[Beat] Mastering Science before hitting puberty

People often complain that I take to long in my columns to get to the point. As far as I’m concerned you people are lucky I even have a point. No paper I’ve ever written for a grade has had one.

Anyways, without any further ado, the point:

Just like Donatello, I’m a scientist. I have been ever since I preformed my first experiment on what would happen if you light your little sister’s Barbie on fire. From which I developed my first real scientific equation: H₂O * Sd <= G(t), which states (obviously) that the amount she cries combined with the smoke damage you cause are directly related to the amount of time you’ll spend grounded.

This was than followed by the discovery of other scientific principals such as gravity pulls objects of smaller mass toward those with bigger, that food that’s only been on the ground for 10 seconds in still safe to eat and just because you head will fit through something doesn’t necessarily mean that it can come back out.

Despite my illustrious career in the sciences there are some things I’ve never understood. How scratch-and-sniff stickers work and my little brother’s irrational fear of weasels are two of them. Also high up on the list is pretty much anything that a grownup ever said to me when I was a child.

From “Don’t hold you’re face like that, it’ll stick,” to “root beer is not for breakfast,” everything my authority figures would say to me didn’t make a lick of sense.

The one that would really dry my Play-Doh out was “Don’t play too much video games, they’re a waste of time and will rot your brain.” Personally I don’t think anyone who can’t figure out how to get Link the wooden sword could accuse me of having a rotten brain.

With the exception of watching Drew Barrymore movies and coloring maps of various countries I’d never heard of in seventh grade geography, I don’t think anything I’ve done in my life has been a complete waste of time. What may appear to be the useless actions of a kid with any over active imagination was in truth a secret training regimen for the day when my skills would be needed.

What would the rest of the class do if a dragon came? Throw a football at it really hard? Play piano at it? No, all they would do is hide and cry until I was able to slay the beast with my yellow Wiffle bat.

I would spend the time that wasn’t dedicated to the pursuit a sword of dragon slaying to further my scientific prowess. You’d think my attempts to build a time machine on my skateboard would make me popular with the other kids but rather it just let to them doing their own experiments on how far up my underwear could go.

That’s another thing I haven’t been able to understand scientifically, why people claim kids are innocent and pure. From what I remember they were all mean and punched hard.

In grade school I used to get beat up for pretending to be He-Man by some kid pretending to Mike Tyson. Am I the one who sees the hypocrisy in that?

Sorry, this is a very personal topic for me. Just thinking about it brings a tear to my eye and the taste of 2000 Flushes to my mouth.

Well it looks like this column, let the semester, is coming to an end. Thanks for reading, I’ve enjoyed our time together and hope you will join my for next year’s Geek Beats. Until then, geek on.

Geek out.

This was the last Geek Beat publish in the Spring Semester of this year. Published in the Utah Statesman.

Don't ask what prompted this

Who designs girls' T-shirts? I would like to have a word with them.

They always put the words where you get in trouble for reading them.

Geek on.

Childhood is gross when you think about it

Who came up with bobbing for apples? Looking back I feel really stupid about how good I was at this drowning hazard.

Basically you stick your head - with your mouth open mind you - into a mixture of10% apple juice, 35% and 55% percent backwash.

Yeah, that's gross.

Geek on.

[Beat] Dinner, dancing and zombies: the perfect honeymoon

I got permission to post my beats here as well as in the paper. This one was pretty well recieved. Most people liked the mental image of Magic the Gathering geeks trying to play DDR.

The unofficial title of this column is “What I did over my summer vacation,” because that’s all I’m going to talk about. I’m sure some of you are saying, “I don’t wanna hear about what you did.” Well, to you I say, “Hey, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘Steve’.”

I got married over the summer. This just goes to show that just because your high school class votes you to be the last to do something doesn’t mean it’ll happen that way.

We went to Las Vegas for our honeymoon. It was great, Vegas is my kind of town. It’s really shinny and has lots of buttons. Plus I can ride a roller coaster, watch a circus and pretend to be a pirate, all on the same street.

I don’t gamble in Vegas, at least not with my money. I gamble with my life every time I eat at on one of Vegas’s world-famous buffets.

