Saturday, January 7, 2012

Alternative Lecture Series Take the Scenester World By Storm / Nerd Nite 3 Preview / Replay Matinee Recap

"Alternative lecture series" are so hip right now! Check out this piece from the NY-Times which offers a glimpse inside several such series.

There's the "Secret Science Night" series:

"Dr. Harcourt-Smith flashed a “slightly kinky” slide of a chimp holding up a silver stiletto with its feet before offering to buy that evening’s special cocktail, the Fossil Evidence, for anyone who could guess the name of a certain bone."

There's the "Moonlighter Presents" series:

"This series, which started in 2010 in a former funeral home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, draws about 50 people. It features youngish academics, artists and writers on subjects outside their expertise... topics lean toward theory-tinged eclectica like the poetics of hay fever, the cultural politics of Steely Dan fandom and the history of the car ferry in Elberta, Mich...".

And of course there's "Nerd Nite":

"Susan Carnell... did manage to slip some real science into her talk, including references to a recent study of the mating behavior of male topi antelopes and a slide depicting the vagina photoplethysmograph, a contraption used to measure female arousal."

As you should know by now, Larryville has its own Nerd Nite series, and Round 3 is this Tuesday.

This week's lectures:

"Caffeine, Public Showers, and Howling Wolf T-Shirts: Exploring
America’s Truck Stops" by Stephanie Day


"An Introduction to Scotch Whisky" by Kevin Freese (let's hope there are free samples!).

and the one with the most adorably academic title:

"Let’s Get (meta)Physical!: How to dip your toes in the Neoarchaic
Revival without getting wet" by Nick Ray.


Visit the FB event page here.

And you should also consider presenting at a future Nerd Nite. Chip is hard (!) at work on a presentation called "A History of Boners: From Lysistrata to Bridesmaids to the One in My Pants As I Speak." And Richard is rumored to be preparing a collaborative presentation with Bananasuit called "Building a Better Book Club: How We Convinced a Bunch of Folks to Spend the Holidays Reading a 900 Page Japanese Novel."

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We didn't make it to any late-night scenesters shows this weekend, but that doesn't mean we didn't witness some weird shit at the Replay. At Friday's matinee, we beheld the following sights:

--Lance Fahey marching around the inside bar with an accordion trying to get the crowd to sing along to the Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven" (with very few joining in despite the fact that everyone in the bar is BORN knowing those lyrics).

--the gals in Smile High Club inviting a (lucky) guy onstage to be ridden like a horse during a song about ponies (bad photo here, but we assure you this dude is being ridden like a horse!).





















--Smile High Club performing a song about the pleasures of sitting atop a washing machine (with the orgasmic moments consisting of the chorus from "Natural Woman"). Is this something that women often do? Please send us detailed accounts of your experiences to be incorporated into a future Nerd Nite presentation titled "Spin Cycle: Oh My God Don't Stop!"

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