Stick to baseball, 1/22/22.

I’m still grinding away on the top 100, with more than half of the player capsules written so far. It’ll run on January 31^st, followed later that week by the column of guys who just missed. The team-by-team reports will run the week after. I have a podcast episode ready to roll that should be up any day now.

My latest review at Paste covers The Rocketeer: Fate of the Future, a two-player game from Funko based on the cult classic Disney film, which is itself about to get a reboot.

And now, the links…

• Before the longreads: Richard Uihlein has been a major dark-money contributor to the GOP and various right-wing endeavors (including anti-LGBT rights groups) for years, but a new report found that he helped fund groups trying to overturn the 2020 election. His company, U-Line, is one of the major sellers of shipping boxes in the country. If you run a company where you use cardboard boxes, please consider using another manufacturer. If you get a package and the box was made by U-Line, contact the shipper and ask them to consider using another manufacturer. Here’s another call for a boycott of U-Line.
• Longreads: Brookside, Alabama, has created a machine for hitting travelers with bogus traffic violations and generating fines for it, according to this outstanding investigative piece from John Archibald on AL.com.
• Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, is a right-wing activist with what appears to be undue influence at the Supreme Court, according to this report from the great Jane Mayer (author of Dark Money). Judge Thomas has not recused himself from cases in which his wife his involved.
• Texas Monthly looks at the stalled investigation of an abusive gymnastics coach in Texas, and how it parallels a dysfunctional process across the gymnastics community.
• The Washington Post has the story of an alleged thief who lived with a wealthy woman for the last few years of her life and then started selling off her art and jewelry when she died – and may have stolen from many other people as well.
• Joss Whedon gave a long interview to New York that I don’t think went the way he planned it. Tim Grierson broke it down for MEL.
• A Vanderbilt student who was raped by another student there writes about how the university declined to expel her rapist, despite a finding that he had committed the most serious violation in the student code.
• Input looks at Instagram “petfluencer” account owners who clone their pets. Just because you can does not mean you should.
• I didn’t know Cincinnati had an unused subway tunnel network for a train system that was never built.
• Maybe Cincinnati would have a subway if they hadn’t pissed away $920 million to pay for the Bengals’ stadium in the last twenty years – with more costs to come.
• The University of Michigan fired its President after learning he may have had an affair with a subordinate, about two years after they first moved to fire their provost for his own sexual misconduct allegations.
• Senate Republicans’ move to block the John Lewis Act puts more than just voting rights in grave peril.
• DirecTV announced, finally, they will drop the misinformation-spreading OANN later this year. Do you have Verizon FiOS? CenturyLink? Prism? AT&T U-Verse? Call them and ask them to do the same.
• The seven Chicago-based AV Club employees who were told to move to Los Angeles, only to find their jobs had already been listed online for new hires, have all chosen to take their CBA-protected severance.
• The COVID-19 vaccines are safer than aspirin or acetominaphen.
• Arkansas is so in the thrall of anti-science forces that they gave ivermectin to prisoners who caught COVID-19, despite a lack of any evidence that the deworming paste is effective against the virus. Some of those prisoners are now suing the state.
• Florida Republicans may pass a bill that would prohibit schools from teaching anything about the racism of white people that would make white students feel “discomfort.”
• Many major media outlets have been reporting on a “rise” in thefts that isn’t actually happening. Stories about cargo thefts against Union Pacific have omitted the fact that UP laid off most of its security employees during the pandemic.
• Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni – who has been in power since 1986, and once spent foreign aid to buy himself a private jet – has imprisoned and tortured a writer for insulting him and his son in a tweet.
• Paste profiled Yard Act, one of my favorite new rock bands of the last two years, a Gang of Four-influenced post-punk act with lyrics that are spoken as often as they’re sung.
• Board game news: The Kickstarter for Skate Summer, a route-building and set collection game from Pandasaurus, opened up this week.
• Keymaster Games, publisher of Parks and Trails, opened pre-orders for Caper: Europe, an upcoming two-player heist-themed game.