008: Go to a nerd convention

Most of the main tropes of nerdery are lost on me. I don't like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, or science fiction. I was too old for Pokemon and Dragonball Z and too young for Doctor Who. For some people, these are enveloping subcultures and rallying points, and it was one of these points I visited on Sunday.

Immediately upon entering I knew I had to start a reverse scavenger hunt; that is, write down all the things I saw that would be, in the regular world, difficult to find. Here is my list:

Kid in a bowtie
VHS tapes, for sale, for actual money
Gay Tigger
Troma DVDs
Grown woman wearing a child's backpack
Plastic axe
Japanese cartoon porn
Star Trek costume; wrong ethnicity
Fake assault rifles
Mother/son costume combo
Pikachu pyjamas
Fat princess
Ironic internet hat
An uncomfortable celebrity
Obese samurai

The uncomfortable celebrity was David Faustino, better known as Bud Bundy from Married With Children. He sat alone on a stage fielding questions from a small but enthusiastic audience. One man gave a five-minute précis of an episode before asking his question. The object of adoration stumbled through an answer. It was clear that not only had he not watched his own TV show, he was probably doing massive piles of drugs during the filming and operated at a fundamentally different level of awareness.

Rather than wait on further pearls of wisdom, I headed back into the main hall to see what basement-dwellers do with their hard-earned cash. Video games seemed to be a big draw, as did film merchandising. I bought a T-shirt that declared that in the timeless battle between sparkly imaginary monsters, I was clearly in the Jacob rather than the Edward camp. My allegiance was heartfelt, and also there was no Team Edward shirt in my size.

There is a particular brand of person that I like to call the 'Sad Bastard.' The Sad Bastard mood hung heavily in the air at the convention, clinging to particular people like potato chip crumbs cling to the front of a Dungeon Master's shirt. The saddest thing about a Sad Bastard is the glimmer of hope submerged below several layers of failure and shame. Obvious Sad Bastards moved fitfully about in samurai and military costumes, the stubble on their second chins glinting in the halogen lights. Less obvious Sad Bastards trailed behind their children, new recruits in the subterranean-dwelling, World-of-Warcraft-playing, figurine-having, animated-character-impersonating subculture of outcasts.

Spectacle was never far from view. Here went a Lady Gaga costume; there was an archery booth; further on appeared a missile, a soldier, a racecar. In keeping with the general mood of ultimately disappointing fantasy, the Army and Air Force were there, as was a constant string of professional wrestlers catapulting one another around a ring. A Darth Vader, Boba Fett, and a slightly-too-fat-to-be-sexy-Miniskirt-Star-Wars-Captain girl posed for photographs.
 

Here, my compatriot Rob threatens me with paperwork and cellphone radiation.

After selecting the least cancerous of the food options available to me and sitting not as far away as I would like from a table of what appeared to be Sheriff of Nottinghams from Space, I concluded that the convention could offer me little else in terms of gawkery or schadenfreude. It was time to go. I trudged past a line of extremely fat teenagers and an ogre wearing a tutu.
I didn't understand any of this.

007: Go to a rock concert

Given my distaste for public events, most music, and general loud noises, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I have been to just two concerts in my life. My third was at the Auckland Town Hall to see The Smashing Pumpkins.
Well, really it's not The Smashing Pumpkins. It's Billy Corgan plus three people who were born about the time The Smashing Pumpkins first started making music. But they were here to play SP music, and I bought a ticket.

I made my way in to the hall after demonstrating to security that I was in possession of nothing more dangerous than a willingness to rock. A cursory glance around told me that there were two types of SP fans: those who grew up, and those who occupied some kind of twilight alternative universe where smelly black T-shirts qualify as business-formal. I navigated the maze of stairs and balconies to my designated level and stepped inside. The warmup band was playing. They were making various loud noises to a fairly indifferent crowd. I left to get something to eat before the main event.

I returned with that rarest of timings: perfect. I found my seat beside a stiff-looking goatee just as the band was coming onto the stage, to a roar from the pit. They went immediately into one of their new songs, and I became aware of something deeply disturbing. To my left appeared a woman in her mid-20s dressed in clinging black tragicware, the folds of her lumpen torso flopping around as she danced with the balletic grace of a rhinoceros who urgently needs to get to the urinal after fifteen beers. She punched the air and flailed about; she twisted her body and closed her eyes; she strode with confidence and staggered with lurching uncertainty. It was with a particularly ambitious lunge and retreat that she fell into the arms of her partner, a man who looked like Russell Brand but on cocaine instead of weed. As he relaunched her I gave him a sharp glance and looked back to the stage. 
A thumbs-up appeared an inch in front of my face. I looked at the owner and he grinned. Or rather, he showed his teeth in the Joker-ish way that someone who is incredibly coked-up does when they can't relax their face. I turned back to the stage and there was another thumbs-up, slightly closer to my nose. I was then distracted by the beer being spilled on my shoes by the resident Mata Hari, and, all things considered, decided to change seats.

