Category: 101 Things Brum Gave The World

Pretty much anyone who ever invented or discovered anything of note was a nerd.

Just look around you: electronic devices; carpet; the shoes on your feet. All of those things, just like everything else man has created, from the world-changing discoveries to the mundane, everyday items, only exist in the first place because someone, somewhere had an idea and then worked obsessively to make it a reality.

In other words, someone was sufficiently nerdy about it to will it into being.

You’d think, then, that we’d celebrate the nerd. You’d think that the state of nerd-dom, the practice of nerdery, the act of nerding, would be highly prized. You’d think it would be something to aspire to, but it isn’t. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. Let’s look at the dictionary definition.

Nerd (noun: informal)

1. a foolish or contemptible person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious.
2. a single-minded expert in a particular technical field

Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein & Marie Curie were all nerds by that second definition, and all are quite rightly held in high esteem by our culture. Chances are, though, that when you read the word ‘Nerd’ at the top of this article the picture that formed in your head was based not on the invention of the lightbulb, or the theory or relativity, or the fight against cancer, but was instead based on that pejorative first definition.

Not only that, but it’s also likely that the mental image your mind effortlessly conjured up is one that is very similar to the image many others would have arrived at. This is because it is a mental image that is deeply informed by popular culture: The Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons; Moss from The IT Crowd; Egon Spengler from Ghostbusters – socially awkward weirdos who will never, ever get laid. The customers of Nostalgia and Comics. Nerds.

These types of nerd, rather than the cancer-curing, electric light-giving nerd, have a particular function in our society: They are there to make you feel better about your own obsessions. Nerds are effectively a barometer of cool and sit firmly on the bottom rung in the social caste system. No-one wants to be a nerd.

But, and here’s the thing, we’re ALL nerds.

We’re all nerds because we’re all barking mad in one way or another and to varying degrees – we all have something (or more than one thing) that is our ‘thing’. Running, cooking, shopping, DIY, gardening – you name it and I’ll show you someone who is a little bit more into it than most.

My particular ‘thing’ is Pop Music and, as luck would have it, society deems that to be ‘quite cool’. My mate Robson’s ‘thing’ is poetry, and society deems that to be ‘quite interesting’. I’m sure your ‘thing’ is also an equally interesting and sexy ‘thing’. Well done, you.

If, however, your ‘thing’ happens to be science fiction, or computer games, or comics, or – heaven forbid – all three, well, you’re fucked. You are a first definition nerd, you sad sack.

Guess what? This brutal social and cultural apartheid in which all of Western culture blithely takes part would not be possible without the city of Birmingham!

It was here, in 1971, that the first meeting of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group took place. Initially the BSFG met informally in pubs and acted as a space where Science Fiction fans could discuss their ‘thing’ with like-minded individuals, but it soon evolved into a proper organisation with members all over the world and laid the groundwork for a network of other organisations that grew throughout the 1980s and beyond, all of which ultimately cemented the idea of the nerd-as-saddo in the collective consciousness.

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Photo CC wheatfields

 

On Tuesday, November 8, 2016 voters in the USA will choose their 45th President. If it’s not Hillary then Hillary will at least be the story, and behind every great woman is a man and behind that man is a song and behind that song is a woman and that woman is from Bearwood, behind which is: Birmingham.

The song that catapulted Bill Clinton to the presidency was Don’t Stop by Fleetwood Mac: a hopeful song forged in adultery, a message between two parts of a powerful professional couple whose careers were intertwined.

Don’t Stop was written by Christine McVie who grew up in Bearwood, the daughter of a concert violinist and music teacher. She studied art in Birmingham and played in bands, getting connected within the music scene. Her own career was going pretty well but it wasn’t until she met and married John McVie, and then joined his band Fleetwood Mac that she really found success in the music industry. Both partners to the marriage found greater success during their period of professional and marital partnership then they had before, peaking with Rumours the album that gave us Don’t Stop – Bill’s election theme – and the tour that preceded the McVie’s divorce.

McVie has said that the song is about her feelings about the break-up of her marriage. As she’d also written another song on the album about how much she was enjoying her affair with Fleetwood Mac’s lighting director, this might seem bastardly behaviour but it was pretty standard in the Mac at the time. Christine, being an honest Brummie type, at least wasn’t as bad as Lyndsay Buckingham whose contemporary practise was to write songs about how he didn’t love Stevie Nicks: and then give them to her to sing. This author likes to cast her in the role of Bill and so we look again at the lyrics, hopeful but also personal, a love letter to Hillary perhaps:

“Don’t stop, thinking about tomorrow,

Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here,

It’ll be, better than before,

Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.

 

Don’t you look back,

Don’t you look back.”

What’s next? Hillary in 2016, that’s what.

Image CC Ableman. Fleetwood Mac facts checked by Howard.

Technically, you could argue that, as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, Birmingham and the Midlands will eventually gift to all humankind a catastrophic environmental collapse that will ultimately destroy the human race. Some might say it’ll be our just desserts for pillaging the planet’s resources. But knowing what form our destruction will take? Well, that can be laid at our door too.

The time was 11:15pm; the place, latitude 35, some 24 degrees west of Greenwich; the ship, the ‘Guinevere’. Our narrator and his new bride watch as mysterious red glowing lights fall from the sky into the ocean. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that an alien life-force has colonized the ocean depths. In theory, we could have lived peacefully together, co-existing in our separate corners of the Earth. But no, the humans have to go and fuck it up it, sending down submarines to investigate and, when these are destroyed, dropping nukes into the sea to upset the new arrivals. What follows is an escalation of attack and counter-attack until the aliens unleash their most devastating blow: they melt the polar ice caps. This causes sea levels to rise, flooding many major cities and resulting in social and political meltdown across the globe. Serves us bloody right.
Continue reading “101 Things Birmingham Gave The World. No. 55: Environmental catastrophe”