The Think Tank

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

One of these ape descended digital watch enthusiasts was named Douglas Adams.  He spent most of his time in a country called either England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom or the Lesser Satin, depending on who you asked.  He shared his singularly unique view of this small blue green planet by writing radio shows, magazine articles, novels, video games and eventually motion picture movies in exchange for small green pieces of paper.

This is not his story.

It is, however, the story of his day.

If you have never heard of Douglas Adams, then you have probably never spent very much time talking to me. In my humble opinion he was one of the worlds greatest minds and most entertaining writers.  I mourn his loss whenever I think of any of his quirky pearls of wisdom brought forth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Dirk Gently novels, the Meaning of Liff, the Prostitute in the Family Tree, or any of his other wonderful publications – which is to say, several times a day.

Over the years I have invested in his offerings using every conceivable medium so that his complete works now grace my book shelves, my CD cabinet, my MP3 collection, the games directory on my hard drive, my kindle – probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Amazon’s Ursa Minor facilities – and finally my Outlook calender.

As with all great men and women who have come before him, Douglas Adams has his own holiday, and that holiday is Towel Day.  But as is fitting the man who brought you a 5 book trilogy, Towel Day takes place on multiple days… or at least it will when I’m done with it.

Douglas hitched his final ride on May 11, 2001.  Three days later D. Clyde Williamson presented the idea of Towel Day to the world with a post on the now defunct forum “Binary Freedom”, suggesting that all the frood’s out there come together in remembrance by knowing where our towels are every May 25th (two weeks after his death).  That became the official day, and celebrations are held all over the globe – and they are getting bigger and more widespread each year.

The problem with May 25th, in my opinion, is that it isn’t particularly significant, for either Douglas or his literary legacy.  Other possible dates have been suggested which make some real sense:

• “Adams Day” – February 11, the 42nd day of the year
• “Second Day of Remembering” – July 6, 42 days afterDouglas died
• “Douglas Adams Memorial Day” – March 11, Douglas’ Birthday
• “The Day of The Coming of The Great White Handkerchief” – The 42nd Weekend Day of the year, which occasionally falls on Official Towel Day
• “Frood’s Day” – 42nd Thursday of the year, which for 2010 will be October 21st

I have to confess that I completely made up Frood’s Day, but it makes enormous sense to me.  (If you don’t understand the importance of 42, don’t know what a frood is, don’t understand how mind boggingly useful a towel really is, or if you still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea, you must immediately trade some small green pieces of paper for a copy of the wholly remarkable book,  The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

I did find one compelling reason to have Towel Day on May 25th: if you add the hexadecimal numbers 25 and 5, and convert the result to decimal, you get 42!  I honestly am not sure how anyone ever figured that out, but he or she is definitely hoopy.  However, I do think that is slightly offset by the fact that May 25 is also recognized as both Star Wars Day and Geek Pride Day.  I think Douglas deserves his own (six) day(s).

My proposition is this: I think we should celebrate them all!  Not sold?  Perhaps you need  another reason for celebrating all of these days?  4+2 = Six Days of Towel Day.  Think about it.

I for one am planning on kicking off Towel Day by celebrating Adams Day on February 11 at a local pub.  Right now I’m planning on that pub being The County Cork on 13th and Fremont, by my house.  If any of you sass a better location, let me know.  Wherever it is held, I am planning on eating peanuts and drinking five pints of ale.  I might even put a paper bag over my head if I think it will make me feel better.

Most importantly though, wherever and however you choose to celebrate, just remember to always know where your towel is and, most importantly…

DON’T PANIC!

Any one who knows me is no doubt well aware of my political affiliations, so it should come as no surprise that Fox News blowhard Glenn Beck is not one of my favorite people.   He has said any number of things that I feel are utterly ridiculous and often shameful, and Fox has recently come under fire for creating events to report on like Mr. Beck’s own “9/12 movement”, so I suppose Mr. Beck’s suggestion last week to make September 28th a “day of Fast and Prayer for the Republic” really shouldn’t come as a surprise.  And at first blush, you might even think “Hey, who cares?”  After all a National Day of Prayer has been in existence since 1952 (it was later fixed on the first Thursday in May by President Raegan), so what’s the big deal with Glenn Beck’s idea?

The problem is that September 28th, 2009 is already taken.  That is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for followers of the Jewish faith, also known as “The Day of Atonement”, a day when millions of Jews around the globe will pray for repentance and fast for 25 hours.

