I woke up this morning and felt like watching the news instead of the Weather Channel, so I turned on CNN. Guess what? Jon Stewart isn't a comic genius, he's just an astute observer of the car crash that is the American media. I know, why beat a rotting, liquefied, already-reincarnated horse to death? Because it's fun. Here's what I learned this morning.
Ben Bernanke:
1. scored 1590 on his SATs (so did Bill Gates, but Paul Allen scored 1600)
2. skipped classes at M.I.T. in 1975 to watch the world series (CNN commentator: "I guess that makes him a Red Sox fan; a man can't be perfect)
3. used to work at South of the Border
4. did well in English classes
5. won the South Carolina state spelling bee, missed the word 'edelweiss' (dumb fuck, I wouldn't have missed that one)
Nothing about his background, his politics, his economic world view. Then, in a very natural segue, the idiot anchorpeople started talking about VH1. It might have been a slow news morning, but if Bruce Springsteen is releasing a remastered Born to Run boxset today so how slow could it have been? They could have just played that song for 30 minutes with stills of Bruce punching the air and it would have had more social relevance than CNN news stories. Sickening.
At least Bernanke is smart. Academic credentials never impress me (some of the biggest assholes I've ever met have been Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford grads) but MIT grads do. I just imagine superconductors and compression machines and giant magnets and lasers...hoorah! I'm sure that in another life, when I was born with an real attention span and an abstract-problem-solving capability, I was a mediocre computer programmer who ended up marrying someone who was an MIT professor and we had a long unhappy marriage filled with inadequacy, emasculation, eyeglass prescriptions for our children and mathematical sex. Hence my geek fetish.
Interesting fact. Wikipedia has a list of polymaths through time (don't anyone steal that book title, something like Pigs in Space... Polymaths through Time...) Nat Hentoff and Nick Cave made it on the list!!! So did Condoleezza Rice (she plays the piano and brokers fake peace treaties in the Middle East--genius.) and Danica McKellar (that chick from the wonder years that every guy my age inexplicably adored. She had a huge moon face. ) , who apparently is a mathematician.
But my genius pinup is Richard Buckminster Fuller. My favourite molecule (actually, most people's favorite molecule C60), Buckminsterfullerene, is named after his geodesic dome design. But he should have more things named after him, he was a true genius, philosopher and crazy as shit. He was also expelled from Harvard for dancing and lack of motivation. Any enemy of Harvard is a friend of mine...
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