“Pandemics, asteroids, nuclear war, and sudden, destructive climate change” — one of these things might take us out as a species, but there’s nothing to stop you from getting greedy and wishing for all of them at the same time.

Would you like to start out your morning with 15 minutes of ominous harp music inspired by the latest work from the guy who did The Disintegration Loops? Wait, come back! Listen, I know it sounds like something that would only be preferable to an extended session of eyeball extraction, but the music in question is by harpist Mary Lattimore, whose At the Dam has been one of the unexpected delights of the year thus far, and Disintegration Loops guy’s The Deluge is probably the best thing he’s done since he got lucky with those melting tapes. Anyway, let’s be honest: From here on out your mornings are going to get progressively more ominous all the way up until November, if not beyond; at least with harp music you can kid yourself into thinking you’re headed to heaven. Enjoy.

★★ The fog was enough to leave the view faded but not erased; the damp chill was not quite so damp as to threaten rain. Hardly anyone needed to be threatened by this point. Maybe the one man on the downtown platform in bare ankles and white sneakers, or the other in slate-blue suede shoes. The fog lightened still more, to a spectral unclearness on the air. The sky went from gray to white, and people intermittently cast shapeless shadows on the gum-flecked pavement. Then, with the day all but used up, the sky went on over to blue, if not clear blue.

by A Gigantic Fucking Idiot

“A new virtual reality film will take audiences where they never expected to go: directly inside Anne Frank’s attic in 1942.”

I want all of the perks of being rich, without having any money. I want all of the benefits of exercise, without lifting a knee. I deserve a gift registry, even though I am not getting married. I should be allowed to take time off, despite the fact that I am neither ill nor bereaved. I should be treated fairly, even though no one else is. I want to make my boyfriend three hundred sandwiches and I don’t want anyone to judge me for it. I want to be both old and young at the same time. I should be able to drive on driveways and park on parkways. I want to get away to a remote tropical location but also always know what everyone is saying about me and each other online. I want to get a tan but I never want wrinkles or skin cancer. I want to eat my cake, and then eat another slice, and then eat the whole rest of the cake without any of it hitting my caloric bottom line. I want the New York Post to stop pandering to the outrage machine but I also want to be entertained. I want to write about how takes are bad but without it being a take. I just want everyone to love me. Is that too much to ask?

If you have not yet come across Fluxblog’s survey of the 1980s I highly recommend that you check it out. It’s currently down to 1983, and as an Actual Old Person who was There At The Time I can personally guarantee that it was almost exactly like this, only more poignant because of the very real threat of nuclear annihilation that haunted our every waking moment.

“[W]hen they rest they come close to death: on frigid nights, or when they are starving, they retreat into torpor, their metabolic rate slowing to a fifteenth of their normal sleep rate, their hearts sludging nearly to a halt, barely beating, and if they are not soon warmed, if they do not soon find that which is sweet, their hearts grow cold, and they cease to be.”

Maybe people become enraged during air travel because rent-seeking and the exploitation of labor results in insecurity, instability, and inequality while inculcating conformism, commodity fetishism and a tragic acceptance of our powerlessness against the system’s inevitable destruction of free will. Also those assholes who lean their seats all the way back.

Awl pal, The Parent Rap columnist, and The Cut staff writer Laura June has sold her book, Now My Heart is Full, to Penguin. Congratulations, Laura!! Hi Zelda.

What if I told you the greatest baseball game in History happened seventy years ago this year? What if I told you that the score was ninety-six to ninety-five? And that it ended with a controversial play on the top of a skyscraper? And that the Statue of Liberty even took a side?

Baseball may be our national pastime, but it can be laborious. And boring. And interminable. It’s one of my favorite sports, because you can take a nap in the middle and by the time you’ve woken up you really haven’t missed much. Soccer is the best at this. Go to sleep at 0–0. Wake up at 0–0. They’ve started to make rules in baseball to try to make the game go a little quicker. But most National League games still last about three hours and most American League games still last four. So when the Tea Totalers took on the Gashouse Gorillas at a packed Polo Grounds in 1946, how come the game only took seven minutes? What made this game so fun?

The Gashouse Gorillas were a visiting team, but one New York could love. Nine identical, thug-looking ruffians literally doing a line-dance around the bases. With tank-like physiques that would be impressive today even in our era of PED-dominated hardball, their mugs identified them for what they were: bullies. And no one likes to cheer for bullies. Except New York. No one cares about the little guy in New York. There’s four million Cinderellas and another four million Ragged Dicks. Nothing will ever come of them and they certainly will never play baseball here. We want giants, juggernauts, bombers. There’s no pity when lovable underdogs come to town. It’s our birthright to crush them. This is New York. We’re loud, we’re obnoxious, we’re bullies. If you had the choice to be a bully or an underdog, no one would chose the underdog. In the real world, underdogs lose. And baseball forgets losers.

This is the only game where a town was so in love with a team, they adopted them in the middle of the game. Check out the scoreboard: the Gorillas were the only team in history to go from the away team to the home team.

