of the September 2, 1885, edition of the Dublin Post:

It's official! The citizens of Dublin, Georgia, have always been bat-shoot crazy.

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Most tombstones show the date of death. Many tombstones record the date of birth. But there aren't too many tombstones showing a third date.

This tombstone for Jennie Hardaway McBride, found in Newnan's historic Oak Hill cemetery, demanded a little research. And not because there are no oaks or hills anywhere in sight.

It turns out that "Jennie" isn't even Mrs. McBride's real name. Before she was Mrs. "Jennie" McBride, wife of Newnan merchant and Scotch-Irish society member William Cardwell McBride, she was Virgina Rebecca Hardaway, daughter of Isora Burch. In 1903, Isora Burch organized the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, named in honor of her great-grandmother, Sarah Dickinson Simms. Jennie would eventually succeed her mother as regent for the DAR Sarah Dickinson chapter. But that doesn't solve the question of why she has three dates on her tombstone.

The death certificate for "Mrs. W. C. McBride" of 14 Robinson Street in Newnan, Ga, lists the cause of death at age 50 as "acute uremia." The internet tells me that uremia is typically caused by kidney failure. In this case it wasn't a surprise to anyone when she died; the certificate notes that she was diagnosed with "uremia" six months before it killed her. However, that still doesn't account for the third date on the tombstone.

The father of Mrs. McBride was Robert Henry Hardaway, descendant of a boy "kidnapped" onto a ship bound for America in 1685. It turns out that daddy also has 3 unusual dates on his grave: "December Twelfth, 1837, - 1869, February 11, 1905." Robert Hardaway was born in 1837 and died in 1905. So what did he do between those two dates? He stayed busy. For one thing, Hardaway was a Confederate States Army soldier in Company B of the 1st Georgia Calvary. For a time afterwards, he was a member of the Georgia State General Assembly. And he was also a partner in the merchant firm Hardaway & Hunter in Newnan where he met Isora Burch and was married on December 12, 1869! Ah, ha!

The historical record states that Jennie R. Hardaway was married on April 18, 1894. Mystery solved. At least two generations of the Hardaway family of Newnan liked to put their wedding dates on their tombstones. Who knows why, exactly, but if I had to guess, I'd suppose they died a little those days. They don't call spouses "balls and chains" for nothing. Marriage: it's a life sentence.

[For the record, Jennie Hardaway McBride shares a common ancestor with my mother. Sarah Dickinson Simms, Mrs. McBride's 2nd great-grandmother, was my mother's 4th great-grandmother, making her my 5th great-grandmother. What can I say? Newnan's kind of a small town.]

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I went on the Newnan-Coweta Historical Society 2010 Yuletide Tour of Homes yesterday with my mother and her sister. It was pretty much everything that you would expect a Christmas walking tour of historical homes to be: cold and uncomfortable. No offense meant to the home owners, but I couldn't help but walk through their homes and compare them unfavorably to mine, where I can walk around without wearing shoe-coverings and take what I want from the refrigerator.

That picture above is the Sumner home, a former Confederate headquarters. It stands majestically on a small hill overlooking LaGrange Street, a stone's throw from downtown Newnan. From the outside, it looked very majestic at dusk this December evening, but I can't say as I learned very much by walking through its living spaces crammed with scores of people themselves perhaps best described as historic. I'd post a picture of the 10-inch hardwood board walls or the prized 48-star United States flag flown for President Garfield, but interior photography, like smoking, was strictly prohibited.

Not every home on the tour was a historical relic. Some were just old. I told my mother that her home could be on the tour if she renovated the kitchen. And added $100,000 worth of antiques.

Mother insisted on telling every one of the docents that we spoke with that we were locals. I thought that was odd until it was pointed out that most of the people on the tour had driven down from such far-flung locations as Marietta or Decatur to wander through strangers' homes. Newnan may be a nice place to visit, but apparently they don't want to live here.

To be fair, I'm sure that I wasn't exactly the life of the tour. Hearing one homeowner's son say that he had spoodles -- a cross between a spaniel and a poodle -- I turned into a complete snob and replied, "I only appreciate purebred poodles." I know, I know. What do they expect when they let people like me into their homes? I'm sure that there will be full background checks and pat downs before future tours.

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