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So you're lop siding the leagues or expansion?

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Separate gripe: why can't the participants' home networks cover postseason games as well? The only thing worse than having to watch FS1 is being forced to listen to Ron Darling. The broadcast teams spend all year with fans - and then POOF they're gone.

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Ron Darling is FANTASTIC in one of the best booths in the country while doing the Mets games. (And I say this as a non-Mets fan who watches a lot of Mets games.) It’s during the national broadcasts when it seems like he’s a lesser version of himself.

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I agree about his regular season work. But he's HORRIBLE in the postseason.

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Then let’s all agree to blame the network suits for that

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You can't escape Billy Joel if you live in certain areas of Long Island. I happily lived for 30+ years without Billy Joel being a part of my life except for his music...which is fine, even if I'm not a fan. But then I moved to the North Shore and he and his people were everywhere. His mother was a fixture at a restaurant I frequented often. My in-laws went to high school with him (called him Stinky). My wife, who was in the service industry for most of her life, waited on him numerous times. He tipped her $1 once. Seriously. I've seen the house from the cover of Glass Houses many times...never inspired me to get a tattoo of it. My assistant at work who is 20+ years younger than me is obsessed with him and has seen him in concert going on 30 times. I don't get it. I saw him in concert once with Elton John...it was fine. Didn't change my world or my views on the man or his music. Meh.

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Imagine the comments, if someone put a photo like that on Instagram now?

"Oh, you're so tough in your leather jacket, "getting ready" to throw a rock. Let's see the next photo, of the broken window. Or the subsequent video of you getting dragged away by the police, crying for someone to get your parents."

Personally I wouldn't be that mean-spirited, I would just stay away from Billy's Insta account, but you know...

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I grew up in central PA, not Long Island. I was the oldest child in my family, but many of my friends had older brothers.

Older brothers have historically been the gateway to things for their younger siblings, and it was thus for my friends when it came to beer, weed, partying, etc. (and I tagged along, of course).

For some strange reason, though, one of the older brothers' habits didn't make it the younger brothers. The older brothers were cool when it came to music, at least by late 70s/early 80s white boy definition of the word - Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, etc.

My friends, for reasons known only to them, however, *insisted* on listening to Billy F*cking Joel when we'd get high, which absolutely killed my buzz every time.

I still haven't forgiven them...

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In the early 80s I was a dreadfully unskilled bass player in a small local metal band. When we were drinking, we listened to the Scorpions et al, but when we got high, we listened to (and sang along to) Elton John.

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How does Jake McGee get away with being a closer while throwing nothing but 95 mph fastballs?

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If you had to reduce it to one word it would be "location" but it's also a lot of other things: https://community.fangraphs.com/jake-mcgee-the-one-pitch-pitcher/

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He used to have a devastating curve back when he was with the Rays. He also used to have elbow ligaments. His curveball was removed with his elbow ligament, but as a closer, no one has cared.

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Giants black magic. Dude is 35 and has been in the wilderness for years before rocking up in San Francisco and becoming an elite closer. can't make this stuff up man

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One of these days Giants fans will have to come to terms with whatever it is that Farhan Zaidi promised to the Devil during that fateful meeting at the crossroads. For now, we're just kind of holding our collective breath and hoping that it isn't SF sliding into the sea in the next earthquake, or something fun like that.

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Jesus Sanchez’ OF assist was a lot less impressive live given that Carter Kieboom was barely in the frame when the throw reached home. Another victim of 3B coach Bob “Bad Send” Henley … especially since Ryan Zimmerman was on deck. Before that it was a fun young pitchers’ duel between Edward Cabrera and Josiah Gray. (Making lemonade here…)

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I don't get it. How did an English musician play in so many games last night?

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I don't know. The non-hits All For Leyna, Close to the Borderline, and Sleeping with the Television On make Glass Houses a pretty strong Billy Joel album in my book.

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Glass Houses was the first album on cassette I ever owned - All for Leyna SLAPS. Craig is not wrong about it not being his best album but it’s pretty strong nonetheless.

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Yeah, from what I can tell (and believe personally), Glass Houses is pretty much his last very good to great album, and The Stranger, 52nd Street, and Glass Houses are pretty much his peak.

