I'm a geeky 37-year-old!

[avram]

I was just swapping email with mamishka in which I talked about how me and many of my local friends are just very detail-oriented, especially about writing. I mean, just a couple of days ago we had a discussion at NYRSF about whether it’s proper to use hyphenated phrases as verbs (“he half-turned” was the exact case in question). And we do this for fun.

It brought to mind one of the reasons I love the Aaron Sorkin’s sitcom, Sports Night. There’s the episode with the web-poll asking which of the two sportscasters, Dan and Casey, is cooler. Casey wants to win badly, and asks the office computer geek, Jeremy, to fix the poll for him. Most shows would have just had Jeremy agree, and then shown him typing for a bit, and that would be it. That’s not good enough for Sorkin. Jeremy actually says something like “I’ll telnet into the server and write a perl script to hit the CGI....”

In Sorkin’s other show, The West Wing, one of my favorite plots involved CJ being told about map projections, and how they’re distorted in various ways that we don’t generally think about, for cultural, practical, and political reasons. It was a great example of how people who really study a subject become aware of all sorts of details that most people totally ignore. And it’s not just maps — everything in the world’s like that. On the downside, the show neglected to mention my favorite map projection, the Fuller projection, which solves most of the problems that were brought up.

Jeez, I’ve got a favorite map projection! What does that say about me?

Oh, thank you to the folks who’ve wished me a happy birthday.

Comments

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

I admit I'm less detail-oriented than the rest of the NYRSF gang. Maybe it's all that statistical training, or something.

I remember the upside-down map on the West Wing episode; I would see similar maps at Hampshire College. I always found the politics behind them kind of dubious, though. Most of the Third World (population and land mass) lies north of the equator, after all. Placing Australia, Argentina and South Africa "above" India, Nigeria and Mexico seems perverse to me.

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

Hampshire? Did you go there, or just see maps there? :) Cause I went there, and now that you've mentioned it, I think I recall seeing one of those maps in that little curved annex room on the third floor of the library, just to the right of the elevators. Course that was a looooooong time ago. :)

[kent-allard-jr.livejournal.com]

Hi there Mimi! Yeah, I went to Camp Hamp 1986-90, and that's exactly where I remember the map, too.

[bigscary.livejournal.com]

Sorkin's shows are by and about geeks. There's a reason that Bartlett is a complete and utter geek, rivaled only by Sam and, now, Jeremy (sorry: Will). (You memorized it? It was 1200 pages! 1123, actually.)

What other show on earth would give proper credit to the raw coolness of the title "Supreme Commander, NATO Allied Forces"? Or to cartogeekery? Or to obscure verseforms?

By the geeks, of the geeks, and for the boring.

[cadhla.livejournal.com]

First off, happy birthday.

Second off, anal-retentiveness in writing isn't that uncommon. (So speaks the woman who wrote a dictionary of spelling and capitalization, using grammatical examples of use in sentence to make sure that she'd stay accurate.) Adam and I once had a blazing row over whether 'he said' or 'said Harry' was more workable.

Try adding in a completely fluid interface between American and British grammar, and then life winds up getting...

Interesting.

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

Yeeks! Happy Birthday! :)

Technically,

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

the discussion was about the contexts in which phrases modified by "half" should be hyphenated--as an adjective ("half-baked"), as a complex verb ("half-turned")? Are there circumstances in which such a formation is not hypenated? And so forth.

Geekery is good

[volund.livejournal.com]

A (now belated) happy birthday to you.

I remember that West Wing episode as well, or at least that particular scene.

Geekery is good. We should rule.

gleep

[jmhm.livejournal.com]

Hey, missed the birthday. Happy birthday.

My husband and my brother are map geeks, so it seems perfectly normal to me.

Of course, I'm on the teetering brink of moving from "geek" to "lame old lady" so I'm probably not your optimal source for normalcy analysis.

gf as usual, god I hate livejournal's interface

[(Anonymous)]

Happy birthday. But why does the Shadow not use his real name here?

You kid, you.

(Watching The Godfather for the jillionth time, and wondering what anyone else thought would happen to the favorite dog of the slob bad guy on Kingpin. File under "sheesh.")

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Your favourite map projection is my favourite map projection!

And happy birthday.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

I mean, just a couple of days ago we had a discussion at NYRSF about whether it’s proper to use hyphenated phrases as verbs (“he half-turned” was the exact case in question). And we do this for fun.

You say that as if it's odd. Since tnh is one of my favorite people in the world, I can't possibly see anything odd about it. (The copyediting panel at Boskone rocked!)

Jeez, I’ve got a favorite map projection! What does that say about me?

You mean there are people who don't? I adore maps. Map stores are probably even more expensive to wander into than bookstores. Fortunately, there are fewer of them and I go there less.

Oh, and a very belated Happy Birthday!

MKK