→ July 18, 2012
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Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

I rarely recommend any product I haven’t used or read, but I’m making an exception in the case of the new e-book The Hall of Nearly Great because it includes so many great writers, telling the stories of good big leaguers who were never good enough to earn legitimate Hall of Fame consideration. (I do have a copy of the book, but haven’t started it yet.) It’s available now for just $12 through that link.

I wrote yesterday about improved and declining farm systems for Insiders.

–

Anita Loos’ 1925 comic novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is best remembered now for Howard Hawks’ movie adaptation, starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, but at the time of its release it was an enormous best-seller, second only to John Erskine’s The Private Life of Helen of Troy among novels published in the U.S. that year. Loos’ book, a scant 120 pages, is now typically sold with its sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, a weaker sibling that doesn’t have the same high or low comedy of the first book.

The blonde in question is the shameless gold-digger Lorelei, who narrates the novel in diary form, detailing her exploits in convincing various witless suitors into buying her expensive meals, clothes, and jewelry, while also taking her from California to New York to London and across Europe. What Lorelei lacks in brains she makes up for in cunning, manipulating multiple men simultaneously without any remorse for the way she leads them on and leaves them once she finds a better offer. She’s accompanied by her sarcastic friend Dorothy, whose lack of decorum and interest in men without money confuse and aggravate Lorelei, whose only end seems to be having a good time through someone else’s wallet. For the time, Lorelei’s casual attitudes towards love, sex, and money, as well as a disinterest in then-traditional female roles of doting wife and mother – even when she settles on one man at the end of the novel, it’s more about what he can do for her budding career than about love or family.

The book is extremely funny between Lorelei’s own observations and the occasional cutting line from Dorothy; Lorelei is always talking about “educating” herself by reading, yet confesses that she and Dorothy “do not seem to be mathematical enough to tell how much francs is in money.” She says her friends told her she had talent for music, but “I mean I simply could not sit for hours and hours at a time practising just for the sake of a career.” (Spelling errors are rampant throughout her diaries, accelerating once she and Dorothy reach Paris.) And because she’s beautiful and, presumably, because she’s blond, men fall all over themselves to buy her affections – in a rare turn of events, it’s a book where the thinly-drawn characters are males, a sort of anti-Sorkinism that had to be even more unusual in the ’20s.

But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes doesn’t live up to its predecessor’s humor, as Lorelei only appears as the narrator of Dorothy’s life story, from a very rough upbringing to her eventual pursuit of a wealthy New York scion whose mother rather thoroughly disapproves of the match, setting various schemes in motion to save her son from a disastrous marrage. The narrative is more traditional, but aside from the slapstick nature of Dorothy and her beau chasing each other while her would-be mother-in-law interferes, it lacks the farcical nature of the first book, in part because Dorothy is no longer the wise-cracking observer but is enmeshed in the plot. It’s as short as the Blondes, though, and with the original illustrations by Ralph Barton taking up a number of pages, you could probably knock off the pair of novels in three hours or so.

Next up: I’ve finished Mario Livio’s The Golden Ratio (about the irrational number φ) and moved on to Michael Ruhlman’s The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America.

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→ July 16, 2012
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Scotland Yard app.

In case any of you missed it, my top 50 prospects ranking update went up on Thursday. I’ll be back on the Baseball Today podcast on Tuesday.

Scotland Yard is one of the few mass-market boardgames from before Settlers of Catan ushered in the modern era of “Eurogames” to fare well in the comparison to the more sophisticated, less luck-based games that players like me tend to favor. It has a very simple mechanic, has cooperative elements, and involves a tiny bit of luck. The Scotland Yard iOS app, released early last month, is a very strong implementation that only falls short in that it’s a hard game to play with AI opponents or partners.

The game is semi-cooperative, with two to five players as detectives chasing one player, the thief Mr. X, around London, attempting to catch him by landing on the space he occupies in the span of 24 turns. On each turn, a player can move to an adjacent location or station using a taxi, a bus, or the subway. The detectives start the game with a limited number of passes/fares for each method of transportation, and when a detective uses a ticket, he gives it to Mr. X to use on a subsequent turn. The location of Mr. X is obscured for most of the game, but is revealed four times, after moves 3, 8, 13, and 18; on all other turns, the detectives see what method of transportation he used, but not his location. Mr. X also gets two “double move” tickets, allowing him to make two moves within one turn, and has several “black” tickets, where he can obscure his method of transportation as well as his location. Finally, he can take boats along the Thames by using black tickets, a method entirely unavailable to the detectives.

