Chances are that if you are sitting in a room that has two PCs, two printers, a pocket PC that hooks up and transfers back and forth from your main PC, a cell phone/camera that surfs the web, a MP3 player, a flat screen TV hooked up to a combination DVD/VCR, a second TV, a second DVD player, a second VCR, a stereo set that hooks up to you MP3 player if you want, a Galadrial doll, two Irish fairy dolls, a doll of Colonel John Shepherd from “Stargate Atlantis”, a digital camera, an Advantrix camera, and a 35mm camera that you might have to admit you’re a geek. If you add the fact that one of my all time favorite shows was McGuyver then it is a foregone conclusion that I’m a geek.
I grew up a geek. I love fantasy and science fiction. I’ve worked many science fiction conventions. I even ran my own science fiction convention. I write fantasy. My art work has a strong fantasy/science fiction/astronomy slant to it. As far as I’m concerned everyone should embrace their inner geekness. It has always bothered me that there is such a bias against geeks as if there were something wrong with it. Where do they think science comes from? It isn’t in the realm of the macho man that’s for sure.
This old house that I live in has a lot of quirks and problems that keep cropping up. Sometimes it takes a McGuyver moment to fix them. Shortly after I moved in I needed to fix the towel rack upstairs in the bathroom I share with my brother. He had tugged too hard on a towel one day and having no mechanical ability what-so-ever just left the towel rack dangling. My Mom wanted to know if I could fix it. To start with that particular wall was hallow. The studs Dad had put in to hold the towel rack had torn loose on the one side. There was nothing to put them back into. Okay I could plaster the holder back into the wall with heavy caulking. No problem. The towel bar has to be in the holder however. Problem. It made the thing too heavy to stay in the wall until the caulking dried. I didn’t plan on staying up all night holding it up until it dried. Ah a McGuyver solution presented itself. My Mom has a flat basket with flowers right above the towel rack. A long piece of dental floss attached to the nail, wrapped around the towel rack bar, an viola. It stays up until the plaster dries.
The McGuyver moment number two comes up on Sunday. The power had gone wonky on some of the circuits. This house would be an electricians nightmare. It turns out there is a little circuit box behind the panel in the family room. This box was covered up by a couple of pictures. The man who repaired the circuits that had blown needed to enlarge the hole in the paneling. We don’t know if we are going to need to go back in there some day to fix something else. This house is so weird we probably will. Not having a piece of paneling to fit and not having anything that I can really put the little pictures over without a hole showing I needed to do something. It so happens that in our bathroom upstairs is a clothes hamper with a wood colored base. Too many towels on the fabric top and it was shot so I got some wood designed Contact paper and recovered it. Since it is plastic my brother can throw all the wet towels he wants over it. And guess what else was the same color as that Contact paper? You guessed it. A piece of Contact paper goes over the hole in the dining room panel, it matches perfectly, the little pictures go back up and no one knows any different.
One of the reasons that shows like McGuyver appealed to me so much was the fact that the hero actually knew how to think and think outside the box. I have always been an outside the box thinker. I love science fiction so much because of the speculative quality of it. I always want to know what if. What if we tried this instead of that? What if life on other planets exist not as carbon based but silicon based? One of my favorite quotes is from Hamlet, “There is more to heaven and earth, Horatio, then is dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Many people think geeks are nothing but pie-eyed dreamers. That geeks only inhabit a world of make believe. In reality it is the geeks who are the ones who are the scientists. It is the geeks who will have to solve the problems in the ecology. It is the geeks who will take us to the stars and other planets. And you better believe it will be the geeks the world will turn to when we actually make contact with an alien species. We’ve known how to talk to them for years.
I believe that our young people should be encouraged to be geeks and dream. It is in the dreams of geeks where we will find the answers to the problems facing this planet today. Thinking inside the box all the time is never going to work. Children have to be encouraged to think creatively. Some one has to use up all that spare dental floss and Contact paper.
I grew up a geek. I love fantasy and science fiction. I’ve worked many science fiction conventions. I even ran my own science fiction convention. I write fantasy. My art work has a strong fantasy/science fiction/astronomy slant to it. As far as I’m concerned everyone should embrace their inner geekness. It has always bothered me that there is such a bias against geeks as if there were something wrong with it. Where do they think science comes from? It isn’t in the realm of the macho man that’s for sure.
This old house that I live in has a lot of quirks and problems that keep cropping up. Sometimes it takes a McGuyver moment to fix them. Shortly after I moved in I needed to fix the towel rack upstairs in the bathroom I share with my brother. He had tugged too hard on a towel one day and having no mechanical ability what-so-ever just left the towel rack dangling. My Mom wanted to know if I could fix it. To start with that particular wall was hallow. The studs Dad had put in to hold the towel rack had torn loose on the one side. There was nothing to put them back into. Okay I could plaster the holder back into the wall with heavy caulking. No problem. The towel bar has to be in the holder however. Problem. It made the thing too heavy to stay in the wall until the caulking dried. I didn’t plan on staying up all night holding it up until it dried. Ah a McGuyver solution presented itself. My Mom has a flat basket with flowers right above the towel rack. A long piece of dental floss attached to the nail, wrapped around the towel rack bar, an viola. It stays up until the plaster dries.
The McGuyver moment number two comes up on Sunday. The power had gone wonky on some of the circuits. This house would be an electricians nightmare. It turns out there is a little circuit box behind the panel in the family room. This box was covered up by a couple of pictures. The man who repaired the circuits that had blown needed to enlarge the hole in the paneling. We don’t know if we are going to need to go back in there some day to fix something else. This house is so weird we probably will. Not having a piece of paneling to fit and not having anything that I can really put the little pictures over without a hole showing I needed to do something. It so happens that in our bathroom upstairs is a clothes hamper with a wood colored base. Too many towels on the fabric top and it was shot so I got some wood designed Contact paper and recovered it. Since it is plastic my brother can throw all the wet towels he wants over it. And guess what else was the same color as that Contact paper? You guessed it. A piece of Contact paper goes over the hole in the dining room panel, it matches perfectly, the little pictures go back up and no one knows any different.
One of the reasons that shows like McGuyver appealed to me so much was the fact that the hero actually knew how to think and think outside the box. I have always been an outside the box thinker. I love science fiction so much because of the speculative quality of it. I always want to know what if. What if we tried this instead of that? What if life on other planets exist not as carbon based but silicon based? One of my favorite quotes is from Hamlet, “There is more to heaven and earth, Horatio, then is dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Many people think geeks are nothing but pie-eyed dreamers. That geeks only inhabit a world of make believe. In reality it is the geeks who are the ones who are the scientists. It is the geeks who will have to solve the problems in the ecology. It is the geeks who will take us to the stars and other planets. And you better believe it will be the geeks the world will turn to when we actually make contact with an alien species. We’ve known how to talk to them for years.
I believe that our young people should be encouraged to be geeks and dream. It is in the dreams of geeks where we will find the answers to the problems facing this planet today. Thinking inside the box all the time is never going to work. Children have to be encouraged to think creatively. Some one has to use up all that spare dental floss and Contact paper.
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