OGTEleven

Dire Straits - Dire Straits Close to the Edge - Yes Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd (Call me crazy but I think The Wall deserves consideration too) Shangri-La - Mark Knopfler (check out all his solo stuff) These Wilder Things - Ruth Moody (way different from the rest of the list). I love Zep and agree that III is way underrated. I can't say it is their best and even like some of their later stuff like In Through the Out Door, but I think I and II are strong but overrated when compared to III. III to me showed way more range. I have no argument with IV.

I haven't been a frequent poster for a long time (I used to be) and I'm not sure why this thread and your post made me want to reply. I'm conservative but I wasn't always. My whole family is liberal (to varying degrees) and I started out that way. I don't remember everything about why I changed stripes but I do remember when it started. I was about 20 and went to a Jackson Browne concert. I didn't like President Reagan at the time. I liked Browne's music (something else that I wonder about now, but he is ok I guess). I left the concert annoyed because of all the railing against Reagan between songs, the pictures on the screens behind JB during songs and certain things he said that I knew were only part of the story (I shared his overall beliefs but wondered why he left things out that didn't fit his theme). For this reason, it was the worst concert I'd ever attended and I saw The Cars play live (ugh). You make interesting points about Drudge, but I look at it from the opposite angle as well. Even though I agree with you about Drudge scooping by use of the internet, I think there is a lot Drudge did that exposed the shortcomings of network and cable news in ways that had little to do with scoops. To this day his page is almost completely links. He posts his own stuff (scoops) from time to time but most of it sends you somewhere else. People can say he mostly links right leaning articles and that can be argued either way. Even if you buy that, the middle column of his simple page, has for as long as I can remember been simple links to the latest editorials written by people left, right and center. His page is basically aggregation. There is nothing stopping anyone (especially CNN, Fox and other news outlets) from copying him. They could have very easily done that 20 years ago, but they were too tied to their filters. Why can't CNN link Thomas Sowell or Fox link Maureen Dowd? Shouldn't they want their audience to get a complete picture that draws them to a nightly broadcast? To me, Drudge exposed the politics of others. Maybe he didn't do it on purpose but I'm glad he did. Now he has a name and people go to the site, but when he started, he could have easily been beaten, or at least copied. Travelocity vs. Trivago vs. Hotels.com vs. 15 others isn't really all that different but Drudge is still by himself? These filters still exist. I can't count how many times I've gone on Drudge in the last two years and followed a link about an American political topic and found myself landing at an article from the UK. Very often these article have turned out to be very truthful and hit American news outlets months later. What is that? As for the overall topic I find the political takes of sports figures annoying. This is mostly for two reasons. First, I find them mostly uninformed and the better ones usually have a spin or filter. Lebron James seems like a nice well intending guy to me but he does not sound like he knows about politics. Colin Kaepernick is articulate to an extent and has formed beliefs, whether I agree with them or not. but I don't think he considers all sides and I think if he did there would be a lot less reporting about him. The second is that these guys are doing this at work and it creates problems for their employers. I have zero problems with a guy saying he will give his full opinion on something right after he leaves the locker room and that the reporters can wait for him ini the parking lot, but while he is at work? I pretty much stopped posting on the main board because although I am a fan I don't know how to evaluate a 3 technique or a cover 2 so I don't feel like I contribute much. I look at athletes the same way when they speak on politics until they prove otherwise.

I like a lot of guys mentioned here already. I love that Gilmour is getting a lot of mentions. I like classic rock for the most part so I thought about Hendrix, Gilmour Page, and a bunch of others. For a lot of them I like some of the lesser known deep tracks type songs. I was trying to pick one of those to post and was surfing around Youtube. When this popped up I couldn't look past it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1Wp2ASqyxI For one that you might not have heard, look up a live version of "Speedway at Nazareth".

