Martha Stewart Magazine Nightmare Traumatizes Young Geek

If Martha Stewart had really appeared in a geeky magazine such as Wired, it could shake the foundations of geekdom!

The day started normally...I awoke at 11:38am sharp after a long night of heavy drinking...generic caffeinated colas. I had to have something to wash down the stale-dated bulk-pack corn chips and weeks-old lemon-lime licorice whips. Per usual, I had passed out at my quasi-ergonomic keyboard after an exhausting evening playing multi-player online Minesweeper.

After a side-trip to my local 7-Eleven for an ice-cold breakfast Slurpee, I walked over to the big-box bookstore outlet, excited about purchasing my usual assortment of geek lifestyle magazines, which includes Wired magazine. I know I'd probably save money just subscribing to my favourite journals, but I need an excuse to exercise, and I don't get enough sunlight as it is. My friends say that I should download scanned versions of books and magazines, but I can't imagine I'd save any money printing full-colour pages, and spending all that time on the bindings and the glossy covers...

Now normally, my PC gaming, Windows, and Linux rags are all sectioned together in the bookstore on a series of stacking shelves entitled appropriately "computers". But today something was wrong...very wrong. Now, this is not the kind of "wrong" you get when you miss a question on Jeopardy! This is the type of icy-touch-of-death cringing wrong you feel just before a fatal hard-drive error occurs at about the same you were thinking: "hey, I should probably back-up my novel."

As I approached the shelves that held my most revered reading materials, I noticed something unusual. From a distance, it appeared that someone had inadvertently placed a homemaking magazine in the computer section--it happens occasionally when someone is too lazy or embarrassed to walk to the other side of the shelves to replace that edition of Gay Bride, The Ringworm Enthusiast, or Glistening Greek Wrestlers Quarterly.

Upon closer inspection I noticed that this was not a misplaced housecleaning magazine, but rather, something else, something much more sinister! (cue the lightning).

I pinched myself not once, but twice, to make sure I was awake. Then I sniffed my Slurpee to make sure that it hadn't been laced...again. Surely I must have been hallucinating, for what I saw before me, printed on the cover of Wired magazine, my favourite source for geekness and gadgetry, was...Martha Stewart. (cue the werewolves howling).

At that moment of realization, several uncomfortable emotions welled up inside me, like a thousand pop-up windows. And I couldn't Alt-F4 fast enough to recover my composure. "This is not a good thing."

I tried to rationalize. Was this a joke? Was I being Punk'd? Were there hidden cameras around me recording my reactions to this mock-up copy of Wired? Was my open display of feverish human emotion soon to appear on YouTube for the world to laugh at?

Then Occam's Razor helped me center myself. It was more likely that it was Martha Stewart herself who was the butt of this joke. Surely the savvy, ultra-hip editors of Wired were attacking the ribbon-wrapping, doily-making queen of crafts and cookies. They were probably dissing this lace-loving Luddite because of her backwards technological views!

I then reached for the Martha Stewart-stained magazine, and for some reason I felt like Dracula picking up a cross. Again there was the sense of wrongness. Cautiously, I opened up the publication to look tentatively at the titles of the feature articles. No, it couldn't be! It mustn't! But yes, it seemed that Martha had bewitched us all, and had managed to cross-platforms, like some enchanted version of Halo. She was contributing content that fit into Wired magazine's idiom! Impossible? No, Martha was talking gadgets and baking techie cakes!!!

My world started to spin like a version of Google Earth gone wild, rotating endlessly because of a stuck arrow key. I felt dizzier than Elisabeth Hasselback from "The View"!

What next I thought? Will Linus Torvalds be contributing to cooking magazines by sending in recipes for Linux Loaf? Will Steve Jobs teach us how to turn rack mount servers into beautiful curio cabinets in next month's issue of Good Housekeeping? Will Bill Gates be posing for Playgirl??!!

I screamed as loudly as was befitting a computer nerd, which isn't very loud unless your World of Warcraft server times out in the middle of a raid. I ran out of the bookstore as fast as my pasty-white chicken legs could carry me. I got home, put on a pot of Kraft Dinner (Mac & Cheese), and curled up on my duct-taped recliner chair to re-read my signed copy of Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash. Slowly, my world returned back to normal.

That afternoon I slept. I dreamed vividly of a new Matrix trilogy, and thought up a new shape of marshmallow for Lucky Charms cereal. The whole Martha Stewart/Wired episode started to fade away like a very bad dream. I chuckled at the ridiculous thought. What next, Paris Hilton starring in a clever, believable sequel to The Net?