Lit City Blues

Happy Birthday, America.  It's an odd one this year. I think there's a saying floating around out there in the universe that America is a country that will try literally everything else before doing the thing they know they're going to need to do in the first place. President Trump got his big, beautiful bill. We get no tax on overtime until 2028. Seniors get a $6,000 tax cut just because, and the rich get yet another tax break, and the social safety net gets shredded a little more. I might be inclined to believe that things will work out in the end, and they might, in a half-assed, mediocre sort of way, because President Trump seems to have preternatural amounts of luck. We heard a lot of talk about the Biden Economy and how people were suffering under the Biden Economy, and there were people who felt that, but a lot of people didn't see any difference at all. What if the script flips? What if some people get burned, and for a lot of people, their tax refunds get bigge...

Shockingly, I've been through the complete archives of the original run of Albums2010 , and I don't know if this Album made the cut. It's possible that The Blue Album was lost in the unfortunate WordPress experiment (#68-#80), but it is a glaring omission from the original run of Albums2010 and one that I will have to rectify, and there's no better time than right now. Weezer's self-titled debut dropped in 1994 and I don't consider this a particularly spicy take, but if you do, that's fine, but I'm going to go ahead and say it: this is one of the best albums of the 1990s and apparently Rolling Stone ranked it at 294 on it's list of 500 Greatest Albums of all time, which is probably about right in the grand scheme of things. But for the 1990s- and I know there's a lot of good music that dropped in the 90s, you would have to put this in the Top 25 at least for me to take your list seriously. Probably higher, if I'm being honest. (Doesn't ma...

I wasn't really expecting this. I was thinking maybe by the evening of the 2nd day of the Conclave, maybe they'd push it into day three-- but lunchtime on Day 2? That was a surprise and as I sat (as everyone did) and waited for the official announcement to find out who it was, the more convinced I became that this was going to be a fascinating choice. I don't know if we ever get hard data on vote totals from Conclaves-- I do think names float out there after a while-- who came in second, that sort of thing. (That's how we figured out that Pope Francis was runner-up when Pope Benedict came in)- but if I'm guessing (which naturally, I am) I think that if there was a 'liberal' bloc and a 'conservative' bloc, both sides figured out pretty quickly that their preferred candidates were not going to cut the mustard and set to work finding someone who would. (I also love the attempts to try and force an American political analysis into all of this-- yes, this...

Hey, remember when I wrote my elected officials about the potential cuts to NOAA and the National Weather Service? Remember when the cuts went ahead anyway, and there are now delightful tweets like this one floating around? I want to say again: I'm not against cuts. I'm not against shrinking the size of the government, but what I am against is cutting off your own nose to spite your face. I am against this delusional idea that absolutely everything of value must go regardless of its good or not. This is not good. Don't believe me? Go talk to any meteorologist, and they will tell you that these cuts are a terrible, terrible idea.  (The interesting thing-- if such things could be called interesting-- is going to be how people react to this when the cuts are felt in a real way. I do not think we will be frogs in boiling water that's turned up slowly-- I think we're going to be frogs in suddenly boiling water and we're going to be pissed off. At least I hope so.) A...

The Missus read this book a while back and really liked it, so after hearing her talk about it for months , I finally got around to picking it up and seeing for myself what the fuss was about. In essence, Michael Easter is arguing something pretty unusual that grabs your attention right away: we're too damn comfortable. "Embrace discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self." That's the tagline on the front of the book, and quite honestly, going into it, I was a little bit dubious. I don't know why: I got really into the whole mushroom thing that went around a few years back, and I will happily take Lion's Mane until the end of my days because I found all the mushroom science I read to be somewhat convincing. (I am, I will admit, also the type of person to say, "hey, that supplement sounds interesting, maybe I'll try that," so there's a little bit of that there I've got to be honest about as well.) I've heard all the Joe Rogan ...

 1. Look, I've been saying it for years now, but this has to be the year of Book 4. It's grinding away, little by little but at minimum, I'm going to get this damn thing into a workable draft format this year. If I'm very lucky and write very well, I might be into revisions by the end of the year and beating into shape for a final draft and a release. I have no idea why this is taking so long. I have no excuses to offer. I just really, really want to get this- at a minimum- closer to the finish line this year.  Quarter One revealed to me that Book 4 had a structural problem. I'm working on re-tooling it a bit now and I want to get back into it sometime this month and have palpable progress to report on by the end of this quarter. (For more details, you can see my Substack update.) Do I think I'm still on track to get this thing closer to the finish line by the end of the year? I do. But when I started writing books and putting them out into the world, I mad...