Lit City Blues

I'm going to recharge my creative batteries for a bit this month and step away from regular blogging. I might pop up here and there if the mood strikes me, but expect regular coverage to come back July 1st...

Adopt-A-Team: They survived! Defensa y Justicia managed a solid 9th place performance and didn't get relegated! My curse (if you could call it a curse since this is only year two) has been stopped in its tracks. We checked in with them last time on March 14th, wrapping up their season looked like this: L to Talleres Cordoboa L to River Plate W over Boca Juniors W over Racing Club W over Independiente W over Rosario Central L to Newell's W over Arsenal Sarandi W over Mitre (Copa Argentina, 1st Round) Out of the three losses down the stretch, only Newell's seems to be a bad one as they're  at the far end of the Superliga table- though three teams above the eventual relegation zone. Both Talleres Cordoba and River Plate finished ahead of Defensa y Justicia in the table and the win over Boca Juniors (eventual winners of the league, surprise surprise) is good. Not sure where I'm going next season yet, but stay tuned for the fall, because I'm sure it...

I'm not a Democrat, but I find them to be incredibly frustrating at times. To me, if the Democrats can't claw back something on the state level here in Iowa (not to mention nationally) this cycle, then the future for the party looks bleak indeed. The actions of the legislature down in Des Moines only underlines the importance of the Democrats getting their act together for November- this session, kids, is why you don't give one party the keys to the whole damn place. If they can't get the Governorship, it'd be great to claw back at least a chamber of the legislature just to limit the damage at very least. I want sensible governance. Keep the financial house in order. Keep the kids in school Monday-Friday and make sure no bridges fall down. Governance as political warfare? That I won't reward and that's exactly what the Republicans have delivered for the past two years. So, when I found the Democratic Primary Debate from Iowa Press online , I was all about ...

Watched On: Amazon Prime Released: 2017 Starring: Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevinge, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Krus Wu, Rutger Hauer Rotten Tomatoes: 49% By the 28th Century, the International Space Station has grown so large that it's had to be moved out of Earth's orbit and into deep space. Once safety away from Earth, it just keeps right on growing and growing and growing until it becomes Space Station Alpha, home to thousands of civilizations and millions of inhabitants, both human and alien. Special Agent Valerian (Dane DeHaan) wakes up from a a dream about the planet Mul, where the inhabitants live in a low technology paradise. The pearls they fish for contain enormous amounts of energy and small, lizard like creatures replicate more pearls. In his dream, he sees wreckage begin plummeting from the sky and then there's an apocalyptic explosion and just before it reaches the young princess, she sends out a telepathic signal- and then, Valeria...

The Red Hot Chili Peppers were always on the radio when I was in junior high and high school. There's a small collection of bands that just sort of throw me back to the days of Q103 and RHCP are for sure one of those bands. But it wasn't I saw Anthony Kledis induct the Talking Heads into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that I really sat up and took notice. Not long after, I think I purchased this album and enjoyed the hell out of it. It might still be lurking in my basement right now. Released in 1991, Blood Sugar Sex Magik was their fifth studio album, which seems slightly ridiculous to me. I always assumed they were firmly a product of the 1990s, but in fact, they made their debut all the way back in 1984, only a year after my birth. ( Their self-titled debut apparently was credited as the 'first release from the funk metal genre' and has also been described as 'the little spark that ignited the rap rock revolution'. So Red Hot Chili Peppers begat the like...

It's a special Friday edition of This Week In Vexillology and we're heading back into the Lost Archives of the Unfortunate Wordpress Experiment to take a look once more at the flags of the two Guineas: Guinea and Guinea-Bissau. First up, we've got Guinea: Adopted on November 10th, 1958 for national and civil usage Guinea followed Ghana (and I guess Ethiopia's lead) in using the pan-African colors of red,  yellow and green. The flag is modeled on the French Tricolor (since Guinea was a French Colony) and the colors are also taken from the RDA, the Rassemblement Democratique Africain, which was the dominant political movement at the time of independence. (Apparently Sekour Toure, the first President of Guinea was a close associate of Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana who's flag is remarkably similar to Guinea's.) The color scheme is pretty simple: red symbolizes the sacrifice of the people, the yellow is for the sun and the riches of the earth an...

So, a recommendation for an episode of Pod Save The World floated past me on my Twitter feed and since it was about the Iran Deal (and President Trump's decision to withdraw from it), I thought I'd give it a listen and see what they had to say on the matter. It was... disappointing. Less an analysis on the pros and cons of the decision and more a twenty minute segment bemoaning the decision and rending their garments over the damage this disastrous decision is going to do to America's standing with our allies and in the world. Now, don't get me wrong: all of that could be 100 percent true. Withdrawing from the Iran Deal could be a boneheaded, dumbass move that we could seriously regret at some point in the future. So their analysis isn't invalid, per say. It's just not the only school of thought out there . The whole time I'm listening to the episode, this clip from The West Wing kept running on a loop in my head. "Look at the whole board." ...