Lit City Blues

A few months ago, we raided three very large boxes of CDs my parents didn't want and I ended up snagging just about the entire Led Zeppelin discography and then spent the subsequent months listening to all the albums I had and discovering the full depth of the awesomeness of the Greatest Rock N'Roll Band in history. I didn't have their entire discography of studio albums (I was missing Led Zeppelin III and Presence) but between CDs and judicious use of Spotify I managed to make my way through the whole set. Along the way, the secondary question came up: Led Zeppelin has made a lot of long songs over the years (for the purposes of this ranking, I went with any song above seven minutes in length)- which one is the best 'long song'? A lot of people will probably insist on 'Stairway To Heaven'- as you'll see below, I have a slightly different opinion. So, without further ado: Led Zeppelin, Ranked. THE STUDIO ALBUMS 1. Led Zeppelin IV I really wante

Watched On: Hulu Released: 2006 Starring: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolpha, Dax Shepherd Directed By: Mike Judge Rotten Tomatoes: 76% Pick: Mine Idiocracy is one of those movies that I've spent years hearing about but never actually sat down and watched it all the way through. It'd be on various cable channels over the years and again, I'd see some of it, but never actually all of it. So, when I discovered that the whole movie was on Hulu, I thought I'd sit down and finally watch the whole movie once and for all.  And you know what? I would say that it lived up to it's name and a certain amount of it's hype. In 2005, Corporal Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), a US Army librarian is about as average as you can get- so, he's selected for a suspended animation experiment to preserve his average nature as the military is apparently concerned about the detriorating intelligence of future recruits. The military goes out and finds Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute wh

This Week In Vexillology, we're dipping back into the Lost Archives for a national flag from Africa and a subnational flag also from Africa! (Well, it's not really a subnational flag--more of a separatist flag? Maybe a rebel flag? I don't really know how to classify it- but we'll see!) First up, Liberia : Adopted on August 24, 1847 as the national flag of Liberia if you think that this flag looks a little familiar, well, there's a reason for that! The country of Liberia was founded by free people of color and freed African-American/Caribbean/West Indies slaves from the United States and the Caribbean with the support of the American Colonization Society. (I feel like the American Colonization Society is worth a tangent here. The biggest proponents of the idea of creating a colony for freed slaves/free blacks were, unsurprisingly perhaps, Southerners. African-American leader ssuch as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and many others opposed it as they (corr

Image Prompt:   https://i.imgur.com/MFKxvKK.jpg Shaleena halted at the foot of the stairs, her shield in one hand and her sword in the other and just stared up at it. There, at the top of the stairs was the Elder Tree. Finally. She was here. She had done it. Slowly, she began to ascend the staircase, wondering if this was a dream. How long had she been travelling? How long had she been questing? How long had her people suffered under the blight the Sorcerer had brought upon the land? Now, at least, their salvation was here. Her father had sent her after the last of her brothers had succumbed to the blight. She remembered the afternoon well: "Princess Shaleena?" She had been in the library, studying hard, trying to find some scrap of knowledge of the ancient world that might prove to be the salvation they had been looking for. The Royal Library of the Kingdom of Cormant was supposed to be among the most extensive in the known world and she wasn't the first to sear

All right, I'm just going to get down to brass tacks with this post: 1. I'm not doing an Adopt-A-Team this year. I feel like I've got a good stable of teams to track whenever the mood strikes me and I want to actually figure out a way to watch some of their games using the magic of the interwebs. Secondary goals for 2019-2020: go watch some soccer! Whether its the Hawkeye women's team, the Dubuque Union or even an MLS or NWSL game. 2. HAWKEYE FOOTBALL PREDICTIONS: I think the B1G West might be one of the most interesting divisions in College Football this season. Quite literally everybody except Illinois probably can make a case for going to Indianapolis and a lot of people seem to be quite high on the usual suspect (Wisconsin), or buying in too soon on the up and comers (Nebraska, Purdue, Minnesota) while completely forgetting other teams (Iowa, Northwestern). You can say the same for every division in every conference at this point of the season, since nobody h

