Tuesday, December 05, 2006
There's a longer post coming in the next couple days, but until then there's something I want to address.
You know how every so often some waggish columnist will decide to characterize all geeks (by which they invariably mean anyone who ever saw a Star Wars movie, or watched an episode of any Star Trek series) by the usual stereotypes? You know, lives in parents basement, can't get laid, thinks D&D is real, and so on.
But there's another, more insidious subculture that is not only larger, they are actively evil while ours is merely socially awkward. I'm speaking, of course, about sports fans. Our social awkwardness is fairly self-contained. We're smart enough to know, and have fun with, our peculiar interest. Sports fans, though, those are the guys who go forcing cities to spend billions of dollars replacing sports stadiums that are less than ten years old. When we geeks are happy that a movie did well, we celebrate by picking it apart in chat rooms. When your sports team does well, you go and burn down your city. If we don't like someone, we fucking deal with it. You invent games like Smear The Queer.
So it's time we turn the tables and start exposing these cretins for the cancer on society they are. Bloggers, columnists, journalists, the next time you talk about sports fans - any fan, any sport, we have to be as hardline as they are - be sure to work in the following officially notarized stereotypes:
- Illiterate
- trailer-dwelling
- Bud-swilling (or Miller Lite-guzzling)
- meshback cap-wearing
- date-raping OR wife-beating
Note that I've kept them short and simple, to facilitate spreading of the hate. See if you can come up with some of your own - after all, we need something about that idiotic habit of painting their pasty, flabby naked torsos in their team colors.
Copyright 2006 Rich Bowen
You know how every so often some waggish columnist will decide to characterize all geeks (by which they invariably mean anyone who ever saw a Star Wars movie, or watched an episode of any Star Trek series) by the usual stereotypes? You know, lives in parents basement, can't get laid, thinks D&D is real, and so on.
But there's another, more insidious subculture that is not only larger, they are actively evil while ours is merely socially awkward. I'm speaking, of course, about sports fans. Our social awkwardness is fairly self-contained. We're smart enough to know, and have fun with, our peculiar interest. Sports fans, though, those are the guys who go forcing cities to spend billions of dollars replacing sports stadiums that are less than ten years old. When we geeks are happy that a movie did well, we celebrate by picking it apart in chat rooms. When your sports team does well, you go and burn down your city. If we don't like someone, we fucking deal with it. You invent games like Smear The Queer.
So it's time we turn the tables and start exposing these cretins for the cancer on society they are. Bloggers, columnists, journalists, the next time you talk about sports fans - any fan, any sport, we have to be as hardline as they are - be sure to work in the following officially notarized stereotypes:
- Illiterate
- trailer-dwelling
- Bud-swilling (or Miller Lite-guzzling)
- meshback cap-wearing
- date-raping OR wife-beating
Note that I've kept them short and simple, to facilitate spreading of the hate. See if you can come up with some of your own - after all, we need something about that idiotic habit of painting their pasty, flabby naked torsos in their team colors.
Copyright 2006 Rich Bowen
