→ April 13, 2009
→ By

The Thirty-Nine Steps.

I’m in the midst of the wakes/funeral after a death in my wife’s family, so my moderation of comments and responses to them may be sporadic and arbitrary for the next few days.

The blog post on Borchering and Washington is up on the draft blog. I think video of Washington will be up tomorrow.

John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps is on the Guardian 100 and served as the inspiration for the excellent early Hitchcock film of the same name, although Hitchcock, as was his wont, rewrote a good chunk of the plot, including the meaning of the title phrase, so if you’ve seen the film much of the book will still be new to you. It’s a straight-up spy story with an emphasis on action: The protagonist finds himself privy to an international plot and by the start of the second chapter is on the lam from both the authorities and the nefarious plotters seeking to destabilize Europe and spark a world war.

The book runs a brief 106 pages and the narrator is in almost constant motion; when he’s not on the move, he’s hiding or planning his next move or both. The double pursuit ups the stakes and almost guarantees that he’ll be in danger, but also increases the need for him to engage in some serious social engineering to find food and shelter as he dances around Scotland trying to evade his pursuers.

I’m not sure how it landed on a list of the greatest novels of all time – it’s good, but it’s just a spy/adventure novel and doesn’t even have the distinction of being the first work in that genre (Erskine Childers’ lone novel, The Riddle of the Sands, holds that honor). It’s a good airplane read or just the solution for a dreary day, as an unnamed man quoted in the book’s introduction put it: “It was one of those days when the only thing to do was read John Buchan.”

Next up: Nonfiction – William Easterley’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 11, 2009
→ By

Lonesome Dove.

Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is a broad epic of the American West covering the hardships – many self-inflicted – of settlers and would-be settlers moving into the western plains. The focus is on a pair of former Texas Rangers – the original kind – leading a cattle drive from southern Texas all the way to the unsettled territory of Montana, with each of a half-dozen major characters getting his or her own storyline.

McMurtry’s great skill is in that ability to splinter the story without destroying the narrative greed of the novel. As a new major character is introduced, McMurtry carves out a new plot line, although they all eventually intersect and not always in credible ways. Each of the major characters is deep and complex and given adequate “page time” to give the reader the full sense of the man or woman – particularly Gus McCrae, who would probably make my list of the top 20 protagonists in any novels I’ve read, with a shot at the top 10 – and even the secondary characters were three-dimensional with perhaps the lone exception of the biggest villain, the murdering Native American named Blue Duck.

Lonesome Dove is mammoth – I think it’s the third-longest novel I’ve ever read* – but the variety of storylines and significant quantity of dialogue kept it moving. Where the novel was light, for me, was in what I usually call literary value. When reading most books I can pick up on themes or metaphors without really trying; my wife, an English major in college, always tells me that if you have to work that hard to find them, they’re probably not there at all. Without that, Lonesome Dove felt more like great popular fiction than great literature, which isn’t a bad thing, but it makes it hard for me to rank the book as highly as some of my favorite novels, which had the same evocative prose and intriguing characters as Dove but add more weight from the themes they tackle.

*My best guess at the longest novels I’ve read, going by pages since word counts aren’t available for some of the titles:

1. Don Quixote – originally published as two books, now sold as one; over 1000 pages
2. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – over 1000 pages
3. Lonesome Dove – roughly 940 pages
4. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling – 860 pages of tiny print
5. The Pickwick Papers – 840 pages of not-much-larger print
6. Vanity Fair – over 800 pages
7. The Sot-Weed Factor – around 750 pages
8. Anna Karenina – over 700 pages
9. The Woman in White – around 650 pages
10. The Three Musketeers – around 650 pages

Oddly enough, all of those books that I had read before assembling the Klaw 100 are on the list, and all ten will probably be on the next iteration.

Part of why McCrae was my favorite character was his slight obsession with food, not the least his ten-year-old sourdough biscuit starter. One wonders how cowboys lived so long on diets that would make the food Nazis at CSPI have aneurysms, but reading about them certainly put me in the mood for southern breakfasts.

Since I have nothing else intelligent to say on this novel, I’ll just move along and mention that I’m following up one of the longest novels I’ve read with one of the shortest, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ April 11, 2009
→ By

I weep for our language, part 8.

From what is otherwise a very interesting article on NCAA recruiting rules as they are being applied to fan pages on Facebook:

But dozens of Facebook groups are still up in plain site for current recruits, including Wall, and other top undecided basketball players such as Xavier Henry and Lance Stephenson.

