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...

. A Proof of Nerd ID by Kasey Bomber Technically, I know that Spelling and Grammar are two different things.  Grammar is how you use those words you should know how to spell, but poor spelling and poor grammar can be equally off-putting when it comes to moments where a good first e-pression counts.  Times such as job cover letters, homework assignments for that online business class you signed up for so you can start that topless cupcake bakery/dog walking service, or those all-important online flirtations that start with LOL and end with a UHaul. Whereas sentence structure can always be monkeyed with for the sake of personal expression, because sometimes you. just. need. to. emphasize. something. with. punctuation!  Spelling is a little bit of a different animal, though text messagers and 1337 geeks will tell you differently.  But, when they try to tell you differently, or they start ROTFLing or giving you “teh” business, you have my permission to kick them in the nuts for ruining the beauty and complexity of the written word with their junior high note-passing lexicon of squiggles, emoticons (*ew, shudder*), and abbreviations.  If you’ll allow me to sound like Jessica Tandy’s childhood friend for a moment:  When I was a girl, people could actually express emotions with carefully chosen, correctly spelled words arranged in sentences completely devoid of yellow faces with red wagging tongues. Until they invent a font denoting sarcasm, some of you will continue to rely on the dreaded emoticon (I hate that fucking shirt you wore today.  It made you look fat!  LOL ) to get you out of trouble for saying something potentially inflammatory (or to make some asshole comment seem like a joke, see above), while I, and my fellow grammarian contrarians will...

. A blogumn by Kasey Bomber Oh Hollywood.  How I love walking down your star-embedded sidewalks on a Sunday afternoon.  I can entertain myself with all my favorite games – i.e.:  Bluetooth or Schizophrenic?  Hip or Homeless? and Gay or European?  I might get a slice of pizza, mingle with las turistas, and wonder at the fact that people from all over the world save up for a lifetime to visit a place with far more cheap T-Shirt shops than celebrities.  And if those celebrities are in fact within spitting distance of the transvestite shoe stores, the Armenian suit shops, or the hip hop-booming tacky electronics stores that smell like the 6 sticks of nag champa they have burning in the window, they are probably holed up in some restaurant/lounge that wouldn’t let a tourist inside if said tourist owned the whole of Eastern Kentucky – mostly because the celebrities have to eat fast before that restaurant spontaneously becomes another soon-to-fail trendy restaurant overnight. But the magazines tell us that not only are celebrities teeming in the streets of greater Hollywood, but also that they might be “just like us!”  Hey, look, Cameron Diaz goes to a laundromat!  Wow!  Leonardo DiCaprio just ordered his 6th latte of the week!  Hey, guess what, Julia Roberts shits out more than just kids! And speaking of kids, we come to my latest pet peeve in today’s gossip magazine lexicon:  the baby bump.  Lest you need clarification, a baby bump is officially the new term indicating pregnancy.  As in: “Is that a baby bump we spy on J-Lo?”  or “New Dresses to Accentuate Your Baby Bump Because Pregnant is the New Rehab.”  Under no uncertain circumstances should the baby bump be confused with “lovely lady lumps” which seem...

. A Proof of Nerd ID by Kasey Bomber Today’s citation for gross grammar mindfuck.  The word “myriad.” Essentially, in AP English as a senior in high school, my flagrantly pretentious poetry-loving teacher loved to pieces the word myriad.  On any given rainy day, when she was feeling like sowing her poetic grammar oats, she’d wax philosophically to our ennui-encased dead lustre-less eyes about this, her favorite word.  She drilled into us, each time as though it were the first, that the word was an adjective, a synonym to “many,” to be used as such: Mrs. Boringpants offered myriad discussions of poorly reasoned grammar.  And that under no circumstances was it a (gasp!) wretched, everyday, dime-a-dozen, bourgeois noun to be used as such:  I have devised a myriad of ways to fucking kill myself if anyone uses that word in my presence. So, not only does this word for some reason sound less like “a vast array” and more like “the description of an eye booger”, but also it guarantees that anyone who uses it sounds like an utter dickhead.  Why use this word at all I ask?  If you use it as an adjective correctly, it is like saying, “ha ha, peasants, I know how to correctly use this word as a substitute for much better words!”  And if you use it incorrectly, it is like saying, “Hey I’m a fucknut.  I think I’m pretty fucking smart but I is really stoopid.” I read the word in a book and I cringe.  Lord forbid some earnest heartfelt dope puts it in a song! But it gets worse!  Because people are bound and determined to be pretentious, the legacy of the word “myriad” is ever-evolving.  Turns out that once upon a time it WAS...

. A Proof of Nerd ID by Kasey Bomber According to dictionary.com the use of “heart” as a verb is archaic and was used as a synonym for “to hearten” and “to encourage.” Therefore, the use of heart as a verb in sentences such as “I heart you” in place of “I love you” is incorrect. Besides, it also irritates me. Next edition of the Grammar Police Blotter: Why use the word “myriad” at all if either using it right or using it wrong results in the same impression that you are a dickweed?...