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, July 3, 2014

Daily Bafflements

fireworks
Photo by Randolph Croft
• Well, tomorrow is Independence Day, a day to celebrate our great nation with hotdogs and hangovers. Here’s something a little different: the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C., an actor will stage a reenactment of Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to the slave is the 4th of July?”

• Today in Bespoke: Bushmills whiskey is creating “bespoke rock band whiskeys” on the occasion of its “Bushmills Live” music festival. For instance, for the band Tired Pony, master distiller Helen Mulholland created a unique triple blend; “Three types of Bourbon casks contributed to the blend—each said to represent one of the three renowned bands from which Tired Pony was formed: R.E.M., Snow Patrol and Belle & Sebastian.”

• California will raise its minimum wage to $9 an hour—an increase that apparently makes a big enough change for business’ bottom line that one pizza place owner plans to do away with lunch specials because of it, but not enough of a change that workers will be able to, you know, pay their rent. “I don’t even know that I would call it a steppingstone—it’s a pebble,” one activist told a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News.

• Media bro-hemoth Vice is reportedly getting a $6.5 million tax break from the state of New York to hire 525 new Brooklyn-based employees to fill out its huge new warehouse-turned-office in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. As Joe Coscarelli from New York magazine puts it, “The Bedford stop is dead.”