The Cars were my first favorite band as a kid and it is nice to see them nominated, but i don't think they really deserve to get in. There music was fun, but did not exactly require an overwhelming amount of talent. Dire Straits, on the other hand is almost a victim in that a lot of their commercial success came via MTV (Money for Nothing, etc.) although their primary work was far better and about as Rock and Roll as Roack and Roll can be. Songs like Sultans, Tunnel of Love, Telegraph Road and Romeo and Juliet should have had them in the Hall a long time ago. E Even so, it is really Mark Knopfler that belongs as he was the singer, songwriter and guitarist for everything they did and a lot of band members changed over time. His collaborations throughout his career are widely varied (Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, James Taylor, Van Morrison, Emmylou Harris, Eric Clapton, Chet Atkins and many many others) He has been covered by an equally diverse group (Indigo Girls, The Killers, Randy Travis, The Judds, Kenny Rogers, Metallica), His post DS career outstanding. He is absolutely one of the most talented musicians of the last 75 years. If you don't realize it, listen to some of the post DS work or just look up the things he has done. The HOF doesn't really mean much though, given who is already in. Being a Bills fan I have no comment on Bon Jovi, but if Madonna is in, almost all of the bands mentioned in this thread need to be in 10 years ago.

I get it and you're probably right about a lot of people. I think you are right about Trump playing that game and large portions of the press and Democrats falling for it. I also agree about disinformation being increased. I disagree with it being the right approach because there are also people on the other side of the argument that aren't the best people. There are racists and bigots. There are bad cops. I'd prefer the other side not think every cop is a racist or everyone not agreeing with Kaepernick is a bigot. The shout down and shaming arguments are fine one on one I suppose (Personally I don't even bother with the discussion). What gets me is when the Sean Hannity's of the world make them. From everything I have seen, Hannity is a decent guy who is not a racist or anything like that. But the way he makes his arguments would lead someone on the other side to want to shout back as a group and fight rather than talk. He's not the only one and Bill Maher is no better. But none of it makes sense to me if the goal is a society that keeps moving forward gradually. We are not going to be a perfect society tomorrow or any time soon, but we are far better than a Castro society and the fact that someone following Castro can get such action tells me that we are not communicating very well. McLaughlin lives (you'll see) I get what you're saying about triangulating facts and agree. I just think that too often the known facts get skipped over and people go right to the triangulation. Or they skip facts that they can't reconcile and go hammer the ones that bolster them. Both sides do it. The fact that more whites were killed by cops is a fact, but so is the fact that more blacks per capita were killed. You can't use one and ignore the other and frame a good argument. As for the last part, yes I need to lose a little weight and I also need to improve my skills but that doesn't make your comments less mean or unnecessary.

Well then I guess I got owned then. But I wasn't arguing with Levi's points so I don't know how. I was really talking about how he made his points and why I thought people don't listen.

Hallmark fired me but I got them back because I stole the company sarcasm detector on my way out. It still works.

I'm not attempting to separate or ignore crime rates any more than you are attempting to say that skin color leads to the higher crime rates. Some people would read what you said and think you feel that way because they have made false assumptions about your intent. I think that when conversing with someone on the other side of an argument, it is smart to attempt to discern what the person factored in when arriving at their conclusion. And even though I like to think I have the noblest of intent, I have to realize that the other person might think the exact opposite of me. For that reason, I try to avoid making points with partial data and blanks filled in by things that ring true to me. If they simply ring true to me, they probably ring false to the person on the other side of the table. It is better to start with things that are simply true and explain your side from that foundation. It is fair for someone to challenge the things that you feel are obvious just as it is fair for you to challenge someone that thinks it is obvious that all cops are racists. I completely agree with what you say about the quickness and charged nature of deadly encounters leading to foggy memories. From what I can see, emotion takes too prominent a place in this discussion (most discussions really but even more so in this). I think that needs to be stripped out to whatever degree it can be and replaced with facts. If that doesn't lead everyone to the same conclusion, it should at least be helpful in having them trust people with opposing points of view and not lump them into some unnecessary category. I remember way back in school one of the things that stuck with me was the assumptions of pure competition and at first thinking they were simply bad assumptions. One was "full knowledge of the available products by all consumers". I thought it was crazy because how could anyone know everything that went into making a Corn Flake as opposed to a Wheatie and how would this knowledge matter anyway? As I got older I realized that the point was that pure competition had not yet been achieved but we should always move toward it, not away from it. My guess is that with the advent of the internet and many other tools, people know a lot more about they products they buy than at any other time in history. We still don't know everything, but we know a lot more and that is a good thing. There is still a lot of filtering out that needs to be done, but if you want to compare a Ford to a Chevy you are in a much better position to do so today than you were in 1970. Do Chevy and Ford each try to highlights their strengths and ignore their weaknesses? Of course. But there is much more out there can be found much more quickly. The same should apply to things we aren't buying. We know more now about events around the country and the world than we ever have. If Michael Brown happened in 1980 we probably barely hear about it unless we live within a relatively close distance to Ferguson. In some cases the stuff we hear about is useful, in others it is useless (reality TV), and it certainly can carry unintended consequences. The whole country is like a big neighborhood now in many aspects and if there is a theme someone wants to drive, it can be driven. It doesn't even have to be something serious like race relations or police shootings. Remember all the creepy clowns last Summer? That stupid thing fed on itself. If it happened in 1980 in two neighboring towns in Pennsylvania it would have made the local news, tops. As time moves on, facts should inevitably become clear if information is allowed to flow freely. Right now, we are in a place more similar to the 1970s Ford vs. Chevy paradigm than the 2017 Ford vs. Chevy paradigm. There is a lot of spinning going on and it is coming from more angles than simply two competitive auto companies. The point is that the more we move toward fully objective information and not away from it, the better off we'll be.

