OldDenverGuy

@mamboitaliano__ American John Adams composed the controversial opera, "The Death of Klinghoffer" in 1991 in response to the highjacking. Critics insisted the libretto was too compassionate toward the highjackers. Adams also wrote "Doctor Atomic" about the atomic bomb, and "Nixon in China."

The Night of Sigonella, 1985: Italy Stands Up to the United States 🇮🇹🇺🇸 The story begins on October 7, 1985, when four Palestinian terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF, a faction of the PLO) hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean, off the coast of Egypt. Hundreds of passengers were on board, including many Americans. The hijackers demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

🚨 Italy denied a U.S. military plane permission to land at the American base in Sicily, Sigonella But when I say Sigonella, who remembers the crazy 1985 episode with a whole night of “Mexican standoff” and a tug-of-war between Craxi and Reagan? The full story in the comments

@arenella1 Twenty-nine countries for me, mostly in Europe (18) and Caribbean (4), but also Egypt, Israel and Jordan.

Most Americans have never traveled outside the US with exception of Caribbean vacations. Unlike Europeans who visit other countries frequently, Americans lack any understanding of how significantly cultural and social norms differ from one country to another. I spent a month in

@NamethatYank Earle Combs (with a misspelled name on this card)

Name the most random Yankee that comes to mind when I say the word “outfielder”.

@CheyCab 342 W. Kellogg (St. Paul), looking like a far more desolate place than its actual location, thanks to the direction in which the photo was taken.

New alcohol free bar in the neighborhood. Just when I was thinking about taking up whiskey again for the end times.

@Matt_Pinner Reggie Jackson, whom I met outside a Tulsa radio station as I waited my turn for an interview. Chatted for about 5 minutes. Don King, with whom I shared an elevator at Bally's Las Vegas just a day before a Mike Tyson fight there. I complimented him on his exquisite suit.

Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever spoken to? Not “seen from far away” — actually talked to, even for a minute. A quick hello, a handshake, a normal conversation… and you still remember it. Who was it?

@OleTimeHardball Pretty random ...

Name a Kansas City Royals player Random is welcome

@micyoung75 @mary_dysart Ronnie Reagan’s “welfare queens driving Cadillacs” updated for the modern day.

Stephen Miller stood at a White House task force event yesterday with the Vice President and described a Somali refugee who drives a Mercedes, never works, and gets unlimited free money by lying on a government form. He called it "the system" that Vance's task force will demolish. The administration already ran this investigation. It is called Feeding Our Future — a $250 million federal nutrition fraud case out of Minnesota. The ringleader who was convicted is Aimee Bock. She is a white woman. Operation Metro Surge, the federal enforcement sweep that followed, made thousands of arrests. Zero Somali Americans were charged in connection with the fraud. Ninety-two percent of Somali Americans are United States citizens. The community Miller described — drivers of foreign cars, idle, lying on government forms — does not match the prosecution record the administration itself produced. Miller knows the record. He helped build the task force. He is not describing the fraud case. He is describing a Somali neighbor. At a White House table. With the Vice President nodding alongside him. That is a senior government official using a fabricated ethnic caricature as the face of federal enforcement policy. The Mercedes is not in the indictment. It was never in the indictment.

@RomaPete Wife and I visited on a midweek afternoon in early Feb. Got online tickets the day prior, and the line went quickly. But it was wall-to-wall people inside. Wife said, “Pickpocket’s paradise,” as we made the slow clockwise circle around the place. It was even worse at the Louvre.

Boy howdy Notre Dame is packed even at 9:30. My having become a morning person in my decrepitude is often an advantage in tourism but not today. I shudder to think what it’s like in the middle of the afternoon.

@EastEndJoe @Vegasdave59 Well, if any of them were virgins prior to their visit, they aren’t anymore.

I find this very disturbing. Who in their right mind would send their teenage daughter to Mar a Lago? Fucking idiots!!

@PaulRudnickNY The only thing Trump has that’s “invisible to the human eye” is his dick.

