Revenge of the Nerds nothing. Inevitable Triumph of the Geeks. In general I'm not much of a politics person-- the whole scene, especially on the national level, just makes me tired and frustrated. In contrast, I can get almost passionate about local politics and policy-- maybe because I'm just a hometown girl and this far-flung metropolis situated between the Mississippi and the Pacific is my city. I'm ready to take on anyone who wants to wreck it. Just ask me what I think of our soon-to-be-former mayor, the �honorable� Wellington E. Webb, and you'll get an earful. Don't even ask about spending the city into deficit with his �diplomatic� trips to China and Africa, or what he's done to the local economy. Thief. Liar. @$$#0!e. At any rate-- thanks to the good fortune of term limits, the mayor and his staff and all of city council are being replaced after this most recent municipal election. In the initial race there were seven-- count 'em, seven -- mayoral candidates. Eeep. In the runoff it came down to Don Mares, Webb's former city auditor (and we're supposed to trust him?) and John Hickenlooper, a geeky geologist who started opening restaurants here in Denver when the mineral-nerd thing wasn't paying the bills. He helped revitalize LoDo (historic Lower Downtown, for you non-Denverites) and became wildly successful. He stepped into the mayoral race largely because Webb has tried to destroy independent businessmen downtown because they're all evil white and Jewish capitalists (did someone delete �revenue� from his vocabulary?) and Hickenlooper and anyone else who loved the city had had enough of it. Hickenlooper's not a politician. That's why people like him. So, yesterday the city held runoff elections, and Hickenlooper, champion of non-city-hall types and geeks everywhere, won the race . Mostly I'm excited about having someone with an ounce of money sense at the helm, but there's also this bizarre sense of unity between him and everyone in the city who has ever felt like an underdog. In February he had something like 11% support in the polls, and last night he came in with 65%. He's just some nerdy guy who thinks he can make some changes. Mike Littwin, columnist at the Denver Rocky Mountain News , decribes how watching the guy dance at a campaign party led to an epiphany:

"I was told as early as breakfast by Hickenlooper's staff that I needed to see him in action. I have covered many politicians over many years. I had never been advised to watch one dance.

"And so it begins.

"It's the end of a campaign and those who have worked the hardest and longest, many from the early days when Hickenlooper was the longest of long shots, are letting loose.

"One campaigner after another takes a turn dancing up and down the aisle. Everyone is clapping, and all that's missing is one of those silver balls hanging from the trolley ceiling.

"And then Hickenlooper takes to the floor.

"You can probably guess. I'm thinking John Travolta off his meds. I'm thinking Elaine in the famous Seinfeld dance episode. I'm thinking how un-self-conscious the soon-to-be mayor can be.

"And as I'm watching, and as I'm laughing at the new mayor, it comes to me who John Hickenlooper really is.

"He's the self-mocking geek who knows in his heart that, in real life, the geeks eventually win.

"Rock on, Hizzoner."

For now, I'm behind him. Let's hope for a new, uncorrupted city hall, free of the graft, nepotism, and overspending that ruled the last administration, shall we?

In other geek news, Spanish grammar saved the day yesterday. I'm liking philosophy-- we're reading Plato right now. I had a beautiful geek moment yesterday in class. We were discussing a quandary in Euthyphron , the question of piety-- whether something is pious because it is beloved by the gods or if it is beloved by the gods because it is pious (read that again, it really is a tad confusing and you'll see why I'd been struggling a little with that one). Socrates presents the problem that some actions might seem pious but since the Greek gods are constantly at odds with each other, some actions will please some gods and displease other gods. After asking that, Socrates goes into something about whether a thing is carried because it is being carried, or seen because it is being seen, and so Dr. Gould made up a diagram of active versus passive states, etc., (Thinking that this was probbly clearer in the original Greek, I was wishing that he'd make up a chart of Greek verb conjugation). I was a little lost. Then, because I've started taking notes in Spanish to make myself pay attention, the answer was revealed to me. I wrote the question in my notes, �Algo es p�o por qu� est� amado por los dioses, o est� amado por los dioses por qu� es p�o?�, and I had my answer. I doubt that this is as difficult a question in clases de filosf�a in Spanish-speaking universities. I'll give ya'll a quick grammar lesson to show you how this made so much sense.

Unlike English, Spanish has two verbs equivalent to the solitary English verb to be . The first, ser , is used to express inherent or objective quality. Por ejemplo: �Yo soy estudiante.� I am a student. That is who or what I am. �El vestido es verde.� The dress is green. �Green� is essential to what the dress is. The other verb, estar , is used to express subjective qualities or evaluations and conditional or resulting states. Por ejemplo: �Yo estoy cansada.� I am tired. �Tired� is a conditional state, resulting from not having slept enough or whatever. �El hombre est� muerto.� The man is dead. �Dead� is a conditional state arising from having died. Now, either ser or estar can be used with certain nouns and adjectives, blah blah blah that goes deeper, point being that I could have used either with the adjective amado (beloved). However, at that moment it made more sense to me to use �est� amado�, because I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an instinctive Spanish grammarian and I have to think through these things.

So, the light came on-- �Pious� is an objective quality. �Beloved� is a subjective quality, existing only because love has been imposed on the object by the subject. The object, that which is pious, will continue to be pious independent of whether or not it is beloved by a subjective observer, and now I've digested and understand that little scrap of Socratic thinking. So. Spanish grammar clarified philosophy for me, and I'm terrifically geeky because I'm so proud of that. In the end, what does it matter whether I understand Socrates/Plato? Probably not much, and in the end, most hispanohablantes are kind enough to overlook my grammatical mistakes and listen to what I'm trying to say. All the same, I feel satisfied that in ever more frequent incidences my education, my aquired body of knowledge, loops back on itself and I see how well everything can be connected.

I wonder if having a master's in geology is going to help Hickenlooper save the city. Ya veremos.