So does anyone really think that Glenn Beck didn’t know this?  Doesn’t it seem like an awfully big coincidence that he just happened to pick the exact date when millions upon millions of people around the world would be praying and fasting, to suggest that people around the world should pray and fast?  I for one am not buying it.

But then the question has to be asked: why would he do this?  Is he trying to get in touch with some deep seeded issues of faith?  Is he trying to reach out to his Jewish audience without appearing to overtly cater to the Jews who supposedly run the world?  (By the way, if it is true that Jews run the media, and its true that Fox News is actually part of the media – two assumptions which find highly doubtful – wouldn’t you think that Glenn might know the date of Yom Kippur?  Wouldn’t it probably have been mentioned around the water cooler at least once?  Wouldn’t he notice that all the bosses were at synagogue?)

Personally I think it is much more basic.  I think that Glenn Beck believes that most of the people who watch his show are ignorant and unlikely to know anything about Yom Kippur, including when it was held this year.  So I think he picked that date to hold his very own special holiday so he could take credit for all the millions of people around the globe who seemingly took his advice.  It’s like sympathetic magic: you see dark clouds on the horizon and predict rain, and when it rains you look like a prophet.  Glenn Beck asked people to fast and pray on Yom Kippur, and 10 million people did.

The only question in my mind is this: does Glenn Beck himself actually believe he convinced these people to pray and fast?  Or does he just hope that you are dumb enough to believe that he did?

Here are some interesting facts about Yom Kippur that Glenn forgot to mention:

Yom Kippur is the 10th day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, also making it the tenth day of the Jewish New Year (which starts with Rosh Hashanah)

According to Jewish belief, God transcribes each persons fate into a book on Rosh Hashanah and seals the verdict at the end of Yom Kippur.  During the Days of Awe a Jew will pray for forgiveness of the wrongs he or she has committed against God or mankind.  At Yom Kippur’s conclusion, the person is believed to have been absolved of sin, similar to Catholic confession.

Unlike most Jewish holidays which include a feast, Yom Kippur requires a fast, so the feast is held on the Eve of Yom Kippur instead.

Yom Kippur begins at sundown on what most non-Jewish people would consider the day before, and continues until sundown the following day.  During that time the following prohibitions are observed:

• No eating or drinking (except for extreme medical conditions)
• No wearing of leather shoes
• No bathing or washing
• No wearing of perfumes or lotions
• No marital relations
• No exchanging of money

Erev Yom Kippur (the Eve of the Day of Atonement) traditionally has two feasts, the giving of charity and praying or asking for forgivness, similar to the All Saints Eve traditions of Christianity.

There are 5 traditional prayer services for Yom Kippur: Ma’ariv (evening prayer); Shacharit (morning prayer); Musaf (the “additional prayer”); Mincha (afternoon prayer); and Ne’ilah (the closing prayer).  There is also a unique prayer which recounts the service of avodah, a practice originally recited by the Kohen Gadol by which one can achieve atonement without entering the Temple of Jerusalem, which was destroyed more than 2,000 years ago.

I was a young stud of perhaps 21 years and my friends and I acquired a screen saver of all the Playboy centerfolds since the magazine’s creation in 1953 (with Marilyn Monroe as the cover/center fold girl).

I learned three very interesting pieces of information from this collection:

1.  If Playboy magazine is the source of your information, women seem to have gotten much prettier in the 70’s.

I really have no reason to believe that this is actually true as I have seen pictures of any number of very beautiful women from before that period, so I am forced to ultimately conclude that the Playboy editors got choosier as the decades progressed. I can only imagine that this happened because the stigma associated with posing in the nude diminished over time and therefore the eidtors had a larger pool to pull from and could be more selective in their choices.

Either that or Mike and I are right and the government secretly started putting pretty pills in the water starting around 1973

2. Until January 1972 Playboy was a breasts and backsides only magazine.

I’m not sure why, whether it was a change in the law or just greater acceptance from the public mindset, but for nearly twenty years Playboy photographers had to carefully cover the ladies’ nether regions with all manner of scant clothing, towel corners, deep shadows or fig leaves.

Which leads us to…

3. The personal grooming habits of women ebb and flow just like other fashion trends.

The 70’s seem to show no particular favorite. The styles ran the gambit from moderate trimming to untamed thickets, but everyone was sporting something. Th 80’s were mostly wildly untamed until about 88, when things started calming down and the triangle was subtly replaced by the “landing strip” as the preferred style. This stayed in fashion all the way through the end of the 90’s, though things got progressively thinner as the years went by.

