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Walk-Off

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Posts posted by Walk-Off

  1. 8 hours ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

    The reason for the Chargers' move back to San Diego will not be love of fans. Rather, the reason will be the bad publicity that is generated every time that team plays a home game in a stadium full of fans who are booing it.

     

    The image-conscious NFL is accustomed to being presented as a juggernaut. It will not put up indefinitely with being made a fool of in one of the biggest cities in the world, especially not when it can exchange the guaranteed bad publicity and embarrassment of the Chargers playing in Los Angeles for the great publicity that would accompany the team returning to San Diego under new ownership.

     

    I agree that the NFL is a highly image-conscious organization and is accustomed to being, and wants to be, regarded as a juggernaut.  However, I think that one of the many historical factors that has caused the NFL to be so obsessed with its image happens to be all that went wrong with the Raiders as a Los Angeles team from 1982 through 1994 -- especially after the Raiders and their then-owner, Al Davis, won an antitrust lawsuit against the league to earn the right to move to La La Land.  As the Raiders garnered so few home sellouts, and thus played very few home games on local television due to the league's blackout policy of that time ... and, even worse, became a magnet for an embarrassingly high number of criminally inclined fans ... throughout the time that L.A. was their home, I think that Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, et al. were are all too justified to look at the Raiders' situation in L.A. and think something like, "Al Davis sued us ... and beat us in court ... for this?!"

     

    How does this relate to the Chargers' current situation?  Well, my impression is that, as displeased as the NFL might be with the Chargers' continued dearth of fan support since leaving San Diego for the Los Angeles Basin, the league might actually be willing to tolerate such a problem as long as allowing or requiring the Bolts to leave the L.A. market creates even the slightest risk of enabling and emboldening the Raiders to try to betray their commitments to the Las Vegas area and then head back to the Greater L.A. region.  It all makes me wonder if, deep down, the NFL establishment's most desired situation in Southern California consists of (a) the Rams thriving over the long term in the Los Angeles market as an NFC team, (b) any AFC team other than the Raiders playing alongside the Rams in the L.A. market, and (c) any NFL team other than the Raiders, regardless of conference, occupying the San Diego market.

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  2. 10 hours ago, the admiral said:

    I can understand those cheapo '70s domes not standing the test of time, but I would think that by the late '90s, we would have figured out stadium construction and maintenance a little better. I mean, this place ain't Madison Square Garden; most of the year it just sits there not doing anything. How much could you have let it go to crap unless you were trying to?

     

    Especially after reading the originally linked article, I think that much of the impetus for a new Nashville NFL stadium, especially one with a roof, is coming from elements independent of the Tennessee Titans -- who, as late as last month, seemed to be content just to spend 300 million of their own dollars, and then try to extract at least 300 million more dollars from the Nashville / Davidson County metropolitan government, to make various fixes and upgrades to Nissan Stadium.  Specifically, I suspect that such entities as the Nashville Sports Council (a group that recruits annual and one-off sports events to Nashville and nearby areas), the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation, and the Country Music Association (whose annual activities include a springtime country music festival at Nissan Stadium) want such a stadium even more than Amy Adams Strunk and her lieutenants across the Titans organization do, if only to increase (if not maximize) Nashville's potential as an event destination.

     

    This all reminds me of certain things that I think that I have read about the lead-up to the 2002-03 renovation of Soldier Field.  Apparently, certain figures within Chicago's political and/or business establishments wanted Soldier Field to be rebuilt as or replaced with a stadium with both a retractable roof and a much larger seating capacity, so that the Chicago area could get in the running for Super Bowls, NCAA Final Fours, and other events that the region could host only with an indoor venue with lots of seats.  However, also presumably, the McCaskey family insisted that Soldier Field be renovated in a way that maintained both a full-time outdoor configuration and a seating capacity that was and is intimately small by NFL standards, and the McCaskeys' modest wishes for Soldier Field's future prevailed ultimately.

     

    9 hours ago, DEAD! said:

    ...and on top of that the stadium is surrounded by a Gila River Arena parking lot that is also not doing anything. If a stadium was such a great investment,  all the owners would have paid for it themselves. A city is better off having a souless mall at the same location. 