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I don't remember what my first actual cassette was, but my first purchase of music with my own money was a trifecta of albums: Black Sabbath "Master of Reality", Grand Funk Railroad "Closer to Home", and Tom Petty "Damn the Torpedoes". Wish I still had all the albums I'd bought over the years...and a turntable on which to play them.

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No tats myself, but I think Glass Houses is the best album cover for that kind of thing. My first album was the Uplift Mofo Party Plan, which I think is braggable.

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No tats for me either but I've considered this one:

https://images.app.goo.gl/qT5dDDnxWNqdRqb38

In the lyrics they reference the "hurricane of experience" and I think that might be what is depicted on the right side of the album cover scene.

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I don't know man, maybe it's my age at the time, but Glass Houses always struck me as Billy Joel's peak. Everything before that built up to Glass Houses, and everything after Glass Houses, feh.

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I wonder if Matt Barnes dropped a Rolex in Robles’ locker at Fenway yesterday??

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There was a Twilight Zone episode, I think, where someone who was bigoted wound up jumping into the experiences of others, so he was a runaway slave trying to escape the white mob chasing him at one point. I think the episode ended with him being shoved into a crowded cattle car while being shouted at in German, because of course he was also anti-Semitic.

I wish there was a way to make anyone who trivializes the Holocaust experience that, because I honestly think some of them (not the ones smart enough to know others are stupid and thus manipulate them accordingly) don't have a clue what it was, except it involved a lot of people getting unjustly yelled at and discriminated against and they invoke it to feel like some kind of martyr for a great cause instead of a whining, extremely comfortable white person who feels as though a minor inconvenience is a major oppression because they never had to deal with inconvenience before in their lives.

What a bunch of awful, empty headed, hollow souled individuals. I'd pity them if they only hurt themselves.

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I’d comment that how did a guy with that

much garbage online get elected to any office, but you’ve described enough about New Albany that I don’t have to ask.

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Forget it, Jake, it's New Albany.

Actual short version: he's a rich business owner who has the approval of the New Albany Company, which is Les Wexner's development company/foundation, which in 2015 made a push to take over the school board with compliant people like Derrow. Their aim -- and I shit you not -- is to move away from property tax funding for schools (which is good!) and to make it income based. Which is also good in some respects, except they want to exempt all investment income and make it only based on W2 income.

This would, if enacted (and it hasn't been yet) would basically allow all of the wealthy people in New Albany -- which is a great man people, Derrow included -- to get out of the business of funding schools, moving that burden to the middle class and lower income folks. That's the aim.

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They seem nice. (Yikes.)

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I’m assuming you’ve got one of those countdown screen savers showing years, months, days, minutes and second until you can move away, I know I would.

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Every conversation in the house:

Me: The thingamajig is broke. Need to fix it.

Allison: Don't spend too much fixing it, it just has to last until June of 2023.

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My wife and I have sold 3 houses that required 2-3 months of extensive work to get ready to sell. Each time, we ended up saying, "Gosh, that looks nice! [or that works so well!] Why couldn't we have done it in time to enjoy it ourselves?"

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Sounds like me with my early retirement date. Going to get my house fixed up and cleaned out so at that point I can sell it and move if I want, but I don't want to do anything real expensive (like remodeling the kitchen) unless a tree falls on that corner and crushes it so I have no choice.

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Why are school budgets not lumped in with the rest of the local budgets anyway? We don't have a fire board or a sanitation board or a transit board.

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It all depends how on school districts operate. In Texas all school districts are independent entities because the districts don't necessarily follow the boundaries of the city/county. And we also have a transit board because again, our bus/train system covers multiple cities/counties.

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I'd opine that it's probably easier to get a school budget approved than a local budget. so that may be why the split them out. But Cosmo is right. My local school district goes beyond the boundaries of my town.

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Yeah, I grew up in NYS, which had separate school budgets, voted on by the town. I can't tell you how many cycles of the proposed budget being voted down, the school board saying "well, we'll just have to cancel football season", and the budget then being approved I lived through, back in the 60s.

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I'm in NYS too, and it seems the only place they have (or are willing to) cut the school budget if it's voted down is sports and buses. And that's small change in the overall budget. The actual education costs seem to be non-negotiable.

