We're going to make it

There's a scene in Gay Talese's book about building the Verrazzano Bridge where a half-foot long steel bolt falls from way up and hits an iron worker in the cheek with such insane force the tip of the bolt punctures all the way into his throat. Few weeks later he was back working on the bridge again

Hell yes

Wrote about going home for this month's Hydra flaminghydra.com/home-for-the...

This is one of the best and most exciting things I read all year. It's a profile of these two terminators, but there is so much brilliant, wonderful stuff in here too about human genius, obsession, confidence, & the nature of sports narratives. It's dynamite. bookshop.org/p/books/chan...

Yes, true. @flaminghydra.com is $3/month, it is a coop 100% owned by 60+ writers / artists who make it Recent unpaywalled pieces: @samthielman.com on Platner's tattoos: flaminghydra.com/boys-lives/ @josie.zone and @zachrabiroff.com on Marvel's secret ghostwriter: flaminghydra.com/a-swingin-su...

The fiction Colin's written for Hydra the last few months has really knocked me on my ass

Flaming Hydra is a coop. All you can do with your share is sell it back to the coop (for $1), and nobody can have more than one. You have to be ready for growth to take a long time. Journalism is a public trust that should be accountable to readers alone, and that means readers alone pay for it.

This rocks

Wrote about Italy, Caravaggio and man against the machine flaminghydra.com/caravaggio-s...

Current* conditions near Michigan City, IN:

Maybe nothing in sports as close to hard drugs as watching a bullpen rollicking in and out of jams, wet hair and strange jewelry, spitting and cursing, having entire conversations with themselves. A ship of filthy pirates drunk on the high seas.

Clairemont, San Diego @rbuas.bsky.social @damonagnos.bsky.social

Current* conditions near Grand Haven, MI:

There's an ancient-looking tree on the corner between us and the elementary school and some city guys came by to take it down. They sent one of them up into the air in the little bucket with a chainsaw, and every time he cut a branch off the schoolkids all went nuts like there was a walk-off homer.

Drinking the last half of a beer as Dennis Santana gets Ohtani swinging and deciding the 63-77 Pirates will make the playoffs

This is really great

"Whoa whoa whoa. Take a look at this. Now if you're the confederacy, you like that they've put you in this position. Look at this action here by the Union, trying to cross the Rappahannock under the rebel guns. This is as foolish as anything you will see in the league"

"Okay, we have a significant numerical advantage on the left flank. What we want to do is attack that flank, turn it, and roll the Confederates on back to Richmond. But McClellan doesn't see that clearly. He hesitates. And now Lincoln's gotta think about 'can I trust my commanding general here?'"

Re-watching the Ken Burns Civil War doc and doing Hubie Brown Voice as we scan across another battlefield McClellan has let get away from him.

Seek and destroy: defector.com/seek-and-des...

Current* conditions near Michigan City, IN:

There's a lot to be repulsed by in The Argument -- the tone of haughty "We Finally Figured It Out" that permeates the entire project; the flaccid mediocrity of all the people involved, blundering pedants like Yglesias & slimy zeros like Derek Thompson. This was a really sharp, thoughtful discussion.

Watching the Bear Cam is mostly a spaced-out, cooling Zen — Alaskan rivers in the heavy summer months — but there's a strange terror too when a bear arrives in the morning with some fresh & undocumented injury, an enormous gash down the shoulder, a broken jaw flapping open like an old paperback.

There's an excellent crank theory that insists we're playing a lot of old music at least twice as fast as was originally intended, and I wrote about it (and about the collapse of the Western order) for Defector's music week: defector.com/are-we-playi...

This is the real deal

Rooting for a plainly bad and hopeless team is one of the ritual and honestly sometimes charming agonies of following sports, but what the Pirates offer is something far worse. A chop-shop scam from lazy, erratic losers who can’t even sell a coherent narrative you can delude yourself with.

The Pirates are bad, and more than that bad in a way that even squashes so many of the micro excitements you resign yourself to in a season drifting to nowhere, but I think Ke'Bryan Hayes is one of the greatest fielders I've ever watched.

California Valley 2, SanLuisObispo County, CA 🗺35.2709, -119.9894 🧭155° ⛰2707 ft https://ops.alertcalifornia.org/cam-console/1871

Pete's a contemptuous pedant by nature so you expect it from him, but since Zohran's win I've seen this exact same kind of sneering fake-congratulations through gritted teeth a bunch of places, and it always reads to me as even more pathetic and desperate than the explicit attacks on him.

And Moses came upon a burning bush, and God said unto Moses, “Who do you think you are? I am!”

Subscribe to Flaming Hydra. It's $36 a year and you get stuff this good every day.

Folks, they’re calling him Pedo Turkoglu

Weir Canyon North 2, Orange County, CA 🗺33.8523, -117.7236 🧭0° ⛰837 ft https://ops.alertcalifornia.org/cam-console/11094

Francesa has an 8-minute bit in today's show on the new Superman, and it's some of the great grumpy work of his career - an incredulous riff on SuperDog, some Actually Good thoughts on extended universes - but particularly his pronunciation of "Green Lantern" is one for the Long Island Hall of Fame.

Current* conditions near Muskegon, MI:

I wrote about cats, anxiety dreams, wondering if you're irretrievably washed up and joyless. The essential components of living. flaminghydra.com/patton/