As promised last week, this week EGWPATF was going to take aim at either 64-bit computing or e-voting. However, in light of recent events, it has been determined that 64-bit computing is the future. E-voting is the future. 64-bit computing will usher us into a golden age of something or other, and e-voting in the gateway to a hellish landscape of some sort of trouble. And that’s all there really is to say about that.

So anyway, the news: Naturally, LotR took home 11 eerie little statuettes, and the burning question in my mind is, who gets a statue? Does everybody in the movie get 11? Or just the producer? Do they get little plastic knockoffs in a baggie? Do they number them? Or are they divvied up according to participation? Is there, somewhere, an impossibly fresh-faced, blond and androgynous young man with a souvenir recurved bow that gets, say, a gold foot, and a grubby, pudgy little sound engineer who has a few precious shavings in a shredded nest of hi-cap shielded cable?

Really, aside from the geeky little details, and the fact that that the director looks like your high school chemistry professor and probably dated about as much, who cares?

Remember the rules; if everybody does it, it can’t possibly be geeky. If everybody likes it, it’s time to scuttle away in loathing. Remember, they always hated us, and it’s only fair that we get to make fun of them for liking things we used to like.

So gird up thy loins, geekarians-even though the Hollywood species have wrapped their impossibly long and slender tentacles around the LotR and are busily leeching it to a husk with self-congratulatory slurps, we can remain pure, by remembering two things: they messed with the ending, and the damn things were practically ripped off point blank from the animated versions. So, really, anyone who liked it is a weenie.

And yes, I’m buying the DVD. As soon as I get my Tivo clone/DVD player/entertainment PC up and running. Yep.

In other news, the outside world has sullied the pure in another way. Playboy.com has ravished the purity of our love by declaring Morgan Webb the hottest TechTV girl and apparently suckered her into posing nude. The words to describe their perfidy are boundless, but their words are drearily predictable. Some nasty greaseball wrote the feature thus: “If there’s anything computer geeks love more than next-generation hardware and massive RAM, it’s hot giga-babes.” That’s about as clever as finding your keyboard with both hands, pal. Go die.

The real wrench, of course, is that none of the lonely young romantics that so avidly watched and loved the TechTV girls with every hormone in their raddled bodies could ever convince any of them to dress up, pose, or smile. Their unassailable purity fell to the frat-boy in the backwards baseball cap, and that alone has wrecked them, our poor lost madonnas of the airwaves. Alas for their bright, but apparently greedy brains, alas for our hearts, alas for their credibility-someone should warn them that the sex object and the smart female do not mix in the geek mind.

Anyway, Cat is obviously the hottest. So bite me, playboy.