Anti (or Ante) Wedding Anniversary

Hurrah, hurrah for today is my Anti Wedding Anniversary.

I feel I should stress here that I do not mean Anti Wedding in the way that one is Anti-smoking or Anti-drinking.

I mean anti in the way that Antimatter is the equal and opposite of matter for today is one year or 366 days until Tallulah and I get married!

(This is probably an unsound analogy in physics terms and if there are any Quantum Physicists reading this I heartily apologise - while at the same time asking why the hell you're reading this and not developing warp drives or finding a way to accurately calculate restaurant bills).

Perhaps Ante-Wedding Anniversary is a better term.

You may be able to tell from this that I have already imbibed more than enough champagne (it doesn't take much) and are about to depart for happy sleepy land.

Apparently the first Wedding Anniversary is paper and so on this Ante-Wedding Anniversary day Tallulah and I should (by the laws of physics) take a piece of paper off each other.

Anyway, here is the Geek starting our official wedding fund:

and here is the geek trying a tricky backwards starting the wedding fund manoeuvre...

Here is a photo of Tallulah starting the wedding fund in a more sensible way...

Blessed are the Geek!

Amsterdamned Part Two....

Where was I? Oh yes, I was over here in the corner (in the spotlight and very probably losing my religion into the bargain).

As I was saying (before I was so rudely interrupted by the need for sleep) Tallulah and I have recently returned from a trip to the beautiful city of Amsterdam.

While there we visited a great many famous sights including the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh museum and the moving (and also surprisingly hopeful) Anne Frank House. A substantial amount of eggs and cheese were also consumed during the visit - these are apparently the cornerstones of Dutch cuisine which has led me to theorise that the Dutch are actually descended from the Welsh.

(Further evidence for this theory can be found in the fact that the Netherlands, alone amongst its European neighbours, produces a large number of rugby players and male voice choirs.)

I would now like to present to you a photograph entitled: "The importance of not building a house when you have partaken of too much Dutch Gin". This will give you a flavour of our holiday in Amsterdam.

Amsterdamned!

I want to tell you a story about tulips.

Once upon a time there was an old Dutch man who grew the most fabulous tulips. The other tulip growers were jealous of his abilities and of the fabulous tulips he grew and so they constantly pestered him for his secret.

After many years one of the other tulip growers, let's call him Frederick (although his name was Maximilian) decided to discover the secret of these masterful blooms for himself and so he followed the old man out to the tulip fields and watched what he did.

When the old man arrived at the fields he went into a rickety shed which was full of cages. The cages were all full of hamsters and the old man would pull out half a dozen of the fattest of these, stuff them in a blender and turn it on. After turning the defenceless little rodents into puree he would take the resulting gloop and spread it on the tulip fields.

The horrified Frederick witnessed all this and ran back to the other tulip growers to report.

"What is the old man's secret?" they asked Frederick "Why are his tulips so great".

Frederick replied "I'm afraid that the tulips we grow will never compare with his, because his tulips come from Hamster-Jam!"

(roll of drums and strike on the cymbal)

All of which is a very drawn out way of saying that Blessedarethegeek and Tallulah have just returned from a week in the beautiful city of Amsterdam.

More on this in the next post.

(and can I take this opportunity to say that recently a lot of people in what we term consensus reality have mentioned that they read this blog - the fools - but don't ever post comment. To these people I say: please do comment, even if it's to say that the blog is rubbish. Obviously I can't take criticism or anything, but you should know this by now).

Geeks of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your lightsabers!

Greetings.

I want to draw your attention to a very old problem that we've not yet been able to sweep from our society.

The problem is called geekism.

Many other isms - racism, sexism ageism - are thankfully in decline as people are finding their age-old prejudices challenged on a regular basis.

Unfortunately it is still socially permissible to discriminate against people on the basis that they play dungeons and dragons, are able to recite obscure Doctor Who plot points from memory and know how to do a Vulcan salute.

