→ January 3, 2017
→ By

Colt Express.

Colt Express won the 2015 Spiel des Jahres prize as the best moderate-level boardgame of the year, beating out Machi Koro (which I think should have won) and something called The Game, which was apparently named by designers who wanted to be sure no one could ever Google their product. Asmodee, the publisher of Colt Express and now owner of the boardgame and app publishing studio Days of Wonder, has just released an app versionof the game, and it’s a solid adaptation with a couple of major frustrations built into it.

Colt Express pits players against each other as bandits in an old-fashioned train robbery, with the twin goals of collecting as much loot as possible while also shooting as many of your opponents as possible; the final scoring rewards the gems and purses you collect, and gives a bonus to the ‘best shooter’ who’s discharged the most bullets. There’s a marshal on the train as well, and if you happen to run into him, you get shot and forced up on top of a train car.

All movement and action takes place via cards that are played to the table at the start of each round, most visible to all players but some hidden when the train passes into a tunnel, but not actually enacted until all cards for that round have been played – it’s a two-phase process, playing all cards, then going through the pile and letting players act on those cards. Cards allow for movement along the train, movement up to the top of a car or back down into one, punching an opponent (which forces him/her to drop one item), picking up an item from the floor, shooting at an opponent, or moving the marshal one car in either direction. If you’ve been shot, you also get a neutral, useless bullet card in your deck, which just reduces the options in your hand for your turn. You can also pass on a turn to draw three more cards from your deck if you’re looking for a specific card. A round can involve as few as two card plays or as many as five; sometimes the order reverses, sometimes you’ll get to play two in a row (very valuable for sneaking up on someone and poking him in the snoot). Some rounds end with a special rule, such as any character on top of the car that contains the marshal draws a neutral bullet card.

The entire strategy of Colt Express involves guessing what your opponents are likely to do and planning out your cards to anticipate those moves and/or give yourself flexibility to react on the fly, once the cards are played but before they’re used. When a player plays a card at the start of the round, that player doesn’t have to specify, say, how far they’re moving or in which direction, or who the target of a shooting or punching card would be, so you need to see what’s played and keep track of the tree of potential decisions from that. The only random aspect of the game is the card draw, but there’s a ton of luck involved in the guesswork – you can plan well and still whiff because another player did something unlikely or unanticipated.

The app version looks great, as all Asmodee and DoW apps have, with strong graphics and bright colors, and it ran smoothly on my iPad Pro. (I just upgraded from a five-year-old iPad 2, which couldn’t run a full game without crashing.) The app allows you to play in Classic mode with any number of the game’s pre-set characters – each of whom has some special ability; I think Cheyenne’s is the best – and has the potential for you to play with some variants, although those aren’t immediately available.

There are two real flaws with the app, one easy to fix, one less so. The app comes with a story mode that includes five short missions for each of the five characters, and completing all five missions for a character unlocks a variant for you to use in the base game, such as having the last car on the train detach at the end of a round. I have never liked this concept in app design, where certain aspects of the game are inaccessible unless you complete something else; Catan made this mistake and it is one of the main reasons I don’t recommend that particular app. If you pay for the product, you should get the whole product up front. I completed the stories for two of the characters, but the missions generally are more like puzzles than full games, because you’re often ignoring what the AI characters are doing; you’re completing one or two tasks, while the AI characters are playing the game normally. Just make the variants available from the start and use Achievements to reward players who complete the stories.

I’ve also found the AI players to be a little dumb, at least in terms of card choices. Obviously, you’re playing a little blind, not knowing what other players will play or do over the course of a round, but there are certain cards that you know you won’t be able to use, or are maybe 5% likely to be able to use – for example, punching another character when there won’t be anyone in your space, or picking up an item from the ground when the ground is empty. The AI players tend to do that a couple of times per game, in total, and there’s no excuse for it; AI players have the advantage of calculating every possible set of moves in a game this limited, and moves that are 5% (or less) likely to work should be discarded.

There’s one technical glitch that could also have been user error (meaning I may have screwed up). When you play a card to shoot or punch another character, you have to select the target, and sometimes you have more than one choice (e.g., you’re in a car with two other characters). Choosing the right target is occasionally tricky when you’ve got several characters bunched up together in a car. Twice I thought I clicked on one target but the game selected the other one, so either 1) it was not clear which selection button attached to which target or 2) I just did it wrong.

The app is $3.99 for iOS devices or $4.99 for Android; I have only played the iOS version. I think the game itself is enjoyable enough for a $4 price, but I think you’d get more out of it if you use the online multiplayer feature instead of facing off against AI opponents.

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→ December 31, 2016
→ By

Stick to baseball, 12/31/16.

No Insider pieces and no Klawchat this week, between the lack of MLB activity, a little holiday-related travel, and me just generally taking it easy this week. I did review the boardgame City of Spies: Estoril 1942 for Paste, and have reviews coming up for Doom, Kodama, and Inis.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

  • Texas is making rapid progress in becoming the nation’s worst backwater, from anti-gay laws to wiping out abortion clinics to reducing environmental protections to a statewide cut in special education resources, as detailed in this Houston Chronicle investigative report on how tens of thousands of disabled children in Texas aren’t getting the education help they deserve.
  • This New York Times profile on an Iraq War veteran suffering from PTSD who was convicted of a home invasion highlights how little we do for soldiers returning from active combat duty, and how costly the war in Iraq has been in human lives.
  • I thought the Telegraph had the best piece on George Michael’s career, life, and death at age 53, possibly the result of a heroin addiction. If you haven’t heard his 1990 album, Listen Without Prejudice, Volume 1, it stands up incredibly well today for its mixture of styles that, at the time, was seen as a disappointment by fans who wanted him to remain a bubblegum pop star. And the same publication also wrote how horrible Gene Kelly was to a 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds during the filming of Singing in the Rain, and how Fred Astaire came to the rescue.
  • Security expert Bruce Schneier, who coined the term “security theater” to refer to all the things we do to appear to make our lives safer, points out that TSA Pre-Check also won’t work, as it just provides a second way for a would-be terrorist to beat the system and get on a plane. He links to a former TSA administrator’s post explaining Pre-Check’s vulnerabilities, but the two disagree on the solution – Schneier wants less pre-flight screening for everyone, rather than for a select few, saying that terrorists are going to pick ‘clean’ operatives no matter what we do.
  • This longread on Olympian Debbie Thomas’ descent into mental illness and poverty is from March, but I just found it this week and it’s one of the best and most awful stories I’ve read in the last few months. Thomas won a bronze medal in Calgary in 1988, became a doctor, but has lost everything in the last few years as a result of bipolar disorder.
  • Donald Trump took credit for Sprint’s decision, made in April, to add 5000 jobs in the U.S., and here’s a partial list of media outlets who repeated his lie in headlines without pointing out its untruth. Yes, there’s more to an article than a headline, but I know from experience many people will read the headline and then move along … but will still send me an angry email about a headline I didn’t write. (Editors write headlines, not writers.)
  • A New York Times investigation found rampant bribery among Homeland Security officials charged with protecting our borders. I doubt there’s a simple solution to this: no private or public entity will pay agents more than defeating the security is worth to those trying to do so.
  • The same Russian hacker group that has been accused of trying to influence our election placed malware on a computer at the main electric utility in Vermont, raising concerns about an attack on our infrastructure.
  • Meanwhile, the Russian government has also been supporting far-right movements across Europe in an attempt to destabilize EU states, finding success in Hungary, Estonia, and Bulgaria, along with the rise of the neo-Nazi National Front Party in France.
  • “More than a third of the almost 200 people who have met with President-elect Donald Trump since his election last month, including those interviewing for administration jobs, gave large amounts of money to support his campaign and other Republicans this election cycle.” So begins this Politico story on the rising kleptocracy in Washington, where money buys you direct access like we haven’t seen in decades (under either party).
  • Another neo-Nazi group is planning an armed march in Whitefish, Montana, where its founder’s mother lives. There’s more background, and information on the community’s response, in this audio piece from NPR, which describes businesses putting menorahs in windows to show support and solidarity this week.
  • Jane Coaston of MTV.com looks at the roots and insolubility of the Syrian civil war.
  • New York issued the first (known) birth certificate for an intersex person – that is, one that states the person’s sex as “intersex,” referring to someone born with physical and genetic characteristics of both sexes, often including sexual organs. This is law catching up to science, but I ask you, North Carolina and Texas and Mississippi and every bigot out there trying to make life miserable for people unlike you: What bathroom would you like her to use?
  • In 2018 and 2020, remember how the Republicans stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing to even hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, nominated to fill that vacancy by President Obama.
  • The political crisis in Burundi, sparked by the questionable re-election of Pierre Nkurunziza to a third term as President, was not helped when he hinted he might run again in 2020. The Burundian constitution limits the president to a single re-election, and his decision to run roughshod over that clause led to 500 deaths and over 300,000 refugees leaving the country.
  • An open letter from 23 activists, many of them Nobel laureates, calls for the UN Security Council to stop ethnic cleansing in Burma against the Rohingya minority – and criticizes Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi for her inaction on this issue.
  • That Gambian election a few weeks ago that appeared to end the tyrannic rule of President Yahya Jammeh? Yeah, well, so much for that, as Jammeh is trying to annul the results and declare himself the winner. Senegal, which surrounds Gambia on all but the latter’s tiny coastal border, has said a military intervention is only a “last resort.”
  • Fortune looks at the recent spate of frauds among tech startups, asking whether this is a growing trend giving the amount of VC money flying around.
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→ December 30, 2016
→ By

Top Chef, S14E05.

Welp. This season had two chefs I was truly interested in watching, and one went home tonight, in what is rapidly turning into a bad season of Top Chef: All Stars, where every challenge involves cooking something “southern.” If I wasn’t doing these recaps, I’d bail on this season and just come back if Brooke makes the finale (which I can only assume she will).

* Silvia is shown talking to her mother on her birthday, and apparently there’s a “birthday curse” on Top Chef, with at least three chefs going home on their birthdays in prior seasons. Since curses aren’t real, this is just bad TV nonsense.

* Sheldon says he herniated his disc ten years ago while carrying a pan of noodles, leading to surgery, painkillers, and an eventual return to the kitchen – but his back is bothering him again. He never mentions what he took, and the way he’s dancing around it, I wonder if the painkillers became a problem; it’s hard not to think of that after Prince died from painkiller use just a few months ago.

* Quickfire: The chefs walk in to a dark kitchen with no one there, 40 minutes on the clock, and no ingredients or instructions. (I’m not sure if they see the cameras but don’t realize they’re on, or if they can’t see the cameras at all.) The garage door opens to show the ingredients, and the clock starts, but they still have no instructions. Sylva guesses it’s a biscuit challenge. Brooke is the one loud dissenter, saying, “we can’t just decide our own challenge.” Well, it turns out that you can.