I’ve never played the physical boardgame, but the need for secrecy makes this tailor-made for an adaptation to a mobile platform, whether you’re using pass-and-play or online multiplayer. The graphics in this app are bright and pretty clear, no mean feat for a complex board with lots of fine lines representing paths for each method of transportation; the app also brightly highlights all acceptable moves for each player on his turn, and includes a countdown clock of variable move times for live games.

Playing solely against AI opponents, I found it more fun to play as Mr. X because you can’t coordinate with AI detective players when playing the other side. Yet escaping the detectives quickly became simple, even on the hardest setting, because they’re not deductive enough – for example, they never seem to grasp that when Mr. X reaches one of the stations on the Thames and uses a black ticket, he probably took a boat to a different part of the board. So while gameplay is clean and simple, it’s much better suited to play against live opponents, even if you want to supplement with an AI detective, or want to gang up on an AI-played Mr. X.

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→ July 15, 2012
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Brave.

Brave is by far the most beautiful animated film I have ever seen, with details so clear and so lifelike that the movie exceeded any expectations I had for how realistic computer-generated images could be. It features a strong female protagonist, something I appreciate as the father of a six-year-old princess-obsessed daughter, and a stirring score primarily written by Scottish composer Patrick Doyle, with two songs performed by Scottish singer Julie Fowlis. Unfortunately, the story is a lot less nuanced than previous entries in the Pixar canon, with a more predictable plot and none of the secondary storylines we’ve come to expect from a studio that has produced so many masterpieces.

The warrior princess at the heart of Brave, Merida (voiced by, who else, Kelly Macdonald), is being groomed for eventual betrothal to one of three princes from allied clans in the Scottish highlands, yet has no interest in an arranged marriage or any fate written for her by her domineering mother, Elinor (Emma Thompson). Her father, King Fergus (Billy Connolly), is happy to encourage her tomboyish habits, giving her a bow and arrow for a birthday present and making fun of her would-be suitors with her, yet defers to his wife on all matters of import. Merida runs away after a blowout quarrel with her mother over her refusal to accept any of the princes, ending up in a witch’s cottage in the forest, which, naturally, leads to a spell that goes awry, the effects of which Merida must spend the remainder of the film trying to undo.

The animation of Merida’s unruly, curly, red hair is an absolute marvel, both an obvious symbol of her fiery independent spirit and a chance for Pixar’s animators to show off their tricks, which are even more impressive now than they were in Ratatouille, perhaps my least favorite Pixar film but which featured remarkable animation of Colette’s hair. Pixar re-wrote its animation system for the first time in 25 years to allow for more realistic depictions of human characters, and it shows all over this film, even in the depiction of the fur on the two ursine characters and in breathtaking panomaric shots of the highland forests, cliffs, and waterfalls. It is a new high-water mark for computer animation in the movies.

While my daughter enjoyed the movie tremendously, adults will likely find it a little too predictable, and the resolution relied on what was, for Pixar at least, an abnormal amount of just straight-on physical combat between man and bear and eventually between the two bears themselves. The mother-daughter bonding that occurs after the spell takes hold is poignant without becoming too sentimental, with the usual Pixar message of the need for characters who disagree to open their minds and work together. Merida’s three younger brothers, mischievous triplets who are too young to speak but are old enough to understand and use simple machines, steal most of the scenes in which they appear and seem tailor-made for future appearances in Pixar shorts, if not in a film of their own. Yet they don’t have any sort of story, appearing as comic relief and to help Merida and her mother try to break the spell. I also thought the film had less of Pixar’s trademark humor, relying on more obvious sight gags and even some mild bathroom humor to fill that gap.

However, I know I’m holding Pixar to an impossibly high standard – one they set through their first eleven films. (I still haven’t seen Cars 2.) No studio has been so good for so long and it may be unfair to expect every one of their films to be as good as The Incredibles or Up. Brave is an excellent movie by industry standards and my daughter loved it, not least because it has such a strong female lead. It just didn’t quite meet my very high expectations.

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→ July 10, 2012
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Kansas City eats.

I posted some quick reactions to Sunday’s Futures Game a few hours after it ended. Next ESPN post will be Thursday’s top 50 prospects update.

