I am told that Nature Network celebrates its first anniversary today. Another year gone, already? I am not sure of the significance of anniversaries: after all, the likelihood that any two people in the same office celebrate the same birthday is surprisingly high, and, well, anniversaries happen all the time. For example, happening on this day was

- the bombing of Dresden (1945);

- the death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie (1989 – but the search for the Ayatollah’s missing contact lens was eventually to prove inconclusive). To show that anniversarial coincidences are of absolutely no significance or interest whatsoever, on this day in 1958 Walter Cronkite reported that the Iranian government had banned rock’n’roll , citing that it was un-Islamic and also a hazard to health, both allegations being of course absolutely true;

- and on a happier note, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won a gold medal for the so-called sport of ice-dancing at the winter Olympics (1984), an event that we’re never likely to be allowed to forget. Why, oh why, can’t we celebrate beach volleyball instead? Or is that just the middle-aged voyeur in me talking? But hey, it’s not just me. A favorite recreation of Louis Kahn, the bohemian architect who designed the Salk Institute, was to watch women roller-skating. Now, I can’t find any other source for this scurrilous information other than my own meticulously researched journalism, but the fact that it was published in Nature means that it’s probably okay, even though the issue date was 1 April. So that’s all right then.

- the birthdays of the notorious Parker Pair, Maceo (James Brown’s brassman, 1943) and Alan (film director, 1944), as well as musician Jack Benny (1894), labor-union boss Jimmy Hoffa (1913) and Teller (1948; no, not Edward Teller, you fool, but the Teller from pseudopsychotic stage magicians Penn and Teller. Oh do keep up).

- the deathdays of King Richard II (1400), Captain James Cook (1779), Sir Julian Huxley (1975), James Bond (1989 – the real-life ornithologist whose name was appropriated by Ian Fleming for a notorious watcher of birds of another nature), and Dolly the Sheep, put down in 2003 (or should that be sacrificed?) after she had been diagnosed to have been suffering from a progressive lung disease (even though she’d cut down to 90 a day after leaving Marlboro Country. Ain’t life a bitch?)

- the day that Aretha Franklin recorded R. E. S. P. E. C. T. (1967); The Who recorded their concert at Leeds University (1970), released as Live At Leeds; and Frank Zappa appeared in an episode of Miami Vice (1986) as a crimelord called ‘Mister Frankie’;

- Thomas Watson founded IBM (1924), exactly 22 years (1946, but who’s counting?) before the world’s first all-electronic computer, ENIAC, was unveiled at Penn (that’s Penn as in the University of Pennsylvania, you dolt, not Penn and Teller).

- Oregon (1859) and Arizona (1912) joined the United States, and Peru, Paraguay, Chile and Ecuador joined the United Nations (1945). Bet you never knew that.

- and the wholly dreadful show Grease opened off-Broadway (1972) where it ran, like a cold-sore, for a total of 3,388 performances, which is at least 3,387 too many, and the fact that we are still never allowed to forget this utterly feculent drivel is a sad reflection on the human condition;

- and, of course, the St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1929)

To celebrate this anniversary we Nature Network Bloggers (hey, that’s us) are being encouraged to assume a state of heightened blogginess and do a kind of Busby-Berkeley SynchroBlog thing. Well, wouldn’t you know it, but I don’t have a thing to write about. Zip. Nada. Sweet Football Association.

Sure, I could tell you that I’m off next week to a Secret Location to do some writing, but hey, I’ve already told you that.

On the other hand, I could recount an anecdote. Here’s one inspired by a story recounted by fellow bloggista Cath Ennis about things one shouldn’t say in public.

Some years ago I was going to see a movie with two colleagues (the movie was Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, but I won’t embarrass my colleagues by revealing their identities – you know who you are). Before the movie we were in a restaurant and the subject turned to unwelcome visits by Jehovah’s Witnesses and what might be done to repel them. I said that had I the courage, I’d open the door, preferably nude, and say that actually, I was a satanist, but that the callers would be very welcome to come in and buy tickets for our annual coffee-morning and virgin-ravish, and maybe share a mug of goats’ blood, which had gotten a bit congealed, but with a good stir and a freshen-up in the microwave, would probably be OK. After this story my colleagues laughed heartily – but the woman at the next table got up, pointedly, and left.

All of which is most entertaining (well, I think so, but there’s no accounting for taste), but once again it gets us nowhere. Ah, the futility of it all. So, if anyone wants a question, perhaps for a pub quiz, on things that happened on 14 February, you might add that this was the day that I was utterly stuck for things to write.

Except that at lunchtime I’m off with another colleague, who knows his fugu from his wasabe, to buy a few packets of kimchi. Mrs Gee, you see, absolutely adores it. And being Valentine’s Day, well, being the slushy and romantic chap that I am, I thought that when I get home and after we’d put the chickens to bed and nailed the kids to the ceiling for the night we could put on some Barry White or something on the ol’ sony music centre and open the packets of kimchi and smear it all over each other and … and …