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Kings and Queens of Geek Proms past are charged each
year with the awesome task of choosing the new bearers of
the crowns and sashes. The names and credentials of the 2009
judges are listed below to show that we're not messing around
here.
Trish (Stinnett) Dagen is the 2008
Queen Geek and a lifelong costume
fanatic. She’s also a landscape architect, water
aerobics instructor, manager of the Duluth Women's Soccer
League and a Photoshop guru. Some of her other accomplishments
include first place at the 2002 Fargo
Valley Con costume contest, second place in the 2005 Food
as Art costume contest, and vice president of the Wild Ones
native plant society. Trish really likes miniature things
and even has a dollhouse under her bed that her grandfather
made for her mother in the 1940s. She was in Girl Scouts,
Boy Scouts, 4-H, Rainbow Girls, the National Honor Society,
American Society of Landscape Architects, Duluth Garden Flower
Society and an academic fraternity in college. Her favorite
math is geometry and she even goes to high schools to tell
them how, as a landscape architect, she uses it on a daily
basis.
Lawrence Lee, the 2008 King Geek,
was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Ohio, the hometown of Neil
Armstrong. He started playing D&D in 1977 when players
still had to use crayon to color in the crappy plastic dice.
He learned BASIC on a TRS 80 and FORTRAN using a card reader.
In high school he was salutatorian of his class, medaling
in the state Mathletes competition and also serving as a library
assistant. In college he studied physics, mathematics and
philosophy, and worked as a civil engineering lab assistant.
In graduate school he ran the A/V department. His current
interests include HTML, blogging,
board games (especially Settlers of Catan), World of Warcraft
and helping his kids learn math (which he insists is fun).
He works as a Presbyterian minister, and his study is decorated
with a lava lamp, an original Chris Monroe painting and Star
Wars paraphernalia. As Geek King he would like to decree for
all time: “Han shot first.”
Katy Haugland is the 2007 Queen
Geek and a student at Macalester College with an independently
designed major that combines astrophysics, sociology and education.
She built her first telescope when she was 11 years old and
could fit inside it then. “It’s close now,”
she says. “There are pictures to prove it. My feet stick
out the end.” Katy also enjoys baking, welding, costuming,
drumming in a bagpipe band and organizing astronomy slideshows
for herself. She really like jokes about German physicist
Werner Heisenberg, she once calculated the terminal velocity
of a cat, and recently made an optical radio and had a dance
party with it in her optics lab. She spends the time between
Christmas and New Year’s Day in Death Valley every year
with a crazy old astronomer doing public service astronomy
education. And she’s also “really into African
geography, sometimes.”
Neal Spinler is the 2007 King Geek
and a compulsive downloader of bootleg episodes of Battlestar
Galactica. Sci-fi rules his life, and his obsession with
Doctor Who is downright unhealthy. His Dalek ring
tones often frighten and confuse those around him, and his
style of clothing is influenced by the tenth incarnation of
the good Doctor (suits and Chuck Taylor All Star basketball
shoes). He can recite the dialogue from most Firefly
episodes – as well as the film Serenity --
from memory. In high school, Neal was president of the National
Honor Society and Students Against Drunk Driving, played trombone
in jazz band, and had his grad picture taken with his euphonium.
Neal can be found at the Children’s Theatre Company
creating intricate spreadsheet calculations, on the road driving
his art car,
or at home working on his Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator
project. He plans to take his fiancée’s last
name when they get married so he can legally be called Neal
Armstrong.
Shari Hartshorn is the 2006 Queen
Geek. A science fiction and fantasy nut, Shari enjoys staying
up late reading (or re-reading) a great book or watching sci-fi
TV. Currently, she's enjoying Stargate, Doctor
Who and Torchwood. She laments the passing of Farscape,
Firefly and Invisible Man, and soon will
"suffer great anguish when SG-1 finishes its
stellar run." Shari loves to play the card game Munchkin,
especially epic style with all the sets. She has worked at
the Minnesota Renaissance Festival and still volunteers there
for Gaeltacht Minnesota, the Irish language group she's involved
with. "Mostly we spend our time letting people know that
there is in fact an Irish language and it is not just English
with an Irish accent," she said. In college, Shari took
more calculus than she needed, just for fun. She lives in
St. Paul with a cat and five birds.
Eric Houston is the 2006 King Geek,
a title he bears with pride, despite his little brother screaming
in horror upon learning the news. In high school, Eric was
an avid mock trial and quiz bowl player, and he wishes he
still was. Other hobbies from his younger days continue on,
however. Eric owns several thousand comic books and continues
to be a huge fan of Star Trek and Doctor Who.
He is prone to quoting dialogue from Ghostbusters, Blues
Brothers, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Star
Trek II without provocation and ad infinitum. These days
he lives in Hudson, Wis, where he works in television production
and lives alone with his pet G5. Other hobbies include pina
coladas, taking walks in the rain, the smell of the ocean,
and the taste of champagne, as well as using lyrics from "The
Pina Colada Song" to pad his bio. He also has a deep,
abiding love of pie.
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