I named Houston’s Alex Bregman as our 2016 Prospect of the Year, and listed a bunch of other worthy candidates and the 2016 draftees who had the top debuts as well, all for Insiders. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.
My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the cute, fast-playing game New Bedford, where players build the town and send ships out on whaling expeditions to rack up points. I really loved everything about that game – it looks great, the play is simple, Within that review is a paragraph on its two-player spinoff, Nantucket.
You can pre-order my book, Smart Baseball, on amazon already; it’s due out in April. Also, sign up for my email newsletter to stay up to date on all the stuff I write in various places.
And now, the links…
- Terry Jones, one of the original members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, has been diagnosed with dementia at age 74. He’s losing or has lost his ability to speak (aphasia), a shame for a great comic talent and the author of this delightful letter to then-President George W. Bush.
- Turmeric is being touted by all the woo-wielding nature-people for alleged health benefits … and that might be true, as long as you eat it as opposed to taking supplements. My guess is that it requires the presence of fats to work. Its main benefits appear to be anti-inflammatory, although too much turmeric can also give you heartburn so don’t go too nuts. I add a teaspoon of it when making homemade granola; it alters the color but not the flavor.
- “I’m a non-binary ten-year-old,” writes a child for the BBC’s magazine site. What bathroom would you suggest this child (who prefers ze or they) use? How about those with ambiguous genitalia, known as intersex? Why is this a fucking government issue at all?
- Speaking of which, North Carolina’s Hate Bill 2 has cost the state nearly $400 million already in lost business, according to an estimate from WIRED, all in the name of discriminating against LGBTQ people. If you live there, you get to vote in November and let your representatives know how you feel about this…
- Truthout looks at Penn State truthers who try to whitewash the tattered legacy of Joe Paterno. Not mentioned is the sick role Paterno’s adult children play in this, using semantics to argue that their father somehow wasn’t culpable in covering up for a sexual predator.
- Two interesting posts on attempts to save dying languages, one on a Native American woman trying to create the first Wukchumni dictionary, as she’s its last fluent speaker, and the effort to save the Chickasaw language with an app, part of a broader piece on language loss.
- Following up on the Derrick Rose story I posted last week, Julie DiCaro wrote about the importance of anonymity in rape cases after the judge in that civil suit ruled that Rose’s attorneys can name the victim (and smear her).
- A rare Hawai’ian crow showed the ability and knowledge to use “tools” to retrieve food placed out of their reach in a test run by the Hawaii Endangered Bird Conservation Program.
- Vox breaks down how rap lyrics and meter work with or against their underlying beats.
- A reader sent over this fantastic cognitive bias cheat sheet, that takes the 175 biases listed on Wikipedia’s page on the topic and organizes them into a much more manageable tree of major archetypes.
- The great J. Kenji Lopez-Alt made a lighter take on fettucine alfredo, although I think his version couldn’t properly be called “alfredo” given the modifications he makes. True pasta alfredo contains just pasta water, Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and butter, but of course the result is a rather stomach-unfriendly pile of carbs and fat, and many American restaurants compound the problem by adding cream. Lopez-Alt’s version uses science (of course) to lighten things up and give the dish more flavor.
- Another piece on Rob Daviau and how his idea of Legacy games has changed boardgaming. These games involve storylines and permanent alterations to the board and components as you follow the story across multiple plays. Daviau’s latest title, Seafall, is the first standalone Legacy title after Risk and Pandemic got the treatment.
- This week the United Nations held a summit to discuss antibiotic resistance, only its fourth summit ever to discuss a health-related topic.
- Growing vegetables instead of grass can help reduce greenhouse gases in the air. Also, you can’t eat grass, so there’s another benefit to switching to produce.
- Yet another massive price hike for an obscure pharmaceutical, although in this case, it’s not even clear how effective the skin gel is.
- The shift to the far right isn’t just happening here – it’s as bad or worse in Europe, with Austria set to elect a far-right President, and Islamophobia and xenophobia becoming major tenets in party platforms.
- Courage House, an organization that houses victims of sex trafficking, is being accused of violating the girls’ privacy rights and forcing them to attend Christian masses. I don’t agree with the article’s use of “exploiting” here – in this context, it sounds like they’re allowing the girls to be sexually violated again – but the allegations themselves are disturbing.
- The Guardian‘s superb writer Jessica Valenti argues that distrust of Hillary Clinton is a function of our distrust of women in general.
- Gary Johnson said in 2011 that fighting climate change is futile because the sun will eventually expand and swallow the earth. This is true, although there’s probably a 3 billion year gap that he might wish to consider. This goes along with an article I tweeted earlier this week, Slate‘s piece arguing that Johnson is not in any sense a “liberal” candidate, and liberals shouldn’t vote for him as a protest vote. I thought the article failed to fully make its case about young voters, but it is correct about Johnson, whose fiscal and regulatory policies would favor higher-income earners and large corporations at the expense of the lower-income strata, especially those with chronic illnesses, as well as the environment.
- Charles M. Blow writes in a NY Times op ed that Clinton and Trump are not equal and protest votes are folly. He articulates my own opinion on the subject better than I could.
- Joss Whedon’s celebrity-filled anti-Trump, get-out-the-vote ad was probably more funny than effective, but since I agree with the stance on Trump, I laughed quite a bit.
- Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle his own legal problems. The Washington Post‘s David Fahrentold has been all over Trump’s phony charity, calling hundreds of alleged beneficiaries to verify donations (with many saying they’d never received a dime). The New Yorker claims Trump’s charity duplicity has become a campaign issue.
- Trump may be looking at oil exec and anti-environmentalist Forrest Lucas for Secretary of the Interior. The article has quotes from leaders of the Sierra Club, the Oil Change USA, and the Humane Society. Trump’s ties to oil and gas industry people may mean he fills Cabinet posts typically aimed at balancing corporate needs with the public good of environmental stewardship.
- Speaking of which, Trump is a climate-change denier, which doesn’t jibe with rising sea levels on the east coast. The damning quote: “Donald Trump lives in a parallel universe where the facts established by the scientific community to him don’t exist.”
- Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials continue to investigate ties between Trump’s camp and the Kremlin. I can’t believe this hasn’t become a bigger issue. Russia is a dictatorship where dissent is quashed and journalists are killed for their work, and as their economy continues to shrink they’ll become more of a threat to global stability. Cozying up to Putin should be an automatic disqualifier.
- The Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump, but black cops in Philly say the endorsement ignores their views. I have no idea if such endorsements matter at all, but it would seem that any group with a mixed membership will have a minority that feels marginalized by a single endorsement like this.
- Talking Points Memo describes the “fever inside” Donald Trump, his arbitrary, impulsive nature and outsized reactions to perceived slights.
- Drew Magary wants to say fuck you to Trump voters. Who am I to argue?
- I Just Wish NFL Players Could Find A Way To Protest Without Starting A National Dialogue. Yes, it’s from The Onion. Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.