→ September 3, 2009
→ By

Brighton Rock.

Today’s chat transcript is up and, I think, rather snarky. I wrote a bit about Happ and Penny last night on the Four-Letter. I’m tentatively scheduled to be on ESPN Radio tonight at 10:25 pm EDT.

Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is his lone entry on the Bloomsbury 100, yet more evidence that as much as critics agree that Greene was a great novelist, they can’t seem to agree on what his best work was. Modern Library had The Heart of the Matter on their top 100; Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo put both that work and The Power and the Glory on theirs; the Guardian put The Quiet American; and I believe I’ve seen similar praise (that I can’t locate) for The End of the Affair. And for all of that, I loved the half-serious/half-satirical Our Man in Havana*.

*Apropos of nothing, this is now the 11th Greene novel I’ve read, including all of his “serious” novels. That puts him sixth on the list of authors when ranked by the number of titles I’ve read – your challenge is to guess who the top five are in the comments. One hint: I’ve never written up a book by #2 or #4 on this site.

Brighton Rock is lumped in with Greene’s “Catholic novels,” but while there’s certainly a lot of discussion among the characters of religion and its relation to right/wrong, I think that’s at most a secondary theme in the book. The novel focuses on a teenage delinquent nicknamed “Pinkie” who has taken over one local gang of street toughs who run, among other things, small-time bookmaking outfit. Pinkie’s gang commit a murder before the book has started, which leads to a string of murders and attempts all aimed at covering up the initial crime. Pinkie himself starts out as just an amoral, power-hungry killer, but as the book progresses and Greene peels back the layers of Pinkie’s character, we see more that he is driven by a raging feeling of inadequacy, set off when others show a lack of respect for his abilities, and driven by a desire to be seen as a capable adult.

Pinkie is pursued by an amateur detective named Ida Arnold, whose passing acquaintance with one of Pinkie’s victims turns into a quest to identify the killer(s) and see them brought to justice, a quest that itself changes shape as the story progresses. While Pinkie has clear, dogmatic views on life informed by inexperience and a superficial form of Catholicism, Arnold is a spiritualist with an independent moral compass of less certain origin. Pinkie hooks up with a girl who could provide testimony against his gang for one of the killings, and saving her becomes part of Ida’s quest, but the girl herself (Rose) is a cipher of a character who is childlike in her thoughts and actions.

Greene’s novels are short and tend to move along quickly, but despite the detective-novel portion of the plot, Brighton Rock was slow and plodding, especially when the camera focused on Pinkie, who is more interesting as a character to study and dissect than as one whose actions we might want to follow.

Next up: I’m a bit behind on reviews, as I finished John Cheever’s Falconer last night.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 2, 2009
→ By

Yankee Stadium eats.

I’ll be on ESPN 710 in LA at 1:12 pm PDT today, and on Mike & Mike tomorrow morning at 9:25 am EDT. I posted a piece on five interesting prospects recalled on Tuesday. I also appeared on AllNight on ESPN Radio last night.

I am not impressed by the food at Yankee Stadium. You build a $1 billion ballpark in the greatest eating city in the country – at taxpayer expense, of course – and you put in Johnny Rockets and Nathan’s and Famiglia Pizza? There’s virtually nothing local. The breadth of cuisines represented in the city where you can find food from any country where they eat food is dismal. And I only found one item there there I’d actually recommend*, the steamed dumplings at the noodle bar in the third base food court. They were superb, not heavy, not over-gingered (I like ginger, but a lot of restaurants go a little berserk in the dumplings), and steamed perfectly. You get four for $6, which wasn’t quite enough for lunch, but two servings would have been overkill.

*Okay, I lied, they have Carvel, which, for those of you outside the northeast, is frozen custard that rivals anything I’ve had in Wisconsin. It’s overpriced, and you can get it just as easily outside the Stadium, but yes, I had some, and you probably should too.

I went to the Lobel’s stand for a $15 steak sandwich, which seems to be the consensus “best food item in Yankee Stadium.” I don’t really have a problem with paying $15 for good beef; beef is expensive, and it should be, because cheap beef is nasty to eat, bad for the environment, and really bad for the cows*. But this sandwich was boring as hell – the steak had absolutely no flavor of its own, it was drowned in some undefined sauce, and, worst of all, it was tough. I’m no aficionado of steak, but one thing I know is that good steak should not be tough. Either it wasn’t cooked right, or it wasn’t carved right, not that I could tell under the tsunami of brown stuff on top.

