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last modified:Thu Apr 14 00:24:34 2005
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Why Geeks and Nerds Are Worth It...

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Reply to: anon-66795671@craigslist.org
Date: Sun Apr 03 21:30:08 2005


In the wide world of dating, there are many options. Do you go for the flashy guy with the smooth smile, or the dude in the corner typing away on his laptop? The following are reasons why I think my fellow females should pay more attention to the quiet geeks and nerds, and less attention to the flashy boys.

1.) While geeks and nerds may be awkward, they’re well-meaning 9 out of 10 times. That smooth dude with the sly grin and the spider hands? Wonder what HIS intentions are... plus, I’ve never had a geek guy not call me when he said he would. Score major points THERE.

2.) They’re useful. In this tech-savvy world, it’s great to have a b/f who can make your laptop, desktop, and just about anything else that plugs into a wall behave itself.

3.) They’re more romantic than they’re given credit for. Ok true, their idea of romance might be to make up a spiffy web-page with all the reasons why they love you, with links to pics of you and sonnets and such... but hey. It lasts longer than flowers, plus you can show your friends.

4.) Due to their neglected status, there are plenty to choose from. You like ‘em tall and slender? There are plenty of geeks/nerds who are. You like ‘em smaller with more meat on their bones? Got that too.

5.) They’ve got brains. Come on now, how can intelligence be a bad thing?

6.) Most are quite good at remembering dates. Like birthdates and such, especially if they know it’ll make you happy. Due again to their neglected status, they’re more attentive than guys who “have more options”. Plus, with all that down time without a steady girlfriend, they’ll likely have mental lists of all the things they’d love to do once they GOT a girlfriend.

7.) Sex. Yep. Sex. I’m not really familiar with this myself, but I’ve friends who’ve been intimate with geek guys and it’s raves all around. They say a virgin wrote the Kama Sutra... all that time thinking about sex, imagining sex, dreaming about sex, (they are male after all) coupled with a desire to make you happy? Use your imagination.

8.) They’re relatively low-maintenance. Most can be fueled on pizza, Twinkies and Mt Dew. No complicated dinners needed here, so if you’re not the best cook, eh. Can you order a pizza?

9.) Most frequent bars as often as slugs frequent salt mines. You won’t have to worry much about your geek guy getting his “groove” on with club hotties because, frankly, he’ll be too busy rooting around under his computer wondering where that spare cable went. You won’t have to worry about him flirting with other women because, 9 out of 10 times, he’ll zip right by them in a perfect b-line towards the nearest electronics store. I’ve seen this happen.
Me: “Eww. Victoria Secret’s Models... They’re so skinny. How is that feminine? You can see her ribs!”
Geek Guy: “ooooooo...”
Me: “Hey!” *notices he is staring lustfully towards the computer store*
Geek Guy: “What?”
Me: “Never mind...”

10.) Although he may not want to go to every outing with you, you can arrange swaps, as in, you’ll go to his Gamer Con dressed as an elf princess if he’ll take you to the ballet. Plus, if he doesn’t want to go someplace with you, you won’t have to worry much about what he’s up to. You’ll probably come home to find him asleep on his keyboard in a sea of Mt. Dew cans with code blinking from the screen. It’s ok. He’s used to this. Just toss a blanket over him and turn out the light.

11.) His friends aren’t jerks. I can’t stress this enough. You’ll more likely get “Omg! A GIRL!! Can I see?!” than “Hey hot stuff back that ass up here and let me get some grub on...” They’re awkward geeks too and will, 9 times out of 10, treat you with the utmost respect and, more than likely, a note of awe. A cute girl picked one of their clan to date? It could happen to them! Hope! Drag some of your single girlfriends over, open up a pack of Mt. Dew, crack open the DnD set and get working. Nothing impresses geek guys more than a girl who can hack-n-slash (well ok maybe if she can code... a geek can dream).

12.) They’re rarely if ever possessive. They trust you, so you can be yourself around them. You like to walk around the house in a ratty t-shirt for comfort? He won’t care. He does too! They won’t get pissy if you don’t wear make-up or don’t want to bother primping your hair. If you gain a few pounds, they won’t try their best to make you feel like crap.

13.) They’re usually very well educated. Physics majors and the like. See #5. You won’t have to listen to him blathering on about his car (ok maybe a little), he’ll have loads of other interesting things to talk about. Politics, world events, how much the chicken burgers down at the local place rock, so long as you douse them in hot sauce...

