Greg Cravens
About Joey Hack’s post, “Questions Raised by Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man'” …
The answer to these questions, and many more like them, is that in 1974, Prozac had only just been invented. It wasn’t until years later that it went into wide circulation.
OakTree
He should be wearing a piano key necktie in that photo. And why is Billy Joel brandishing a Telecaster, anyway?
Packrat
I love that moment when he hits that soaring final chorus in “Piano Man,” and dozens of catheters come flying onto the stage.
Mark
Who cares about all the damn metaphors in “Piano Man”? I understood what he was saying. I also remember when Billy and his small group played to a packed house at the old Lafayette’s Music Room at Overton Square in the early 1970s. I listened to it live on FM-100. Billy loved Memphis, and Memphis loved Billy. He became a superstar almost overnight after that show.
Paul Scates
About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Another City/Suburban Battle” …
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but did the city not determine that South Cordova was going to lose money for the city immediately after annexing it? I’ve been saying for a while that the annexation strategy is and has been failing.
If you were to do a postmortem on the annexations, I believe you’d find that even the ones that at first were profitable for the city likely are no longer profitable.
The big problem the city has is that the minute it annexes an area, property values in the area drop. So any business case the city did based on the potential tax revenue of the annexed area was wrong if they didn’t assume that the pool of funds would be reduced after annexation. Knowing how most governments operate, I doubt that kind of analysis was ever done on any of the annexations.
GroveReb84
Mark Luttrell: 26%; George Flinn: 11%; Brian Kelsey: 9%; David Kustoff: 8%; Tom Leatherwood: 7%; Steve Basar: 1%; Undecided: 38%.
Given the choice of the above, it’s easy to see why Undecided is winning.
B
About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column, “Medium Cool” …
Maybe the Flyer is too “cool” to educate themselves on Trump’s policies, but you can read them here if you can find time between comparing IPA’s: donaldjtrump.com/positions.
Clyde
Dubya was cool to a certain segment of the country — largely the same segment that loves Trump, and for many of the same reasons. The difference is that many of the people who voted for Dubya but weren’t fond of his cool trusted that his handlers would actually run the country for him. They don’t have the same trust with Trump. They know he’ll surround himself with yes-men and do whatever he damn well pleases, and that’s what scares them.
Hillary Clinton’s cool is 10th-grade math teacher cool — the teacher everybody hates after the first day of class, but toward the end of the year decide she’s all right, and by the time they graduate, remember her quite fondly as one of the best teachers they ever had.
Jeff
Bruce, you’ve gone too far. How dare you insult the noble brotherhood of “Siding Salesmen.”
I prefer to think of Trump as more like the guy who owns a bunch of sleazy and failed businesses and has the audacity to show up uninvited to the party, referring to himself as a “Business Genius, and VERY, very rich to boot.”
Oh … Wait a minute. Never mind.
So maybe we can just call him what he is: the turd in the punch bowl of the 2016 election year. And that’s not cool.
John Shouse
I dunno, I have sat in a bar with John Kerry and voted for him anyway.
CL Mullins