Been there, done that.

You will swallow some tacks. You are a little
weird, maybe not so much in a good way. Buy a
yellow tie and wear it on your head.


What horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die?
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Once, when I was a little kid, I swallowed a tack. Yes, seriously. I was a stupid four-year-old. I don't exactly know what happened after that--I just don't remember--but it probably just got stuck in my throat and then ralphed it back up, because I don't remember suffering from sharp pains for any length of time afterward. In fact, I only remember this happening because my grandmother used to tell me about it.

My Identity, At Last!

SomethingAwful.com today features Dr. David Thorpe's Field Guide to North American Hispters, Vol. 1, and of course it's really hilarious and insightful...except that he actually pins down exactly what I am!

Identification: Pop Nerds have an abiding love of everything canonically agreed upon as great by their peers, none of whom they respect. Their own taste is unimpeachable, and everyone else’s is dead wrong. They know more about bands they hate than you know about your favorite band. They know what label Jesus was on. They are torn between hating Rob Sheffield and secretly wanting to be him. They read books about books about music. Pop nerds are much more likely to be male than female, because boys have a far greater tendency toward wasting their lives in the pursuit of meaningless trivia. They fancy themselves as John Cusack from High Fidelity, but really they’re a perfect mixture of Jack Black and the effeminate bald guy. They can be tough to spot in the wild, because they never leave their houses. The most effective way to identify a pop nerd, should you encounter one in the wild, is to ask him if he’s heard of a made-up band. While any non-liar with nothing to prove would simply say “no,” any nerd worth his salt would try to bullshit their way out of it (as I have expertly detailed in my “How to Fake It” article).

Musical Taste: They all like The Velvet Underground, unless you accuse them of liking the Velvet Underground, in which case they bust out their contingency plan about what a pathetic poseur Lou Reed was.

How to Tame a Pop Nerd: Say something bad about a specific rock critic. Walk up to a pop nerd at the vinyl bin of your local ultra-hip record store and say “Greil Marcus is an idiot.” The pop nerd will take it as a cue to explain why he himself knows a million times more about everything than Greil Marcus ever will.

Benefits of Friendship: Access to record collections that often border on obscenely decadent.

Drawbacks of Friendship: Never, ever mention anything about music to them, unless you’re agreeing with them or intentionally setting them up to win an argument and boost their ego. In the rare instances in which a pop nerd becomes interested in a girl, he will ultimately fail in the pursuit and you’ll have to hear about it. He’ll make you listen to heinous crap that he has tricked himself into considering great, like Scritti Politti and Einsturzende Neubauten (which he can spell without looking it up).

There are just a few quibbles here: 1) I fucking hate the Velvet Underground, period; and 2) I didn't have to trick myself into liking heinous crap like Scritti Politti and Neubauten, I just naturally like heinous crap!

Many Cool Things!

First: The Freesound Project is the coolest goddamned thing I've discovered in months. It's a Creative-Commons-licensed collection of...well, sounds--all kinds of sounds. Twenty thousand of them! And all downloadable! Expect a lot of these to show up on Malpractice.

Second: I don't give a flying fuck if Wal-Mart is destroying America or responsible for third-world sweatshops (after all, what good is the third-world for, otherwise?). Why? Because you can get the new Aeon Flux DeeVamaDee collection (all episodes, shorts, and other stuff in completely remastered and redone editions) for $28. And, you can also get the unrated edition of The Devil's Rejects for $19 (FYE has it for $27), and if you pick up the new Spielberg remake of War of the Worlds there (it was just released today), you also get a free bonus DeeVamaDee with the HBO Special on the making of the film and a collection of "pre-visualisation" FX and filming specials.

Third: Monket-Calendar is an awesome, iCal-based, FREE and open-source web-based calendar project that lets you install a PHP/MySQL-based calendar on any webserver. I'm going to put this up on Pegritz.com as a means of planning my classes for next semester AND thereby making those calendars conveniently accessible to my students as well! Glory be to PHP and MySQL, and people who write software for them so I don't have to, since I can just barely find my way around PHP and MySQL.

Thank you, drive through.