     

    While Nissan Stadium is surrounded by what are indeed probably enough parking spaces for a shopping mall, I am not quite sure if an ordinarily configured mall would fit within the footprint of the stadium itself.  When I imagine a mall taking Nissan Stadium's place, all that comes to mind is something that would need to have many more floors than a typical mall in a suburban area and might have room for only one anchor tenant (be it a traditional department store, a cinema multiplex, or a Dave & Buster's or something similar to that) at the most.  Besides, if that area were being developed today as something other than a sports venue, a much more likely result would be a fashionably mixed-use urban development with offices, apartments, retail stores, and restaurants bunched closely together and at least most of the parking being concentrated in multi-level structures and/or underground garages.

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  3. On 2/16/2022 at 8:01 PM, the admiral said:

    Bill Wirtz was too old and too drunk to be much of a leaguewide power broker by the time Bettman came in. He screwed with the Bradley family in Milwaukee, but that was about it; the St. Louis arena deal is ancient history. I think it was Ed Snider and Steve Stavro who had to go around Bettman to end the first lockout. Mike Ilitch was always very powerful as well.

     

    To add to my own list of hyper-powerful owners of NHL franchises, I have thought for a long time that the Phildelphia Flyers' ultimate parent company, Comcast, had even more clout than did the Jacobs family during the sixteen seasons (2005-06 through 2020-21) that it held at least the cable part of the NHL's US national television rights.  In addition to the Flyers and those national cable rights, Comcast owned the respective regional cable TV outlets for the Flyers, the Washington Capitals, the Chicago Blackhawks, the San José Sharks, and even US simulcasts of Sportsnet Pacific's coverage of some Vancouver Canucks games.  Also, Comcast sponsored many US-based NHL teams that were not carried by Comcast-owned regional channels, but did play in areas where Comcast was the local cable provider.

     

    I think that Comcast's influence on the NHL was particularly evident between September 2009 and the middle of March 2010, when a contract dispute caused Comcast's national cable outlet for NHL games, then known as Versus, to be absent from DirecTV.  The NHL was openly encouraging the public to pressure DirecTV to re-add Versus, but the league did not make any similar request to the public to convince Versus to deal more amicably with DirecTV.  That situtation indicated to me rather strongly that Comcast's leverage with the NHL far exceeded the NHL's leverage with Comcast.

     

    Finally, of course, Comcast's pull with the NHL reached its apparent peak in 2011, when the company gained majority ownership of NBC, who already held the over-the-air portion of the NHL's US national TV rights ... and Comcast then secured a ten-season-long extension of both the NBC over-the-air network's NHL rights and the cable NHL rights held by what would become known as the NBC Sports Network, or NBCSN for short.  Therefore, when the NHL reached its current US national TV deal with Disney / ABC / ESPN and AT&T / WarnerMedia / Turner, I was very shocked.  That decision by the league came across to me as very much an "Oh, how the mighty have fallen!" situation for Comcast.

    • Like 1
  4. 1 hour ago, GDAWG said:

    A new domed stadium in Nashville would help with recruits for Tennessee State, coached by Eddie George.

     

    That all depends upon whether or not the Tennessee State football program gains a guaranteed right to play home games at an indoor stadium in Nashville, just as what that team has enjoyed at what is now Nissan Stadium since that venue's 1999 opening.  The TSU football team's right to play at the Titans' current stadium has been a stipulation of the portion of the funding that the Tennessee state government gave to the stadium project, so any future stadium for the Titans in or near Nashville may also need to get partial funding from the state's coffers in order for TSU to keep having that perk.

  5. When the Chargers exercised their option to move to the Los Angeles market (with only a few days left before the NFL would have forced the Bolts to surrender that option to the Raiders, if I remember correctly) and join the Rams at the latter team's then-under-construction stadium, at least one report that I read had stated that not only would the Chargers be obliged to play a certain minimum number of seasons in Inglewood, but also the NFL would require the Spanos family to wait a certain amount of years after either the basic relocation itself or the opening of the new stadium before selling the franchise (I do not remember which event was the exact trigger), so that the family could not use either a move to the more populous Greater Los Angeles area or the debut of the Inglewood stadium as a basis for "flipping" the Chargers to new ownership for a quick, easy, huge profit.

