Hello and welcome to episode 1793 of Effectively Wild, a band-grave space ball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters, I'm Meg Rally of band-grave's hand.

Hello and welcome to episode 1793 of Effectively Wild, a band-grave space ball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters, I'm Meg Rally of band-grave's hand. Join us always by band-member of the ringer. Thank you.

I'm alright, happy new year. Happy new year. How was your new year? You know, I stayed up till midnight. I was very proud of myself. I am not prone to midnight. It is not an hour I often see on purpose as a person who is an early riser.

I don't say that as if there's any moral superiority to rising earlier or one way to be that is just the way that I am wired. Sometimes people get very fussy about their sleeping habits. I only get fussy about yours because I don't think you sleep enough but now you have newborns.

I'm not going to do that. That would be crazy. But anyway, I don't normally stay up till midnight and I was proud of myself. I survived the sound of fireworks for many hours after that. And here we are. In 2022, I had to write down the year. I got it right on the first try.

My year might be downhill from there. I don't know if I can do better than writing 2022 on purpose correctly the first time around. It might decline.

Yeah, I don't have to write a date all that often these days. Back when I used to, I would always screw that up for a while. I probably still will but have fewer opportunities too.

But yeah, I was a past midnight, which was not because it was New Year's Eve. It's just because that's what I do. And otherwise didn't go anywhere or do anything.

I could say was because of the pandemic and might have been, but also that's just probably what I would have been doing anyway. It turns out that a lot of like lockdown pandemic precautions just mirror what I would normally do on her regular circumstances.

So I just watched some drunken Andy and Anderson and then went back to regular life.

Yeah, I watched when Harry met Sally, which one could argue that that's a New Year's film. Right?

Definitely.

Yeah, it's also a Christmas film and a summer film and a fall in New York film. It is a film that reminds us that fashion is cyclical because Meg Ryan looks fantastic throughout the whole thing.

And I'm like, I would wear most of these outfits now. Again, if I ever left that. But yeah, that was that was quite nice and satisfying. Funny, you know, Nora Efron, she was a talented gal.

Miss her was she were still around. There you go.

Well, Happy New Year, everyone. It is a new year, but same slow news week generally. No development in the lockout as of yet. No meetings that we have heard of.

Just a couple of news items. I guess we could touch on briefly before we get to our topics and guests today.

One is that there were further developments in the saga of the baseball card industry. Yes.

And tops. So we talked last year late August, episode 1736. We did an interview about the surprising some might say shocking news that fanatics had swooped in and secured exclusive card licenses.

With both MLB and the MLB PA, which seemed to leave tops, which had been making baseball cards for 70 years in a pretty precarious position.

And I think there was a lot of consternation about what this meant for baseball cards and for sports cards in general and what it would mean for tops.

And now we know at least the latter, what it means for tops is that fanatics is reportedly purchasing tops. So tops has lost some of its valuable licenses had lost the baseball license, although that was not scheduled to kick in until 2025.

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