14.) You’ll almost never have to hear, “Yaw dawg whazzap!!” plop out of their mouths. Unless it’s in jest. They spell properly, use correct punctuation, and are able to tell the difference between the toilet and the floor. They almost never get “wasted”, so you won’t have to worry about coming home to find him and his friends passed out on the floor amidst a pile of beer bottles. Mt. Dew cans, perhaps...

15.) And the final reason why geeks and nerds make great boyfriends: They actually give a damn about you. Not how you look (though that’s a plus), not how skinny you are, not how much make-up you primp yourself up with, but they like you for you. That kind of thing lasts longer than “DaMN baby you got a fine ass!!!” Believe me.

  

Some weekend mp3s. Twinkle, she of "Golden Lights" infamy (aka everyone's least favorite song on the Smiths' Louder Than Bombs), checks in with a Shadow Morton- style motorbike melodrama called "Terry," while Joe Meek star-student chantoozie Glenda Collins gets all self-deprecating and invents Morrissey.

Twinkle - "Terry"
Glenda Collins - "Self Portrait"

It's not until August 2006, but I'm already psyched about the Interactive City festival in San Jose. If yer the presentatin' kind, you just missed the early call for proposal submissions, but there's still a month for you to cobble your ideas together for the "official" call. No doubt that there's a lot of lead time to secure crash space. Topics covered: Urban Archaeology, Non-Places, Parallel Cities, Hacked/Exposed/Open Source Cities. Interactive City is but one of the themes of the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts' 2006 symposium.

Thanks to the "circumcision" episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! I just discovered my favorite new company logo! Let's hear it for the American Association of Tissue Banks!

Breaking news! (And this is one development plan I'm actually sort of happy about, being that it'd boost a local economy that REALLY needs a boost, plus it'd be ridding the area of an ecosystem of health hazards and serious criminal activity.)

April 14,2005: Developer Unveils Plan For National Retailers At Dixie Square (Article From The
Star) By Michael Hirtzer

A developer Monday touted a plan to bring several top tier stores to the long-shuttered Dixie Square
Mall in Harvey.

John Deneen, president of Chicago-based Emerald Property Group, said he already has received
calls from stores such as Costco, DSW Shoes, Kohl's and Old Navy. All of the businesses have shown
an interest in opening shop, he said.

"Several national tenants have begun contacting us, which, when we first started, was quite the
opposite," Deneen said during Monday's city council meeting.

The $74 million project could create as many as 1,000 new jobs, all of which will be available to
Harvey residents, Deneen said.

Deneen said demolition could begin as early as this week at the site. The group is demolishing many
of the remaining structures not already slated for redevelopment. Deneen declined to say how many
buildings will be part of the group's plan.

The 33-acre mall, near 152nd Street and Dixie Highway, has been mostly vacant since 1979.

On Monday, the city council voted to transfer the vacant property to the developer. Last month, the
council voted to apply for Class 8 status for the property, giving the developer more than a 50 percent
break on property taxes.

Before the council voted on the matter Monday, several aldermen praised the plan.

"This is the first viable developer that's going to finish the job," Ald. Daryl Crudup, 3rd Ward, said.

Ald. Thomas Dantzler, 4th Ward, said city officials have been aggressively marketing the property for
less than a year and already have results. The YMCA is building senior housing nearby, and a Harvey
food service business is expanding into the former Montgomery Wards building.

"I don't think Dixie Square was free for six months, and we already have several developers
interested," Dantzler said.

Mayor Eric Kellogg called the day "historic."

"These areas have laid dormant for years. Now they're being brought back to life," Kellogg said.

Deneen said he hopes to break ground on the project by the end of the year.

(from DixieSquare.com)

If you looked at my del.icio.us bookmarks from the other day you saw my link to Suzanne Kofke's photos of the Dixie Square Mall in Harvey, IL (brief history for the uninitiated: opened in the mid '60s, closed in the late '70s, abandoned and left to the elements ever since, its only subsequent legal, commercial use being a Blues Brothers set location the year after the mall closed). Suzanne has added many more pictures in the past day or so, and the server's behaving a lot better too. I urge anyone interested in photography and/or urban exploration to venture over there. (Related links: CLUI's Dixie Square Mall page and a very informative page at DeadMalls.com. And finally, the money shot: DixieSquare.com!!)

Yowza! A k-FOXY Kelly Osbourne DJs at MisShapes.

