Lit City Blues

I'll be honest: I think the next couple of years in both the Marvel Universe and the Star Wars Universe are going to be interesting to watch because I think both studios risk running into a hitherto unknown phenomenon in the world of entertainment: content overload. I am woefully behind on my Marvel movies and shows and you know, at this point, there are so many of them I don't know if I'll ever catch up, and more to the point, they're starting to feel like a chore , you know? So I approached Moon Knight with something approaching a mixture of outright indifference and mild curiosity. I like Oscar Isaac. It looked interesting. It was only six episodes long- so, why not check it out? Moon Knight opens with Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac) going to his job at the British Museum in London- he's hoping to be a tour guide eventually, given his extensive knowledge of Ancient Egypt, but after going to sleep one night, he wakes up in the Austrian Alps, at a cult meeting led by Ar...

I love Star Trek. I've always loved Star Trek-- I got into it a bit too late for The Next Generation (but I do remember watching 'Rascals' on television one Saturday night when it was actually airing)- but DS9, Voyager, everything that came after? I grew up with all of it. Eventually, I went back and watched every bit of Star Trek I could get my hands on and I am loving Discovery, Lower Decks, Picard, Prodigy, and now Strange New Worlds. I love the shows. I love the franchise. I love the characters. I love the struggles and fighting to keep an optimistic future. I love it when creators and writers take risks with the franchise- because sometimes the results are uneven, but (and granted I may be a wee bit biased because I love the franchise so much) rarely are the results genuinely bad. But what I can't stand? Less charitable people would call it: "Terminally online people who do nothing but complain, complain, complain," but a better and more charitable descri...

Westerns aren't usually my thing, but this one was recommended by a co-worker, and what a recommendation it turned out to be. The Son is an amazing novel and although I went the audiobook route for this one, the audiobook was even more brilliant, because they've got Will Patton, Clifton Collins, and Kate Mulgrew to do the narration for it.  The story begins with Eli McCullough at the end of his life, beginning narration of his last testament before flashing us back to the Texas frontier of 1849. Eli is 13 years old when his family is attacked by the Comanches which results in the rape and murder of his sister and mother. Eli and his older brother are kidnapped and eventually, Martin, his brother dies as well. Eli is eventually welcomed into the band- first as a slave and then gradually as a full member of the tribe. He's eventually adopted by Toshaway, the man who kidnapped him. A series of misfortunes eventually it the tribe, including an outbreak of disease that eventual...

Look, I read a lot of books on my own but I've also got a healthy posse of crotchgoblins, so it occurred to me that poking into the weird and wonderful world of Children's Books or more precisely, the books my children sometimes charm me into reading (when they pick good ones) or force me into reading (when they pick the bad or interminable ones) and so because Kids should do shots (like Bookshot) but they do drink plenty of juice boxes, when given the opportunity, Kids Bookbox was born and for this inaugural edition of what I'm sure will be an intermittent feature on the blog, we're going to look at an interminable book and a charming book. So, first up: the interminable book. Let's leave aside the tiresome Culture War Brain Worms that had the internet all in a tizzy about Dr. Seuss being canceled sometime last year. The fact is that every parent should probably realize by now that Dr. Seuss has a lot to answer for and not necessarily in a good way. Yes, they'r...

We are clinically insane. But we loved our first Great Dane so much that after my parents' dog got sick and couldn't play as much we wanted to get her a friend and so what's better than one Great Dane? Two of them.  Yes, we know we're crazy. Four kids, three cats, two dogs... and Penelope Joy (Poppy for short) is finally home and settling in. 

Development doesn't usually bother me. The great economic engine that powers the city, county, state, and our nation I think makes it more or less inevitable. I can't say I'm a huge fan of the multiple steel-and-glass apartment complexes that seem to be springing up all over downtown, but I'm not going to join protest groups like The Coalition Against The Shadow to protest Mordor's plans to build a tower on the edge of downtown. While Wal-Mart isn't my favorite corporation on the planet, I laughed at the whole STOP IOWA CITY WAL-MART thing. (Not because Wal-Mart wasn't shitty at the time- my impression is that it treats its workers marginally better now, but because Champagne Socialists and White Liberals always, without fail, come down on the side of performative activism instead of wanting non-rich people to have an affordable place to buy food.)  And if you really want to throw it all the way back to way back in the day, it still amuses me that the Firs...

I stumbled across the Revolutions podcast a few years back and ate that up like nobody's business. Not wanting to stop consuming quality history content, I went ahead and took the plunge into The History of Rome- though I'll freely admit that Roman history is not something I've ever been particularly interested. Having consumed all that content and appreciating the level of work that Mike Duncan put into creating his respective podcasts, I figured the least I could do was buy his book, The Storm Before the Storm . As I mentioned, Roman history just isn't my thing. That's not because I dislike it- I grew up eating up Greek mythology and loved the epics of Homer, but I just never got into it for whatever reason. Other than the basic outline of Roman history (first a city-state, then a Republic, then Ceasar comes along, crosses the Rubicon and they become an Empire which eventually splits in two while Byzantium continued and the west collapsed) I didn't get into t...