     

    Whether or not any of that is true, I think that, ultimately, how much longer the Chargers stay in the L.A. market will depend mostly on (a) how well Dean Spanos and his family keep getting along with the other NFL teams' ownerships and with the league's own leadership and (b) how much the league trusts the Raiders to stay in the Las Vegas market, let alone keep out of Southern California in general and the vicinity of the City of Angels in particular.  A sharp decline in the respectfulness of the Spanos family's relationships with other owners in the league and with Roger Goodell or any future NFL commissioner might be very likely to cause most of the rest of the league to ignore any and all commitments that the Chargers had made upon relocating just over 100 miles up the coast and instead pressure the Spanoses either to sell their team or take the Bolts out of Greater Los Angeles (if not bring the team expressly back to San Diego).  Even then, however, most of those other owners and the people in charge at the league's headquarters might fear that the Raiders' ownership would exploit a departure of the Chargers from the L.A. area by doing whatever can be done to wiggle the Raiders' way out of their own long-term commitments to Clark County and the State of Nevada and then make a beeline back to the Los Angeles Basin (whether as roommates to the Rams at SoFi Stadium or at a second Greater Los Angeles stadium such as a revival of real estate developer Ed Roski's 2008 proposal in the City of Industry).  In that case, most of the powers that be across the NFL might favor a Chargers team continuing to play deeply in the Rams' shadow at Kroenke World over a second coming of the Los Angeles Raiders -- a team that, throughout their 13 years at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, had an extremely sparse number of sellout home games and tended to attract fans who were, at best, too poor to attend games regularly and, at worst, too willing to commit violent or otherwise criminal acts.

    • Like 2
  6. 30 minutes ago, Red Comet said:

    The Tennessee Titans are allegedly looking into a new stadium.

     

    I don’t know enough or really anything about their current stadium, but what is so wrong with it that it needs an upgrade besides some billionaire demanding welfare? 

     

    Even before I read that link, @Red Comet, my first guess was that certain people in high places in Nashville -- if not the Titans' ownership, then definitely some local politicians and/or some bigwigs in the city's tourism and entertainment industries -- have been wanting Nashville to have an NFL-caliber stadium with specifically a fixed or retractable roof, so that Nashville could become able to host such events as Super Bowls, College Football Playoff championship games, NCAA Division I men's basketball Final Fours, indoor concerts with much larger crowds than what any indoor venue currently in or near Nashville can hold, or even SEC football championship games if that conference ever wants to have that game played somewhere other than Atlanta.  Sure enough, the linked article suggests (rather strongly, if you ask me) that the push to replace Nissan Stadium is probably being fueled heavily by a yearning for a Nashville NFL venue with a roof.

     

    First came "Jerry World" in Arlington, Texas.  Then came "Kroenke World" in Inglewood, California.  Hmmm ... might "Amy World" be coming soon to the Music City or someplace near there?

  7. According to Bloomberg.com, the NFL is hiring Loretta Lynch, the latter of the two US Attorneys General during Barack Obama's presidency, as a defense lawyer in the Brian Flores lawsuit.

     

    This news comes eight days after comedian-turned-television producer Byron Allen announced that he is assembling a group of investors to help him bid for the Denver Broncos -- who, like the NFL, happen to be one of the organizations that Flores is suing.  Furthermore, Allen claimed that he had been encouraged by both Roger Goodell and Robert Kraft to pursue buying an NFL team as far back as November 2019.

     

    With all due respect to the NFL, Byron Allen, and Loretta Lynch, I cannot help but suspect that both the league's supposed encouragement of Allen -- one of the wealthiest, and also one of the least controversial, Black men in the US entertainment industry today -- to buy a franchise that is a co-defendant in a racial discrimination lawsuit, and the league's hiring of Lynch -- the second Black, second female, and first Black female federal Attorney General in US history -- to try to defend against all that Flores is alleging, are highly blatant and troublingly questionable attempts to deflect attention from a possibly very deep and entrenched pattern of systemic racism throughout the respective leaderships of the NFL and at least the majority of the teams in that league.