Perhaps with good reason, between educational mandates and teacher contracts which set compensation. But sports and buses are only tiny part of the whole budget, so it seems like were voting for nothing. They just run more or less the same budget up for a vote repeatedly until the opponents get tired of voting and/or the parents get motivated enough turn turn out and pass it.

I generally vote YES on school budgets, but the whole process seems like a bit of a farce with the outcome predetermined.

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Craig, this bit of information is far more interesting to me than your reporting on this school board member's social media rants. The reason for this is two-fold: 1) The wealthy and powerful control politics in America. 2) I don't see a big health risk to children not masking:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-science-of-masking-kids-at-school-remains-uncertain.html :

“A year ago, I said, ‘Masks are not the end of the world; why not just wear a mask?’” Elissa Schechter-Perkins, the director of Emergency Medicine Infectious Disease Management at Boston Medical Center, told me. “But the world has changed, there are real downsides to masking children for this long, with no known end date, and without any clear upside.” She continued, “I’m not aware of any studies that show conclusively that kids wearing masks in schools has any effect on their own morbidity or mortality or on the hospitalization or death rate in the community around them.”

Schechter-Perkins is just one of a number of top experts calling for this type of discussion — and raising questions about the CDC’s recent recommendations and what has become accepted conventional knowledge.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/children-delta-covid-19-risk-adults-overreact/619728/ :

Although cases are certainly increasing among children as well as adults, a recent report by the American Academy of Pediatrics shows that 0.9 percent of COVID-19 cases in children have resulted in hospitalization—a slight increase since the spring but well below the corresponding percentage for most of last year—and 0.01 percent have resulted in death.

A recent peer-reviewed study in Britain of nearly 260,000 children (1,700 of whom showed symptoms) reminds us that for most kids, a coronavirus infection will manifest as the common cold—if anything. Also reassuring is that only 4.4 percent of children diagnosed with COVID-19 in this study had symptoms after 28 days (and 1.8 percent after 56 days). Probably not surprising to any parent, about 1 percent of kids in this study who had upper-respiratory symptoms and tested negative for COVID-19 also had lingering symptoms at 56 days—a reminder that COVID-19 is only one potential cause for a child’s malaise.

Abundant evidence indicates that coronavirus transmissions rates in schools are roughly equal to or less than those of the surrounding community. In other words, educational settings are not inherently dangerous for younger children. This should reassure parents and policy makers who are nervous about sending them back to the classroom.

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I treat masks like umbrellas - I'd rather have one and not need it than need one and not have it. If I got myself or someone else sick - or, God forbid, killed them - for lack of a mask I'd never forgive myself.

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It's like that old line - "my decision is going to cause pain and hardship for many of you ... and that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."

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I feel like this is the only argument needed really.

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What exactly are the actual "real downsides to masking children for this long"? I see lots of studies on mask efficacy and very few on the actual effects of masks on child development and wellbeing. There are some studies on language and social development in very young children (who in general aren't being asked to wear masks right now--that's reserved for elementary age and older), and for children with hearing impairment (which of course we should try our best to accomodate). I see now evidence of real downsides to masks, so a mistake in using them unnecessarily seems relatively harmless. And since the vast majority of our data about transmission in schools is pre-Delta, there are real downsides in my mind in assuming that masking is unimportant.

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Indeed. If one isn't a giant douchenozzle, there are usually reasonable accommodations available for those who ask for them.

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Well, that doesn’t really help the hearing-impaired, since it’s ~everyone around them~ that needs to use clear masks to be any sort of help. But beyond that…..yeah, still waiting to hear what all these downsides of mask-wearing are.

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now = no. Take it up with Craig's editor.

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I guess it's because some kidsnare annoyed by them. OTOH if you talk to many young children they would say there is a major downside to wearing pants, but we still make them get dressed before they go to school.

It's an irritant but so is wearing splash goggles or steel toed shoes, personal protective equipment isn't for style. It's for safety.

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IME, kids are perfectly fine with masks. It's the adults acting like toddlers on this issue.

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They're honestly probably better with masks than pants, actually.

