Nerds

We are at a dinner party. Seven people sitting around the living room after dessert and coffee.The cast of characters includes: A researcher for the Oxford English Dictionary. A newspaper editor. A powerful political reporter. An artist/free-lance editor. A person who helps run the Library of Congress. A Ph.D. in education who works in a think-tank and whose reports end up on George Bush's desk. (George Bush unfortunately gives them to Dan Quayle, who makes paper airplanes out of them, but that's another story.

Sharon Boston, media relations manager at University of Maryland Medical Center, normally spends her days fielding requests from the media. But when it comes to weekends and vacations, it's a safe bet that she's on the road, traveling to visit homes once occupied by presidents, writers and other historic personages. Boston cheerfully bills these perambulations that she began in 2001 - some right here in her own backyard - "Nerd Trips. " She also writes an illustrated blog she fittingly calls, "Nerd Trips!

Bernard Booker, 16 years old, is going through change of life. The throwing of rocks at cars is behind him. So is the running from cops, which was considered sporting activity in his old crowd. On weekends, when he sees his buddies from the neighborhood, they talk across a communications gap."They consider me a white boy," Booker says, "or a nerd.""A nerd, of course," laughs Sharonda Alston, sitting next to him. The two of them nod knowingly at each other. Sharonda is 16 and says she's heard accusations of nerdiness all of her young life.

An important thing happens on this week's episode of "The Amazing Race": I kind of fall in love with Abbie's Boyfriend. I know. Something else happens: We learn someone's drag queen name. I know! Let's just get on with it. Farewell, Indonesia, fourth most populated country of the world with karmic pedicabs. Time to travel to Dhaka, Bangladesh, the most densely populated city in the world (according to Phil Keoghan's Twitter feed, which I absolutely believe). Abbie and Her Boyfriend Ryan, Team Dominate, depart at 9:52 p.m. They take a cab to a travel agency.

IT'S SOMETIMES said that mathematicians live on a hyperbolic plane -- deep-rooted in their work, sheltered from the world and current events, speaking in different tongues -- all rendering them, well, nerds.Dweebs. Squares. Zonkoids.It does take a special sense of humor to understand this joke: "What do you get when you cross a sheep and a goat?" Answer: a sheep-goat sine theta. Mathematicians who work with the cross-product of vectors think that's a scream.Mathematicians are as much maligned as blonds when it comes to stereotypes.

Ring one up for the "Dial-A-Nerds."The Howard County Board of Appeals indicated last night that it would allow the father and son computer consulting business to continue operating in Riverside Estates, just south of Columbia, despite objections from residents who did not want a business in their neighborhood.After nearly three hours of testimony late last night, the Board of Appeals was considering restricting the way Peter and Jeremy Moulton do business, but not prohibiting them from working at home.

Someday, historians may look back and mark these pre-millennial years B.N. and A.N. - Before the Net and After the Net.Not to say the Internet is a second coming (no matter what all those Web entrepreneurs say). But this technology has become a force in American life like none other. These days people fall in love online, are born online, die online. It's a place where you can earn your Ph.D. or your first million.It's the medium rumormonger Matt Drudge (and later Congress) used to unleash accusations that threaten to bring down a president.

Someone better tell the mayor-elect that in Baltimore the honeymoon lasts until the first snowflake.Henceforth, membership will be by competitive examination in the House of Nerds.Bradley and McCain sound like ideal Reform Party candidates.In the interest of journalistic integrity, the right hand typing these comments does not know what the left hand is saying.

It's the tsinger, not the tsong.Anita Nall for president (when she turns 35)!The Commerce Department's Index of Leading Economic Indicators says Bush will squeak through.Attention, nerds and hackers! A prize for the software condom that allows computers to interface without fear of virus.How are you going to keep CEOs from looting their companies when some baseball player gets $7 million a season?

4Kids Cool School of the Month KUDOS TO CAPTREE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL Congratulations to Captree Elementary School in West Islip, N.Y., www.4Kids.org's Cool School of the Month. John Simeone and Dianna Grancagnolo designed and maintain Captree's excellent Web site at members.fnol.net/~captree/. You'll find an up-to-date photo album that serves as a journal for the school dating back to September when the doors first opened. The school's state-of-the-art library media center, a combination library and computer lab, allows students to read and do further research on the Internet.

Baltimore is brainy. And that's a good thing - nerds come out ahead. A study released recently by the Brookings Institution ranks metro areas by number of college graduates, and the Baltimore-Towson area comes in 14th, with 35 percent of adults holding college degrees. A New York Times story about the study describes a "growing divide among American cities, in which a small number of metro areas vacuum up a large number of college graduates" and notes that areas with more college graduates have longer life expectancies, higher incomes and fewer single-parent families, which result in higher regional incomes - and tax bases.