I suppose the redesigned Facebook might qualify as a plain site, but I doubt that was the writer’s intent.

Incidentally, add me to the list of people who finds the NCAA’s intrusive attitude on this matter troublesome. It’s not even remotely clear what the harm might be, and as long as the page or group in question is not formally affiliated in any way with the university or its athletics program, I fail to see how the NCAA has the right to demand its termination, and the last time they got a little too big for their britches, an Ohio court put the smack down.

Filed Under: Grammar Tagged With: , ,
→ April 10, 2009
→ By

Sarasota eats (and links).

Links first: Today’s chat transcript. My podcast with the drunks at Drunk Jays Fans. Some intriguing-looking jalapeno cornbread with a recipe, although it includes sugar, which makes it corn cake, doesn’t it? Jerry Crasnick wrote a good piece on Adenhart that gets a little more at Adenhart as a person than as a prospect. (Seriously, stop talking about his baseball future. It’s trivial.)

Speaking of Adenhart and the chat, did anyone get what I was saying here?

J.B. (Dunmore, PA): As a father, today’s news really upset me. Three lives lost and another in the driver that is pretty much over. This may sound harsh but I really hope that young man spends a good chunk of his life behind bars.

Keith Law: They should release the other driver and give him a pass to the Angels’ clubhouse for Friday’s game. And then lock the doors.

I was suggesting that the killer (let’s not mince words – that’s what he is) would be locked in the clubhouse with Adenhart’s teammates. It doesn’t read that way to me now.

On to more mundane matters: I was in Sarasota for the last three days and ate a lot of needlessly heavy food. My go-to place from years past, an Amish restaurant called Yoder’s, wasn’t quite up to my memories of it. They’re best known for their pies, and while they do have a great variety, I had three flavors in three days and didn’t love any of them. The strawberry-rhubarb pie was packed but with about 90% rhubarb; if I wanted rhubarb pie, I would have ordered it, since that’s another option. The peach pie and blackberry pie were both filled with gooey cornstarchy liquid and not enough fruit. Their pie crusts are very good, though – tender, not really flaky, very soft and buttery.

The food is mostly comfort food. Their fried chicken is above-average, pressure-fried (the Colonel’s method!) to produce a crisp crust and fully-cooked meat in a shorter time than traditional skillet-frying, which takes about 45 minutes. Unfortunately, the meat I got was lukewarm and I had to send the thigh back. (The drumstick wasn’t much warmer, but you can’t put a fried drumstick in front of me and get it back unless you use the jaws of life.) Their roast turkey is solid-average – it peels apart like it’s been smoked but doesn’t have the slightly rubbery texture that I always associate with smoked turkey – while their smoked pulled pork was moist but kind of flavorless. The stuffing was mushy, and the green beans were grayish-green from overcooking. I did have one meal at another Amish restaurant down the street, called Mom’s, with pretty similar results.

Tropical Thai in northern Sarasota was just bad. The chicken in the chicken with green curry was barely cooked and way too soft – almost like a great steak, except that that texture is great in steak and lousy in poultry – and the sauce had clearly been thickened with some kind of starch, while the vegetables in it were also undercooked.

And one more dud before I get to the two recommendations: Dutch Valley is a diner that claims to be known for its Belgian waffles (spelled “Belgium waffles” on the sign outside, which I now know was a warning). Putting pancake batter on a Belgian waffle iron does not produce a Belgian waffle – it produces a thick, dense, doughy cake-like waffle that, if cooled to room temperature, might make a suitable mattress for a hamster.

Word of Mouth was a better bet for breakfast, at least a solid 50, although I found the food to be a little hit or miss. On the plus side, their scone of the day today was pineapple-coconut (right out of the oven) and it was incredible – slightly dry, like a good scone should be; sweet but not overly so; with bits of actual coconut inside and a crumbly texture. Their home fries are nicely browned and cooked with onions, although today’s onions were more black than brown. The Tex-Mex omelet with chorizo had absolutely no salt in the egg portion, and when I ordered eggs over medium the other day I got something about five seconds past over easy. They serve Harney & Sons teas and the service is very good, but they play awful music (John Mayer on Tuesday, Hootie & the Blowfish today). There are two locations, and I went to the on Cattlemen near Bee Ridge. It’s a solid 50.

