Let's pretend for a brief moment that my mind isn't a dark and scary place. Instead, after listening to this, go listen to American Beauty by the Grateful Dead.
As much as I slagged Hallowe'en in my last post, here's one of the few great aspects of the holiday. The tragic self-esteem of Charlie Brown. The dependency issues of Linus. The fawning infatuation of Sally. The repressed sexuality of Lucy. The denial of Peppermint Patty. The pressured prodigy of Schroeder. The tacit understand that every adult only speaks gibberish and that the only cool character is a dog - enjoy! ... btw... I got a rock.
Is it just me or does Hallowe'en seem more culturally devoid every year? I know. I get it. I'm kidless. And while baby goats shouldn't be a consideration for one's love or hate of Hallowe'en, I'm thinking back on my own childhood at memories of All Hallow's Eves gone by and realizing that there really aren't that many fond memories. I'm not saying I hated the event, in fact I remember, at the time, having a certain anticipatory delight in thinking up costumes and gathering free candy. Quite simply, the costume/candy ritual was fun, but did not inspire near as many found remembrances as other holidays.
Let's take a sobering look at Hallowe'en: pre-pubescent, confused children try to hide behind dollar store Transformer masks as they threaten homeowners with vigilante violence unless they fork over individually-wrapped sugar confections. Clearly then, Hallowe'en has come to serve several purposes:
1) attempt to feed disenfranchised children once a year and allow for governments to forgo actual food subsidies.
2) satisfy the powerful dentist lobby, where 4 out of 5 dentists agree more candy is a good thing... no, bad thing... well, privately, a good thing.
3) seeks to encourage indentured servitude of cane workers in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
4) bows to the snack food lobbyists who don't have tons of money, but keep the assistants of government officials knee deep in Junior Mints.
5) endorses gang swarming for the purposes of intimidating the middle class.
6) allows our vampire overlords to come out one night a year and feed on Blood Red Twizzlers.
7) makes lower class kids feel inadequate when they have to wear their Superman Underoos as a costume.
8) enables the rarely-seen-at-other holidays "razor-blade-in-the-apple" lunatics.
9) forces adults, who would never otherwise think of dressing up, to participate in a drunken costume party ritual.
10) remind me, that despite all else, for two years I had the coolest stormtrooper costume in town.
The disappearance of original screenplays in Hollywood. Free up screenwriters and support independent film.
While I've certainly had my obligatory lovehate on the Canadian and US elections, the self-perpetuating of election news cycles have allowed bloggers to be up front and on point with political snippets on a minute to minute basis. Whether it's bloggers that work for CNN, CNBC, Fox News, or some of the larger independent blog sites like Huffington and Drudge, people (including network news producers) are turning to blogs on a more frequent basis for information. Such a relationship has also reinforced the persistent echoing of Uncle Ben in Peter Parker's head: "With great power comes great responsibility."
Any news agency that gets duped by a blog post cries foul over the blogger's resposibility. Any reader who gets deceived when they buy into a false fact or "opinion as fact" mopes and pouts about how blogs have done them wrong. But the simple truth of the matter is that bloggers don't owe anyone anything. If a news organization gets duped by a blog post, I say "Hell Yeah!" If CNN or Fox News can't do some fact checking before they run with something, their discredit serves them right. And, while I would admit that a casual reader is far more likely to buy into something they read on a blog, I offer up the bastardized consumer warning: "Reader Beware".
We will police ourselves.
We will express ourselves in every language, including objectionable.
We will post with abandon.
We will breach taboos.
We will cross every line.
We will not apologize.
We will not relent.
Sure, everyone knows "Rock, Paper, Scissors". And sure, some of us "experimented" in university with the occasional drunken binges of throwing "dynamite" or "gun" into the mix, but the folks at www.baseballbatyouth.com have taken Roshambeau to a fantastic new level. Three options have expanded to twenty-five; this is no longer a game for drunken escapades.
You may have to make saving throws against spells or find ways to build your armor class... Gygax Beware! Sorry... became a geeky teenager for a second there. Expand your Roshambeau and party it up with friends.
How might your mom, dad, or grandparents be even bigger geeks than you? Oh, and porn too!
According to Mary Richert (I really don't know who she is, but she probably doesn't know who I am either) of guardian.co.uk, social networking sites are more popular than porn sites. In the article she asserts some criticisms about social networks that I agree with. Most importantly, she states that, in comparing social networks to the antisocial aspects of porn, "there's something similarly antisocial about social networking sites."
My immediate concern is that internet technology has been driven by porn since its inception. Broadband was developed simply as a way to get porn faster delivery times. Porn drove peer to peer applications for almost a decade... let's face it, while many people on Kazaa were downloading Britney Spears songs, other were looking for Britney Spears lookalikes in compromising positions. Bandwidth demands spiked for Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee and, a few years later, for A Night in Paris.