The collection we had at our disposal came to a close late in 2000, so my official evidence ends there. However, we felt obliged to continue the research and our tireless studies found that, ironically, just shortly after we put a Bush in the White House the same disappeared from ladies’ fashion.

The reason that this has suddenly leapt back to the forefront of my mind is because, apparently, the ‘stache is back.

I know this because a friend of ours was heading back to India this week where he has a beautiful fiance waiting for him, and as such we felt obliged to throw him a bon voyage / bachelor party. We really only know one way to celebrate such occasions (or perhaps I could say “We only know one way to celebrate”) so naturally we ended the night at a strip club. Now, we aren’t exactly strangers to the strip club scene, but we are far from what you would call regulars either, so I can’t provide the exact date that the transition occurred. But sometime within the last fiscal quarter the shaved looked has given way to what my friend very accurately described as “little Hitler mustaches”. At least 80% of the girls we saw were sporting them. This is in stark contrast to everything I have ever learned about stripper grooming habits. Until know the sum total of hair I had seen on professionally naked ladies couldn’t have been woven into a wig for a grape. Not even a pea! But suddenly everyone is very proud of their little magic carpets and the patrons seemed more than happy to take a ride on them, so I guess everyone is happy.

What struck me about this whole phenomenon is this: how do these trends manage to migrate so quickly? If we were talking about a stupid dance like the Macarana or the perfect pair of summer shorts, I can totally understand: some designer or other will flood the market with pictures of pretty people doing pretty things in them and blam! Instant fad. But I don’t really see any large scale media campaigns alerting people to the fact that pubic frenzy is sooooooooooooooooo last quarter. Nor have seen the Democrats dancing around the Capitol building flashing their nethers in grand show of pubic service.

And I can’t really buy the lip service angle either: I’m not really sure how girls do things, but I can safely say that none of my friends and I have ever sat around and discussed the relative merits of how/if/when to shave our balls.

So how do the girls learn what is popular? Do they get requests? I’ve never seen a comment card at any of the clubs I’ve ever been at. Do they just get bored? Do the clippers get dull after a while? Is global warming the culprit? Perhaps Democratic administrations inspire this departure from hard wood floors? I don’t know.

I haven’t yet figured out an answer to this question.  None of the ladies that I know well enough to ask have any answers for me, and I haven’t yet resorted to holding up a sign in Pioneer Square, so I am woefully in the dark on this one.

It feels to many of us as if the presidential race has been going on since 2004, and in many ways I suppose that it has. But it officially kicks off tomorrow (January 3rd) in Iowa. I’m sort of a political nerd so I have been following the goings-on pretty closely since the ’06 Mid-Terms, but for those of you who haven’t, there has been some interesting developments leading up to tomorrow’s Midwest caucus.

First off, there’s a great deal of confusion regarding exactly what the differences are between a Primary and a Caucus. I myself was confused, so I’ll start there. I do think it is important to point out that each state political party sets the rules for their own system for nominating delegates, so the procedures and requirements not only vary from state to state, but from party to party within the same state as well.

For instance, in Iowa the Republican Caucus is non-binding, meaning that the caucus-goers will select the candidate they want their delegates to vote for at the Republican Convention in the summer, but those delegates are in no way required to cast their votes for that candidate. The Republicans also operate their Caucus on a winner-take-all basis, so the one who finishes first gets all the delegate’s votes and the runner-ups get none.

Contrast that to the Democrats, who operate their Caucus in a different fashion: the Caucus decisions are binding on the Dem’s side, and the “winner” gets the largest portion of the delegates’ votes, while the rest are divided between the other “viable” candidates. “Viable” candidates are those who finish with more then 15 percent of the caucus-goers’ votes.

Lets start out with the basic differences between Caucuses and Primaries.

♦ In a Primary system, voters fill out secret ballots and deposit them at designated voting booths just as we do in a general election. The polling centers are open all day and the time required to cast your vote is very short. Here in Oregon, we have a primary system, and since we are the only state in the Union with Vote-By-Mail, we don’t even have to go a polling station. Generally speaking, voters are only allowed to vote for candidates running in their declared political party, meaning registered Democrats can only vote for Democratic candidates, and registered Republican’s can only vote for Republican candidates. Registered Independents and those without declared allegiances are not able to vote in Oregon’s presidential primary, and I think that holds true for the other states as well, though I do not know that for certain.