The best Q I had on in Kansas City was the burnt ends platter at the original Oklahoma Joe’s location (that is, attached to a gas station). This absolutely lived up to its advance billing, as the meat had great smoke flavor and the characteristic tooth of real burnt ends (although not the crispy exterior I expected – I admit I’m not a big burnt ends expert, though), without being so dry that sauce was required. Smoke rings were evident throughout, not that I needed proof after tasting them. The French fries were just fair; many of you recommended them and I’m guessing it’s because of the red pepper-based seasoning rather than for the fries themselves, which weren’t as good as what you’d get at Five Guys or In-n-Out. I’d try the beans for a side next time. The insider tip is to call your order in ahead of time, but I spent most of the ~45 minutes in line chatting with the two sports nuts behind me, as well as one of you who spotted my tweet about being in line.

Next-best was Jack Stack, which is solid Q at a table-service restaurant, the most expensive Q I’ve ever eaten by a wide margin. Their signature item is a beef short rib, given some absurd marketing name (“Crown Prime Beef Rib” or whatever, it’s a freaking short rib, get over yourselves), and since that is by far my favorite cut of cow I was all in. It’s extremely well done with a lot of surface area for bark and plenty of fat (maybe too much, but that’s the cut) to keep the interior meat moist through a long, slow smoke. Their pork burnt ends were just chopped pork chunks with a little bark, really nothing special. The beans were outstanding though – sweet, smoky, salty, very slightly tangy, maybe a little too soft, although that’s the style (I like beans just a little past al dente). The seasonal vegetable was asparagus, funny because asparagus is a spring vegetable, but they did do a nice job of cooking it correctly so it wasn’t stringy or mushy. Service could not have been better, Q joint or otherwise. The total cost including iced tea and tip was $36, though.

Last Q joint was Gates, which disappointed. I may have ordered the wrong thing – more on that later – but I got no help from the kids behind the counter who seemed to have no interest in taking my order. I went with the short-end ribs, since ribs seemed to dominate the menu, but they were dry, tough, not smoky, and drowned in a vinegar-pepper sauce.

I had Sunday brunch – yes, I rolled out of bed around 9:30, thanks to the time difference – at Bluestem Cafe, which had a small line out the door before it opened at 10:30, usually a good sign. The special breakfast sandwich of the day comprised an over-easy egg on top of pulled pork with very crispy potato wedges and a small salad of mixed greens, a pretty significant amount of food for lunch and enough to hold me through the Futures Game. The pork was moist but the sauce was vinegary, so this could have been braised rather than smoked and I wouldn’t have known the difference. Everything else was clearly fresh and high quality, and they get extra points for the cute bartender.

I tried Eggtc for breakfast on Monday morning, looking for something quick but still local, although the quality just wasn’t there. The eggs on the benedict were poached too long – or poached earlier and held – so they had started to cook through, and since the greatest pleasure of eggs benedict is the sauce made by the warm but runny yolk, this was kind of a failure. The home fries had also clearly come out of a bag.

Finally, I have to thank all of you who weighed in on Q options for my weekend, including Jeff Passan of Yahoo! and Brooks Melchior of Sports by Brooks (via his Twitter feed). Brooks says my next trip to KC should include a visit for Stroud’s for fried chicken and cinnamon rolls and a second chance for Gates where I order the “beef and a half” sandwich rather than ribs.

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→ July 7, 2012
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Saturday five, 7/7/12.

I’ll be part of ESPN2’s broadcast of the MLB Futures Game on Sunday starting at 5 pm Eastern. If you’re going to be at the game, I’ll try to be available between BP and the first pitch up on the concourse behind home plate. My most recent preview piece on the game went up Friday.

* This made the rounds on Twitter this morning – a Times story titled ”The Worst Marriage in Georgetown,” featuring not only a bad marriage, but intrigue, fraud, and murder, all in one exceptionally well-written article.

* Outstanding journalism by NPR’s Kelly McEvers, examining the effects of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, from demonstrating that official reports are understating civilian casualties to examining the question of whether such efforts are merely creating more militants than they’re eliminating.

* Friend of the dish Ken Trem… er, Michael Schur talks to TV Guide about season 5 of the best comedy on television, Parks and Recreation.

* This Smithsonian slideshow on the 20 best food trucks in the U.S. is from February, although I just came across it last week. I haven’t tried the lone Phoenix entry, a crème brulee truck called Torched Goodness.

