Not a sexy geek

The number of Joe Morans in the world who are not me continues to proliferate, worryingly. A friend has alerted me to a recent issue of Wired magazine in which Joe Moran is nominated as the sexiest geek of 2009. This Joe Moran is not, you will be astonished to discover, me, but an actor who recently appeared in Stuck like Chuck, a film with which I have not yet had the pleasure of acquainting myself.

We have warm, cuddly feelings towards geeks on this blog because these unsung heroes – trainspotters, motorway enthusiasts, twitchers – are the humble foot soldiers of everydayology. However we view the recent, supposed phenomenon of sexy geekdom with a cool eye. It feels wrong somehow. Geeks should engage in activities – inventing computer languages, keeping notebooks full of serial numbers, writing books about roads etc. – that repel the opposite sex as surely as Bog Myrtle repels insects. It is the way of things.

We are of course happy for any of the sisters to profess and indeed practise their geekophilia. But can we please agree on one thing? David Tennant doesn’t count. He is a good-looking, clever, talented, famous and popular actor who just happens to be slightly skinny and occasionally wear glasses. He is NOT a geek. We have to have some entry requirements, for god’s sake. Get your ungeeky tanks off our geeky lawn, Tennant.

Let’s hear it for all the unsexy geeks out there, keeping it real.

Mundane quote for the day: ‘Mankind is a collecting animal, and the compulsion manifests itself in scores of ways. Kids collect bubblegum cards; men travel hundreds of miles to obscure football grounds just to say they’ve been; cooks fill pinewood racks with herb jars, even though they’ll never use more than five of them. Consumerism is loaded with “trainspotting” overtones – the must-have item, the desire for a complete range, whether it be PG Tips cards or kitchen utensils or “Great Composers” cassettes.’ - Nicholas Whittaker, Platform Souls: The Trainspotter as Twentieth-Century Hero