Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

While browsing through 50 vintage-style photos of current stars here on Listal, the one I felt had the most geek cred was of Carlo Gugino (who plays the original Silk Spectre in the Watchmen movie) playing chess—and oh, yes, she is touching your piece before the game has even started.

The rest aren’t really geeky, but some are very cool. From what I can tell, the person who compiled the list just nabbed photos from all over the web with the loose theme of current celebrities in a pin-up style. Some were more slutty than sexy, and many were vintage-ish but the photography didn’t match the style or they were anachronistic.

These ones were the closest to what I think of as True Vintage Pin-Up: Read more…

After 20 years on the air, The Simpsons will finally get their own United States postage stamps! Our beloved prime time cartoon family will be available to adorn snail mail and/or stamp collections on May 7. There are five different stamps, each featuring the face of a core Simpsons family member.

The USPS definitely understands the minds of collectors. There are several options to purchase The Simpsons stamps online, not all of which are actual stamps.

• Booklet of 20 (4 stamps of each face) with a random cover
• 4 Booklets of 20 (so completists get all of the covers without that pesky blind box anxiety)
• First Day Covers (envelopes with the stamp and a special digital postmark dated May 7)
• First Day Covers—but with special color postmarks
• “Simpsons Cancellation Keepsake” (all 4 colorized First Day Covers plus a booklet with random cover)
• Stamped postal cards (but since postcards only cost $0.28 to send, I’m assuming they’re ironically not  stamped with the Simpsons stamps)
• Individual 11×14 inch giclée art prints of each stamp, matted
• A family set of giclée art prints, 11×20 inches, matted and framed

So, if you have an extra $250, you can get all of that for your stamp and/or Simpsons collection. I know, I know, it cuts into your Qee budget. But if you’re a real fan, you know that “budget” is synonymous with “oppression” and not even something called “therapy” could help quell your desire to acquire everything SIMPSONS. (And that’s probably why Matt Groening has issued you a restraining order.)

Since I’m not that “real” of a fan, the only stamp collectibles I’ll probably get are the 4-pack of stamp booklets so that I get each cover. The First Day Covers would be neat, but not top priority. However, if I could convince Ben that we should spend $25 on it instead of a gallon paint to touch up the front of the house, I would really love to have a giclée art print of Lisa.

I wouldn’t call myself a stamp collector, per se, but I do have a small stash of stamps sheets featuring images I love. Maybe someday I’ll tell my uninterested children about why I find them so interesting. I hope that they’ll appreciate commemorative stamp issues like Jim Henson and the Muppets, Marvel superheroes, Hubble telescope, etc. I’m not going to hold my breath. (Since my uninterested children are still imaginary, you’d think that I would imagine them as being interested. But since they’ll likely get half their genes from Ben, I’m a little more realistic. He has a pretty practiced BLANK STARE OF INCREDULITY whenever I get excited about my cool little stamp stash. Or my coin collection, for that matter.)

And on days when I’m feeling optimistic and happy, I can get a good dose of bitterness just by looking at my stash as a record of the rapid price increases of stamps from year to year.

By the way, USPS prices are going up again on May 7 to counter your Simpsons excitement. The standard stamp will increase from 42 cents to 44 cents. So if you still send letters via snail mail, you might want to consider buying some more non-denominated Liberty Bell “forever” stamps.

Don’t hang on to them too long, though, because I estimate that the Forever Stamp Bubble will burst around 2011, when nobody will have any use for any sort of snail mail whatsoever. Because that’s when 3D fax machines (aka Transporters, natch) will make it possible for you to receive that adorable bargain-priced kitten calendar from Aunt Helen over the internet.

Periodic Table Quilt

Originally uploaded by fadinghippie

A quilt in the shape of the periodic table! In delightful patchwork! With rainbow colors designating element categories! Flickr user “fadinghippie” is a genius!

I twittered today that I wanted to embroider and frame a periodic table, and my friend John sent me the link to this rainbow piece of nerdy/crafty/geeky delight.

What a lucky person the recipient is. My sister is getting closer to finishing her PhD in neuroscience, and I was just going to get her a subscription to “Over-Educated and Under-Employed” magazine.

Now I’ll feel lame if I don’t do something crafty for her, like paper mache a brain and turn it into a lampshade.

Any other suggestions for an appropriate nerd craft item that I could make and bestow upon her when her Day of Nerdoscience arrives?

