December 2005 Archives

I guess two years makes a tradition, right? Once again, as we did last year, I and an extremely select group of geeky pals will spend New Year’s Eve watching the entire Extended Edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We’ll stop only to watch the ball drop in Times Square at midnight... and since it’s now past noon and we haven’t started yet, we’ll be up until the wee hours of New Year’s Day before Sam marries Rosie.

And if you think that’s geeky, there’s a guy who’s clearly spent a whole lotta time researching the sex lives of elves in Middle Earth, and he doesn’t even appear to have been motivated by an unhealthy attraction to Orlando Bloom in a blond wig and blue contact lenses. Though he does note, quite amusingly:

Ever since the movie of the book Fellowship of the Ring came out, there seem to be two popular ideas about Elves' sex lives. Either they are radiantly asexual, or they are all screwing each other madly, along with any dwarves, hobbits, and men who happen along. Whichever you prefer is usually based on how attractive you think Orlando Bloom is.

His essay What Tolkien Officially Said About Elf Sex is informative and cheeky, and he’s also got a much more scholarly look at elvish naughtiness called Warm Beds Are Good.

Enjoy, and Ná alya i vinya loa! (That’s Elvish for “May the new year be blessed.” Found that at Some Useful Elvish Words and Phrases.)

Ever feel like you're not sure whether you're coming or going?

You could be in a "cat state":

This fall scientists announced that they had put a half dozen beryllium atoms into a "cat state."

No, they were not sprawled along a sunny windowsill. To a physicist, a "cat state" is the condition of being two diametrically opposed conditions at once, like black and white, up and down, or dead and alive.

The universe: weirder even than cats.

The man who brought geekiness to New York theater, Charles Ross is this weekend wrapping up his Off-Broadway run of One Man Star Wars [my review here]. But it -- and his new show, One Man Lord of the Rings -- will be touring all sorts of interesting places in the next few months, including California, Georgia, Florida, and Wisconsin. Charles spoke to me recently about memorizing movies, getting dissed by The New York Times, and how weird geek audiences can be.

MAJ: I want you to know from the outset that I’m a big geek, I think it’s a good thing, and there’s not going to be any derogatory comments about geekiness.

CR: Actually, to tell the truth, I’m not even worried about when people do derogatory things. I think when they’re a little bit myopic, like, the review that came out in The New York Times...

MAJ: Uh! That was horrible!

CR: It was rather telling of... I don’t know if you want to call it. Audience discrimination? As though there’s some kind of upper echelon of the public. As though there’s only one kind of audience patron allowed and other people just aren’t welcome.

MAJ: Yeah, I was really stunned by that piece... especially since apparently The Times is supposedly trying to bring in more younger readers. And by younger, I mean people our age, not kids. Because we’re not reading The Times anymore, and you have to wonder why... It’s no surprise, because they obviously do not understand our culture.

CR: Well, the guy [from The Times] is a younger guy... he’s sort of mid-30s, I think. I don’t entirely know what it is. I guess any reviewer has a bit of soap box. It’s just kind of unfortunate -- it’s like somebody trying to bully somebody outside of high school. Like only certain people are cool and other people are not.

All the bloggy kids seem to be playing this at the moment, and who am I not to jump on a bandwagon. Thus...

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: newspaper delivery girl (while I was in junior high school), retail slave (at a Service Merchandise, my senior year in high school), pedicab driver (for one day this summer, when I was desperate for cash; fortunately, my freelance writing/editing work picked up immediately after), food/fashion/beauty writer at McCall’s magazine

Four movies you could watch over and over: The Princess Bride, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Midnight Run, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension

Four places you’ve lived: Long Island, Manhattan, Yonkers, the Bronx -- all in New York State

Four TV shows you love to watch: at the moment? Stargate SG-1, Medium, House, Lost

Four places you’ve been on vacation: Iceland; Vancouver, Canada; London; Northwest Arkansas

Four Web sites you visit daily: Americablog, Savage Chickens, Astronomy Picture of the Day, Slashdot

Four of your favorite foods: red wine, brie, red peppers, Ikea Swedish meatballs

Four places you’d rather be: at the movies, London, asleep, Mars

Four albums you can’t live without: Walk the Line soundtrack; John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together; The Road to Ensenada, Lyle Lovett; The Mask and the Mirror, Loreena McKennitt

Feel free to chime in with your own fours in comments...

As we travel into a new year, the range of time trippers: the Time Lord known only as the Doctor, Dr. Sam Beckett, and Emmett "Doc" Brown.

