Lit City Blues

I have had this book lurking on my bookshelf for years and I've made an attempt or two at actually reading it, but have never made it all the way through- at least until now. It is, I will confess, an abridged version, which some purists may have an issue with, but I didn't.  The story begins with Edmond Dantes who is returning to the port of Marseilles after being at sea and his future is looking very bright indeed He is on the verge of becoming the master of his own ship. He has a young lady that he loves (Mercedes the Catalan) who accepts his offer of marriage. Good fortune, stable finances, and a prosperous life seem to be ahead of him.  However, not everyone is happy with Edmond Dantes. His crewmate, Danglars wants the job that Dantes is on the verge of getting. He's also got a rival for the affections of Mercedes: Fernand Mondego. Together, they plot to undo him and in this, they are helped by an unusual fact. On the way back home, at the behest of the Captain (now d

Okay, this going to seem like a tangent, but stick with me, because it's part of a larger point I think is worth making. I never left Twitter. Some people I know did, but I sort of stuck around to see what would happen and when I didn't see an appreciable decline in the quality of the septic tank fire that it always had been, I shrugged and kept going. On impulse a few weeks back, I downloaded the Threads app, because I find the Threads web interface incredibly clunky and MAN OH MAN is Threads so much better on the app. But I've been running them side by side for a few weeks now and I'm starting to see what people are talking about when it comes to the declining usefulness of Twitter. Now, it's not all bad. Full credit to Elon, Community Notes was a brilliant and much-needed feature that honestly, more social media platforms should copy-- and it should be a lot more widely used than it is on Twitter. But man... it's getting rough. Either my algorithm is breaking

It's just a game, but at the same time it's not. I think it would blow people's minds the number of moving parts involved in making sure a stadium is ready to go for 70,000 people to walk in, sit down, and watch a sporting event for three hours. But last Saturday, I worked the day job for nine hours, holding the baton (in my case, my trusty tactical spork) and dealing with the symphony of gameday chaos. It went better than week one, as it always did, but there was an extra fillup of crazy in the air because it was Iowa State and that's just how the world works. But after my shift, I drove home, grabbed a burger, poured myself a generous measure of single malt whiskey, and wandered down to my firepit where the Missus was waiting for me. The kids eventually joined us, and Smores were made. We listened to music, looked at the stars and it was just perfect. The tension of the day bled out of me and I realized that it was just a game. I walked away from downtown and drove do

I'm trying to think where my fascination with this period of British history began and I think it might stem from a trip to visit relatives in the UK when I was younger where we went and saw a historical re-enactor present about the English Civil War at my cousins' school. The re-enactor in question was dressed as a Cavalier and I thought the overall look, but especially the hat was pretty damn cool. (He also, once he found out we were American informed us that at least one battle of the English Civil War took place in Maryland, which is true .)  As I grew older, I think it was a combination of picking up random books on various UK trips ( Cromwell, Our Chief of Men , King Charles II , and most recently, The Glorious Revolution ) but I think I have to give credit to Mike Duncan's incredible Revolutions podcast that got me interested not just in expanding my own knowledge of the period, but trying to trace back what influence it may have had on the development of American d

I tweeted this: What I’m 👀 for the campaign: 1. Harris VP pick 2. Convention Speech Would hope to see her do some interviews (actual, non-soft ones) after that. Am increasingly convinced that she’s a fundamentally different candidate from 2020. — Tom Nixon (@litcityblues) August 2, 2024 #1: Nailed it.  I get that Walz has some detractors in the Punditocracy, but Harris is working on a condensed timeline and has not time for an intraparty fight, even if it might be one worth having. Shapiro would have helped in Pennsylvania, but he also would have meant an intraparty fight and she ain't got time for that. Walz helps in the Upper Midwest (MN, WI and probably MI) and it doesn't hurt that he used to be a teacher, served in the national guard and is an effective communicator to boot. I have not worn a uniform, so I'm going to let the folks who have litigate any fights over the nature of his service. To me and probably a lot of other normie voters, the fact that he wore the un

This is a well-written essay . I will give the author all his flowers: it's well-written, it's compelling, it's even persuasive (in parts) but it's also utterly wrong. 'Reflections on the revolution in England' immediately grabs your attention, because: what Revolution? The anti-immigrant riots? The criminalization of speech? There's a reason people sailed away from that Island over there and landed on these shores, buddy and it's because there hasn't been a revolution on that sceptered island and its relationship with speech has always been sketchy. This is the same Kingdom that brought us the Star Chamber after all Full credit for this quote, however: The latter shed more heat than light-- the American grasp of European affairs is generally poor, a quality amplified by orders of magnitude when discussing the European grasp on American affairs, which is simply abysmal. Truer words have never been put to paper or screen. It's even worse because

