I had two Insider pieces this week, one on hypothetical postseason award ballots and one on notable September callups, and then someone else I didn’t expect to see came up after the latter was posted so why do I even do anything.
Klawchats at ESPN.com are indeed dead, as are all chats there, but I think I’ve found a solution that will let me resume the chats here after Labor Day. I’m looking for a little help with a script to clean up the transcripts so I can post them after the fact for everyone to read, so if you’re handy with perl, Python, or the like, please let me know. I’ll keep doing Periscopes, but they don’t work for everyone, including my deaf readers, so I want to make sure I use both media going forward.
My review of the second edition of the boardgame Evolution plus its Flight expansion is up at Paste. You can buy the game for $48
And now, the links…
- How “Big Egg” has used underhanded and possibly illegal tactics, with the help of the USDA, to try to sabotage Hampton Creek’s vegan mayonnaise. It’s incredibly sleazy.
- Andrew Zimmern talks about the future of food, from synthetic food replacements to insects as a sustainable protein source.
- Scientists have discovered a naturally-occurring protein that would help slow the melting of ice cream. I see a problem with this, though: Ice cream tastes better when it’s at the brink of melting, because our taste buds don’t detect flavors in cold or frozen foods that well. That’s why ice cream has to be high in sugar – otherwise it wouldn’t taste sweet.
- A Chinese writer talks about how the “gross” immigrant food of her upbringing has been culturally appropriated as “trendy.”
- The programmer adapting the board game Brass into app form has started a blog about the process.
- Chef Rick Bayless – yep, that’s Skip’s brother – writes about his dismay over the unbanning of GMO corn in Mexico, using culinary and cultural arguments rather than (un)scientific ones.
- An experiment among Israeli schoolteachers found unconscious gender bias in math grading, bias that affected those kids’ choices as they advanced to higher grades. I know some of you get on me for discussing bias (racism, sexism, etc.) where it isn’t immediately evident, but these issues still exist, especially racism within the white-dominated baseball industry, even though it’s rarely explicit any more.
- Alton Brown talks to the New York Times about his attitudes about our attitudes about food.
- A paid anti-GMO shill for the organic agriculture industry was “severed” from Washington State University. Particularly notable are the undisclosed conflicts of interest, the same violation of which the anti-GMO side is accusing Kevin Folta.
- Why is Missouri executing one death-row prisoner a month?
- Vaccine denier Dr. Bob Sears – whose license to practice medicine still hasn’t been stripped, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom – is continuing to push his looney-toon, law-breaking agenda on gullible parents.
Wow, as a resident of Missouri I didn’t realize the state was executing people so often. I guess I have noticed a lot of stories in the Post Dispatch lately because they always bum me out, but wow. Humans deciding when other humans die is such a terrible idea.
So why are ESPN chats done? Purely technical reasons, or corporate policy?
I’d also like to know this! And I’d also like to second Raymond’s note below…klaw chats led to fangraphs, Ruhlman’s and plenty of other things. klaw chats are a gateway drug to better parts of the internet and the world is better for them.
Following some recent, high profile defections from ESPN, it seems there are some big cost cutting decisions being made. That seems to be the feeling among a lot of sports media writers. Perhaps the chats were a part of that. Although, why let the issue linger for a month with no chats because of a technical issue, couldn’t log into the server remotely, if the ultimate decision is that they won’t happen anymore? It seems it would have been better for all to make the announcement a month ago and be done with it.
Thank you Keith for continuing to give us an opportunity to engage with you going forward, even though it is out of your own pocket. And I also agree with “Throat Warbler Mangrove” below about all the subjects I’ve become interested in because of the chats and this blog.
Yo Keith,
Thank you for attempting to keep KLAWCHATs alive!
As a baseball lover I stumbled across a KLAWCHAT years ago. The info you provide is the kind of stuff I cannot get anywhere else. The first time you wrote about cooking I thought it did not belong in a baseball chat. (I now own “Ruhlman’s Twenty”.) The same for books: (If not for KLAWCHAT I never would have known about, let alone read, Calvino’s “IOAWNAT”.) Your experience with anxiety disorders needs to be heard. (But hey, I’m not a doctor.)
Thank you for many hours of enjoyable reading! And finally, if this is the end of KLAWCHAT, please become the Phillies’ GM.
Sincerely,
Keith, if you need some help with perl scripting, drop me a line. I assume you can see the email address from this comment.
