Top Ten Nerd Moments in Life. Part 1

With my impending 30^th (5 more days and I’ll finally shut up about it!!!) I’ve found myself in a reflective mood. And as I look back over my 3 decades upon this earth, I find, un-surprisingly, I’ve racked up a few moments of serious nerdiness. I have nerded it up big time! So for this blog, I thought it might be fun to make a little top ten of my nerdiest moments ever. A few of these I did with friends, you’ll see the names Nathan, Nick and Will crop up more than once. Both of those guys would have some pretty awesome top tens of their own!

So for the top ten, I had to think pretty hard. I can list off a lot of nerdy things I do, but I needed ones that would be unusual. To nerds anyway, almost everything I do is unusual to a lot of people. So playing Dungeons and Dragons is nerdy maybe, but will not make the list by virtue of not being unusually nerdy enough. Being in Britain, people are a bit more reserved, so if many other people do do any of these things, they probably wouldn’t admit it. So I’m generally basing these on whether they’re out of the ordinary for people I know of. I wouldn’t claim them to be unique, just unusual. But each thing is certainly a treasured memory in my life as a nerd.

Here's the first half of the top ten.

I said it might be fun! No promises. In fact, any fun experienced is purely coincidental!

10) Meeting Christopher Lee! Not just meeting him, but queuing up a fire escape stairway with some really irritating girls to meet him. For hours! But this is a guy who was a movie legend before he played Count Dooku and Sauruman! And he has just as scary a voice in real life! Got a signed video copy of Attack of the Clones from it!

And as a side note, the irritating girls were stood behind me and Nick and Will. I’m not calling Nick and Will irritating girls!

9) Making stop motion animation films with Star Trek action figures. Yep, this would have been me about fourteen or fifteen, using the animation feature on the family camcorder. Initially starting with the kitchen worktop and a background from a weetabix box, (back when they did their Next Generation cards promotion) to culminating in my home made shuttlebay set and me and Nathan almost burning down the garage using fire to simulate phaser hits. And if my parents ever read this, that will clear up any remaining curiosity about that very odd Saturday afternoon. I hope my parents don’t read this, I think they’re better off thinking I’m a nerd without knowing the extent.

8) Going to see films in costume. Yeah, due to the Star Wars fan film (see later in the list) I’m involved with, there were three of us with Jedi robes. So we went to see Attack of the Clones dressed as Jedi. Got in the local paper and the Odeon were so impressed by us they gave us free T-Shirts and beer! We did the same for Revenge of the Sith, but to less fanfare and no free stuff. But go further back to the release of Star Trek First Contact, and the local cinema at the time were treated to me arriving in my Starfleet uniform! Early DS9/Voyager style in services gold. I wasn’t the only one doing so, there were three others in uniform too, and we all got in the local paper again! Yep, the local paper loves it’s nerds! Or loves going ‘hey, look at the nerds!!’.

Marvellous addendum to the Star Wars tale, a less nerdy friend was joining us for Revenge of the Sith. At work, he’d mentioned to his colleagues he was off to see it with some guys who were pretty into it. One of his colleagues held up the local paper which was re-running the picture of me, Nick and Will from Attack of the Clones, and said, ‘they’re probably not as into it as these freaks!’. To which my poor friend had to admit that those freaks were us!

7) Recorded audio clips of episodes of the Next Generation to try to create my own answer machine message with Captain Picard. Yep, hours spent with videos of Next Gen and a dictaphone to try and assemble a message from bits of dialogue, that I then played into the answer machine to use as an outgoing message. Oddly my parents didn’t want incoming calls to be greeted by Captain Picard’s voice advising them to contact Commander Riker instead. I know, but it’s really hard to find appropriate dialogue to use!

6)Learning Klingon. Yep, I got the Klingon dictionary, the Klingon language CD’s and even a copy of Hamlet in Klingon. I know there’s a lot of guys who try their hand at learning Klingon, but it’s still a really nerdy thing to do. It’s probably even nerdier if you succeed, but sadly linguistics is not a strong area for me. I can remember how to say, ‘yes’, ‘what do you want?’ ‘stop!’ and ‘where is the bathroom?’ but that’s about as much as I can remember. Though even when I was working on it, I couldn’t remember much more, though I could count to ten.

There we have it, the first 5 of my top ten. Yeah, I look pretty cool now! Well obviously I don't. Some things that didn't make the top ten though...

Nightmares about the Borg and/or Daleks. Pretty nerdy to dream about these things for sure, but I rejected them from the list on the basis that they're involuntary. I couldn't choose whether or not to dream about these things. Had my parents dressed me up in Star Trek uniform onesies when I was a baby, I wouldn't count that as it wasn't my choice.

Creating a Star Trek Desktop theme for my Dad's laptop. It very nearly made it in. You can find Trek-based desktop themes all over the place these day, but this one was all drawn and made from scratch with no internet access! Hell, it was in the early nineties, the internet was not widespread. In fact I only got net access in 1997 I think.

I shall post the top 5 in the next couple of day. Yep, they get worse...