* At least three of the twelve chefs have never made biscuits before, which I find a little surprising for two of them. Neck-Tat has a restaurant in Charleston; how do you cook in the American south and not know how to make a biscuit, at least by ratio? Sheldon and Silvia at least come from entirely different cooking cultures, although I think Hawai’i is Americanized enough that biscuits would be familiar to him. For Silvia, though, biscuits are probably pretty foreign, pun slightly intended; the word “biscuit” and its equivalents in Europe refer to cookies, often those cooked twice (biscotti), but never to the sort of rolled, shaped quickbread we call a biscuit. The closest Italian quickbread I could think of was brazadela, a sweet quick bread of the Emilia-Romagna region, but that’s not a biscuit. An American, Southern biscuit is usually just a vehicle for dairy, both what’s baked into it and what’s slathered on or poured over it once made. Biscuits here are closer in concept to pie crusts, with some boost from a chemical leavener and milk or buttermilk instead of water.

* I’m not sure if Shirley has never made them, or is just saying she doesn’t make them now, as she does say she tries to avoid baking whenever possible.

* The ovens are at 450 degrees. I’ve never cooked biscuits – which Silvia calls “bis-queets” – at a temp that high. I think they’d burn before they cooked through.

* Katsuji rambles on about corn and biscuits, and then it’s like a switch flipped, and he turns into Katsuji Nye the Kitchen Science Guy, explaining why the butter in your biscuits (or pie dough, for that matter) needs to be cold.

* Sheldon’s didn’t rise – he was just copying Brooke, so if he didn’t see her add baking powder/soda or didn’t add enough, that would explain flat biscuits – so he cuts them in half, puts something on the bottoms, and then forgets to put the tops on.

* The guest judge is John Currence, chef-owner of Big Bad Breakfast in Oxford, Missisippi, and now Birmingham; he has a new book out, called Big Bad Breakfast: The Most Important Book of the Day, which includes his acclaimed biscuit recipe on page 183.

* The dishes: Sylva made a grated corn biscuit with pan seared scallops, served vol-au-vent style, which Tesar slagged in the confessional but Currence loved … John made a drop biscuit with cheddar and jalapeño with country gravy … Katsuji made biscuits with sweet corn relish and jalapeño honey butter … Silvia made a strange, savory salmon biscuit with avocado and crème fraiche, but Currence likes it, and says “I hope you do everything this well on your first try” … Neck-Tat made a traditional breakfast biscuit with truffle honey and a sunny egg … Shirley made a biscuit with black pepper mascarpone and blackberry compote … Jim did a cream cheese lard and biscuit with a creamed corn sauce and a seared scallop that he cooked on both sides … Brooke made black pepper and poppy seed biscuits with smoked salmon salad … Sheldon did biscuit bottoms with ham, soft-boiled egg, and parsley.

* Worst dishes: Shirley’s biscuits were dense and her mascarpone extremely salty. Sheldon’s were undercooked, and he only served half. Jim’s were overworked and dense, and Padma said his scallop was “hammered,” one would hope on some good rum.

* Best: Brooke’s was “immaculate” and showed off her technical precision. Katsuji’s was fantastic, Currence liked the dish, and said the biscuit couldn’t have been better. Neck-Tat seems to have also executed well on the classic presentation. But Brooke wins, again, and gets immunity. She’s the 2016 Cubs right now.

* Elimination challenge: Rodney Scott of Scott’s whole pit BBQ – not the same as Rodney “Cool Breeze” Scott, though. The twelve chefs split up into three teams and each must cook a whole hog plus three sides for 150 guests, including Darius Rucker.

* Sheldon’s going for an MRI, which may or may not be TV drama going on. I think based on the previews that this may be an issue in the next episode, but not this one.

* The chefs go to two Q joints first, before cooking. First is Sweatman’s BBQ northwest of Charleston, a place that’s only open Friday and Saturday, as many good Q places are. (When they’re out of meat, you’re out of luck.) Sweatman’s sauces its hog just once, and they try to finish the hog between 175 and 200 – although I may have misheard that, because at 175 the shoulder is not going to be done. Their mustard sauce uses yellow rather than brown mustard and contains a lot of sugar.

* Scott’s sauce starts with a vinegar-pepper base, both cayenne and black peppers, and “maybe” has some sugar. Sure thing, Rodney.

* Here’s what gets a little underplayed here, other than Jim pointing out that grilling is not BBQ. Real Q takes time, and it is not something you’d expect any experienced chef to have done. This is truly low and slow cooking, eight to twelve to sixteen hours depending on what cut of which animal, from pork shoulder to beef brisket to any ribs to this kind of whole hog cooking. You are working with real wood and real fire, so you’re in maintenance mode the whole time, keeping the temperature relatively constant, ensuring the food is cooking via indirect heat and is absorbing flavor from the smoke, but not getting so hot that it’ll cook too fast and fail to have any connective tissue break down. I’ve never smoked anything bigger than a pork shoulder, and while I love doing it, it ain’t easy and I wouldn’t tell you I’m good at it.

* Silvia wants to make a non-traditional potato salad, without mayo, and I can’t decide if this is a good idea or a terrible one. Was the mandate to make traditional southern Q sides, or just to make sides that would go well with smoked pork? Should her teammates have pushed her on this? Hold that thought.

* Sheldon returns, says he has a herniated disc but got “a shot in his spine” and apparently is feeling little or no pain.

* The chefs are up all night, although Brooke seems more annoyed that Tesar won’t shut up (editing?) than about getting no sleep. Silvia also gets to eat her first s’more, which … eh, they’re overrated. Melting cheap marshmallows and milk chocolate together doesn’t make them any less cheap-tasting. She’s only been in US for four years, now co-owns two places and has now opened a third since the show ended. We’re also seeing a lot of Silvia this episode, in case you missed that foreshadowing.

* Did they ever say what kind of wood they used? I didn’t catch it. I always use hickory if I can, because I like that very pronounced flavor.

* This might be the best cooking tip of the season: Tesar wants to make a roux for mac & cheese, but somehow they didn’t get AP flour, or lost it along the way. No one else bought it, but Katsuji offers to swap him some xanthan gum for Tesar’s peeled garlic – mostly because Katsuji was being kind, I think, not really because he needed it. Xanthan gum is big for gluten-free baking, because it can provide the structure that would otherwise come from gluten. Tesar says it’s emulsifying his sauce, but that’s not right – xanthan gum, which is produced by a bacterium that ferments certain simple sugars, is a thickener and a stabilizer, but not an emulsifier. It is a powerful thickener, however; a little goes a very long way, and it’s resilient at a wide range of temperatures, unlike corn starch.

* Shirley cooks baby piglet at her restaurant. Yeah, I know that’s traditional, and there’s nothing inherently worse about eating piglet (“suckling pig” is the preferred euphemism) than pig, but … ugh.

* The green team (Katsuji, Amanda, Silvia, Sylva) is cooking its pig at 350. No way you BBQ at that temp. That’s roasting, and it’s going to end up toughening the exterior if not blowing the whole animal out.

* Sylva adds hoisin and ketchup to make his BBQ sauce; Amanda says it’s delicious, just not a SC sauce, neither mustard nor vinegar-based.

* Silvia says in Italy, potato salad uses a salsa verde, which is like an Italian chimichurri with parsley, garlic, vinegar and lemon. Tom seems OK with this in concept.

* Something’s off with Katsuji’s beans, with a sour, funky smell Tom and Rodney dislike. This is revealed later, but Tom thinks Katsuji took a gland from the pig head when going for the jowl meat, perhaps a scent gland, which would wreck the dish’s aroma and flavor. (Jowl meat itself is fine – if you’ve ever had “head cheese,” you’ve had it.)

* Emily’s beans aren’t quite cooked. She claims that adding salt and vinegar makes them “seize up” and take longer to cook. This is bullshit. Salt your cooking water and the beans should cook a little faster if anything, because (see that link) the sodium in the salt will replace calcium and magnesium in the beans’ skins and allow greater penetration of the hot water into the beans.

* Let’s go already. The yellow team made smoked mac & Cheese (John), braised pinto beans with pork (Emily), sauerkraut-style pineapple slaw (Brooke), and whole hog topped with chile citrus vinegar sauce (Sheldon). The beans aren’t as done as they should be. The pork is delicious and seems to hit all the marks for temperature, texture, and spice. The judges also seem to like the mac & cheese. Tom wipes out his plate.

* Red team: Head and trotter hash, braised cabbage and apples, fresh pickle, and whole hog with pepper citrus vinegar based sauce. Rucker loves the hash, which seemed to be Jim’s main dish; this team also had Neck-Tat, Shirley, and Casey. Their sauce seems less “interesting.” The cabbage and the hash were Rodney’s favorites. Tom seems satisfied with the pork, however, and we all know this is Tom’s show.

* Green team: Whole hog with a hoisin-vinegar sauce and apricot glaze; kale and pickled apricot slaw; potato salad with salsa verde and red onion agrodolce; and Katsuji’s beans. There’s something off in Katsuji’s beans; Gail notices it too. Tom mutters that Silvia’s potato salad is “terrible.” Padma says don’t call it potato salad, since that means people will expect mayo, but if it was delicious they wouldn’t care what she called it. Amanda’s slaw has no flavor. The pork is mushy. Rodney says potato salad in the south has to have mayo; Gail says it was slimy. It really sounds like this team went 0-for-4 while the other two teams combined went 7-for-8 on their dishes, with Emily’s beans the lone exception.

* Yellow team wins, so Brooke comes out on top again, although she doesn’t get the individual win, which goes to Tesar for the xanthan gum mac & cheese. It’s his first elimination solo win ever on the show; he does say to the judges it was a team effort when thanking them, but I think it’s completely fair for him to take credit for this one (except maybe for thanking Katsuji for the assist), since he had to make up a new recipe on the fly.

* Green team is on bottom, of course. Rodney thinks the jowls hurt Katsuji’s beans, although I assume he means the glands; the beans’ sauce was “murky” and had – wait for it – too many ingredients. Everyone went for “sweet acidity.” Tom says the hoisin didn’t work at all, making the sauce as thick as something from a bottle at the supermarket. Silvia deviated from the tradition, but again, it seems like a failure of execution more than concept, as Gail said the texture of sauce between the potatoes and vegetables was off, the vegetables were undercooked, and the dish didn’t look appetizing (it had a greyish cast on TV). Amanda somehow escapes special criticism here despite making a slaw that the judges agreed had no taste.

* Silvia is eliminated. This is hugely disappointing given some of what she did earlier, even in the quickfire here, and we lose yet another rookie from the show. What’s particularly disappointing about this season even beyond the rookie/veteran format is that the challenges so far have almost all involved regional cooking from just one region, and you can be a great chef without being versed in the cuisine of the American South. The new chefs are all at a disadvantage, while Shirley and Sheldon at the least appear to be at a disadvantage because they learned cooking traditions outside of the continental U.S. – and Sylva seems to have done the same, with a Haitian background and culinary training in Paris. Are we looking for the best chef, or the best Southern chef?

