Today's Phillies T-shirt of the day is an oldie but goodie: The Birdland/Fightins.com Matt Stairs Moon Shot shirt (submitted by friend of the Clog/CP contributor Matt Hotz)  that's an appreciation of the take-and-rake slugger's mammoth home run and subsequent ass-hammering in last year's League Championship Series vs. the Dodgers.

However, we're making special notice of the available Moon Shot hoodie, given that the whole team could probably use one or four of these tomorrow night in Denver where the high temperature is predicted to be 34, the low 28 and, oh yeah, there's snow in the forecast.

All of which makes this armchair analyst a little suspicious of Charlie Manuel's burning potential game-3 starters Joe Blanton and J.A. Happ in yesterday's loss, meaning that the guy they're now more likely to start  (unless Manuel pulls another trick from up his sleeve) is Pedro Martinez, a frail, aging hurler who hasn't thrown more than four innings in a start since tossing 119 and 130 pitches in back-to-back starts Sept. 8 and 13.

Granted, that would seem to make Kyle Kendrick Pedro's caddy should the great one get bumped early (or should his arm, say, freeze, drop off his body and shatter), and given Kendrick's ground-ball tendencies, that might actually be the decent Plan B for (given that yesterday, original plans A and B limped off the field and threw 19 pitches respectively). Though, now that we think of it, pitching at Coors is probably Kendrick's main role on this roster.

Anyway, back to shirts: Let me add that I've always appreciated the clever way the people at Birdland/Fightins get around the licensed team logo issue by just popping the player's uniform number on the front panel of the hat/helmet.

Got a nomination for a Phillies T-shirt of the day? e-mail it to bhoward (at) citypaper (dot) net.

And don't forget, Phils play again Saturday at freaking 9:37 on TBS (unless, y'know, it's snowing).

Ballantine, Aug. 25

In today's Shelf Life lit column, Justin Bauer compares four novelists who grapple with notions of identity — Boualem Sansal, Rawi Hage, Michelle Huneven and Dan Chaon — with varying success.

He particularly dug Chaon's Await Your Reply:

Chaon's characters — three sets of them, in three independent, loosely linked storylines — each willingly shuck off the lives they've been given. They get into their cars and set off to create entirely new selves, in the barrenness of the Michigan backwoods or an abandoned Great Plains motel or trekking through the Canadian tundra.

On one hand, Chaon's bleak, thrilling high-wire stories celebrate the freedom of losing yourself, even as this lack of stability opens up his narrative to weirdness and terror. But in showing the ease with which his characters cast off one identity and assume another, Chaon questions the basic existence of a single identity.

Since today feels like the kind of day we'd like to trade our identity out for someone else's (maybe someone who has Phils playoff tickets?), we're giving away a copy to the first Clog reader who can answer the following trivia question:

At which Midwestern college does Chaon teach?

E-mail me at carolyn.huckabay@citypaper.net for a chance to win. (Go Phils!)

Let's try to do this every day of the Phillies playoff run:

Today's Phillies T-Shirt of the day comes from woot.shirt.com Todd Marrone, was submitted by CP's own Drew Lazor and depicts Big Phoot, the Phillie Phanatic's wild cousin:

Todd Marrone | woot.shirt.com

Big Phoot

Got a nomination for a Phillies T-shirt of the day? e-mail it to bhoward (at) citypaper (dot) net.

And don't forget, Phils play again this afternoon at 2:37.

Julia Harte with your mid-morning fix.

The U.S. Supreme Court was debating whether a cross erected in the Mojave National Preserve to honor fallen soldiers violated the First Amendment's ban on governmental establishment of religion.

A Northeast Philadelphia couple was on trial for attempting to faith-heal their two-year-old son rather than seek medical treatment. The boy died of bacterial pneumonia in January.

France's Culture Minister, Frederic Mitterand, was facing intense pressure to resign over his defense of Roman Polanski as well as an autobiography in which Mitterand stated that "the abundance of very attractive and immediately available young boys" in Thailand "put me in a state of desire."

A new study suggested that the birth control pill, by suppressing hormone levels, has made women more likely to seek a responsible, long-term mate rather than lusting after the men with most sex appeal.

More than 600 Jane Austen fans were preparing to descend on Philadelphia for the the 31st-annual general meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

The German author Herta Mueller, whose novels and stories about political alienation have been periodically censored in her birthland of Romania, won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature.