♦ Caucus systems vary somewhat from state to state, but share many of the same basics. Voters are required to meet at specified locations throughout the state at specific times of day and participate in a town-hall style debate. Everyone votes – or in some cases stand in groups – and is divided into camps representing their favorite candidates. The people who are unsure who they are going to support are gathered together and those unallied folks become the target of everyone’s attention, as the other camps engage the undecided voters in vigorous debates to convince them to caucus for their chosen candidate. This process can take many hours and restricts the franchise to those who are capable of showing up at the stated time of day and specific location- if you have to work, or you can’t get a babysitter, the road is washed out, your car has a flat or you are agoraphobic, you get screwed. It does have the benefit however of adding a very personal touch to the campaigning process: instead of getting your information from television commercials which have been carefully crafted by anonymous PR firms, “Caucusers” are influenced by arguments made by their neighbors and friends. After the undecideds have been swayed, another vote is taken – or a headcount, if everyone is standing in groups – and a winner is declared.

I mentioned candidate “viability” before. The idea of “viability” can lead to interesting developments: let’s say that when the initial tally is taken to divide the camps Clinton has 23 percent, Obama 22 and Edwards 22 as well and therefore are all “valid”. That leaves the remaining 37% divided between Biden, Dodd, Richardson, Kucinich and all the Undecideds. But what would happen if the Dodd and Biden camps decided to lend their support to Kucinich? Suddenly he could be “valid” without any help from the undecided voters at all! In the at scenario, if he can manage to snag some of the unaligned voters, he could not only be a “valid” candidate, he could be the winner. It’s pretty weird stuff.

13 states use the Caucus system for assigning their delegates to the Party Nominating Conventions, as well as the District of Columbia and two US Protectorates, Guam & Puerto Rico.

Iowa is of particular import because it votes first, even though it is generally accepted that Iowa on the whole is not necessarily representative of the nation on the whole, and to make matters even worse only 6 percent of Iowans bother to caucus at all. Many people claim that this makes the results of Iowa caucus meaningless on a national candidate level, but in reality Iowa plays a pretty important role, even if it is only a psychological one: Candidates that win or place well in Iowa get a big bump in press coverage, especially if the winner is someone who has been considered an underdog to that point. With the surge in media coverage comes new donors and an image as a “winner” which can in turn translate into momentum which can carry over into some of the bigger states that vote in the next couple of weeks.

Iowans have a strong track record of selecting the underdog candidate, which has often times had the effect of starting the avalanche that leads to an eventual Nomination. One of their most famous unexpected picks was former Georgia Governor and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, who of course went on to be President. Another is John Kerry, who was almost unheard of before the Iowa Caucus, but went on to become the Democratic Nominee in 2004 and very nearly became President.
More often then not, however, the Iowa winner tends to fall short in the general election, including George H.W. Bush (in his reelection bid) and John McCain. However, runner-ups tend to have a much better chance of arriving at the White House; Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan & George W. Bush all failed to win Iowa but did finish in the top three before continuing on to their Party’s Nomination and the Presidency.

This year the whole nomination process has been moved up. Wanting to have their states play a bigger role in the selection of candidates and thereby diminishing the importance of smaller, early-voting states like Iowa and New Hampshire, the Secretary of States for Michigan, Florida and several others moved their primaries ahead of the earliest voting date set by both the Republican and the Democrat Party’s. Since Iowa and New Hampshire both have a State Constitutional requirements to vote first, this forced them to move up also, and so started a tug-of-war between the States and the Party’s. There was even speculation that Iowa might caucus before Christmas of 2007! Instead, they settled on January 3rd in Iowa and January 8th in New Hampshire.

Since both of those states are required to vote first by state law, the Democrats did not penalized Iowa or New Hampshire for moving ahead of the February 5th early voting restriction. Both party’s penalized other states that moved ahead and forced the Iowa and New Hampshire date changes, chiefly Michigan and Florida, though there are others.

As I mentioned earlier, the two Party’s are responsible for creating their own primary and caucus rules, and therefore came up with different punishments for moving ahead of February 5th, known as “Super Tuesday” because so many states cast their votes on that day.

The Dem’s decided to punish Michigan and Florida for moving ahead by removing all of the delegates provided by those states at the Nominating Convention, completly removing the influence they had hoped to enhance in the first place. The Republicans, on the other hand, decided to count delegates from all of the states but penalized those states voting before February 5th by eliminating half of their delegates from the Convention. The states that will be penalized by the Republican’s are: Wyoming, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina and Florida. Iowa was not penalized because the result of the Republican side of the caucus is not binding.

