Features for a Defining Week

By the time this week is over, the largest and most intrepid undertaking I have...undertaken, will have reached its completion. The Geek Tournament is currently down to four teams and the Geek Champion shall be determined by April 1st, which also happens to be April Fool's Day. So with that on my mind, I will now update our weekly features.

This week's top five list consists of five geeky practical jokes you can play on someone this April 1st:

5. Move their bookmark - What a shock it will be when they think momentarily that the Fellowship must pass through the Mines of Moria a second time. I don't remember that from the first seventeen times I read this book, they'll think.

4. Repose their displayed action figures - This is best when your target owns a figure with articulation in every finger. Imagine their surprise when they look to their shelf for inspiration and find Optimus Prime flipping them the bird.

3. Take their movie collection out of alphabetical order - You can do this randomly, but if you can sort it in some other order like by last name of first production assistant or foley artist or according to the Dewey Decimal System, it will prove even more maddening as they try to crack the code.

2. Leave an empty telephone booth on their front lawn - It's up to you if you want to leave a scarf or a Wild Stallions poster behind inside of it. Get creative.

1. Replace their 20-sided dice with identical dice that have 1 on all 20 sides - Good luck defeating those goblins now! Mwa-ha-ha-haaaaa!

This week's cool-ass thing you will never own is a piece of basketball net from a Final Four appearance. The cutting down of the game nets is one of the cooler sports traditions in my opinion. What you might not know is that if you manage to fashion the threading from it into a vest, it gives you +5 armor class.

This week's sign you are a nerd is that you don't need to reference the instructions to recall the exact number of each type of piece that came with your board game. It makes clean up much easier, but it also displays your level of OCD. My knowing there are exactly 49 cards and 49 monster tokens that come with Castle Panic doesn't count because that's such a unique number. I mean, who wouldn't remember that it's seven squared, right?

This week's nemesis is my NCAA bracket. I can't recall a year in recent memory that I didn't have a single team in the Final Four. In fact, I only had two teams in the Elite Eight predicted correctly. Disgusting.

And along those lines, this week's lesson learned is to check your facts before bragging about something. For instance, make sure you looked at the scores of all the completed games before you decide to post a tirade about how everybody should listen to you more often.

This week's equation helps you determine how much shame you have:

You can determine the amount of shame you posses if you add the number of people you dated in high school (d) to the average number of people you interact with on a daily basis (i) then multiply that by the number of pairs of shoes you own (p) and the percentage of your wardrobe that does not consist of t-shirts (w) then subtract the product of your age in years (y) and the number of kids you have (k) to the power of 1 if you are single and 2 if you are married (m).

Finally, this week's Star Wars quote is, "We won't get another chance at this, Admiral!"

Thank you, everyone, for reading. I hope you've enjoyed the Geek Tournament thus far and continue to vote up until the final decision is made. And I hope you keep reading for a long time beyond that.