* So this elimination leaves us with seven veterans against four rookies, two of whom haven’t shown any reason why we would want to see more of them. Silvia may very well have had the worst dish – I wasn’t there, so I can’t really argue this – but I’d rather see more of her than more of Katsuji, whose beans were apparently borderline inedible, or Emily, who’s been repeatedly on the bottom and was saved this week by her teammates’ food.

* I think Brooke is the overwhelming favorite at this point: She executes, she’s imaginative, and her only dud of the season so far came in a team challenge with one of the worst contestants as her partner. After her, I’d go Jim, Sheldon (if healthy, as if he’s another pitching prospect), Shirley, Sylva, Casey, Tesar, Katsuji, Amanda, Neck-Tat, Emily.

* LCK: I skipped the last two episodes of LCK for the same basic apathy I’m feeling about the main show. But Tom is far more entertaining here than on the main show – he seems to have far more fun on LCK. It turns out Sam won the last two challenges here, so it’s him versus Silvia. The two chefs must cook with seven of the available “lucky” ingredients. Silvia ends up winning with a branzino dish against Sam’s chicken-fried pork chops; I thought the pork looked overdone, given the color and Tom appearing to have some trouble cutting it, but he only dinged Sam for the bitterness of the browned kale, while his only criticism of Silvia’s was that her onions weren’t cooked enough.

* One unrelated LCK observation: Silvia tried to make an aioli in her Vitamix, but said it wasn’t working. Does anyone on this show test the equipment? Or if something malfunctions, do they not just have a spare machine or alternative (like a stick blender) lying around? Sometimes I wonder if these mishaps are deliberate attempts to make the chefs think on their feet, but if that’s the case, I’m not sure I understand the point of the show any more.

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→ December 30, 2016
→ By

Fences.

Most of the buzz around Fences has been around the individual performances of Viola Davis, seen as the heavy favorite to win the Best Actress Oscar, and Denzel Washington, who play Rose and Troy Maxson, the center of this film set in 1950s Pittsburgh. That’s both the movie’s strength and its weakness: This is an ensemble of great acting performances around a script that’s very talky, the way a play on a stage needs to be but a filmed version does not. (The film is based on the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning play by August Wilson, who died in 2005.)

Troy is a 53-year-old trash collector in Pittsburgh who portrays himself as a devoted husband and father, a strong provider, and a bon vivant, only for the complexity of his character and contradictions of his (offscreen) actions to become clear as the movie progresses. Troy played in the Negro Leagues – this movie has a lot of baseball talk in it, and the playwright behind it, August Wilson, obviously knew his baseball – but was denied his chance due to his race or perhaps his age, although he remembers it one way and his wife the other. Troy’s self-built narrative takes one hit after another as we meet his sons, learn the story of his war-wounded and addled brother Gabe (a tremendous turn by Mykelti Williamson), and discover the secret he’s been hiding from Rose that turns the entire story upside down, giving Davis control of the second half of the film to deliver her very Oscar-worthy performance.

Davis dominates her time as the wronged wife, but Washington’s work, especially in the first half of the film where he’s the storytelling, bullshitting center of every scene, seems a little too on the nose. I haven’t seen the play, so I lack that means of comparison, but either the script or Washington’s interpretation of it – especially the way he voices his lines from his jowls – seems to border on caricature, in a way that particularly emphasizes Troy’s race.

Yet Fences is not inherently a movie about race or racism – there isn’t a white person to be found except the nameless driver of Troy and his best friend Bono’s garbage truck – and only a portion of Troy’s misfortune is due to his blackness. His downfall is not the color of his skin, but his willingness to rationalize all of his mistakes, from mere errors in judgment to total lapses in responsibility, because they felt right in his heart. He’s kept his sons at arm’s length for different reasons, but in both cases it has produced damaged relationships. He has a good, eighteen-year marriage to a devoted wife, Rose, who has chosen a life of subjugation to her domineering husband and his expansive personality, but he throws it all away because, in his mind, of his need to escape the stress of being the sole provider for the family. That’s a role on the stage that would require a huge persona to fill up the theater, but Washington seems to bring the bluster along with the bravado in a way that overwhelms the rest of the family throughout the first half of the film.

Fences is much stronger as a document about women, and perhaps their role in the newly upwardly-mobile black communities of the 1950s, where the door had just begun to open on financial opportunities for black men, at least in the north and west of the U.S. Rose reveals, in one of several speeches that could form her Oscar nomination reel, that she suppressed her own goals in life because she found that accommodating Troy left no “room” for her, only to find that Troy has betrayed her in the most treasonous way possible. This is The Remains of the Day for the working class, and a story in which one of the two characters looking back on a life of lost chances gets a second act to try to regain what they gave up.

As for the fence of the title, Troy and his son Cory (played meekly by Jovan Adepo, later upstaged by a six-year-old girl) are supposed to be building one around their property at Rose’s request, and the fence serves as a clumsy metaphor for Rose’s attempts to keep her family close to her and Troy’s goal to keep the Angel of Death out. It never worked for me, both because it was too overt a symbol and because we don’t see enough of Rose’s strength in the first half of the film to reinforce the metaphor.

Fences is a better film than I may have implied here – it’s flawed, but in small ways, factors that keep it from being as strong as Moonlight or Manchester by the Sea. It’s also a pure joy to watch Davis, Williamson – playing a character who is childlike as a result of a serious head injury he suffered in World War II, without veering off into clownlike caricature – and Stephen Henderson (as Bono) just do their thing, delivering precise, full-bodied performances in a movie that is largely a showcase for them. Even Washington, for all his scene-chewing, is a magnetic presence on the screen; I think I have more complaint with his direction, such as some needless close-ups of characters in anxious or pensive moments, than his acting, although he’ll probably get nominations for both. He infuses the character with rakish charm in the opening scene, and then allows the character’s actions and justifications to chip away at our admiration until, by the time of the Big Reveal, there’s little left but a shell that Troy himself can’t put back together, no matter what he tells Rose or himself to defend it.

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→ December 28, 2016
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Stranger in a Strange Land.

Continuing my roll through Hugo winners, I finally got around to Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land right before Christmas. It’s long been on my to-read list, but I figured I’d eventually find a copy in a used bookstore and waited until that happened to read it, even though I’ve read a few other Heinlein works (Double Star and Starship Troopers, both Hugo winners) and enjoyed them. Stranger is something else entirely, however – a deeply philosophical work, a new version of the Christ figure in literature, and a book with just a veneer of science fiction about it. Heinlein’s views on religion, morality, and human nature may not be yours or mine, but this novel gives you plenty to consider and reconsider on these subjects and more, simply because he sets off the correct bomb in the middle of the metaphorical town square.

That bomb is the person of Valentine Michael Smith, a man who was born on Mars and raised by Martians, an alien race, apparently much older than ours, that evolved quite differently from our own and possesses physical powers well beyond anything humans have acquired. When “Mike” returns to Earth with a second spacecraft, he’s suddenly the most sought-after person on our planet, with the government hiding him, multiple authorities trying to steal from him, and the media chasing him, and, eventually, one reporter and his nurse friend choosing to free him, sneaking him out of the hospital where he’s a de facto prisoner. Mike and the nurse end up at the estate of Jubal Harshaw, a polymath, hack author, and attorney who takes an immediate interest in Mike’s case and becomes his mentor and cicerone and protector all in one, negotiating for Mike’s freedom under the guise of the latter being the leader of humanity on Mars.

Mike ends up exploring human religion and philosophy, including the megachurch/cult of the Fosterites, and selects pieces of that he finds worthwhile in building his own Church of All Worlds, where members advance through various levels of enlightenment towards an inner circle, learning the Martian language and acquiring some of the same psychokinetic abilities Mike has. The Church of All Worlds becomes a counterculture haven, preaching free love and naturalism, eschewing modern capitalism, and living in a commune-like structure each time they set up shop in a new town. Their popularity threatens many existing forces, from the government to traditional religions, who whip up enmity towards its members and Mike in particular, leading to an entirely predictable ending that completes his Christ-like journey through the novel.

The novel’s title comes from one possible translation of a phrase in Exodus 2:22, “And she bare him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land.” Smith comes here as ignorant of human customs as a baby, and even has to learn to use his body properly in our higher gravity. He brings Martian concepts of dualism and an afterlife, of war, commerce, and, of course, of water, which is revered through the practice of “sharing water” with someone, after which you are “water brothers,” a sort of blood oath that bonds you to each other for life. He adopts some trivial aspects of human culture, at least temporarily, such as wearing clothes, but takes on a mystical role to those around him – first Jubal’s employees, then gradually more and more who take to his own message of free love, spiritual enlightenment, and … uh … being nice to everyone.

That’s where the book goes a bit off the rails for me, at least, although Heinlein is aiming for something very big here and probably gets as close to his goal as most authors could. Smith’s religion is cultlike too, and it’s not very clear what he’s preaching or promising – people see that he can move stuff with his mind, and he’s offering a sort of spiritual salvation without stigmatizing or forbidding sex the way the Catholic Church and many evangelical Protestant groups do, so of course they’re flocking to him. And there’s certainly something Christ-like in his messages of love, tolerance, and nonviolence, as well as his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of everyone around him. But Smith’s transition from ingenue to wiseman/Pied Piper is wildly abrupt and unexplained; in one chapter, he’s still confused by common human norms, and in the next, he and Jill, the nurse who got him out of the hospital, have run off to join a traveling carnival. (I read the version of the novel that was first published; Heinlein later restored material cut by his publishers in a separate edition that’s about 30% longer.)

Where Heinlein succeeds, however, is in crafting a sci-fi story that’s powered by the plot, not by the scientific details. None of the action in the book takes place on Mars; we meet Smith on earth, and for a time it’s unclear whether there’s anything different about him beyond his experience. He has psychokinetic powers learned from the Martians, and some very different ideas on death, but Heinlein uses that to drive the story – how would Earthborn humans respond to the appearance of a man with these abilities? It’s a twist on the Second Coming, but rather than playing it straight, Heinlein adds the interplanetary twist. There’s also an ancillary subplot, never fleshed out, about what the Martians might do to earth, having previously destroyed a nameless planet and civilization between Mars and Jupiter, but it feels unnecessary and unfinished, especially since the novel stands just fine on its own without that attempt to justify Mike’s return to earth.

Stranger in a Strange Land is a big novel of ideas – or perhaps a novel of big ideas – and whether it works may depend on your acceptance of some of the more mundane aspects of the philosophy Mike preaches to his followers. And it is preachy – there’s no question that Heinlein is advocating something here, which I thought caused the last of the novel’s five sections to drag until the last few pages. The real power in Heinlein’s concepts here, as voiced by Smith, is how absurd human conflicts, from war to prejudice, would appear to someone who fell in from the sky and wasn’t raised among the rest of us. If there’s a lasting message to take from this novel, that should be it.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot to mention the one absolute nails-on-chalkboard line in the book, where one character (Jill?) says that nine times out of ten, a rape is at least partly the woman’s fault. I know it was written a half-century ago, but it’s absolutely cringeworthy, and knocked the book down a full grade for me.

