Wolf Gnards

Oh Asians, what will you do think of next? The UFO Cap is the next big trend out of Korea. It manages to combine an umbrella with a raincoat to maximize getting punched in the face, while minimizing actual rain protection. The point of umbrellas and their ilk are to keep rain out of your face, so you can see where’s you’re going. The point of the UFO Cap seems to be to keep shoulders dry, while announcing to the world your views on classic sci-fi. Seriously, if you want your kid to get beat up at school wear the UFO Cap, if you want them dry, stick to the classic yellow raincoat.

Enough attention has been given to Frost/Nixon… the real interview of the century is Heeb/Gnards. Check out my interview with Heeb Magazine to learn everything you never wanted to learn about Wolf Gnards. Enjoy.

Wolf Gnards Interview with Heeb Magazine

In a Heeb Magazine exclusive, writer/director/(dare I add Ghostbuster) Harold Ramis responded to Wolf Gnards. Yes, that’s right–this is not a typo–Harold Ramis responded to your friendly neighborhood Wolf Gnards. Of course, he responded to Heeb which got the link from Tony Hawk who followed the Bill Murray Digg parade, but in the roundest of ways Harold Ramis responded to the Gnards.

As you may or may not know, Digg picked up my article on the amount of time Bill Murray spent trapped in Groundhog Day. Which in turn caused a series of computers to explode with my hosting service. But if anything good came out of this, I can, at least, say I made Harold Ramis blink. Not just blink, but email. Take out his laptop, open up Outlook, and type a brief paragraph.

Harold Ramis emailed the Heeb offices with this message:

“I think the 10-year estimate is too short. It takes at least 10 years to get good at anything, and alloting for the down time and misguided years he spent, it had to be more like 30 or 40 years… People [like the blogger] have way too much time on their hands. They could be learning to play the piano or speak French or sculpt.”

I 100% agree with him. When I thought of charting Groundhog Day, I thought it would come out to be 100+ years. It could take Phil any number of years to learn any of the things he mastered. Instead I had to work with the average, and I was surprised at how quickly his feats could be accomplished. 8 years, 8 months, and 16 days is more or less the minimum amount of time he needed.

What Ramis said in those ellipses the world may never know. It was probably something like, “That being said Wolf Gnards is as sexy as he is witty, a virtual playground of ungodly delights.”

Now as to Heeb calling me a spaz and Ramis alluding to the fact that certain spazoids may need to get a life, let me remind everyone that they took the time to respond to a spaz. What’s lower on the totem poll? The geek or the geek who feels the need to correct geeks?

Bill Murray tried to take down the Nards, but Wolf Gnards is back and not nearly as big as ever.

My article about Bill Murray in Groundhog Day through a combination of luck and stupidity became #1 on Digg’s trending topics. Alas, like Icarus, Bill Murray flew just a tad too close to the sun. For every single person on Digg came to my little website, and that was about 100000 more than usual. Those numbers are reserved for the porn biz and the porn biz only. Pop culture nerds sites do not get cut the same sort of slack from hosting companies.

My host server then, of course, yanked my site, and I had to go pleading and begging and explaining how much a loser I really am. And I don’t usually get ever single Digg user checking out Wolf Gnards every day. And while they should (because the Nards is awesome), they shouldn’t because it will make my website implode. So, my hosting service put the site back up and I got a stern talking to about never being successful again.

But Wolf Gnards is back in business, tell your friends, but your friends’ friends, well, they can just suck it.

The Legend of John Hughes

I have two words for you: Weird… Science. How much of my childhood did I spend trying to make my very own woman? More than I’d care to admit. Much more time than a reasonable person (young and stupid as they may be) should spend building a woman. I’m older, perhaps, wiser, but I’ve never given up dreaming. Much to the dismay of teen movie fans everywhere, 1980’s film maker John Hughes has passed away. John Hughes was not only responsible for every great movie in the 80’s, but some of the greatest nerd moments in cinema.

Hughes’ great film nerds include: Farmer Ted, Long Duk Dong, Brian Johnson (The Brain), Gary & Wyatt, Duckie Dale, Cameron Frye, and Keith Nelson (The whinny Eric Stoltz character from Some Kind of Wonderful). Three of these characters, of course, were played by Anthony Michael the Hall, but it was always Hughes at the heart. There seems to be a bit of a theme of misfit guys pining after unattainable dream girls. I have a feeling had John Hughes gotten more play at little Glenbrook North High School, there’d be a lot less classic movies.

