I have written three Insider pieces this week, one on David Price and Chris Young, one on Zack Greinke and John Lackey, and one on Jordan Zimmermann and J.A. Happ. I also held my weekly Klawchat on Thursday.
Top Chef recaps began this week with episode one and episode two.
And now, the links…
- Anyone else remember Sideshow Bob running for Mayor as a Republican in a 1994 Simpsons episode? The Daily Beast points out some similarities to a current Presidential candidate.
- Quietly underlying the multiple rape accusations against porn actor James Deen is the pervasiveness of the idea that any sex worker – porn actress, prostitute, whatever – has less of a right of consent than any other woman.
- Of course, if I’m linking to the Daily Beast twice, I should also include this takedown of their embarrassing journalistic fails in identifying the wrong Syed Farook in the San Bernardino attack, including photos and the wrong home address.
- Speaking of San Bernardino, a day later “every Senate Republican except Mark Kirk of Illinois voted against legislation to prevent people on the F.B.I.’s consolidated terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns or explosives,” per the New York Times. How this is a partisan issue is beyond my limited cognitive capabilities. The paper followed up today with their first front-page editorial since 1920, calling on an end to the gun epidemic in the U.S.
- The New Yorker weighed in too, along the same lines: The average person does not need these guns.
- Those crap viral sites that steal other people’s content grabbed this one in the last week or two, so here’s the original: The Battle, a fantastic comic on having depression and anxiety.
- Charles Pierce drops some fire in an op ed for Esquire subtitled “nowhere is Idiot America more at work than in the Climate Change ‘debate.’ This is yet another topic where we are likely to have one Presidential candidate actively denying settled science. I can vote a lot of ways on the various issues that matter to me, but I can’t vote for someone who thinks science is a matter of who yells loudest.
- In case you were concerned, no, the universe is not merely a 3-D hologram. I don’t think any reasonable scientists thought it was, though.
- Earth – you know, this one – has one-third of its arable land in the last four decades. You know what they say: you can feed all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time, but you can’t feed all of the people all of the time.
- The Useless Department of Agriculture said something right, for a change, with a brief post on alternatives to antibiotic use in livestock. Of course, they could just ban such use as a major public health threat, but, you know, why be so drastic?
- Oh, maybe because of the rise in carbapanem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, the “phantom menace” bacterium that can transfer its resistance to nearby bacteria.
- This story’s a few weeks old, but it seems to be getting relatively little mainstream coverage: The singer known as Kesha (or Ke$ha) has alleged that her producer Dr. Luke sexually abused her, and is now suing Sony for the right to record music without him. While I understand the allegations are unproven, why would Sony appear to ignore the allegations, and potentially force an abuse victim into continued contact with her abuser?
- Mars’ larger moon, Phobos, has been a key part of many works of fiction that explore colonizing the red planet, and appears as a territory in the game Mission: Red Planet, but it’s slowly falling toward the planet and will fall apart in 20-40 million years, becoming a ring around the god of war. So we’d better get there fast.
- The Hollywood Reporter talks about the process behind its annual actors/actresses roundtables and the pre-Oscar nominations machine in explaining why its actress roundtable has no women of color this year. It’s an ugly reason.