Stick to baseball, 1/30/16.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the very strong Warhammer Quest card game, which I liked even though I don’t play any Warhammer anything and don’t do much with RPGs. My usual Klawchat schedule resumed this week now that I’m not bedridden with plague.

The top 100 prospects ranking and the organizational rankings are still scheduled to post the week of February 8th. We may push back the org top tens and reports to the following week because I lost so much time to illness this month.

And now, the links…

• Luke Bonner, former pro basketball player (and brother of Spurs power forward Matt Bonner), pens a vicious op ed for VICE Sports on how raw a deal NCAA athletes are getting.
• Uganda receives billions of dollars in foreign aid, yet has one of the most corrupt “democracies” in the world, with President Yoweri Museveni – who used public money to buy himself a $50 million Gulfstream jet a few years ago – running for certain re-election to extend his already 30-year term in office.
• This isn’t getting much play that I’ve seen, but the Texas investigation into those “fetal harvesting” claims against Planned Parenthood had an unexpected outcome: the grand jury indicted the two people who made the videos, but not PP. There was a tremendous amount of time and money wasted on these investigations across the country, none of which found anything except political gold, and these two “activists” should be asked to pay those costs.
• Peyton Manning is playing in the big game! Remember when he sexually assaulted a trainer in 1996? No? Wow, I’m surprised that just slipped everyone’s minds. Maybe I should turn it into a jingle. “Pey-ton Man-ning is a creep.”
• The Supreme Court ruled this week that the federal government can regulate demand response in electricity/energy markets, or “negawatts,” just as it regulates production. This is potentially a huge deal for consumers (in the form of lower wholesale prices) and for our energy usage and thus production of climate-changing emissions, reducing loads on power-production facilities during peak periods. I still don’t understand why there’s a single rooftop in Arizona that isn’t covered with a solar panel, other than the laws that so actively discourage this.
• Ted Cruz was thrilled to announce an endorsement from Tony Perkins this week. That’s cool, except that Perkins is a longtime gay-basher with ties to white supremacy groups.
• The Guardian looks back at the influence of the 1996 cult hit film Big Night, which it says helped spark an American food revolution. I found the film so frustrating to watch – it was well-made and well-acted, but how could you not want to throttle the chef who’s cooking the restaurant into bankruptcy?
• Craig Calcaterra talks some sense on ballpark security. Here’s the truth: MLB probably can’t do anything to stop a terrorist attack at one of its stadiums. But they can pretend to do stuff, like confiscating your bottles of water when it’s 105 degrees at field level so they can sell you $6 bottles of tap water taken off a Native American reservation in drought-stricken California.
• She died for saying no: Janese Talton-Jackson was shot and killed by a man whose advances she’d rejected. That appears to be all there is to it: He approached her at a bar, harassed her, and then shot her when she continued to say no, according to police documents.
• I wish this piece had been a bit longer, but it’s still a great topic: tourists who deliberately seek out forbidden or repressive destinations, and the way such tourism might actually help change policies.
• A six-year-old the Chianti region of Italy suffering from an immunodeficiency disorder can’t go to school because eight out of her eighteen would-be classmates are unvaccinated. These are my people, and still, I say, what the fuck is wrong with them? (Article in Italian.)