From The Archive
Created | Updated Jun 4, 2008
The Post has been lucky to attract many contributors over the years and, thankfully, all
their articles are lovingly preserved in our extensive archives. This series aims to introduce you to some
of them.
Personality Number One: Greebo T
Cat
Who better to kick off this series than one of our most prolific and varied contributors. Joining h2g2
way back in 1999, Greebo soon came to be a stalwart of both the site and The Post, culminating in
becoming my right-hand, all singing, all dancing assistant for over 4 years. Sadly, we lost her cheery
~grin~ in October 2004 when she relocated her lair and misplaced the keys to the doughnut cupboard
but I can report that she is alive and well and often drops by to visit old haunts.
Artistic Endeavors
It never ceased to amaze me how a cat could be so creative. Once we had the go-ahead to
produce our own graphics for Post articles, I could always rely on Greebs to come up with something
appropriate. Check out her Post Artwork which even managed to
sneak in some early h2g2 animated graphics.
Another popular series featured Greebs two loves; wordplay and art. Her Cat-egories produced a dazzling array of interpretations ranging from
Anniversary to Trollop with a
few stops on the way. We found out how she came to work in Carpus, what a Crocus really is, a
foretaste of another series1 in the making at Horoscope and the
consequences of a wild night on the town in Trumpery.
Special occasions would inspire Greebs and we puzzled over Santa's
Photo Finish and Ghost Muddle, sometimes more than
once.
Literary Scribblings
Poetry featured heavily on Greebo's agenda and she covered a wide range of subjects. In April
2001 she gave us her vision of moggies in Ode To Cats and tackled
every writer's nightmare in Writers Block. The introduction of new
smileys to h2g2 inspired the Ode To The Humble Smiley and a more
serious side was revealed in Memories of the Past. I am still not
sure whether to be flattered by her The Shazzalump, though!
Greebo enlisted help from a good friend for her The Toy Box
series. Wilson Brown Bear wrote poetry with the younger reader in
mind and had his heart broken by a flighty lady bear in Shattered
Love. All together now - Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Community news was always important to Greebo - she did seem to appear in the most unlikely
places around h2g2 - so it was obvious that she should write an article on the aforementioned New Smileys on the Block2. Also on the community front was the creation of
appreciation societies and we first learnt of GAS3 via her first regular column Greebo's Bits. This was soon superceded by Just For Fun which had a long and productive run throughout 2000 and
2001. Regular readers were invited to play along, share a laugh and write in with amusing letters.
Bouyed by the willingness of readers to participate, it was Greebo who organised and ran the first
h2g2 Post Christmas Poetry Competition. The fact that it was caught
out by the h2g2 hiatus when the .com site was taken over by the BBC, and the results didn't appear until March, its popularity was obvious as The Post
still runs poetry competitions in various forms and guises.
Fun, Games and Quizzes
As you would expect from such a well-read, cerebral cat, Greebo delighted in setting brain teasers
of all kinds. One of the most popular was The Post Word Play which
ran throughout 2003 and 2004 and even had its own Champions
Board where winners were feted and their cups displayed!
A popular forum in the early days of h2g2 was the H2IQ. Greebo revamped it into 'H2IQ' Revisited which led to some 'quite interesting' answers - in general
much funnier than the correct one.
QED also exercised the grey matter and covered a wide
variety of topics. Those veteran h2gers amongst you may score 10 out of 10 for the Ten Profound Post Puzzles whilst you sf fans may find the Ten Startling Star Trek Stalwarts or the Hitch
Hiker Muddle more to your taste. With 44 to choose from, QED provided Post readers with
hours of fun.
Another series instigated and run by Greebs was The Post Room
1014. Oddly enough,
as with the TV show, hardly anything proposed ever made it in to the bottomless pit of the Post junkyard.
Sadly this was a short series as Greebo packed away her doughnut stash and moved to pastures
new.
So there you have it. A tribute trawl through the archives of one of the most prolific contributors to
The Post. A big thank you to you, Greebo, both for your own wonderful brand of entertainment and also
the many hours you put in behind the scenes on cold, lonely nights when the 'to do' pile reached to the
ceiling of The Post Office, the GuideML tags refused to work and h2g2 threw a wobbly and
disappeared offline.
Scope based on the month everyone joined h2g2, which proved popular back in
2002.2Greebo was responsible for designing the
smiley.3The GreeboAppreciation Society.4Which I have been thinking of resurrecting!
