Off-Day TV Guide: July 14

Happy Bastille Day! Today is one of the worst days of the year. Football and basketball season are still months away, and all of baseball is quiet as All-Stars rejoin their clubs. The TV slate is a bit light, so tonight I'll be watching the copy of Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense I got from Netflix. Here are your options:

• 8 pm EDT, Best In Show (TV Guide Network): Apparently they show actual content on TV Guide now. I'm for it.
• 9 pm EDT, Ken Burns' Baseball, The Seventh Inning (1950-1960) (PBS): The "golden age," when half the teams had yet to sign any black players and no one discussed amphetamines.
• 9 pm EDT, The Espy Awards (ESPN): I've never watched this. My streak continues tonight. Seth Myers is hosting. I would have preferred Zach Galifianakis. Not that I would have watched had he hosted, mind you.

Tonight's book recommendation: I'm currently reading Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. I'll tell you one thing, Pynchon is about the only writer with the imagination to create a character who calls the John Birch Society "our left-leaning friends." If you can get through his intricate and dense plot (here's some crib notes), you may enjoy Pynchon's biting sense of humor and inventive flair for character names (like Oedipa Maas and Mike Fallopian).