Maximum geekdom achieved!

Unless there's a Society for Creative Anachronism blog out there, can you really top an online video in which Glenn Reynolds interviews a sci-fi author and discusses, inter alia, "the suckiness of the Starship Troopers movie"?

This is just sad, people. It's what happens when boys whose mothers won't let them play football grow into teenagers who can't dance, then become college students who spend their weekends rolling those weird D&D dice and . . .

Well, you see how this disturbing pattern of pathology ineluctably progresses to the point where grown men actually care about the film adaptations of space fantasy novels.

Am I the only one who sees this whole cluster of behaviors, centered around the telltale abnormal interest in fictionalized distant worlds and/or ancient times, as constituting something that might be called Total Geek Syndrome?

I'm almost exactly the same age as Insty, and I well remember those who succumbed to the geek syndrome. Some of my college buddies got into that SCA thing, where they spent their weekends playfighting with wooden swords in preparation for the much-anticipated "Renaissance Faire."

OK, there were probably more antisocial things that students could do with their leisure hours, but watching my loser buddies waste their weekends on that lame SCA crap sure made me feel a lot better about my own decadent habits of getting drunk and scoring with disco skanks.

Today, of course, geekishness more commonly manifests itself as online role-playing videogames and attending Comic-Con, puerile Battlestar Gallactica fixations, etc., but it's still all part of the same syndrome.

These observations will spark a nature/nuture debate -- are geeks "born that way"? -- and I will predictably stand accused of intolerance for alternative lifestyles. But really, I'm just trying to help.

Somewhere in America at this very moment there is a 13-year-old boy refusing the offer of a Marlboro Red from the neighborhood juvenile delinquent.

"Uh, no thanks . . . I might get in trouble," says the geek-to-be, and seals his fate forever. No ditching school. No disciplinary infractions. No motorcycle accidents. No strange rashes after sneaking out of the house one summer night at age 14 to rendezvous by the laundromat with a girl named Tonya.

That 13-year-old kid confronted with his first chance to smoke a Marlboro is at a fork in the road, you see. One way leads to a leather jacket and an electric guitar, the other leads to a 3.9 GPA and a lifelong Robert Heinlein obsession.

I'm not saying that the geek path is necessarily unworthy, but I do feel it is important that these kids know they have a choice.

Won't you please give generously to help fight Total Geek Syndrome? The kid you save will thank you . . . once that strange rash clears up.