Edinburgh: Story 1 (in two parts)

Part I:
The story behind this photo:

On the left we have Dean Haglund, whose main claim to fame is that he played one of the Lone Gunmen on the X-files. We went to Mr. Haglund's improv show at the Fringe (because Nicole found a flyer at a venue) and Nicole snagged a photo afterwards.

The story behind this photo is more interesting:


The show was essentially an improvised episode of the X-files in which an audience member went up on stage and helped with traditional improv games, like providing sound effects or random words when prompted or reading out lines previously written out by the audience. Because I'd had a pint and a half and because I'm kind of a jack-ass at improv shows (I once suggested "magic realism" as a genre) I gladly yelled out suggestions. Thanks to my suggested profession of "theoretical physicist", I got pulled up to the stage and got to play Dean Haglund's arms.

(photo courtesy Nicole's Facebook)

The set-up was that Dean Haglund was playing a government scientist at a press conference. For the final part of the section, he took questions from the audience. One of the questions was "Can you still touch your toes?"

As you can tell from the photo, Mr. Haglund is quite a bit taller than me. So it was clearly physically impossible and the audience member was clearly just being a jack-ass. So in response, I gave him the finger.

[no photo due to Nicole's laughing too hard]

Afterwards, though, it did lead to the multi-middle finger photo above, which I will treasure always.