Lit City Blues

Somewhere, back in the many days of my misspent youth when burned CDs were as numerous as one-dollar bills in a strip club, I acquired a copy of the Best of Paul McCartney and Wings. No idea where it came from. No idea if I borrowed the CD from someone to burn it, but somehow, someway, I got this CD and honestly, it's a pretty awesome CD.  First, let's dispense with the obvious one: "Live and Let Die" is excellent, and no, GNR did not do a better version. Knock that shit off right now. But you've also got ' Band On The Run ', ' Mull of Kintyre ', and ' Maybe I'm Amazed ' before you get into songs like ' Listen To What The Man Said '. And then, there's 'Jet.' The song itself works. It rocks pretty hard. It soars pretty far. You get the feeling that you're racing through the sky in an actual jet if you want to flog the metaphor a bit.  But then you actually listen to the lyrics: Jet, jet, jet I can almost remembe

I don't know why I got away from watching movies, but for some reason I did- but even I was shocked to find out that I hadn't posted a Netflix & Chill since the archive went up on November 16th, 2021. Once I saw that, it felt like it was well past time to bring it back, so with a double feature, let's talk about Top Gun: Maverick (we had been meaning to see this one for a while, but finally got around to it) and Sully (TikTok does this thing where they post clips of movies and after a while, when you see enough of them, you just sort of throw up your hands and say "Fine, damn it, I'll watch the whole movie." Sully is the second movie I've dug up and watched purely because I got tired of seeing it in bits on TikTok.) (drumroll, movie fanfare, etc.) Top Gun: Maverick Set 30 years after the events of the first movie, Captain Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is still a test pilot and still just a captain. His tendency towards insubordinati

The Gentlemen Bastard Sequence heads into its second volume with Red Seas Under Red Skies and while the characters are engaging and roguish charming as they were in the first volume ( The Lies of Locke Lamora ) the structure is similar enough to the first book that I hope we see a bit of a change-up in the next volume otherwise this series might risk becoming somewhat formulaic if it goes the distance and we get the full seven volumes that Scott Lynch is apparently planning.  We'll get to the potential structural issues in a minute- let's talk plot first. Red Seas Under Red Skies picks up two years after the end of The Lies of Locke Lamora -- Locke and Jean Tannen have fled Camorr and created new identities for themselves in the island city of Tal Verrar as professional gamblers in a casino known as the Sinspire. The place is run by Requin and his disfigured lover Selendri and they have a strict policy of killing anyone caught cheating, no matter their social rank. Of cours