NPR is commercial radio; they just call the advertisers “sponsors.”

Some higher-end places just have water carafes and glasses at the end of the bar for self-service water, which doesn’t mess up the aesthetics. Of course here in California places rarely give you a glass of water directly without a request, because drought.

No- a lot of SF bars give the card back these days, so I don’t think it’s against any regulations.

Not only is the solo awesome, but the backstory behind that performance is crazy. He never got to rehearse the solo with the band because another musician kept stepping on his solo during their only rehearsal time, he was supposed to do the middle 8 but was like, “whatever, I’ll take the end,” and then no one knew…

They should, and do. Like Newsweek reporting on its own financial scandal recently, the NYT reporting on its own problems.... they don’t do it enough, but it’s good journalism, and remember the journalists and the execs have different agendas. The reporters (often) very much *want* to report on malfeasance at their…

Seriously- very few serious tennis watchers consider McEnroe a particularly good commentator. Brad Gilbert is fairly meh as well. The preference among the bigger names, that I typically hear, is for Darren Cahill and Pat McEnroe, and then a lot of the smaller names who do great commentary. Johnnie Mac is just not it.

The TennisTV app, on the ATP side, carries all the non-majors and the commentators are almost always the best of the Europeans: Koenig, Goodall, Nick Lester, Colin Fleming... the commentary is *so* much better than the American version.

You’re second point is a good one though: Mary Carillo doesn’t have much of a record, Pam Shriver either, nor Mary Jo Fernandez (and when I say “not much” I mean: relative to Navratilova or McEnroe; all three were very successful, but not hall-of-fame); they weren’t chosen necessarily for their success, but more for…

Kids: “What’s a pension plan?”

Look, I don’t think Serena was taking prednisone as a PED, BUT: it is a corticosteroid that has been demonstrated in at least some trials to have some performance enhancing effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17805102 Again, I don’t think that was the intent, but it’s not ridiculous to call it a PED, which is…

Thanks for stopping by, Bari

Kudos to you if you can actually hang with collegiate-level players. I *do* know how to play tennis, and I can’t take a game off of a genuine collegiate-level player (who are generally required to be rated 5.0 or above), unless they basically gift it to me.

I think Fognini saw the grip change and read it as a drop shot and started for the net, then he was too far in to recover when he realized it was a full slice. You can see him go into a forward sprint for just a second, then pull up bewildered.

I paid so much attention to your comments that I directly refuted them, with substantive arguments about the nature of meat production generally, the relative conditions of said production in America, and the logic or lack thereof of differentiating based on the nature of the animal in question. Your response, twice,…

Solid counterpoint: “you’re a hypocrite cuz, and, uh, you’re dumb.” Well-constructed argument.

This is what we call “straw-manning.” You get to pick the most egregious example from (very importantly) *somewhere else,* somewhere foreign most preferably, and then you go: “look, this is worse [marginally, possibly, maybe] than the [actually totally unbelievably horrible conditions] in the U.S.!” Therefore, it’s…

It speaks to the hypocrisy of the moral relativism of claiming “dogs must be saved! But cows, eh...”

The treatment of meat-production animals is equally bad in the United States as in... basically anywhere else. We’re not talking about zoos, we’re talking about factory farms, and there’s plenty of documentary evidence out there attesting to the conditions (although you might not want to view it, since it would…

Indeed.

Actually it’s totally hypocritical, because it has nothing to do with any relative morality, just your own personal conditioning. Other cultures don’t have a tradition of dogs as companions, for better or worse (or cats), and they eat them. We don’t, but we eat cows, which Hindus won’t. No better, no worse, just…