Mi Pueblo is a local mini-chain of Mexican places serving mostly the usual fare of burritos, enchiladas, and tacos. Their tacos al carbon with steak were outstanding. The steak was soft – how often have you had steak in a taco or fajita and needed a hacksaw to chew it? Mi Pueblo’s was at the other end of the spectrum. The rice was fresh and gently seasoned, not sticky with tomato paste or sauce. The one I went to, at the corner of McIntosh and Bee Ridge, is tiny and there was a wait when I arrived on a Wednesday night after 7, so the locals seem to have caught on. Based on one dish I’d hazard a grade of 55.

Filed Under: Chat, Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ April 9, 2009
→ By

Radio & chat.

You can find clips of my appearances on AllNight and the Doug Gottlieb Show on espnradio.com; the Gottlieb link may only be for Insiders, and my hit is about a half-hour into the clip.

I’ll also be on our Seattle affiliate around 12:25 pm PDT on Friday and on 790 the Ticket in Miami at 11 am on Friday.

Klawchat is still tentatively scheduled for 4 pm EDT on Thursday. I may have finished Lonesome Dove by then.

Filed Under: Appearances, Chat
→ April 6, 2009
→ By

Season predictions.

My actual predictions for each team’s W/L record, with some brief thoughts on why for most clubs, are now on my main ESPN blog.

By the way, I love this headline. This might be the first time ever that a front office person has said with a straight face that a pitcher was better suited for the pen because he was tall.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With:
→ April 3, 2009
→ By

Phoenix eats, 2009.

Before I get to the food, the BBC’s site had a somewhat scary article about a link between hot beverages and esophogeal cancer. Consuming beverages over 160 F – which would include black tea and drip coffee – was associated with higher incidence of that very nasty type of cancer. On the bright side, green tea should be brewed at 160, so it’ll be served around 150-155, and the milk in espresso-based drinks should only be heated to 160, meaning that it’s also consumed below that mark. Of course, almost any coffee place that serves green tea will serve it around 200 degrees, including Charbucks, so do what I do and ask the barista to throw an ice cube or two in there.

On to Phoenix eats.Havana Café is a local mini-chain of three restaurants, one on Bell near 64th in northern Phoenix. The food is Caribbean rather than just Cuban, with a lot of Puerto Rican dishes and, most importantly, maduros up the wazoo. The ingredients are clearly very high quality and the food aims for a somewhat “cleaner” look than typical Cuban joints. The pollo Cubano, a half chicken breast marinated in a lime-orange mojo and pan-seared, was bright and tangy, while the pollo ajillo had hints of garlic but probably wouldn’t give your neighborhood vampire more than a brief scare. Just about all entrees come with white rice, most come with black beans, and I think all come with maduros, which were spectacular. They also have a huge selection of tapas featuring foods from the same Caribbean islands as well as a few from Spain; their mofongo is good, as are the masas de puerco, but their tostones were coasters and their alcapurrías were very greasy. I recommend it for lunch, but not for dinner, when they charge fine-dining prices for what is more or less peasant food. It’s a solid 50.

A reader (sorry, I’m too lazy to see which of you it was) suggested the Cornish Pasty Company over by Arizona State, and it’s now a major Klaw recommendation. The concept is great – it’s a tiny place in a strip mall, dark and narrow … like the mines in which the Cornish men who ate the pasties their wives made would work. A Cornish pasty is a type of pocket pie, a flaky pie crust wrapped around a filling that usually contains meat and root vegetables. The Cornish pasty company offers a few dozen pasty varieties, but I went with the “Oggie,” with the classic Cornish pasty filling of beef, onions, and potatoes. The filling was rich and thick and peppery, and the meat was soft enough and cubed well enough that it didn’t require a knife, and the crust was flaky and buttery and perfectly browned. The pasty itself cost $6.50 (I think it’s the cheapest one on the menu) and I barely got past half of it. On a sample of two meals – plus a bit of a caramel apple dessert pasty – I’m giving it a 60.

Another reader suggestion, Los Olivos, was less successful. It’s somewhere between really authentic Mexican food and chain Tex-Mex food; the portions were generous but everything was overdone – oversalted, overflavored, and oversauced. My wife, usually less critical than I am, said that her food wasn’t bad so much as “a mess.”

One of our favorites from last year, Blu Burger, is still going and still serving amazing Wagyu (American Kobe) burgers, but their location in Scottsdale near Kierland closed on March 7th. They still have three other locations and are opening two more soon (according to our server) in Peoria and Chandler. We did hit the one in north Scottsdale twice, and everything was the same except for the fact that while they still offer sautéed mushrooms as a topping for $1 extra, they no longer offer raw mushrooms as a topping. When I pointed out the absurdity of this, the server told me that they cook all the mushrooms they get.

