• Hope everyone reading this in the U.S. had a good Labor Day weekend — or, as they call it at the Big Box, “Protecting Your Signature Day Weekend.” (“Protecting Your Signature” is the name of the very first training video that every new hire of the Box is required to watch and, ironically, confirm having watched with their signature. When I saw that title I naively thought it had something to do with vigilance against identity theft in the retail biz. But no, it’s all about the purported danger of signing up for unions.)
And for everyone reading this in the rest of the world, yeah, we ‘murkans don’t celebrate Labor Day on May 1 like normal countries. That’s American exceptionalism for you.
• I haven’t got a PlayStation, or the time to enjoy one, but boy does “Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture” look like it’s a game I’d want to play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z8qv6qhhAY• Happy Birthday to St. Augustine, which turns 450 years old today.
On Sept. 8, 1565, Don Pedro Menendez de Aviles landed on the shores of Florida, his devout followers clutching their King James Bibles and thanking Almighty God for this New World on which they hoped to build a Christian Nation with prayer and creationism in schools, traditional marriage, small government, punitive co-pays for women’s health insurance, white male hegemony, English as the official language, and guns for everybody.
Or something like that. (I’m not clear on the details — I haven’t watched all the cartoons in Mike Huckabee and David Barton’s “Learn Our History” series yet.)
• I thought about posting a round-up of recent commentary on the whole Rowan County business, where Kim Davis is doing her best Orval Faubus impersonation, but Bill Lindsey already did a fine job with that, so just go read his.
Timothy Kincaid also offers an encouraging look at Republican candidates’ responses to this nonsense — which hopefully shows that the GOP, despite its recent ritual of pilgrimages to Liberty University, hasn’t quite yet wholly embraced the full-gonzo alternative universe of Liberty’s lawless law school.
• Temple 27. Penn State 10. This is encouraging. My older daughter is a junior at Temple and I’ve been impressed with the school in almost every way — terrific professors, exciting opportunities for study, top-line facilities, etc. Everything has been great except the Bursar’s Office and the finance department, which is like something out of Brazil (the Terry Gilliam bureaucratic dystopia, not the country). It’s all fax machines, photocopiers, and a nightmare of manila folders misfiled in the wrong catacomb of battleship-gray file cabinets.
But if the Owls’ moribund football program can turn things around, then maybe — just maybe — there’s hope for Temple’s inept Bursar’s Office as well.
• In other sportsball-related news, I’m five years older than Bartolo Colon, but watching him play makes me feel young:
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