The Nils Blog

While I do my best to stay abreast of all things technological and pop-cultural, one trend I have yet to bow to is the one that’s put the iPod in the pocket of every American under retirement age who doesn’t live in a shack in the woods. As such, it wasn’t until just recently that I learned about Apple’s campaign to get celebrities from across the various lists (A to Why are you famous) to submit to iTunes a compilation of their favorite tracks with explanations behind the selection of each song.

Curious, I logged onto The Girlfriend’s iTunes and clicked on “Celebrity Playlists” to see what I could find. The first person’s list to catch my eye was Al Gore’s. Like his wife, his list was short, phony, bloated, and boring. What a shocker.

Inspired by the unabashed smugness of the Democratic Party’s Professor Emeritus of Incompetence, I posted his songs, his explanations, and my commentary below:

Continue reading →

The bodega is one of those tiny mom-n-pop–or in this case mamasan-and-papasan–shops that is carved out of a much larger, nobler edifice that typically occupies a corner lot. It has wrought-iron bars on its windows. I assume the windows are made of glass (why else would you need bars?) but the years of yellow dingy buildup give them the appearance of warped plexiglas, like the windows in the exterior doors of dilapidated grammar schools. It’s brick-red on the outside, but there’s no telling what the original paint color was. I think the place is called the Chinatown Market, but I can’t be certain because taking the time to check the signage above the door is the least of my concerns when I’m anywhere in that vicinity.

My back door is a 6-iron from this little corner store and yet I still don’t know if it has a real name. Like many bodegas its size, I imagine it has many names. Some probably call it “the convenience store across the street from the Chinese place with the chef in the window.” I’ve heard people in my building refer to it simply by its geographic location. You need anything? I’m going down to the corner store. I call it a shithole.

We left the restaurant arm in arm and cut briskly through the first truly chilly morning of the fall. We walked into the small bodega in search of champagne and orange juice. As neither of us had been inside before, and the only things we’d ever seen people exit with were wrapped in small brown paper bags, we were unsure if we would find either.

The store is incredibly small. It can’t be more than 30′ x 20′ inside and, but for a narrow aisle that runs between the counter, the center display, and around along the beverage cases, every conceivable inch of floor space is occupied by something for sale. No matter where you stand it feels like something heavy is a mere shoulder’s nudge away from collapsing and toppling over onto you. Picture an indoor track-and-field stadium where the grandstands extend vertically to the ceiling, the infield is a large double-sided display case, and the track is a narrow strip of dirty linoleum flooring wide enough for two anorexics or one disgusting homeless person wearing every piece of unwashed clothing he owns.

Continue reading →

I’ve invented a new game for spelling the monotony of riding the Metro to and from work. Here’s how it works:

As you pull into your station of disembarkation, make eye contact with someone standing near the double doors who you think won’t be getting off with you. As you exit the train and make your way toward the escalator or stairs toward street level, do whatever you can to maintain eye contact as long as possible. Then, right as you think the doors are going to close and the train is going to pull away, sneer at the person and flip them off.

Bonus points for running after the train and pressing your Bird against the train door window.

Double bonus points if you give them the Double Bird.

Triple bonus points if you miscalculate the train’s departure*, the doors re-open, your target jumps out, and starts a fist fight on the platform.

Quadruple bonus points if you win.

Continue reading →

For a city renowned for its stilted, unoriginal, power-suited clones, I never figured D.C. for much of a Halloween town. Prior to moving here, I imagined the parties on the Hill to be a congested, acrimonious tangle of Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats dressed in flowing white robes that looked, depending on how they were worn, like ministerial garb or a Klan outfit. The Republicans decked out in corduroy and peasant girl dresses with Birkenstocks and syringes taped to their arms.

Ask a Democrat what s/he’s supposed to be and you elicit a chuckle that is followed closely by “I’m a Republican” at a volume intended to carry over to the other side of the room. Ask a Republican, and s/he tells you defiantly, “I’m a liberal. Isn’t it obvious?”

I never expected anything even remotely creative to come from the D.C. crowd on this, the most pagan of holidays. When I got on the Metro this morning, headed to work, I could not have been more surprised. Half the people in my train car were dressed up.

The first celebrant I saw was a young guy seated by the double doors.

Continue reading →

For months now, The Girlfriend and I have been salivating over KFC’s brilliant slow-motion commercials for its new–yet apparently already– “Famous Bowls.” For those who have not seen these commercials (I don’t know how you could have missed them unless you are blind or in Iraq), allow me to depict through the medium of the written word the ballet that is the construction of the KFC Famous Mashed Potato Bowl.

First, a cumulus cloud of the most savory of mashed potatoes is placed at the bottom of a remarkably sturdy plastic bowl. Atop the cloud, much like the angels and cherubs of Greek and Roman legend, roasted corn and perfectly fried bits of KFC original recipe chicken perch themselves resplendently. While I’m sure you would agree that this is a Vision unto itself, a judicious drizzling of golden gravy and a sprinkling of three shredded cheeses complement it like a sun shower at the end of the perfect picnic on a hot, summer day.

If BALCO was in the business of concocting monster fast food

“Christ that looks good.”

Continue reading →

Rudius Media is launching a new site, InternetCelebrityPoker.com (site is not up yet), to organize monthly poker tournaments that allow anyone to compete against Internet Celebrities. The second official tournament is Wednesday, November 1st at 9:30pm EST, with a $1000 prize pool. As an added bonus, there will be bounties on the heads of each of the celebrities for whoever eliminates them from competition. Internet Celebrities scheduled to play this month:

Tucker Max – Internet celebrity, New York Times Best-selling Author.

