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You could call them a saving grace. One type of business was deemed essential at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that helped families living paycheck to paycheck – pawnshops."This is actually our history," Andrew Charbonneau said as he showed off an Edison cylinder phonograph at his shop, Palm Beach Pawn King in North Palm Beach, Florida. Typically searching for precious antiques, Charbonneau said this year, treasure hunting took a backseat in the pawnshop industry."I think we're all in a situation we're not used to, so everybody is doing what we call [to survive]," said Charbonneau, who also owns two other pawnshops, American Gun and Pawn in West Palm Beach and Andrew's Coin and Jewelry in Delray Beach.Across his three shops, Charbonneau saw firsthand what the lockdown in March did to local families."We had a lot of nervous individuals that have never pawned before in their life, and they were in a situation where they had nowhere to go, no other avenues to obtain cash," he said.Some bank branches were temporarily closed, hours reduced in others, but those in the pawning business were open."The essential aspect of what we do was very important for the community because the bank will not lend you on your cellphone, won't lend you on your computer," said Charbonneau.The COVID-19 pandemic put thousands of people in Palm Beach County out of work.According to statistics from the state Department of Economic Opportunity, the city hit hardest was Boynton Beach. In just 30 days, the unemployment rate increased from 4.7 in March to 17.5 in April."They would come in and say, 'I lost my job because of the pandemic,'" said Bobby Gloyd, an employee at G & C Pawn Shop in Boynton Beach.Unemployment rates from the state show Delray Beach had the second-highest increase in unemployment within Palm Beach County, going from 4.2 unemployment rate in March to 15.4 in April. Riviera Beach was the third, jumping from a 5.5 unemployment rate in March to 15.1 the next month.Gloyd said that people pawn the items that hold the most value to pay their mortgages and rent."Gold is always good. It's easier to sell and also has a lot of value," said Gloyd."Family heirlooms, anything jewelry related that has emotionally passed down value, meaning sentimental value. We did see a lot of that. It wasn't so much about selling. They were still nervous about losing it because they didn't know if they'd ever be able to pick it back up," said Charbonneau.When those stimulus and unemployment checks did start coming through, pawnshops say business shifted to sales. They were selling laptops, gaming systems, anything that could help people get through quarantine."Everybody was looking for laptops, I guess when the kids were being homeschooled," said Gloyd."PS4 was one of the big things. If I had 500 of them, [they] would have sold within a week, at the time period," added Charbonneau.Musical instruments, tools for home improvements were all among the hot commodities. And then there were items people couldn't find at retail stores."Bike sales were very, very high. I would say that was a 75%-plus increase. Work out equipment again; we're not used to selling that. It usually sits on the shelves, so there was a lot of increases in fields that I would never project in the future will be the same,” said Charbonneau.Most pawnshop owners said people not only came back for their pawned items when they got their stimulus checks, but they also bought more."iPad air: a lot of people were looking for that," said Charbonneau."The newest thing is like sneakers. ... They've been probably easier to sell than tools. It's nuts," added Gloyd.With 2020 coming to an end, pawnshop owners like Charbonneau, who have been in the business for 40 plus years, say they could have never predicted business trends this year. And, with a third wave of COVID-19 in motion, they don't expect to know what the holiday season will be like."There is no way anyone can predict how this Christmas season is going to unfold," said Charbonneau.This story was originally published by Michelle Quesada at WPTV. 4109

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-- firefighters Timothy Jackson, James Lyons III, Joseph McGuirk, Paul Brotherton, Jeremiah Lucey, and Lt. Thomas E. Spencer -- who were killed in 1999 in a warehouse blaze allegedly started by a 197

Yes, an asteroid is heading toward earth and is expected to get close on November 2. But you should still plan on voting November 3, the asteroid is “not big enough to cause harm,” said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.Asteroid 2018VP1 is about the size of a refrigerator, hurtling toward Earth at more than 25,000 miles-per-hour. Tyson says the asteroid will “buzz-cut” Earth on November 2, but is not expected to cause any harm.NASA says the asteroid only has a .41 percent chance of entering Earth’s atmosphere. Even if it did, the space agency says, “it would disintegrate due to its extremely small size.”“So if the world ends in 2020, it won’t be the fault of the Universe,” Tyson wrote on social media. 719