I come not to bury the Gorillas, however. They are the kind of team I could cheer for. I don’t want my baseball heroes to be goody-two shoes nice guys. I want them to stay up late, staring at a hotel wall desperately gripping a baseball bat tightly, haunted by the hits they did not get. I don’t want them to have the souls of poets. I’m the one with the soul of the poet, and I only hit one home run in my entire baseball career, because a tree had grown so far over a tall fence in right field that hitting a tree meant hitting a home run. I was the only kid to ever run the bases incredulous, not confident. There must be some mistake: that’s how underdogs think. I want to marvel at the talents of the over-confident, overpaid, under-hygiened. And the Gorillas were a cigar-smoking jackhole mob.

And the crowd loved it. Caps only landed long enough to be thrown in the air again. They recall the William Carlos Williams poem “The crowd at the ballgame”:

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly — 

This is
the power of their faces

This was their kind of team and this was what they expected. But what does New York expect even more than winners? Haters.

The hometown Tea Totalers were a team worth ignoring and disowning. And they were doing a great job of being ignorable. Down by more than ninety runs after four innings, their chances in the game looked bleak. One of their main sluggers claimed to be ninety-three and a half years old. Their pitcher looked similarly aged. They were completely outclassed. Even when the pitcher threw a strike, the umpire was beaten by a Gorilla until it was called a ball.

But even this type of dominance didn’t satisfy the Gashouse Gorillas. They paid no mind to the fans throwing caps in the air. They did not hear the zealous announcer. They heard the one dissenter booing from a hole he’d burrowed into the field. That voice is the voice all baseball fans get to use when they’ve had a few beers and a few dogs. Or carrots in hotdogs buns. This fan believed he could beat the entire baseball team entirely by himself. And got the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to replace an entire team mid-game.

There are very few chances to individually dominate the game of baseball. You generally have one at-bat every three innings. Pitchers these days usually only get six or seven innings to weave their masterpieces. After that, you have to rely on the bullpen not to punch a hole on your Mona Lisa. So to have a player throw his first pitch and then run behind the plate and catch it, you knew you were in for something special. Bugs Bunny was not known as a pitcher for his fastballs. He was a pitcher that played on the black. “The Bugs Bunny Change-up” is still the gold standard of all off-speed pitches. It is unhittable, filthy nonsense. The kind that makes big sluggers look silly.

Like most geniuses, genius pitchers like to talk to themselves on the mound. Sometimes directly to an unseen movie camera. Mark Fidrych of the Detroit Tigers in the seventies comes to mind. And when Bunny said “I think I’ll perplex him with my slow pitch” he wasn’t bragging. It is possibly the most mystifying pitch in the history of Baseball. Even the mysterious eephus pitch or the wacky knuckleball never struck out three batters in one inning on one pitch.

Bugs Bunny may be remembered for his pitching prowess, but he was prodigious at the plate as well. Coming back after being down ninety-five runs is unheard of in all the major North American sports, and is probably only humanly possible in bowling and cricket, whose rules are unknowable. Bugs wasn’t a bopper with the bat like the Gorillas, but what he lacked in pop he made up for in guile. He hotdogged it around the bases, and would clearly have been out at the plate had he not whipped out a poster of an attractive lady to distract the Gorilla ready to tag him. He outsmarted a Gorilla who had beat up and replaced the umpire at home. He sent one to an early grave with a clean liner to the outfield and left another one conked-out against the wall. Balls collided with players like the inside of a pinball machines. But perhaps Bunny’s greatest feat was defeating the scoreboard itself. If you added up all of the Gorillas’ runs in the first four innings (all earned against the Tea Totallers’ elderly pitcher with the wacky sideburns) you would get ninety-six. The game should have been a tie when the final out was made. Extra innings should have been played! What wonders might have awaited.

We’ll never know. Instead, we got one of the most controversial finishes in all of sports. Bunny gave up a long drive that left the stadium. Did he give up? He did not. He raced from the stadium and jumped into a cab — a cab, somehow driven by a Gorillas’ player, that started off in the wrong direction. Bunny had enough time to switch to a downtown bus, go to the top of the “Umpire State Building,” hoist himself up a flagpole and toss his glove into the stratosphere. It was an incredible catch, but was it legal? Should the game have ended? You can catch a ball on the field and fall out of play and it’s an out. But can you really travel a mile downtown to make a catch? That’s one for the rulebook junkies.

Scoring ninety-six runs and driving in ninety-six RBIs in one game are records that will never be broken. Bugs Bunny is the kind of ball player we can all cheer for. He’s a gamer, and will do whatever it takes to win. You may not want to hang out with him off the field, because he’s a loudmouth and a self admitted “stinker.” But I could watch him play all day. He supplied the greatest performance in all of sports, and when I walk down the street with my kids someday and see him leaning up against a building, chomping a carrot, I will tell them: “That’s the greatest baseball player I have ever seen.”

And that’s the magic of baseball. Not the slugging or the fastballs. But the magic of the thing. You leave the park thinking, I’ll never see anything like that again.