Lit City Blues

1. I am getting that tattoo, damn it. Well, that didn't happen. I know exactly what I want to get and where I want to get it and I just have to make the appointment and do it. Guess what's rolling over to 2018? That's right...  I am getting that tattoo, damn it. 2. I'm declaring this my  Year of Books I did do a ton more reading than I had in years past this year...  I haven't been reading exclusively from the list and I have taken some detours ( Lincoln In The Bardo, Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion ) but I think I'm going to make it a goal to finish this list in 2018. The Book of the New Sun , Gene Wolfe Gravity's Rainbow , Thomas Pynchon Catch-22 , Joseph Heller Wolf Hall , Hilary Mantel Before The Fall , Noah Hawley War and Peace , Leo Tolstoy Fahrenheit 451 , Ray Bradbury Ulysses , James Joyce Siddhartha , Hermann Hesse Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,  Robert M. Pirsig Use of Weapons , Iain M. Banks Aurora , Kim Stanley Robi...

We're wrapping up 2017 with two more flags featuring the letter 'B', this time a duo from Africa: Benin and Burkina Faso. (I'll be off for a couple of weeks for the holidays ostensibly to do my annual year end review as I scratch my head and puzzle at how to take this modest little blogging venture of mine to the next level, whatever that is- though this year, I'm really combining holidays with a scoop of paternity leave as the arrival of Baby #3 is imminent!) Our two flags this week are actually pretty cool in their own way and while they dip into the traditional color scheme/design pattern seen across West Africa quite a bit, they're striking in their own way. First up, Burkina Faso: Okay, mild tangent time: I have an incredible twitch when it comes to globes in antique stores and Burkina Faso is one of the countries that I use to figure out just how old the globe is, since there was a bit of a coup d'etat there that changed the name of the country fr...

Okay: At the outset, I should admit that I've only listened to parts of Songs of Innocence and since this album is intended to be a companion piece to that album, I'm probably going to have to back track to listen to that one as well, just to get the full effect. ( Songs of Innocence , of course, was the infamous album that just sort of showed up in your iTunes a few years back- for free, mind you- but regardless of whether you wanted it or not.) But any new U2 album is going to pique my interest, so I found this one on the old Spotify and gave it a listen. Songs of Experience is enjoyable enough and shows flashes of interesting moments, but didn't really do much for me overall. I feel like it sort of balanced between trying to recapture the sort of sound that the band went for in All That You Can't Leave Behind and pushing into something new and different. I remember listening to All That You Can't Leave Behind and thinking, 'man, I don't know where...

According to Goodreads, I started reading this on February 4th, 2012. I finished it on December 8th, 2017. That's almost six years to get through all twelves volumes of this series and it feels as if an incredible weight has been lifted off of my shoulders. You can say a lot about Churchill and goodness knows people have, but the man could write. I'll be honest though: I have an abridged one volume version of his A History of The English Speaking Peoples knocking around somewhere and I vastly prefer that one volume to this twelve volume monstrosity. Partially, I think it's because when properly constrained, Churchill can write history that is both compelling and informative. When left to his own devices, however, he can, well, carry on and on and on and on- and that, combined with Churchill's own admission that the twelve volumes about The Second World War are about giving his own version of what happened to ensure the old phrase, 'history is written by the vic...

I'm shaking off the cobwebs of the great and grand Star Trek Cycle and catching up on a lot of shows that I've missed and this month's Squawk Box is a kind of a good example of 'catch-up' featuring a oddly mis-matched trio of brilliant television: American Vandal , The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and, of course, the second season of Stranger Things . American Vandal I read about courtesy of NPR and gave it awhirl based solely on their enthusiastic review only to find it was as brilliant as advertised. A satirical take off of Netflix's Making A Murderer, American Vandal plunges into the depths of the social strata of Oceanside High as the school is reeling from an ambitious act of vandalism: 27 dicks were spray painted onto 27 cars in the faculty parking lot and class clown and school ne'er do well Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro) has been expelled for the crime. A couple of members of the AV Club/Morning TV Show for the high school, Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alva...

Watched On: Amazon Prime Released: 1987 (The Living Daylights), 1989 (License To Kill) Starring: Timothy Dalton, Maryam d'Abo, Joe Don Baker, Art Malik, Jeroen Krabbe, Carey Lowell, Robert Davi, Talisa Soto, Anthony Zerbe Rotten Tomatoes: The Living Daylights- 71%, License To Kill- 77% Picks: Mine James Bonding has made it's way back into my podcast rotation and they've tackled both the Timothy Dalton Bond movies in recent episodes and thanks to Amazon Prime getting every non-Daniel Craig Bond movie, I decided to give both of them awhirl and watch them again. I've always felt that Dalton got kind of a bad rap as Bond. The Living Daylights is probably one of my all-time favorite Bond movies and License To Kill ...  not so much. (My main beef with License To Kill was Felix not dying, which made Bond's revenge tour seem somewhat pointless to me, but on a revisit, I've actually changed my mind.) I started with Dalton's debut, The Living Daylights . 0...