Next up: I knocked out Thomas Hager’s non-fiction book The Alchemy of Air, about the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, and have just started Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction that year.

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→ December 25, 2016
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Top Chef, S14E04.

I did not recap episode 3, since I didn’t even watch it until five days after it aired. I’m just jumping ahead to episode 4 and should be on schedule with every episode at least until spring travel begins.

So we start with some comments from Tesar on how Katsuji “gets a hall pass for being an asshole.” And that’s why 1) he’s back on the show and 2) I’m not happy to see him on the show. What Katsuji seems to think of as gamesmanship is borderline harassment. It’s not good TV and it has nothing to do with food.

* Quickfire: The new EIC of Food & Wine, Nilou Motamed, is here as the guest judge. Each chef has a box in front of him/her, and must use everything in the box – the gag is that it’s “not quite everything you wanted for Christmas.” The boxes contain cooking tools as well as ingredients: pressure cooker, tequila, pomegranate, wasabi, melon baller, chocolate pretzels, squab, and so on. We’re ripping off Chopped here, right?

* Jim says melon ballers are “from a pantry in the 1950s” but I use mine constantly to take out the seeds of apples. Cut the apple (or pear) in half, then use the baller to carve out the half-sphere with the seeds and tougher flesh from each half of the fruit. I don’t use them for melons, though.

* Shirley’s using white chocolate in place of butter. I’m not sure how that’ll work – white chocolate is fat plus a lot of sugar, while butter is fat, milk solids, and water.

* Emily has never used a pressure cooker, which I find hard to fathom. Tesar points out that they use them on this show all the time, so basically don’t come on this show without learning. Also, how do you not own a pressure cooker when you’re a chef? You don’t cook at home, ever? This isn’t some sort of novelty device. I just used mine two nights ago. They’re fantastic.

* Jim’s stand mixer bowl is smoking … it would have been nice to know why. I’m just sayin’.

* Shirley burns her squab in a tequila fire – although that can’t be what actually happened. Tequila is usually 80 proof, and that’ll burn if vaporized (like, say, heating it in a hot pan), and of course if it’s bringing any sort of lipids with it those will burn too. But 80-proof tequila shouldn’t just burn on its own, and even if it did the fire would be cool enough to slip your hand through it (not that I recommend doing so). I once created about a three-foot high flame by adding rum to a pan that was much hotter than I realized, and it didn’t ignite anything else – not even the wood cabinets the flame touched – or leave any scorch marks anywhere. So I guess I’m really wondering what was in that fire to char the exterior of the bird.

* We only see a few of the dishes here, I guess for time’s sake, not that we’d want to see more food on a show about food. Katsuji made braised squab in tequila and soy with pretzels, pomegranate, and wasabi in his salsa … Tesar made a pan-seared squab with mole and an avocado and pomegranate salad; he calls avocado “light and refreshing” which it’s not, with about 75% of the caloric content of an avocado coming from fat … Brooke made a pan-roasted squab with a clove, tequila, and pomegranate stock, and some melon-balled squash … Emily made a pan-roasted squab with a soubise, and Padma delivers the deadly compliment, “well, the squab is cooked nicely” … BJ made a pretzel-encrusted squab with wasabi cauliflower puree, tequila, and pomegranate; Nilou asks if that was the texture he wanted from the deep-fried squab, so we know what that means .. Jim made a roasted squab with beets, fennel broth, and a smoked pretzel and tequila whipped cream (that’s what was in the stand mixer, I suppose) … Casey made a smoked chili, tequila, and squab soup, then compressed pineapple with several of the other ingredients from the box … Shirley made a roasted squab with wasabi rapini and flambe tequila. She didn’t use the melon baller because she didn’t have hers – Sheldon appears to have taken it at some point. Then Padma makes a bizarre comment about hoping it’s not a sudden death quickfire. If Sheldon took her melon baller, shouldn’t he be eliminated (hypothetically) rather than Shirley? And the fuck is Padma talking about here anyway?

* Bottom three: Shirley, really because she charred her squab “to within an inch of its life” … Emily’s soubise was gummy, and now they’re saying she was not “kind to that protein” … BJ’s squab was very tough. Top three: Brooke, Casey, and Tesar. The winner is Casey, again, so she gets immunity.

* Anyone else see a little bit of Kristen Bell in Casey?

* The guest judge this week is Mike Lata of Fig, a very highly-rated restaurant in Charleston that made Eater’s list of the 38 most essential restaurants in the country for 2016. Also, he used to be Emily’s bossn and fired her once.

* The elimination challenge is based on the Italian feast of the seven fishes. I never had this growing up, even though I’m ¾ Italian, and I’ve never had it as an adult because my wife is allergic to shellfish. The twist on this episode is that the chefs are going to use “trash fish,” incidental catches that are often discarded because “consumers aren’t familiar with them,” which makes them good for chefs interested in sustainability. Jim seems comfortable with the concept, though, having won the Great Ameircan Seafood Cookoff in 2011.

* Casey gets first pick of the fish and chooses amberjack, which I’ve never thought of as a trash fish; if you’ve had the kind of sushi or sashimi called “kampachi” or “kanpachi,” you’ve had amberjack. The remaining chefs are combined randonly into teams of two. Tesar gets Katsuji, the only person Katsuji didn’t want to work with, although later they’re bickering like buddies in the confessional. Shirley’s paired with Sheldon, but they’re getting along fine in Whole Foods. BJ’s paired with Silvia, Silva with Neck-Tat, and Jim with Amanda.

* The other fish available are tunny, blackbelly rosefish, gray tilefish, triggerfish (which Lata was the first chef in Charleston to serve), mullet, and barrelfish.

* Tesar wants to use canned tomatoes; Katsuji wants to use fresh heirloom tomatoes. Each is acting like the other is insane. But doesn’t this depends on the time of year? If tomatoes are in season, you’ll never beat fresh. If they’re not, then they’re not going to have much taste, if any.

* Shirley wants to use mullet shank, the tail end of the fish, which has fewer bones (?).

* Emily is deferring to Brooke on everything, so Brooke ends up the de facto head chef on their team with Emily playing the role of a line cook. That could go either way – Brooke’s probably the best competitor on the show this year, one of the best they’ve ever had, and Emily appears increasingly to be a train wreck as a contestant.

* Silvia is making pane carasau, a traditional yeast-raised flatbread, similar to pane guttiau (which you might have seen at Trader Joes). Both are Sardinian, with the former using yeast and the latter not. To Americans, they’re more like crackers – I’d compare pane guttiau to what matzoh would be like if you made it with something like puff pastry dough, so it shatters rather than breaks.

* Tesar and Katsuji are now each making a sauce with the tomatoes, and then each ends up plating some of the dishes with his own sauce. This should have been a disaster.

* Sheldon & Shirley made a Sichuan peppercorn (a Chinese spice that isn’t a true pepper) braised mullet with tofu, celery, and buttered radish. Tom seems to have gotten a small bone, but says he loves the dish, especially the use of the Sichuan pepper. Blais likes the combination of tofu and fish together because their textures are similar. I’m not sure if I’ve ever had mullet, although it seems like the most familiar name among the trash fish after amberjack (I’d never heard of triggerfish or barrelfish before this show).

* Hugh is back! Judges’ table is always better with his dark Canadian humour.

* Silva and Neck-tat had Tunny. I’ve heard the term before, because it can refer to a couple of fish, but I’m assuming this one is little tunny, a fish in the tuna tribe (Thunnini) but in a separate genus from the fish we eat as tuna. That Wikipedia article mentions anecdotal reports of ciguatera poisoning from eating tunny, so I’ll pass on this one, thanks.

* Lata says he’d go calabrian with tunny, making a spicy preparation because the fish itself has such a pronounced fish flavor. The team made a ras el hanout-dusted tunny, seared so it’s nearly raw in the center, with melted leeks, parsnip puree, wild mushroom ragout, and xo jus. Graham Elliott says is “looks like a $30 tuna steak dish.” Hugh deadpans that “we were all guessing that you’d fail miserably.” One thing no judge mentioned was the taste of the center of the fish. If tunny is oily and has a strong fish flavor, and the chefs didn’t address that throughout the fish, what happened when the judges got to the middle of those “steaks?”

* Brooke and Emily made roasted blackbelly rosefish with fiddleheads, marble potatoes, leeks, corn, coconut, and tamarind sauce. Lata says it’s a tough fish to work with and needed more than just the sear? All the judges seem to agree that the dish was totally confused, with a bunch of different ideas all on one plate. Brooke won’t throw Emily under the bus, however, even though Emily contributed nothing to the concept of the plate. Tom says “leek sauce all day, all this other stuff get rid of it,” which I suppose would be great if this were a leek challenge.

* BJ and Silvia made a barrel fish brodo with leeks, kale, cauliflower, and pane carasau. They poached fish, but as it dried outside of the poaching liquid, it seized up and became tough; Tom suggests they could have flaed it back into the broth, although if the broth was still hot enough to be safe, wouldn’t it have continued to cook? The broth was apparently excellent, but there wasn’t enough of it, and Silvia’s pane carasau is probably the most-praised aspect of the dish.

* Tesar and Katsuji made trigger fish with chili sauce, fennel puree, bottarga, and breadcrumbs. Tom says the sauce is terrific and the fish was cooked beautifully. Hugh says they bridged a monumental gap to put aside their egos, which also says to me that it’s no accident that these two chefs were asked to return this season.

* Jim and Amanda made a gray tilefish with tomato and fennel broth, and some apparently very undercooked beans. Tom asks, “Who cooked the beans?” and Amanda responds, “I did. Why?” She looks like she just ran a marathon.

* Casey’s amberjack dish is a catastrophe, but we never really saw anything about why? She barely cooked it at all, and her rice porridge is gummy and tasteless. So what was she doing during her allotted time in the kitchen? She thinks she’d be sent home if she didn’t have immunity, so what the hell happened?

* Tom: “There’s a reason why these fish don’t usually end up on a table – they’re very difficult to work with.” For some of these fish, that’s almost certainly true – tunny being oily and fishy is going to be a deterrent no matter what chefs or fishermen do, but gray tilefish is supposed to be lean and mild-tasting, and amberjack is lean and firm like mahi-mahi or swordfish. Some of the problem is just education: consumers only look for a few common types of fish, like salmon, because they’re familiar with those and know how to prepare them.

* The top three are Sheldon and Shirley, Jamie (Neck-Tat) and Silva, and John and Katsuji. Katsuji’s sauce was amazing. S&S’s dish ate like something they’d cooked before. The mullet had a lot of bones, but they made the best of it. Every component of Jamie and Silva’s dish was done very well and it showcased the fish. John and Katsuji win, and Katsuji wins the individual honor for the sauce. He even tears up, I don’t think he expected that. I’m sure he’ll handle the victory in a quiet, professional manner.