* Okay, beef production in general is bad for cows. Just go with it.

That’s the good and the bad; here’s the ugly. Zeppole are the Italian version of fried dough – thick blobs of yeast-raised dough deep-fried until crispy on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside, and then doused with powdered sugar. If you grew up in New York and ever went to an Italian feast, you probably love them as I do. What they serve at Yankee Stadium and call zeppole should get the concessions people arrested. They’re tiny, tasteless, and, worst of all, fried before the game. It’s a ballpark. You have deep fryers at full blast all around the place. You can’t fry a few zeppole to order? If they’re not going to do it right, they should just take it off the menu entirely.

I did have one meal in Manhattan on this trip, breakfast at Good Enough to Eat at 83rd and Amsterdam, recommended by a few readers, including a couple of NYC sportswriters. I asked the girl behind the bar what I should get, and she suggested the four-grain blueberry pancakes, which sounded good since 1) I like pancakes 2) I like blueberries 3) “four grain” makes it sound all healthy-like. They were fine, nothing special, and including a few stray blackberries, which I’m assuming was an accident rather than a gift from a Keith Law fanboy in the kitchen. The pancakes themselves had a faint cardboard-y taste of whole wheat – common, but avoidable – and they were a little overdone and dry, and probably shouldn’t have left the kitchen like that, although it takes a lot more to get me to send a dish back and waste the food.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ September 1, 2009
→ By

The Secret Life of Bees and Losers Live Longer.

Last night’s hit on the Brian Kenny Show is up. Will be on AllNight tonight (taped), First Take on ESPN2 tomorrow at 11 am EDT, and ESPN 710 in Los Angeles tomorrow at 1:12 pm PDT.

UPDATE: Analysis of last night’s trades is up now.

I had avoided Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees because it looked like chick-lit – not crappy chick-lit like Luann Rice or Nicholas Sparks, just chick-lit with higher ambitions. When I saw the pull quote from the Baltimore Sun‘s review that referred to Kidd as “a direct literary descendant of Carson McCullers,” I decided to give the book a shot, since I loved McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. The Sun reviewer was way, way off base; where McCullers’ work is suffused with sorrow yet written in beautiful, thoughtful prose, Bees is sentimental and predictable with unremarkable writing.

The story is narrated by Lily, a preteen girl who vaguely remembers a childhood accident when she was four years old where she picked up a gun and shot her mother while her parents were fighting. She’s haunted by guilt and her lack of memories of her mother, and lives with an unloving and occasionally abusive father who appears to want no part of her, handing off the task of rearing her to one of the black peach-pickers on his farm, Rosaleen. When the Civil Rights Act is passed and Rosaleen goes into town to vote, she ends up in an argument with three local redneck racists, which leaves her beaten up and arrested; Lily decides to spring her and they both run away to a small town in South Carolina where Lily thinks her mother once visited or lived. Once there, they run into three sisters* straight out of The Well of Stock Characters, including the most cliched of all, the wise older black woman who dispenses sound advice on matters life and spirit. As you might imagine, someone dies, Lily’s father shows up, there’s a lot of crying, and the end is heart-warming but just a touch ridiculous.

* The wise woman is played by Queen Latifah in the film version, where all three sisters are much younger than their counterparts in the book. What I find interesting is that another sister is played by Sophie Okenodo, who probably seldom finds herself as only the second-most beautiful woman in a movie, which had to be the case here with the third sister played by Alicia Keys. That’s some good casting work.

I couldn’t really get past the vaguely patronizing portrayals of black women in the book, and of course, just about every male character is one-dimensional and the dimension is unflattering. The lone exception is the lone African-American male to get any significant page time, a teenaged boy named Zach who is one-dimensional in how good he is. The dialogue is clumsy and heavy, laden with Big Meaning, Kidd hit only a few notes right for me – I enjoyed her portrayal of the feminist twist on Catholicism that the sisters and their friends practice, and some of the beekeeping information was interesting although the metaphors were a bit obvious – but on the whole it wasn’t worth my time.