In the part you colored red I wasn't trying to use analytics at all. I was putting myself in the shoes of the person who thinks cops are racist and trying to figure out how I'd respond to Levi's points. His facts weren't wrong, but they were incomplete and they hopped around trying to fit his conclusion. If i were someone who disagreed with his premise, I'd probably dismiss his arguments more quickly than I should and might even start to mistrust him. That would probably be the wrong thing to do, but it probably wouldn't stop me. I'd probably proceed to cite incomplete facts of my own leading Levi to believe he couldn't trust me or my intent. The rest of what you wrote is something I'll have to come back to at a later time. Sorry about that.

It has sort of been done but not really. I get what you are saying about BLM and all of the other stuff and I have my own opinions about this as well as guesses about the reality. My point is that the more facts we have and the fewer opinions and guesses we have to rely on, the better off everyone will be. I also get that the facts get filtered through agendas. 26% of the fatal shootings involved a black person. 12.3% of the population is black. So your statistic, taken on its own, does not answer all of the questions. In your next sentence you get into the unarmed cases and then start throwing qualifiers around. It is not a compelling way to make an argument because you haven't addressed at all why shootings of blacks are basically double the population percentage, you haven't said how many shootings of whites involved unarmed whites (or just non-blacks), you haven't qualified any of those but you did say one of the armed white guys shouldn't be counted as armed. Whether i agree or disagree with a spoon being a weapon is moot. If I'm someone who believes blacks are treated unfairly, much of what you've written confirms what I think, because the stuff you wrote is all over the place. Mathematically you have to start with the number 987 and determine if that is enough of a sample size from which to draw a statistical conclusion. Then you take the factors other than race into account and measure the best you can. Was income level a more important factor than race? Drug involvement? Domestic dispute? If you have enough information you can determine that race was a factor ini x% of the shootings and likely resulted in the deaths of x additional people because of skin color. Tasker's study tried to do this but also pointed out that not all the data was reliable. I have conclusions I have made in my own head about a lot of this stuff as do many people. I don't think they would all be proven correct if every bit of related data was suddenly available. I don't think anyone's would. I hope I've done a good job reaching mine. I haven't even shared them at this point. The point I'm trying to make is that talking past each other with partial information isn't going to change anything. As you point out, people with agendas will ignore or hide information as well. I'm not naive enough to miss that. I think there is a lot of stupidity to go around on this topic. I think Kaepernick was off base (but within his rights) to base this off of Michael Brown. I am not all that sympathetic to Michael Bennett based on the information I've seen at this point and I think Goodell fanned those flames a little with his statement of support based on what was probably limited information. I assume he did so for NFL-centric reasons and disregarded societal impact. I think Trump was very stupid with his stream of comments on the topic and I think the players and teams were put in an awful weird spot by all of the factors listed above. Trump isn't the first or last president to put his foot in his mouth. Obama did it on racial topics too in my opinion. I'm glad you're not agreeing with him because that interview is not a good look for him. Having the context of any friend of Malcolm X's is a friend of mine isn't a real good context, and that isn't a comment on Malcolm X. It's a comment about him needing to evaluate Castro based on Castro, not on someone whose hand he shook. In the interview he seemed to know a lot about Castro and seemed to have a positive impression.

