Te Big Bang Teory

So since we’ve spent the last ten months or so basically never leaving the house (other than to take the animals to the vet when necessary), we have, unsurprisingly, been watching a lot of television. One show that we picked up—which, amazingly enough, we never watched when it was originally airing—is The Big Bang Theory. My wife refers to this show as “dessert”, i.e., a nice little marzipan confection to be consumed after watching something dark, say, an episode of His Dark Materials or I May Destroy You or Lovecraft Country* or, you know, the news.

Being, basically, a show about nerds, there’s lots of interestingly nerdy stuff to be found in Big Bang Theory, if you look for it. For instance in one episode the main characters were at a comic book shop examining a replica of Jon Snow’s sword Longclaw from Game of Thrones, and in the next episode it could be seen hanging on the wall next to their front door. (This was shortly after I had editorialized to my wife that the show was “not big on continuity”, leading her to say something along the lines of “Not big on continuity, huh?”) I’ve also many times paused the video to inspect something on a character’s shelf or on a table in the background in order to try to figure out what comic book or character or movie it came from. Anyway, the astute reader will not be surprised to learn that when, in a recent episode, we were treated to a close-up of Sheldon’s computer desktop, I stopped playback so I could go take a closer look at it.

Wife: “What are you doing?”
Me: “I want to see if I can figure out what operating system they’re pretending Sheldon uses.”

Wife: “What operating system is it?”
Me: “Well, the window in the lower right looks like Windows, but the window in the middle looks like OS X. But then the squares along the side look like DockApps from Window Maker. So … All of them?”

Because when you’re Sheldon, you can run Windows, Linux, and macOS all at once on the same computer at the same time. Probably on a chip you designed and built yourself.

While inspecting Sheldon’s desktop, however, I noticed a little something amiss.

Did you see it yet? Hang on, let’s zoom in a little closer.

Me: “Sheldon has a typo in a folder name on his desktop.”
Wife: “He does?”
Me: “Yeah, look, right here. It says Pysics Fiesta Questions instead of Physics Fiesta Questions.”
Wife: “That’s out of character. Sheldon would never have a typo on hs desktop.”

See? Told you it wasn’t big on continuity. Or at least on proofreading.

^* Not that my wife watched Lovecraft Country, except insofar as she paid enough attention to one or two early episodes to tell me, “I hope they don’t kill off Atticus.”