If you have read my previous blogs, you know I don’t have the best luck with written correspondence, my pen pal dumped me and my nephew really let me know what he thought about the present I got him for his birthday. However, I prefer criticism over being ignored and that’s why I’m bitter that Richard Nixon never wrote me back. Why did I write Nixon? Well it’s sorta a long story. I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by the 37th President of our country, although I can’t really say why. I was born while he was in office and some of my earliest memories were sitting with my dad watching Nixon on the news. He scared me, like Dracula or Frankenstein, but my dad was very conservative and a supporter so I watched intently. I wanted to understand why people liked him enough to vote him into office. This is probably the point where I should add I was a weird kid. My mom was born in Holland, raised in Indonesia, during WWII she survived the Japanese occupation in a concentration camp but her parents did not, she struggled greatly to be able to take care of herself, immigrated to the U.S., met my dad and moved to Las Cruces, NM where she had me. My mom had a lot of fear and understandably so, she also had me later in life which meant a big age difference, plus she had no idea what it was like to live a normal childhood, and she taught me English with a Dutch accent. I loved my mom, but through no fault of her own, she made it so I had a lot of fear and that I had a hard time fitting in with other kids....

Dear Nerds at Think Geek: I do believe I first learned of your wonderful website right here on Fierce and Nerdy.  My brother is an astrophysicist and my sister-in-law is a neuroscientist and they are never, ever easy to shop for and almost impossible to impress. And then I found you!! Each birthday and every Christmas I can go right to Think Geek and find a gift that is entertaining, or useful, and always amusing.  Thank you! My nephew’s birthday was coming up and when I asked my brother what his son would like he responded: a chess set. I adore my nephew, but I am already fearful his growing nerdiness is going to result in his butt getting kicked all throughout Junior High without adding ‘future chess team member’ to the equation.  I also do not want to be the lame Aunt who purchases the chess set  when everyone else is probably getting him Lego Death Stars and robots. My attempts to find a ‘badass’ chess set were failing as each Google search for Charles Bronson Chess Set yielded no results.  And then it was almost like we were in synchronicity as what popped into my inbox …. an email from Think Geek announcing the Khet 2.0 Laser Game!! “An awesome game that combines chess and lasers (with a sprinkling of Ancient Egyptian flavors) into one fantastic package!” I looked at customer action shots and saw enchanted children, a dog and even a grandmother all happily playing this laser chess game. My fingers could not click “Buy Now” quick enough as I felt triumphant in fulfilling my brother’s suggestion, while finding a gift for my nephew that had to be pretty badass and impressive. I mean after all it had LASERS!!! My nephew’s...

. an occasional blogumn by Else Duff I’ll never forget my first real passionate kiss from my first love, he tasted like Jack Daniels.  And thus began a life-long love affair with whisky (and bass-players).  In college, my roommate and I enjoyed experimenting with whisky and were always up for trying something new or shall I say old. We really liked our whisky.  In fact when I got married (to a bass-player) and my ol’ college roommate threw me a bridal shower, she forwent the usual party games and instead had a ‘Name That Whisky’ game. I won. So when I heard about a free Johnnie Walker tasting event in my neighborhood, I decided to check it out. The only time I’ve ever drunk Johnnie Walker was when I was on vacation in Thailand and Cambodia. So it reminds me of going to a bar in Cambodia and the disturbing image of lots of middle-aged men cuddled up with Cambodian hookers…and their bottles of Johnnie Walker.  However, I didn’t actually try the blended scotch whisky until I was in Thailand.  We went to a club with a friend’s cousin who treated us to Johnnie Walker bottle service. I must admit I didn’t really like it all that much, but when in Bangkok…. Plus if you’ve never been to Thailand, well I don’t know what it is about the Thai people, but damn can they be happy. Like EVERY song that comes on is THE BEST SONG!! THIS is the BEST NIGHT!!! Raise your glass of Johnnie Walker clink clink clink!!! This goes on and on to the point where you’re wondering what the hell is in this stuff??  So I figured I’d give it another shot or two. My friends and I arrive at my neighborhood tasting shortly before 9pm...

