geeks

i am a geek and i an proud if it.
compared with some of the people i know i am a bit of a junior geek, but they arw the people who have an encyclopedic knowledge of their subject matter, or they have large detailed lists (hi kenny) that celebrate their geekness. we geeks see it as just a way of organising and categorising the results of our hobby, if we do not create the lists ourselves we know where to go to get the list so that we can make sure we the right thing, that it has the correct information and that we know what other ones we need to get to have a full set.
the list (in whatever form it takes) is crucial to the geek. it is the link between the wanting and the having, it connects the past with the future through the present.

for all geeks there is a hierarchy of geeks - i know bird spotters who look down on plane and train spotters (no skill in it..) i know film geeks who look down on people who do not have the uncut version of the movie, i know book geeks who disdain readers of paperbacks, there are competitions between fans of star wars, star trek and doctor who, geek comic fans who are dismissive of people who have anything other than near mint or look down on collectors of football programmes....

and so it goes.

imagine my surprise while looking through the guardian that plane spotters are responsible for getting the cia and the usa into shit over the extraordinary rendition of prisoners.
the plane spotters are the ones who spotted the fact that gulfstream v had been poppping up all over the place.
as one of them said in true geekness:
"It's not the CIA bit that interests us. You don't even know who owns the plane when you take down the serial number," he said, already distracted as something comes in to land through the grey drizzle. "You keep accurate logs, for your own records."

the uk planespotters linked up with other european planespotters and from a pointless hobby the usa and the cia are in the shit.

so from a bunch of bods with a penchant for copying down serial numbers from the wings of planes the world has been able to piece together the whole torture route thing.
the obvious next step is for the cia to employ these planespotters and have them try to track down osama, because they are going to do a better job than the cia. get a bunch of them together with their note books and pretty soon they are going to have all the terrorist cells in the world named and shamed.

and although the article ends with "The planespotters have been given first names only, as they asked not to be identified" that the cia should have learnt their lessons by now and in fact all of those planespotters are now recruited by the agency and are now working towards protecting our way of life.

more likely the reports of the planespotters have been mislaid.