Results tagged “nerds”

      

Last night at Pete's Candy Store in Williamsburg, Robert Moy took home the crown at the finale of the long-running Williamsburg Spelling Bee (now about to enter its 9th season in February). It's more commonly known as the "Hipster Spelling Bee," but that just seems like the same reactionary snark fired at anything happening within sneezing distance of a few Brooklyn L stops. When one of the nine contestants offhandedly mentioned that she was "channeling her inner Rebecca Steele," we agreed with the assessment of another overheard label: "Nerd Soup" (it's charming, in an Alpha Bits cereal sort of way).

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog never seems to run out of material when it comes to making fun of nerds. Ever since Conan O'Brien and (the man beneath Triumph) Robert Smigel let him loose on the Star Wars fans lined up for the premiere of Attack of the Clones in 2002, sci-fi and comic book fans have been a regular target for Triumph. Last night, Conan showed Triumph's latest trail of terror throughout last weekend's Comic-Con in San Diego. In the video, Triumph himself is astounded at some point that he hasn't run out of fat jokes. Yet no matter how many comic book nerds he goes after for being fat, chronic masturbating virgins, the shtick never seems to get old.

In American Nerd: The Story of My People, Brooklyn-based writer Benjamin Nugent combines a peripatetic history of the word “nerd” with accounts of the various kinds of people it is most often used to describe. The book includes an autobiographical dose; one section called “My Credentials” details Nugent’s early 90s adolescent exodus from d20-style probabilities. On page 3, Nugent fittingly discloses: “when I was eleven, I had a rich fantasy life in which I carried a glowing staff.” But American Nerd isn’t a massive, single subject history, and it isn’t straightforward memoir. The book is often poignant, especially when Nugent revisits the proving grounds of his young nerd-hood, and more often than that it is funny. The nerd you recognize in its pages may very well be yourself.