Geek Pride 2014

Seeing as our clientele have an interest in this - cite most popular posts to your right most days....here is the Facebook page cataloguing everything that is going down for Geek Day this year.

e.g.this event last year in Croton-On-Hudson in the United States-  a place with a name that surely any geek would want to visit - featured entertainment & activities including which can serve as a blueprint for organising your own event:

• DJ music & karaoke
• Zombie Tag (epic - I thought this only existed in Scotland)
• Scavenger Hunt with Geocaching
• Board Gaming Tables
• The Cosplay Catwalk (open to all cosplayers*)
• Raffles for PRIZES - TWO 3-DAY PASSES to NY COMIC CON & more!
• Special Edition Geek Pride Day Trivia Contests
• Giant JENGA
• A Geek Swap Table (oh the mind boggles - did they swap actual geeks? or just geeky things?)
• Food for the Masses
• ...and general geekery for all ages!

Add your event with pride at https://www.facebook.com/GeekPrideDay.

In the textile gallery

This poem was written in the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) where there is a display on Dr Schunk and other eminent Victorian dye chemists. Good stuff. The poem was first published in Iota.

Before you read it, or after - go and sign the petition to save the museum here http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/science-museum-group-save-the-museum-of-science-and-industry-mosi

In the textile gallery


Some of the substances contained in lichen
make bright dye; brush past a lily’s stamen
and your shirt is streaked with red and orange
showing against nap or strong pattern.

In Schunk’s laboratory, flowers grew on desks,
grasses twisted in the many-drawered chests
and, one corner set aside, the place for cotton.
Each strand dropped in a vial specked with forgotten
leaves, stalks, shellfish, reeds and rock
that he hauled back into a finely written log.

Colours the clothmen fought to use in their design
resplendent in granny’s cover for chaise longue
and pelmet. Fabrics that still give me a pang
stretched in ranks of glass case and machine.

  © Bridget Khursheed