The Think Tank

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.