Ben and I spent the afternoon with Kathleen and Ron on Christmas Day last year. Kathleen was diagnosed with colon cancer in early 2008 and had undergone chemotherapy, but even though she’d lost a lot of weight and looked more frail, she was as talkative as ever. She told me that she intended to live for another 20 years to see her grandchildren married, and that she’d told her doctors that their grim predictions just wouldn’t work for her.

I believed her. And I am now trying to deal with sadness from her death and guilt from not going to see her since Christmas—not even after I got the message last week that she was in hospice. The time just passed by too quickly, and I guess I’ve been floating around in denial and avoidance. She was only 57 years old.

Kathleen and I were coworkers at my last job, and though her kids are my age, we bonded over being the only non-Mormons at the corporate office. And over trains. Her husband, recently retired, was the manager at the local Union Pacific railyard and Ben is a model railroader who goes ga-ga for real trains.

They invited us to visit the railyard the last few Decembers (along with the employees’ families, who mostly come to see Santa and eat Kathleen’s cookies) so that Ben could take photos and touch the insides of a locomotive. At the railyard in 2007, I took a photo of Kathleen and Ron that she really loved. The photo was a little blurry, but she had a great big smile on her face.

We went to her memorial service this morning.Kathleen was Christian, but had not found a congregation that fit her spiritual needs since moving to Utah from Texas in the 90s. Her Mormon neighbors offered to hold the service at the local church, and it was very nice. A lot of my former coworkers were there from the company that laid me (and Kathleen) off last year. I was happier to see some more than others, but I know that Kathleen would have wanted every one of them there.

I’m not typically a crier, but I don’t have a great history of holding myself together at funerals or memorial services. I was doing okay walking into the church building, greeting Ron and his kids, until I got to the table with the guestbook and programs. Read more…

Rock crawling in the suburbs

Originally uploaded by innergeek

Yet another day that I am impressed by Utah drivers.

Anything with the keyword geek in it captures my attention because I am always interested in its usage. Not just whether it’s being used as a noun or verb, but whether it’s used in an insulting or admiring manner and how the stereotype is changing over time.

When I assembled the first version of the Geek Test in 1999, the dictionary definition of geek was “1. An odd or ridiculous person. 2. A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.”

In 2002, when I started creating innergeek.us and researching the nature of modern geeks, I was amazed to discover that the entry for geek on (then shiny/new) Wikipedia still reflected the “traditional” definition of geek. Though I’m no Wikipedian, I registered so that I was able to add more current information—and it’s been tweaked and updated over the years by others to create a very full meaning of the word geek.

So as an avid student of geekology, I naturally watched the first season of “Beauty and the Geek” when it aired on the CW network in 2006, plus a few episodes here and there in later seasons. I have mixed feelings about the show as it relates to the stereotype of geek.

Granted, it’s a reality show produced by Ashton Kutcher. But it’s only the third TV series to contain the word geek in the title—the first was the undervalued and prematurely canceled comedy-drama Freaks and Geeks in 1999-2000. Then there was the Comedy Central game show Beat the Geeks in 2001-2002.

Now, I like the idea of expanding people’s world views through forced cooperation between individuals with (apparently) little in common. Many of Beauty and the Geek’s participants also seem to come away from the show with a better sense of self. Or at least episodes are edited that way. What I don’t like, though, is the polarization of the two sides that perpetuate the stereotypes in the eyes of the viewer.

Back in December, I came across this casting call for geeks: Read more…

I am delighted to announce that yesterday evening, completely unprovoked, Ben took our relationship to a new level. He invited me to organize our CD collection.

What’s the big deal, right? It’s just a ginormous pile of plastic and digital music files.

Heh.

Okay, there are a couple things you need to understand before you can understand why this was such a big deal to me. When I was in elementary school—elementary school—I had a small bookshelf in my room where I kept my small collection of books in alphabetical order by title. My parents gave me a typesetting/rubber stamp set that I used to stamp my name in every book, as well as to make official-looking library cards for my family and visiting friends. And I kept index cards with the book titles and stamped due dates on them. I, uh, kind of really wanted to be a librarian when I grew up. (And also a veterinarian, a babysitter, and a writer, but that’s not really relevant to the story.)

By middle school, I switched to organizing my books alphabetically by author and then title. They stayed that way for many years through many moves. When Ben and I finally got bookshelves in our house a few years ago, I spent a very happy weekend pulling books out of boxes and shelving them in a loose Dewey Decimal order. Fiction is separated from non-fiction, which is grouped by subject and then alphabetically by author. It’s a little tricky because of the arrangement of the shelves. Ben understands my need to have my books organized, and doesn’t really care how I mix his in.

Now, about multimedia. Read more…