Jeff Buckley is on my mind for the first time in a while. His "legend" has come a long way since... before he died, even. He went from being a famous guy to a famous dead guy who left behind only an album and an EP, to a famous dead guy with a tell-all bio and several post-mortem releases through which his mother exploited his tragedy by revealing his most rare and intimate butt-scratchings to an ever-decreasingly interested world. Fans who'd loved Grace started to move away from the fold, leaving Buckley's oeuvre there for the stronger-stomached and less jaded (or more jaded) to pick away at.

Which, in 2005 amounts to this: If you like Buckley, people will assure you you've been scammed, hoodwinked. He was just another twentysomething pothead slumming in New York, stealing Dalai Lama calendars from East West Books, flirting with every piece of flaxen-haired NYU shiksa pussy that dropped a quarter in his guitar case. (Yeah, well, welcome to the history of folksingers.)

When I was in college I bought into all that sexy-shabby-chic-bohemian shit. Not the mysticism so much, but definitely the New York bits. Hell, I still get excited when city kids make good! But yes, I understood where in space and time the dude was coming from, and I'm sure that accounted for a good 50 percent of why I loved Grace.

There is a lot to be said for context -- music would seem so much worse without it. The easy thing here is to map out where things went over the 11 years since Grace came out:

-the mutation of anti-folk (Beck) into nu-freakfolk (Devendra)
-the coffeehouse balladeers embraced by the Starbucks/NPR taste-police axis (first it was Jewel and Duncan Sheik, now it's Norah Jones and Nellie Mackay)
-the way sensitive-guy-music-for-guys would split off into nu-metal and emo during the later '90s, determining whether you were an Iron John tears-on-the-football type or a sniveling girly man (both genres are one lateral move away from the pigfuck/Albini/Chunklet ethos)
-the bridge from "alternative" as an eminent pop-culture crush to alternative as part of pop culture's quotidian subconscious (more watered-down but more omnipresent) to the taken-for-granted quotidian alternative segueing into pop-qua-pop (Smash Mouth/Sugar Ray/Meredith Brooks -> Britney Spears/boy bands/Natalie Imbruglia)

But what was going on in the early '90s that led up to Grace? Except for "grunge, duh," no one has anything relevant to say on this issue. In 1994 people were more interested in comparing Jeff to obvious '60s touchstones like Tim Buckley and Nina Simone and an assortment of "unclassifiables" from the past, but just as Nevermind and Ten have different production values than the ones we choose to remember, Grace's production has a particular sound that died along with it when the musical style itself started to take off. '94 was the very ass-end of shoegaze and swirly guitars and the rotting corpse of Madchester, the thing that American radio used to call "modern rock" and what alternative sounded like for a good while before grunge and the big chordy indie guitar bands took over the scene.

Also, '80s baby-boomer mania didn't officially end until about '93; if you turned on a classic-rock station you'd hear CLASSIC ROCK, the old cartoony monolithic kind, Zeppelin and Aerosmith and the Doors. They played newer, new wavier stuff too, but not as often as they do now that the demographic has changed. And there are so many new markets out there now, and so much accessibility to what commercial radio isn't offering, that it's probably unusual for a young person to have a meaningful relationship with his nightly Get the Led Out block (as Buckley obviously did). I'm sure it gave him ample opportunity to discover prog -- boy-music if ever boy-music there wuz.

Buckley was 100 percent boy; don't let the press release fool you. Grace's great dichotomy is how this publically "sensitive" dude, this coffeehouse dude who'd been groomed to interpret Leonard Cohen and Benjamin Britten, really wanted to be back home shredding "Missisippi Queen" into a four-track.

In the late '80s and early '90s there were the nascent burblings of a full-on rockabilly revival -- Social Distortion and the Reverend Horton Heat were big cult acts, the Cramps were still at it, and Rocket From the Crypt were getting into it. The cover of Grace is an homage to the young Elvis -- vintage microphone, gelled hair, wife-beater, snarl. This probably has less to do with an affinity for Elvis than it does Buckley's enthusiasm for Southern California punk. (Again, that schism: SoCal skate-trash meets NYC art-fag.)

And so, 1994. Grace is a history of the prior five years and a prediction of the next five. Best music appreciation textbook ever.

More big-box fun: the Wal-Mart Game!

Various and sundry (unordered):

1) April Power Hacks ("16. Consider using a desk") from 43 Folders.

2) French things, from France (Les Olivensteins - "Fier de ne Rien Faire" and Jacqueline Taib - "7 Heures du Matin" mp3s). (I know the Taib track shows up here and there on frogpop comps, but most non-francophile music fans worth their fleur de sel are probably unaware of the song.)

