National Geek Day

Happy National Geek Day!  It’s about time geeks got their own holiday.  If you enjoy finding the value of Pi, if you can multiply six-digit numbers in your head, if you’re excited about the latest news about the Boson’s Particle, if you scored 800 on your SAT or GRE math scores, if you’re a fan of Just Six Numbers, this is your day.

The big issue of this holiday, aside from whether the scientists just made a huge mistake about finding the Boson’s Particle (I spent yesterday with two genuine Geeks – the Nephew and his girlfriend), is which science fiction series or film series best satisfies the intellectual curiosity of Geeks?

The contention is between Star Wars and the original Star Trek. Which really involved actual science and still qualify as a drama?  According to our family’s Grandfather of Geekness (who is now wandering among the particles of space) – our father – it was definitely Star Trek.  He lived long enough to see to the original Star Trek when it was really on, and Star Wars.

He thought Star Wars was a joke, and a movie that mistakes a measure of space – parsec – for a measure of time, didn’t measure up in his view.  Dad generally didn’t watch children’s shows with us, but Star Trek piqued his interest, in spite of the foam boulders.  Gene Roddenberry’s ideas were ahead of their time.  Dad especially liked Mr. Spock and the notion of three-dimensional chess.

All the episodes of the original Star Trek series are available on Netflix.  If you have, you can have your very own Star Trek marathon – without the commercials.  Celebrate your Geekness with pride.  Remember, if it hadn’t been for a geek, you wouldn’t have an HDTV or Roku or other wifi device on which to watch the Star Trek reruns.  You wouldn’t have a computer, cellphone, tablet, or graphing calculator if it hadn’t been for some geek like yourselves.

Here’s to the Geeks of the world:  Live long, and prosper!