We're dipping back into the 'Lost Archives' for the last two weeks of 2018 and focusing on the countries that begin with the letter 'B'. Why? Well, I just sort of feel like it knocking off some 'B' countries...  so, this week, we've got Belarus and Bulgaria and next week we'll tackle Benin and Burkina Faso. First up, we've got Belarus: Infamously known as 'Europe's last dictatorship' the flag of Belarus was adopted on June 7th, 1995 and was modified again on February 10th, 2012. It's a modification of the old Soviet-era flag which was adopted in 1951. There were some obvious tweaks made to the flag: the symbols of communism have been removed and the ornamental pattern on the hoist, set against the flagstaff was changed as well. The original pattern was white on red and this one is red on white. There's no official interpretation for the colors of the flag, but President Lukashenko has stated that red represents freedo...

Adopt-A-Team: Well, good news is that Defensa y Justicia seems to be doing okay! We last checked in on October 13th and since then, we've had a loss to San Lorenzo, a draw with Olimpo and then four wins in a row, over Temperley, Lanus, Banfield and Godoy Cruz in that order. Right now, they're sitting at sixth place in the Super Liga Table. In short, for being where they are in the table, they seem to be doing what they should be doing at this point in the season. The draw with Olimpo (currently relegation bait along with Arsenal and Chacarita) is really the only bad result of the run. Yes, San Lorenzo thumped them pretty good, beating them 3-1, but San Lorenzo is second behind Boca Juniors in the table with an 11% chance to win the whole thing at this point in the season according to FiveThirtyEight anyway . We'll see if they can keep it up, but it's somewhat heartening to know that apparently I'm not the kiss of death to whatever team I follow around for a seaso...

This book was another birthday purchase and is the perfect intersection between my appreciation of the writing of Neil Gaiman and my long time love of all things mythology related. While most of my mythology obsession was when I was much younger and centered around Greek mythology*, I've always been curious about Norse mythology but never seemed to be able to find a really good one volume book on Norse mythology- until now that is. (I do have the actual Prose Edda kicking around my Kindle somewhere, but I haven't gotten back to it yet.) Gaiman happily stepped in and produced an eminently readable volume of Norse mythology that breathes new life into the tales from both the Poetic and Prose Edda while managing to put them into a contemporary voice that can appeal to as many readers today as possible. Gaiman starts the book with an introduction to all the major Gods (Aesir) in the pantheon, ranging from the familiar like Odin, Loki and Thor to names like Balder and Freya and Fr...

Watched On: Amazon Prime Released: 2008 Starring: Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Karen Allen, Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent, Shia LaBeouf Rotten Tomatoes: 77% Pick: Mine I listened to a recent episode of James Bonding where they talked about Indiana Jones instead (they called the episode 'Indiana Jonesing' which I dug) and that sort of got me interested in going back and revisiting the fourth and most recent Indiana Jones movie: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull . I remember not really liking it all that much the first time I saw it, but upon second viewing, I am happy to report that despite the weird paranormal bits and the ridiculousness of escaping an atomic blast in a lead lined fridge, it actually was much better than I remember it being. The film opens in 1957, with a group of Soviet commandos sneaking into a secret Army base to raid 'Warehouse 51'- in the trunk, they've got a kidnapped Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) and his associate Mac (Ray...

We're kicking off December with our Second Trifecta of World Cup 2018 Qualifiers! Yes, we've got Colombia, Belgium and Switzerland. (Of our six, I think France has the potential to make the deepest run, but Belgium has ridiculous amounts of talent that didn't really go anywhere in Brazil, so I feel like if they don't go deep, it'll be disappointing. South America is getting gloriously deep these days, so while I'm bummed Chile didn't get in, I'll be cheering for Colombia instead!) First up: Colombia! Adopted on November 26, 1861 as the national flag and ensign, the flag of Colombia is the brain child of both Goethe and Fransisco de Miranda and once upon a time was part of Miranda's vision of a united 'Gran Colombia' which encompassed Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador (and I guess Panama too?) which is why you see the yellow-blue-red combinations running across all three countries. Historically, the color combination is due to something tha...