People get on you for acknowledging that unconscious bias exists? If so treat them like you treat vaccine deniers and GMO-fearmongerers. Believing that unconscious bias against women and people of color does not exist is equally untenable. In fact the bias is so significant that individuals apply it to themselves – women, for example, do worse on math tests when their womanhood is emphasised beforehand, and better when asked to imagine themselves as make. There is no comparable effect for men.
“Make” should be “male” In the last sentence. Why would autocorrect change a real word to a different word?
I appreciate you bringing up “isms” of the malicious. It helps me critically think about things. The tweet you had around an angry woman is a bitch and two women fighting are cats but never woman was especially good. Or however it went. I’m guilty of both and examined my language and thank you.
There’s definitely sleeziness in the egg board article but I like it because the targets are animal rights bozos. I couldn’t care less about the living conditions of any farm raised animal. All those behind the scenes hidden videos do for me is make me hungry …
Ice cream tastes better at the brink of melting because it is warmer and therefore we can detect the flavors better. The protein to make it “melt” slower isn’t changing the temperature so it wouldn’t make it stay colder longer, it is basically just binding it together to make it less drippy. So as I see it this may actually taste even better, since the ice cream wouldn’t need to be as cold just to hold it together.
gol dang it, i can’t believe I screwed this up. I’m sorry.
Keith:
I’d be willing to take a shot at the scripting if you’re ok with using awk (which is actually kind of designed for this). Let me know if you’re interested.
Keith,
As a Deaf person, thank you for trying to figure out a way to get your chats to work. It is appreciated.
I had no idea RIck Bayless was brother to Skip. You probably can’t comment, but they seem to have ended up with vastly different degrees of talent and professional value in their respective fields.
Anyway, I”m not an expert on the subject but I generally concede that issues related to crop biodiversity are real and worth considering. However, banning GMOs is neither the only nor best solution. Crop biodiversity is undoubtedly a commons issue. So involving the government is reasonable. But banning an entire array of products — many with very real benefit — is totally overshooting the problem.
I’m surprised you thought the WaPo article about cultural food appropriations was worth attention and sharing. The first problem I had upon reading it as that the author seems to ignore the rich cornucopia of immigrant-driven restaurants and cuisine within the DC area itself. George Mason economist Tyler Cowen has a handy, comprehensive blog documenting literally hundreds of these places in the DC area:
https://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/index.php/welcome/
The second problem I had with the article was that the author used her teenage friends complaining of “Chinese grossness” as stand-ins for white people. These are people without the wisdom of experience, and some Asian cuisines can be pretty rancid smelling considering some of the cooking methods they employ.
I’d argue even calling them “rancid” is a bit of cultural … well, whatever word I use there will sound too strong, but I’m saying that ingredients like fish sauce may smell foul to a western nose but wouldn’t to someone who grew up in that culture. (Plus sauces made from fermented fish go back at least to ancient Rome.)
To your first point, however, I read it as the author talking about chefs from outside of those cultures and cuisines becoming leaders in presenting it to American audiences. Rick Bayliss is one of the best-known chefs of Mexican cuisine. Harold Dieterle has a very highly-regarded Thai restaurant. Tiffani Faison, who was born in Germany and raised in Massachusetts and California (among other places) now has a southern-cuisine restaurant in Boston. I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with this, but I could see someone from Mexico reacting negatively to the adoption of her native cuisine by an American-born chef who turns it into high-end, higher-priced food. It was the perspective I liked, not any underlying opinion that what Bayliss and Dieterle have done is bad, because it’s not.
That point would have come across better in the article if she hadn’t used local, DC-area restaurants as supposed cultural appropriators. DC’s most high profile celebrity chef is (arguably) Jose Andres, an immigrant from Spain and who’s several restaurant in the area focus on Spanish cuisine. One of the restaurant examples the author used was Masa 14, a restaurant owned by Richard Sandoval, an immigrant from Mexico and who owns several other Mexican-style restaurants in the area.
The author’s backyard is full of the type of restaurants to which she seemingly thinks reader should be patronizing, yet she never mentions or encourages them to do so. Given the grievances she was airing this would have been an excellent time to bring them up.
At best her article might have been a missed opportunity, at worst it reeked of cognitive dissonance. (If you can’t tell I was really annoyed by it, haha).
Thanks to those of you who offered help with the new chat transcripts. I think reader Patrick has cooked up a Python script that will do the trick – it will at least be good enough for this week, so I’m tentatively planning to do a chat on Thursday. I’ll keep you all posted.