I'd hoped that we'd got over this sometime in the nineties with the cross over success of the X-Files and (more recently) Harry Potter and Heroes perhaps indicating to people that genre is not without merit, but it still seems to be a problem in some sectors. I've encountered at least two instances over the past week when the old jokes have been trotted out in the media - i.e. geeks have no girlfriends, geeks all live with their mothers etc.

Had this been any other minority then the broadcasters in question would have been castigated for their stereotyping - but not with anti-geekism.

Like any despised minority we have our meeting places - Gamestation and Forbidden Planet being two of the most important - but we don't yet have our own subculture.

We need geek newsletters that list geek clubs

We need more geek-friendly pubs and b&bs and, in larger cities, geek villages.

We need more prominent celebrities to out themselves on national TV admitting that they've been living a lie and are actually fans of Babylon 5 and Blakes 7.

We need geek pride weekends and geek pride marches in which we walk down the street, humming the imperial theme to Star Wars (You know - it goes DUM DUM DUM DUMDEE DUM DUMDEE DUM)

Women's rights and gay rights have come on so far in recent years but geek rights are, as yet, not recognised in this country.

So I say to you all: let us rise forth from our hidden places, take up our lightsabers and sonic screwdrivers and march on Number 10 in order to force Mr Brown to make Britain a geekier place!

Say it once, say it loud - I'M A GEEK AND I'M PROUD!!!

Sinister pedicure...

I'd like to present you with the following tribute to the Daniel Day Lewis film 'My Left Foot'.

I feel that I have managed to convey the complex psychological pain of the film (being somewhat of a complex psychological pain myself).

Summertime and the moaning is easy....

My bad move of the week has to be the purchase a new winter coat a couple of days before the summer heatwave finally appears. D'oh!

I've reached the conclusion that I can't do hot weather and furthermore I've never really seen the point of hot weather. I like brisk cold days or pleasant warm ones but the kind of days where you can't really do anything more than laze around...well that's not for me.

(Not because I'm in any way active - I can laze around in all climes and I don't need to wait until a socially acceptable climate asserts itself)

I'll admit that it's not been _that_ hot over the past couple of days but forecasters have prophesied a hot weekend I just want to tell the weather gods that its too little, too late and I'm no longer in that 'wanting hot weather' place anymore. Been there, done that, ate the burger and choreographed the musical.

Lets just put summer 2007 down to experience and crack on with autumn, shall we?

Haven't visited here for a while....

Greetings gentle reader,



As you may have noticed Blessedarethe geek has been off air for almost a month. It has been both a quiet and a busy month in many ways.



The truth is that tallulah has been indisposed and away from work for weeks now and I haven't really wanted to sneak off of an evening and pour my random brain drippings into this blog and leave her alone and bored out of her skull (she's spending enough of her time in that state at the moment, especially with daytime TV to contend with). As a result I've tried to spend less time with my Pentium enhanced colleague recently - whether it's harassing orcs or tip tapping my thoughts onto various websites - as it's been a long overdue opportunity for me to concentrate on spending some time with my honey. So, gentle reader, you'll have to lie back and think of England while I ease myself back into this blog thing gradually (and with a certain amount of tenderness).


Last weekend was spent north of the border both with the prospective in laws and my sister. It was lovely - both my family and Tallulah's are lovely - but on these occasions a deeply paranoid person like myself cannot escape the dread feeling that something is going to go wrong at any moment. One is constantly tense that either family is going to withdraw their support on the basis of "what so-and-so said about so-and-so" despite the fact that both my family and Tallulah's are pretty laid back. Everyone knows that inter-familial disputes can be far more heartfelt and bloody than anything going on in the middle east.


Oh, and (despite the venom of the previous post) I've actually read the latest Harry Potter. It's actually not too bad because there is a) hardly any mention of quidditch and b) hardly any terminally dull boarding school shenanigans. There is much less padding than the last three books and JK finally appears to have got some balls - gone are the smug school heroics and 'stunt' deaths and instead some major characters are killed off or maimed left, right and centre although (SPOILER ALERT) most of the really annoying ones survive. Still, kudos to ol'JK for providing a children's book with the highest body count since Enid Blyton's ill fated "The Famous Five and the Thermonuclear device".