Lit City Blues

I enjoyed Season 1 of Reacher enough that I knew I was going to at least check out Season 2 to see where they went with this show and I'm glad I did because Season 2 kicks things up a notch in all the best ways. The second season is an adaptation of the novel Bad Luck and Trouble and opens with a man being thrown out of a helicopter to his death- but not before laughing at the bad guys in a last show of defiance and telling them he wishes he could be around when 'the big guy' hears about this. Cut to Reacher (Alan Ritchson) who is drifting through Arkansas and making a pit stop to collect his pension check when he stumbles upon a carjacking while you, the viewer, may wonder just how common carjackings are in what seems like a fairly bucolic town in The Gem State, you also don't care, because Reacher does a Reacher thing and is very entertaining about it. A military distress code embedded on his ATM receipt, however, sends him back to New York City. There he contacts Ne

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 First 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. The back half of February was unkind on multiple fronts, but the first four chapters have been revised and I've got a draft done of chapter five and am going to roll up my sleeves and start work on chapter six. I am really hoping to get more done over the course of the next three months and get this in much better shape by the time of the ne

When I saw the news that Helen Mirren had signed onto this movie to play Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, I got excited. I mean, who wouldn't? Helen Mirren is Helen Mirren and despite the current conflict in the Middle East, objectively, you would have to assess Golda as one of the more interesting historical figures of the 20th Century. This movie had 'Oscar bait' written all over it to me-- it debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival in February of 2023, dropped in the US in August of 2023, and made its debut in the UK and Ireland (with some unfortunate timing) on October 6th, 2023. There was a casting controversy about Mirren getting the role of Meir because she's not Jewish- though her casting was apparently given the blessing of Meir's grandson, Gideon- but other than that, I was sort of expecting a lot more buzz around this movie.  Then, I actually saw it. Look, Mirren is excellent. There is no denying that she absolutely owns the role and I'm

They hung a banner seven stories high off the side of a building. (Then they followed that up with another one a block away from the top of the downtown parking ramp.) I've seen All-American Banners for various Iowa football greats hanging off Kinnick Stadium over the years. But I'd never seen that. I was at work when I first saw the picture on Twitter and, it being maybe a half a block away and being blessed with one of those days where nothing much is going on, I took a little stroll to see it for myself. It looked even bigger in person. Complaining about Carver-Hawkeye Arena has become an annual tradition for the Iowa Commentariat and for the life of me, I can't figure out why. I get that the Online Commentariat thrives off of complaining about anything and everything, but if you really dig down and look at the place, you'd find that there really isn't all that much to complain about. Carver-Hawkeye is a product of its time ('The House That Lute Built', W

I don't know why I purchased this book. That seems like a funny line to open a book review with, but I've been genuinely thinking about it since it's been sitting on my bookshelves for so long and I think, at the time, I was attempting to get a good grasp of British politics through the purchase of books, ranging from Jenkins' massive biographies of Gladstone and Churchill to Alan Clark's History of the Conservative Party and I think I've got a Pitt The Younger biography I've got to get too and I want to say Paddy Ashdown's diaries are lurking somewhere on my bookshelves as well? So I think that's why, but really, with two World Wars at the start of the 20th Century, I think people forget- because Churchill is a glorious black hole that sucks up ink and draws biographers to him like a moth to a flame- that there were other wartime leaders as well and while everyone probably gravitates more towards David Lloyd George for the First World War, because