I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s Star Wars day, so it seems like a good time to repost. Remember last Star Wars Day, when I snubbed the CERN CinéClub’s showing of the original three Star Wars movies in order to write a poem about Star Wars, from my perspective as someone who has only seen The Phantom Menace, several hours of The Star Wars Holiday Special (with Rifftrax), the start of the original trilogy, under duress, while tired, from 2a.m. until I fell asleep, and a lot of Star-Wars-related songs and Internet memes? Well, I still haven’t seen the movies, and it doesn’t look like the CERN CinéClub is showing them today. But I did recite the poem in front of a crowd of nerds and geeks at the open mic night on JoCo Cruise Crazy 3, and they didn’t lynch me as an infidel, or throw me in the hot tub and force me to drink mudslides and watch Star Wars on the on-deck movie screen. Some of them even said they liked the poem! Even several people who I know write great things themselves! Here is my video of it. Having a decent microphone and no need to use up all my breath to speak loudly eliminated most causes and symptoms of nervousness, but oh boy, is my high-rising terminal showing at the beginning.

If you’re wondering, my first comment referred to Mike Phirman saying earlier that when you go on stage your body shuts down its vital functions and ‘you can really, really, really have to pee before you go on, and then you walk on stage and your body goes into like war mode, where it’s like, ‘There’s no time for that! We are at war!” I don’t think anyone laughed at the reference to the story Wil Wheaton read on the first cruise, so there goes my best chance at any audience noticing that. I missed out the following lines, at the start of the second stanza:

There were Chewie, and Yoda (the OSV talker)

Han Solo, and Leia, of course, Luke Skywalker.

I excused that in advance by saying I’d spent more time memorising Chicken Monkey Duck than this poem. That was not a joke, although I also made one mistake in Chicken Monkey Duck, so I guess I’m just imperfect. That means I’m not a replicant; hooray! (For what it’s worth, I saw all of Blade Runner for the first time this year, while outside in the rain, no less, so I finally know what that means. And I’m still using it wrong, because it seems like replicants aren’t perfect either. But passing the Voight-Kampff test just seems like it would give a higher-level qualification than passing the Turing test.)

To anyone else out there who still hasn’t seen Star Wars and feels like they should have: remember it’s entertainment. It should not be on your to-do list. Put it on your ‘things that might be fun to do when I need a break from the to-do list’ list if it seems interesting to you. Or, like me, use it to quickly dispatch anyone’s insistence that you see, read or listen to every other piece of culture that they deem important. Once you tell them you haven’t even seen Star Wars yet, they dismiss you as a lost cause and stop trying to add things to your to-do list. And if you’re a geek and they tell you this makes you a fake one, just tell them that, as Marian Call says, you have been a nerd since your first five syllable word, and no TV series or movie changes that:

In other news, I’ve signed up to read something at the Leman Poetry Workshop open mic night (warning: gratuitously-Flash-only website; don’t bother clicking if you have special needs that this won’t cater for) on May 31. I haven’t decided what to read yet, but it’s on my birthday, so probably something about birth, or death, or cake.

Also, I’m working on several different things at the moment, including the long-planned but little-implemented six of hearts, so hopefully I’ll finish those and post them here soon.