I was somewhat disturbed recently to find my dark side laid bare for all the world to see. But, since its out in the open and more than 11,000 people have watched it, I guess I should put it here for all the world to see.

You may find this video shocking, but really, it’s a call to wake up and smell the MediaWatch. It’s the red pill. It’s reality…

For more of my underhanded trickery, you should catch Late Night Letters and Numbers at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival as part of Curtin Comedy.

(With thanks to “Addled Aphorist” who created this video back in July.)

When I was a younger man, imagining where I might be in 2011, I thought I might be on my way to becoming the next Dr Karl, auditioning to play an elder Weasley brother, or perhaps starring in a YouTube Doctor Who fan film as the first ginger Doctor.

I never considered I might be in a musical about a killer robot travelling back in time to kill Jesus before He’s born.

The Terminativity is easily one of the greatest things I’ve ever been involved with. First, it’s been super popular: I’ve never before sold out an entire (short, and not including the preview) run before opening. So a big thank you everyone who came along! Second, the response has been great. Cameron Woodhead in The Age gave us four stars (not 40, as the Google search result suggests). Wonderful talented people I admire came to see it and liked it and wrote about it on their blogs and told me so on Twitter. And so many friends have come as well and laughed and said lovely things! (Mostly, it’s true, “I didn’t know you could sing!”, to which I want to answer “I’ve been in five musicals!” but I understand that very few people saw the last four.) I love you all. I even got the chance to sing on the radio – and you might get to see a bit of the show online in the future. (I’ll keep you posted!)

But most importantly, The Terminativity is a great experience as a performer because it’s a great show. The cast – Aurora, Mike, Gatesy, Lawrence, Andy, Tegan, Adam, Rebecca, Scott and of course Richard – are amazing. I’m working with friends and peers and people I admire, all putting in professional effort out of all proportion with the amount of time we’ve had to prepare. The band – Casey, Matt, Ben, Ross, Enio and Vincenzo – are amazing: we sound good because they are all top notch, and similarly have put in hard work to sound so amazing. Our production team – Catherine, Jacky, Jackson, Julz and Lara – have done an incredible job with props, costumes and lights; we don’t just sound good, we look good. Nick Caddaye (with a little help from the cast, it’s true, but not too much) has crafted some of the finest Christmas/Terminator mashup gags you can imagine. And Casey Bennetto…well, I’ve used the term musical genius before, but that’s because I’ve now met about half a dozen people who really deserve the title. Casey is king of the bunch; when people tell me they love my song, I reflexively deflect that praise onto him. After all, he created it, and was kind enough to let me be the one to sing it.

In short, I’m in the kind of show I would be in the audience watching if I could be, and really that’s the best possible thing any of us can ask for, isn’t it? It’s like a Christmas present that we all get to do this again. Now I understand what the cast of Doctor Who mean when they go on about it being like a family.

So thanks to everyone involved in, watching or even just talking about The Terminativity; it’s only halfway through our brief run of four nights and it’s already been a rollercoaster.

And if you wanted to come, but you didn’t get in quick enough, don’t worry: I’ve a feeling you haven’t seen the last of us.

We’ll be back.

Yes, it’s true, your very own Man in the Lab Coat was a contestant on Letters and Numbers, the world’s greatest and nerdiest game show! You can watch the episode on the SBS web site – but I’m not giving away any spoilers!

Of course there’s no such thing. But every year I try to inject a little science into the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, usually through the medium of the Melbourne Museum Comedy Tour. This year is no different – and you can get all the goss, and tickets, over at museumcomedy.com.

But, I sense you wonder, what else are you doing? Surely you have something more directly science-y in the works? And, well…I sort of do. It’s true that my focus has wandered in recent years, taking in a broader geeky scope than just science. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t written often here on the blog – I try to confine myself to science topics, and yet a lot of my time is taken up thinking about games, stories, politics and other things. Mostly in a geeky context, of course. For this reason, my next solo show – or shows, it might be two – is also broader in scope. Roughly 25% of it will be science based, but the other 75% will be the other three quadrants of the geek equation.

But this is all part and parcel of my life, both as a person and as a comedian. You can read about the comedy output on my production company site, Shaolin Punk, and more specifically about Museum Comedy on its own site. This place…well, this is about me as a solo performer, and if I’m going to me more broadly geeky, then so is this site. I’ll still write about science topics close to my heart – so expect things about dinosaurs, space, evolution and so on – but I’ll also be writing about the other things that matter to me.  I’ll tag things, though, so you can filter stuff out, but it’s time I talked more here, and that means opening it up.

I’m curious, though; assuming anyone reads this still, what do you want to see? What would you like to hear me talk about? I’m entirely open to suggestions. Maybe I’ll even start a podcast. Who knows?

I’ll tell you who knows. Only the future. Let’s go hang out there.

It’s always an international year of something. Indeed, usually of several things: 2011 is the international year of Forests, People of African descent, Veterinarians, and Chemistry.

Chemistry is the study of matter – what it’s made of, why it does things, how it can be changed. Much of it has very little to do with beakers and bunsen burners, but of course that’s what we all remember from high school. But all that stuff you think of as elementary physics – the structure of atoms, how they combine into molecules – that’s all chemistry. And it’s awesome. It’s really the study of stuff (if you’ll excuse the Dr Karl-ism), the study of everything. Everything is, after all, made up of stuff.

Fittingly, a day or two ago it was also the centennial of Marie Curie winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Take a moment and think: what was significant about Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in 1911?

If you answered “she was the first woman to win one”, well…if this was QI, you’d get a big “OBVIOUS BUT WRONG” alarm going off. Sure, Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and that’s significant – there have only been 41 prizes awarded to women, compared to 776 to men since 1901 – but she was the first female Nobel laureate in 1903. In 1911, she became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, something only three other laureates have managed in all the years since, the first not until fifty years later.

It’s for these awesome reasons that I am the proud owner of a Marie Curie T-shirt, produced by nerd retailer ThinkGeek. I’m pretty excited by this range of excellent women T-shirts, which show them being awesome for things other than cleavage and nudity. I plan to pick up the others (Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace) when I can convince myself to get rid of some of my old T-shirts.

Before I finish talking about 2011, let me say that I also hope it to be a year in which I get out there and do a few more gigs for science. (There are a few lined up already; check out the gigs list.) I’ve not been idle, but it’s been a long while between drinks when it comes to writing science shows. I’ve been instead feeding that other geeky side of me, the one that loves games, mainly with +1 Sword and Dungeon Crawl (you can read about them at Shaolin Punk). I might write a bit about that here for you as well; this is my blog, after all. I never said it would be all about science stuff!