* Padma says Casey “really needed” that immunity. The other three teams are on the bottom, by default. Jim and Amanda’s dish died for a few reasons, but Mike says in his kitchen one of his commandments is never serve undercooked beans. The inclusion of mussels also took the dish away from the star ingredient. Brooke and Emily’s dish just had way too much going on, and it obscured the fish. Silvia and BJ’s fish tasted like overcooked chicken. BJ made the broth, Silvia did the bread, but the fish was both.

* While the chefs go back to the stew room to wait, Katsuji starts going after Emily for failing to tell everyone more about Mike Lata’s preferences. What a dick move.

* Mike says the barrel fish (Silvia/BJ) was overcooked, while Tom says BJ overreduced the sauce. Brooke and Emily put too much on the plate, but it seems like the judges are giving them a pass because the two were “too nice to each other.” Jim and Amanda’s fish got lost in “all that stuff.” Tom says that could be the worst dish because of the beans, which Amanda cooked. At this point I assumed she was gone, given the emphasis on the beans, and also, how do you serve undercooked beans on Top Chef and survive?

* Yet BJ is eliminated. He could have gone home last week, or the prior week with the pork that he cooked poorly, a move that tanked his team because it took so much of the team’s budget. That’s three rookies out and one veteran who was just barely eliminated in four episodes. I thought Amanda had ‘earned’ the elimination, given what we heard from the judges, but it’s hard to weep for BJ with him on the bottom so many times already. But we’re now at seven veterans to five rookies, and two more of the rookies (Neck-Tat and Emily) seem perpetually close to elimination.

* I guess it’s time to rank ’em … Brooke is the clear #1 in this group, and of the rookies I think only Silvia has shown the potential to catch her. I’d go Brooke, Silvia, Shirley, Sheldon at the top. Bottom three: Emily, Amanda, and Neck-Tat.

* I’ll catch up on LCK later this week. In the meantime, have a safe and Merry Christmas.

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→ December 24, 2016
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Stick to baseball, 12/24/16.

For Insiders this week, I wrote up Cleveland’s deal with Edwin Encarnacion and the Clay Buchholz trade, as well as a piece last Saturday on some potential problems in the new CBA. I also held my regular Klawchat on Thursday.

My first-ever piece for Vulture ran this week, a holiday gift guide to boardgames for gamers at various levels (including newbies to the hobby).

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

And now, the links…

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→ December 22, 2016
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Klawchat, 12/22/16.

You can preorder my upcoming book, Smart Baseball, on amazon. Also, please sign up for my more-or-less weekly email newsletter.

Klaw: Bow down before the one you serve. Klawchat.

Jimmy: Over/Under 3 division titles for Cubs in next 3 years?
Klaw: Pretty sure “under” is the safe bet on that one. You can build the best team in history on paper, but you can’t control for injuries, non-performance, or, say, the Pirates collectively having career years and slipping past you.

G: So, after the bizarrely affordable Nova signing, do the Pirates still have a series of blockbuster moves ahead of them? Acquire Quintana, deal McCutchen?
Klaw: I’d like to see them do that, if possible – trade Cutch now if a strong offer comes in, because his value will be lower next winter, and of course I’m a big Q fan. Those moves probably make them a 90-win team again, no?

Nathan: Suggestions for an aspiring baseball nerd who has yet to grasp advanced defensive metrics and statistics?
Klaw: I heard about this book called Smart Baseball that’s coming out in April. You should check it out. The writer’s a funny guy.

Matt T: Idk if you have in the past, but if offered a chance for a book signing, would you ever do it? I’d love to get your autograph. Been a huge fan of yours for awhile
Klaw: Yes. If Harper Collins doesn’t have me to do a full book tour, we’ll still do some ad hoc events around my spring travel. Also, I have confirmed there will be an audiobook version of Smart Baseball.

TCJ: Any thoughts on Jason Hewyards new swing?
Klaw: Any thoughts today would be pure piffle. Let’s see it against live pitching before we think anything of it.

Jim: My girlfriend gets bored with board games to the point that she tries to lose on purpose so she can stop playing. What game(s) would you recommend for a smart, creative, and historically-bored-with-board-games person? If possible, something that works as a two player? Thanks!
Klaw: I’d say stick to games that play well in 30 minutes or less. 7 Ronin. 7 Wonders Duel (no connection). Patchwork. Jaipur might be too light, but it plays very fast. I put a whole list of the best two-player games at the bottom of my top 100 ranking.

Jake: Do you see Cody Sedlock starting in high A next season ?
Klaw: I would expect him to, yes. He’s polished enough.

Ross: How high of a ceiling do you see for Delvin Perez?
Klaw: True ceiling, all-star regular at short. Probability of that, maybe 10%.

Aron: Are there any dishes that you never get at a restaurant because you can make it easily/better? Any that are so time-consuming to make at home that you never make them and just get them at restaurants?
Klaw: I don’t order pasta dishes in restaurants unless the pasta is freshly made, and you won’t see me order something like pasta alla carbonara for that same reason. Long-cooked dishes like brisket (smoked or braised), pot roast, etc. are easy choices for me at restaurants because of the time required. I also eat more seafood out because I can’t cook shellfish at home (wife is allergic) and don’t cook much regular seafood either.

Alex: Do you see Dakota Hudson as a high potential guy?
Klaw: High ceiling? no. Move fast, get him to the rotation soon to extract value, mid-rotation upside.

Michael nuno: Your thoughts on Thomas Szapucki. What’s his ipside ?
Klaw: Probably a number two. Well above-average starter.

Mattey: What’s on the menu for Xmas Eve, Xmas day at Casa Klaw?
Klaw: Nothing special on Christmas eve. Going to do a roast pork shoulder on Christmas day.

Pat: Head Like a Hole. If 1st round draft picks were fully tradable, what kind of Major League talent would s straight up trade for a first round pick bring? Obviously, the higher the selection, and the more deep the draft pool the better, how much contract control is left for the Najor Leaguer(s) involved, etc. But any general sense what a first round draft pick is worth in terms of Major League talent?
Klaw: Depends on the pick, too, but a top 10 pick should return an average regular with a few years of control. The expected return on a pick that high probably is less than that in terms of annual production, but it comes with six years of control, three of them (or three-plus) at the minimum salary.

John Wick: What do you see as Kyle Tucker’s upside? Would he be a sticking point for you in a Quintana deal?
Klaw: I’m a fan, think he’s at least an above-average regular in a corner who hits for average with power, but if he’s the best player in the deal, I’m OK with that for Houston, because Q is an ace.

Tom: Do Alex Faedo and Kyle Wright have TOR type potential?
Klaw: Yes, Wright more than Faedo for me. They are the only college starters in this class I’d say have that potential. Houck looks like a reliever. Lange doesn’t have this stuff. Bukauskus has ace stuff but he’s a six foot RHP with some effort.

Anonymous: Keith, I truly appreciate your work. Good stuff. Thank you. Now what do you think about Bud Selig being elected to the Hall of Fame? Don’t you think there’s a bit of hypocracy there considering voters have decided not to let players connected to steroids into the hall? Seelig turned a blind eye to all of it so that baseball could profit. Also, his ideas on how to implement instant replay (4 dude string around waiting to talk to someone in a remote location) and the all-star game winner gets home field advantage were absolutely garbage. Yeah he made MLB a lot of money but is anyone considering the opportunity cost of what could have been. Baseball is truly regional (root for the home team) in that hardly anyone on the east coast knows who Mike Trout is. Thoughts?
Klaw: Absolute joke. It’s a big baseball circle-jerk. But I think it has opened the door for writers to vote for Bonds, Clemens, and even suspected-without-evidence PED guys to get in. So that’s good. But let’s not normalize Selig’s reign. He shut the sport down in ’94. He colluded against free agents in the 1980s. He ran players and the sport down for most of the first decade of the century, caved to Congressional pressure, and instituted policies (e.g., HGH testing) that have delivered no tangible benefit to the sport. The industry thrived under him, and he gets some (but not all) credit for that, but don’t forget the harm he did first to put baseball in the position in which he found it.

JJ: Any thoughts on Josh Tobias, the player acquired in the Clay Buchholz trade? Does he have any upside, or is he just a warm body to complete the salary dump?
Klaw: I wrote that deal up the other day.

Thomas: How is Joe Mixon not in jail?
Klaw: Because he’s good at hand-egg. Better question: How is Stoops or the Oklahoma athletic director still employed?

Doug: Happy Holidays to you and your family KLaw! Thank you for always being accessible and answering questions via multi-mediums! Curious, what kept Patch The Sky off of the top 10 (or expanding the 10 to 11)? I know you loved the three song romp that opens the record…did the back half drop off that much for you?
Klaw: Found it kind of repetitive after that. Not bad, certainly, but I felt like I was listening to the same songs again. Had I gone to 16 albums as I originally intended it would have been on there.

Anonymous: Regarding your answer last week about relievers and the HOF – are you saying that Rivera should be the threshold for relievers to make it in?
Klaw: I’m saying he’s above the threshold, but no other modern reliever comes close to the threshold. There’s an enormous gap between him and whoever you feel is #2 (Hoffman, Wagner, other).

Scrapper: In a year with more celebrity deaths than I can recall, was there a particular celebrity’s passing that impacted you this year?
Klaw: Prince, given his age, talent, and the fact that I have been a huge fan of his music, at least his peak output, for about 25 years.

CB: Now that Ryan Howard, A-Rod, etc. are off the books, what’s the worst contract in baseball right now? Cabrera? Pujols?
Klaw: Probably Pujols. Not that productive, under contract forever. At least Miggy produces. Dark horse right now: Stanton. Can’t earn that kind of coin if you’re rarely healthy.

Ivan’s a BUCKS-aneer: Not that he’s so great, but I’m shocked Nova got so little guaranteed in this pitching market. Toronto’s gamble with Happ paid off so well last year. Granted, he’s a lefty & hadn’t had TJ surgery, but I though Nova would at least match that pact, since so little pitching is available. I think this is a GREAT gamble for the Pirates to take. How do you feel?
Klaw: I think so too. Between that and the bargain salary for Hudson, the Pirates have had a nice week working in a bad pitching market. I’d be very happy with these moves if I were a Pirates fan.

Tom: Hi Keith- what do you think of Marco Gonzales for the Cardinals going forward? Any chance he can stick as a starter or do you think he’s a reliever post-injury?
Klaw: Starter for me. Not sure what that looks like as a reliever – I don’t think he’s going to have better stuff in short stints; he’s a fringy fastball, plus change, above avg CB guy, who’ll have to work to the edges of the strike zone with his fastball. That’s not the profile of a guy who’ll be better as a reliever.

Dave: What would you do if you were the Orioles? Tear it down, make some incremental upgrades for the short term? The system is pretty barren and player development is lacking, so I’m worried about this being a messy rebuild like the Reds.
Klaw: All in for 2017, then look at dealing Machado after the season. Or in July if things go really pear-shaped, which they might if Duquette can’t find some starting pitching.