So apparently President Trump has inquired about the possibility of the United States acquiring Greenland , of all places- with, it is said, varying degrees of seriousness. This produced much mockery on the interwebs and a polite and firm refusal on the part of Greenland's government- but all of it got me thinking: how realistic is this notion, how would it all work and what would it look like, if it did? Look, it sounds crazy, but it's actually not a new idea . I guess Harry Truman tried to buy Greenland for $100 million after the war. When Denmark fell to the Nazis during the Second World War, we stepped in and help defend the place and we've already got an Air Force Base up at Thule. It's not a completely crazy idea- but it is a complicated one. First, yes, we can technically 'acquire' Greenland. It's probably not the word I would have used- perhaps, I would have said, 'maybe we can extend an invitiation to the people of Greenland to join our U

Do you have white teenage sons? Listen up. I've been watching my boys' online behavior & noticed that social media and vloggers are actively laying groundwork in white teens to turn them into alt-right/white supremacists. Here's how: — joanna schroeder (@iproposethis) August 13, 2019 Ugh, this thread. Look, on the one hand this lady isn't wrong . As a parent, you wanna make sure that your kids- male or female, are watching and consuming healthy content online or watching age appropriate television shows. If I found my seven year old son watch an episode of The Wire , for instance that would be something that we would need to a. turn off immediately and b. have a little bit of a talk about. I have no problem with absolutely any of that. This, however... is not that. It's not advocating healthy parenting and it's not even advocating raising healthy, well-mannered, upstanding young man. What it is doing, however, is feeding into a cultural notion th

One of the best classes I took as an undergraduate was a course on Chinese Foreign Policy taught by Professor Read- he was one of those Professors who really knew the subject matter of the course at an expert level and his enthusiasm for it was infectious. I appreciate Professors who know their shit and aren't just phoning it in- I think a lot of students can probably sense the difference as well, but as a result, I think I absorbed a ton of information about China and really had I been a little more focused in my career planning might have (and probably should have) doubled down on China as one of my serious areas of study for my Master's Degree. But, c'est la vie- here I am, armchair political scientist and dabbler in the world of international relations and occasionally I follow news stories down rabbit holes and have to unload some of this excess knowledge I've accumulated over the years into a digestible form. So, let's talk about Hong Kong for a second.

We're going back into the Lost Archives once more this week to take a look at two very different flags- both of which are from Africa. This week, we're going short and sweet with the flag of Tunisia and the flag of Mali. First up, Mali : The flag was predated by the flag of the Mali Federation which was more or less identical, except for the presence of a traditional kanaga figurrine. The Federation dissolved with the exit of Senegal and then the remaining colony of the French Sudan became Mali and dropped the kanaga and adopted the current flag on March 1st, 1961 and it's been that way ever since. The tricolor pattern should be familiar: as a former French colony, it's a nice tie back to the colonial power- though I'm sure some folks were less than thrilled by that. So the color scheme of green-yellow-red are the traditional Pan-African colors and according to wikipedia, the green stands for the fetility of the land, gold is for purity and mineral wealth an

Every time we'd sit down and do our taxes and the tax lady would ask us if we wanted to throw a couple of bucks at the Presidential campaign fund, I would respond with a firm 'No.' In general, I felt that there were few, if any politicians that had done anything worthy of my money and I sort of took the attitude of, 'don't give them money, it'll only encourage them.' The interminable march toward next November has been underway for months now. At this point in the cycle, I don't know much. I may not pick a candidate at all. I might make the decision right then and there in the voting booth next year and just let it go. It might be dependent on what the polls look like in Iowa. It might be dependent on any number of factors I haven't even considered yet. But I know two things for sure: 1. I'm not voting for a billionaire. 2. I have real problems voting for someone who wants to eliminate private insurance. The latter point isn't becau

I've never been big into collections of short stories. But lately, I've been hearing more and more about the rise of Chinese science fiction and when a preview for The Wandering Earth showed up on the interwebs a few months back, I decided to run down the original novella by Liu Cixin and give it a try-- I didn't know, however that it came along with more short stories. So, I worked my way through all of them and this is what I thought: The titular novella, The Wandering Earth tells the story of a future where scientists detect an impending hydrogen burst from the sun which will wipe out all life in the inner solar system. In response, humanity unites to construct massive Earth Engines to first stop Earth's rotation and then start a journey out of the solar system and into the nearby star system at Proxima Centauri. Most of Earth's surface is ruined and then frozen by first stopping the rotation of the planet and then moving out into the darkness of space. Humani