March 2007 Archives

Oh my god, the whole world has gone geeky. Even the federal government.

Have you come across one of these R2-D2 mailboxes? (Apparently there's only 400 of these geeky mailboxes around the country, so count yourself geekily blessed if you've been in the presence of one.) Didja wonder what the heck was up? Yeah, me too. Turns out the good ol' stodgy United States Postal Service will be issuing a series of 15 new First Class stamps (at the soon-to-be-new 41-cent rate) on May 25th to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars.

Man, I feel old. I remember being scared to death as an eight-year-old by Darth Vader and those skeleton-looking stormtroopers, and now I'll be able to buy Princess Leia stamps to slap on my obscene credit-card payments.

My brother Ken suggested that the world needs a Museum of Ignorance, and I was gonna make that my second entry in "steal these domains." But someone already owns museumofignorance.com and isn't doing anything with it. What a waste.

So now it's a new category here, in which I will be offering, without commentary, new exhibits on a regular basis. I don't imagine I will ever run out of stuff to highlight, and here's an excellent (ie: sad and pathetic) beginning:

I was at my brother Ken’s place last night, and we were flipping around the tube, and we came across The Empire Strikes Back on one of the HBO channels. Shockingly, Ken had not heard of the saga of the Bespin Ice Cream Guy, so after Bespin Ice Cream Guy made his brief appearance, we Googled him, so I could show Ken the hilarious action figure fans have developed.

BICG Central seems to revolve around these two sites:

http://www.geocities.com/ocb75/
http://www.thecustomalliance.com/curto/willrow.asp

Look at those URLs. My shock at discovering Ken’s lack of exposure to BICG’s saga was nothing compared to learning that no one has registered any of these domains:

bespinicecream.com
bespinicecreamguy.com
bespinicecreamcompany.com
bespinberryblast.com
willrowhood.com

So I challenge geeks to steal these domains, and create a worthy tribute to one of Cloud City’s bravest and more ingenious citizens.

(Technorati tags: Bespin ice cream guy, unregistered domain names)

“You’re not a geek, you’re a lot of fun,” Marisa Tomei’s cute and perky diner owner says to William H. Macy’s computer programmer in the all-around abysmal Wild Hogs, which opens today in theaters. Macy’s character is a total nerd, the worst and most negative stereotype of a geek: more comfortable with computers than with people, and especially awkward around women; physically uncoordinated and weak; all the usual nonsense. And so naturally he could not possibly be a geek and be a lot of fun at the same time. This is hardly unexpected: the movie is a sitcom in which every character is a cliché, and Wild Hogs is aimed at an audience older than Xers for whom geek is likely nothing but a dirty word, if it means anything at all. The director, Walt Becker, born 1968, is an Xer, so you’d think he might know better, but then again, he also directed the awful college frat fantasy Van Wilder, which makes me suspect he was probably one of those guys who wasn’t into computers in high school and now feels left behind to see that it’s all the geeks making good and getting all the chicks and needs to compensate for that somehow.

It hit 60 degrees in New York today, March 2. I guess our one month of winter is over. In December I was thinking about buying a new winter coat, something dressy for when my utilitarian peacoat wasn’t appropriate, and then I figured: Why bother? I’m not gonna need it. And I haven’t. On Christmas Eve I went out to a fairly fancy restaurant with my family, and it was too warm to wear the nice new sweater I’d just bought. That’s not normal for NYC. And then we had a ridiculously warm January, followed by a cold and snowy February, and now March is coming in like a lamb.

Meanwhile, in Alabama: