Simon Pegg Rocks

I never called myself a geek, but looking back I probably was half that and half just plain weird when I was in high school. I don't think I ever settled on any particular attitude or aura, which might have kept me from being as liberated as this. I think I wound up just being seen as artistic -- which is liberating in its own way.

But I love this sentiment, and I've known people who lived by it. I think that's part of the reason I like "Big Bang Theory" so much -- they're geeks caught between brilliance and boyhood, and have no problem living their lives in a way that makes them somewhat happy even if others view them as oddballs.

But Simon Pegg is being disingenuous. Any guy who can go from being potential zombie food with a deadly record collection to Scotty in "Star Trek" is a force too cool to be reckoned with.

I heard an interesting comment on NPR, this morning just as I was headed out the door. It was some theater critics commenting that at the same time Russia was exploding with novels and plays by Chekov and Dostoyevsky and Turgenev and the like, who saw the world as bleak and the embodiment of darkness, even in their comedies, England was having an explosion of plays and novels by the likes of Shaw and Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward that faced everything, even death and disaster, with a humorous shrug.

Simon carries on the tradition, especially by contrasting his haughty expression with a t-shirt of a Silly Symphonies skull and crossbones. Only a geek would do that; only a cool guy would get the reference.