CP contributor/friend of the Clog Jesse Delaney writes sharing these two T-shirt designs from excellent T-shirt site Philavania.com:

If I see someone wearing this shirt I might have to beat him down on sight.
Such is my disgust with SEPTA.

This one, too.

Jon Solomon

I'm not sure whether newspapers can have sister stations, but we think of WPRB like family around here. Aw. It's true, the free-form commercial-free radio oasis up there in Princeton does so much we like — especially on Wednesday nights when Jon Solomon keeps score at home.

Solomon — who hosted CP's Local Support podcast, back when we could afford such a luxury — is always turning me on to new music, and setting aside blocks of time for in-studio live sets by artists from the Philly-NJ-NYC area.

Tonight, WPRB starts its annual membership drive. I recommend you tune in — Solomon goes on at 7 p.m. with guests/music by like Obits, Jennifer O'Connor, Danielson, Screaming Females, The Spinto Band,  Caterpillar, Bitter Bitter Weeks, Rebecca Gates and Tim Midgett — and consider sending some money to keep the station rocking and pick up a sweet t-shirt.

Julia Harte with your mid-morning fix.

Nine Philadelphia men, members of the Pagans outlaw motorcycle gang, were arrested along with more than 40 members in other states after the unsealing of a nationwide racketeering indictment.

Microsoft was being investigated by a European Union competition commission to ensure that the software giant is allowing its customers to run web browsers made by rival companies on its operating systems.

Defense contractors are often negligent, subject to little oversight and irresponsibly compensated, according to a new investigation by the Associated Press. Auditors for the Defense Department found that independent military contractors have received as much as $6 billion from the U.S. government in payments of questionable cause.

Philadelphia's Board of Revision of Taxes will be replaced by an independent entity that will no longer set property values or be permitted to exhibit personal and political favoritism, Mayor Nutter announced.

China's efforts to clean up its energy sector were paying off, according to a report from the International Energy Agency, and the nation will be at the forefront of the fight against climate change if it achieves its predicted savings.

Apple is the most recent company to quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest of the Chamber's climate policy, especially its opposition to regulating greenhouse gases and implementing a cap and trade bill.

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

The latest victim in a spate of random cruelty against Philadelphia-area felines, a six-week-old kitten in Chester, died at the vet from injuries sustained while being set on fire and stoned.

A Saylorsburg, PA woman was mauled to death by her 350-lb pet black bear, Teddy, whom she had raised from cubhood in a secluded menagerie that also contained an African lion, cougar, jaguar, tiger and leopard.

Counterterrorism experts were alarmed by the news that an al-Qaeda suicide bomber was able to ingest an explosive, pass through airport security and fly to Saudi Arabia, where he detonated after a signal from his cell phone. Though the target was not killed, the incident was a striking example of the innovative terror technology being developed by al-Qaeda.

More Americans die prematurely from preventable causes -- illnesses such as diabetes, epilepsy, stroke, influenza, ulcers and pneumonia -- than almost any other industrialized nation, according to new research from the Commonwealth Fund.

A tree estimated to be over 600 years old was chopped down in its Queens neighborhood after a tree expert warned that rot had made the 70-foot-tall, 100-foot-wide colossus liable to fall over.

The new building that will house the Barnes collection of impressionist and early modern art will be a "gracious, golden-hued temple - contemporary in style," according to the Philadelphia Inquirer's architecture critic Inga Saffron. It will include the typical museum spaces that the collection doesn't have at its Merion site, such as a special-exhibits gallery, café and support spaces.

photo by Mark Stehle

The Nor'easter.

CP Choice Winner Shannon McDonald — you know, the Temple student reporter who exposed racist coptalk in a ridealong story — has some unexpected and ambitious plans for her NEast Philly newsblog: She wants to give the operation a real-world presence the form of a storefront. Which is why McDonald and co. are applying for a $40,000 Knight Foundation grant (which, Google tells me, does not come with a talking car). Quoth the application:

We intend to rent a small, centrally located office that will serve as an open newsroom for residents and our small staff. We'll choose a resident from each neighborhood to receive basic journalism training, professional support, access to multimedia equipment and a small payment of roughly $15 per post, if they share an update from their neighborhood at least once a week. They will include coverage of monthly civic meetings, but also updates on community events and interviews with other residents. Their coverage will then be curated by our professionally trained editor, whose time will be freer to track trends and write larger, more in-depth pieces when necessary.

photo from thespec.com

Dan Carcillo was not implicated in the incident.