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  8. On 2/13/2022 at 2:06 AM, rams80 said:

    I'm not sure the OVC is "take Hillsdale" desperate, because I don't think any group of D1 league school presidents would be up for dealing with Hillsdale on a regular basis.

     

    On 2/13/2022 at 2:50 AM, sportsfan7 said:

    Yeah they're pretty much Liberty without the brand or money

     

    To me, Hillsdale College seems like a smaller, decidedly more old-money (if not more elite), and more secular (if not more libertarian) version of Liberty University.  Ironically, for a little more than a century after its founding in 1844, Hillsdale had a much more progressive image, particularly due to that school's early embraces of both mixed-gender education and racially integrated education.  As best as I can tell, not until the Civil Rights Era, when Hillsdale's leadership quarreled with the federal government over affirmative action requirements for federally funded colleges and universities and then chose to stop accepting any federal funding so as to escape such burdens, did Hillsdale become so beloved among political conservatives in the United States.

  9. 5 hours ago, kiwi_canadian said:

    Jacobs has WAY too much pull in the NHL I think. He's the main reason the NHL  did not allow the Houston Aeros into the NHL when they "expanded" and absorbs the Oilers, Nordiques, Whalers and Jets. I also believe that Jacobs is the real commissioner in the NHL  and Bettman is the puppet and does what ever the Jacobs ownership group says.

     

    It seems to me that, for a long time, certain ownership groups within the NHL have had excessively and undeservedly high degrees of power and control over the league's affairs.  I agree that Jeremy Jacobs and his family are at the top of that list ... and I think that a clear but close second are the Chicago Blackhawks' owners, the Wirtz family -- who, ironically, deserve most of the credit for St. Louis getting one of the six franchises added in the NHL's 1967 expansion, but also are worthy of most of the blame for the ongoing lack of an NHL team in Milwaukee via a longstanding demand of a massive territorial rights reparation fee from any NHL club that dares to play in the Milwaukee market.

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  10. On 2/14/2022 at 8:47 PM, Dilbert said:

    So when do we start calling them the Quebec Nordiques of Arizona?

     

    Personally, I think that the answer is ...

     

    23 hours ago, JayMac said:

    Unfortunately never because Bettman the Jacobs family will never allow them to go north of the border to Le Centre Vidéotron à Québec or any other arena that is not doing business with that family's precious Delaware North company.

     

    FTFY, @JayMac.

     

    Seriously, though, I think quite strongly that Jeremy Jacobs and his family -- with their ownership of both the Boston Bruins and food service giant Delaware North and their seeming to have a stubborn, fanatical, childish, greed-drenched, mobster-like vendetta against Le Centre Vidéotron or any other NHL-size hockey venue that either keeps concessions operations in house or outsources concessions work to any competitor to Delaware North -- have been, far and away, the number-one obstacle to any return of the NHL to La Ville de Québec, even more so than such factors as the presumably small size of that market, the French language's preeminence in that city and across the whole province of Québec, the Canadian dollar's inferiority in value to the US dollar, the greed of the respective owners of any currently Canadian-based NHL teams, or even a fear of reducing the value of the NHL's US national television contracts.  Furthermore, I believe that the Jacobses have received far too little attention for their actual or supposed role in making and keeping the one-time home of the Nordiques off limits to any NHL franchise and that Gary Bettman, for all of his miscues and misdeeds as the league's commissioner, has been too much of a fall guy on this matter.  As I see it, the biggest (if not only) thing for which Bettman can and should be blamed with regard to this issue is, like the owners of all of the other teams in the NHL, being too cowardly to pressure the Jacobs family to choose between the Bruins and Delaware North.  (Also, all of the other teams in the NHL could have been protesting the Jacobses' conflict of interest by boycotting Delaware North, but, again, they seem to be too gutless to shun that company.)

     

    12 hours ago, monkeypower said:

    Ownership group is committed to the market because that's how he can run a gambling business under Arizona state law.

     

    11 hours ago, Gary said:

    The only thing that he’s doing is a sports betting business. Which I have no problem with. It’s legal and it’s his business to burn to the ground if he wants.

