I should be more explicit with that title. A more effective headline for this piece would be ‘Geeky Is As Geeky Does, or, Why Dungeons and Dragons is like The Strokes.’

Unlike other cultural phenomena like, say, Ugg boots, which burn themselves out in a blaze of ill-conceived glory, the idea of accepting geekiness has been on a slow boil for a while. Evidence: the recent season two of ‘Beauty and the Geek,’ the eminently geeky Tiger Woods pulling Elin Nordegren, the above picture of Bill Gates from a 1983 Teen Beat photo spread.

LIke I said, this geek movement has been on the back burner for a loooong time.

I’m on the train yesterday when come across this story about references to Dungeons and Dragons cropping up in everyday culture. Wow. Vin Diesel played fantasy games. The guy from My Chemical Romance too. Huh. I thought about it for ten seconds and turned the page to do my crossword.

But one stop before I get off, I look up at the station advertisements: Apparently the Dummies series has taken a break from Brewing Coffee for Dummies and Proposing to Your Pregnant Fiancee Because It’s The Right Thing To Do for Dummies to bring you Dungeons and Dragons for Dummies. And has decided the best plan of action would be to advertise this on public transit. On a sign. To yuppie professionals.

While I won’t comment on the company’s marketing strategy - please, please, please click here and watch the commercial, then tell me if it’s brilliant or wretched, because I’m still on the fence - I was struck by the fact that in a five-minute period around 8:10 a.m. on a train in a pre-coffee fog with headphones on, I was confronted with two Dungeons and Dragons references.

Which brings me to The Strokes.

Frankly, I’m not sure if it’s cool to like The Strokes again. Yet. Or ever. See? I’m confused. Sure, the band came out with a great debut album, but once it was too big, you were vilified for even mentioning those poseur wannabes. Don’t even talk about that second album. Nobody bought that.

But then The Strokes might, just maybe, be hip again after the release of their third album. So while you may be accepted for liking D&D today, that situation could change immediately. In a few years, all the D&D geeks will cease to be cool again, much like The Strokes. I suggest dropping your 20-sided die now and hitting the beach.

Or pose for Teen Beat and 23 years later become the world’s richest man. Whichever.

Once upon a time, I blacked out in Prague. Supposedly.

According to third-party reports, it was a beautiful night. The soft glow of the streetlights illuminated a scene from a Kafka novel - one full of possibility, but with a tinge of unknown seediness and compelling danger - while the low hum of chatter punctuated the serenity of the scene. Vendors hawked cartons of cigarettes to passers-by, footsteps of arm-in-arm lovers clacked on cobblestone streets, vaudevillians performed impromptu juggling and puppet acts for a mostly disinterested and sparse crowd.

And we missed all of this. We were those jelly-legged, stumbling drunks that give the scene so much … well, character.

We had neglected Rule One of first-time absinthe consumption: Slow down, enjoy the experience and have only a few drinks. Not an entire bottle. While the events of evening are fuzzy, the allure of the beverage was unmistakable. Slightly illegal? Check. Marked by an arcane ritual with something called louche? Yep. Able to make stationary objects vibrate in your field of vision? Most certainly.

With such an appeal, absinthe was bound to make a comeback. I was seeing a burgeoning Internet trade hinging on thujone - which is supposedly the reason behind the so-called ‘absinthe effect’ - but then in the November issue of Wired, the efforts of Ted Breaux, a New Orleans native interested in distilling a pure, historically accurate version of the drink, discovered that the compound may not be as integral to the drink as previously thought. His new distillation, Nouvelle-Orleans, containted less than five parts per million of the stuff.

Wow, great, interesting. I forgot about the article ten minutes later.

Until last week. The the first article in the March 13, 2006, issue of the New Yorker talked about this crazy new absinthe guy named Ted Breaux who is trying to reverse-engineer a beverage that has been blamed for Van Gogh’s cutting off of his own ear. Crazily enough, the article seemed vaguely familiar.

From the Wired piece:

Dressed in a black muscle T-shirt, blue jeans, and a Dolce & Gabbana belt, Breaux looks as if he’d be more at home on Bourbon Street than in a research lab.

And from the New Yorker:

Breaux seems an unlikely man to revive a drink with such a fearsome reputation. Amiable, muscled, and bespectacled, he is a picture of wholesomeness.

Granted, the New Yorker piece was peppered with overly-erudite phrases (’like an image from the medieval Book of Hours’ or ‘Neuchatel, home to Val-de-Travers, was one of only two cantons to vote against the measure’), but it was pretty much the same piece. C’mon, New Yorker. You’re better than that. Granted, the overlap in readership between the two publications is most likely miniscule, but even the dateline in the third sentence showed the datedness of the piece, as Jack Turner writes ‘on a crisp, clear fall morning …’ Scooped by Wired, and all he would have had to do would be to ask me all about the effects of absinthe.

Not that I could have remembered anyway.

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Postscript. This picture is why you don’t go out with your entire office on St. Patrick’s Day and start imbibing at noon. I’m on the left. With my eyes closed.