JWR: What is your favorite holiday movie?
Klaw: Muppet Christmas Carol. We usually watch that, Holiday Inn (yes, the original cut), and White Christmas.

JWR: If you were suddenly instilled as GM of the Angels and if the owner said that he would accede to whatever vision you see for the team, would you trade Trout for a mega-package?
Klaw: Yes. It’s the best path back to contention for them. It’s going to take a lot of time to rebuild that farm system to the point where they can field an organic contender around Trout.

Big Hen: unless the Mets get someone outside the org. isn’t their best OF alignment, Yo-Lagares-Conforto from left to right? I get the skepticism but they can’t play Grandy in CF and Bruce in RF, I will throw up.
Klaw: If Lagares is healthy, yes, I agree with that. I see no role for Granderson or Bruce there at this point.

Lars: How do you think trump’s predictably horrendous approval ratings will impact his decisions? On the one hand, he doesn’t seem to care at all about keeping his word and doing what he promised. On the other, he is about as ego-driven as you can possibly be.
Klaw: I don’t do much in the way of political predictions anyway – I never predicted anything around the election or primaries, because WTF do I know – but I will predict this: Trump is and will remain unpredictable. I guess “mercurial” is the kind word. If the Republican party believes they can control him, I would predict that they’ll be disappointed.

LarryA: Last week you metionned briefly ordering mail-order coffee beans. Wouldnt lower quality but fresher beans rasted locally be better than older beans packed and shipped from across the country?
Klaw: No, not if they’re packed correctly, and I’ve learned that better quality beans benefit from a few days of rest after roasting, especially for pour-over or other drip coffee use.

Greg: I know you’ve had concerns about Austin Riley’s bat speed. In the second half, his Ks went down a lot and he hit 17 homers while hitting .284. Did you hear anything that was encouraging on him, or are you still really down on him?
Klaw: There’s nothing different; he just hit better in a smaller sample. The default expectation for prospects who aren’t promoted should be a better second half than first, because other prospects in the same league were promoted and, presumably, replaced with younger or lesser players. Sometimes that doesn’t work out – guys get tired, play hurt, etc. – but it’s a good starting point.

Marshall MN: Reports say the Trumbo offer was pulled by the Orioles, the rumored amount seemed really high anyway. I have a feeling internally that they are probably kicking themselves for not pulling their monstrous offer to Crush Davis last year as well. Why pay Trumbo $70 million when you could get a slightly downgraded version of him off the street for less money and less years?
Klaw: Pretty sure the Davis thing came from Angelos, not Duquette. No way I’d pay Trumbo that when you can get the next Trumbo for essentially nothing – trading a possibly-racist backup catcher, or claiming a guy off waivers.

Ty: Acuna is triple slashing 375/446/556 in the ABL through 20 games. Is the ABL High A quality and if so could Acuna open up in AA and be a skip away from the big leagues despite the relatively few professional at bats?
Klaw: ABL is below high-A quality. Maybe below low-A quality. But I like Acuna a lot anyway.

Jeremy: what did you think was the best and worst thing to come out of the new CBA?
Klaw: I hate the international amateur system – the players blew that, they should have taken a draft – and that we don’t have trading of draft picks. I like reducing the link between free agents and the draft, love the ban on hazing (duh), and love that the league is going to stop subsidizing Oakland. Move the team or sell it.

Jiminy Christmas: Michelle 2020? Warren 2020? Hanks 2020? Who would make you most excited?
Klaw: Booker? I really don’t know. Good chance it’s no one on our radar now. The DNC’s position that nothing is really wrong so let’s keep all the same people doesn’t give me a ton of hope.

splash: I have a two hour flight tomorrow. Is there a recent collection of short stories you could recommend?
Klaw: Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew.

Ben: I’ve been tasked with cooking the Christmas prime rib. I just got an Anova sous vide circulator and want to use it. The roast is 10 lbs, boneless, and I’m looking for medium rare. My thought is to cut it in half and put them in separate bags (to make it easier to handle), cook at 134 for about 6 hours, then finish in a 450 degree oven to brown it. Does that sound about right? Got any tips?
Klaw: I have never cooked prime rib via any method, but my gut reaction reading this is that 134 then 450 oven is going to push you to medium. Also ensure you have some resting time, maybe 30 minutes, between the sous vide and the browning step.

Joe: Have you gained respect for anyone (in the public eye) you didn’t expect to since the election? Lost any?
Klaw: Lindsay Graham has been one of the few Republicans to continue to say anything at all against Trump, and while that’s a low bar, I’m pretty impressed by his relative willingness to stand his ground.

Jeremy: seems like whoever inks EE for 3/$60M for DH-only duty will be pretty happy in 2017/2018, no?
Klaw: I think so. If EE’s agent is bluffing, as I kind of think he is, there’s a little bargain potential there for a team with cash.

Craig: Can you win at this game:


Klaw: I think two of those are players. This isn’t as fun as “Ikea item or death metal band,” though. (UPDATE: I only got 2/5 right. Womp womp.)

Tim: Derrick Goold and Baseball America just put out the Cardinals top 10. I was surprised Jack Flaherty wasn’t on it, but Goold did offer a solid explanation. Sounds like managers and coaches within the league just weren’t that impressed. What are your thoughts? I was excited by the selection and he seemed to have success, but that’s admittedly stat-lining.
Klaw: That surprises me that he’s not in their top 10, but I haven’t done anything with their system yet, and as a general policy I don’t criticize anyone else’s lists. Usually I don’t even mention other lists, but Derrick’s a friend and knows that organization extremely well.

Jeremy: Brett Anderson as a 7th starter insurance is a better option than Brian Johnson/Henry Owens/Elias, right?
Klaw: Yes. Most of Anderson’s career, he’s been good when healthy. I’d be fine giving him a deal where he gets like $500-700K a start or something. Like, here, you earn the minimum with your first start, and every additional start where we don’t have to put you on the DL, here’s another check. Not that I think he needs incentive – I’ve talked to Brett, it’s not like he wants to get hurt – but it’s totally reasonable to pay a good-when-healthy guy for how often he’s healthy because you’re probably both going to be happy with the return.

Oscar: Any books for first time parents that you recommend? Thanks.
Klaw: The Happiest Baby on the Block.

Matt: Have you heard anything about Chesny Young in the Cubs system? Seems to be able to hit no matter where he goes…zero power an obvious issue. Is there a potential UTIL here, or just a AAAA guy?
Klaw: No power indeed, don’t see those guys much in the majors any more, think he sees the majors but would say 60/40 against him having any kind of role.

Bryan: Klaw, please correct any portion of the following that I have wrong. Regarding Schilling, I think you have said in the past that you consider him a friend and that you would vote him into the Hall. I am all for his Hall candidacy, but a little surprised you would count him as a friend. Do you object to people that claim Curt is a bigot?
Klaw: You’re conflating a bunch of things here. Yes, Curt’s a friend, and I get along very well with him. Yes, I would vote for him for the Hall, because I think his performance merits it, not because I know him. No, I do not object to people who call him a bigot, and I could not disagree with him more on pretty much anything on politics, race relations, LGBTQ rights, and so on. I can be friends with people I disagree with politically; we’re friends with a family around here who are gun-toting, possibly survivalist Trump supporters. I wouldn’t and don’t support any of the stuff Curt has said about minority groups, and I said at the time I understood ESPN’s decision completely.

Kyle KS: What is the appropriate punishment for college football players that act violently against women? Mixon would’ve been taken in by another college due to his talent. A lessor player would’ve been forgotten and no one would remember the consequence. The NFL tolerates players with recent incidents of violence in college like Tyreek Hill who was kicked off his team but has talent. Should the NFL go to a zero tolerance policy to take an actual stand against this behavior?
Klaw: Zero tolerance policies are complicated, as many people have written recently, because taking away the livelihood of an abuser can make the victim, if she’s still with him, worse off. However, for an individual school to say, we’re revoking your scholarship because you hit a woman … that’s well within their rights, and they can certainly take a moral stand even if Mixon would end up playing for another school. Give the scholarship and the possibility of an education (ha!) to a more deserving person.

JR: How annoying is it when you know you are going to be in a place where you will have some reading time (airplane, doctor’s office, etc.) and then the person next to you tries to start a conversation while you are deep in your book. “what are you reading” “is it good” “what’s it about.” So annoying. I’m not anti-social, but I planned ahead and brought a book, so leave me alone.
Klaw: It really depends. This happens to me a lot, of course, because I always have a book. Sometimes it’s clear the person is just being kind and the smalltalk won’t last. Sometimes the person really knows the book I’m reading, or is truly asking if it’s worth reading. And I’ve had some wonderful, entirely serendipitous conversations because of stuff like that. If my gut reaction is that this person is a wacko, or going to be rude, or about to proselytize to me (that’s happened a few times), then I try to polite close the conversation. But I try to at least start with the assumption that s/he doesn’t realize s/he’s being rude and go from there.

Tim (NJ): We traditionally do a tenderloin for christmas – sear in pan, finish in oven (rosemary, mustard seeds, etc). Any recs/thoughts on how to spice it up?
Klaw: Beef? Black pepper. Cloves. Garlic. Lots of garlic. I’m not a huge fan of beef – I’d choose pork over it every time – so I’m probably not the ideal person to ask. If it’s not a short rib or a brisket, which are both good because they’re fatty as hell, I’ll have the pork shoulder, thanks.

Jeremy: do you do ‘Elf on the Shelf’ with your daughter?
Klaw: No. That little fucker is creepy.

addoeh: I sw you aren’t doing a long write-up, but any quick thoughts on last week’s episode of Top Chef?
Klaw: Yes, I apologize for skipping last week but I will resume with tonight’s episode. I thought it was bad TV, in a sense, that every dish was apparently good, and we didn’t get a ton of explanation of why the guy who went home went home. Asking “did you make your own bread” seemed a bit of a stretch too – we almost never see anyone make his/her own bread on this show. Also, if every dish includes radishes, tell us more about how the chefs are cooking them, because that’s something I have only eaten raw.

Pat D: Should I try to defend that guy by saying “at least he voted for the maximum amount of players” or is the vote for Hoffman over Raines just way too indefensible?
Klaw: If you put Hoffman, who faced a total of about 4400 batters in his entire career, over Raines, who *reached base* about 4000 times in his career, you don’t understand the first thing about the sport and shouldn’t vote. This is so incredibly fundamental, and that voter’s friends being all “don’t ballot shame” is just a way of avoiding accountability, which is exactly the wrong direction for the electorate to take. You want the vote? Fine. Be accountable. Don’t vote stupid.

Ed: Is Dylan Cease ready for Myrtle Beach, or would you keep him at Eugene?
Klaw: You’re skipping low-A there. He needs to go to a full-season league, yes. I might be willing to jump him to high-A because of weather, but I don’t think he’s demonstrated he’s ready for high-A hitters just yet.

