culture: December 2005 Archives

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.)

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.

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?