. an occasional blogumn by Else Duff My first dreams of real estate must have occurred when I was a little girl and went to Disneyland and saw Sleeping Beauty’s castle and declared: Someday I’m going to live there!!! As an adult, my real estate dreams changed. I started fantasizing about 1900s Craftsman Houses with big porches, lots of build-ins, and glistening chandeliers.  Now as someone who has been trying to purchase a home for over a year in Los Angeles, let’s just say my dreams have changed even more.  After bidding, not getting house, bidding, not getting house, rinse, repeat, onward and so forth – now I just want something that: is not in the ghetto, is at least the same size of my current apartment, has 2 toilets (I know – crazy!), and was not most recently a crack den (former halfway houses are okay.) I also realize, according to my friends, that if and when I finally buy a house that homeownership isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Unexpected expenses and repairs are of course the norm.  However, the big X factor is always the neighbors.  My parents built their home when their neighbors in their apartment building bought a lot to build a house and suggested my parents buy the lot next door.  It was the house I grew up in, and lucky for me the neighbors had a girl only a few months older than me.  We grew up like sisters and have maintained a lifelong friendship. Before my mom died, these neighbors cared for my mom above and beyond the call of duty when she developed dementia and before my brother and I could place mom in a care facility.  So maybe we won’t get neighbors that incredible,...

Hey guys! Make sure to stop in next week when one, possibly two HUGE announcements will be made re: your dedicated FaN editor. Oh, and if you haven’t weighed in on which photo I should get made into Michel Gondry sketch, please do so here, as I’m going by your results and sending in the photo this weekend. Til then we had a doozy of a week in comments. Let’s revisit some of our faves: HELLO FRIDAY re: Wagner vs. Coachella, in which Evil E and Kasey Bomber brave a 5-hour Die Walkure and the Coachella festival respectively. So many good comments on this post, but this one actually made me want to sit through a 15-hour Ring Cycle. Howard L: If you’ve never seen the whole RING [in] one go, I highly recommend it. Take the week off. Do it. Immerse yourself. You will never regret it. In my 20’s i was lucky enough to work on a production of it at Seattle Opera, so saw it 7 times in one summer. It remains one of the great experiences of my life. PHILOSOPHICAL MONDAY re: Crazy Cat Ladies Are Good Marriage Material, in which we put forth the theory that having a cat might not render single ladies undateable, based on a study which found that the cat-friendliest cities in America all had more single men than single women. kim: ok I am not a social scientist but this study disproves nothing other than there are more single men than single in cat friendly cities. it didn’t measure WHO owns the cats. and as someone who lives near San Francisco I think I can safely say although there may be more single men than women, that doesn’t mean that the single men are...

. a special event by Else Duff and Kasey Bomber Last week had some red letter days for music lovers of all stripe.  Your faithful and generally misanthropic correspondents, Evil E and Kasey Bomber are here to report from both sides of the musical spectrum.  While Evil E rubbed elbows with the opera cognocenti, Kasey braved a sea of fanny packs and body odor in the hot Coachella sun to bring you, loyal Fierce & Nerdy readers, all the news from both fronts, so that you can feel as though you were there.  Can the unlikely duo of a Wagner Opera and an Indie Music Festival make beautiful love, or are the two destined to remain mortal enemies (albeit probably too weak and artsy to actually ever draw blood)?  Which cornucopia of aural extravagance will win in a sonic battle royale? Below, we pit them mano-a-mano, head-to-head, bulging codpiece to pale pigeon chest…you get the idea. VS. EVENT DESCRIPTION Wagner: Die Walküre is the second of the four music dramas which make up Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Die Walküre is an epic tale of gods and mortals, incest, and it includes Wagner’s best-known piece “The Ride of the Valkyries.”  It took Wagner 26 years to create the Ring Cycle and it first premiered in the United States in 1885 – 124 years later and it finally made its way to Los Angeles!  When done in its entirety the Ring Cycle will last 15 hours, a feat I have always dreamed of experiencing.  However the LA Opera chose to run it in its separate parts over the period of a year. The first part, Das Rheingold, was staged earlier this year and they will conclude the Ring cycle with Seigfried and Gotterdammerung in...