By some miracle I was not evicted from my stolen seat, which was excellent and gave me a great view of the stage. The band alternated between new songs and old songs—and by 'old songs' I mean songs that were written nearly 20 years ago. I can't imagine what it's like to play ancient music to crowds for 20 years, but Billy Corgan gave short shrift to much of his back catalogue, adopting a twee sing-song tone. Well, as much as he could, anyway. 

When people go to hear music this old, they don't want to be entertained; they just want to remember. During "Perfect" I thought of Hamilton and the flats I lived in there. During "Tonight, Tonight" I thought of driving in my high school days. During "Zero" I thought of late-summer parties, and during "Stand Inside Your Love" I thought of long, boring classes. I never thought that I would ever have the chance to hear these songs live, and being there and feeling these things again made me realise how fully this music captured six or seven of the most turbulent years of my life, and how they possessed a vocabulary for expression that I lacked at the time. It was a time when I believed, when I thought things were important, when there were things to be for and against, and when I was still becoming.

And so, for ninety minutes, I leaned forward and stared and listened to this pulsating, brutal rendition of the songs that littered my life. It was fantastic.

006: See an old film in a new cinema

The Orson Welles classic 'Touch of Evil' was playing in a local cinema, so I braved the driving rain and sleet and hail and a lingering odour of popcorn and went. 

The first thing I learned was that old movies aren't as good as new movies. I don't mean to say that they're deficient in plot or acting or craftmanship; rather they're on shitty film compared to the pin-sharp digitally-enhanced crowdpleasers issuing forth from Hollywood's highly-polished digestive system. The film was blurry and small and in narrowscreen, if that's a term at all. 
Orson Welles filmed his noir in a deep spiritual blackness. There was a lot of visual blackness too. Also a lot of scenes near the start didn't seem to start, only end, as sentences began two or three words in and people left buildings they never seemed to enter in the first place. 

All this created an unsettled feeling - was this a bad cut of a good film thrown up on a screen by uncaring money-grubbing cinematrons in the knowledge that anything, no matter how unscrubbed, would find an audience by virtue of its reputation?

By the end of the second reel, I had been caught up in the story and the print didn't matter anymore. A nice thing about old stuff, whether it's movies or music or art or grandmothers, is that you notice influences. There are shots, characters, and mannerisms that come through strongly and remind you of their future echoes in films from the '80s and '90s. 
I've got a lot of films to watch—I'm slogging through 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die—so there's no doubt that when one pops up in the big screen listings I'll put it in my calendar. Some films simply weren't made to be viewed on a laptop.

005: Say "hello" in ten languages

Today I become a citizen of the world with a tiny number of international greetings at my disposal. Persons of foreign cultures will look upon me with pity as I mangle their ancient languages with my Anglo-Saxon-driven tokenism.

(Unless you've got a decent set of language packs on your computer, some of these characters are going to display as squares.)

Buenos Días - Spanish

Bonjour - French

こんにちは [koh-ni-chi-wa] - Japanese

Guten Tag - German

你好 [nǐ hǎo] - Chinese

Ciao - Italian

안녕하세요 [ahn-young ha-seh-yo] - Korean

Bom dia [bone dee-ah] - Portuguese

Bore da [Borh-rle dah] - Welsh

Доброе утро [doh-braye oo-trah] - Russian

Now I can follow up conversations with a blank look instead of opening with one. Success!

004: High-five complete strangers

The high-five is a complex social gesture. It cannot be ignored—by anyone. No-one can ignore a high-five! To leave someone hanging is a gross breach of etiquette. Like a gangsta scientist, I decided to take this hypothesis to the street.

I started out easy; my first high-five was with a friend. I then moved on to men waiting in line. "HIGH FIVE!" I would say in a loud, clear voice. They would turn, as stunned as deer in the headlights, and mechanically raise their own hand. SLAP! The high-five was complete.

