Dave Garrett

I can't find much to criticize about that list. I've certainly seen far worse "100 best" lists over the years. Plenty of unimpeachable classics represented, but there's some newer stuff as well. It remains to be seen how those will hold up with the passage of time and increased historical perspective, but from where I sit, there don't seem to be any obvious howlers. Edit: OK, one nitpick - no Melville?

I have seen at least one article speculating that the Astros may try to sign Eovaldi, although that may well have been wishful thinking. It sure would be nice, though, as we are facing the potential loss of 3/5 of our starting rotation. Keuchel and Morton are free agents, and Keuchel will almost certainly opt to cash in on a big payday elsewhere. He has earned it, as he was one of the few bright spots in the rebuilding years of 100-loss seasons. Morton is a bit more likely to return, as he's said he would like to retire as an Astro and will probably only pitch for 1-2 more seasons anyway, but he might have to take less money to remain. And after McCullers' uneven performance during the postseason, he implied that the arm issues that sidelined him toward the end of the year were more serious than had previously been disclosed and might require surgery in the offseason. Rumor has it that it's TJ surgery that's being discussed, in which case he'd be out for the entire upcoming season. It could be worse, though, as we still have Verlander and Cole, as well as a couple of guys (McHugh and Peacock) who pitched out of the bullpen this year but were formerly starters. But Verlander and Cole will likewise both be free agents after next year. I can't help but shake the feeling that this year was the Astros' best chance at another title. Unfortunately, it also happened to be the year they ran into a historically great Boston team.

It's strange to see another name besides that of Angell on the byline of their annual Series wrapup. I guess this is a tacit acknowledgement that he's no longer able to manage even the shorter pieces he's done in recent years.

Apparently Roberts said he was just going out to the mound to talk to Hill and didn't intend to pull him, but Hill assumed he was getting pulled and handed Roberts the ball before he could say anything, so Roberts went to the pen. If that's true, well...

Last time I looked at this list, it was pretty much Chapman all the way with a handful of other names interspersed throughout. Things have changed rather quickly. http://m.mlb.com/statcast/leaderboard#pitch-velo Eovaldi has been tremendous, but with the velocities he is consistently hitting combined with his medical history, I have to wonder about his durability. Even so, he has certainly improved his standing in the free agent marketplace with his performance this postseason.

As luck would have it, I ran across a related anecdote over the weekend. Any doubts I may have previously harbored regarding how seriously these things were regarded in New York back in the day have been laid to rest.

The region-free hack for Blu-ray players is a hardware hack which is usually easily reversible (typically a dongle that plugs into the main circuit board inside the player). Unlike DVD players, Blu-ray players can't be region-unlocked with just a firmware upgrade, which is why a hardware dongle of some sort is required. I'd assume the sellers of region-free players are the ones installing the mods. I've never bought a player from 220 Electronics, but they are pretty well-known and reputable among those with multiregion needs. I've had my eye on that Woodfall box set for some time. The BFI's releases are usually excellent and feature-packed.

It's often overlooked that Dodger Stadium is the third-oldest MLB stadium after Fenway and Wrigley, so it's at least approaching "historic" as a legitimate designation (granted, there's a significant gap between the latter two and Dodger Stadium in terms of age). Baseball's probably the only sport in which the 60 years that have elapsed since the Dodgers and Giants relocated to the West Coast is still considered to be recent history by more than a few people.

