Lit City Blues

We went out to the new Pizza Ranch on Saturday night to eat and discovered happily that 2/3 kids were actually free and that there's a new Chocolate Cactus Bread that's actually pretty damn tasty. About half way through the night when I was waiting to see if they were going to add more Cactus Bread to the line when it hit me: I was sitting in an all you can eat fried chicken and pizza buffet and they were playing Christian Rock. In short, it was about as Peak America as you can get. I mentioned this to the Missus and she got a chuckle out if it, but then as I grabbed a slice of the Peach Cactus Bread and another one of the Cherry Cactus Bread (both delicious- for real, apart from the chicken, the Cactus Bread is the best part of Pizza Ranch) it hit me again. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but looking around the Pizza Ranch and you saw everyone: old people, young people, families, immigrants- hell, the local Sudanese community must really like Pizza Ranch because there were

The concept of Four Weddings And A Funeral immediately intrigued me. Mindy Kaling and Richard Curtis are amongst the producers- Curtis wrote the original movie and Kaling has a pretty good track record when it comes to rom coms- it's obvious she appreciates the genre enough to bring out the best in them (charm, chemistry and genuine romance) while at the same time tweaking the many lamentable tropes that you tend to find in rom-coms and freshening them up for a contemporary audience. And yet...  the movie version of Four Weddings And A Funeral isn't just a classic rom-com, it's a genuinely great movie all by itself. Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell, John Hannah, Kristin Scott Thomas, Rowan Atkinson- I mean, it's an incredible cast which takes that movie to another level. Taking any movie and translating that into television has proven to be something of a mixed back. Taking a great movie and translating into television- even if it is 'The Golden Age of Television

All right, I've drunk a lot of scotch over the years and if you drink enough scotch- especially Islays, sooner or later you're going to hear tantalizing things about Mezcal. "It's not like tequila," people will tell you, "it's smoky ." Round these parts, mezcal seems to be hard to find- to be fair to any local mezcal that might gathering dust on local liquor store shelves I didn't launch into a full scale Mezcal Quest to make a comprehensive survey of what's around here. In general, unless I'm after something very specific, I don't do that. It's what I see on my liquor store aisle shelves that I go for- because if I can find it, then y'all can too- and when it comes to Mezcal there's not a lot out there that gets picked up by the casual eye. Before we get into the mezcal I actually tried- we've gotta take a minute to talk about what Mezcal actually is . Unlike tequila- which is made from blue agave in the area aro

So, it's officially after Labor Day. We've had three debates so far. Traditionally now is the time where people actually start paying attention a little bit to the race, so what better time than now to take stock about where the (still lamentably large) field stands, at least from my point of view. I'm honestly not sure what to think about the overall state of the race. Maybe it's the size of the field, but it feels like the debates aren't really clarifying anything in the polls- apart from Gabbard's attack on Harris' prosecutorial records in the second debate, nobody has really broken out in a major way. Everything feels strangely stuck and I'm not quite sure why. Conventional wisdom seems to be that a lot of the moderates (Bennet, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Bullock) are sort of waiting around assuming that Biden is going to do what Biden usually does and collapse in a heap, leading to an opening for one of them to step in. Biden has run for President mult

Watched On: Amazon Prime Released: 2019 Starring: Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, Max Casella, Hugh Dancy, John Lithgow, Denis O'Hare, Reid Scott , Amy Ryan Directed By: Nisha Ganatra Rotten Tomatoes: 80% Pick: Mine So I first heard about this movie way back in like January/February or so when it debuted at Sundance and got some buzz. Amazon snatched it up and I think it did a theatrical run for a bit, but it's finally on Prime Video. Now, I had heard mixed things about it- which surprised me, because Mindy Kaling is funny and Emma Thompson is awesome- and there's John Lithgow knocking around this movie as well, so who can beat that? But a lot of the reviews seemed fairly 'meh' which is kind of surprising given the Rotten Tomatoes score. But, I guess I was reading the wrong reviews, because this was actually a really good movie. Emma Thompson stars as Katerine Newbury, an acclaimed comic and light night comedian who's been doing it forever, but her

Technically, I didn't read this book I listened to it. Yes, Ready Player One marked my first foray into the world Audible and Audio Books and I scored a sweet audio version read by none other than Will Wheaton himself. I wanted to try and finish it before I sat down and watched the movie-- but as it turns out, I tried to watch the movie with the kiddos (Eldest Spawn thought the racing scene in the movie was 'SO COOL' and was very excited by it) and between one thing and another I only saw bits and pieces of the movie- and surprisingly, I didn't really feel the need to sit back down and watch it again- which once again, proves that with surprisingly few exceptions the book is always better than the movie. The main character of the book is teenager Wade Watts who lives with his aunt in Oklahoma City in the 'stacks' which is a poor district featuring trailer homes stacked on top of one another. He spends most of his time in the OASIS, a virtual reality, fully

'Boyhood' Director Richard Linklater has signed on to direct a movie adaptation of the musical 'Merrily We Roll Along' which prior to today I don't think I'd ever heard of- except perhaps in a passing reference in an episode of The West Wing or Gilmore Girls . There's a catch though: it's going to take him 20 years to film.   If this seems like an odd way to segue into some more thoughts about Brexit, forgive me- but at this point, 'Merrily We Roll Along' seems like a deeply ironic sentiment to apply to the current political dumpster fire underway in the United Kingdom. And it may well take them twenty years to resolve, at this rate. But congratulations though! I didn't think anyone could top the current dumpster fire that is the politics of our United States, but the UK has somehow managed it. So where are we? There's a joke that I think showed up on an episode of The Newsroom of all places about Jesus and Moses are playing g