It's a grand night for Klingon

I actually went out last night - strange company I'm keeping lately. My friend Nicole (who I know from an internet FlyLady chat list) invited me to some geek-fest her husband Jason was having at a restaurant at S Station. Anyway, he wasn't sure how many people would show up, and he had a rather loose agenda.

It was in a small function room upstairs away from the hip trendy crowd (darn), but still had a TV and bar.

Jason has made a 10 part DVD documentary on the BBS's of the 80s/90s, which also runs off into all kinds of other geek related topics (such as ASCII art ) and hacking etc. Anyway, there were only about 12 people, all guys except me, Nicole and another friend of hers who does web developemtn for State Street Global Advisors and seems normal. (however both of them met their husbands through some online gaming site) One guy brought a girlfriend who remained silent - and probably stunned - throughout).

So he talked about himself and his morphing into being a "digital historian", and how he gets fan mail from 15 year olds, and people are constantly sending him stuff (old files they don't want to discard but don't know what to do with), and how he's trying to collect like every text file from every BBS, (www.textfiles.com) and all shareware programs, and all old Atari games, and, well you get the picture. Apparently, he says he has OCD and he has this thing about always having to collect ALL of something. His wife, strangely enough, is pretty normal. Jason isn't outrageously geeky looking either - and he speaks well.

And then, AS IF IT COULDN'T GET ANY STRANGER.... Their friend Rich, who I've met before, spoke about KLINGON. He is the "grammarian" of the Klingon Language Institute (www.kli.com) and he knows the guy who invented Klingon, (and the only person who is allowed to create new words), and he writes Klingon music (the National Anthem, which he sang for us)
and it was, actually, more interesting, from a linguistic standpoint, than I thought it would be.
And after that, I went home.