Once, in 9th Grade, I filibustered on the cotton candy-filled goo of Olympic coverage for a solid thirteen minutes because all I wanted to do was watch some fucking speed skating, but no, whoever had the Olympics at the time insisted on filling so much time with human interest stories that it crowded out the sport . Of course, I was in 9th grade and was full of teenage arrogance and lacking in any sort of knowledge of basic media criticism, but I believed what I believed damn it . So when I watch the Olympics, I do judge the coverage. And the older I get, the more judgey I get about it. But, you know what: Paris was awesome .  Medium Spawn and I watched the tape-delayed broadcast of the Opening Ceremonies and, the weird menage-a-trois moment aside, it was awesome. It did something no other Opening Ceremony managed to do effectively and that was a showcase of the host city itself. The boat parade on the Seine? Perfect.  This-- which on the broadcast I remember being dead silent apart fr

I've always had a fascination with maps, dating back to childhood- but that, combined with now obscure 80s cartoons like The Mysterious Cities of Gold has always left me fascinated by the Tierra Del Fuego (because it's literally, 'The Land of Fire') and the Straits of Magellan. So, when I found a book that detailed the voyage that first circumnavigated the globe, it was an easy sell for me. Over the Edge of the World , by Laurence Bergreen tells the story of Magellan's voyage in 1520. It's tempting to credit Bergreen's writing for how quickly he keeps the narrative moving and the pages turning, but in reality, the subject matter does it for him. (That's not to say that the book is badly written, quite the opposite- it's just that sometimes authors need to paint a picture and jazz things up a bit to get the pages turning. Bergreen has absolutely no need to do that with this subject matter.) The politics of setting up such a voyage are interesting en

2024 is going to be the most fascinating election of my lifetime and my political science nerd brain has been running at *Red Alert* for the past couple of weeks now trying to sort all of my initial thoughts and reactions into something coherent and readable and this is my first crack at unpacking it all.  (If you have been living on another planet and/or under some kind of rock: President Joe Biden shortly after the end of the Republican National Convention, announced he was dropping out of the Presidential race and threw his support to Vice President Kamala Harris.) Hopium & Copium: Before The Convention Edition If you, like me, are a voter who's getting tired of feeling like you're trapped in some kind of insane asylum, voting for Kamala Harris is a no-brainer. If she can do a 100-day sprint of an election cycle and manage to win-- and do so convincingly-- it's a hammer blow to the primary system. This is something that has not gotten enough play in my opinion, The p

So, I'm going to try something new this year and post quarterly updates on how I'm doing with my goals for the year. I don't know if this is going to provide me more motivation to keep on top of them throughout the year or give me the chance to do an occasional reset on my goals as I work my way through the year, but I guess we'll see how it goes. Without further ado, here's the Second Quarter Update: 10 For 2024 1. Book 4: Get this book into draft form (close to, if not ready to launch-- fingers crossed!) by the end of the year. I have some other writing goals as well, but this is going to be my big, main focus for the year. Okay, I will be honest--  Book 4 is moving, but slowly- slower than I'd like. I haven't written anything like this before, I went back and revised the first four chapters, got through chapter five and have made a hefty indent on Chapter Six (which I'm hoping to get done this month-- at least that's the plan.) As of this writing,

Another book that's been on my shelf far too long, Five Past Midnight In Bhopal is a harrowing story of the world's worst industrial accident. Before reading this book, I knew the basic outlines of what happened. An industrial plant in Bhopal, run by Union Carbide had some kind of a gas explosion, that killed a ton of people, and then Carbide refused to take responsibility for it. (There were some court cases/decisions in the early 2000s that put this in the news back in the day, so I was vaguely aware of it.)  This book, however, lifted the veil on the horrible details you don't get from reading random news articles about court cases. I don't want to say something trite like "Man, this was way worse than I realized" but that's more or less what I was left with. Honestly, comparing this to Chornobyl in scale and long-term after-effects probably wouldn't be too far from the mark and I don't want to say it's a 'searing indictment of corpora

I had to close the internet last week a few times because it just got to be way too much. I get that the algorithms are designed to feed into rage and hysteria. It's just a general byproduct of social media these days, but sometimes, it gets to be a little much. Especially lately, so let's look at the HYSTERIA METER of late June and early July: 1. The Biden Thing:  I was torn when I first heard about the debate schedule. On the one hand, I've always thought that the Commission on Presidental Debates was a festering pile of horseshit designed to shut out and an all third party candidates to preserve the duopoly as much as possible. (If you can get to 270 electoral votes on paper, you get an invite to the first debate. 15% in the polls get you to the second debate should be the rule.) On the other hand, I didn't know why they were scheduling debates before the convention until it actually happened. You have a debate in June because if you're 81 and people are concern