I agree with all of that, as well as the sentiment expressed earlier that you have to be both talented and lucky. Unfortunately, the Astros have not had much luck in this series, and have suffered from way too many uncharacteristic mistakes and failures to execute. Correa, who has otherwise been tremendous on defense, doesn't touch the bag last night while trying to turn the double play, so instead of the inning being over, the runner is safe and eventually scores. More wild pitches and passed balls than I care to remember, and too many runners left on base when scoring opportunities have arisen. The starting pitching hasn't been what it should've been with the exception of Verlander - Morton hadn't pitched in a game in something like 16 days, and the rust was apparent. And the bullpen, which everyone expected to be our ace in the hole, has looked quite mortal. McCullers walking in a run last night was a low point, and Maldonado clearly hasn't spent a sufficient amount of time catching McCullers to be comfortable handling his signature breaking ball. If I'm Hinch, I don't pull Pressly last night and bring in McCullers in a high-leverage situation to get the last out of the inning, especially since most of the damage Boston inflicted came with two outs. Given everything that happened, I guess it's a bright spot that we still managed to get into a position to win the game in the bottom of the ninth. Hard to fault the hitting that kept pulling us back into the game, after the bats had been largely silent the previous two games. But this time the Red Sox had both the skill and the luck that we seemed to be short of, and Benintendi makes that tremendous game-saving catch to decisively swing the pendulum toward Boston. 1-3 is a lot different than 2-2, and although it's not an impossible hill to climb, if the Astros don't rediscover their mojo quickly, I don't see this series going past game 6.

Minute Maid Park has a retractable roof. But they're apparently going to keep the roof closed for all three of this week's games in Houston, which from the baseball purist POV doesn't sit well, especially since we're finally getting the first taste of fall in Houston this week with temps in the 50s and 60s. I don't have as much confidence in Keuchel as I do in the other starters (although to be fair his record this year is more a reflection of how uneven he was early in the season, and he has been mostly solid since then), but I certainly didn't expect Osuna to be the real weak link tonight. He's occasionally gotten into trouble since becoming the designated closer but has always managed to pitch out of it until tonight, and had likewise never given up a grand slam previously. Combine that with Cole's worst outing of the season in game 2, and we're setting the wrong kind of benchmarks at a very inopportune time. On to game 4 tomorrow, and hopefully a better performance by the home team.

IIRC the ink in Sharpies has a high alcohol content, which doesn't mix well with CD-Rs. Sakura Identi-pens are recommended by many folks for use on CD-Rs - I've used them for years without any problems, and they're readily available. https://sakuraofamerica.com/marker-permanent

On one of the Astros forums there were people practically screaming for Hinch's head for not pulling Verlander as soon as he started issuing walks in the 5th inning. That got louder when he loaded up the bases and walked in a run, and when he was sent back out in the 6th, one guy almost had a stroke. I figured there was no way Verlander would repeat the woes of the previous inning, and sure enough, nine pitches later the side was retired. The big difference between this year and last year is clearly the Astros' bullpen - last year it was more often than not ass-clenching time when the pen was called on, and no lead was safe. This year, it's a night-and-day difference with the additions of Pressly and Osuna, and with McCullers moved from starting to relief duty after a stint on the DL, you've got a lights-out pen that many teams would kill for. The only question mark is whether Rondon, who was left off the division series roster but added back for the ALCS, has fully regained the form he displayed earlier in the season when he was the unchallenged closer, before a string of putrid outings near the end of the season spiked his ERA by over a full point.

Anyone heard anything recently about Roger Angell's health? His last piece that appeared in the New Yorker was in May. Last season he had five pieces covering the Yankees' October run and a couple more after that to wrap up the Series. Of course, he did turn 98 in September, and it really would not have been a surprise if his long tenure at the magazine had ended at any point during the past several years. If we've seen his last byline there, he will be missed.

Can't say I've noticed that, although I also can't say I'd spent much time looking at their turntable recommendations before. Assuming this is the guide you were looking at: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-turntable/ a Rega Planar 1 strikes me as a pretty solid upgrade recommendation for people who are relatively new to vinyl and are interested in something significantly better than a crappy Crosley. And they do title their guide "The Best Turntable for Casual LIstening", which is a pretty strong indication their target audience isn't going to be seasoned audiophiles.

I had the same thought. It doesn't exactly give you a warm, fuzzy feeling when a show is cancelled a month in advance due to illness, particularly when it comes to older folks.