Mark Ebner – Rudius Media blogger, New York Times Best-selling Author, poker fiend.

Andrew Breitbart – Runs his news website, New York Times Best-selling Author, West Coast editor of The Drudge Report.

Bill Dawes – Stand-up comedian, actor, and Rudius Media blogger (and the celebrity who lasted longest last month!).

Me – Somehow I register as an internet celebrity using this rubric

For more information including sign up bother Jordan Golson, he is the guy who runs all this shit.

Next month, the tournament will have all these people, but will add Paul Shirley, Maddox, TheBunny, and many more. As this grows and develops, they’ll also get a site up where the results of each months tourney can be seen, and you can see how you did against the various celebs.

So you aren’t too intimidated to join, understand that I am fucking horrible at poker. I have zero patience and take stabs at the pot like a blackjack player goes with an instinct on a particular hand. If I last more than 45 minutes it will be a fucking miracle. Sign up and have fun. Or don’t and masturbate quietly in the dark, alone with the sound of your hand as it pummels your genitals.

Get sign-up information and more here: Internet Celebrity Poker – November 1, 2006 – 930PM EST

I never quite understood what people meant when they said “you can never go home again.” To me, it sounded less like a time-tested adage and more like an excuse foster-children used to decline invitations to their high school reunions. Sure you can go home! Just hop on a plane and go see your mom. That’s what I’ve always done. Over the past several months, I have been disabused of this simplistic notion.

I grew up in Alameda, California. It’s a small island town, geographically speaking, nestled against Oakland in the San Francisco Bay. When I was young it had a distinctive small town feel despite having 75,000 residents. It has a Norman Rockwellian Main Street (ours was Park St.) whose merchants host an art & wine fair each summer that draws thousands over the course of a traditionally very warm weekend. It has a cross-town rivalry between the two public high schools even though the schools reside on the same street and have students who have played soccer, Little League, and Rec League with and against each other since they were 9 years old. Unlike certain Orange County hamlets or Virginia coastal towns, Alameda does not boast a laundry list of famous citizens: only a few (Willie Stargell, Mrs. Fields, Jason Kidd, Jimmy Rollins, Dontrelle Willis, Simon Rex) of whom they are immensely proud. Mostly.

Continue reading →

Here’s the thing with Danny…I was twice his size. At a young 7, I towered over Danny by a good 10 inches and outweighed him by at least 20 pounds. In body, I was Nitro to his Ralphie. In spirit, the roles were reversed.

The He-Man lunch box incident that Monday was only the beginning. The torturous relationship became almost organic, taking on a life of its own. A rhythm. Twice a day, I found myself fending off an attack. Sometimes it was before school and lunch. Sometimes it was lunch and recess. Sometimes it was lunch and after school. Regardless, it always involved lunch.

I blame poverty and fetal alcohol syndrome, my mother blamed Joan and Danny’s mom. We were probably both right.

Continue reading →

Danny had almond-sliver eyes, just like Scut Farkus. Just like Zap. He peered at you through them in a perpetual squint, as if he would spend his entire life driving west into the glare of the setting sun. I knew he was mean, because I knew who he was. Had I never met him, though, the eyes would have been a dead giveaway. You just can’t trust a kid whose irises you’ve never seen. I only saw his eyes open wide one time in the two years I knew him and even then it was only because of shock and blunt force trauma.

It was not simply the almond-sliver eyes that made Danny’s white-trashedness so menacing. It was the freckles. He didn’t have the cute freckles, either. He had the kind that made him look filthy. Little Orphan Annie had the cute freckles; the type that were symmetrical and distinct and not so numerous that they obscured the true pigment of her alabaster skin. Danny had the blotchy, splattered freckles that look like your windshield after a homeless man tries to clean it with tepid, dirty water and yesterday’s classified ads. You’re pretty sure there’s clear glass under there, but it’s hard to tell through the streaks of caked on dirt.

Continue reading →

I went to a small private school for kindergarten through 2nd grade. It was run by a squat, angry woman named Joan out of a 2-story yellow house with a giant backyard. The backyard was our playground. It had a regulation-height basketball hoop that was the domain of the male teachers (all two of them) who used it to assist all the little boys in mythologizing them more than they already did. No kid ever truly conceived of making a shot in that hoop, so when Ken (we called our teachers by their first names) drilled jumper after jumper during after-school playground time he became something more than just “Ken.” He became KEN: WARRIOR POET.

On the days I was last to get picked up, KEN: WARRIOR POET would lift me onto his shoulders so I could at least hit the rim with my feeble shot attempts. If I missed too many in a row, he would get tired of chasing after the basketball and just lift me higher so I could dunk it and we could call it an afternoon. It was all very special and left me feeling like KEN and I had our own super-secret friendship. When I asked him to help me shoot during the school day or when other kids were around he would flatly refuse. I thought it was because I might be inadvertently exposing our secret game. In retrospect I think he just wanted to avoid having to hoist 25 kids into the air every day; because once you do something for one kid in front of others, you have to do it for all of them. I can’t say I blame him. We had a couple of really fat kids in that school.

“Ken” ended up being my 2nd grade teacher. I say “ended up” like there was more than one 2nd grade teacher. That’s a lie. The school was K-5. There were 6 classrooms. There were 6 teachers.

Continue reading →