The Phoenix Ranch Market near Phoenix airport has a full-service restaurant, Tradiciones, that offers mostly different fare from the quick-service options available inside the market. (Speaking of which, the quick-service food is still excellent, but they seem to be slacking on trimming the carnitas before cooking; the last two times I went there I ended up having to remove large chunks of pork fat from my mouth. Pork fat is good for cooking, not so much for eating.) The best thing going at Tradiciones is the tortilla chips served before the meal – just made, not in the least greasy, and salted. The food itself was just average; I tried the pollo asado, which seems to be a signature dish of the restaurant and the market, and it was … roast chicken. Good roast chicken, but really, it was just roast chicken. The absence of carnitas or chili verde (the latter only in a burrito, I believe) on the menu was a disappointment. The food is better inside the market and much cheaper. Grade 50.

Brian from Laveen has been pushing Joe’s BBQ for years, and I finally had a reason to go out that far to try it. It was solid-average. The Q had good flavor – I went with pulled pork and brisket – but was kind of dry, which is odd since the place was busy. I often find dry Q is the result of low turnover, since Q is something you have to make in advance and try to keep warm until it’s ordered. BBQ beans were good, a little sweet but not too much so, and the corn was, well, corn. The homemade root beer is good but strong, almost spicy. It’s a fringe 50 for me.

Raul and Theresa’s in Goodyear is a little tough to find – you have to go past the stadium, behind the airport, and you might drive right past it as I did – but worth the trip. It’s straight-up Mexican food with the usual suspects on the menu, but the food is incredibly fresh. The guacamole was an easy 65 on the scale, maybe a 70, bright green, chunky, and tasting primarily of avocadoes, not of all the junk that usually gets layered into it. The rice that’s served with every dish was fresh, not too salty, with a good tooth. My entrée was chicken enchiladas with red sauce, obviously made to order, and probably about 10% more food than I really needed to eat. Again, the actual flavor of the chicken came through, enhanced by the red sauce, not drowned by it. Overall grade 60.

Butterfield’s was our one breakfast out, and it’s a zoo on Sundays, not helped by a server with two personalities (alternating between friendly and why-the-hell-are-you-bothering-me) and no ability to estimate wait times (he was off by 100%, and not in the good way). The food was mostly good – I had a waffle that was light with good crust and an almost cakelike flavor, and I tasted the pancakes, which were not heavy and had that same flavor, which I’m thinking was vanilla combined with butter. The chicken apple maple sausage wasn’t dry but also didn’t have much flavor beyond apple. My wife loved her whole wheat brioche French toast. The restaurant is a solid 50, but plays up because of the big menu.

Goldbar Espresso in Tempe seems to get rave reviews, and they talk a good game about the freshness of their coffee, but the espresso there is atrocious – they pull the most diluted shots I think I’ve ever had, with maybe twice the water that they should be using, so the result is something like what you’d get if you tried to make espresso using Maxwell House grounds. I sort of knew I was in trouble when I walked in and looked at the menu board and saw a caffe mocha as the first item; if a coffee place really prides itself on its coffee, shouldn’t espresso be the top listing? And they use Hershey’s syrup in their mochas, too. Hershey’s is to chocolate what McDonald’s is to beef and what Bud Light is to beer. Anyway, my wife went to Starbucks and I went a month without coffee.

I’ve mentioned Gelato Spot before, but having stopped there at least a half-dozen times last month I’m upping my grade to a 55. I had found in the past that they kept the gelato too cold, but they’ve fixed the problem, and their chocolate seems darker than it was in the past. The coconut gelato is still a favorite. I did try the chocolate caramel brownie flavor, but it was too sweet, and there’s something about their caramel that I don’t like, a sourness that shows up in the caramel gelato too.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
→ April 3, 2009
→ By

Friday nonsense.

And we have our first malcontent in response to my decision to stop accepting Facebook friend requests from total strangers. Kevin R.’s response to my message asking him to follow the fan page instead:

omg, that is so pretentious…have a lovely day…

After which he promptly blocked me from even responding to him.

