"Enuf is enuf. Enough is too much."
— Protesters are picketing outside the Scripps National Spelling Bee this week with signs carrying this slogan. The small group, which includes an 81-year-old former school principal, wants to make spelling simpler. If they had their way, "fruit" would be spelled "froot" and "slow" would be spelled "slow." I'm not sure this would make things easier.
Popular for her unpopularity, the female nerd has long been loved for her willingness to put it all out there. Maybe even show her dark side? These antiheroines are always socially maladjusted yet professionally successful. They annoy everyone around them while endearing an entire audience. And they are, without exception, played by pretty actresses.
The American Prospect notes it's almost like nerdy female characters have to flaunt their frumpiness just so they're believable. No one exemplifies this better than Tina Fey's Liz Lemon on 30 Rock. By all sane standards, Tina Fey is an attractive woman. Watching Liz Lemon makes me think it's not her nerdiness that's the problem, but the snobby egomaniacs who surround her. Which, if 30 Rock is a metacritique of how single women of a certain age are treated, makes sense.
Yet even when the soon-to-be canceled Ugly Betty's ratings dipped, the producers — who did a great job making America Ferrera look ugly with big glasses and bad wigs — tried to save the floundering show by making its star less ugly.
So it appears the only way to portray a nerdy woman is to make her a ticking bombshell; one that might whip off her glasses and throw down her hair at any second. Is it that regular women, who relate to their nerdiness, can hope that's true for them too? Or is putting a nonbeauty in a main role just a risk Hollywood can't take?
Updating an image or spinning off of a product is nothing new, but lately it seems like this concept has taken over the candy industry. I recently received a box full of new products that were featured at the National Candy Expo a month ago in Chicago. The majority of items weren't exactly new, but rather re-creations of old products. 
I selected four — Pop Rocks Chocolate bars, Nerds Giant Chews, Chocolate Pez, and Baskin Robbins Soft Candy — and decided to perform a taste test. Sadly none of the new variations lived up to their established counterparts. To see what I thought of each product, read more
Between Chuck and Flight of the Conchords, The Big Bang Theory and Tina Fey's 30 Rock alter ego Liz Lemon, I'm not sure we needed any more proof that we're in something of a pop culture nerd renaissance right now. But just in case, here's something else: The guy who wrote Fanboys just had another script picked up, this time about "a video game junkie facing a midlife crisis who learns that a young punk had broken a record he set as a teen." The guy sets out to reclaim his position at the top of the gaming throne. Nerd power!
That got me thinking about some of my favorite on-screen nerds — from the aforementioned Liz Lemon and Conchords guys to more classic outsiders like My So-Called Life's Brian Krakow (and his volumeter) and Patrick Dempsey's Ronald from Can't Buy Me Love. So now I'm wondering: Who are yours? For the purposes of this conversation, let's assume that "nerd" and "geek" mean approximately the same thing, though of course we could debate the distinctions for days . . .
