A Short Primer on IRC §707(b)

Last Thursday I was in a seminar in DC, and at lunch at the hotel (chicken; it's always chicken) I happened to mention to the five or six of my bosses and co-workers at the same table that it might actually be worth buying a Kindle if I could get the Internal Revenue Code on it. A couple of my fellow diners tried to move farther away from me, but most of them just gave me an indulgent he-may-be-a-geek-but-he's-our-geek smile. I get that look a lot. The only person who thought I was joking was the boss that I work most closely with. As it happens I was joking, but only because I knew that they almost certainly wouldn't have gotten around to making a Kindle-friendly version of the Internal Revenue Code. If such a thing were to exist, it would be the coolest thing ever, and I'm pretty sure my boss (whose geekiness rivals my own) would have the firm buy one for me.


It occurred to me that, perhaps because I spend so much time writing about mansex (mmmmmmm, mansex), I rarely talk about the pleasures or indicia of geekiness. I'm sure there are plenty of geeks who are not at all sexy, but I routinely lust after the clueless and skinny young men who walk around with vacant expressions because their minds are too occupied by whatever it is they're thinking about to notice that they're a few seconds away from running into someone in the hallway. Especially if they've taken the trouble to acquire a nice pair of eyeglasses and to wear a clean button-down shirt. I wanted to populate today's post with pictures of hot geeks, but I was unable to locate any nudes of Nate Silver. But at least these guys have nice asses.


I'm not always the world's most successful geek, but Cthulhu knows that I try. Well, okay, I've never really been able to get into H.P. Lovecraft, but I did read an awful lot of science fiction in my youth. I would probably get back into it now, but only if I could find pornographic gay science fiction. Which, now I think of it, either must exist or is a niche screaming to be filled. If you've read any, drop me an email and let me know the titles. Otherwise, I'm likely to spend most of the day fantasizing about zero-gravity ass fucking. It's hard to imagine how that wouldn't be a good time.


By the way, topping the list of other geek-related areas in which I could use some serious advice and/or help is Nethack. I've been playing, off and on, for years, but I've never managed to ascend. Right now, I've got a twenty-third-level Valkyrie most of the way to the bottom of Gehennom, and I still have one charge left on my wand of wishing, but I'm probably going to have to use that for some fireproof speed boots. But there's still a long way to go to win, and this is the farthest I've ever gotten. Finding a scroll of genocide early was key. It's just a shame that I don't have a functioning magic marker right now, but since I've already wiped out liches, eels, and green slimes, I might be okay. My main strategic adjustment this time was to stop playing at midnight. One little fatigue-related error in judgment and suddenly you've been turned to stone or drowned. The dungeon is a cruel place.


I suppose that any readers who were paying attention to the words as well as the pictures could have inferred my level of geekiness from prior rants about grammar and usage. B&c got annoyed with me after dinner the other night when he said that something was an acronym and I told him that it was really just an abbreviation. Even though I was unquestionably in the right. B&c is an intellectual, but he doesn't really have geek tendencies. I mean, he's intelligent, and he's got the clueless part down, but while there may be some sort of moral-aesthetic equivalence between geeks and opera enthusiasts, we're really different animals. But at least he's got a nice ass.