—

Also disappointing was Russ Atwood’s Losers Live Longer, the most recent release from Hard Case Crime, a boutique publisher of hard-boiled detective fiction, both new works and out-of-print novels that deserve reissue. Atwood put together a strong, tight story with just the right number of characters and twists, but his writing and dialogue were sloppy and occasionally cringeworthy (such as the 40-something white detective who says, “Homey don’t play that” about fifteen years after the phrase was last popular or relevant). He also falls into the trap that Raymond Chandler warned against in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” – don’t make characters do unrealistic things just to push your plot forward. The detective character makes a couple of extremely dumb and obvious mistakes (such as not noticing that a potential client is named “Jane Dough”) that require us to forget that before, he was aware of what was going on around him.

Next up: Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ August 29, 2009
→ By

The Confessions of Nat Turner.

My Kazmir trade analysis was posted this morning.

William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967 and is on the TIME 100, but its main claim to fame is the controversy that surrounded its publication, as African-American writers and scholars largely banded together to criticize the book’s fictionalized portrait of its title character. Turner led the only major slave rebellion in the U.S., killing 55 white men, women, and children before the rebellion fizzled out and he was captured, but very little is known of his life other than what we have in the 20-page document known as “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” the accuracy of which is in question because it represents Turner’s words as written by one of the white attorneys working on his case. The novel did little for me – the prose was bombastic and the story is so full of digressions, tangents, and internal monologues that Turner’s reasons for rebelling are beaten into the ground – but the controversy is worth a deeper look.

The edition I read was the 25th-anniversary reprint that includes a new afterword from Styron, who quotes his (African-American) friend and fellow author James Baldwin to argue that, had he himself been black, he would not have caught the same criticism. That is, his biggest crime was being a white author writing about an African-American icon, intruding into territory in which he did not belong. I’m sure there was some element of that in the backlash against Styron’s book (which included an influential book of essays called Ten Black Writers Respond), but Styron glosses over some of the least flattering elements of his portrayal.

Styron ties Turner’s desire for rebellion to three causes. One is religious fanaticism, which we know was a factor from the actual confessions; Turner was a preacher who believed his violent rebellion was a divine mission. Another was certain aspects of his life as a slave for both cruel and kind masters, which was fictionalized but is almost certainly a valid explanation. But the third is a deep sexual repression that manifests itself in disturbing ways from a sexual encounter with a teenaged boy to a fantasy of raping the woman who is perhaps the only white person in the book who treats Turner as something approximating a full human being. The portrayal, which as far as I can tell has no basis in reality, demeans Turner and diminishes his myth by removing any righteousness from his cause. Demonizing Turner would have been easy enough through more attention to the violence of his makeshift army’s rebellion, where revenge was taken on all whites, including young children. Adding this bizarre sexual-repression twist seems to tie into the view of white slaveowners, that blacks were more akin to animals than to whites.

The book is fiction, not a biography, and Styron emphasizes that point in his afterword in response to critics of the book’s inaccuracy. I have no particular issue with an author creating a backstory for an actual historical figure about whom so little is known. What bothered me was the creation of a backstory that delegitimizes the simple idea (or myth) that Turner rebelled against the system that enslaved him and over a million other blacks at the time of the rebellion. We can condemn the violence of the insurrection while still understanding and sympathizing with its causes.

Next up: I’m a little behind, having just finished Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees this morning. Let’s just say for now that I don’t agree with the Baltimore Sun critic who referred to Kidd as “a direct literary descendant of Carson McCullers.”

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , ,
→ August 25, 2009
→ By

The Hunter and Heavy Weather.

Cape Cod League top 30 prospects: 30-16 and 15-1. I’ll be on ESPN 1000 Chicago’s 9-11 pm program, but we’re taping it beforehand so I don’t know exactly when I’ll be on.

—

Richard Stark’s The Hunter is a different sort of hard-boiled novel from the ones I usually read. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler wrote about good guy private eyes who were tough and comfortable with moral ambiguity but rarely strayed into darker territory. The Hunter revolves around a thief named Parker who is hellbent on revenge against the girl and guy who betrayed him during a big score, shooting him and leaving him for dead.

The story starts with Parker catching up with the woman, then jumps back to tell us about the score gone wrong, then shifts focus to Parker’s other prey, the onetime partner who masterminded the betrayal but realizes that Parker isn’t dead. Where Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe would knock a guy cold, Parker kills him – he kills for revenge, he kills for leverage, he kills to send messages. He shows remorse for one death he didn’t plan, but otherwise reasons away every kill (when he reasons them at all) as justified. Stark’s style is dry and efficient, short sentences, minimal details. It moves, and I found myself pulling for Parker despite the fact that he’s a nasty piece of work.

