• I’m probably not alone in this: When I first heard that Amazon would be celebrating “Prime Day” on July 15, my first thought was — wait, 715 isn’t a prime, it’s divisible by 5. If you’re going to have “Prime Day” in July, then it needs to be on the first, or the ninth, or the 19th, or the 27th. Or on July 33.
Anyway, Volume 2 of The Anti-Christ Handbook won’t quite be ready by Prime Day, but I’m working to have it good to go sometime soon.
• “A Song of Ice and Fire, and Hope?” Matthew Civico on the addictive, unnerving story of Game of Thrones. I relate to much of what Civico says there. This story is compelling because we don’t have any idea how it ends. But we can’t yet know what to make of this story because we don’t have any idea how it ends. We can have ideas or theories or guesses about what it all means, but we won’t know if any of those ideas are true until we know how the story ends.
• Good for Bubba Watson. Here’s hoping this helps some of the other Bubbas to come around.
• Christianity Today — a publication that believes gay and lesbian couples are “destructive to society” — reports that Wheaton College has lost its legal battle to opt out of opting out of providing the insurance coverage for contraceptive care that it used to provide before it became a partisan wedge issue to oppose it. “Wheaton College May Have to ‘Outsource Sin,'” CT says. I suppose that’s appropriate, since they’ve already chosen to outsource biology.
• Every year, on July 1, the New York Mets send former outfielder Bobby Bonilla a check for $1.2 million. The fact that one of the team’s best-paid players is a guy who retired from baseball 14 years ago is dismaying for us Mets fans. The fact that, despite that, he’s driven in almost as many runs as their current lineup is even more depressing.
You may read that headline and think it means that Bobby Bo is the overpaid beneficiary of a sweet deal. But if you read the story, you’ll realize that the team simply made a promise, deferring payment of what Bonilla was rightly owed based on magical thinking about the future growth of its investments. The story, in other words, is a lot like the so-called “pension crisis” for a lot of public workers. The main difference is that the Mets — unlike a lot of rat-bastard governors — are honoring the deal they agreed to.
• Talking Points Memo offers a succinct refresher on the history of the American ritual of having our schoolchildren recite a “Pledge of Allegiance” to the flag. I will, of course, take this as an excuse to repeat my objection to this practice: Requiring children to recite a loyalty oath is just plain creepy. No getting around that.
• I enjoyed the conversation here the other day involving Worst Song nominees. I won’t try to make any sweeping claims here about all of American pop music, but I can identify — categorically — the Worst Song in rotation on the 1970s channel of piped-in music at the Big Box. That would be “Afternoon Delight” by the Starland Vocal Band — a song inexplicably mentioned only in passing in the Dave Barry column discussed here in comments.
I say this with confidence and authority despite the many other strong contenders regularly playing as background music for our shoppers and our overnight freight team — “You Light Up My Life,” “Float On,” etc. What separates “Afternoon Delight” from the pack is the utter incompatibility of its lyrics and its music. Almost no one who can relate to those lyrics can also relate to that music. And vice versa. This is, quite possibly, the least sexy sex song ever recorded. Say what you will about the schmaltz of Debby Boone’s big hit, or about the epic strangeness of the Floaters’ weird masterpiece — the lyrics and the music go together.
That can’t be said of “Afternoon Delight.” At all. We have a winner.
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