* Mental Floss delivers again with a piece from last month on twelve famous novelists who answered a teenager’s questions back in 1963 on whether symbolism in their work was intentional.

* Finally, I mentioned this baseball-themed dance routine from So You Think You Can Dance, my wife’s new favorite show, on the podcast earlier this week. The best part is the first 15-20 seconds of the routine, when the dancer in the faux-Texas uniform does this robot-like technique that defies belief, after which it pretty much lost me.

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→ July 5, 2012
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Priceless.

Recent ESPN stuff:
* Notes on Trevor Bauer, Andrew Cashner, and Pat Corbin from Tuesday night
* notes on six top July 2nd signings
* Today’s Klawchat transcript
* Today’s Baseball Today podcast
* And my guest appearance on today’s Fantasy Focus Baseball podcast.

I apologize for how little I’ve been posting here; the draft, followed by a 16-day east coast trip with family, put a serious dent in my blogging time. I’ve still been reading as usual, with the best book I read in June a bit out of my normal interests – Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures, Robert Wittman’s memoir of his time at the FBI, where he founded the bureau’s Art Crime Team.

Wittman wisely spends most of the book talking about major cases he helped solve for the FBI, including recoveries of objects as diverse as Goya’s The Swing, North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, and a flag used by an African-American army unit during the Civil War. He bookends all of those stories with the attempt to recover several paintings, including a Vermeer and a Rembrandt, stolen from the Isabella Gardner Stuart Museum in Boston in 1990, an attempt that (mild spoiler) was unsuccessful, something Wittman blames largely on bureacracy, infighting, and one particularly obstinate and territorial bureau chief within the FBI. He also includes a little of his own backstory, explaining how he ended up the bureau’s art crime expert, how he learned enough about art and artifacts to go undercover as a crooked art dealer/broker, and how his life was nearly ruined by a car accident that resulted in the death of one of his colleagues.

I’d be stretching to call this a collection of spy stories, but there’s a surprising amount of intrigue involved in stories that you know (other than the final one) are going to more or less work out OK, and are usually very successful. Wittman and co-author John Shiffman, a former investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, manage to work in enough of the personalities of the various thieves and shady dealers with whom Wittman had to negotiate – and was usually also trying to set up, with a SWAT team hanging out in the hotel lobby or in the room next door – to keep the vignettes from feeling paint-by-numbers: Wittman gets the tip, negotiates the deal, and then the bad guys get arrested. The details on how he managed to operate for so long in fairly small underworld circles without being compromised until right before he was due to retire also made for interesting reading, enough so that I wish they’d spent more time discussing backstopping or how he’d cover his tracks after a bust.

My only other criticism is that it’s way too short – even as someone who doesn’t know art, I was interested in the histories of the pieces he was trying to recover, and would gladly have read another dozen such stories between that and the unintentional comedy of the crooks who had the stolen goods. (Really, stealing a Vermeer … I get that the piece is valuable, but you can’t exactly put the thing on eBay and get 90 cents on the dollar here. Whatever happened to knocking over a nice jewelry store?) I also thought the back half of the Gardner Stuart story treated the FBI’s internal squabbling a little superficially – it reminded me of the way The Wire often used the FBI to throw an obstacle in the main police characters’ paths – even though in both cases the Bureau probably was a legitimate part of the problem. The idea that the most significant unsolved art theft in U.S. history remains unsolved in large part because one doofus in the Bureau’s Boston office wanted to cut the FBI’s main art crime expert out of the loop should make your blood boil, but at the same time, the allegation could use more substance.

Next up: Anita Loos’ two comic novellas, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes & But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.

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→ July 2, 2012
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Durham eats.

My column on this year’s All-Star Game roster flubs is up now for Insiders.

Our 72 hours in Durham were very filling, even though I ended up skipping lunch one day while at the ballpark. We stayed downtown, where there’s quite a bit within walking distance (and a relative paucity of crappy chains) and a tremendous amount of variety within a ten-minute drive.