     

    In that case, anyone who wants the Coyotes to stay alive and keep playing in the Phoenix area and in the State of Arizona in general had better hope that (a) Arizona's sports betting regulations do not get loosened enough to allow Alex Meruelo to hold a sports betting license in Arizona without owning a professional sports organization in that state, (b) Meruelo does not become the investor / operator of an Arizona-based MLS club, or (c) Meruelo does not buy any other existing Arizona-based pro sports operation that holds or at least qualifies for an Arizona sports betting license.  Should any of those things happen, I think that the Yotes could become very expendable to Meruelo ... and even might be very likely to go out of business.

     

    Yes, I am of the opinion that if and when the Coyotes run out of ways to stay in the Phoenix market, their most likely fate would be like that of the Cleveland Barons: The NHL and the Yotes' main owner (whether Alex Meruelo or someone else) agree to fold the franchise, the NHL arranges for (or otherwise helps, or at least allows) the Yotes' main owner to buy one of the remaining teams in the league, and the NHL allows said owner to "merge" the surviving club with the Yotes via a cherry-picking of the best players, coaches, and front-office staff from each of those franchises.

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  11. I can understand a San Diegan suing, at minimum, the Spanos family and the NFL over the Chargers' move, but how and why would the government of the City of San Diego be also a defendant in such a case?

     

    Also, I believe that there is still an ongoing lawsuit over the Rams' departure from St. Louis, and I would not be surprised if at least one person or group in Oakland is suing over the Raiders leaving that town for the second time in that franchise's history.  Hmmm ... might all of these relocations end up fueling a class-action case against the NFL and its teams?

  12. If BYU's entry into the Big 12 and Liberty's gaining of Conference USA membership have any common thread, it seems to be that the only realistic chance for a parochial university with a strict moral code to upgrade its conference situation is if a conference is very desperate for new members.

     

    Speaking of C-USA, the athletic director at WKU has recently revealed some details regarding the chaos within that league and why the Hilltoppers are staying put for now:

     

    https://www.bgdailynews.com/sports/wku/carousel-of-madness-how-wku-ended-up-staying-in-c-usa-and-whats-ahead-for/article_b527e8be-60bf-5233-adcf-17e647f9d68e.html

  13. 7 hours ago, bosrs1 said:

    I mean what say do they think they're entitled to? It's not county land involved as I understand it or county tax revenues. Plus they expressed a desire to get out of the stadium game pretty definitively and now are having second thoughts?

     

    7 hours ago, bosrs1 said:

    Everyone has seemingly forgotten politics is by definition a series of compromises. No one should get everything they want, everyone should have to give and get about half of what they're asking for. But I agree, Oakland/AlCo was on the right track disengaging AlCo from the stadium game. If AlCo wants back in, forget it. The County and City are at such loggerheads lately that I doubt anything would get done, and not in the timetable the A's want.

     

    https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2021/06/16/county-to-oakland-not-so-fast-on-that-waterfront-ballpark-tax-plan/

     

    https://www.rickeyblog.com/2021/06/16/22-observations-from-the-as-new-stadium-meeting-with-alameda-county-oakland/

     

    According to these two articles, the City of Oakland actually requested that the Alameda County Board of Supervisors sign off before the end of this month on a tax district that would help fund the infrastructure improvements needed to facilitate a ballpark and a neighboring mixed-use development at Howard Terminal.  Thus, the AlCo government might be quite justified in wanting the right to have formal input on the A's proposal for Howard Terminal and/or desiring that the process move more slowly.  In other words, Oakland's politicos are apparently dragging their AlCo peers into this issue, and the county's powers-that-be are giving their first obvious bit of pushback.

     

    I apologize if I had implied that AlCo's supervisors had made an unprovoked, fully voluntary choice to involve themselves in this project.

    • Like 1
  14. On 6/10/2021 at 1:22 PM, bosrs1 said:

    Oakland has always been somewhat dysfunctional at the local governmental level, more so that even most California cities are accused of being even with getting those supportive measures that are palatable. You have multiple points of view that don't like to see eye to eye to get things done. And the Coliseum site and its teams were a prime example. You have not only Oakland but Alameda County as having been stake holders in that (so double the government double the problems, particularly since Oakland and AlCo don't work well together and never have).  AlCo in particular just wants out of the sport business. And Oakland has mixed feelings about where the A's want to build as it's prohibitively expensive (the whole project is $12 billion and they're still asking the city for the equivalent of $897 million in indirect subsidies, and half the city council can't understand why they just don't build and redevelop where the existing stadium is instead for far less.

