artist's rendering. if you need me to remove this image, please let me know.

BIRTH NAME: John Geoffrey Thurbis AGE: 32 BIRTH PLACE: HEIGHT: 180 cm/6' WEIGHT: 82Kg/170lbs FAVORITE ACTIVITIES: bad American TV, sex, alcohol, reading Richard Feynman's books on anthropology, walking, staring directly at the sun INSPIRATION FOR JOHN: Well, duh, obviously, as anyone can tell by the above picture, John Taylor (formerly of Duran Duran). I have spent more than half my life hopelessly in love with that man; most of the things I've ever written have something of him in them, if not long complicated missives about him specifically. His face, his smile, his voice, all deeply imprinted in my mind. Only other Durannies can possibly grasp how much he means to me. The word "idol" doesn't seem to really get into sufficient depth and complexity. John's a part of me.

Also, of course, I have a massive stiffy for physicists in general; I would do Stephen Hawking in less time that it would take him to vocode "Hey baby, want to come up and see my etchings?" If I could have been a pointy-headed science geek, I would have; unfortunately I didn't get sufficient math early on, so I'm fairly dumb when it comes to physics. It doesn't stop me from finding it incredibly sexy, the more obscure the better. Brian Greene is a hunky babe who has made tremendous advancements in the field of string theory; he's pretty much what I'm talking about. Yikearoonies, isn't he cute? In his leather like a badass. Oh wait! He is!

SECRETS ABOUT JOHN: I have John Thurbis so firmly in mind that I could have gone on for hundreds of pages just describing his relationship with Ariane and the Loony Geek Farm, and ended up going in the opposite direction, only giving him the most cursory of roles in VOTB. A lot of readers don't really like John, and I think that's because they never really get to know him. For that horrible sin, I apologize, and I know that unless the readers of the world want either a not-vampirey-at-all novel about John and Ariane falling in love, or a bad imitation of Gertrude Stein's Lifting Belly to accurately depict John's state of mind after the events of VOTB take place, I will never get a chance to rectify the situation. Here is my attempt to remedy this a little bit. Please humor me.
What can I say? Dr. John Thurbis rocks!
-He's kind of a cross between Hugh Grant and Mr. Spock.
-He's dastardly fucking handsome, if obviously a total nerd, still a bit insecure from having been a bucktoothed, spotty scarecrow five years younger than anyone else in his class. A bout of encephalitis as a child, which hospitalized him for seven months, left him with a debilitating stutter that lasted for years.
-After several years at Oxford, Cambridge, CERN, and MIT, he is sardonic, inquisitive, aggressively outspoken, and dedicated to occasional bouts of total hedonism to keep himself "sane".

-After his difficult, working-class upbringing (his father worked in a cannery until bowel cancer killed him, and his mum is a maths teacher in a local school), academics is the only life that makes sense to him. He enjoys the structure of the school years and the insulation and abstraction of research. He is ambitious, but quietly so; it's not in his nature to destroy others to further his own ends. -Before he met Ariane, he sometimes slept on a cot in his office with a computer on and linked directly to the supercollider in Switzerland, so eager for figures and results that he didn't want to bother with getting out of bed before he could get to work interpreting them. -His favorite bands are the Clash, Devo, and Consolidated. SONG FOR JOHN: "My Love Paramour" by Cocteau Twins WHO WOULD I CAST AS JOHN? No one else is good enough: Cast John Taylor. He'd be perfect for it; the dialogue is written for him.

can YOU find the boson?