. an occasional blogumn by Else Duff …Or how a bowling alley massacre, and a complete inability to draw, killed my dream of becoming a cartoonist. While I was in college I started doodling a cartoon (for my own amusement and to keep me awake in class) called Aliabbitt & Dippy. Aliabbitt was part alligator/part rabbit. Dippy was created for my dear friend Sandra. I had first met Sandra hanging upside down on the monkey bars in 5th grade, I started calling her Dippy in high school during a time when she was trying to grow out her bangs and was always wearing these dippy hair things. It was during a very heated and drunken game of quarters that I started calling her Dippy and somehow the name stuck. Not that Sandra was all that dippy – she was a bio/chem major in college. Anyway I recently found some of these cartoons. The first one I drew because Sandra had a pet iguana, which she adored, and one day her crazy dog Patty ate her iguana. In all the years I knew Sandra and in all the years she had that dog I never once saw it, whenever I came over they put the dog in another room because she was so vicious. Perhaps that was my inspiration for Aliabbitt (I drew these cartoons in the early ’90s so I don’t really remember what inspired me.) [Click on pics to enlarge] The first found adventure of Aliabbitt & Dippy: For some reason I decided to illustrate* burning in hell meant you were burning inside a McDonalds. I’m not positive but I think the creature outside by the slide is a demonic Ronald McDonald. (*Please note I use the word “illustrate” lightly – I have...

. Proof of Fierce Nerd ID by Else Duff Cringe worthy moments of my life! No. 2 The Air Band Years Long ago, in a time known as the 80’s, some shopping mall marketing “genius” came up with the idea that if you can’t get a star like Tiffany to perform outside your local Dillards in order to attract the masses that you could hold a lip-synch contest and get girls to dress up like the current teen stars to attract people. It was a hit! If you were a wannabe rock-n-roll star this was your chance, yes it was a simpler time, long before Guitar Hero and I was a lip-synch contest fanatic. I always wanted to be the front woman in a rock band, but with absolutely no ability to carry a note most of my rock-n-roll fantasies took place in my bedroom lip-synching to Stevie Nicks songs in front of a mirror while holding a hair spray can as a microphone. My local mall was all about having lip-synch or air band contests and my first opp to participate came along while I was in Junior High. My friends were planning to do the Go-Gos and lucky for me one of the air-guitarists dropped out and I secured her spot. I remember how seriously we practiced in my friend Genni’s living room, working not only on accuracy and showmanship, but also carefully planning our outfits. The contest was a total blast, we didn’t win but I did catch a Y & T record in a record toss, sadly I seem to recall I actually fought a pregnant woman for said record. Now at these contests whether you preformed one song or two depended on how many people were entering. Second contest...

  A Proof of Nerd ID by Else “Evil E” Duff “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Martin Luther King I don’t know exactly how true those words will be “in the end” but it is one of my favorite quotes. Sadly one thing I seem unable to forget is the day my junior high pen pal dumped me. At the time I was horrified and yet now all these years later – I am sharing it with all who want to see. Yes, here it is – for your amusement the rejection letter, dated exactly 1 month after I turned 13 years old, from Miss Jennifer Pratt, my junior high pen pal…. I never met Jennifer Pratt in person, I don’t think we ever even talked on the phone, but for a period of time fate lead us to become pen pals as part of a project during a junior high English class. I guess you are wondering what I did to inspire my pen pal to dump me so cruelly. I’m sure kids today have it a bit easier, if their pen pals (or is it e-pals) decide to tell them off they need to look no farther than their “sent box” to see what words they wrote to evoke such a response. I’m only going on my memory and I seem to recall it had something to do with this: It was at this time girls my age were starting their menstrual cycle. Talk about a difficult and embarrassing time for a girl, getting your first period was not easy. But one of my friends embraced this time of change, she didn’t hide it, she wasn’t embarrassed, she...