The Dorkadia Week in Geek – The Superb Owl
As we’ve mentioned before, Dorkadia is based out of Seattle, Washington. With our local sportsball team, the Seahawks, having thoroughly stomped, crushed, and all-around teabagged the Denver Broncos in last Sunday’s Superbowl, this city has been in government mandated party mode. Literally – our governor decreed that on Wednesday at 12:12PM we’d have a moment of loudness across the entire state.
We’re pretty into this winning thing. Mostly because we’re not all that used to it. However, the much-touted infobyte about this being our first championship since 1979 is something that the two time WNBA title-winning team, the Seattle Storm, have a problem with. And rightly so.
The Superb Owl, as always, brings us a rash of big-budget, big-name commercials, and this year was no different. Some of the more notable commercials included a Full House reunion, the most adorable friendship, a better Matrix sequel than the actual Matrix sequel, the most tasteful Go Daddy has ever been, and whatever this epic tale with Arnold and pingpong and beer is.
Probably the most talked about ad spot, however, was one for Coca-Cola, which featured “America the Beautiful” sung in a variety of languages besides English. It was a pretty cool spot, actually, and the first commercial of the night that I was personally impressed with. Other people didn’t seem to think so – if Coke was going for ‘most controversial commercial’ they apparently succeeded, with a very mouthy percentage of people arguing that “America the Beautiful” should only be sung in English. Many of them also called “America the Beautiful” the United States’s national anthem. Considering our actual national anthem (“The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is infinitely more badass than the still very pretty “America the Beautiful”) was sung barely two hours before that commercial aired, I’m a little worried these people were the ones getting tackled, not the Denver Broncos.
Speaking of the Denver Broncos, the internet quickly weighed in on the events of the Superbowl and produced more glorious Sad Peyton Manning memes than points the Broncos scored (not difficult).
While this Week in Geek is a little less geeky and a little more sportsbally than usual, I’d just like to take a moment to share my feelings on nerdom:
To me, being a ‘nerd’ or a ‘geek’ or a ‘dork’ isn’t limited to specific genres like fantasy or science fiction, or even limited to specific topics like comic books or video games. To me, a nerd is anyone who is maybe a little too focused or even a little obsessive over their chosen love; be it Dungeons and Dragons or Magic the Gathering or Major League Baseball.
We geeks delve deeply into what we love, picking open our hobbies for information, data, statistics, trivia and theories. We get vocal and excited – maybe a little too vocal and excited in the eyes of non-nerdy types. It’s because we’ve found a thing and we’ve latched on to it so that now it’s our thing and we love it.
This week, almost everybody in Seattle was at least a little bit of a nerd.
