Happy Pi Day: a story about our Uncle Geek

It’s Pi day, which seems like a good reason to give you a free download of our children’s song “Uncle Geek’s House.”This is a song I wrote for our Uncle’s big-number-birthday a few years ago. Our Uncle Ed is an awesome, awesome person. He taught Computer Science at a University in Missouri from the days when computer sciences involved punch cards and wizards and cauldrons.When I was a kid and would visit Uncle Geek (I would stay with him a lot when I would visit my ailing grandparents) he would set up a laptop for me to check my Internets (AOL and neopets 4 life), which often involved stringing ethernet cables around his house in complicated patterns. He made us a mix CD of Weird Al and other parody songs that stayed on my CD to iPod to laptop rotation for years. When I got my first computer, a PC in a Mac household, and proceeded to ruin it with viruses because none of my family had ever needed to protect from things like that, he rescued all my photos. He and I would go to Target and buy bargain DVDs of old comedies. He’d take me to his “nerd gatherings” at the local pizza buffet with all his friends who were professors, IT guys, and wireless-thing-installers. As a very awkward, very lonely kid, seeing happy nerds was a really, really big thing for me.When we started the band, Uncle Geek (not his real name) was a huge supporter. He ordered one of our t-shirts custom so he could get a pocket T - he, like my grandfather did, wears his pens and notebooks in a pocket protecter in his t-shirt, unapologetically rebelling from the norm.In our touring life, we’ve met a lot of awesome people who have adopted the “Uncle Geek” role. Not everybody can have nerdy parents (I didn’t)… but having that geeky Uncle to show you the way… the way of Linux and Monty Python and Weird Al… that’s a wonderful part of growing up.