All of his pent up sexual frustration slowly churned and turned into nerd rage and teen angst. Teen angst, of course, being the corner stone of any moderately successful teen comedy. Angst as we know is measured in cubic centimeters and is a measure of anxiety over fear in correlation to puberty. It’s what we do with teen angst that’s important. Do you let it fester into a killing spree, or do you channel it into something beautiful.

Average Teen Angst Level

The average human has a teenage angst level of 8180 cubic centimeters or roughly 15% angst production.

This sort of teenage angst is mainly forgettable. A couple of bad dates, a failed test, never getting off the bench. We get over these teenage dramas, and after long enough we forget they were ever dramas to begin with.

John Hughes Angst Level

Hughes, however, has a 43600 angst rating!

Those are angst readings reserved for only the true teenage misery. This kind of angst cannot be let go of, this is when your dream girl/soul mate leaves you for the preppy rich kid. Is it a coincidence he died of heart failure? A little too much love to handle. J.D. Salinger may have the only angst index higher.

It’s been awhile since there’s been a truly great John Hughes film (You can argue Home Alone, but I’m going to go with Planes, Trains and Automobiles). And though his legend lives on, one question remains, one that shall now go to the grave: Is Ferris really Cameron?

Call a Jedi a Trekkie and just see what happens. Lightsaber to the throat, kid. There’s nothing worse than being misclassified. It’s just a profound statement of just how misunderstood you really are. Do your parents really understand you? Not if they’re putting phasers under the Christmas tree, they don’t. The same is true for Nerds and Geeks. No nerd calculates so hard, gets such perfect grades, to be called a geek. Likewise, no geek spends 3 weeks putting together the perfect steam punk ensemble to be called a nerd. Too many people use the terms “geek” and “nerd” almost interchangeably. While the key differences between the two may be relatively minor to some, they are critical to those in the know. For the uninitiated, it’s time to find out makes a nerd a nerd and a geek a geek.

Nerd

The term nerd first came about in the 1950’s when suspenders, pocket protectors, and badly taped horn rimmed glasses were all the rage. “Nerd” first appeared in print in Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo. “… A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too! “ However, the meaning is a little unclear. Other sources claim it’s an off shoot of nert (meaning nuts), knurd (drunk spelled backwards), and also gnurd (hmmm… could it be related to gnards of all things).

But despite its origin, Nerd has taken on a meaning of its own. In the world of Nerds and Geeks, perhaps the Nerd is the more cerebral of the two. If a nerd is anti-social it is merely because they’re studying far too hard. Calculus, Science, straight A’s: these are the things nerds are made of. They do enjoy a good calculator joke from time to time (6922251 x 8), but will forever be marked by their need to achieve. Some say nerds lack any sort of social development skills, however, this is simply untrue, a nerd just does not care to develop social skills. The frame of thought is if they make enough money, who needs to be socialized? Nerds are raw brain power at its finest.

Famous Nerds: Bill Gates, Steven Hawking, Al Gore (he invented nerds), Ben Stein

Geek

If nerds are almost soulless computation, geeks are their free-spirited counterparts. The geek is the nerd’s inner freak… literally. The term geek comes from carnival sideshows, the wild man who bites heads off of chickens and such. Something far more primal than today’s modern geeks. Geeks are now unilaterally almost always associated with fandom. If geeks are better socialized than nerds, it is only because they’ve devoted their lives to a piece of pop culture that happens to have other like-minded geeks also devoted to it. The average geek gets pretty solid B minus grades, but can repeat every line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail verbatim. Comic books, Dungeons & Dragons, Sci-Fi, Cosplay: these are the tools of the geek.

Society has even seen a rise in geek subculture with the geek chic or faux geeks as the case may be. A strange blend of Emo and techie, the faux geek manages to impress girls with his iPod while having little to no knowledge of the inner workings of Dr. Who. While, a faux geek may be tolerable to hang out with, DO NOT bring them to trivia night. They will be little help.

Famous Geeks: Weird Al Yankovic, Tina Fey, Seth Green, Wil Wheaton

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