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Ha. Beer & Weed Magazine answered this exact question a couple months back. Page 28.

Maine's Beer & Weed Magazine had a cover story and interview with Papi about this in their February issue.

The AAU equivalent in baseball is for sure killing Little League, which in turn kills high school baseball.

These kids are like 9 and being told they need to try out for travel ball and if they don't make it they must suck, etc., all while they're being asked to cough up $1500 for a season while Little League is sitting right there for $150.

Is the coaching better? Usually not really. They play the best kids, emphasize winning over everything, and blow smoke up the few good players' skirts until they start believing they're special. The uniforms and equipment are sometimes better, but they also convince parents to buy a bunch of shit no 10 year old needs.

In reality, most good 10 year old pitchers are that way because they happened to grow faster than their peers, don't have any special talent, and are allowed to go forward with crappy mechanics because they're "successful." Great!

Then, everyone catches up, they're 14 and mediocre, and they're terrible at taking coaching and so don't continue to get better. Welcome to high school! Where they quickly become frustrated because they're not very good, have no feel for the game, and it's all a mess.

What kids need is to play as much as possible in a way that keeps them enjoying the game and with feedback on technique that's appropriate to their level. That can be done on the town level just fine with some basic training of volunteer coaches.

Everyone has a story of some kid who bloomed late and was all of a sudden amazing. Too often, that kid doesn't even keep playing past 12 years old nowadays because it's not any fun being one of the kids who isn't that good while all your friends bail for travel ball. It sucks.

There are pockets of places where we're keeping the little league flame alive, but it's harder and harder every year.

Our league had 8 teams of 12 kids in the majors level as recently as 15 years ago. Now it's three teams of 10 if we're lucky.

My high school kid and his friends all use "bro" with each other, but their parents call them "bub." I think man-to-man is usually "dude" or "bub," although I think bub is used at least somewhat ironically.

Yeah, the experience is as you describe. Generally, I read it on my laptop and the experience is mostly fine. And then I get the Sunday physical paper, which I still enjoy, though it gets smaller all the time.

On the phone, I log in basically every time I click through. Not ideal. But I generally don't like reading on my phone anyway.

People tell me that the e-paper product on a tablet is a good experience. Much better than just a pdf. But that's not my jam.

Moose Pond at the base of Pleasant Mountain has had tons of pop-ups for the last couple weekends; looks like Long Lake in Naples, too. Depends on how south you want to be.

I wish the trucks hammering their air brakes as they drive by my house were using whisper fluid. Quiet that shit right down.

I gotta put in a plug for Pleasant Mountain (FKA Shawnee Peak). It's a little farther from you than Lost Valley, but there's a little more room to move around and there are a few great snowboard instructors who often do family lessons.

But the best answer is whichever place is most convenient and that you'll actually go to regularly. If you want to snowboard, you need to get out there and do it and develop the muscle memory and confidence to enjoy it.

Pleasant and Lost Valley are particularly good because they offer night skiing, which can be more convenient and less expensive. Monday nights at Pleasant are only $24 and there's a ton of terrain open under the lights.

There is unequivocally zero risk to flying with CBD. You could walk up to a TSA agent and offer them one of your CBD peanut butter crackers and there would be a bigger risk of getting in trouble for endangering someone with peanut allergies than getting in trouble for the CBD.

Yep, every book. Because reading is awesome and doing awesome things makes your life not suck. Pretty self explanatory.

Happy to sign up for your anti-mayo/save-marriage newsletter.

But why not just order from your local bookstore's website? All Bookshop does is the same thing local bookstores do: buy the books from the publisher/distributor and then sell them to you.

Why not give your local bookstore (or some bookstore of your choosing, if you don't have a "local") all the margin, rather than giving Bookshop a little cut?

If for some reason I can't understand, it's Amazon or Bookshop, then by all means Bookshop. Amazon is bad. I just can't quite figure out what Bookshop offers that your local bookshop does not offer, though I guess some locals just set Bookshop up as their online stores, in which case I guess Bookshop is just acting as a webhost and is charging the bookstore a fee for doing it, which is fine.

Anyway, mostly just putting it out there that most local bookshops would be happy to ship books to you.

The governor's climate plan should always get a mention in these kinds of threads:

https://www.maine.gov/climateplan/

Maine Won't Wait is pretty good as actual plans to address climate change go. A good mix of reduction in consumption (I'd advocate for more), increase in renewable production, and mitigation efforts.

Lol. That's a list of books that people think are supposed to be good books, but they never read.

Sure, there are some foundational texts in there that are important for understanding the development of western literature, but having the Holy Bible as #1 is just do dumb it makes my head hurt. What are they even trying to accomplish?

Absalom, Absalom! Why? Have they read that shit?

Literature and art are some of the only places where human ingenuity somehow stalled hundreds of years ago. Was the best car ever the fucking Model T? Was the best TV ever full of tubes and offering three channels? Seems like not.

But some dude lays down some tortured prose in a mind-bendingly complicated series of narrations, offering zero guide for the reader to follow, almost purposely making the book difficult to read, and we've got to genuflect for centuries to come? Stop that shit.

It's a good example of early-20th-century American literature. That doesn't mean we've got to keep it up there on a pedestal for the rest of time. If you like that stuff, guys like John Irving and Paul Auster and so many others have moved the genre forward.

Gah. Why did I post? No idea. But by no means should anyone lend any credence to this nonsense. It's nonsense! Ill informed! Trolling!

What business?

Yes, for sure. Paper costs went bonkers last year and shipping basically doubled for a while there, and publishers passed on the costs. We've had the experience where we'll purchase books with one cover price and they ship with a different one.

We're hoping prices stabilize now that those two particular costs have come back down to earth. But we're definitely worried publishers just leave prices where they are because they're getting it.