Oregon does not vote until May 20, meaning that in all likelihood the Nominees will effectively be chosen before we ever even cast our ballots.

The latest Republican poll numbers from Des Moines Daily Register show Huckabee with 32% of likely caucus voters, Romney with 26%, McCain with 13%, Ron Paul with 9%, Fred Thompson with 9% and Rudy Giuliani with 5%.

The Democratic side is a tighter race at the top, with Obama at 32%, Clinton at 25%, Edwards at 24%, Richardson at 6%, Biden at 4%, Dodd at 2% and Kucinich at 1%.

The Primary calendar is listed below for your reference. States followed by a C are Caucus states.

Geeks have always been around.  There has never been a time when there wasn’t some dweeb wedged in his locker doing the quarterback’s homework, or captaining the Chess team, or rocking the fashion world with polyester blazers and plaid shorts.

They’ve always been there, their contributions to the world wildly accepted and devotedly followed, but the geeks themselves have always been overlooked, overshadowed by the things they invent and principles they uncover.  Without nerds and geeks, we wouldn’t have things like rockets, or lasers, or coffee grinders, or guns, or in fact the very freedoms that we hold dear; without those beloved civic nerds we now call the Founding Fathers the Good Ol’ US of A wouldn’t exist.  Without geeks like Copernicus, we wouldn’t have an understanding of how our universe works, and without dweebs like Leonardo da Vinci and  his extensive work on human corpses we wouldn’t even understand how our own bodies function.  Both of those men paid a heavy price for their nerdiness, they were each placed under house arrest and threatened with death.

And while very few of them have been banished by the Church or governmental bodies, we can’t forget about the computer nerds, those awkward souls who burned through the night, staring past horn-rimmed glasses with tape on the bridge while they created not only the very device you are now using to read this blog (a word invented by some nameless geek out there), but the whole damn internet as well, something that has without doubt revolutionized the whole planet.

But for all of those accomplishments, the geek has widely been depicted as a symbol of ridicule.  Sure there are a few examples of geeks who have made it to the top, names like the ones I mentioned above, and let us not forget guys like Bill Gates and our very own Paul Allen.  But even when they achieved their successes and put their names into the everyday lexicon of millions, geeks on the whole have still been widely overlooked.  Superhero’s are never geeks, at least not fulltime.  Sure, Clark Kent is pretty geeky, and as the mild mannered reporter Lois Lane won’t look twice at him, but what happens when he slips into those bright blue tights and shows off the studly muscles?  Suddenly he’s hot shit, not nerdy any more at all!  He’s sure of himself, confident, even flirtatious.  And who wouldn’t be, leaping buildings in single bounds, bouncing bullets off his biceps and beatin’ down the bad guys?   With those glasses ditched in the nearest phone booth, Lois is on him like a rat on a Cheeto, despite the fact that he’s wearing his underwear on the outside.

Want another example?  How about Star Trek, the holy bible of all geekdome?  Who got the chicks?  Who got to sit in the big chair with the fancy buttons?  Who got the Admiral’s stars?  Kirk, that’s who.  Not Spock, the ultra nerd who figured everything out, not Bones the medical geek who brought everyone back from certain death, not Scotty the engine dweeb that always got the ship out of there just in the nick of time.  After twenty stinkin’ years who was holed up in the fancy office at Starfleet Command and who was still schlepping away at the same damn jobs they’d had when they were just out of the Academy?  The guy who threw the punches, that’s who.  Hell, Kirk was so cool that he earned the wrath of Kahn, one of the baddest bad asses ever to roam the galaxy.  And then who saved the day?  Was it Kirk?  No!  Spock killed himself to save the crew and the ship.  So who’s the cool one?

I can go on all day.  On the show Knightrider, did anyone ever see the geeks who built the talking car, who kept him running, who changed his oil and rotated his tires and flipped his DIP switches?  Nope, you saw the Hoff riding around in a sweet car with some big-haired beauty.

Occasionally you’d get a Revenge of the Nerds type of deal that would float past to remind everyone that geeks are okay people, and if you can manage to out think the jocks and make them look like idiots you might have a shot with the female lead character, but those were few and far between and didn’t do all that well at the box office.  And of course, they were comedies.