3) Key Food's eight-green-plantains-for-a-dollar sale. I pan-fried one tonight for dinner, and I can't wait to find out what I can do with the others.

4) Social Explorer's Interactive 2000 Census Map and what Ishbadiddle calls the National Gaydar System (aka "where the [self-reported] gays and lesbians are ... at least the ones who are in couples"). Includes red states too!

5) TheBoxTank's report on Wal-Mart bingo games.

6) Food/wine blogger Amuse Bouche. Right off the bat, his bio page mentions fondnesses for V&T's and Zabar's -- could this be love?

OMG (also, OMG)

As Robyn Hitchcock once sang, "be true to your drummer / this summer is gonna be hot." That in mind, here's some rock 'n' roll to make you feel like you're all that and a pair of Bermuda shorts: Hefner's "The King of Summer".

Epiphanies of the day: I'm not too wild about passion fruit, but frozen pineapple sprinkled with crystallized organic sugar might just be the most refreshing thing ever.

I feel tremendously lucky that I'm of an age and upbringing that has allowed me to get a piece of what the real, old NYC was like. People often ask "So you're saying you'd rather have crime, crackhouses, and garbage overflowing in the streets than a couple of shopping malls?" When it comes down to it, yeah, because New York would never have become such a force to be reckoned with if it weren't originally a sleazy, anarchic, colorful cess pit. (You can say the very same about San Francisco.) I live here because places like Coney Island -- cultural anachronisms that could never be authentically replicated elsewhere -- have continued to rage against the dying of the light rather than in spite of that fact. Why would anyone want to pay such ridiculous rents to live in a city that resembles itself only in the most superficial way, and may as well be any other dreary, anonymous-looking "downtown redevelopment project" with pristine new buildings and freshly mowed waterfront parks and weird yupmarket retail emporia that no one really shops in? It gives me the creeps.

And now they wanna take away Ruby's bar and Nathan's??

Jeez. At least we still have Washington Heights, the neighborhood that time (thankfully) forgot.

Erstwhile MTV personality (and former JBR crush-object) Steve Isaacs has a blog! He's a musician too, but I'll try not to hold that against him.

also on flickr: yours truly as a south park character.

My FTP isn't working right now, otherwise I'd blog the picture I took of my peanut butter, chocolate, and banana sandwich. But for the curious, I Flickr-ed it. (Ingredients: whole wheat bread, organic peanut butter, Trader Joe's house-brand dark chocolate, and an overripe banana. A few minutes on the trusty George Foreman Grill and voila.)

April 2005 Fucking Ten

1) twee scottish indiepop
2) reed's extra ginger brew ginger beer (just gingery enough without being overbearing)
3) making mix cds
4) finding (and taking) a theodore sturgeon book left on someone's stoop
5) finding (but stupidly not buying) a $1 copy of paul zindel's rats at the used bookstore (maybe i'll go back tomorrow and see if it's still there)
6) the fact that both those authors are from staten island
7) the episode of be the creature where a pack of hungry komodo dragons gnaws on the flesh of a newly killed pig and one of the dragons walks off with the pig's head in its mouth
8) the arctic circle & the north pole (i'm obsessed with them for reasons i can't really make out)
9) springtime
10) the george washington bridge (the most underrated bridge in nyc: graceful as a swan, complex like an escher drawing)

Weekend linkage: Yann Arthus-Bertrand's The Earth From Above. In case you haven't seen these.



Linked (several times) from this page on "the monotony of high density". Note the pics of the creepy developments in Colorado and suburban Copenhagen -- all I see is an oppressive-looking Candy Land board and a field of bogus crop circles.

1968, Korat, Thailand. Click, click, off you go then.

By default, family issues have fallen to conservatives who defend "the traditional family" (which really means the early modern family, with a husband who goes out to work in a factory or office and a wife who stays home). The conservatives strike a chord because they do not try to deny the damage done by the decline of the family during the past few decades, but they cannot get at the root of the problem because they believe in economic growth.

For example, Ronald Reagan once praised women who stay home with their children by saying, "Unlike Sweden, ... the mothers of America have managed to avoid becoming just so many more cogs in the wheels of commerce" - unconsciously implying that American men are just cogs in the wheels of commerce, probably the strongest criticism of the modern economy that any American president has made since Jefferson. Yet Reagan also boasted that his economic policies had created enough jobs to give America the highest "employment ratio" of any country in the world. Apparently, he did not know that a higher employment ratio means more working mothers.