The best meal we had on the trip was probably the first one, dinner at Nanataco just south of downtown towards Chapel Hill. It’s a fairly new gourmet taco place that offers a wide variety of meats, both normal and “dirty” – and, like any good foodie, I went right for the dirty menu, including smoked duck and crispy pork belly. The three taco plate allows you to go with up to three different meats, so I chose those two and then the suggestion of the woman (possibly the owner) who took my order, the fried calamari taco, which unlike the other two came with arugula and a very faintly spicy mayo. The corn tortillas are made fresh in the kitchen and threatened to overshadow the meat, where the duck was excellent (but not smoky, just ducky) while the pork belly was just fair (and not crispy). Learn from my rookie mistake, though, and eat the calamari first if you order that taco, since it started to overcook from its own carryover heat while I ate the other two tacos. The roasted plantain milkshake had a great caramel/savory flavor combo but the slightly fibrous texture imparted by the plantains ended up outweighing everything else.

Dames Chicken and Waffles is pretty clear about its mission, and while they make a big deal about the five waffle options and their various flavored butters called “shmears” (I know, it doesn’t really fit), the selling point here is the fried chicken, some of the best I have ever had. The two drumsticks that came with my classic waffle were absolutely perfect: hot, crispy, correctly seasoned, and moist on the inside. A bucket of those and I would have been quite content. The waffle was solid, a little undercooked like the waffle half of almost every chicken-and-waffle combo I have ever tried (exception: Thomas Keller’s Cafe Bouchon), but with a mild cinnamon flavor and plenty of air within it to keep it relatively light. The meals rather incongruously include a side dish; my daughter liked their mac and cheese, while I actually finished the buttered grits after adding some salt. (I’ve never had grits anywhere that had enough salt in them.) My wife ordered a waffle that came with a chicken cutlet – actually two very large pieces of egg-battered chicken breast, maybe two to three times the meat that my dish came with, if you’re all about quantity. The drumsticks are fried more traditionally and had a thinner, crispier crust.

We had breakfast twice at Rue Cler, a cafe attached to a French restaurant right downtown, probably best known for their beignets – six for $5, a dozen for $8, fried to order, with a thick crispy layer masking light spongy goodness on the inside. They also do an impressive egg sandwich, cooked to order, made on thin slices of fresh sourdough bread with eggs barely over medium and cheese and/or bacon. They offer local coffee roasted by Carborro roasters – I don’t drink a lot of drip coffee, but this was obviously freshly roasted – although their tea selection was sadly diminished the two days we visited. Everything was fantastic; the only negative is that seating in the cafe is quite limited. Really, though, it’s about the beignets.

With Rue Cler’s cafe closed on Sundays, we walked over to Scratch, just down the pedestrian-only Orange Street from Rue Cler. Scratch is primarily a pie bakery, offering smaller crostatas as part of an eclectic (and constantly changing) breakfast menu that may also include shirred eggs, fried duck eggs, and homemade buttermilk biscuits with an optional patty of local pork sausage, which is what I ordered. How anyone could order a crappy fast-food ‘sausage biscuit’ when places like Scratch offer the real thing is beyond me; even though the biscuit was a little dense, the flavor was buttery but not too tangy, and the sausage tasted of actual pork with a hint of black pepper, not the overpowering salt/cheap pepper profile of fast-food (or, for that matter, bad diner) breakfast sausage.

We spent Saturday at Durham’s Museum of Life and Science, and their new on-site restaurant, Cafe Sprout, is more than good enough to thrive even without the captive audience. The menu was designed by the chef behind the BBQ joint the Q Shack (a recommendation I didn’t get to try on this trip) and includes a lot of locally sourced items and real cooking in the back, not the reheating you’ll find at most museum or stadium food outlets. They smoke several of their own meats, including bacon and turkey, and the bread on the sandwiches and paninis is high quality; I went with a smoked turkey panini with fresh tomatoes, red onions, and local goat cheese, and other than the bread being sliced a little too thinly it was excellent. Prices are also insanely reasonable, with $8-9 getting you a sandwich and one of about ten options for side dishes, one of which was fried okra, which I can never turn down. (It was average, a little greasy and short of salt, but also piping hot when I got it.) They even offer the local paletas made by Locopops, with six flavors available; the strawberries and cream was a little too understated for me but the French tart flavor – essentially fruits de bois, with blueberries, raspberries, cherries, and red currents – was perfect.

Foster’s Market, towards Chapel Hill, apparently is the brainchild of a locally famous chef, offering a wide array of sandwiches and pastries; the service was excellent, but the food was only fair, probably not worth a return visit for me.

I should also mention Vin Rouge in Durham, which we didn’t visit because my wife declined my offer of a nice upscale French dinner, but would be a must for me any time I’m solo in Durham for dinner. Review is at that link; the executive summary is that you must get the bacon confiture starter.