Tim (NJ): Top Chef – so they put 8 veterans with a massive thumb on their scale (experience with contest, more experience after contest) against 8 chefs new to the competition. This seems like a ratings grab, bc from a competition standpoint, this seems really fixed.
Klaw: I’ve been disappointed with the season to date for that reason.

Adam: Do you see any HS or college players poised to shoot up draft boards between now and June? Do you see any that look like they’ll fall?
Klaw: No. Too early for that.

Tim (NJ): If a fortune teller told you Senzel would win ROY in 2018, would that surprise you?
Klaw: No. Although it wouldn’t shock me if he played 50 games in the majors in 2017, either. Kid can hit. You’re not waiting on a ton there.

Tom: Just wanted to say thanks for all the columns, chats, Saturday links, your kindness in Twitter convos, and of course, restaurant recs. A lot of people try to speak for me on Twitter that I’m only interested in your baseball stuff and nothing else. “No you can’t take that away from me.”
Klaw: You’re welcome, and thank you for the kind words. I couldn’t stick to baseball if I wanted to. People who demand that of me get muted or blocked.

Zoey: Keith, how much does pedigree play into prospect rankings? I’m wondering even if it’s subconscious, would a guy like Patrick Weigel rank higher if he was a say a top 50 pick?
Klaw: Not on my rankings. Once you’re in pro ball, the slate is clean.

Tyler: So the original title was suppose to be “Smrt Baseball” right? Publisher forced you to add the a?
Klaw: We thought Smrt Baseball would be unsearchable.

Chris: Given the how sharply the cost of good relief pitching has risen, has it caused you to re-evaluate how you rank prospects that are likely relievers?
Klaw: No, because the value a reliever delivers hasn’t really changed, and we’re not any better today at predicting who they’ll be than we were five years ago. Betances is a great example – total washout as a starter, awful command, goes to the pen, completely different guy now.

Carl: No question. Just wanted to say thanks for the great content, science advocacy, & common sense. Now let me get back to Star Realms while eating leftover Ruhlman Roast Chicken and reading this chat.
Klaw: That’s a strong combination. And you’re welcome. I stand for science.

CB: Weird, I heard the author of Smart Baseball is a biased tool of the liberal media who hates all 32 teams and feels the need to comment on things other than baseball.
Klaw: That too.

Ed: What are your thoughts on Eddy Martinez’ first season? About what you expected? Better / worse?
Klaw: Worse than I expected. Same for Yusnier Diaz. Hopeful both are better in 2017 now that any rust is gone. But maybe I overrated both guys.

Andy: Gary Bettman, the NHL commish, overlapping a lot with Selig, seems utterly incompetent. The NHL canceled a full season and had multiple labor disputes. Yet the NHL is still a money maker for the owners. Losing money on an established sports league at this point would frankly be more shocking.
Klaw: TV money is the determining variable here. It’s like when Democrats tried to give credit for the Internet economic bubble to Bill Clinton. Yes, he made some decent policy decisions. He was also sitting on the oil deposit when it started gushing … oh, god, this analogy is terrible, I’m sorry.

Geoff: Hi Keith – spending a year of grad school in Gainesville, is the UF team worth checking out? I’m from Massachusetts, never seen big time college baseball. Thanks
Klaw: Always worth checking out, with two potential first-rounders this year in Faedo and Schwarz, and Guthrie not far behind.

Zach: Hey Keith, aside from ATCQ (Goat) has any hip-hop album really stood out for you this year?
Klaw: Nothing really. Kendrick’s untitled record was good, but I never felt compelled to go back to it after March.

Joe Schmo: My wife went to see her primary because of some numbness in hands and face. He thinks it could be caused by stress so he prescribed Xanax. He’s the medical professional…but it worries me that he’s offering it to her so willingly without going through a proper diagnosis from a psychiatrist. Am I overreacting?
Klaw: Xanax is a go-to script for primary care docs these days, even though it’s quite habit-forming. I feel like i know a dozen people who’ve told me they have it. I’ve taken it maybe four times in my life, all during my episode of panic attacks and inability to sleep in 2012, and then stopped when I was able to sleep again because I worried about long-term use.

Cletus: Nats should give closer to- Glover, Treinen, or other??
Klaw: I bet they acquire someone but I’d put Glover over Treinen.

Felix: In all of your travels, where did you find the best brisket?
Klaw: Franklin BBQ in Austin is the best, Little Miss BBQ in Phoenix is second. 4 Rivers near Orlando is good too.

Zach: I imagine you’re too busy to really play video games, but was the younger Klaw a gamer? Picturing you as the Rpg type.
Klaw: Only a little. I played some computer RPGs like Bard’s Tale and the original Pool of Radiance but didn’t have a ton of patience for them. Loved the original Civilization game, though. I lost a lot of time one semester in college to that.

Andrew: Isn’t there a logical fallacy to the rise in Clemens/Bonds voters as a result of the Selig HOF selection? In theory, if we shouldn’t use Jim Rice to argue that similar players are HOFers….shouldn’t we not use Selig to justify Bonds/Clemens? (p.s. I’m still pro Bonds/Clemens in the HOF, but still)
Klaw: In this case, I think voters are saying, well, we asked you for guidance on PED guys, and you implicitly gave it to us by putting Commissioner See-No-Evil in, so, all’s fair now.

Andy: I know you aren’t a fan of the extremely vague character clause. Bonds and Schilling’s on field play is good enough for you to vote. If it comes up, would someone with an offense like Chapman’s violate your personal character clause to vote for the HOF?
Klaw: Probably not. If he had Rivera’s credentials, for example, and this one incident is the only one of its kind he has (nothing worse, either), I would likely include him, reluctantly. Of course, with Chapman, there’s been other stuff, some smaller offenses that are public, some character issues that are not.

Chris: Do you think people are finding false comfort on stating over and over again that 2016 has been a particularly terrible year? I mean, can’t it get much worse? And isn’t it likely that it will?
Klaw: It can, it probably will, and it’s not like the universe is aware that the western system of numbering collections of days is about to see the last digit roll over.

Jay: Could Bryan Reynolds be an above average CF (offensively and defensively) at AT&T park? ETA in 2018 or 2019?
Klaw: Yes. I’m in. Some risk with high K rate but great value pick there with upside on both sides of the ball.

Ryan V.: Shazaam, starring Sinbad – great movie, or Greatest Movie?
Klaw: That story is in my list for Saturday’s links post. That’s absolutely amazing. The power of a collective delusion?

Andrew: Do you agree with eat like a king during breakfast, a king at lunch and a pauper for dinner? Trying to find ways to improve my diet.
Klaw: No. I eat more at dinner than the other two meals, typically. I don’t know that it’s best, but it works for me.

Mikey: Give me a reason to believe in Javier Guerra. He really struggled with the stick. Can he figure it out or is he a future Rey Ordonez?
Klaw: I think he was very young for the level, has plenty of ability, and is in a good situation now with an organization that is committing a lot of resources to helping him. He’s going to be good.

Dan: Did you watch The Magicians series? Have only read the first book and am ~7 episodes in. It took me a while but I finally enjoy how different it is from the source material.
Klaw: No, it’s on my to-do list, which is getting longer rather than shorter.

addoeh: Through odd circumstances, someone has taken your espresso machine away from you and will give it back if you do one of two things; watch three hours of Calliou or a three hour video of the 2016 Cleveland Browns highlights. Which will you watch?
Klaw: I don’t know football well enough to be bothered by watching a bad team play badly.

Moltar: Definitive ranking of renditions of A Christmas Carol: 1.) Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol 2.) Muppet Christmas Carol 3.) Scrooged 4.) Flinstones Christmas Carol 5.) Patrick Stewart version
Klaw: You missed the George C. Scott version, which I think is my favorite straight-up adaptation.

Andy: If Bud Selig were still commish, he would threaten to contract Oakland and TB, and then sell both teams to Jeff Loria for practically nothing.
Klaw: Also a problem we tend to forget. He certainly didn’t solve either team’s situation, or even push towards a resolution.

Joey Bagodonuts: I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas and say that I look forward to being mentioned in your draft projections for 2017.
Klaw: Thank you, and I can tell you now that you merited a mention in Smart Baseball.

J: Yes The R&R Hall of Fame is ridiculous as art is not a competition, but one band/performer you think should be in that is not? Using the current no criteria criteria of couse
Klaw: I was floored that Bad Brains, who are incredibly influential despite having no popularity themselves, were nominated but left out. You don’t have to like their music to recognize that they influenced entire genres and broke the race barrier in punk.

Steve Fratantaro: Hi Keith. i’m curious to hear your thoughts on the contract Odubel Herrera signed recently. Seems like a team friendly deal to me. What do you think?
Klaw: Team friendly if he never gets any better, bargain if he does. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve heard questions about his work ethic, however, and if those are legitimate – let’s face it, makeup rumors can be complete bullshit – then there’s some risk to the team here.

Jeff: Gavin Newsom is a darkhorse I would watch for in 2020, but 2024 is probably a better bet. But given the recent reports of how Trump partially makes his Cabinet decisions based on looks, maybe 2020 is a real possibility. Can you imagine how intimidated Trump would be seeing Newsom standing across the debate stage? He’d probably call him “Dreamy Gavin”.
Klaw: I’ve been impressed by Newsom’s commentary so far, especially on some pretty contentious issues, but it’s easier to take a firm stand when you’re preaching to the choir in your home state. It’s hard, for example, to remain so firmly pro-gun control when you see how much of the electorate opposes that and will vote on that one issue.

Nelson: Coffee question. I use the Kalita Wave with a burr grinder. Do you vary your grind with the bean? Do you locally roasted beans or mail order? Thoughts on Ronald Acuna as compared to Andruw Jones?
Klaw: Yes, I have to vary the grind by the bean for whatever I’m making. I don’t see the Acuna/Jones comparison, though.

Craig: Regarding Schilling’s drop in HOF support, do you think it is permanent or do you think that voters are latching on to his comments as a way to cull their ballot down to 10 names (i.e. “I have 12 guys I would vote for and only 10 slots, so the jerk gets cut first”) and he’ll rebound as the ballot sorts itself out in future years?
Klaw: I think the timing of his post about lynching reporters is having a direct effect on his support, but I don’t know if that endures. We may not know for another year or two until we reach a point where most people agree the number of qualified candidates on the ballot is ten or fewer. Right now I would say there are twelve and I’d accept any answer from about eleven to maybe fifteen.

Ang: What are you doing with the pork shoulder for xmas? I really like the recipes I’ve been using, one Korean with a long gochujang marinade and the other a kind of kalua pork, but would like to try something new this year,
Klaw: Using the Momofuku bo ssam recipe, which is easy, almost foolproof, and damn good.