I don't have any bloggity quips for this. It's just bizarre and it bummed me out. According to the Daily News's Stephanie Farr, some Flyers fans got into a knife fight in the Northeast.

In the bizarre incident, two Flyers fans who took a bus trip to see their team play in New Jersey were critically stabbed by other Flyers fans who were awaiting the bus' return at a bowling alley in Northeast Philadelphia, police said.

...

During the course of the argument, the cop's 28-year-old brother was stabbed once in the chest and once in the back by a man in a Flyers' jersey, Northeast Detectives said.

Another occupant of the bus, a 26-year-old man, was stabbed once in the back by a different assailant who also wore a Flyers jersey, this one with ripped sleeves, police said.

On the upside, the Flyers has look pretty amazing in their first two games. Ray Emery blanked the Canes on Friday, and a crazy, cannonballing offense destroyed Marty Brodeur and the Devils on Saturday. Thi Pronger guy's pretty good, eh?

Yesterday, on the PA House Floor, Representative Mike O'Brien, whose district includes Fishtown (where the SugarHouse casino is expected to open), introduced an amendment to Senate Bill 711  — the gambling "reform" bill that also seeks to introduce table games like Blackjack and Poker — that would require Pennsylvania casinos to pay an additional 1 percent tax on gross table gaming revenues. The revenue would go straight to the county hosting that casino.

The amendment passed.

Whoopee, right? Everybody wins! Except the casinos, but they've won so much already they shouldn't mind.

But wait — there's more.

Click For More »

The Phillies are playing things close to the chest with regards to their playoff rotation in that they've not yet announced it. In fact, all they've announced is that they're not announcing it.

So we'd like you, dear readers of the clogosphere, to pick the rotation for them.

Of the pitchers on the Phillies roster who've started games in September (not including Jamie Moyer who's out for the season), what 4 pitchers should be in the rotation? And what should that rotation be, which is to say, who should start Wednesday's 2:37 p.m. Division Series opener and so forth?

Julia Harte with your morning fix.

The U.S. Supreme Court was preparing to take on a Western Pennsylvania case against a man convicted but later acquitted of unlawful cruelty to animals in his dogfighting videos.

Bereaved female macaque monkeys in Morocco were observed to drink their own milk, possibly to relieve stress or boost their immune systems. One macaque self-suckled for 106 straight days after her infant died.

Iraqi tribal leaders who helped the U.S. army fight insurgents were feeling abandoned after the abrupt departure of American troops from Anbar province, complaining that U.S. soldiers didn't even say goodbye and that the British were better occupiers.

Eight U.S. troops and three Afghan soldiers were killed over the weekend in the densely forested Afghan province of Nuristan: one of the deadliest attacks yet launched against an American base in the country.

Afraid he'd be arrested for dropping a one-ton bomb on a densely populated area of Gaza in 2002 to kill a single militant, Israeli minister and foreign military chief Moshe Yaalon canceled a visit to the United Kingdom.

A Philadelphia man brought a 32-year-old live shell into a police station on Saturday to dispose of it but failed to call ahead, causing the station to briefly evacuate and call in the city's Bomb Squad.

Shawn Brackbill

The Vile One

Friday: Book nerds rejoice! The 215 Fest is back with events ranging from a hot-to-trot library dance party to musical interpretations of your fave books. Check sites.google.com/site/215festival for more info. But before you get down and dirty with some about-to-turn naughty librarians, take a stroll through Old City before First Friday becomes to cold to endure. Chucks gives you the hook-up this week.

Saturday: It's Design Philadelphia time! Nathaniel Popkin's got the scoop and gal-about-town Lauren F. know what's up events-wise like the TAZtetris. Check out this abandoned lot-cum-gallery space Flickr photos. Tonight is your last night see it so get to it. Is Kurt Vile the most important man in music today? Decide for yourself when the hometown hero does Philly up right at Kung Fu Necktie.

Sunday: It's getting oh-so-cold outside but warm up with a viewing of Allens Lane's Psycho Beach Party, about a Gidget-y surfer chick who just wants to fit in — too bad her split personality transforms her into Ann Bowman, dominatrix goddess. Then head to the revitalizing South Street for the Harvest Beer Dinner at Supper or just curl up by the TV and watch Jose Garces own on The Next Iron Chef.