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Eating Shit On Ice, Or What I Learned From Walking To Work Yesterday

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So, our saga began on Tuesday afternoon. Our white ol'reliable Subaru Outback began flashing check engine lights and doing strange things as the Missus was coming back from lunch with a friend. She gave the local mechanic we use a call and managed to get the Outback over there with no problem, but then, a few hours later, we got the call with the big ugly news.

(I should note here: we both freely admit we're terrible car owners. This experience has made us both vow to be better car owners going forward, as our tendency of 'drive the car until lights began to come on and weird, fucked up shit starts to happen' has bitten us in the ass before. We also think we can learn to be car people- and that's not really going all that well, as the sad, blue shell of our Mini Cooper can attest too.)

Upshot of the big ugly news: no car until Friday and a monetary amount that made us both grimace in pain, but was thankfully workable and should secure a major repair to keep the ca…
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Netflix & Chill #71: Frozen 2

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Watched On: The Big Screen!
Released: 2019
Starring: Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Josh Gad, Jonathan Groff, Sterling K. Brown, Evan Rachel Wood, Alfred Molina, Martha Plimpton, Jason Ritter, Rachel Matthews, Jeremy Sisto, Ciaran Hinds, Aurora
Directed By: Jennifer Lee, Chris Buck
Rotten Tomatoes: 77% Tomatometer/92% Audience Score
Pick: Family Choice!

The sequel was so inevitable they weren't just going to 'let it go'. (No, I won't apologize for the prior sentence. I know y'all groaned. Hashtag Dad Joke. Hashtag No Apologies.) But unlike prior Disney sequels as the always memorable, Return of Jafar and The Little Mermaid: Return To The Sea and Pocahantas: Death by Smallpox*, Frozen II is actually an excellent continuation of the story and a welcome return to Arandelle and all these characters.

We return to Arandelle with King Agnarr telling a story to a young Elsa and Anna about their grandfather, King Runeard, who established a treaty with the Northuldra people by build…
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This Week In Vexillology #299

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Y'all.  We're almost done with The Lost Archives...  I've got one more entry planned after this and then we will officially be moving into unknown territory and then we'll have to start getting really creative with this stuff.  So, what's on deck for today? A couple of state flags from down in Brazi- Santa Catarina and Rio De Janeiro.

First up, Santa Catarina:

Located in southern Brazil, the state of Santa Catarina is almost the southernmost state in the country and to be honest, if you were trying to pick a state in Brazil to move to, Santa Catarina would probably be somewhere in your top ten or so. It's got the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, lowest economic inequality and illiteracy in the whole country. It's one of the oldest states in Brazil as well and was separated from Sao Paulo all the way back in 1738. It's capital is the lovely sounding city of Florianopolis.

What about their flag? It was adopted officially in 1953, based on …
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Free Write Friday #15: Resolve

#FWF is back for 2020 and I'm going to try something a little different now and again. After a co-worker told me about Theme Thursdays on r/WritingPrompts, I decided to give one a shot. (They're 500 word shots, centered around a theme, which I think is a good exercise in how to write something with a limited word count.) So, I'll probably be trying my hands at these now and again and if I find an actual Writing Prompt I like, I'll throw one of those up as well. In the meantime, here's my first attempt at a Theme Thursday: Resolve

 His head was pounding. Nausea filled him. His gorge was rising and he was doing his best to resist the urge to vomit. He knew he should probably drink some water. he knew he should have a shower. He knew he should do many things, but instead, he was alone at the kitchen table, staring at the bottle.

It was a green bottle, about half-full of a 16 year old single malt from the Western Isles of scotland that tasted of peat and smoke. Appropri…
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Squawk Box: The Witcher

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The end of Game of Thrones naturally kicked off a scramble amongst various streaming platforms to figure out what, if anything was going to be the next great fantasy television series. Netflix had Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance drop last year. Amazon has The Wheel of Time and Lord of The Rings: The Second Age coming son and there's a Willow television series in the works. If you like fantasy and are excited to finally see some of your favorite books come to the small screen or your favorite streaming platform, there's really no better to time to be alive. 
Kicking it all off- (yes, technically there was a Chronicles of Shannara series which was on MTV for some reason and kind of bummed me out after a few episodes and so, I didn't really bother with it because, well, it wasnt' that good) is Netflix's adaptation of The Witcher.
I suppose I should note going into this: I've never read the books, I've never played the video games and I didn't know a damn …
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What's Hopefully A Fairly Lukewarm, Not-Crazy Take On The Whole Iran Thing

Okay, so we've all had a weekend to take in the drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and we're all nice, calm and rational. Things are good now, right? Right? I mean, as I'm typing this, World War Three has not broken out, the draft hasn't be reinstated and we're not invading or bombing Iran.

*checks Twitter just to be sure*

Yeah, no. We're all good. (At least for now.) The question now we must confront is how exactly to unpack this mess in a sensible way. After thinking, reading and stumbling across some interesting and not at all reported takes leaking through on Twitter over the weekend, I'm going to go with the following:

First, I don't want to go to war with Iran. Iran is not Iraq. I would have no idea what the point of a war with Iran would be- I don't think airstrikes alone would lead to regime change and a land invasion would be a massive undertaking which, given the fact that we're still fighting in Afghanistan and s…
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Bookshot #126: Quicksilver

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I can't tell you how long the parentals have had all three volumes of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle on their bookshelves. It's been years since I picked up Quicksilver and took a crack at actually finishing it- but post their move to the new house, I snagged all three volumes from them and sat down and took a swing at Quicksilver again and this time, I hit it right out of the park.

I was going to try and summarize it all but I was about a third of the way into it when a realization struck me: this is really kind of three books in one so it's...  hard to really summarize it in an effective way without getting way too verbose- but I'm going to give it a shot.

Book One, features Enoch Root coming to Massachusetts to get Daniel Waterhouse to importune him to come back to London to resolve a feud between Newton and Liebniz. The book then flashes back to the 1670s and recounts how Daniel met Newton, went to college together, were separated by plague and how Daniel …
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