Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

There’s a geeky woman out there who loves her nerd/geek husband so much, she spent a TON of time making and knitting a Super Mario Bros. screenshot into a sweater vest for him. She even hand-dyed the brightest green yarn because she couldn’t find any in that shade. I am impressed. I may also have exclaimed, “Now THAT is geeky!”

Her site has just been updated with a free PDF of the pattern.

I could see myself making an epic knitting pattern like this, and possibly buying some of the yarn. Perhaps I would experiment with hand-dyeing yarn. I would probably stop at that point, though, because it would take me for-freaking-ever, and even if I eked out enough patience to see it through, I very highly doubt that my husband would ever wear something like this. Mostly because of its sweater vest nature.

A full sweater, though? Now that’s another story… and it gives me a headache to think about knitting that much detail right now!

The adorable baby-sized knit Link outfit, though? Maybe someday. It has an arrow quiver designed to hold a baby bottle. I just died from the cuteness.

I need to share some other braintastic stuff I’ve come across recently. First, there’s the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art in Oregon. Its images stimulate my crafty nerd synapses and make me squee! My favorite is the Knitted Brain, which took one year for Dr. Karen Norberg to knit. There’s an article about her project here. It reminds me of the knitted digestive tract I came across last year but looks a lot more labor-intensive.

And then there’s the recipe for chocolate ganache-filed brain cupcakes by notsohumblepie in Seattle. “Because it is a well known fact that human brains are filled with chocolate ganache,” she says. Tee hee! They look delicious, and could be easily translated to a zombie-themed fest if the decorative icing were placed on a red velvet cupcake.

If you are in any way geeky, nerdy, or offbeat, you really need to check out her recipes… especially the ones labeled science and weird. They’re all complete with mouthwatering photos. Well, all of the photos are mouthwatering except the petri dish cookies. Having been a biology major at one point in my life, and having a vivid smell memory of petri dishes in the lab, the execution of her design with all their isolated colonies kinda makes me want to hurl. But you go ahead and enjoy!

I really think that I need to get one of these t-shirts. But first, I want to know why the dinosaur is wearing braces. That’s just ridiculous.

Thesaurus t-shirt from snorgtees

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.

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…

Happy Square Root Day! Even Scientific American is talking about it! This holiday comes only 9 times a century (and 9 is my favorite number), so please do something to celebrate.

For example, choose to eat square foods—preferably made from some sort of root. You could cut a potato into a cube, then cut it into 15 slices and fry them up. Eat the slices in groups of 3, 3, and 9. If you don’t have any square and/or root foods available, just try to eat or drink in groups of 3 and 9.

Or watch the trailer for the upcoming Tim Burton Movie, 9, and send it to 3 friends with the instructions that they should each send it to 3 friends. (But that’s it, okay? It’s a mathematical celebration, not a chain meme.)

It’s also a great day to learn shortcuts for typing the square root symbol (√)!

Mac OSX: option + v

Windows: alt + 0251

Number code: √

Character code: 221A

If you choose to celebrate Square Root Day, please leave a comment to share what you did!

In related news, I would like to publicly apologize for disappointing my friend John on Febrary 13. I neglected to blog about 1234567890 Day. Perhaps this little factoid will help with my redemption: I cherish the memory of my mixed 4th/5th grade class pausing to celebrate sequential numbers at 1:23:45pm on 6/7/89.

March of ’09 is pretty special because it’s the only month in each century wherein one may celebrate both Square Root Day and Pi Day (3/14). It’s also my dad’s birthday!

Dad is a scientist and fairly geeky in his own right, so I happily explained to him over the phone what a special day it was to have a birthday. He told me to have fun with whatever fumes I was huffing. Happy Birthday, you crotchety ol’ smartass! Love you!

The word niche has been popping up everywhere in my life lately. Home, school, every damn book and periodical I’ve read in the past couple weeks. Perhaps you also experience word phenomena like this in your life from time to time?

What’s really been bugging me, however, is the pronunciation of the word. I don’t recall growing up hearing it one way or the other, and dictionaries include multiple ways of pronunciation: neesh, nitch, nish. For the most part, I say neesh, though I’m pretty sure I’ve said nitch and nish in the past—probably when repeating the word back to someone in conversation.

This past week, my marketing professor used the word multiple times while referring to niche markets, and she pronounces it nitch. The pronunciation really started grating on my nerves, not unlike times when Cincinnatians say pin instead of pen and when Utahns say fill instead of feel. (I’m aware that I have a little xeno-dialectic snobbery problem.)

I polled my Twitter followers, most of whom are American, to find out whether they say nitch or neesh. The results are:

• 6 say nitch
• 5 say neesh
• 2 are bilingual and say neesh in French but say nitch in English
• 2 avoid saying the word at all costs because of this confusion

So though the results lean toward nitch, the sample is not really large enough to reach a solid conclusion.

But it made me think about this word and why pronouncing it nitch bothers me. I’m not bothered by the sound—I don’t have an issue with the words which, witch, hitch, kitsch, pitch, stitch, or bitch—so what’s the big deal?

I think I found the root of my problem by researching the etymology of the word. Not surprisingly, it is derived from the French word nicher, which is pronounced nee-shay and means to nest. Which means that neesh is closer in pronunciation to the original word than nitch. I know some French, so I’m guessing my preference stems from that.

Other derived-from-French words that are spelled with a ch in English but are pronounced with a soft sh sound include quiche, cache, and microfiche. If you mispronounce those words, you might inadvertently say things like “Real men don’t eat kitsch.”

