Lit City Blues

"Start at the beginning," Wei-Ting said. "What do we know?" They had been sitting the workroom of the Jinsha Precinct for hours now. They had reviewed the footage from the interview in Penghu and they were hitting a dead end. "He said it was a Detective," Pei-Shan said. "The question is which one?" "You've got an alibi, right?" Wei-Ting asked. Pei-Shan shook her head, grinning. "I must be rubbing off on you, kid. But yes, I do. I was at a bar in Jincheng. They'll vouch for me. I'm a regular." "So, who's left?" "Vice, Narcotics and Investigations," Pei-Shan said. "Chen and Lee were on a stakeout in Jinhu," she ticked off two of her fingers. "Chiang was liaising with the Xiamen Water Police on the drowning on Tuyu, which leaves us with-" "Narcotics," Wei-Ting said. "Hwang and Tan." "All right," Pei-Shan said, picking up a nearby phone. "Le...

Ole Smoky is probably familiar to locals as being the purveyors of moonshine that graces the shelves of most of our local liquor stores. And let me tell you: once upon a time, we all had a very, very good time with a jar of their Blackberry Moonshine- and perusing their website and seeing the full extent of their range makes me want to a. go down to Tennessee and come back with the really good flavors and b. reflect once more about the paucity of good liquor in this state because of Iowa's stupid ass liquor laws. (But seriously: go look at their website - hot damn do they have a range and we really only get a fraction of it. Granted, I'm not sure how to feel about some of their whiskey flavors- salted watermelon? But some of their moonshine cherries? Yes, please. Butter Pecan flavored Moonshine? Sounds like a fantastic way to dissolve a few brain cells. Plus, they've got a line of canned cocktails. We here in Ioway are getting straight-up robbed and if someone offered me a ...

Pixar keeps finding new ways to raise the bar that are continually astonishing, so it's no surprise that without hesitation that I can safely say that Soul is probably their best movie to date. (Weirdly, I feel like you can make a case for every subsequent Pixar being their best movie to date- but in the case of Soul , it feels like it's actually true.) The story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a middle school music teacher in NYC who has dreams of a career in jazz. His mom, Libba (Phylicia Rashad) objects to it- especially after he gets a solid job offer for a teaching gig at his school. She wants him to focus on his financial security. Joe pushes forward anyway and when his former student Curley (Questlove) calls him up to tell him that respected jazz musician and saxophone player Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett) is looking for a pianist for a gig that very night, Joe jumps at the chance. He impresses Dorothea who decides to give him a shot for the gig that night- and as he...

The two cars were speeding north toward their destination and Wei-Ting couldn't stop looking out the window. He had never been to Penghu before and was struck by the contrast with Kinmen. Where Kinmen was lush, green and almost choked with vegetation, Penghu was flat, green and full of wide, open spaces. As they passed some wind turbines, the land dropped away as they headed out over a bridge and Wei-Ting turned back to the conversation he had only been half-listening to ever since they left the airport.\ "They ran aground on the Kentei rocks just north of Niaoyu Island," the Penghu County Inspector who had met them at the airport was a rotund, middle aged man by the name of Hu Yaodong. '"Now, we've got a precinct out there, but it's too damn small for a mess this size, so we've been shipping them into the Baisha Precinct all morning." "What were they carrying?" Mei-Shan asked. "The usual," Hu shrugged. "Ton of ephedrine ...

Editor's Note: I love Science Fiction and Fantasy- they're probably two of my favorite genres and I consume just about any version of media- books, TV, movies, streaming that I can get my hands on. Sometimes, though, I'll have some thoughts that don't really fit into a blog post, so I've decided to launch a periodic (I'm hoping once a month) blog post where I nerd out about this kind of stuff. So, please enjoy this inaugural edition of Sci-Fridays! Star Trek Discovery Season 3: I approached Season 3 with a lot of optimism and it turns out that optimisn was right on the money. Personally, I thought the choice to send Discovery into the future at the end of Season 2 was brilliant- almost as brilliant and canon-subverting as J.J. Abrams decision to destroy Vulcan in the first Kelvinverse Trek- the inherent problem with Star Trek is that 50+ years of canon means that you're always getting something wrong and there will always be someone out there somewhere ...

Wei-Ting looked around as they got out of the car. He hadn't been in Taipei for years- so he wasn't sure where they were. There was a gas station tucked under the elevated road across the way, but Mei-Shan and Shan were walking towards an entrance along the side of the 7-11 that led to a set of stairs. The apartment was on the second floor and Mei-Shan knocked three times before the door opened a crack and Wei-Ting saw the face of the young man in the picture. He was older now, of course and exhaustion was etched on his face. He opened the door the rest of the way and sighed. "I must be getting sloppy in my old age," he said. He turned and made his way back into the apartment. "Come on in." They entered the apartment with Shan coming last and checking the hallway before closing the door. The apartment was small, with a kitchenette, a bed shoved under the window and a couch, coffee table and television and not much else. The young man was moving around the sp...

 I didn't really know how to feel about the Disney+ version of The Right Stuff . My initial reaction was: "...but why?" and really, can you blame me? I mean the 1983 film is a classic- Sam Shepherd as Chuck Yeager? That whole opening sequence of him breaking the sound barrier? The rest of the cast of the movie: Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Lance Henriksen, Dennis Quaid, Barbara Hershey, Veronica Cartwright? Incredible! Plus, my memory of The Right Stuff involved watching it in science class in high school and the science teachers were cool enough not to be scandalized and fast forward through the Sally Rand fan dancing sequence (at least I don't think  they fast forwarded through all of it) which was totally educational, I swear. In short, this concept felt like: "Let's remake Lawrence of Arabia and turn it into an 8 episode mini-series and put it on Disney+" it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, but happily, if you're into the early history of th...