Shaping Up

I was going to talk about the upcoming election because this is a political blog (although there are either 9 or 10 games left to play and some teams [hi, Cincinnati!] are just waiting for the season to be over, already.  Tampa Bay, Kansas City, the White Sox, Minnesota, the Angels, and Oakland get to play out the string on the American League side; Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta, San Diego, Colorado, Arizona, and everyone in the NL Central Division who is not the Cubs have cancelled the champagne orders [Wait till next year!].  I don't have favorites this year.  I'm...curiously apathetic.  Must have been the Céspedes transaction.), but I keep getting...distracted.

• Happy 67th to Bruce Springsteen.  His songs, ranked by Caryn Rose for Vulture.
• Avedon lays about with knout and cudgel.
• Michael Caine had to change his name legally (he had been travelling under his original name).  Another reason to kick a terrorist.  (via Avedon's Sideshow.)
• Terry Jones (the other Terry in Monty Python) has been diagnosed with dementia.
• Via Mark Evanier, a long article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine about accusations of Hillary Clinton "scandals."

  Open up any interview with undecided voters, and you will find them equating Trump’s shocking lack of qualifications with Clinton’s mundane transparency issues. (For instance, this Florida voter: “Mr. Trump scares him, Mr. Lewis said. Mrs. Clinton, he believes, is dissembling about her health. He, too, is considering sitting out the election.”) The ongoing normalization of Trump is the most disorienting development of the presidential campaign, but the most significant may be the abnormalization of Clinton.

• Douthat displays his tush ignorance.  Professor Chaos to the rescue:

  Oh. My GAWD! They're pushing a message of anti-hate? And anti-discrimination? And anti-bigotry? What kind of radical leftist bomb-throwers are these that would have us not hate our fellow Americans based on minor differences?

  And Yastreblyansky:

  What the Monsignor [that is, Douthat] is up to in this column isn't the development of some big and magisterial political science theory, as his language might lead you to suppose; it's really first steps in the construction of a narrative about how even though Clinton is going to win it will be bad for the Democrats, and in fact she really isn't going to win in the baseball-statistics sense, because it's the preposterousness of the Trump that will bring her victory and not any virtue of her own.

• Whedon Get-Out-the-Vote video.  Definitely biased.  (This vid precedes  some news videos.)
• Signature (barbershop quartet) doing Queen's "Somebody to Love."  "At Last."  The Barbershop Harmony Society's YouTube page.  Traditional a capella street group doing "My Girl."