gehringer_2

Anybody think Cabrera has dropped a little weight. I think he looks a little better than earlier this year.

Lord, way worse! 😱 I always thought Nixon did well in public, too well really - he saved his dark side for behind closed doors. Can you imagine DeSantis handling Krushchev the way Nixon did? He was not graceful physically - e.g. his "V" salutes always looked weird, but aside from that suspicion on the part of us who didn't trust him that wheels were always turning behind the mask, my recollection is that did fine in public settings. Even the "I am not a crook" speech wasn't really badly done considering the stakes and the pressure. Maybe the 'Checkers' speech was a little over the top - but only for its day because in that era pols were not allowed to evidence self-involvement., but that level of self-pity, which earned him a fair amount of ridicule, wouldn't even be noticed in a pol today. More the frustration for those of us who believed in his duplicity that he was pretty good at normal.

Sad day indeed. Jim is still a few years short of the man he always called 'the Great Al Kaline", who was already 14 yrs into his Tiger career when JP arrived. Al was with the Tigers over 65 yrs. This year was Jim's 56th. Still pretty amazing. I was never that big a fan of Paul Carey, so while no-one had topped Ernie individually, for me Dickerson and Price were the best radio broadcast pair since those few years when Ernie and George Kell worked together.

This one was a black swan. Just chalk it up to bad luck.

DeSantis fires his campaign manager. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/08/us/politics/desantis-campaign-manager-generra-peck.html Also of note that in an NBC interview DeSantis said Trump lost the 2020 election. That probably won't gain him any support. But there is a dynamic beginning here that maybe has been missed. As the GOP hopefuls start campaigning in earnest, they have to deal with the MSM, and I think they realize they will never get off that first question to any other topic until they admit Trump lost to the interviewer. The question is whether having people inside the hard right GOP like Pence and DeSantis undermining the 'Steal' narrative will actually help deflate it or not where it matters. Maybe not, but it can't hurt.

OTOH - I think if you look at the salary inflation to accept high priced players in return for low priced players that analysis would be somewhat tempered. Adding money at every turn is a good way to grease the wheels for 'good' trades. But the cost of talent matters if it means that X yrs later the team finds itself in a total retrenchment.

logued off.

The other thing to consider is that anything like a music video has a lot of chefs in the kitchen. Aldean may have been happy just to hit a chord with the MAGA with the song, maybe someone a rung or two lower in the machinery involved in location scouting saw a way to send a giant dog whistle to those with the familiarity with that history for it to register. "Some of them want to use you Some of them want to get used by you"

when you draft Hooker you don't if you are going to land TB or an equivalent player. Being 25 and having played longer/seen more than maybe some college QBs, maybe by Nov or Dec if rehab goes well he could be a better backup option that Sudfeld. Maybe not, maybe probably not, but it's another possibility you can add to your contingency coverage. When you are a bad football team, you don't really have to worry about covering contingencies in depth because winning 6 vs winning 3 doesn't matter all that much. The better your team, the more important to cover as many possibilities as many ways as possible because every game will matter more. Even with the injury Hooker might still be more viable than a Sudfeld sooner than anything they could have done with that little draft cost. Given that this Lions team has ambitions, it shouldn't be either/or anymore, but either/and. So you are able to pick up TB and now you have a lot more leeway. win/win.

Character assassination transcends politics!

well, lack of some team somewhere. Actually it seems untenable to have a 20 round draft and only one rookie league team to try to shoe horn most of them into. Maybe there was an assumption that with increasing numbers of college players being drafted some of them could start at higher levels, but even among college players you are only talking about players from the 1st couple of rounds likely to be able to go straight to A ball. That's not much of dent in your 20 rounds of players. Baseball clearly hadn't thought the future out very clearly. What else is new?

Beckman's act when he started with UM really put me off. Then as he started revealing himself as a right winger, it all added up. 🤔

I can believe there is some market for a strong evangelical who will play the game inside the lines. There have to be some small d democrat repubs left, just not that many. If you assume "GOP" immediately limits you to <30% of the electorate, then 6% of that is less than 2 in 100 total voters. Probably for these folks their support was exactly contingent on him throwing Trump overboard ergo the bump. I also wonder if that profile doesn't fit more GOP women than men.

Z came out to vote in decent numbers in the last cycle. It's possible apathy is higher again in the newest 18-21 cohort - only time will tell.

another 3 walk inning for Lange. He did throw a few FBs for called strikes, which is progress, though the strike % on the FB was still only 50%, too low but it's better than where he was. But now guys ware just taking the curve because he's not throwing in the zone enough either.

LOL - if you wonder why the NCAA is so desperate for Congress to act, these are the reasons: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/07/pac-12-collapse-conference-realignment-ncaa-college-athletics/ If NCAA member schools are going to screw CA, CA is going to screw the NCAA right back!

They broke ground on the Howe over 5 years ago, it's still not halfway across the river.

Brieske at least throws a hard FB with decent spin, which is a better fail safe than the weak sauce FBs Wentz and Manning have been featuring.

This is the first time I've been interested in the start of a Pistons season since.....I can't remember. Who knows if they are going to shoot well enough for all the other upside to be in play, but if they do it should be fun.

I don't think 3/17 would do it. I'm sure he's looking for 20AAV

You mean Lorenzen? Sure, I could see that. In fact I'd make the odds better than that they extend ERod.

It's also probably more work to understand in sufficient detail than your average college board members is willing to do or maybe even should. The board is there only for the broadest policy guidance - and fundraising. 99% of the time if the admin says "We have to do this" they are going to go along because they basically trust the expertise they have put in place in the admin. I think the bigger breakdown comes with the fact the at a big research university, the Athletic Dept is an unnatural cultural graft onto the rest of the institution. The top admin and the AD and coaches are from different worlds, speak different languages and largely have different overall objectives. So before you even get to any disconnect between the admin and the board, you have a disconnect between the admin and Athl Dept. And so same phenomenon where the AD tells the University President "We HAVE to do this" and he is more or less captive.

This is a very good point. In today's society, people need/crave shared experience because it's in large part missing from the rest of the modern society. That is largely what a concert show is about today - connection. From that viewpoint, a Swift concert is not fully about the music - as music per se, it's what the music represents in term of a bridge - a shared total sensory experience - across the audience. In small scale live acoustic music performance, or if you plug yourself into a Hahn recording of a Bach partita, the variety in tempo, bending of a note, all the freedoms the performer takes in that particular performance as they put their present tense (even if recorded) emotional stamp on the performance make that an animal different enough from a concert show to be apples and oranges. In that case music is an individual experience. All the texture that electronics could wash out is the whole point. It's almost an exact converse.

I am about as completely divorced from pop music as a person can be so I have no dog in this fight, but strictly philosophically speaking, the question might be where is the line between reproduction and performance? Does the modern fan care? Probably not. It's not really even a new question since as noted, performers have been lip-syncing in front of their recordings since pop music first started showing up on television. Today it's just more like "American Bandstand" has met I-MAX. I get more musical enjoyment from walking into a church somewhere to hear a little gospel choir sing live into nothing more electronic than thin air than going to a stadium music concert, but that's fine, to each his own. EDIT: just to note. Video production SW like OBS will have all the video overlays pre-cued for the show and the operator just has to follow the performer in real time if they want to bend things a little. And the artist can cue the booth if they are going to skip or add a verse etc. You can have a human in the loop - it could be completely tied down but it doesn't have to be.

Just for a little cold water, remember last week the Athletic coach/GM survey ranked Goff as a Tier 3 QB. 🤷‍♂️