Lit City Blues

It's Saturday and that means it's time for another installment of my ongoing serial, Murder In Kinmen... please enjoy: Whodunit?
"Wait." Pei-Shan paused at the foot of the main stairs. "Let's-" she turned on her heel. "Let's make a stop real quick.""Where?""Dispatch."She led Wei-Ting down the longh allway where an imposing metal door greeted them. Next to it was a keypad and a buzzer, which Pei-Shan pressed."Yes?" The voice sounded old and gravelly, as if smoking a pack a dayof cigarettes and gargling with kaoliang every morning was a healthy thing to do."It's me," Pei-Shan said.There was a long pause before the metal door gave a distinct thunk and Pei_Shan opened the door. Wei-Ting stepped in behind her. Four of the five dispatchers were busy at work, but the dispatcher at the main console turned to greet them."Detective," she said."Huijun! Have I ever told you you're my favori…

I could give a shit about what the New York Post actually wrote.  (Here's NPR's version of the same story, just for the sake of balance.) The various sins, both real and imagined of Hunter Biden rank pretty low on the list of things I care about. But what should concern you- and certainly concerns me is that Facebook and Twitter went to such lengths to squash the article, to begin with. And maybe some of this is due to the fact that I watched both The Great Hack and The Social Dilemma on Netflix recently, so I will concede that perhaps I'm a little more paranoid about this than I was last week- but it's not paranoia if they're actually coming to get you.Most of the Liberal/Prog Commentariat on Twitter is okay with this. After all, it's speech they don't like and Orange Man Bad after all- but you've got to look beyond the now for half a second. If this was a Vox article or a Washington Post article or a NY Times article, the Liberal/Prog Commentariat, th…

Very happy to present part four of my ongoing serial Murder In Kinmen...  hope you enjoy: Despair
"We've got nothing." Pei-Shan leaned back in the chair, rubbing her eyes. "We've been at this for six hours." She shook her head, fighting off a growing sense of despair. "Damn. First homicide we've had in years and it's like we've hit a brick wall.""Maybe we should-" Wei-Ting hesitated."Do what?" Pei-Shan asked. "Go over all this footage again? There's no sign of movement from the Mainland at all.""I've been checking internet forums, the dark web, the news from over there and there's nothing," Wei-Ting said. "Not even so much as a police report. Even the local underground types in Xiamen haven't heard anything.""The local underground types?" Pei-Shan arched an eyebrow. Wei-Ting flushed. "Not like dissidents or anything," he said hurriedly. "But, you …

So, 'red pilling' is a term that is getting thrown around a lot this year. The media's been red-pilling people by standing in front of four-alarm structure fires and insisting that "the protests are mostly peaceful", the public health community and politicians have been doing it too: "Shut down your life. Don't protest that, protest this. You can't go to church, but you can march in this protest which meets with our approval." "No need for a mask," they said in March when they were worried about a PPE shortage, "but for sure wear a mask now."The overall feeling in the commentariat seems to be that these obvious double standards- whether you agree with them or not, are pissing off people- not people that are plugged into the commentariat and social media more than they should be- but the general mass populace of America that's just struggling to keep their head above water and desperately wanting this pandemic to be over a…

I was looking for Dry Curacao*. Smuggler's Cove has a mai-tai recipe that calls for it and I had seen a bottle at the local liquor store, but when I went back to get it- do you think it was there? Of course not-- but there was a bottle of falernum on the shelf and recognizing that it was one of the "what the hell is that?" ingredients in Smuggler's Cove, I snagged a bottle and started to play around with it. One of the first drinks I stumbled across that calls for it is Corn and Oil.The name endeared it to me: if there's a decent tiki bar in Iowa (a matter I need to investigate further) that doesn't have this on the menu they need to add it! (You could even call it 'Ethanol', which would be even more perfect.)Hailing from Barbados, the recipe is dead simple:1/2 oz John D. Taylor's Velvet Falernum2 oz blended aged rum (Barbados rum preferred)2-4 dashes of Angostura bittersAdd all the ingredients to an old-fashioned glass and fill with crushed ice. …