Some "New Democrats" and Communitarians moved toward conservative positions on family issues, but they consider themselves middle of the road, and the more militant left criticizes them for not being progressive enough.

Yet a genuinely radical approach to family issues would say that we should go further than the conservatives. The fact that parents no longer have time for their children is the worst possible indictment of the modern economy - the thing that makes average Americans wish that they could spend less time working, even if it means living on less money. Rather than demanding more day care and schooling to help fit families into the economy, the left should be demanding changes in the growth economy that make it work for families - policies that let people consume less and work less so they have more time for their children and their own interests.

During the 1980s, as the left retreated to older ideas about social issues, the right took over the issue of empowerment. The New Left of the 1960s wanted to break up bureaucracies and give people control over decisions that affect their lives, but now the left just demands more bureaucratic social services. Again, the right has tapped into the discontent with modern society by criticizing big government, but it cannot criticize modern society effectively because it believes in market economics and growth. The right spends some of its time criticizing big government for stifling ordinary people, and it spends most of its time saying that we should unleash the private sector - which helps big corporations to stifle ordinary people.

Whenever conservatives criticize modernization, they come up with the same distorted response. They are nostalgic about old-fashioned small towns and neighborhoods, but they will not stop the freeways and shopping malls that are destroying towns and neighborhoods all over the country. They want to preserve families and individual self-reliance, but they promote the growth of a consumer economy that leaves people with no time for their families and that takes over most responsibilities of individuals.
-Charles Siegel, "From Progressive to Preservationist" (excerpt)


I've been reading up on homesteading, the "back to the land" movement(s), the '60s/'70s Whole Earth Catalog/CoEvolution Quarterly gestalt. Very fruitful googling. One of the search results was the Siegel article quoted above (a modified version of his 1995 New Perspectives Quarterly piece "Toward an Appropriate Politics"). It's a great indictment of 20th century politics from all sides. He attacks everything and everyone from the socialist utopians who believed that development, modernization, and New Deal programs would bring power to the people, to the hardnosed '50s bureaucrats who turned those progressive ideals against the working-class by razing their neighborhoods to make room for freeways and skyscrapers, to the conservatism of well-meaning liberals who want government programs to fund and guide society's every move even though it ultimately means that the government will get to decide what children learn and whether they pray in school and what doctors we're allowed to see and what treatments we'll be allowed to pursue, to the ironic "self-sufficiency" standpoint of the repubs (which would be all well and good if their REAL m.o. wasn't to sell their soul to the company store, and so on and so forth) (you've seen a few Michael Moore movies; figure it out).

Actually, the Whole Earth hippies make out pretty good here. That's all the convincing I need; I'm off to build a house out of muddy leaves and twigs (haha, knowing my luck it'll be just over the county line from some gun-totin' separatist Freemen).

This is the greatest thing to happen to the pay-per-song industry since downloadable sliced bread: Smithsonian Global Sound (and you Folkways geeks know what that means -- instant access to thousands of world music mp3s, sorted by region and instrument group, all at 99 cents per track).

Categories are broken down thusly:

Geographic Areas
- Africa, Sub-Saharan
- Asia
- Europe
- Middle East & North Africa
- Oceania
- The Americas

Musical Instruments
- Aerophones (winds)
- Chordophones (strings)
- Electronic
- Idiophones (percussion)
- Membranophones (drums)
- Vocalizations (vocals)

Retrocompukitsch part 9542434590801: the 1972 Playskool Computer by Milton Bradley.

From Globes to Stripes: The IBM Logo

I got my new ThinkPad hurrah!

Meet Ed Tajchman, one of the pioneering forces behind early computer-animation tools such as Animac and Scanimate. He was the head of engineering at Computer Image, and unearthed these early demo reels, one from the late '60s and one from the '70s (a sampling of animation used in The Electric Company).

The Development of Computer Generated Animated Characters (.rm file)
Video show open and example segments from The Electric Company (.rm file)

Here's a terrific site about the history of Scanimate and computer-animation. An essential library of photos, screen grabs, videos, articles, and other related ephemera.

Oh baby.



She's good. Even that misogynist cuntbag (and Iron Chef judge) Jeffrey Steingarten begrudgingly liked her.

Her tweaked-Greek presentation impressed me -- because I'm not a big eggplant eater, I can't enjoy moussaka as much as I want to, so for me her potato moussaka is the invention of the century. And she seems to have the expertise, food knowledge, and cool control to fight among the best of them. Too bad she's an Iron Chef, because I'd love to see her kick Bobby Flay in the anchos.

SF Chronicle piece on Cat Cora