I'm a Big Dork

I'd better get that piece of information out there now. Especially seeing as my post tomorrow will most likely be about the comic books I'm buying tonight. I'm a dork. Full fledged. Not chic dork. The kind buys t-shirts with pictures from old Nintendo games on it. I'm a comic book reading, video game playing, Star Trek watching (though I've never written Fan Fiction) dork.

Well, this dork here was randomly cycling though blogs, and I came across this.

Now I can't get it out of my brain. The Curta Calculator. It seems so incredibly cool to me. Curt Herzstark came up with this little machine that does multiplication and division. All these little gears and switches. It reminds me of a genre known as "Steampunk." It's kind of period science fiction. Cast iron robots. Coal burning space ships. Cool stuff like that. The most well known (and worst) example is "Wild Wild West." Loved the concept, hated the execution.

Thinking about the Curta Calculator reminds me of the clock in the pediatrician's office I used to go to way back when. It worked with marbles. The number of marbles on one shelf represented hours, then next was minutes, and the next was seconds. Every time the sixtieth second marble fell, all the second marbles fell and one marble got added to the minute shelf. The best was to have an appointment for 1:00 p.m. One hundred and thirty-two marbles drop, leaving just one on the shelves.

I checked eBay and Curta Calculators are running around $800. Maybe I'll just get a poster.