He started playing some OF in his thirties to prevent wear and tear, and eventually reached a point where he was playing more OF than catcher. Had a bad year in 1962, and responded the following year (at age 38) by going back to catching exclusively, behind Elston Howard.

This was the year Howard won the MVP, but check out their stats:

Howard .287/.342/.528

Yogi .293/.360/.497

The team went 79-49 (.617) with Ellie at catcher, and 24-8 (.750) with Yogi. They somehow managed to win the pennant by ten games despite Mantle missing 2/3 of the season, and with an infield of Pepitone, Richardson, Kubek, and Clete Boyer.

And that was it for Yogi, save a cameo with the Stengel-managed Mets in '65.

(BTW, those 17 consecutive All-Star "appearances" covered the years they played two All-Star games, so by our present-day standards he was a 15-time All-Star.)

I worked for Amazon in Seattle from '99-'01. Around October 2000 we started seeing corporate escorting some Indian fellows around the offices, but they assured us it was no big deal -- our jobs were safe. So we did our usual yeoman's work over the holiday season (which extends well into January to handle returns). Then in February they announced the layoffs. So we were all lame ducks for several weeks -- and then we all got 20% raises for our last pay period. This was closely followed by a press release bragging about how much he was saving in payroll costs by sending our jobs to India -- using our new pay rate as the point of comparison.

There are some who say the jobs were lost in response to threats of our unionization. We were approached by a union but did not vote to join it. I don't believe the two happenings were related -- the push to unionize was a last-ditch effort once the writing was already on the wall. Our tech staff had created a customer service system that was massive but elegant, and advanced fiber optics made it exportable. Ta-daa.

...is capitalized because the National Association of Realtors decided it should be. No other reason. It's a self-aggrandizing absurdity.

But that doesn't explain why it's taken hold among the print media. After all, I could declare myself king, but if nobody else goes along with it I've wasted my time.

No, the reason you see the word capitalized is that the National Association of Realtors followed up its chesty designation by explicitly instructing its members to call any print media outlet any time they saw the word in lower case. The more dogged among the self-starters were happy to oblige, and most copy desks capitulated rather than spend half their workdays getting yapped at for not getting the memo.

Here's a transcript of my uncle Bill Brennan's testimony to the House Banking Committee in 2000 about his decades-long fight against predatory lending. I'm sure Ms. Ferencik was merely being flip in her comment about predatory loans, but they've been an ongoing and well-publicized problem for many years.

http://tinyurl.com/d3hdnw

"Over two millennia society has concluded that the best way to do that is a sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman. And conservatives, as a general rule, have an interest in conserving those traditions."

It's not as though "society" had been presented with much choice about what "marriage" would mean. This, in itself, is not a defense of the refusal to consider expanding the definition.

To the extent that the "rank and file" hippie was not typically a member of an aggrieved group (aside from draft eligibility), but rather a middle-class white kid with the built-in safety net to afford them the luxury of "tuning in et al" for a while, I can see the political conversion idea having some merit.

I added the qualifiers "to the extent" and "some merit" -- not the language of someone being led around by the nose. I find the idea intriguing, that's all. All the "hippies" I knew in my decade-plus of college town restaurant management (hippie central if ever there is one) jibes with the notion that a lot of the original lot were well-off suburban kids who had the luxury of devoting their youth to drugs and music.

I've given Infinite Jest a couple of shots, but haven't succeeded in finishing. I'm very fond of it, but I think I need a few weeks in a secluded mountain cabin in order to get through the whole thing.

Describing it as psychotic makes perfect sense to me. To say "self-indulgent", a common descriptor for the book, would be to criticize Wallace's stylistic intent. But "psychotic", on the other hand, implies that he couldn't help but write it in that way. I'll admit I've never read another book wherein I'm following the story and enjoying the flourishes on one hand, while wondering how the writer put himself through writing it on the other. The level of identification with such a psychotic central character is such that you almost have to apply the adjective to the work as a whole.

There are some stylistic similarities between Infinite Jest and The Mezzanine, but there's one important difference -- The Mezzanine is stunt writing. Baker's digressions are calculated and pat, designed specifically to flesh out the story of a man arriving at work and getting breakfast from a vending machine to novella length. There's no heart to it, which I guess is part of the point.

But Infinite Jest is bursting with vitality and ideas -- so many that the narrative, such as it is, can't hold all of them. Hence the endnotes.