The Hunter was a ripping read until the last five pages, when Stark (actually a pseudonym for the prolific Donald Westlake) has Parker, normally a meticulous planner, make an uncharacteristically sloppy mistake, perhaps just for the purpose of sending him on one last major score in the final few paragraphs of the book. It seemed out of character and forced for a story that was an effortless work up until that point. It’s absolutely worth the read, but I found that ending to be a letdown after 98% of the book was so strong.

—

I don’t devote much time to P.G. Wodehouse books for two reasons. One, I’ve flogged his stuff relentlessly enough that if you were ever going to try him, you probably already have. Two, his books more or less share the same plot but with different gags and twists to get to the same ending. Heavy Weather, part of the Blandings Castle series and a direct sequel to Summer Lightning, gets a mention here for the wrong reason: It was dull and not that funny. It has to be the first Wodehouse novel I didn’t enjoy, and I kept waiting for the comedy to kick in; it’s just a continuation of the plot of Summer Lightning, picking up just a day or two after the previous novel ends, and it lacked both Wodehouse’s typical silly situations and wisecracks and his trick of weaving multiple seemingly unconnected plots into one pat solution.

—

I’m writing this on a plane and they’re showing the chick-flick “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” I looked up to see Matthew McConaghey destroy a wedding cake because he pushed the cork out of a champagne bottle instead of holding it and twisting the bottle. Really? Does anyone actually open a bottle of champagne by letting the cork go flying? I will say this, though: Whoever the casting director was, he clearly had a good time with this film. That’s a lot of good-looking women in one movie. Otherwise it looks like the kind of flick my wife would watch when I’m traveling.

—

Next up: William Styron’s controversial novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , ,
→ August 24, 2009
→ By

Denver eats.

There’s a short blog entry on Troy Tulowitzki’s surge from Saturday night on my ESPN blog, with another just filed this morning.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at 2 and 2:30 pm EDT and possibly on 710 AM in Los Angeles around 12:40 pm PDT.

Denver rocks. What a great downtown – I probably walked six or seven miles in the three days, hopped the free shuttle on 16th a few times, and had a few good meals. I love downtown ballparks where there’s an actual downtown around the park, and Coors Field has a lot going on in the area. (The presence of many clubs nearby meant quite a bit of postgame eye candy walking the other way up Blake Street, a nice bonus.)

I got four different breakfast suggestions from readers but only one was really walkable from the hotel (I didn’t rent a car) – Snooze, on Larimer, very close to the stadium. Three of you recommended it and I can see why, as their food is very fresh and they make some excellent, funky pancakes.

I went twice, and the pancakes are clearly the main attraction. The first day, I got the ginger-peach pancakes, which had diced local peaches and crystallized ginger in the batter and a topping of streusel (just a little) and ginger butter. The second day, I went with eggs, chorizo sausage, hashbrowns, plus one whole wheat-blueberry pancake with sunflower seeds, maple syrup, and blueberry butter. Both types of pancakes had a great, light texture, with lots of big air pockets and a complex flavor. The whole wheat ones were either from a mild sourdough batter or made with buttermilk, probably the latter. The peaches, unfortunately, weren’t fully ripe and ended up bitter after cooking, but I imagine on a better day they’re pretty outstanding. They also do a pancake of the day; Sunday’s had white chocolate chips in the batter, which sounded too much like dessert to me.

My first meal at Snooze came with a bit of entertainment. I was seated in one of the five chairs at the counter, and the seat to my right opened up, at which point a woman asked me if anyone was sitting there and I told her no. She proceeded to sit there to make a call on her cell phone but didn’t actually order anything, so after five minutes or so, the host told her she couldn’t sit there. A little while later, she sat down to eat in the chair to my left, and before she’d finished the process of sitting she asked me which pancakes I had gotten. It was downhill from there:

Me: The ginger-peach pancakes.

Her: What kind of peaches are they?

Me: (reaching over, opening her menu, and pointing to the entry for the ginger-peach pancakes.) It’s all right there.

Her: Yeah, but I want to know what kind of peaches they are.

Me: I don’t know. Why don’t you check the menu?

Her: But are they canned peaches?

Me: I don’t know.

Her: I just want to know if they’re canned peaches.

