Won't You Take Me To... SEPIATOWN??

Those of my six readers who also click on the links to the right (so, then, none of you) may be wondering why Virgil's been so quiet these past couple of years. It turns out there's a simple explanation for why he's been denying so many of us bite-sized nibbles of his that nubile mind of his.

It's called SepiaTown, and it's been a massive undertaking that he launched this past weekend.

Its scope is limited primarily to a few cities right now, but the idea is that eventually, anyone can see what their current location looked like in the days of yore. "Gee, I'm standing at the corner of East 9th Street and Broadway. I wonder what it looked like in 1910." Well, it looked like this.

SepiaTown is a "wiki," B&E readers, which means it relies on user-generated content. If you have old photos, go put them in there. If you know people with access to old photos, tell them to put them in there. The more people that get involved, the cooler the site becomes.

As one buddy said, Virgil has gone and "built a goddamned time machine."

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Happy National Punctuation Day, B&E readers! (You even get an exclamation point for that one.)

To honor this important day, and as long as we're talking about exclamation points, I quote from the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves daily tear-off calendar. Believe it or not, there is someone at my office who's even geekier than I am. It's hers. But she shares highlights with me. Because I'm a geek.

Everyone knows the exclamation mark - or exclamation point, as it is known in America. It comes at the end of a sentence, is unignorable and hopelessly heavy-handed, and is known in the newspaper world as a screamer, a gasper, a startler or (sorry) a dog's cock.

So out of respect for this national holiday, I hope you'll lay off the dog's cock.

Thanks for reading.

I Am Not a Number! I Am a FREE MAN!

I never read comic books, never did any gaming, and was never obsessed with the books of J.R.R. Tolkien. So when I need to remind myself that I am deep down a total geek, I reach toward the complete collection of The Prisoner on DVD, which yes, I own.

Oh, it's geeky. And it's tasty.

The Prisoner was the brainchild of Patrick McGoohan. It was, in some ways, the surreal sequel to his previous TV series Secret Agent (called Danger Man in the UK), which was a rather straightforward spy show. The Prisoner begins with a brilliant opening sequence in which a secret agent resigns forcefully, packs for a trip, gets gassed, and wakes up in The Village. He is henceforth known only as Number 6 and goes head-to-head with a new Number 2 each week. While Number 2 tries to find out why Number 6 resigned, Number 6 is trying to figure out who Number 1 is and simultaneously attempting to escape.

And that summary is tip of the iceberg for the wackiness that ensues.

Patrick McGoohan died today. But The Prisoner is some kind of geektastic legacy. It's being remade, of course, starring Jim Cavazaliezelvaliel (the dude who played the title role - Passion - in The Passion of the Christ a few years back) and Ian McKellen (who is apparently determined to be associated with as many uber-geek brands as possible). Part of me is like, "Oh for fuck's sake, leave well enough alone." The other part of me can't wait to check it out.

Either way, I'm sad to see Patrick McGoohan go, even though he only rarely came out of retirement. The less geeky among you might remember him as Longshanks, the English king who wanted to kill off and breed out the Scots in Braveheart.

I never thought I'd drop two Mel Gibson movie names in one post. Patrick McGoohan can really surprise you that way.

Be seeing you.