(kids that is)

(Some adults are awful with both)

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Exactly. Putting on a mask to go in the grocery store is one of the few things my 3-year-old *doesn’t* put up a fight about - he has no problem wearing it.

He even occasionally, and loudly, asks me why the person we’re walking by at the moment doesn’t have a mask on, and I can’t help but sport a huge grin underneath my own mask while continuing on our way as the now publicly shamed maskless shopper has a bewildered look on their face.

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Aug 26, 2021Liked by Craig Calcaterra

That New York Magazine article really made me disappointed in a publication that I generally love. The article author bases his opinions on a single study by the CDC that had awful response rates, zero control variables, and poor definition of non-control variables. Furthermore - and it states this at the end of the CDC study under the limitation section - this is a cross-sectional study. It is impossible to infer causation in a cross-sectional study.

The CDC should have made it clear that we don’t know anything about the activity surrounding mask use by students in these schools. In other words, we don’t know how the students were instructed to wear their masks or the number of them that did. We don’t know how stringent schools were in enforcing the policy. We don’t know if wearing masks means kids had to wear them all the time or some other amount of time, and we don’t know what kind of masks they used. All we know is that there were potentially some schools where students wore masks, potentially some students who did follow the rules, and that potentially, there was an impact. All in all, the summary that the CDC chose to go with is appropriate in that it is very vague and just says “yeah some stuff helps”. IMHO, this is literally the only interpretation that is ethical based on the data collected.

And therein lies the danger of haphazard interpretation of data. The NYMag article author tries to generalize potential outcomes across the United States, and he 100% implies there’s a causal relationship - or lack of it - between wearing masks and preventing the transmission of COVID. But just because one awful set of data does not show causation or statistically significant correlation doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It’s incredibly reckless that the author infers that this is true.

What’s equally important to mention is that what was never at issue here, and what was not studied at all by the CDC in this study, is whether or not masks work to reduce the transmission of respiratory viruses generally, including COVID. There are hundreds and hundreds of quality studies on this, and they do work. What was at issue in was whether or not various things had any relationship to the transmission of COVID in Georgia schools.

A better post-interpretation of this data, and in my opinion, a better discussion question for the NYMag article to address would have been whether or not masking by students is a feasible method of transmission prevention. If it’s impossible to implement a policy with fidelity, even if theoretically it could be effective, is it worth the time and effort? I don’t know the answer to this. Due to the limitations I noted earlier, it’s impossible to make any conclusions about this from the data the CDC gathered, either.

For example, this would be like if we wanted to find out about various policies and laws about operating motor vehicles and the relationship to injury or death in car accidents. We could look at places that have laws mandating that seatbelts should be worn, various speed limits should be followed, what types of cars are being driven, what safety measures are engineered into the roadways, the baseline health of people driving… and on and on. In this collection of data, it’s totally possible that you could find that there is no relationship between the number of injuries or deaths in accidents and the existence of seatbelt laws. It could be because of any number of those other variables we were looking at, or it could be be because of people’s actual seatbelt-wearing habits. Just because there’s a law doesn’t mean that people wear their seatbelts, and even if they did, maybe they wear them wrong. Those are just two of the potential things that could explain how you could find that increasing seatbelt laws doesn’t lead to better outcomes in accidents. However none of these things mean that seatbelts don’t work. It also doesn’t mean that if we had an effective means for enforcing seatbelt laws or ways for teaching people to use them correctly that we wouldn’t see a positive outcome for accidents.

(I have awful carpal tunnel right now so I dictated this and I very much apologize for any awkward wording or terrible grammar.)

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Is it safe to assume he doesn't have any kids in the public schools?

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His kids go/went to private school.

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I am exactly 0% surprised by this.

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Lemme guess. Masks are required at that school.

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Yep.

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Property tax funding for schools is the modern "separate but equal," and it's very disappointing that progressives have not made this a larger national conversation.

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The Ohio Supreme Court rules that funding schools by property tax was unconstitutional under the Ohio constitution and that it had to be abolished by the legislature.

This happened in 1997. And the legislature did nothing. Really. They, the governor, everyone, simply ignored the ruling. It's still the law in Ohio that our property tax-based funding scheme is unconstitutional, but everyone has just pretended that the ruling never happened and the Supreme Court has never bothered to even attempt to enforce its ruling (of course it's now made up of far more conservative judges).