Klaw: That’s all for this week, and I apologize for being a little slow today – I woke up with a migraine, slept another hour and a half after I got my daughter to school, and still am not at 100%. Thank you all for bearing with me, for your questions, and for your support throughout the year. Have a Merry Christmas, for those of you who celebrate it, and for the rest of you, may the calendar keep bringing Happy Holidays to you.

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Top 10 albums of 2016.

The last few years I’ve ranked a number of albums equal to the last two digits of the year, so I should have been due for a top 16 albums list for 2016 … but I can’t do it. I just couldn’t find that many albums I could truly recommend as complete listens, records that were mostly good from start to finish, as opposed to albums that had three great songs (Jagwar Ma’s Every Now and Then) but had a lot of filler.

I’ve always slipped one metal album on to the list for fellow fans of the heavy stuff; the best metal record I heard this year was Kodama (amazon • iTunes) by French shoegaze-metalers Alcest, six songs, mostly long ones, that create a cohesive sound that carries over shifting tempos and movements and the occasional death growl. It was just a fair year in metal, I think, with a lot of well-known artists releasing albums that were pretty ho-hum (looking at you, Metallica and Megadeth). Other favorites of mine this year: Gojira’s Magma, Entombed AD’s Dead Dawn, Omnium Gatherum’s Grey Heavens, Animals As Leaders’ The Madness of Many, Dark Tranquility’s Atoma, and two I’ll suggest with reservations – Cobalt’s Slow Forever, which is brilliant musically but marred by screeched vocals a la Obituary; and Astronoid’s Air, kind of like shoegaze-death metal with clean, often harmonized vocals, but lacking much in the way of hooks.

You can see my ranking of the top 100 songs of 2016, which I posted last week and informs this list as well.

10. Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool (amazon • iTunes). I mean, it’s a Radiohead album, so it’s brilliant and intricate and slightly experimental, but it’s also on the ambient, ethereal side of things, which, as a fan of their first three albums, I find a bit disappointing. There are two standout tracks here, “Burn the Witch” and “Desert Island Disk,” but there are plenty of other worthwhile moments on the album (like the two-step drumbeat that underlies “Identikit”) and nothing truly unlistenable.

9. Wire – Nocturnal Koreans (amazon • iTunes). Barely an album at 26 minutes for eight songs, it’s essentially the discarded tracks from their 2015 self-titled album, but cleaned up with better production, and the result is a distillation of Wire’s best sounds, musically and technically.

8. The Coral – Distance Inbetween (amazon • iTunes). In a year when the Stone Roses dropped two singles in an unexpected comeback, their brand of blues-heavy psychedelic rock was done better on two albums that landed in my top ten, including this one. The Coral seemed on the verge of dissolution after losing two key members in the last few years, but this album sees them back to their mid-aughts heyday of driving, throwback rock, including tracks like “Fear Machine,” “Chasing the Tail of a Dream,” and the opening track “Connector.”

7. Lapcat – She’s Bad (amazon • iTunes). Experimental-ish electronic music, picking up where the xx’s first album left off (an album the xx themselves seem to have forgotten), led by Cate Coslor’s sultry vocals but powered by the sparse, atmospheric synth lines behind her. They’re apparently big Portishead fans and the influence is clear on “She’s Bad,” “Lavender,” and “Nebraska.”

6. SULK – No Illusions (amazon • iTunes). This is the other Stone Roses-influenced album here, this record opens with a three-song punch that will transport you right back to “She Bangs the Drums” and “I Wanna Be Adored,” although they’re missing Ian Brown’s swagger here. Even when the melody doesn’t click, they still evoke a time and feeling with guitar lines like the one behind “Love Can’t Save You Now.”

5. White Lung – Paradise (amazon • iTunes). This album was so hyped, and I bought into it completely, that I found myself a little disappointed when it came out and it was merely very good, a 60 rather than a 70. It’s smart punk, well-informed by decades of punk-pop fusions, but “Hungry” was the only single that I thought stood out on its own, although “Kiss Me When I Bleed” and “Below” are solid too.

4. School of Seven Bells – SVIIB (amazon • iTunes). I tried not to bow too much to sentiment here, as this is the farewell record from SVIIB, whose founding member, Ben Curtis, died three years ago this month of lymphoma at age 35. His bandmate and former partner Alejandra Deheza returned to the studio a year later and completed the record they’d begun, producing an album of two parts. The first seven songs are typical SVIIB fare, dreamy electronica given texture by Deheza’s smoky, low-register vocals, mixing upbeat tempos with a clear sense of loss in the lyrics to songs like “Open Your Eyes,” “Ablaze,” and “A Thousand Times More.” Then the album closes with two ballads to rip your heart right out of your chest.

3. Thrice – To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere (amazon (for $5!) • iTunes). That’s Riley Breckenridge of the Productive Outs podcast and the band Puig Destroyer on drums for these post-hardcore stalwarts, whose latest album was their first in five years and something of a return to heavy rock after 2011’s Major/Minor. This hits a particular sweet spot for me, as I’ve always favored guitar-driven music, even to the point of listening to some extreme metal, but also am drawn to strong melodies and smart lyrics. “Blood on the Sand” and “Black Honey” made my top 100 but I’m also a fan of opener “Hurricane” and the angry “Death from Above.”

2. Wild Beasts – Boy King (amazon • iTunes). The best rock record of the year finds Wild Beasts coming down from their art-rock heights to produce their most accessible album to date, a disc devoted to the idea of toxic masculinity (“Now I’m all fucked up/And I can’t stand up/So I better suck it up/Like a tough guy would”). Their willingness to experiment is corraled here within normal song structures, and they’ve created hypnotic, twisted dance songs like “Alpha Female,” “Get My Bang,” and “He the Colossus” that fill out the record along with the slower but still catchy “Big Cat” and “Tough Guy.”

1. A Tribe Called Quest – We got it from Here … Thank You 4 Your Service (amazon • iTunes). Another record informed by loss – founding Tribe member Phife died in March, just as the quartet were finishing the album – this isn’t merely the best record of the year, it’s one of the best records of the century and my favorite rap album of the last twenty years. Where the Tribe were always pioneers of Afrocentric lyrics and infusing jazz and other traditionally black music into their songs, they were fundamentally about peace and personal, spiritual uplift. We Got it from Here, however, finds the Tribe seriously pissed off, and their lyrics and vocabulary reflect it – but Q-Tip, Phife, and the revenant Jarobi White are as energized as ever, dropping rhymes like they never quit, like The Love Movement never happened, like the state of Black America is more important than whatever personal feud kept them apart for almost two decades. Busta Rhymes hasn’t sounded this good since The Coming. Kendrick Lamar is here. Jack White is here. Elton Fucking John sings on this record. And there are hooks everywhere – on “The Space Program,” “We the People,” “Melatonin,” “Dis Generation,” “Ego,” and more. I didn’t see this album coming, and I don’t give any record extra points for coming from an artist I love or one that’s been gone a long time. The only flaw here was that, at sixteen songs, it probably could have been shorter, but with Phife gone, I’m happy to hear everything he recorded before he left. This is almost certainly the end of the Tribe as we knew them, but what a fucking way to go.

Others I considered that didn’t make the cut – and I listened to a LOT of albums this month to make sure I had enough of a sample to put together a list at all – included sad13’s Slugger, Bob Mould’s Patch the Sky, Jagwar Ma’s Every Now and Then, Broods’ Conscious, and Daughter’s Not to Disappear.

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→ December 19, 2016
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A Fire Upon the Deep.

Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep shared the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1993 with the vastly superior The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, a “tie” that beggars belief if you’ve read both books. Willis’s ranks among the best novels I’ve ever read, period, and comparing Vinge’s to it is unfair to the latter book, which is certainly ambitious and epic in scope and theme. Where A Fire Upon the Deep falls short of the greatest sci-fi novels I’ve read is in the stuff that makes a novel a good one: Vinge can’t give us compelling, well-drawn characters, despite his imagination and remarkable ability to create a complex, textured universe within his book.

Set millions of years into the future, A Fire Upon the Deep finds the Milky Way populated with numerous races, including humans, who can travel faster than light – but only if they’re in a zone sufficiently far from the galaxy’s center. These “zones of thought” affect everything from technological and philosophical progress to speed of travel, so a spaceship that moves from the Beyond down into the Slowness (nearer the black hole at our galaxy’s core) can go from traveling at several times the speed of light to a mere fraction thereof.

The story opens in confusing fashion, but after a hundred pages or so it becomes clear that the main plot thread revolves around an ‘ancient’ threat unleashed by the humans of a planet known as Straum, who appear to have found a dormant AI routine, implemented it, and opened Pandora’s Box on a “perversion” that attempts to take over huge swaths of the galaxy. One ship survived the apocalypse at Straum to jump to the Slowness, where the ship lands on an earthlike planet that, it turns out, is populated by a race of wolves, later called the Tines, who have the ability to think in groups: an ‘individual’ Tine is a pack of four to eight wolves who operate with one mind. The Tines attack the ship’s denizens, a family of four, killing the parents and taking the two kids as captives, one to each of the Tines’ two warring camps. These two plot strands are connected in a way that isn’t immediately obvious, spurring a cross-galaxy space chase, an exploration of predetermination, and a story of the intrusion of modern combat technology on a primitive society.

This is a space opera, with shifting timelines, multiple perspectives, intersections between several alien races, and even a pit stop that might as well be the book’s Mos Eisley, with no shortage of sci-fi wizardry. Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, which foresaw the era of wearable technology, was bogged down by his need to give us extraneous details, and A Fire Upon the Deep isn’t much different, especially when it comes to details of the operations of various spaceships – we don’t need any of this, and it brings everything to a crawl (like we’re stuck in the Slowness). Here, this problem is compounded by a plot that can only have one ending: there is no question that the people working to stop the ravenous “perversion,” known as the Blight, are going to win out in the end. The story would just end abruptly if there were any other resolution, and if I tell you one or more heroes will die in the effort, you can probably pick them out before the halfway point.

The other core problem here is that Vinge expends so much effort on crafting this brilliant, imaginative universe that the characters are all far too thinly drawn to create any emotional investment on the reader’s part. The kids are actually both kind of annoying, even though they’re orphans on a strange planet with no other humans around, and for almost the entire book each thinks the other is dead. If you can’t generate any empathy for those characters, you have a serious problem. Another character finds out her home planet has been basically blown up and her whole family annihilated; it’s a ho-hum moment that passes without any real emotion in the text or, obviously, off it.

I didn’t actually hate this book, although it may sound that way; I just wouldn’t recommend it that highly. It’s an achievement in scope and vision, but not as a work of cohesive fiction. I assumed that the Blight would lose the race, and that certain characters would survive, but I can’t say I particularly cared about any of the characters, and there was nothing specific to their individual story arcs beyond mere survival. The mark of great fiction, genre or otherwise, is more than mere plot; without strong characters or good prose, it’s just a story, and that’s all A Fire Upon the Deep was for me.

Next up: I’m halfway through another Hugo winner, Robert Heinlein’s classic Stranger in a Strange Land.

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