I spent a few minutes on Christmas Eve trying to convince my friend John Redmond that I am indeed a geek. I have the entire Star Wars trilogy memorized, I told him, which he didn’t quite get -- John is a champion accordion player and a wonderfully creative guy, but he hasn’t got a geeky bone in his body, and I had to explain that that meant I could recite the dialogue (including all of R2D2’s beeps and clicks) from memory. He was still not convinced. Finally, I had to say, “Look, John, it’s Christmas Eve and this is a party and we’re playing Trivial Pursuit. I’m still not sure he got it, but the rest of us knew: We’re geeks, and we were spending the holiday doing geeky things, and we liked it just fine that way. (The game Upwords featured in the festivities, too.)

I can’t stand routine. The reason I’m basically unsuited for employment is because I can’t abide doing the same thing every day (like reporting to a cube farm at an ungodly hour of the morning and sitting there for eight or more hours). But there are certain low-level subroutines that help my life run smoothly that, when they get disrupted, are way more discombobulating than I expected they would be.

And all through the house, not a creature was stirring. Certainly not Nuala (below) and Nemo (below that), my feline niece and nephew, who were way too pooped from a hard day of napping to wait up for Santa...

Have you been very good this year? Cuz look who can see you all the time: Macy’s Kris Kringle, Jack Skellington in disguise, and bad Santa.

Yes, I know Kong is an ape, not a monkey, but still: herewith, in his honor, the curious one, the behatted one, and the evil one.

Mmm, tastes like chicken. If you’re missing Gary Larson and his Far Side cartoons, fill the void with Doug Savage’s Savage Chickens, where you’ll find chicken-flavored insight and weirdness every day. I talked to Doug recently about creativity, geekiness, and why Jim Henson is to blame for Generation X.

MAJ: What does “geek” mean to you, and do you consider yourself a geek?

DS: I guess I’ve always thought of a geek as a person who has a passion for something that most people consider unimportant. A sort of healthy obsession. And if the obsession becomes unhealthy, that’s when you’re veering into nerd territory. I have to admit that I’m a geek on several fronts -- I’m a B-movie buff and I love anything to do with 80s pop culture. And I’m also a music geek -- collecting 70s R&B on vinyl. And you can tell from some of the cartoons that I’m also a bit of Shakespeare geek.

Still life: Mrs. Kennedy on ugly couch. Cuz what’s the point of having nice furniture when you’ve got cats? It gets clawed up just the same whether you spent $2,000 on a leather sofa or $50 for two loveseats at a garage sale. (The much more demure slipcovers that usually cover the couches are at the laundromat.)

Final verdict on Sci Fi Channel’s The Triangle? A big fat "Eh." Too long, and not enough Sam Neill. I post this:

merely for my own amusement.

Looking for some alternatives to crazy Christmas commercialism? How about making prezzies this year? You could check out Craftster.org for some inspiration, like this adorable project, Yoda ears for the fashionably geeky baby:

Or you could whip up some mittens with a pocket for an iPod:

Greg Der Ananian’s Bazaar Bizarre: Not Your Granny's Crafts! has some neat-o geeky projects, too.

I’m fascinated by how Xers and geeks have taken something so traditional as yarncraft and turned it into something funky and fun and hip and cool (my favorite knitting domain name? knithappens.com). But crochet artist Patricia Waller takes yarning around to a geeky zenith, with projects like this:

Waller’s projects are individual works of art -- you won’t find instructions for making them at her site. But go take a gander anyway -- she’s delightfully demented, and obviously a geek.

In honor of Aslan’s reappearance in Narnia, nice kitty cats: Patience, the stone lion on the south side of the facade of the main branch of the New York Public Library, who always retains his dignity, even when forced to wear a Mets cap; the baby Simba, confused and clueless; and the Cowardly Lion, who’s pretty hopeless even with his heart.

So I got to meet Tilda Swinton recently, and had to resist the urge to grovel at her feet, she’s so damn cool. We were talking about The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (my review is coming on Friday, but here’s a sneak preview: Kick ass) and she had just the right attitude about the Jesus-osity of the flick: It’s not religious, she noted, "it’s prereligious. The children’s story is about surviving and being self-reliant. It’s the opposite of relying on a belief system."