Speaking of Facebook, Slate’s Big Money site has an op ed on why Facebook’s current model won’t work. It’s interesting – I’ve said before that I don’t know how Facebook thinks it’s going to make money off of me – but I don’t know that I was convinced of anything. I guess it’s better than this travesty, an article that trashes MBA educations, written by a guy who hasn’t actually been to business school but appears to know all about what’s taught there. (For the record, I’ve said before I’m not sure that business school is a good financial decision for most people, and it certainly wasn’t for me given the career change I made after attending.)

This weekend doesn’t just mark Opening Day in MLB, but in baseball leagues all over the world. Japan’s NPB started up last night; Korea and Germany start tonight; and France and Sweden (yes, Sweden) start along with MLB on Sunday. The Dutch Honkbal Hoofdklasse starts next Saturday.

A simple recipe for lemon squares. Not quite my cup of tea – where’s the chocolate, dude? – but the picture is appealing.

Links over at the Four-Letter: Yesterday’s chat, my Wednesday hit on The Herd (around 6:20), my Thursday hit on First Take (and no, that’s not my photo), and our MLB preview package, with two sentences from me on each team covering one rookie hitter and one rookie pitcher who could make an impact in 2009.

Filed Under: Appearances, Chat, Cooking, Food, Sports Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ April 1, 2009
→ By

Breakout players, media, Jay Cutler.

My annual breakouts piece is a photo gallery this year with shorter text from me. And yes, I still love Rickie Weeks, even though he’s not on there.

I’ll be on First Take via phone at 10:20 am on Thursday, and KTAR at 9:24 am Arizona Time. I’ll be on Baltimore 105.7 FM tonight at 9:30 pm.

Yes, there will be a Phoenix food post soon. It’s mostly done, but I’ve got some more preview stuff to hand in to ESPN.com first.

There will be a Klawchat on Thursday at 1 pm.

So can someone explain this Cutler thing to me? I keep hearing how the Broncos have to trade him. Isn’t he under contract? So he wants a trade. I want a million dollars, a night with Ashley Judd, and a pony. If I’m Josh McDaniel, I’m staring at two options:

1. Keep Cutler and make it clear to players and agents that I am in charge.
2. Trade Cutler for 80 cents on the dollar* and show everyone that the lunatics are running the asylum.

*This is my assumption, as someone who doesn’t really know football, because Denver would be seen as somehow unable to keep Cutler, and because I doubt you ever really get full value when trading a top-ten quarterback.

Erik Kuselias was subbing for SVP on the Tirico/VP show today and kept saying how Cutler has “leverage” – but does he? He’s an employee of the Broncos. If they decide to bench him for four games to teach him a lesson, as long as they’re paying him and abiding by the letter of the contract, they are within their rights to do so. I’ve heard no mention of a contractual obligation on the part of the Broncos to avoid hurting Cutler’s feelings, nor does he have a no-trade clause or a no-discussing-a-trade clause or a no-even-thinking-about-a-trade-even-while-you’re-on-the-throne clause. If Cutler doesn’t show up for a required camp or workout, you fine him. You may be able to suspend him without pay, which would be true in MLB. But just like I don’t give in to my daughter when she throws a tantrum, a GM shouldn’t give in to a player (or agent) when he throws one.

Am I wrong?

Filed Under: Appearances, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ March 30, 2009
→ By

The Soul of Baseball.

If you’re here, you’ve probably already read Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America (still just $5.99 hardcover at amazon.com), so I’m not going to belabor the point – it’s a great, great read, much more than a simple baseball book, but more of a biography of a human being.

JoePo followed Buck O’Neil around the country for a year as O’Neil stumped for the Negro Leagues Museum and more generally worked to preserve the memory of the Negro Leagues as real baseball, rather than the minstrel show of the Hollywood depictions of those Leagues. Along the way, the two men ran into a handful of other former Negro Leaguers and gave us a window into their memories, some told by the players themselves with others retold through Joe’s voice. Some are hilarious, some touching, some downright sad.

O’Neil’s personality – his soul, really – dominates the book, which at times seems to border on magical realism with the incredible effect that O’Neil has on other people, most of whom are complete strangers, and his perceptions of others even based on a look or a few sentences. At the book’s close, my overwhelming thought was, “Wow, I wish I had met him.”

It’s hard to compare it to Lords of the Realm, which I’ve always called my top baseball book, but I’d say I enjoyed The Soul of Baseball more – it’s a serious book but has substantial entertainment value, particularly from the stories about other characters like Satchel Paige, but also from the glimpses into the (then) current lives of Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, and the questionable Johnny Washington.

Next up: Lonesome Dove.

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Sports Tagged With: , , ,