This show has been cancelled, with illness cited as the reason. The 18/19 Da Camera jazz series will instead open with Jack DeJohnette, Ravi Coltrane and Matthew Garrison. https://www.dacamera.com/programming-change-nea-jazz-master-jack-dejohnette-open-1819-jazz-series/

"Back during the Harlem Renaissance, he swept the lindy hop of [sic] its feet and transformed big-band dance. More than sixty years later, Frankie Manning got a renaissance of his own." Nice piece on Frankie Manning from 1998

The folks at NitrateVille would disagree. Some of them have been discussing silent films online since the heyday of the Usenet group alt.movies.silent some 25 years ago. For years, Coppola refused to allow any screenings that did not use the score written by his father Carmine. This has been problematic as the score was written for Coppola's four-hour 1980 version of the film, and Kevin Brownlow's current version of the film is five and a half hours long. Coppola has even threatened legal action over screenings of the longer version outside of the US, but in recent years the various parties appear to have finally reached a detente of sorts as he has allowed Brownlow's longer version to be screened in the US with Carl Davis' score. The BFI's recent Blu-ray of this version is very nice but is Region B locked. There's a pretty good summary at Wikipedia of the various versions of the film that have been out there since its debut, as well as some of the history related to the Coppola legal disputes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoléon_(1927_film)

Great piece on the Voice from a design/art direction perspective: The Village Voice: An Art Directors’ History

There's a lot unsaid in that article, but given the audience for IEEE Spectrum, there is presumably some assumption of familiarity with the technology among the readership. LTO has been a standard for almost 20 years, and it is widely used for backup data storage in enterprise IT and archival environments. Every two to three years, a new generation of LTO technology is released, and the specification mandates that the current generation be able to read tapes dating back two generations, and write to tapes dating back to the previous generation. The technology roadmap is well-defined, so users know what to expect going forward for the next 3-4 generations. Linear Tape-Open LTO tape is NOT designed to sit on a shelf for 100 years in a static archive environment. Those who are using it typically have a clear migration strategy implemented, so that current tapes are rotated out of storage and migrated to newer-generation tapes every few years. This can obviously be a financial challenge for smaller archives operating on limited budgets. The bigger problem with almost all storage technologies is not necessarily long-term stability of the medium itself, but long-term availability of playback hardware. 2" quadruplex videotape was a broadcast standard for many years, with untold thousands of hours of television programming recorded on it, but at this point anything that has yet to be transferred to a more modern format is at risk of being lost, as there are fewer and fewer working quad machines out there, and the expertise required to operate and maintain them is likewise fading into history. IIRC the last company that was still manufacturing new quad video heads went out of business a year or two ago, so when the existing ones wear out, there aren't any more replacements.

I have rarely paid more than $5 for an ebook, but Amazon's booming business in Kindle books that sell for significantly more than that suggests that you and I are in the minority of ebook buyers. I've seen comments from people that were less than pleased that the PDF book wasn't included with the FLAC/mp3 downloads of the entire box set, which Destination: Out is also selling for $125. I suspect the prices they are charging for both downloads were strongly influenced (if not dictated) by FMP, CT, or a combination of both.

Destination: Out sells a PDF of the book via their Bandcamp webstore, but it's $50. That's probably more than I'd pay, if I didn't already have the book. https://destination-out.bandcamp.com/album/in-berlin-88-book

Fair enough, but the angles I saw replayed during the game were at best iffy, certainly not definitive enough to overturn the call. I believe MLB has a webpage containing information and/or videos related to all plays that are reviewed, but I wasn't able to find it when I went searching for more info about why the call was overturned. Astros did indeed wind up losing yesterday to slip into a tie with the A's atop the division, but won decisively this afternoon to maintain a one-game lead. The A's are neck and neck with the Red Sox in terms having the best record over the past 55 or so games. The AL West is gonna be a dogfight - right now there are three teams in it that have won 70 games. Only one team in the entire NL (the Cubs) has 70 wins to date.

I think I read somewhere that Altuve is running and taking batting practice, so if that's the case he should be close to either being activated or a rehab assignment. Fortunately we have Correa and Springer back now, and Correa's return has had an immediate impact.