They were powerless. None could resist the high-five. I continued to high-five, but I took on greater challenges; a man of a different ethnicity, a teen, and a woman. The woman was right on the cusp of being startled and being genuinely frightened. Nevertheless, she completed the high-five at half mast.

Having scared off my friend by this point with my egregious lack of propriety, I sought out new targets for my happy slapping. Another two men high-fived with glazed expressions. I held up my hand five metres in advance to high-five an elderly Indian man, but by the time he became aware of my fiving intentions and had taken his hand out of his pocket, we had passed like reluctant jousters.

It was my ONLY incomplete high-five. Every single other person I offered a high-five took it. There were 26 completed high-fives and just one fail—but it was clear that the non-fiver's intention was to high-five, had his mind not been on non-fiving matters at the time.

My hypothesis is confirmed. No-one can resist a high-five. It doesn't matter if the five arrives context-free, or in a funny accent, or from an acute angle. The high-five is an irresistible force.

003: Memorize a poem

In my salad days I was known to tread the boards. I even had the chance to play the role of Hamlet. Not the full version, sadly, but the brutally truncated version known as Dogg's Hamlet or 15-Minute Hamlet. The play takes just 15 minutes to perform, and is then followed by a 2-minute version in which character deliver lines on the run.
All this meant that while I was familiar with the broad strokes of Hamlet's soliliquys, I had never been required to learn one in its entirety.
 

Every performance of Hamlet I have seen—only in film thus far—reveals new meaning and depth to this soliliquy. Laurence Olivier's delivery is very good; even the unfamiliar words ('bodkin'?) are rendered understandable by his phrasing and timing.

Here is the text I memorized.

"To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all."

The great thing about having these words in my head is that can be unpacked and puzzled over at any time. While waiting in a restaurant I might think of "the proud man's contumely" (CON-tume-a-lee: scorn) and the other things that can make life unbearable, and wonder if these things piled on top of each other, make a case for suicide. And whether the chef preparing my fugu puffer fish is drunk or sober. And order another sake.

002: Find out how magnets work

I began, as any rational enquiry should, with Richard Feynman (thanks, Redditor Sfork).
[Video link]

He explains that the same repulsive force that prevents solid from passing through solid is amplified in (ferrous) magnets because the molecules are aligned. The molecules' repulsive force act over a far greater distance than usual because of the field they create together.

Is this a good enough explanation? It seems pretty shitty. It explains the difference between regular old steel and a ferromagnet, which scratches my particular itch—it's good enough for me to think that I know how magnets work.
But it also points in the direction of the root cause... if a 'root cause' is knowable. How deep can you dig? To delve deeper would examine why molecules themselves are magnetic, what 'magnetic' means, how electricity and magnetism are the same thing, and other deeply involved subjects.

I'm interested in molecules, and imagine their component atoms with the planetary model; a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by whirling electrons, chemically bonded with other atoms for reasons that I have yet to completely understand.

Here's a list of other things I don't know precisely that seem somehow related to my not truly understanding magnetism at a molecular level: 
Heat
Electrons
Neutrons
...and also speed of light stuff. It affects time? What? How does that even begin to make sense?

001: Mix a Long Island Iced Tea

To kick off my new habit of doing 1 Interesting Thing each day, I chose something that would steel my resolve. I was going to mix and drink a Long Island Iced Tea, a cocktail known for its high alcohol content. 

Ingredients
Vodka
Gin
Bacardi
Cointreau
Lemon juice
Soda

I don't have a jigger for measures, so I put my glass on a digital scale and poured until each shot was 20g. The Absolut and Sapphire were fine, but the Bacardi got away on me and I ended up with 40g. OK, maybe more. The Cointreau and lemon juice were delivered judiciously, which left only the soda.

Well, really it's meant to be cola based on the recipe I was working from (and tequila, the omission of which some would regard as a travesty) but I didn't have any, so I used L&P. This is a New Zealand soft drink which is made from the pure natural spring water of Paeroa. Or it used to be pure until I peed in it when I was 12.

We were on a class trip and I asked if we could go swimming. The teacher told me no. I went rock-hopping along the river and pretended to almost fall in. Then I did it again, and then I fell in. "Oh no, look what I did, by accident." 

Anyway, long story short, I peed, the water downstream was drawn and used for something people pay money to drink. And now some of that is in my Long Island Iced Tea and therefore inside me. The circle of life is complete. (Or maybe I've just swallowed 100ml of hard liquor and feel more expansive than usual.) 


Also when I was young I thought 'booze' was written 'boos' and was the opposite of 'yays.'

I wasn't a very streetwise child.