You know what this town needs? Batman, that's what. If and when I get to make a Batman movie, fuck Chicago, I am making it in Philadelphia. This town IS Batman. You will not believe how well art directed Philadelphia is. The Batmobile ripping through downtown would look pretty scratch, my friends.

The statue above is a big pile of feet. I saw it and said "corporate stress" and Matty Price said "familial obligations." We invite the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Hey, today we went to Independence Hall which is the cheesiest and most obvious thing you can do in this town, and was therefore really just about the best thing we've done. Yeah call me a whore for the obvious historic touchstone but standing in the room where the Declaration was signed was worthwhile. Then later in the day we watched the Fourth of July parade and got to see firsthand exactly where all those good (and not so good) intentions ended up. A study in narrative, this place is.

Here's Matty Price wearing a really, really, really big hat:

We did a nice, fat on-the-road Mamo this morning - longer than usual and covering the expected plate of summer releases of the past week and change. We also had a bunch of time to kill this afternoon so we went to the Mütter Museum which houses a collection of medical oddities. There was shit in there that would grease your hair for free, Internet. Like a woman with a goddamn 8-inch fucking horn growing out of her head, for one. And info about Abigal and Brittany, who continue to fascinate. But the one that really took me was the skeleton of a guy who lived for 39 years with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, a disorder which basically turns injured muscle and tendon tissue into fucking bone. Can you imagine that shit? Your soft tissues start turning to bone??? I know osteogenesis imperfecta is a completely different thing but looking at that strange, sad skeleton, and knowing that he lives in the city, it wasn't hard to see where M. Night Shyamalan came up with Mr. Glass. We've got this incredibly complex computer code running our systems from the moment sperm hits egg, and if even one of those bajillion combinations of data goes awry, all kinds of crazy holy shit can come babbling out. It gives one pause.

The storm-darkening skies over Independence Hall:

The rains came just as the parade was winding down. We walked back out to South Street and then along, after the rains had stopped and a perfect twilight was descending. Found a really good comic book store a bit too late to be useful - they were closing up, and aside from a sweet conversation with the guy behind the counter who said that the Silver Snail and the Beguiling were reason enough for him to move to Toronto, we had to scarper before any real commerce could be achieved. (Still picked up a couple Emily the Strange books.) Then we hopped in the Pricemobile and were on our way back to the hotel when the mother of all fucking rainstorms came down and blew us clear off course - literally. We were halfway to Jersey before we got turned around and back in the right direction.

In all respects, a successful broadcast.