You see, this is a topic near and dear to my heart.  I am an affirmed geek.  In fact, I might easily qualify as an ubergeek, which is to say that I am a geek across many plains: I know that HTTP (which is how every web address in the world begins) stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol; I know that a full grown male Dwarf would weigh somewhere close to 400 pounds; I know what James T. Kirk’s middle name is; I know that a Vampire which is not effected by sunlight is called a Daywalker; I know that other then Luke Skywalker Wedge Antilles was the only Rebel pilot to survive all major battles against the Empire; I know that Freddy Kruger has four blades on his hands while Wolverine only has three; I know what a Muggle is; and I have actually taken part in a conversation debating the morality of blowing up the Deathstar while civilian contractors were undoubtedly still onboard.  I didn’t realize, however, that Megatron was Optimus Prime’s brother until this summer, but hey, continuing education is a wonderful thing.

My point is this: geeks are breaking out of our respective corners and going broadband (nice pun, eh?), and the entertainment industry is finally realizing that they have a new target demographic: nerds who have unlimited amounts of money to spend on movies and memorabilia because, frankly, imaginary girlfriends are a hell of a lot cheaper then their living counterparts.  Think about it: movies based on comic books are blockbusters, revamped and somewhat disappointing Star Wars stories turn in huge numbers and convince crowds of thousands to sit outside in the rain just to have the honor of being the first nerd through the doors, just as fantasy movies do with Lord of the Rings geeks.  Geek TV shows from the 80’s like Battlestar Galactica and Bionic Woman are topping the weekly ratings even though the women are wearing bras, removing the primary appeal from original shows.
The cool thing is that since we are footing the bill, our nerdy TV personas are starting to get cool.  NBC was even brave enough to make geeks into full on Heroes.  Time traveling Hiro Nakamura is an unabashed computer geek who plays video games at work until he discovers his ability and learns to fight supervillians while wearing a starched white button-down, but unlike the days of Superman when you had to be studly to win the hearts of the ladies, it’s his wiggly cheeks and kind nature that attract women.  And Clair’s badass dad Noah Bennet actually wears horn-rimmed Nerdglass.   But don’t let the specs fool ya’, no one is going to shove him into his locker or give him a swirly.  Then there’s Chuck, where Charles Bartowsky is the head of a Nerd Herd at a chain electronics store who also just happens to be the only guy who can save the world week after week.  Oh yeah, and in his off time he is steadily convincing the totally hot CIA chick to fall in love with him.

And then there’s Harry Potter.

The popularity of J.K. Rawling’s epic seven book saga of young witches and wizards is something no one would have predicted.  Even I, who likes to think of myself as belonging to the upper crust of the geek hierarchy, eventually fell prey to the series and got hooked, doing little else with my time but listening to the audiobooks for a three week span of time.  Which is sadly saying that I was in fact too geeky even to pick up a book, I had to listen to it on my iPod.

But even I, super nerd that I arguably am, was shocked and dismayed by what I discovered today:  At colleges all across this country people have formed Quidditch teams and managed to make the sport of league-based Muggle Quidditch a reality.

I shit you not.

For you people reading this who have actually gotten laid this year and therefore clearly have better things to do with your time then read Harry Potter, you might not fully understand what I am talking about.  Let me explain: Quidditch is the only real sport played by witches and wizards, and they take it very seriously.  About as seriously as crazy Europeans take soccer.  The rules are fairly simple and somewhat resemble soccer, except that it all takes place while flying around on broomsticks.

Let me clarify that point: in order to play Quidditch you have to be able to fly around on a broomstick.

Not to be deterred, however, this group of seven collegiate teams – lead by Vassar University – have adapted the game so all us Muggles (non-magical beings) can play it too.  How do they do it, you ask?  Well, it’s simple really.  They dress up in crazy robes, put goggles on their heads, clamp a broomstick between their thighs and have at it!  In the books J.K. Rawling explained that the only way to win the game is to catch the Snitch, a small, winged, golden ball that flies randomly around the Pitch and must be captured by one of the teams’ Seekers.  In the “Muggle” version, the Snitch is portrayed by a person who stuffs a tennis ball into a tubesock tied around their waste and runs wildly around the field trying not to get cought.

I shit you not.

If you don’t believe me, here is the link to a video of a practice session on Youtube.  Since this is only a practice session, they aren’t wearing their robes, but in a radio interview with one of the players I was assured that on game day everyone is wearing their best robes.

I shit you not.

It just goes to show that there is always a bigger nerd out there.  Sometimes even a whole field full of them.

And it shows one other thing too: you can take the nerd outdoors, you can even make him a jock, but he’ll probably never get lucky with a cheerleader.

I shit you not.