It was like an early preview of Trumpism: if you don't like the law, just pretend it doesn't exist and wait for someone to stop you. Oh, no one is gonna stop me? Hey, great.

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Seems about white.

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New Hampshire only has property tax and there have been numerous lawsuits over this and those are the arguments, communities without expensive properties can’t meet the state requirements because they don’t have the tax base to fund them.

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Texas has the "Robin Hood" plan where the state captures tax revenue from rich districts and distributes it to poorer districts in an effort to even out funding. I have no idea if it's considered successful or not. Probably not because there isn't much the Texas Legislature can do correctly besides give everyone guns and regulate uteruses.

I will be perfectly honest, I have no kids but live in a city/part of town with high (and going higher) property values and every year when I get my bill, it's almost enough to get me voting republican.

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But you don't have state income tax, right? I wonder how property taxes compare in TX and CA (where we have both income and property taxes).

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That's right, we don't have income tax. Which is certainly nice. We do have some of the higher property tax rates in the country though. Not NY/NJ/IL levels but higher than a state that likes to brag about low taxes should have

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Texas has a rather regressive tax structure, so I imagine that property taxes and fees are high (click on TX and CA to compare): https://itep.org/whopays-map/

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That's a good comparison: a 16-inning game now is like 21 innings in the olden days.

Since the start of 2020, there had been four 13-inning games but nothing longer. And since 1901 there have been 27 games that went 21+innings. The last was in 2008, when Troy Tulowitzki had an RBI double in the 22nd inning in San Diego, for a 2-1 win.

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Aug 26, 2021Liked by Craig Calcaterra

Apropos of very little, the school board guy's bio is depressing. A collection of words that are fine on the surface, that would perhaps even carry a positive connotation in some other context, but which nonetheless indicate something sinister and pervasive about the very way the person thinks and operates in the world.

"Passionate about learning and debate w/thoughtful people. Settled science isn’t science."

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"I have money! I can buy off reality into doing what I want!"

Like a virus cares. Idiots.

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The My Pillow Guy should really dissuade anyone from that notion at this point. But Dunning-Kruger ensures that the lesson is lost on those who need it the most.

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Glass Houses is basically my first Billy Joel album. Only I heard it in bits and pieces in summer camp when it came out, mainly "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me" and "You May Be Right." It's a pretty good album, by someone whose stuff I tend to enjoy far more often than not. (For most of my college years and 20s, "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" was my absolute favorite song.) I know that Billy Joel tends to be "your least favorite critic's least favorite pop star," but I will never not be a fan, and I probably should try to see him in concert once before he gets too old.

And of course, while he is that weird sort who roots for both the Mets and the Yankees, he's forever going to be associated with the Mets for me, because of "Last Play at Shea" and performing the anthem at the '86 WS.

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For complicated reasons I have two (2) copies of Glass Houses on vinyl. I’d happily give one away, but no one wants it.

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Aug 26, 2021Liked by Craig Calcaterra

re: Darrow. Go get 'im Craig. If we were anything like the Barstool fanboys, we probably would go so far as to spam his social media accounts with Industrial Shithouse references.

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There was a cute moment in the Orioles game when Adell gave a kid a bat because the previous inning he'd accidentally knocked his drink over when throwing a ball into the stands. And Franmil Reyes hit his homer for a woman with cancer who was in the crowd.

Know who didn't do those things? The owners. And yet we're all braced for fans to somehow side with the ultra rich because they think the players make too much money.

My small city just reinstated a mask mandate (mostly because it's a college town and they started back on Monday). I work in a small business where people openly whined about all things pandemic for the last year. I'm meditating all morning to prepare for the first unmasked, unvaccinated customer who dares complain to me. Because how do you deal with people who think wearing a mask is an atrocity unto mankind without finally going crazy? I don't know how to do it anymore.

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I know you have saved screen shots of the links you have embedded, and that's good. Have you also considered using wayback machine to have a 3rd party do that work for you? There is also a paid service called Perma. The helpful folk at the Texas A&M School of Law have provided a very helpful guide: https://law.tamu.libguides.com/linkrotguide

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Done!

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