And that just doesn’t make much sense, since “real men” will eat pretty much anything.

So keep all of this in mind if pronouncing the word niche has previously caused you stress or confusion. Say it either way—I’m not going to start proselytizing that neesh is the only pronunciation because clearly nitch has its own little niche in English.

However, if your speech also includes words like exspecially, nuculer, or supposably, I will not feel bad about sticking my linguistic lessons all up in your face.

My enginerd husband has now finished buiding (from scratch) and assembling some sturdy shelves for our storage room. The frames are made of 2x4s (FYI: they are actually 1.5″x3.5″) and the 2′x4′ shelves are cut, sanded, and painted plywood. It’s all screwed together and even tucked behind the exposed rafters to prevent tipping. He’s so handy! (Sometimes I even the domestic chore score by heating up dinner in the microwave.)

One of the frames warped a little, which prevented the plywood shelves from properly sliding into place. I didn’t know anything about this issue until he asked for my help. When I entered the storage room, he handed me the rubber mallet and crawled into the frame. First I thought he had been huffing something out in the garage, since hammering anything is always his Duty As A Man, but then he told me what was going on.

He was going to use his Man Strength to straighten out the frame from the inside while I hammered a cross-beam into place that would keep it straight. Oh, hey! I suddenly noticed that there was a cross-beam on the bottom of the frame.

So he did his job, and I enjoyed wielding the mallet for a few satisfyingly effective whacks. As he crawled out of the frame, I marveled at his ingenuity because I probably would have tried to shove the shelves in and broken something and then gone out to purchase a prefabricated shelf. The corners were quite fancy, and by that I mean not cut at right angles.

Ben smiled, quite pleased with himself, and said, “I used trigonometry!”

What a nerd, right? And so adorable. I think I’ll keep him (especially now that there’s more space in the storage room).

(The awesome stains on the cement floor are courtesy of the previous homeowners. Ben scrubbed the area clean before setting up the shelves, but we didn’t think it was worth the extra hassle or expense to try to remove the stains or cover them up with paint.)

You’ll never believe what I’m doing today.

I am working on innergeek.us and going through geekmaster emails that have long been neglected. Which mostly means deleting all the spam.

Occasionally, there are curious emails about specific questions on the geek test. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the fact that people still email me when the site and test are clearly outdated, but just how exactly am I supposed to respond to emails like this?

Hi,
one of the questions in the geek test is "I have looked forward to dissecting a frog, pig, etc.".  Perhaps you didn’t notice, but relatively a large percent of the geeks are vegetarian, or close to be ones. So I afraid that this is not so good question.

I guess I should put that one on the list of crazy emails I’ve received in the past.  It’s not really crazy… just weird. I would argue that geeks are more likely to be meat eaters than vegetarians. Feel free to leave your own thoughts in the comments. 

In other news, the whole ansty situation of what does my website mean in conjunction with what does my life mean and will I ever be a writer is really getting on my nerves, and maybe this is the finally-somewhat-like-spring-weather talking, but I’m ready to do something about it. With baby steps, I think, to prevent an insta-overwhelm.

Of course I still need to finish up my taxes and get that off my shoulders by Tuesday. Blech. Normally I love figuring out taxes (nerd alert), but this year it’s a little more complicated and it’s making me nervous that I’m going to screw it up. And that’s just asking for procrastination… 

I usually save my smirks for later in the day, but a headlining CNN.com article caught my smirking attention this morning.  I’ve heard about the uncontrollable satellite that could come crashing to earth in the next couple of weeks, and that The Man was going to attempt to blow it up with a missile before it entered our atmosphere.

Here’s the first sentence of the article: 

"Pentagon officials said they think a Navy missile scored a direct hit on the fuel tank of an errant spy satellite late Wednesday, eliminating a toxic threat to people on Earth."

Everything sounds great, right? No danger to life as we know it? Hold a sec. Was the phrase people on Earth really just used? Eliminating a toxic threat to people on Earth? That sounds like a sci-fi B-movie to me. Or maybe a fantastic sci-fi cartoon. I hear it in the distance…

"I am Lrrr, ruler of the planet Omicron Persei 8 and controller of a toxic threat to people on Earth!"

Seriously, it doesn’t sound real. It’s weird, scary and humorous at the same time that stuff like that makes it into real news articles. Here’s another snippet, where you can guess which phrase made me smirk a second time:

"China is continuing to closely follow the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries," Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Thursday."

If you guessed outer space security, give yourself a shooting star. I love that China is (supposedly) suspicious because of the USA’s potentially devious actions involving outer space.  I’ll probably never know anything detailed about our government’s full story with this whole thing (or, if you believe any of the conspiracies you see on TV and in the movies, if we’re really the good guys or if we have top secret alterior motives). Maybe China is just cranky about it because this news is stealing their New Year thunder. Or the Rat does not approve of outer space hulabaloo in his/her Year. For chrissake, people, the Rat only gets one out of every 12 years!

Overall, I’m happy to hear the reports of the spy satellite being shot down. I don’t know what naked pictures of me might have been on there, you know? And it’s a really good thing that the spy satellite didn’t fall into China’s territory, because they really don’t need to be seeing that stuff.

Speaking of outer space, I’m bummed that I didn’t get an opportunity to see the lunar eclipse last night. It was cloudy and raining/snowing. Or maybe it was a government cover-up so we couldn’t see the explosion of the spy satellite….

*cue the X-files music*