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→ June 22, 2012
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NYC eats + Flip Burger in Atlanta.

Mario Batali’s Lupa, a “Roman-style osteria,” focuses on traditional Italian dishes (both primi, pasta dishes, and secondi, proteins), done with top-quality ingredients and many elements produced in-house. In Italy, you’d typically have a primo and a secondo at a high-end restaurant, but the portions at Lupa were too large for us to order that way, so we each went with a starter, a primo, and dessert.

Everything I had was strong, but there were minor execution issues with both the appetizer and the dessert that didn’t match the memorable primo. That pasta dish was a special that night, house-made pappardelle with a soffrito-based duck ragout, meaning it had no tomatoes in it. The ragout was hearty and rich but not heavy and was correctly seasoned, while the pappardelle were cooked perfectly al dente, of course. The starter, a salad of arugula, radish, fennel, and radicchio, comprised top-quality vegetables but was slightly overdressed – not enough to have it pooling on the bottom of the dish, but enough that the vinegar overpowered the peppery/spicy produce underneath it, which was slightly disappointing. For dessert, the zuppa inglese – an Italian spin on an English trifle, with the sponge cake soaked in espresso – was marred by a crunchy powder on top that was too hard to chew; I’m assuming the powder was there for texture contrast with the soft trifle (custard and soft sponge cake) but ended up detracting from the dish as a whole. My wife’s fresh mozzarella di bufala appetizer came with a strongly-flavored herb/olive oil mixture, with the fresh oregano taking over the dish a little, a combination I really liked but she didn’t. Her main course was asparagus agnolotti in a light butter sauce, tasting, as it should, strongly of fresh asparagus (in the agnolotti and shaved over the top). Her favorite dish of the night was the hazelnut tartufo, which I didn’t try.

I’m nitpicking here because of where I was – these are minor execution issues, not problems with concepts or ingredients. But I expected a 70, and paid like the restaurant was a 70, but what I got was more 60 or strong 55, recommended, but not a place I’m racing to visit again.

At Citi Field on Saturday night I had my first experience with the cult favorite burger joint Shake Shack; locations in stadiums, like airports, aren’t always the best way to judge a food outlet, so this may be low, but I’d grade the meal as a 60 shake, a 55 burger, and 50 fries. The caramel shake lived up to the name, smooth and strongly flavored (although it’s weird to have any caramel ice cream product without salt), with perfect mouthfeel – no iciness, no graininess. Shake Shack’s burgers are made from a proprietary blend of beef, which their site says is antibiotic-free Angus beef, “vegetarian fed, humanely raised and source verified,” and the burger does taste very strongly of good quality beef – salty, and a little greasy from the grill (albeit in a good way, not like Smashburger’s). As fast food burgers go, it’s better than In-n-Out’s, but In-n-Out destroys Shake Shack in the fries department, as this Shake Shack’s weren’t freshly cut (I don’t know about regular locations) and I could very easily have skipped them. They also have, or at least say they have, a strong commitment to sustainability and limiting their footprint, which doesn’t make the food taste any better but is always nice to hear. If their regular locations are better than the stadium stand – their menus are more extensive, and the food is probably even fresher – I couldn’t see choosing In-n-Out or Five Guys over this.

‘wichcraft, Tom Colicchio’s mini-chain of high-end sandwich shops mostly around New York City, is a small marvel – charging marginally more than national sandwich stores like Panera that peddle massively inferior food. I’m not sure how widely you can expand this concept, but it’s great that it even exists and shows that it is possible to run a business with responsibly-sourced, high-quality ingredients, like pole-caught tuna or organic arugula, made on some of the best bread you will ever find at a sandwich place. My only criticism of that tuna sandwich, made with shaved fennel, diced green olives, and a very light touch of fresh mayonnaise, was that it was hard to keep the sandwich together, but the flavors worked well together. It’s a $9 sandwich, but a far better value than a $6, mayo-drenched tuna salad at a national chain.

