Scandal!
“SQUINCHY” GUDGER STAFF
PHOTO: ALESSANDRO STEADMAN
Scandal rocked U of M’s Theatre community this week after a prominent local scientist revealed that on-campus theatre troupe the Black Hole Theatre Company is actually just an Unusually-Dense Neutron Star Theatre Company. Dr. Edmund Schwitters released his controversial findings in a jargon-heavy report entitled “Galileo’s Kammerspiel: Irony and Metaphor in Neutron Star XTE L1439-265.”
Schwitters first became suspicious when he attended a production of Black Hole’s Footsteps in the Wheat, a Prairie drama which he found both “heartwarming” and “riddled with soft gamma-ray repeater bursts.” He later elaborated, saying that the play had a “7.4 second rotational period” but “little discernible character development.”
According to U of M astrophysics professor Dr. Sylvia Genolytinskin, a neutron star “is simply the ultra-dense, collapsed core of a very large star,” and should never be confused with a black hole, adding that such an error is “as laughable as the turgid drama of Footsteps’ second act.”
The star, which features a crunchy, mile-thick crust and a delicious, liquid-neutron interior, has a density of 6.1x1014 g/cm3, much too light and fluffy to be a black hole.
Because high gravitational fields cause time to slow down, the “Black Hole hypothesis” had previously been able to explain why Black Hole Theatre plays seem twice as long as they actually are, though Schwitters argues that this phenomenon can be observed even in theatre troupes that don’t contain black holes. “Theatre is just really boring,” he explained.
Black Hole Theatre Company publicist Maxime deWinter denied the allegations, saying “Black Hole was just supposed to be a metaphor anyway. We were surprised to learn that our company contained any ultra-dense, giant astronomical objects.” He did not specify how, exactly, the “black hole” metaphor is intended to function, though NASA released a statement calling the metaphor “too vague to achieve much poetic resonance.”
deWinter also stressed that the problem is really one of university infrastructure. “This campus is a disaster,” he said. “Tier is falling apart and Fitzgerald has a family of possums living in one of its maintenance closets.” University Administration defended the possums, saying “those possums are a valuable part of the community,” before adding that some possums can be trained to perform useful maintenance tasks, including “foraging” and “making a soft clicking noise.”
The scandal comes just months after it was revealed that Osborne Village’s Gas Station Theatre had been padding their unleaded fuel prices. Robert Penny Wallace Miliken III, CEO of the Gas Station Theatre, is currently awaiting trial for fraud and insider trading. The colourful Miliken, whose worth is estimated at four hundred million dollars, has called his trial “a mockery” and has accused the prosecution of failing in their calculations to account for gravitational red-shift.
