GeekSix

When sports guys have a novel idea

Joe
Friday
6:00 pm

For some reason, athletes — and voters — think that by being good on the field means you are good in Congress or the governor’s mansion.  This self-sense of mobility has also quietly carried over to the world of fiction.  Here are a few fun (or NOT fun) page turners from jocks whose only qualification for getting published is being able to run faster than you.

Monday Night Jihad

By Jason Elam

The ex-Broncos all-pro kicker penned a series based on an ex-pro football player protagonist named Riley Covington.  The

premise is sort of the Pat Tillman Story on steroids, with a chaste christian player deciding to go into the army after terrorists ..read more

But will the poor birds hear it coming?

Joe
Monday
12:47 pm

Boeing hasn’t worked on anything particularly fun since the Sonic Cruiser was axed after 9/11.  This new plan for hybrid jetliners isn’t quite GEE WHIZ EXCITING but it could still be pretty cool.  The only problem is they don’t expect them to enter service until, at the earliest, ..read more

The $29 Million Canvas for my Wittiness

Joe
Monday
9:36 pm

I’m not the snowiest bunny in the world, but if I was privy to $29 million, I would gobble up this little resort in no time.  It’s not like it would be that fun trying to compete with ski mountains that are actually convenient to airports and population centers, but how rad would it be to get to name 53 ski runs, 9 lifts and some lodges based on whatever criteria you feel like?  Back when The Canyons (a third-fiddle resort near Park City) was named Wolf Mountain, all the runs adhered to an animal theme.  You could have a lot of fun assigning monikers to the trails, such ..read more

How Korea does America’s Pastime

Joe
Sunday
2:56 pm

Baseball in Korea isn’t as much a game as it is an unscripted rock concert.  The unwavering emotion shown throughout the game, no matter what the circumstance, by the crowd doesn’t come off as contrived, but rather shows genuine passion for the sport itself.  Spectators reward the act of playing, not just success.

On this particular day we went to Seoul’s Jamsil Stadium, home to two of the three teams in the city.  As it turns out, the two were playing each other, making for a rivalry atmosphere.  The Doosan Bears are the big-name team in Korea.  But our hosts were LG Twins fans, so we adopted the underdogs as our ..read more

Time for Kabul to train more peons

Joe
Monday
5:31 pm

From the This-Will-Turn-Out-Very-Good-or-Very-Bad-Not-in-the-Middle files, Afghanistan

just got a visit from Pentagon Clearing House with a post-dated check for 200 infinity trillion dollars.  Or whatever that equals in Afghanis.  The funny thing is that this motherlode of every single mineral on the periodic table was alluded to almost 30 years ago by the Soviets during their skirmish with the locals.  And yet it took another war and two flyovers by tech-savvy geologists to confirm it, and THEN a half decade to actually break the news and set the gears in motion to start mining the stuff.  What happened to the days when Jed Clampett shot a hole in the ground and ..read more

Seoul Searching: Part 1

Joe
Monday
10:37 am

As GeekSix expands its domination universally, we must not lose sight of first making sure we conquer on a global level.  Therefore, I recently went on a fact-finding journey to Korea to load up on geekiness and other random Asian goodness.  Here are the first fruits of that ..read more

Joe’s! Jeopardy! Journey!

Joe
Monday
12:07 pm

If Jeopardy! was an investment firm it would instantly go under due to the inefficient nature of its setup.  A ferret could do better than a human on Deal or No Deal because of how random and greed-encouraging it is.  Wheel of Fortune is a glitzy crossword puzzle for three-year-olds.  But Jeopardy! is legitimately tough to do well on.  Even if you know the answers, you have to be faster than the Nobel Prize winning physicist to your left and the Classical Literature librarian to your right.  And even if you do well, it takes FOREVER to accrue Who Wants to Be a Millionaire-esque hauls.  Ken Jennings won 74 straight ..read more

Unmanned space shuttle…or something far more sinister?

Joe
Friday
12:12 pm

The best part of the Cold War (and that’s pretty high praise) was the underlying suspected accumulation of spy gadgetry that quietly accompanied the nuclear arms buildup.  “Dude, the KGB has exploding remote control gnats!”

But these days, we have to create our own hi-tech enigmas, as  America’s current enemies aren’t exactly the subtle technological wizard types.

Meet the new mystery.  Straight out of an elongated West Wing story arc and much more concrete than the Aurora, the Air Force has launched the X-37B.  What is it?  Other than looking like a sleeker, smaller regular space shuttle, that is open to debate.  The Air Force says it’s just an unmanned device ..read more

Seattle: Cloudy with a chance of DEATH

Joe
Tuesday
5:17 pm

In the modern era, (i.e., after the death of Christ) we have reached a technological level  as a society where any structure built by someone who holds themselves as even the most modest professional should be able to, at the very least, stay standing for a while.

But as tenants of a high rise residence tower in the Belltown area of Seattle found out recently, that is a naive (and long-winded) statement to make.  Especially naive if you have spent any amount of time in the Pacific Northwest, where construction disasters are about as novel a sight as overcaffeination.  I know “rust” and “wrong components” are fringe Manbearpig ..read more

My Next Great Invention: The Personalized TV Wiki

Joe
Wednesday
10:40 pm

Unless you are completely up to date on a TV show, it is supremely dangerous to go looking for info about it online.  Case in point: I didn’t start watching Battlestar until it was in season three.  After a random episode, I felt like looking up background info on some random character and BOOM, there goes one of the Final Five surprises.  And it’s not like I had to look hard to have it spoiled.

In an era where no character is safe from dying/ shooting J.R./ being a Cylon, there has to be somewhere where people curious about TV show goings ons, but not all the way caught up, can ..read more