Me: Ma’am, I did not actually make the pancakes. I’m only eating them. Perhaps you should ask someone who works here?

Her: How could you be in such a bad mood? It’s too early to be in a bad mood.

Oh, it gets better. She had already ordered breakfast to go, but then, just as it was coming out, she decided to sit at the counter and made them take the pancakes she ordered out of the portable container and put them on a plate, which seemed petty and wasteful. Then she ordered a sampler of two or three other kinds of pancakes – like I said, these are huge – and tried the one she originally ordered, the whole-wheat blueberry pancakes, which come with maple syrup already on them. And that set her off again.

Her: Why does it come with the syrup already on the pancakes?

Server: That’s how we serve that pancake here, ma’am.

Her: But the pancakes get soaked. The syrup makes it too sweet. You know that maple syrup is mostly sugar!

Server: Ma’am, it says on the menu that it comes with maple syrup on it. [To be fair, the menu wasn’t explicit about this.]

Her: You should never serve it on the pancakes already. You should serve it on the side.

Server: Well, that’s how we do it … here.

When I went back on Sunday and sat at the counter, the server (a different one), asked if I’d been there before, and I said yes, the previous morning, and I was sitting next to a crazy woman. At which point he said, “Oh, you must have been sitting in that same chair, and she was there (pointing to her seat).” Apparently, she’s a regular, and she’s always batty.

That day-two server actually tried to coax me out of my EMP + a pancake order, saying, “You can get three eggs anywhere. I think what you really need is a benedict,” and he’s right in that they do have a half-dozen options of eggs and hollandaise. I’m not a big hollandaise guy anyway – I respect any chef willing to make it because it’s time-consuming and finicky, but I find it extremely heavy – and Snooze’s hollandaises all contained either cream cheese (which I don’t care for) or smoked cheddar (which I despise), so while a few of those options looked great (like the one with smoked pork), I didn’t see the point of getting a benedict-hold-the-hollandaise. He was right, though – the eggs etc. were on the boring side and the hashbrowns were undercooked, with nowhere near enough crispy brown parts.

When I went to Long Beach earlier this month, I had sushi at Koi over in Seal Beach and sat at the sushi bar. A guy sat down next to me and clearly had been there a few times, so I asked if he was a regular, and he said he had been for years but had since moved to Denver. So we chatted for a while, and I told him I was there on business, I was a sportswriter, loved food, etc., and he said, “Wait, what’s your name?” Turns out he’s not a reader, but a friend of his is, so I pointed Gabe (the guy I was sitting next to) here and asked him to shoot me a note with some Denver food rec’s. He suggested Sushi Sasa, which turned out to be one of the best sushi places I have ever been to. It was a solid 20-minute walk from the hotel, but I got a spectacular view of the river as I crossed over the bridge to get to Platte St, and the food was well worth it.

Sushi Sasa is kind of trendy-looking inside and they do plenty of gussied-up rolls and overwrought appetizers, but if you go there for nigiri or sashimi, the fish is amazingly fresh, easily rivaling that of good West Coast or NYC joints. Sasa’s daily specials menu mentioned that two of the fish had been flown in from some specific market in Japan that day, and they make their own unagi (barbecued fresh-water eel), which I’m told (by some of you, I believe) is unusual, as most places buy it already cooked and just reheat it for service. The maguro tuna was the best I’ve ever tasted and the salmon was close. The seaweed salad was a bit of a rip at $8 and came with some very fresh but unnecessary vegetables on top (e.g., one asparagus spear, cut into 2″ lengths), but it was interesting to see three different kinds of seaweed instead of the standard one, including a burgundy variety I’ve never had before that was slightly bitter and didn’t have the tooth of the more typical, green-and-clear kind. (Sorry, I’m not up on my seaweed terminology.) Even the green tea was good.

(By the way, I’m a piker in the kitchen compared to Gabe, who chronicles some of his cooking exploits on his blog, including making his own duck prosciutto.)

