You hear the thunder of stampeding rhinos...

...elephants and tacky tigers

Still aiming to go through the whole month. Four out of four. I'm rather impressed with that.

Mum & Dad have left to go back to Germany. But I'd rather talk about the day I met C3PO as I don't think I've mentioned it before and it's my one and only star story. In fact, I might split it into two parts.

Around two years ago I heard about a site called Ghosts of Albion . It was a webcartoon written by Amber Benson from Buffy. Now being a massive fan of anything Buffy related and also having had a huge crush on Amber (it was the doe eyes that did it*) I started to watch it.

It was good. Whilst the animation was a bit rubbish (due to having dial-up at the time I had to go for the poorer quality picture) the story was exciting and certainly gave me something to do other than watch the telly. Even though I was just watching the PC instead.

They had the usual stuff on the site for people to interact with each other which at the time was a forum. But they also had the golden ticket competition.

Every weekday they set a question either about the cartoon or regarding the mythology touched upon in the cartoon (Lord Nelson, Boudiccia and another ghost I can't quite remember possibly Byron were involved). If you were the first to answer on the forum you managed to go to an event which would be held in London in December. Apparently the people who voiced the characters would be there. They never mentioned it but I reckoned that Amber would definitely be showing up and I would pull her and then we would live together in LA.

So it was in my best interests to get a golden ticket. Unfortunately most questions were set at noon and I couldn't get net access at work so I usually missed out. The few questions that weren't answered straight away were usually because they were set at museums that no-one went to or in Manchester square on a big tv and no-one bothered to look at it. Can't blame them - I avoid the York Ghost Walk guy whenever he appears through walls.

Eventually the beeb took pity on the people who weren't tax dodgers and actually worked during the day and started to set questions at 6pm. Even then I usually failed to answer in time because I was on dial up and once I worked out an answer about 10 people had already correcty answered it.

I was getting angry. Amber was moving away from me. And we'd make a perfect couple.

Luck was to shine on me though. One of the questions was divided into lots of mulitiple choice questions which ended in you getting a code word. Using my geek skills and google I think I had the right word, which was different to the one everyone else had put down. Further geek skills helped me work out I was definitely correct by the fact that deliberately getting an option wrong gave me the word everyone else quoted.

I was right. I had my ticket to London. Amber & I would finally meet and the planets would align.

Except between getting the ticket and the event I met Freya and Amber left my mind completely. And she never showed up anyway. But C3PO did.

Part 2 tomorrow as I have to get ready to leave for Manchester then & will not be able to think of anything to write about.


* As in she had nice eyes, not that she used doe eyes in a spell on Buffy & that turned me on.