RFK Jr told CPAC that Trump has "encyclopedic, molecular knowledge across a wide range of interests." He added, "Trump's knowledge is so vast it's invisible to the human eye"

@HJB_News__ The U.K. needs to legalize pepper spray, and then there should be a campaign to put a free canister in the hands of every British female over the age of puberty.

Foreign predators don’t like being filmed. With the influx of foreign migrant men entering the UK there is a new trend growing amongst them. Most of the British women and young girls that are being raped after a night out are falling victims to this new trend. They hang around clubs in packs looking for vulnerable British women, some being more easy targets if intoxicated. They try and approach them with only one thought in mind, to have sex. This is what the British government is allowing into the country where women can’t even go out at night. How many stories have you read where rapes and gang rapes are being committed from women on a night out and in some cases being separated from their group of friends.

@MorbidlyObtuser @NeedToTravel73 @Super70sSports Harrah finished the '82 season at .304. It was the only time in his 17-year career he played in all 162 games. He finished with 25 HRs and 100 runs scored; both were career highs.

@NeedToTravel73 @Super70sSports He must have finished strong. Harrah didn't :)

Sunday morning ritual. The kids today will never understand

@MorEdge_Insight "Oil is stronger than Muslim hatred." -- New Chinese proverb.

Don’t you find it weird that China actively destroys mosques, calls Islam a mental disease, and openly oppresses and subjugates the Uyghur Sunni Muslims, yet they have a warm alliance with the entire Arab and Muslim world with not a single Islamic country calling for “Death to China”, no Islamic terror attacks, and zero condemnations or UN actions. But Israel with a 20% Muslim population given equal rights and freedoms, mosques all around the country, and a military that protects all Muslim sites from attack is constantly attacked and condemned and vilified with more UN resolutions against it than all other countries, including dictatorships and tyrants, combined. And America which has mosques popping up everywhere across the country and even has Muslims in congress, with Muslims having full equal rights and freedoms (and in many cases over the past 3 years even more rights and freedoms than other Americans), is constantly hated and has all Arab Islamic countries calling for its destruction. The Red-Green Alliance is stronger than most realize. The hatred for America, Israel and Europe has nothing to do with treatment of Muslims, because Muslims are treated better in these countries than they are in Muslim countries. It’s all to do with the fact that these countries are not ruled by Muslims, or communists, and these countries don’t now and surrender to Islam.

@thomaswright08 People could spend years explaining why everything Mark Levin says is fucking moronic, but no one would be willing to put in the time to do that.

This is what I recently wrote about an operation to seize the uranium: Iran’s highly enriched uranium is a white, crystalline solid, uranium hexafluoride, stored in thick, steel cylinders, and cannot be reliably and permanently destroyed with explosives. If the cylinders are pierced, they emit a severely hazardous gas. A successful seizure from Isfahan would require U.S. troops to secure a wide perimeter, locate and excavate up to 970 pounds of the uranium buried under an unknown depth of rubble, protect it from counterattack, load it onto aircraft, and depart under fire. The operation would be arguably the most complex raid ever carried out by U.S. forces. The 970 pounds of uranium could also be spread among Isfahan and two other sites, raising the possibility of multiple raids.

@ChrissieMayr @saniyafatma1278 One time, I flew on SWA from DEN to SEA, sharing a bulkhead row with a young woman and her sheepdog. They were going to Japan, and the dog had the middle seat. The flight attendant told me I could move if I was bothered. I said, "Don't you dare move me!" Best flight in years!

@saniyafatma1278 There should be dogs sitting like this on every flight

@PaulOPinion Or Jim Leyland flicking a lit cigarette at the guy.

I can visualize an Earl Weaver, Frank Robinson or Lou Pinella, in the middle of a nationally televised game, being approached by a guy with bow tie & a microphone. “Get the &$#@ out of my dugout!”

@DanClarkSports The Marlins will be in town while I'm visiting St. Paul in early May. Can we wait until at least Memorial Day to kick them out of MLB so the Twins will have at least one semi-guaranteed win while I'm at Target Field?

It's time to boot the Miami Marlins out of Major League Baseball. To pull just 10,160 fans to their second game of the season on Opening Weekend is an absolute disgrace!