My one other stop was a minor indulgence, as I am a bit of a sucker for local fast-food burger joints and saw one called Good Times across the street from my hotel. It’s not Five Guys or In-n-Out, with a bigger menu and fries that aren’t hand-cut, but for a fast-food option it was two or three steps above the McDonald’s/BK class of “only if I’m desperate and even then I’ll think twice” establishments. The toppings at Good Times were also very fresh – bright green lettuce that still crunched, thick slices of juicy and faintly sweet tomatoes – and the beef (100% all natural Coleman … do I even want to know what 80% natural beef has as its other 20%?) was better than the bland, generic fast-food burgers forced down our throa… Sorry again, CSPI just hacked my blog, but I’m back. It’s a solid fast-food burger. The fries are coated, which I don’t really like, but they’re seasoned and not over-salted; skip the “wild sauce,” which is just barbecue sauce mixed with mayonnaise and is the color of terra cotta. Good Times also serves frozen custard, which I tried the night before, although they only do two flavors a day, vanilla and a special flavor, which was strawberry on Saturday. The vanilla had a good custard texture, and the mild flavor was nothing a little hot fudge couldn’t fix.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ August 22, 2009
→ By

On copyrights.

A week or so ago I pointed out to reader BSK that his practice of copying CDs to his hard drive and then trading thephysical disks on swaptree was both illegal and unethical. He didn’t accept my argument, so I contacted the Copyright Alliance to get a professional opinion.

The response I received was unequivocal: This practice violates federal copyright law. Excerpts of the reply, interspersed with my comments:

The RIAA explicitly states on their website that this is illegal. (Scroll down to the bottom under “copying CDs”).

The most relevant part on that RIAA link, about copying CDs you own for your personal use: It’s not a personal use – in fact, it’s illegal – to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.

You may, of course, trade a CD or book or DVD that you own (the “First Sale Doctrine”) as long as you do not make or keep a copy.

But, would someone agree that it is okay to buy a
book, scan it into your computer, and then sell the hard copy? Probably
not (I hope not). So, why is music different? It’s not – the law is the
same for all creative forms. Consumers have asked to be able to buy a CD
or a song from itunes and listen to it in their car, on their computer,
or ipod. So, with music it is generally accepted (though not technically
legal) that one can use music on multiple devices for personal use.

As long as you’re keeping all the copies, you seem to be in the clear.

It is also not legal to download a digital copy of a work and then print
it out or put it on CD and sell that. So, why would the opposite be
true?

Well, it wouldn’t, and I think this is just common sense.

I’ve run into a similar issue with people copying articles found online and pasting them into emails. Again, this is illegal, and no, it is not “fair use” – it is patently UNfair use. (It fails fair use on two grounds – the sender reproduced the entire work, and by reproducing and sending the entire work the sender impacted the market for the work because the recipient no longer has to click on the original site or pay for access to the article.) Pasting a link to the original article is legal. Pasting the entire article is copyright infringement, and while your potatoes are probably too small for the copyright owner to sue you, that doesn’t make it any less illegal. One longtime friend sent me an email like this, and copied so much text that he included the copyright notice at the bottom of the article … but sent it anyway. And he was offended when I objected to the practice.

In addition to being illegal, it’s completely unethical. If you make a copy of a CD, then sell or barter the CD (or even give it away), then two people have use of the copyrighted material while the copyright owner has only been compensated once. Isn’t it obvious that this is wrong?

Final point: BSK argued that this was about “freedom.” We do, in fact, have exceptional freedom in our ability to create, distribute, and purchase copyrighted works in this country today. If you want access to formerly banned books like Huckleberry Finn or The Grapes of Wrath, to hardcore pornography, to Pungent Stench’s Been Caught Buttering (if you’ve seen the album cover, you know what I’m talking about), you’ve got it. That freedom does not mean the freedom to make unlimited copies of these works and sell them or barter them or give them to your friends. We have laws designed to protect the rights of those who create intellectual property so they’ll be financially able to continue to do so. If you don’t like the laws – and I wouldn’t argue that they’re perfect, particularly the ever-increasing time of protection for copyrighted works – try to change them. But don’t steal from the authors and musicians whose works you enjoy.

Filed Under: Media Tagged With: , ,
→ August 18, 2009
→ By

San Juan card game.

Chat 3 pm EDT on the four-letter. ESPN 710 Seattle at 2 pm PDT. AllNight later on tonight. Waiting for confirmation but I should be on ESPN 1250 Pittsburgh tomorrow at around 11 am EDT.

Back when I did my original post on board games, several readers recommended Puerto Rico, a 3-5 player game that can be played with two players but that is apparently better with more people involved. When I pointed out that my wife and I play a lot of these games ourselves, at least one of you recommended the 2-4 player spinoff, a card game called San Juan.

