Odds & Ends

As an addendum to my post yesterday encouraging people to nerd it up by watching a video documentary about Spock, and to once again mark the release of Star Trek, here's the classic Saturday Night Live skit involving Wlliam Shatner lashing out at people nerding it up. (As so often is the case, the link is from Jaime J. Weinman).

It seems odd, looking at this now, to think that it actually offended people at the time. Not just because I'd hope nerds might have a better sense of humour than this, but also because of how snarky the nerds themselves have become. The internet, and the forum cut-and-thrust on sites like Ain't It Cool, seems to have bred geeks into a more argumentative, sarcastic breed (a la The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy) than the sheltered losers in this sketch.

A key element of this is constantly professing to hate the things that they obsess over; the current Star Trek nerd is more likely to express contempt for Shatner than Shatner is for them.