MaxedOutMama

I'm serious. You've gotta love 'em.

Take this Dan Rather thing. Dan the man gets caught with his journalistic pants down by a bunch of sharp-eyed do-it-yourselfers, but not by the crack journalists of the day. Oh no. He gets caught by bloggers who ask questions, by people who pass the questions on, and by enthusiasts with vast collections of knowledge. Ninety-nine percent of them are men. Males. The ones with the dangly bits, but emphatically not metrosexuals.

Who are we talking about? The guy who loves typewriters with such a whole-souled passion that he can supply any want or need you might have relating to IBM typewriters of that era. The software engineer who writes in and supplies all the patent numbers, thereby proving that the particular typeface used on these very clumsy forgeries wasn't available on a typewriter in 1972. The military guys who point out all the discrepancies and irregularities in the formats.

Deep inside the soul of every worthwhile male there lives not a child, but a wacked-out wonk with no sense of perspective whatsoever. These are nice guys, too. I've met quite a few of them.

The guy who fell in love with tractors (the real thing, big hunks of motile metal used to cultivate fields), and now owns hundreds of them. Plus, of course, the large metal buildings he bought to store them in. The man who thought toaster ovens were interesting, and now has a barn full of them. The type of guy that can look at half an old truck in the junkyard and immediately give you the make, model and year. The man who knows everything about railroads, past and present.

Women (of which I am one, and therefore something of an expert on the topic) have a sense of perspective. For the most part, we really, really have to overdose on our medication to develop the type of manias that come naturally to men. We have an innate sense of balance that stops us on the fortieth tractor or so. It's not a bad characteristic, really. Many a man only has a house to live in because his wife seized the checking account and paid the mortgage, even if she broke his manly heart as he watched that truly beautiful, one-of-a-kind, unique and priceless item go to a higher bidder on Ebay. Fortunately, there's always another item to fall in love with on Ebay and time tends to cure these ills.

But the point of this post is that you've got to love 'em. Once they're truly obsessed they just don't give up. They got us to the moon. They figured out how to cut a person up alive and fix the person's heart without killing the person. They figured out how to perform blood transfusions, run cables across entire ocean beds, and they even know how to fix the shower, that is if the internet connection fails. They're awesome, really. And you've got to love them for it, even as you hide money so that you'll be able to pay the bills.

And the best thing about this sort of man is that they have an innate sense of fairness. True, you may have to cut the phone cable running into the house to be able to talk to them about some important subject, but once you present the facts they'll answer your argument or deal with its implications. The reason for this is that in their world, facts are important. It matters - it matters absolutely whether such and such a model was first produced in this year or that year. How one atom combines with another to form a molecule matters.

And that is how and why a bunch of internet guys took down a scam being run on the nation by one of the most prestigious figures of the last century. This century, perhaps, will be the century of your average guy, with 50 trucks in the backyard, or 280 tractors on the farm, or a collection of all the significant high-fidelity records produced by the major labels of the twentieth century. Also, I do believe we're going to Mars. And that, my friends, is because we're running out of room for their collections. But that will be another post.