There is no way to quantify it in 2017. Some day there may be. There is an ability to take the best available information and determine whether it is likely blacks and whites are being treated differently. You cannot then go back and say an individual incident was racist but that is not the goal. The goal is to attempt to measure aggregate results. For example, if on a per capita basis the number of whites and blacks shot and killed were the same everywhere but way out of whack in Ohio, you might want to evaluate the laws of Ohio and how they are implemented, right? But you couldn't say that Joe Smith was targeted because his incident was in Ohio. The goal would not be to pacify the dumbasses asking for knives to be shot out of hands. It would be to understand what is actually going on based on the best available data and adjust based on that. I know there are people trying to do this but they are not communicating well. And this leads to Kaepernick wearing pig socks and promoting Fidel Castro as a solution to a guy getting shot after attacking a police officer.

I would not expect what you described, but I would expect (hope) that the numbers would become equal when you account for economic circumstances, situational details, etc. In other words, I would think a reasonable expectation is that a black person that steals a car after beating up its owner and leading police on a chase then aggressively confronting them would have the same odds of getting beat up or shot as a white person who steals a car after beating up its owner and leads police on a chase then aggressively confronts them. Statistics is a difficult science because there are always more factors for which to account, but it is a science. If the numbers indicate a small variance, it might indicate that there are some racist cops. That is more easily dealt with than a wide variance which would indicate a racist structure or system. What about a wide variance in Toledo but no variance at all in San Antonio. Is it fair to call them all "the cops"? I don't think so. I think it would mean Toiedo has some work to do. All sides and neutral parties should be willing to apply real math with the most reliable data and accept the results even if it doesn't meet their narrative. Perfect math is not available. That is a fact and needs to be accepted by all. A quote from the study Tasker provided ia an example. You have to analyze based on the best available data. You cannot expect perfect data. Some day, there will be a sensor on everything and perfect data will be available. The call for body cameras is an example of the call for better data but even that is far from the entire picture. So where does that leave us? It leaves us in a place where there are a lot of blanks to be filled in and people tend to fill them in based on their own set of experiences and biases, all of which are wrong to some degree. As time and technology advance those blanks become fewer (that creates its own problems but that is a completely different topic) and systems can be more accountable. Everyone needs to look at themselves first before shouting their own conclusions from the rooftops. We have the right to expect our systems to treat us all equally and fairly. Perceived injustices absolutely should be addressed and people are right to call them out through the use of their free speech right. If their perceptions are proven wrong, they ought to be able to accept that and not simply look for a way to look right. If the system is proven to be broken, it should be fixed, not violently destroyed. I'd be in favor of re-building the Toledo PD from the ground up to follow the lead of San Antonio if problems merited. I am not in favor of using the Che model of improvements based on the mental extrapolations of Colin Kaepernick.