That’s how I feel, too: Narnia utilizes the same mythological basis that Christianity and a whole bunch of other fairy stories use (even if it was C.S. Lewis’s intent to write a Christian allegory). There’s not a lot of point in getting worked up about the film, like Polly Toynbee in the British Guardian does. Though she recognizes that "[m]ost of the fairy story works as well as any Norse saga, pagan legend or modern fantasy" and [SPOILER ALERT] "[t]he lion exchanging his life for Edmund's is the sort of thing Arthurian legends are made of," she also flat out says "adults who wince at the worst elements of Christian belief may need a sickbag handy for the most religiose scenes." And as an adult who does indeed wince at the worst elements of Christian belief and who has now seen the film twice and can’t wait to see it again, sans barf bag, I can say that that’s just not true.

I’m struck by the fact that Swinton has played two very similar characters this year in geeky spins on Christianity: Narnia’s White Witch, the evil queen of Narnia, and the rather demented archangel Gabriel in Constantine, as caustic and cynical a look at the Bible as I think I’ve ever seen. So I had to ask her if she saw any similarities in the characters. She pondered this for a moment, then said, "No. They’re bookends -- they’re very different. The archangel is righteous, and the witch is truly evil." And then she thought on it some more, and came to an interesting conclusion: Gabriel, she conceded, isn’t such a good guy; he’s "the illustration of the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions." The queen has no good intentions, of course, but like Gabriel, she’s "absolutely unswayable. They’re both without doubt."

Not that the Christian fans of either film will see that as a problem.

I don’t remember a period of my childhood in which I was not geeky, so I think it’s safe to assume that I was not inadvertantly made a geek by my choice of reading material, like every goofy book by Erich Von Daniken and Omni magazine, or my TV viewing, like the UFO series Project Blue Book and the pseudoscientific documentaries of In Search Of.... I was drawn to this stuff, even as a little kid, because I was predisposed to being a weirdo, not made a weirdo because my tender eyes were exposed to such stuff at a vulnerable age.

So -- between my predisposition and the further warping my brain took devouring crap about Bigfoot and ancient astronauts and weird shit like that -- there was no way I was gonna miss Sci Fi Channel’s new miniseries The Triangle, which is like someone took some of the weird shit I was into as a kid -- the Bermuda Triangle -- and gave it a serious, grownup spin (but one that still recognizes how silly the idea is). And I bet that’s exactly what did happen, cuz guess who two of the producers are -- Xer geeks Bryan Singer (born 1965) and Dean Devlin (born 1962). Just look at their resumes: Singer has reinvigorated the comic-book movie by treating it as Important Stuff (X-Men, the upcoming Superman Returns), and his The Usual Suspects is an Xer touchstone for its twisty, cynical way of looking at the world; Devlin’s 1994 flick Stargate is clearly Chariots of the Gods with explosions, a movie for which he created the first movie Web site ever. You gotta know that they were listening wide-eared to Leonard Nimoy talking about cattle mutilations and ancient UFO landing strips in Peru as kids, too. (The third producer, Rockne S. O’Bannon, isn’t an Xer but he is a geek, who gave us Alien Nation and Farscape.)

So far, The Triangle is not disappointing like other Sci Fi productions have (take Taken... please). It’s actually fairly spooky and neat-o -- I like the idea of the Bermuda Triangle as some sort of temporal wormhole, and that really old six-year-old little girl is gonna haunt me for quite a while, I think... Can the geek boys sustain this, and make The Triangle a worthy continuation of all the strange stuff that blew our minds as kids? We’ll see...

I’m constantly looking around for evidence that geeks and Xers are starting to inherit the mantles of societal power -- if Xer geek Peter Jackson’s new King Kong wins this year’s Best Picture Oscar, as the speculation has it, then that will, perhaps, truly be such a sign, for only in a world in which geeks are ascendant could a giant-ape movie actually be hailed by the mainstream as the best movie of the year.

But here’s another sign: Geeks have obviously taken over stuffy, stodgy Forbes magazine, for how else could such a deliciously funny, deliciously nerdy thing like The Forbes Fictional 15 ever have been published there?

To qualify for the Fictional 15, we insisted that members be both fictional (in the sense that we excluded mythological and folkloric figures) and characters (meaning they are part of a narrative story or series of stories). Great wealth was required to be one of the primary attributes of the characters on this list--in other words, we looked for characters that were known, within their universes, for being rich.

The members of the list? Oh, people like Monty Burns, Lucius Malfoy, Bruce Wayne, Willy Wonka, Cruella De Vil... Who let the geeks into the offices of the financial press?

They say we might get our first real snowfall of the year here in NYC tomorrow. And so, one of Calvin’s pensive snowcreatures, the Snow Miser from Rudolph's Shiny New Year, and the horrifying Michael Keaton-in-white snowmonster in Jack Frost

And if you need more Calvin fix, check out Calvin and Hobbes Snow Art Gallery.