I had two new posts for Insiders this week, one on the Futures Game rosters, which were announced on Friday; and a post of scouting notes on Orioles, Phillies, Rangers, White Sox, and Royals prospects I’ve seen in the last few weeks. That Futures Game column included Houston’s Forrest Whitley, but he was removed from his last start with “left oblique discomfort,” so I’m expecting him to be replaced on the roster before game day.
I have two book signings for Smart Baseball coming up this month. Next Saturday, July 14th, I’ll be at Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, signing books and talking baseball with Jay Jaffe; and I’ll be at the Silver Unicorn Bookstore in Acton, Massachusetts, on July 28th, hosted by store owner and former Fangraphs/Hardball Times writer Paul Swydan.
And now, the links…
- The best thing I read this week was this massive essay from author/comedian Sara Benincasa called Reading Joan Didion in California Restaurants, although it’s really a meandering set of observations on her life that is by turns funny and poignant. Her line about one of the joys of sharing one’s art with the world is spot on. I do wonder if her family’s name was Dahomeycasa before they changed it, though.
- From April 2017, the Atlantic predicted that plant proteins called lectins would be the next health boogeyman for idiots. I found this because a friend suggested a book that blames lectins, without real evidence, for a panoply of health problems.
- Henderson Island, an uninhabited island in the south Pacific with a raised coral atoll and a unique, diverse native ecosystem, is also covered with around 18 metric tons of trash, mostly plastic.
- Several locations on the planet set all-time heat records last week, more proof that the Chinese will stop at nothing to perpetrate this elaborate ‘climate change’ hoax.
- Progessives in the U.S. often point to Scandinavian economies as exemplars of their proposed policies, but Denmark is heading in the opposite direction, with strict laws aimed at forcing immigrants to assimilate into Danish society more quickly, including mandatory instruction for children in “Danish values.” The quotes from Danish natives sound an awful lot like those of white American voters who support Trump.
- Timothy Geithner served as Treasury Secretary under Obama, where he condemned predatory lenders who charged usurious interest rates on loans to the poor. Now he runs one via the private equity firm of which he’s President.
- Neshaminy High School in Langhorne, PA, a town between Philadelphia and Trenton, has a history of corruption and other controversies under Principal Rob McGee. The latest and most damning instance appeared in the student newspaper, which uncovered evidence that the school was deliberately hiding sexual harassment complaints against teachers and discouraging victims from reporting. The newspaper’s outgoing editor in chief also accused the administration of outing LGBTQ students who wrote critical articles in the paper. For all of this, McGee was recently promoted to an executive position that will pay him over $150,000 a year.
- Trump considered invading Venezuela. This seems like a terrible idea on so many levels, not least of which is that we’d end up with a lot of dead American soldiers in the process.
- Residents of an apartment complex in Riviera Beach, Florida, are organizing against their landlords over black mold and sewage leaks in their complex. The residents also accuse the city of failing to enforce fines for code violations.
- Conservative something-or-other Dinesh D’Souza tried the whole “Republicans are the party of civil rights!” argument on Twitter and got absolutely dunked on, repeatedly, by historians & writers.
- In North Carolina, an open white supremacist is running for the state legislature, and was running as a Republican until the party belatedly withdrew its support last week. (I don’t know how his name will appear on the ballot.)
- Daniel Radcliffe revealed in an interview recently that he has some very racist friends. So why wouldn’t he do something about it?
- The Phoenix New Times named its seven best new restaurants so far for 2018, of which I can vouch for three: Roland’s Market (a collaboration between Chris Bianco and the couple behind Tacos Chiwas), Starlite BBQ, and Taco Chelo. I’ll try to hit Osteria before an AFL game in Mesa this fall too.
The Other Side of Hope.
Note: I’m on vacation at the moment and thus not checking email or social media. I’m still writing a little, though, because I feel better when I do.
I only have a few 2017 movies I missed and still want to catch, including Israel’s Oscar submission Foxtrot (which made the shortlist but not the final five), but since I’m traveling abroad at the moment a few films that haven’t been released digitally in the US are suddenly available to me. One of those is 2017’s The Other Side of Hope, a really weird-ass Finnish film with a stark message about humanism and the European migrant crisis along with some of the strangest cinematography and editing I’ve ever seen. And that’s before we even talk about the sushi scene.
The film is barely 95 minutes outside of the credits, and the two main characters Waldemar Wikström and Khaled Ali don’t even meet until about an hour into the story. Wikström is an unhappy, apparently affect-less shirt salesman who sells his entire stock, takes his winnings to an illegal poker room to grow them exponentially, and then invests the bulk of it in a failing restaurant with the most incompetent staff you could possibly imagine. Khaled is a Syrian refugee who first appears in a pile of soot or dirt, applies for asylum, and enters the Finnish refugee system, which is depicted here as arbitrary and capricious. It is only when Khaled’s application is denied that fate throws him into Wikström’s path and the dour restaurateur decides to help the Syrian try to stay in the country illegally and eventually be reunited with his missing sister.
The story itself is straightforward if a bit unrealistic at several points – especially anything around the restaurant, which can’t possibly exist with the three stooges running it, including the laziest cook on the planet, the dumbest doorman on the planet, and a waitress who might be the most competent of the three simply because she doesn’t do anything. It’s the way the film is shot that is so jarring; if I didn’t know this was the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, I would wonder if this was the work of a precocious film student. Kaurismäki, who also directed 2011’s Le Havre has said this will be his last film, has a quirky, minimalist visual style that isn’t much more expansive with dialogue, much of it delivered drily to the point of atonality. That makes the Wikström plot line kind of hard to appreciate until Khaled shows up, since the refugee story unfurls with more emotion, mostly from Khaled telling his own history since he before he left Aleppo and from the friendship he forges with fellow asylum seeker Mazdak. There are weird, lingering shots of still faces and background items. People line up to talk to each other as if in a marching band, and often speak to each other at an obtuse angle that looks completely unnatural, using a flat tone and rarely expressing any emotion – no one cries in the film, and no one laughs.
Once the two plots unite, however, the movie takes a sudden turn towards deadpan humor, some of it extremely funny – including the aforementioned sushi scene, as Wikström attempts to turn the failing eatery into a Japanese restaurant, with preposterous results – even as Khaled’s safety is in danger both from Finnish authorities and from a group of neo-Nazis who attack him more than once on the street. The Finnish people generally come off as kind and open in the movie, despite the few outright racists running around, while the government itself comes off as heartless and ineffectual. The encounter with Khaled seems to light a spark of humanity in Wikström, and maybe even in one of the other employees (not the cook, who appears unable to boil water), but any hope there might be in the film comes from individuals, not form the institutions that, in theory, exist to help such people who have found no help from anyone else.