With strikeouts piling up, scoring plummeting, attendance falling and games often descending into all-or-nothing bores, it's no wonder that some people are calling for radical change to baseball.The sport faced a similar challenge 50 years ago, dogged by a scoring depression and?lagging fan interest. In response, baseball's rules committee lowered the pitcher's mound 5 inches and tightened the strike zone, making it harder for pitchers to dominate the game. That sparked more scoring the next season — and more exciting games for fans.If those fixes could breathe new life into the sport then, there's no reason a similar strategy wouldn't work now.Today, infield shifts — where teams load three players on one side of the infield — are gobbling up hits and forcing hitters to obsess over launch angles to lift balls over the infield and into the seats. So, a good place to start would be requiring two infielders on each side of second base, spreading them out in a traditional defensive alignment.Lowering the pitcher's mound also worked in 1968, and it's worth considering dropping it some more to help reduce the elevation advantage that pitchers have, especially in today's era of often overmatched hitters facing down 100 mph+ pitches. And a pitch clock, requiring pitchers to throw to the batter within 20 seconds, could move things along, squeezing some dead air out of games.This year's playoffs have featured some exciting matchups, but oftentimes teams have suffered through collective slumps that have become endemic in the sport. In the National League, the Colorado Rockies scored a total of two runs in three games as they were swept by the Milwaukee Brewers, while the Atlanta Braves got shut out twice in their four-game series loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Over in the American League, the Cleveland Indians managed just six runs in three games in a losing effort to the Houston Astros. And those were among the best-hitting teams in baseball.The 1968 season was known as the "Year of the Pitcher," when pitching was so dominant that Carl Yastrzemski was the only player in the American League with a batting average over .300, the standard for excellence in hitting. Pitcher Bob Gibson led the National League with a 1.12 earned run average (ERA), the best since the Deadball era (an ERA under 3.00 is generally considered very good). Attendance fell for the second straight season and many people wrote off the sport as too boring, especially compared to faster-paced ones. Marshall McLuhan declared, "Baseball is doomed. It is a dying sport."Today, the sport is at a crossroads again, with strikeouts outnumbering hits this year for the first time, and too many plays ending in the dreaded "three true outcomes" -- strikeouts, walks and home runs -- where there's no action on the field. Baseball's leaders recognize that change is needed, and hopefully they will follow through as their predecessors did a half-century ago.The '68 season was truly the ice age of modern baseball. MLB players combined?to hit just .237, the worst in baseball history, and seven teams batted .230 or lower. (By comparison, this year's collective batting average was .248.) The New York Yankees hit a baseball-worst?.214 and still managed to have a winning season. Don Drysdale of the Los Angeles Dodgers threw six consecutive shutouts and broke Walter Johnson's 55-year-old record by tossing 58 and two-thirds consecutive scoreless innings.Drysdale was the winning pitcher in the All-Star Game, which the National League won by a typical 1968 score of 1-0. The sport's best hitters managed just eight hits that night while striking out 20 times.Baseball drew barely 14,000 fans?a game that season, and even some of the players' family members were yawning at the lack of action, as the Washington Post described that summer:"I think everyone would like to see more of the spectacular things you used to see in baseball: the base stealing, the arguments with the umpire, people screaming, 'throw the bums out,'" said Liz Peterson, wife of Washington outfielder Cap Peterson, who stole just two bases that year while batting .204. "That's when the game is fun."A lot of people today would like to see more base stealing, which has gone out of fashion, along with other exciting plays on the decline as players too often swing for the fences. Former player and manager Dusty Baker, who broke into the majors in '68, spoke for many when?he told Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic:"The game is getting so slow. And it's not exciting. What happened to the triple? Scoring from first on a double or a long single, running 3-2. I think the game is going to come back. It has to come back."Ted Williams made a similar prediction after baseball enacted changes to the sport in December 1968. Williams took over as manager of the Washington Senators the next season, and at spring training that year, a young reporter named Ira Berkow asked him: "Is Baseball doomed?"Williams replied: "There's no question about it, baseball is not as popular as it was 10 years ago. But games go in cycles. Baseball is down now, but it'll come back." And of course, that proved to be true, but it took some corrective action to make it happen.By midsummer 1969, Sports Illustrated declared that Baseball Booms Again. That season featured the Miracle Mets winning the World Series, and a minor miracle in Washington, where Williams led the second Washington Senators franchise to its only winning season.Across baseball, runs increased and strikeouts waned, increasing action, just as the owners had wanted. Now, we need that same upswing.Purists might object to tinkering with the sport, but isn't the more radical change continuing down a sclerotic path where more and more of the action is no action? Baseball can be an exciting game, and there's nothing wrong with the national pastime that some extra balls in the gap, stolen bases, and movement on the bases can't fix. 6039