     

    Those tensions between the Oakland and Alameda County governments seemed to have added another chapter yesterday, as multiple members of the AlCo Board of Supervisors indicated that they (a) want a say when it comes to the Athletics' plan for Howard Terminal and (b) want to move at a noticeably slower pace on this matter than do their counterparts at Oakland's city hall.

     

    https://newballpark.org/2021/06/15/6-15-alameda-county-board-of-supervisors-meeting-on-howard-terminal/

  15. 20 hours ago, Crabcake said:

    As @Walk-Off said in the A’s thread, with how much discussion we’ve had recently about Tampa (both in the past, and the present), at this point it deserves its own thread. So here we go!

     

    I am quite sure that I made that suggestion in the 2021 MLB season thread, but I appreciate the shout-out just the same.

     

    Anyway, Josh Solomon, a St. Petersburg city hall reporter for the Tampa Bay Times, has made a detailed thread of tweets recapping this past week's developments in the Rays' stadium saga:

     

    https://twitter.com/ByJoshSolomon/status/1398399480874086404

     

    Also, Charlie Frago, a co-worker of Solomon's who covers Tampa city hall matters, has revealed what one Tampa City Council member claims to have heard recently from Rays officials with regard to one potential option for the team's future:

     

    https://www.tampabay.com/news/tampa/2021/05/28/are-the-rays-listening-to-music-city-siren-songs/

    • Like 3
  16. Yesterday, an anchor of the morning newscast on the Bay Area's Fox station interviewed Dave Kaval:

     

    https://www.ktvu.com/video/938385

     

    Kaval talked up the Las Vegas option so much in that interview that I have come away with the impression that Kaval, A's principal owner John Fisher, et al. are now to MLB, Oakland, and Las Vegas what Anthony Precourt was to Major League Soccer, Columbus, and Austin, respectively -- people who are eager to try to move a big-league pro sports team from a fairly large city that seems to be too boring for their tastes to an area that has noticeably fewer residents but also a considerably more exciting image (be it the hip, socioculturally cool, "weird" reputation of Austin or the hedonistic glitz of Las Vegas).

  17. https://www.tampabay.com/sports/rays/2021/05/27/rays-resurrect-ybor-city-stadum-idea/

     

    • The Good News for Rays Fans
      • A new ballpark for the Rays in Tampa's Ybor City section might be gaining another chance at being built.
    • The Bad News for Rays Fans
      • The Rays remain bound to their stadium lease in St. Petersburg through 2027.
      • Stu Sternberg is still demanding that at least one government somewhere in North America spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a new stadium for the Rays, and he has made no obvious offer to spend substantially more of his own money on such a venue than what he has done so far as the team's principal owner.
      • Sternberg is insisting that Tampa and Hillsborough County, just like St. Petersburg and Pinellas County, settle for sharing the Rays with Montréal and thus letting the Rays be only a part-time user of a new ballpark in the Tampa Bay area.  Furthermore, Sternberg is continuing to spin his split season proposal as a way to enable governments in both the Montréal and Tampa-St. Petersburg metro areas to build open-air ballparks for his team instead of a government in either region having to spend more money in order to construct a roofed stadium for a full-time local MLB club.

     

    On another note, I think that the time has come either for the Rays to have their own "Wheel of Relocation" thread or for the Oakland Athletics' "Wheel of Relocation" thread to be expanded to cover discussion of any reasonable possibility of any MLB franchise moving from one market to another.

    • Like 1
  18. Trucking Groups Oppose Oakland Stadium Port Site Even as A's Mull Moving

     

    Oakland A’s set to come to Portland on a baseball fact-finding mission

     

    Finally, there is this bizarre, tone-deaf tweet from the president of the A's:

     

    https://twitter.com/DaveKaval/status/1397023219421310978

     

    (I made multiple tries at embedding the tweet, but each attempt resulted only in code being displayed in my post.)

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