It’s not the food at these places that worries me, it’s the all you eat part. I can eat a lot, a lot more that I probably should. I think the workers at the buffet should be able to cut me off, similar to how bartenders can tell an alcoholic when he’s had too much. By my seventh plate of baked “salmon” and “prime” rib covered with “chicken” chow mein, someone needs to tell me to stop. I’m no longer in control.

I, like the rest of the world, don’t go to Vegas to eat. I go to Vegas to put coins in to big shinny machines. The difference is that the one arm from my bandit is a joystick.

I love arcades. Always have, and I probably always will. There’s just something about a musty room full of hormone-driven teenagers swearing at inanimate objects that makes me feel at home.

Not all is well in beep-town, however. The arcade is no longer the bastion of geekiness that it once was.

The arcade scene has changed a lot since I was a kid. I’ve been around arcades since a yellow circle passed as a hero and the scariest looking villain was a centipede.

These days there are games filled with zombies so scary that I refuse to play for the simple reason that I don’t want to wet myself in public. Especially since the public consist of ten year olds who can slay countless of these zombies.

These zombie blood fests with names like “House of the Dead,” “CarnEVIL” and “Picnic of Doom” aren’t the games with which I have the real problem. The pox that has wasted our nations gamming dens is none other than Dance Dance Revolution.

For those of you who think Wedge Antilles is a golf club, Dance Dance Revolution (or DDR) is a video game where players actually dance along to Japanese pop music (or J-pop) by stamping along to commands flashed on the screen. It’s been at the forefront of the new trend in arcade to have primarily dancing games (or crap).

I’ve never liked dancing games because they go against nature. If God had wanted geeks to dance, he would have given us Magic: The Gathering.

Up until my honeymoon I had never tried a dancing game. I was much too manly for that. But then my wife asked me to join her in playing one and I found out just how manly I wasn’t.

I honestly expected to like it once I gave it a try. I was wrong. After about thirty of stomping to the beat, I worked up a sweat and it dawned on me “This isn’t a video game, it’s exorcise!”

I wasn’t able to feel ripped off, as my two left feet reared their ugly head and I feel, causes he casino staff to use the gauze in the arcade first aid kit for the first time ever.

And that’s what I did on my summer vacation.

Geek on.

This beat first appeared in the Utah Statesman, in August 2005. Used with permission

I'm not even going to talk about what would happen if we ran out of Mountain Dew

I was walking the other day, considering the many disasters that have effect the world recently and about what would happen if our luck would run out and something would happen here. I hope we would be able to bind together like some places have when called upon to face adversity.

As I walked past the cemetary I realized that sure, Logan may be able to with stand a blizzard, which is granted the most likely natural disaster in this part of the world, but there are many that we would not stand a chance against. For example, our cementary only has a small chainlink fence with unshuttable gates. There is no way that would be sufficent in the case of a zombie uprising.

Geek on.

Spelling

For some reason, I can spell orange the fruit right everytime, but I can't spell the color to save my life.

Geek on.

Time to face the change

Ever since I've gotten married I've been asked several times what the biggest change in my life has been. At first I really didn't know what to say. Actually Ithough I did know but I didn't want my wife to get made at me. After some thinking though I've came across the true, biggest change in my life.

I can't fart in bed anymore.

Geek on.

Will work for swag

Starting today this is not the only blog awesome enough to contain my geeky words. I'll now be posting on a regular basis for Digital Strips. Digital Strips is a really, high quality web comic pod cast hosted by The Mighty Zampzon and Daku the Rouge. They've gotten so busy setting up interviews and putting the show together that they longer have time to stay abreast on web comic news.

This is where I will come in. I'll be doing this for them. I'm still not very sure exactly how it's all going to fit together. For what I understand, as I come across web comic related news, I'll be sticking it up on thier site.

This is cool becuase I love web comics and now I have more of a reason to read them. I can also write more, which is always helpful and fun. They said they could also pimp anything of my own which will be nice. I have tried to start a web comic of my own but to no avail as of yet. I have talked to the cartoonist at the paper and we might be putting something together, but that's a ways off I'm sure.

That's all I have for now.

Geek on.

At least I can articulate

I think it's time that I come clean. I don't have kung-fu action grip. I'm not even sure what that means. I just know that I really want it.