The game takes a while to explain but is very simple to play. In each round, there are phases (one per player) that allow players to build new buildings, produce goods, sell goods they’ve produced, or draw extra cards from the deck. The cards serve several functions: a player can use them to pay for buildings, a player can build the building on the card’s face if he has enough cards, and a player can stash them under a Chapel to sock away some bonus points for the end of the game. The game ends when one player has built twelve buildings in his settlement, after which the player with the most points is the winner. Having the most buildings doesn’t mean you’ll have the most points, as different buildings have different point values, and some buildings are worth bonus points based on what else each player has in his settlement.

Once you’ve started the game, it’s easy to follow and moves pretty quickly; as you add to your settlement, the rate at which you can produce, build, and sell improves, since each building has some bonus feature like reducing the cost of certain buildings or allowing you to produce an extra good during the production phase. All of the other two-player games we regularly play take far longer, so it’s great to have a fun alternative when it’s late and we want to play something fast.

The game also has a good mix of strategy and luck. There are clearly better and worse ways to build your settlement, and you have to make major decisions like whether to build another production building or whether to start building the violet-card buildings, which have the bonus features I mentioned above and are generally worth more points. You have to decide which cards in your hand to use as currency and which to keep so you can ultimately play and build them. The prices of goods change slightly from turn to turn, leading to sell-or-wait decisions. But you’re also at the mercy of the cards you draw, making the game different each time but also perhaps preventing you from always using the same strategy.

And since it’s just a big deck of cards and a few cardboard pieces to mark phases and prices, it’s extremely portable, which never hurts.

I still have to write about Carcassonne, after which it’ll be time to revise the board game rankings.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , ,
→ August 18, 2009
→ By

Signing deadline radio/TV.

I’ll be on the Brian Kenny Show tonight at 9:24 pm, then on ESPNEWS via phone at 11:30 pm and 12:15 am, all times Eastern.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ August 17, 2009
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No Country for Old Men.

Tentatively scheduled to be on Mike & Mike at 8:42 am EDT on Monday. Latest draft blog entry is posted, with updates on the Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Rangers.

I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men before seeing the film and knocked it off in just three days. The book is riveting, a quick-moving hard-boiled mystery along the Texas-Mexico border that starts when Llewelyn Moss comes upon the carnage at the scene of a failed drug shipment, decides to take the money he finds, and ends up hunted by the law and by an amoral hit man named Anton Chigurh. The story is interspersed with first-person passages from Sheriff Bell, who tries to make some sense of the violence and disregard for life he saw while pursuing Chigurh. It is quick and dense with action; McCarthy makes scenes like Chigurh buying medical supplies and treating himself for bullet wounds interesting and fast.

I still haven’t seen the film version, but if the movie was true to the book for the character of Chigurh, I’m surprised to see that any actor could win an Oscar for that role. Chigurh is central, and he is undeniably scary, but he is also completely one-dimensional and boring. He’s an automaton, a remorseless, reasonless killer with no personality and little action in the book beyond (sometimes inventive) murders. The reader sees Chigurh from the omniscient narrator’s perspective, but the narrator’s view is limited to Chigurh’s actions during the events of the novel, and we are left with the same confusion and lack of information as Sheriff Bell, who refers to Chigurh as a “ghost” and whose window into Chigurh is limited to the events laid out in the novel. We know Chigurh by the trail of dead, but we know nothing else of him. (One possible interpretation of Chigurh is that he is Fate or, more likely, Death, which would explain the lack of emotion and inability to change his course of action; I imagine you could write a whole thesis on that topic.) Sheriff Bell is the most interesting and complex character, but he’s not involved in the action – he’s the thoughtful, not-dead narrator who can’t figure out the hows and whys of what he witnessed – almost as if he’s God looking down on a world gone mad.

I also found McCarthy’s prose, a little unclear in the best of circumstances, to be at its most confusing in No Country, not just due to his standard aversion to punctuation but also due to the constant scene-shifting. There are two unnamed characters in offices whose roles were never clear to me, and, when one of them is killed, I wasn’t even sure which one it was.

The problems with thin characters only bothered me upon reflection – the book was a fantastic read because of the pacing and McCarthy’s tremendous and sometimes beautiful prose, and there’s plenty of material to consider after the fact that makes up for the weak characterizations. It’s not as good as Blood Meridian or The Road but still a solid read.

Next up: Back to Blandings Castle for some Heavy Weather.

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