@alt_w_v_g We subscribed to SiriusXM in my wife's 2016 Prius to listen to the Met Opera station. We enjoyed it for two years while driving around town, as well as on several extended road trips. For no reason they moved its location "UP the dial" to a number not in our car. No fix! We quit.

Ran some diligence on SiriusXM this weekend Not because anyone asked Because my 14-year-old nephew connected his phone to my car via Bluetooth, played a Spotify playlist, and asked me what the "SXM" button was for I didn't have an answer So I pulled the 10-K SiriusXM is an $8.56B revenue company with nearly $10B in debt and a $7.4B market cap Read that again The debt is larger than the company Their business model, simplified: 1. Pay automakers to install radios nobody asked for 2. Give every new car buyer a free trial they didn't request 3. Hope they forget to cancel 4. Charge them $25.99/month for something their phone does for $10.99 That's it. That's the model. They have 33M subscribers. Sounds impressive until they lost 301,000 self-pay subscribers last year. And hundreds of thousands the year before that. Revenue has declined three consecutive years The average subscriber is 35-64, male, household income over $150K. Over half have been paying for 10+ years. These aren't loyal customers These are people whose spouses haven't noticed the $25.99 charge on the Amex yet The crown jewel of the portfolio is Howard Stern. They pay him roughly $100M a year. He works three days a week. His show averages 125K daily listeners. That's $800 per listener per year My analyst did the math three times because he thought he was wrong He wasn't For that price, you could buy each listener a Spotify family plan, an Audible subscription, and still have enough left for AirPods Speaking of Spotify. Nearly 290M premium subscribers. Growing double digits. $10.99/month. Available on every device ever made. SiriusXM. 33M subscribers. Shrinking. $25.99/month. Requires a satellite. Spotify's full-year revenue grew 19%. SiriusXM's declined 2%. Spotify trades at 74x earnings. SiriusXM trades at 5x. The market is not confused about which direction these businesses are headed Their growth strategy is called the "trial funnel." There are 7.3M people driving cars with free SiriusXM trials. The conversion rate is not publicly disclosed. Probably because it's embarrassing They have 180M "enabled vehicles" in the U.S. They have 33M subscribers. That's an 18% attach rate on hardware they already paid to install. 82% of the cars with their radios in them are generating zero revenue In any other industry an 18% hit rate gets you fired In satellite radio, it gets you a seat on the NYSE Adjusted EBITDA margin is 31%. Looks healthy. Until you realize "adjusted" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting in a company that posted a $2.08B net loss the year prior. Adjusted EBITDA was $2.73B that same year The distance between those two numbers is called addbacks And they're working overtime 2026 guidance: flat revenue, flat EBITDA, slightly fewer subscribers. The CEO called this stability and meaningful progress. On Wall Street, we call this managed decline Warren Buffett owns 35.4% of this company. This is the most confusing part. The man who said "be fearful when others are greedy" bought a satellite radio company in the age of Bluetooth. His entry was a Liberty Media arb play that accidentally became a long-term hold. The stock is down over 50% from its highs. I don't know why he's still in. You don't know why. His shareholders definitely don't know why. The bull thesis: SiriusXM has 33M people who have been paying $15/month for a decade and have no plans to stop. That's $6B in recurring revenue from people who may not even remember they're subscribed. Churn is 1.5%. Lower than most SaaS companies. The bear thesis: Every teenager alive today has never used a car radio Both are probably right SiriusXM's competitive moat is not content. It's not technology. It's not brand. It's the 47 minutes it takes to cancel over the phone SiriusXM isn't a bad company. It's a case study in what happens when your moat is consumer apathy and your growth strategy requires General Motors. Plz fix. Thx. Sent from my iPhone

@Alan__Curtis @playinglesshurt Very clever!

@playinglesshurt Very good! Here’s a rather nice arrangement: youtu.be/qAZMmoT7kH8?si…

#jokeoftheday sometimes that happens with other instruments too! #music #FrenchHorn

@playinglesshurt I'm definitely anxious to "make several dollars."

#jokeoftheday learn the #drums ! #music #percussion