The Rant Begins or The Reason This All Began

I’m a geek. Ask my beautiful and funny fiancée. I’m a definite geek. She is as well, in her own way, of course. However, her geekiness is more normal, extending to getting excited when she finds that chain coffee shops in the UK serve flat whites and enjoying blues tracks that I don’t always get around to listening. And she’s American, which means her geekiness fits in more with the altogether less reserved personality of Americans.

I’m British, of course, and therefore subject to the reserved rules of my race. Also being from the north of England, I am expected to subsist on a diet of football, fry ups, Friday night booze ups and stories about my time with women of a graphic nature. I am using stereotypes of course, but on the whole, my geekiness doesn’t fit in that much and is altogether less acceptable than my unbelievably better half’s slight coffee obsession.

I am a sci fi geek. I’m also an old tv series geek. I get excited when I see actors names in credits on modern shows and can tell you that they were on this show for 5 years in 1984 when I was 1. The average person of my age sees the actress Teri Garr on a tv show and would recognise her as Phobe’s mother from “Friends”. Myself on the other hand, I think immediately of the “Star Trek” episode “Assignment Earth” where she played Roberta Lincoln and “Tootsie” where she played Dustin Hoffman’s character’s female best friend. I can accept that not everybody is freaky like this. I know it is slightly disturbing that I can remember actor’s careers like a stalker but that’s fine. I understand. I’m strange. I’ve learned to deal with it. But then things changed. In seven simple words.

It became cool to be a geek.

The worst thing that could have happened, you see, when I was a teenager, being a geek was deeply uncool and required effort. It was like athletics, training yourself to be a true geek. Now it’s easy. You just say it. “I’m a geek” and there you are, you’re a geek.  Now, I hear you cry, “You started this blog by saying that you’re a geek, how are you any different”, I’m very glad you asked, dear reader.

I’m a geek because other people say I am and when in a conversation about geeky things I know what I’m talking about. I also don’t claim to be geeks of things I’m not. I’m not a Lord of the Rings geek (notice I don’t abbreviate the name in that oh so trendy way to LOTR, I refuse, it’s a book series title, you don’t shorten “Great Expectations” to “GE”), although I had read “The Hobbit” and “ The Lord of the Rings” by the time I was twelve and have watched all the films, I had real difficulty with “The Silmarillion” and thought “The Children of Hurin” was altogether too dark in a lot of places. I also haven’t learnt to speak Elvish, a lot of respect to those who have though. You guys are the true “The Lord of the Rings” geeks.

I’m not a “The Lord of the Rings” geek and just to reiterate owning the boxset limited edition dvd collection of the movies wrapped in mithril silver with a copy of one of the Elven rings from the movie and whatever else you get with it doesn’t mean anything unless you’ve read the books. Don’t say you’re a “The Lord of the Rings” geek and then say “I don’t like reading”.  Oh, you don’t like reading? It’s an epic book series, “dude”, it has been for sixty years. It was written by an Oxford professor of “Anglo Saxon”, it has exhaustive appendixes. It has invented languages. It is a whole body of work, not just some films from the turn of the millennium.  If you want to be a geek of a movie series go watch “Star Wars” for goodness sake.

I wouldn’t say I’m a Star Trek geek either, I mean, I love all the series, but I just haven’t gone into it to the level some people have. Buying or making their own costumes, buying every episode on dvd and then rebuying them when it comes out on blu-ray, although for the record, Picard is definitely a better captain of a starship and Kirk is just psychedelic sixties fun.

I’m not a comic book geek either. I’ve got my fair share of graphic novels and collected titles but I’ve never been able to keep up with the endless different titles. However it gets hard not to put down so called “comic book geeks” when they tell me they don’t like “The Amazing Spiderman” because it departs from the comic by having Spiderman invent his webbing rather than it come out of his arms biologically. Unbelievable, that’s not the comic. Sam Raimi came up with webbing out of the arms for the first movie, you obviously haven’t read the comics.

Anyway. This blog is about a look into the geek world. Well, my version of it, at least. And I’m sorry if all that earlier seemed slightly petty and teenage but I am a geek after all. So on these pages. I will talk about tv series and sci fi and give my opinion of them. You can read if you want and comment if you’d like. But I’m writing this to rant a little bit if that’s all the same with you. I won’t be going near music, by the way, because I have friends who are a lot better than that and if you want to be berated for liking Kasabian then I can put you in touch with them.