"Take Me Out to the Ball Game" Or Bust

Major League Baseball must permanently retire ‘God Bless America' - NY Daily News: 

[It] embodies great things about America, but also our worst things: self-righteousness, forced piety, earnest self-reverence, foam.

It's not the national anthem so, no, I won't stand, won't remove my cap, and certainly won't sing along. (The Yankees, not surprisingly, are the absolute worst about this. Kate Smith's version scrapes the inside of my skull. I'd sooner stand for "Jeter Bless the Bronx" than listen to that mess ever again.)

way down down down in this subbacultcha

The Dark Internet Humor of Harambe Jokes: 

We should not still be talking about Harambe. When I say “should not,” I don’t even mean that it’s morally wrong to joke about Harambe. (Though more on that in a moment.) I mean that, as a running joke, Harambe should have had a shelf life of maybe two weeks. The meme should have died shortly after the animal did. 

But it didn’t.

If @NCGOP didn't do Harambe, it's only because they were beaten to it. Wetting their pants while trying piss on Tim Kaine is about all they're capable of these days.

Here's a screenshot of that @NCGOP tweet about @timkaine, since they deleted it. #DemsInPhilly pic.twitter.com/LbAywwnnob

— Ben Amey (@BenAmeyTV) July 28, 2016

Bernie Smash

Bernie Sanders is now officially with HER.#DemsInPhilly #HesWithUs http://pic.twitter.com/HxqOjx4QA1

— Pin Head (@PiercedSkull) July 26, 2016

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I'm not #ImWithHer, but I applaud Bernie for trying to fix the machine from within. I don't think it's going to work, but in terms of taking steps toward that goal, he did about as well as he could have last night.

Durham's Duffer Bros. On "Stranger Things"

Two Brothers Funnel Their Nostalgia for Eighties-Era Durham Summers Into New Netflix Series Stranger Things | TV | Indy Week: 

Image via Vulture

Fans of the era's genre films will spot plenty of visual and narrative homages in Stranger Things, from the synthesizer-driven score and the Stephen King-style title card to the presence of eighties mainstays Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine in major roles. There are shout-outs to movies such as Poltergeist, The Goonies, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Less Than Zero, and to pop-culture touchstones from X-Men comics to Dungeons & Dragons.

More, if only slightly, than a mere nostalgia machine, Stranger Things aimed to subvert at least one horror trope -- the sexually active teenager will be murdered -- and possibly a second if we consider the wealthy, entitled sport/prep boyfriend has no redeeming features. (The latter, I suppose it could be argued, wasn't crying out for subversion.)

Not a classic, but if a summer read is a thing, then I'd call this a serviceable summer series. Flawed, but not fatally. For example, Winona Ryder didn't really get a chance to shine until the back half of the series, but her character finally got a little room to breathe, so she wasn't completely wasted. Did the "upside-down" parallel dimension make sense? No.

Black Mirror and Les Revenants have been languishing in my queue, think I'm going to finish them off before I finally give Breaking Bad a try.

Wow, We Are A Fragile Species (Vocal Fry Edition)

Can a Woman’s Voice Ever Be Right? -- The Cut:

Image via nymag.com

The public sniping at women’s voices reflects a deeper cultural anxiety about whether they have a right to speak at all. Classicist Mary Beard points out that this anxiety is historic, written into our cultural DNA. She writes, “Public speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender … the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator, but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state.” This is our cultural inheritance, and its patterns play out on Twitter and the floor of the House of Representatives alike: “Women, even when they are not silenced, still have to pay a very high price for being heard.”