From the article, I think he is coming from the right place with his intent and he is trying to be measured, but this is the kind of thing I was talking about and I don't think it is productive unless he is open to listening. I'll try to give some examples. That is the very first sentence of the article. He later cites a specific case but one in which the person shot was actually armed. I get his connection given his home town and am not too worried about that one error if it were isolated. What does bother me is him saying "by the police" instead of "by police". The whole premise of the protest is that police are categorizing people into groups (which of course they should not do). He doesn't even get out of his first sentence and he has done the same thing. There are hundreds if not thousands of police departments nationwide. "The police" paints them as monolithic. I wouldn't like it if some police chief said some like "this is how we plan on dealing with blacks" or "the blacks". I can understand if he thinks there is a problem with the Baton Rouge police, or the Chicago police, or something more specific than "the police". In general I will give him the benefit of the doubt here because I assume there was limited space for the article, but systemic oppression and the other things listed need to be defined, articulated specifically, and validated before they can be fixed. If not, just about anything can be attributed to them. A dialogue about this should always be on the table but both sides need to be willing to listen. If blacks are being arrested at a higher rate, that is a valid data point and a reason to start a discussion, but it is not proof of anything. Skin color may or may not be a determining factor in those numbers. Clearly it has no place in being a determining factor and if it is one, that should be eliminated. But anything that is in need of elimination needs to be defined. It's not an easy task for anyone on any side of this argument and no one side should assume it is easy for the other. I'm 100% with him on this and am glad to see they took there time and put thought into how to structure their protest. I have to differ here. Kaepernick has shown intentions that are not necessarily in line with what one would call the best. The pig socks, Castro praise and Che t-shirt make me wonder how much of the pervious quote Kaepernick would share with Reid. Free and fair society with free speech? Che? That makes no sense at all. Maybe I don't agree 100% with Reid on that quote because he shouldn't be baffled at the backlash that came after those statements by Kaepernick. His girlfriend equating the Ravens owner with a slave owner is probably not the most constructive thing I have ever heard. A discussion involves more than one way communication. It is not fair to expect Reid, Kaepernick or anyone else to fully comprehend arrest and shooting statistics before saying something. But it wouldn't be fair for them to ignore these statistics either. Because the truth is the truth. Sometimes we know it all but most times we don't. It isn't right to assign cause to the unknown parts so that it matches your agenda. We all do this all the time and always have (I didn't do my homework because that teacher is mean to me and would have just given me a zero anyway). Those who really want a solution to a problem need to move toward a solution. Personally, I don't think pig socks is an indication of someone who wants something solved. Racism will go away when racists are seen for what they actually are, which is groups of idiots. The best way to deal with idiots is to ignore them. Systemic issues in law and policing can be written out. A racist cop or a racist perpetrator cannot be. They need to be dealt with individually and that is not going to happen all at once. It can't, as much as we'd all like that. Assuming the cop that shot Michael Brown was a racist pig and ruining his life over it does not move us toward any worthwhile goal.

I was asking Tasker for numbers. I know I've seen them somewhere but can't find them. If 100 white people and 85 black people got shot by cops then black people are getting shot at a higher per capita rate. That is the point I'm making but I can't be sure it is valid without actual numbers. I'm not assigned racism as a cause (nor am I dismissing it).

Is there a link for that? I'm aware that more whites have been killed by police bullets but there are also more white people overall. The back and forth on this stuff with battling statistics is not productive. If Colin Kaepernick feels that blacks are being targeted he should be expected to articulate why. If he uses good arguments people should listen, if he uses hyperbole, generalities and feelings then he should be ignored. The truth is what should matter as should striving to achieve our goals as a society. If the truth turns someone's argument to mush, then that person should eat a little humble pie and/or try to communicate better.

I should have added another sentence about the Brown shooting because from everything I saw, it seemed justified and an odd choice of a protest topic. Again, it is still his right. I'm not a huge fan of the term good shoot but I get what you mean. I'll give Kaepernick a bit of a break on that one though. These stories get so distorted and oversimplified that someone can fall into a trap believing an incorrect narrative. I think there are a lot of people out there that actually believe cops are going around looking for black people to shoot. I don't agree but that doesn't really matter. I don't think the people that believe this do so out of some sort of evil intent. More black kids are getting shot, per capita, than white kids. The assumption made is that skin color is the reason for this and I find that unproven at best. There is a gigantic mix of things that leads to any shooting. If you stripped out skin color and looked at intoxication, economic standing of the person shot and circumstances of the shooting, my guess is that the numbers some close to evening out. Did some cop in some shooting pull the trigger faster due to the race of the person? Probably. Is it an epidemic to the point that cop pig socks is a valid point? Not in my opinion. Those were very stupid. I think all of the factors that led to the shootings combine to make the disease and that the shootings themselves are a symptom. I think that the American ideal of equality is a big part of the cure. If Kaepernick's protest was an attempt to tell us that we're not living up to these ideals then he delivered his message poorly. If he thinks the ideals are somehow the flawed part, then he should articulate his desired ideals. Starting with Castro digs him enough of a hole for me that I'd rather use my time listening to other people's ideas, but he still has the right to say it. I don't think he should lose a job or be passed over for one based on his beliefs, whatever they are. But then again I don't own an NFL team and if I did I probably wouldn't have been thrilled with his girlfriend calling one of my peers a slave owner.