News Roundup •••• Sony launched the PlayStation Vita on Wednesday in North America and Europe, and analysts are predicting it could actually be a hit for the beleaguered company despite slowing sales in Japan. [ Los Angeles Times ] •••• EA Sports' “NBA Live” franchise, which was briefly “NBA Elite” and then briefly non-existent, will be back for a 2013 edition. I hope EA just caves to “Linsanity” and throws Jeremy Lin on the cover.

After yet another summer of TV busts, our staff chimes in about what fall shows they are looking forward to. .... “Boardwalk Empire” for Scorsese and “Glee” for Santana. Luke Broadwater, reporter, The Baltimore Sun .... “Dexter.” It's more than a show about a vigilante serial killer - it's about the outsider in all of us. Michael C. Hall is outstanding as Dexter, but I love seeing the growth of his sister Deb (Jennifer Carpenter). Anne Tallent, editor, b .... “Community.” It's the freshest, most inventive comedy on TV, and not nearly enough people watch it. If it goes to a premature grave a la “Arrested Development,” I'll be really pissed.

The funniest people don't take no for an answer - at least, they don't without a fight for their audience's yuks. Their policy has never been "invite 'em to laugh." It's "make 'em." This never-say-die zeal (and the laughter that results) is the unifying spirit of Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America, PBS' six-hour, century-spanning showcase of the nation's leading laugh-getters. Hosted by Billy Crystal, the series (two hours over three nights) blends history with performance and taps the expertise of more than 90 comedians, writers, producers and comic scholars.

Trips off the tongue, doesn't it? "The worst recession since the Great Depression." Special interests seeking bailouts, politicians pushing legislation and even some news organizations assure us it's true. Except it's not. Not yet. From what we know so far, this recession isn't even close to being as painful as the terrible slump of the early 1980s. Not the deepest. Not the longest. By some gauges, it's not even as bad as several less severe downturns. The economy is on an alarming course, and it may well break post-Depression records before we're done.

NEW YORK --Talk about a tour manager's worst nightmare. Chad Hugo had missed his flight from Virginia, skipped rehearsal and wasn't picking up the phone. Worse still, with less than an hour until show time, it appeared the 32-year-old multi-instrumentalist and superstar pop producer wasn't going to be anywhere within three states of the Big Apple in time for a taping of Late Show With David Letterman, where he was scheduled to perform with his gold-selling hip-hop/rock/new wave group N.E.R.

Ring one up for the "Dial-A-Nerds."The Howard County Board of Appeals indicated last night that it would allow the father-and-son computer consulting business to continue operating in Riverside Estates, just south of Columbia, despite objections from residents who did not want a business in their neighborhood.After nearly three hours of testimony late last night, the Board of Appeals was considering restricting the way Peter and Jeremy Moulton do business, but not prohibiting them from working at home.

LAS VEGAS -- Purveyors of popcorn and pop at the recent National Association of Theater Owners / ShoWest convention had no real reason to fear that some upstart company would introduce a treat so universally appealing that it could turn the concessions business on it head. Still, it was amusing, at least, to sample some of the wares that were laid out by pretenders to the crown. "I wanted to develop a shish kebab without a skewer, and then I figured out a way to prepare a hamburger patty without a casing, in a convenient shape like a hot dog," said Shlomy Weingarten, CEO of Hi Five Foods Inc., which introduced the "Burgerpipe" sandwich at ShoWest.

Life at Tattaglia High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., can be tough. Homework, heartbreak and, on this day, a red-haired bully is on the loose, determined to torment unsuspecting nerds. Amid the hallway chaos, though, stands a grown-up wearing a white head scarf and gym shorts, with a valuable lesson to impart to the nerds -- how to take a bully's punch. The idea is to heighten the laughs for a scene being filmed on the set of Everybody Hates Chris, the nostalgic Chris Rock-inspired sitcom about a Brooklyn teenager growing up in the 1980s.

As cheers went up and confetti rained down after the biggest basketball victory ever at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Freeman A. Hrabowski III stood at midcourt smiling, his face glistening with tears. The men's basketball team had just trounced the University of Hartford in the America East Conference tournament final on Saturday, clinching UMBC's first-ever bid to the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The team faces heavily favored Georgetown University tomorrow in Raleigh, N.C., in the opening round of what many consider the premier event in American amateur sports.