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On my last trip to Georgia, I did manage to run over to Flip Burger, Richard Blais’ high-end burger “boutique” that now has two locations in Atlanta and one in Birmingham, and features several different types of burgers as well as milkshakes made with liquid nitrogen, which sounds cool but does have the benefit of producing a smoother finished product. The shake was an even bigger star than the burger, just like at Shake Shack but better on both counts – I couldn’t pull the trigger on the foie gras milkshake, and the Krispy Kreme one just sounded too sweet, so I went for the caramel turtle shake, which was surprisingly balanced, sweet but also salty and even a little savory. For the burger, I went with the rbq, a 5.5-ounce patty of hanger steak, brisket, and short rib, topped with pulled smoked brisket, coleslaw, barbeque sauce, and “smoked” mayo; it was something of an umami explosion, rich and very meaty – if you like the flavor of really high-quality beef, this is your burger. I wouldn’t have deleted a thing. The fries are cooked in beef tallow, which I respect tremendously, but this batch was too greasy for me to enjoy, probably a sign that the fat wasn’t hot enough. Needless to say, I was still full about six hours later. Flip does offer non-beef options, including a “fauxlafel” burger, as well as salads and a full bar.

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→ June 22, 2012
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Le Havre boardgame & app.

The board game Le Havre is one of the best complex strategy games I’ve tried, although the emphasis is on complex, involving a lengthy setup, more pieces than I can remember in any other game (mostly tiles representing resources that need to be sorted into piles), and a lot of long-range planning with great potential for other players to inadvertently trip you up. It’s very balanced, nearly luck-free, and rewards patience and attention. But the time to set it up and the time to play it are both major obstacles unless you’re quite hardcore about your boardgaming – and you don’t have to get up early the next morning.

All of that makes it a perfect game for adaptation into electronic form, and Le Havre, released on Wednesday night by Codito, is excellent, playing easily with plenty of instructions and offering sufficient challenges from the AI opponents to allow for many repeat plays.

In Le Havre, a game by the designer of Agricola and heavily inspired by Caylus, players compete to acquire the most total value in buildings and ships while filling growing requirements to feed workers each turn, a balancing act that is far more difficult than it sounds because of the competition for scarce resources and the limited number of ways to obtain food, a problem exacerbated in games of more than two players. On each turn, a player may choose to take resources from any of the seven available stocks; to take the available supply of money (francs); to build one of three buildings visible on the stacks of building cards; or to use a building that is already built, even if it was built by another player. A player may also buy certain buildings outright in addition to that main action.

Each player has to have enough food or francs on hand at the end of every round to feed his workers, and the rounds are short – seven moves in total, so in each round of a four-player game, one player will get only a single move. Yet to acquire points from resources, players have to first acquire the right mix of resources, sometimes converting them to other kinds of resources, sometimes acquiring energy sources as well, and then build the building or the ship in question. It takes patience, and requires a lot of quick decisions about when to move for the short term (food) and when to move for the long (points).

There are multiple ways to win Le Havre, one of the key features in a game that is this complex (and my main criticism of Puerto Rico). Shipbuilding is the best way to beat the AI players in my experience with the app, but there are several different paths to high point totals through buildings, including several buildings that stack up point bonuses depending on what else you’ve already built. There are also several different paths to ensuring a regular food supply, and ships can provide a fixed quantity of food on each turn once they’re built. When a player can’t feed his workers, he can take out a loan – annoying, but sometimes the right strategic move, and sometimes the path to digging a hole you can’t quite escape.

Game play within the app is very straightforward, and one of the benefits of an app version is the fact that you are protected from rules mistakes, which, given the complexity of Le Havre, is a significant advantage. Each card replicates the graphics from the physical game, including symbols that indicate the card’s price in resources, fee to use if it’s not yours, value in points, and resources or gains from usage. Clicking on the question mark in the upper right once the card is expanded gets the full text explaining the card and all of its costs and benefits. Learning the lay of the board took me two or three games, but all of the critical information is either visible or is a click away. The game also gives players the ability to undo a move while the turn is in progress, and confirms the ‘end turn’ request as well (an option that can be turned off). There’s a solid tutorial, although it is no substitute for playing the game a few times against easy AI opponents.

Those AIs are good enough to continue to challenge me, a relative rookie in Le Havre, because they offer multiple levels of difficulty. I do find them a little predictable, and they often race out to early points leads because they plan more for the short term than the long; the first two settings are like training wheels, but in a 4- or 5-player game against all AI opponents, the hardest AI setting is a good enough challenge to allow for repeated gameplay. The app now offers turn-based online multiplayer through GameCenter, which I haven’t tried yet.