i don't agree with the way he chose to protest but it is his choice to make, not mine. I think his point is that cops mentally lump people into groups based on skin color and treat them differently. But if that is the case then he should have done a better job explaining it. He knelt at the anthem, which is a symbol for the ideals of America. It was a way of getting attention. Personally I think it was a good first step to get some attention and have a platform for his message. It could have had a positive impact, but after that he could have said something pointing out that we are falling short of our ideals and that the Ferguson shooting was an example of this. Personally, I see Ferguson as a singular incident so I would have disagreed with him there, but fully understood what he was trying to do. Whether he intended to do so nor not, his message seemed more an attack on the ideals themselves. The pig socks, clearly lumped people (cops) into a group based on their profession. To me, it was an odd way of protesting people being categorized based on a single trait and seemed more like picking a fight (still does). The praise of Castro and the t-shirt of Che also seem like more of a questioning of American ideals than a path toward achieving those ideals. All of these things are still his right, but I think his message is way off base. How many million dollar quarterbacks are there in Cuba? I get that they like baseball more. Why do their players defect here? Had he been a star baseball player in Cuba and knelt for their anthem in protest of the imprisonment of dissidents based on their single trait of dissent, what might have happened to him? I will give him the benefit of the doubt with respect to his message, but he delivered his message very poorly in my opinion. He isn't the only one to do so, but his protest was definitely a pivot point that led us to yesterday.

This thing has gotten so far out of control I don't know what to think of it at this point, other than thinking that everybody is wrong, at least in my opinion (except, oddly enough, maybe Shady). Kaepernick started the whole thing as a protest over Michael Brown IIRC ( I think that was it). It turns out that it may not have been the greatest cause that ever existed because it sure seems probable that the Brown incident was at least primarily on him and not the cop. Regardless of that, how was kneeling for the anthem the right way to protest at all? How about speaking out about Ferguson Mo. in particular? Was the Ferguson incident an indication of our nation as a whole? The ideals of our nation? He certainly seemed to think issues went beyond Ferguson and that is something worth discussing. Starting that discussion the way he did and then with the pig socks, Guervera t-shirt and positive words about Castro might not have been the way I would have approached it. Kaepernick not having a job seemed to be phase two and that one has a lot of moving parts. A high salaried marginal QB who is far from bad and far from a guy that is the last piece to a championship brings a lot of questions by itself. Add the potential fan uproar to the mix and then what? Then his girlfriend and the Ray Lewis stuff? Every owner gets to make his own decision based on his own situation and Kaepernick didn't make it easy but man there are 32 teams so somewhere between 64 and 96 QB jobs and I would put him in the top 64 somewhere. He isn't being blackballed due to his skin color (see Taylor, Winston, Wilson, EJ, Webb, and many other QBs), but i it due to politics? Fast forward (skipping a lot) to Michael Bennett which just seems like it is being overblown to me. The guy was in a chaotic scene and was was detained by police. Was it a little rough? I guess. Were there some bad choices of words flung around in the heat of the moment? Maybe. Was he shot or hurt or falsely charged with anything? No. He has made claims that he got off easy because he was a football star. Maybe. Has anyone named even one non-football star that was not let off easy in that incident once they were cleared? I haven't seen it. Then Goodell and a bunch of owners jump in without all the facts to defend players. I get the labor relations side of this but the NFL has influence and I think they acted hastily. Now we have a bunch of guys kneeling and protesting the flag and country over things that are very cloudy at best. Of course the backlash from the other side comes complete with stupid statistics about how more white people are killed by cops than blacks. Of course there are. That's because there are more white people available. As a percentage, more blacks are killed. There are so many factors that go into this that are socio-economic, locations based and otherwise, but everyone takes a side, all sides based on bad math. Fast forward again and the president says something along the lines of having a right to protest but they should all be fired. What was the point of that? It's none of your business so stay out. How is it different than when Obama said the cops acted stupidly even when they didn't? These are issues that presidents have stayed out of forever because they should be, you know, doing their actual job. Of course this led to yesterday's mass kneelings which led to more reactions. The whole thing is ridiculous. Ted Kennedy, or Tip O'Neil (I can'r remember which, but neither of which I share ideologies with) was correct when he said all politics is local. The problem is that in 2017, everything is local. The speed of information has brought a lot of positives to society but it has also brought negatives, based on human shortcomings. We all oversimplify information in an effort to process it quickly. That proclivity knows no political boundary. The part that I like the least is that the flag and the anthem are supposed to represent our ideals. These ideals are things we should always be moving towards, not away from. No society in the history of human kind has ever completely lived up to its ideals. We are all flawed and we all fail. I think the protestors are mistaken in their protest if they say the anthem represents cops killing black people or something like that. It doesn't. It represents the ideals toward which we should all strive. Individually and collectively we all make mistakes and there are bumps in the road, but the ideals laid out in our founding documents are worthwhile goals. The people speaking out about achieving those goals and not simply arguing about which side is right and which is wrong are few and far between at this point. I'm not sure I even see one.