While, from a purely moral and sociological perspective I can appreciate the fall of porn from this pinnacle position, I fear the future without the omnipresent push of porn. I don't expect holographic technology is going to be demanded for people to talk to in-laws overseas, but 3-D porn? The movement that is going to bring the tactile/kinesthetic cyber interfaces of the future may be left in the cold if lonely education has to prompt change instead of porn. We have reached a precipice my friends. As Trekkie Monster of Avenue Q sang: "Why you think the 'net was born? Porn. Porn. Porn."While I endeavored, in Part One of Finding Your Inner Geek, to show how geek culture is just as applicable to fishing as it is to computer or internet technology. The argument stands that any knowledge of the microcosm of a topic pushes one ever-further toward a level of geekdom. The relevant medium used to explore that relationship with fishing was print periodicals that refined from the generic to the hyper-specific Euro-published Carp Web.
The standard seemingly set by any geek culture is dancing on the fine line between the zen-like esoterica revolving around the people, places and things and the unbridled acquisition of stuff. As one moves up the chain from Hobbyist to Ubergeek, the winnowing of things occurs as knowledge and expertise fills the need for experimentation. But there are people who know how to exploit the Threshold Geeks and Geeks who's prime motivation to buy everything about everything within their field.
And so go the trade shows/conventions/conferences that, with much hype and grandeur, promote products like they've found a cure for cancer. Perhaps nowhere, outside of computer or gaming technology, do products get pumped out with minor tweaks and no real differentiated functions that those of tools.
Everyone knows the tool geek. Whether it's you, your father, mother, sister, brother, someone in your life owns several redundant pieces of hardware (actual hardware, not a 5-bay tower) that do exactly the same thing.
To prove this to you, I offer up the following questions:
1) Do you know someone who owns more that one hammer or drill?
2) Do you know someone who owns more than one set of router bits?
3) Do you know someone who has a collection of tool aprons with various logos?
4) Do you know someone who wears a "Black & Decker" or "Ryobi" hat or shirt?
5) Do you know someone who goes shopping at Home Depot "just to look"?Like any geek continuum, names beget opinions and opinions beget arguments and purchases beget bikini-clad women in calendars holding power tools with conspicuously-placed innuendos in quotation marks that include words like drill, pound, hammer, screw that inspire clever quips like "grinder, I don't even know'er", or "sander, no that's okay I like'em rough". In fact, porn geeks and tool geeks could probably speak exactly the same language and mean completely different things. When talking about a Ridgid Clipped Head Nailer with consistent driving power, adjustable depth of drive, and rear exhaust, who would've thought one could be discussing the menu options at Paris Hilton's new bordello instead of an item in a Home Depot catalogue. While Nascar followers are total realm of geekdom in themselves, there is a Venn crossover with people who cheer for the cars with their tool brand emblazoned on the side. When your girl can draw the Dewalt and Makita logos before the age of four and your boy knows Milwaukee as a Hole-Hawg drill instead of a city, when your spouse's best friend Stanley is a worn tape measure, when the only glasses and mugs you have in the kitchen cupboard have Bosch etched on them and were won as a door prize at a stag and doe or golf tournament, you have a tool geek in your house. And all of this proves only one thing: that the person you stereotypically think is biggest redneck you know might also be the biggest geek you know. Does someone in your family know more about one topic than you know about computers or the web? Can your partner name 200 kitchen utensils and prizes a collection of melon ballers - ball'er I don't even... nevermind. Can your grandmother talk intelligently about 20 different kinds of needlepoint? Do you know ANYONE that scrapbooks, because trust me, I guarantee you, there is no such thing a hobbyist scrapbooker; they are either a full-blown scrapbook ubergeek or they've given it up. Find your inner geek and point out the inner geek in others, then go fishing.
You think Michael Phelps is some kinda hero for swimming fast? Forget it. Brad Sciullo is my hero. Like people who say "I climbed the mountain because it was there." Sciullo ate a 20 pound "Beer Barrel Belly Buster" burger, not because he had to, but because it was on the menu: "To me, it's the accomplishment. This is a passion of mine; this is my sport. Just like they would try and compete to win a marathon of some sort, I am trying to compete and defeat this burger as an accomplishment - it's another thing under my belt." Maybe a new elastic belt, but a belt all the same.
The next time you think about having dessert and the thought process goes something like "I just couldn't eat another bite", think of Brad Sciullo. Did he say "I just coudn't eat another bite"? No! He gave near an entire cow a reason for dying. Kudos Brad! Kudos!