My criticisms of the app are minor – the graphics could be brighter, and the font isn’t as clear as it could be, so some of the text is tough to read without expanding it from the background. The hint feature, suggesting the next move to make, can be a little too focused on the short term, although the point of the hints is to help you learn the game, not help you beat the AI players that are running on the same software. I ran into some very minor graphics glitches that should be addressed in the first update. Also, the music made my wife want to strangle me after about two minutes, so I muted it for my own safety.

If you like Agricola and/or Caylus, I strongly recommend Le Havre. It is as elegant an adaptation as I can imagine for a game with this many elements. I’m also impressed by how Codito’s boardgame apps improve each time out – the leap from Puerto Rico, another complex game with a lot of elements, to Le Havre is outstanding – showing an internal commitment to improving the player experience (and, I presume, increasing revenues). That said, if you aren’t a fan of boardgames with a lot of rules or a relatively steep learning curve, you might find this game frustrating, particularly the physical game given all its pieces. (It took me the better part of an hour to break apart and sort all of the little cardboard resource tiles.) It’s very fair to jump off the boardgame bandwagon before Le Havre or Agricola – but at least the app lets you try it out for $5 first.

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Recent ESPN content, if you made it this far: My quick reaction to this year’s Futures Game rosters; an early look at Mike Trout’s MVP case; this week’s Klawchat; and some fun podcasts from Thursday with Dave Schoenfield and from Wednesday with Chris Sprow.

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Ray Bradbury + the Saturday five.

Ray Bradbury died this week at the age of 91, leaving behind an enormous legacy in literature, one that I fear will be excessively defined as a canon of science fiction, rather than merely of great writing.

My favorite Bradbury novel is the gothic horror story Something Wicked This Way Comes, which I ranked at #28 on my list of the best novels I’ve ever read. It’s a brilliant thriller, one that relies on implied fear rather than graphic violence, but it is also a wonderfully written work that includes one of my favorite lines in all of the novels I’ve ever read:

He laughed, then stopped.
For he though he heard a soft tread
Off in the subterranean vaults.
But it was only his laughter
walking back
through the deep stacks
on panther feet.

That last sentence has stuck with me for over a decade since I first read the novel. Not only is the idea of walking “on panther feet” a phenomenal, evocative image, but there’s poetry in the sentence itself: The rhyme between “back” and “stacks;” the assonance with those two words, “laughter,” and “panther;” the way the sound recedes as you read (or say) the sentence, almost like the words are descending a staircase away from you. It’s just one line in a 200-page book, not even a critical line in the story, but it’s one bit of evidence that Bradbury was more than just a great writer of speculative fiction – he was a great writer of prose.

To the links…

First, my own content:

* American League draft recaps.
* National League draft recaps.
* My day one recap.
* My June 5th chat, which took place during rounds 2 and 3.
* Where each team’s top drafted prospect ranks in their farm system.
* Podcasts: Thursday and Tuesday, plus my Tuesday hit with Colin Cowherd.

And from others…

* Why It’s Ethical to Eat Meat, by Michael Ruhlman. I’m on board with all of this except the quotes from the farmer about the animals being “good with it.” If they had that kind of cognitive ability, we wouldn’t eat them at all, right?

* The New Neuroscience of Choking, by the superb Jonah Lehrer. I have two main problems with applying that study to the question of whether clutch or un-clutch players exist in MLB. The larger one is that the subjects were not highly trained since youth to perform the task they were then asked to perform with the reward promised to them. The smaller one is that my longtime argument about choking isn’t really addressed here – that players who are unable to perform under pressure would likely be weeded out long before reaching the majors, because pressure situations exist at all levels of baseball, and merely playing baseball at all in front of a crowd, knowing that your career hinges to some extent on your performances in front of scouts and your statistics, is in and of itself a pressure situation. That stance, of which I believe Occam would approve, is fully compatible with the study’s findings.

* To Grow A Craft Beer Business, The Secret’s In The Water, from NPR. Have they stepped up their coverage of food/drink subjects, or was I just behind the curve in noticing it?

* Cuisines Mastered as Acquired Tastes. Are non-native chefs who learn “ethnic” cuisines somehow at an advantage because they are more willing – or able – to think outside of the box?

* McSweeney’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do. Very witty but with some useful tips in here … including some I should probably try myself.

* Bonus link: An interesting infographic on how healthful, local food creates jobs. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the report and data behind it, though.

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