I chatted on Friday, and wrote a piece on the Royals’ poor start on Tuesday and on the Yankees’ next move after Rivera’s injury yesterday. My top 100 rankings for this year’s draft will go up on Tuesday, May 8th, with a first-round projection to follow on the 15th.
Since I couldn’t post a Saturday five last week (I was barely online all weekend), here are eleven links of note for the week:
* The New Yorker on close, or too-close, ties between Stanford and Silicon Valley, and on the death of Adam “MCA” Yauch.
* Ernest Hemingway writes to F. Scott Fitzgerald after reading one of my all-time favorite novels, Tender is the Night.
* No, there is no ”Curse of Chief Wahoo”, but this overtly racist image – and the racist team nickname that goes along with it – should be retired as relics of an intolerant age best relegated to the historical dustbin.
* An excerpt from Jeff Himmelman’s upcoming book about whether Woodward and Bernstein used a grand juror as one of their sources on the Watergate scandal.
* I’m not comfortable with an athletics staffer at a state university actively campaigning for discrimination against members of the LGBT community. Fortunately, neither is my colleague Gene Wojciechowski, who wrote a piece about Nebraska’s assistant football coach, Ron Brown. The Kansas City Star has also weighed in with a similar yet more pointed op ed ahead of Brown’s anticipated testimony Monday against an anti-discrimination bill.
* Another interview with the Days of Wonder guys about putting Ticket to Ride on the iPad.
* Over 100 major California chefs have signed a petition opposing the state’s upcoming foie gras ban, while proposing more humane standards for raising geese and ducks for foie gras production. I think Alton Brown said it best on Twitter:
We make our cows stand knee-deep in crap, shove our chickens in cages smaller than cereal boxes, and you want to complain about foie gras?
— Alton Brown (@altonbrown) May 4, 2012
And he didn’t mention all the unnecessary, “prophylactic” antibiotics we shove down animals’ throats.
* NPR weighs in, rationally, on the small controversy over ”tuna scrape,”, responsible for over 200 cases of salmonella over the last two weeks. My issue with tuna scrape, and spicy tuna rolls in general, is that you’re not getting high-quality fish. The point of sushi and sashimi is to appreciate the fish itself; in spicy tuna rolls or similar preparations, the fish can be of very low quality and you’ll never know the difference. Don’t trust any meat item where the cook can hide substandard product under other ingredients, like a spicy sauce.
* Mark Bittman of the New York Times weighs in on the brewing fight over school-provided breakfasts, and how Big Food wants to further enrich itself by delivering junk food to food-insecure schoolchildren.
Hi Keith,
Not sure where to ask this. You mentioned in Friday’s chat you use Alton Brown’s polenta recipe. Is it his savory polenta recipe http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/savory-polenta-recipe/index.html ? You said you use as a base but this seems to have a lot of ingredients.
Thanks
“Don’t trust any meat item where the cook can hide substandard product under other ingredients, like a spicy sauce.”
Wouldn’t this be true of just about any meat preparation that involves a sauce? Or are there ways to differentiate meat quality in other recipes but not in those like spicy tuna? If that is the case, what makes spicy tuna different?