I'm a geeky 37-year-old!

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.