About the phone calls made from the towers and planes on 9/11.

It is hard to beat Saratoga in August and Lake George is right up the road. The track is awesome (but might be a long day for the little one). There is also a lot to do in town with a lot of great restaurants. Lake George is beautiful and there are activities for young ones around the Village area. Both places might be a little pricey when it comes to hotels at that time of year. IT might be a better fit for your mini-weekend getaway afterward.

I'd like to see the Bills get Maclin and have him be great but he can never be my favorite #19.

I'll add two songs that I think are really meant for a female voice, (although it is hard to beat the original of the first), and my favorite female voice at that. I think I posted these in the earlier thread that Jack couldn't find. Dancing in the Dark

As great a guitarist as he is (my personal favorite), his greatest attribute is as a songwriter. He always shows up (too low) on lists of the greatest guitarists but almost never on lists of greatest songwriters. Growing up I liked all the classic rock bands like Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Genesis (mostly the Gabriel stuff), Yes, etc. Dire Straits was definitely on the list. As I got older I still liked all those bands and I still do. The difference with Dire Straits was that I was always finding cool new things that I had missed in songs over the years. I knew all the songs by those bands but the Straits stuff always seemed fresh. The only exceptions were in their super popular stage with songs like Money for Nothing, which I like but is just a fun song. A lot of their songs (Telegraph Road, Lions, Tunnel of Love and even Sultans) have just a lot of stuff going on that is easy to pass over at first. Where Knopfler got underrated was that he was thought of as a guitar hero but his songs has some of the greatest lyrics and were written in original ways. Romeo and Juliet has a line "You can fall for chains of silver, you can fall for chains of gold, you can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold". It's a perfect phrasing for a rejected lover to throw at the his ex. One of my personal favorites is from Telegraph Road. "Cos I've run every red light on memory lane". While in Dire Straits he created the soundtracks to Cal, The Princess Bride and Local Hero, all among the greatest ever. Post Dire Straits he has created songs from about every genre (pop, rock, blues, country, bluegrass, folk, Celtic) and far surpassed his Dire Straits work in my opinion. Barely anyone knows this it seems. Unlike many songwriters, his songs are not commonly about himself. They are usually about ordinary people and usually paint them from a perspective of respect and dignity. They are incredibly relatable. Even when he writes about someone famous like Sonny Liston or Ray Kroc he makes them very real, not some larger than life figure. So many lines of his lyrics are pure genius. I'm sure most songwriters would be happy to have written one of them. He has hundreds. His guitar is still there. I saw him 18 months ago in concert (see clip below) and his guitar is still very much there (as you'll see at the end of the clip). The list of his collaborations and people who have covered his songs is unbelievably long and varied. Tina Turner, Chet Atkins, Bob Dylan, The Killers, The Judds, Kenny Rogers, Metallica, Emmylou Harris, The Indigo Girls, Randy Travis, The Everly Brothers, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shooter Jennings, Eric Clapton, and I'm sure I've left off a ton. I'd say he is underrated.

Oh my God. My wife (about whom I have no right to complain) also does this exact trick. She also adds an intra-store mode to the mix. We can be done grocery shopping and headed toward the checkout pushing a cart overflowing with groceries. After getting 65 things from our original list of 20, she'll stop and say we forgot toothpaste (or something else). I say ok and get in line with three people in front of me while she goes for the toothpaste. The next thing I know I am almost done checking out the full cart and she is still nowhere in sight. Sometimes she'll even get there at the absolute last second (I don't know how she does that) but with two tubes, wanting me to make the decision. Whichever one I pick (completely at random because I cannot even care if I try), she extols the virtues of the other one (but that is really a separate story which deserves it's own post).