→ April 30, 2011
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Home & A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

My latest top 50 ranking for this year’s Rule 4 Draft is up. I’ll also be back on College Baseball Live this Thursday night at 7 pm EDT and on the postgame show as well.

—

The old man nodded. “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength – patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”
Jack said, “I think hope is the worst thing in the world. I really do. It makes a fool of you while it lasts. And then when it’s gone, it’s like there’s nothing left of you at all. Except–” he shrugged and laughed “–what you can’t be rid of.”

She’s only written three books, but Marilynne Robinson has to be in any discussion of the best living American novelists, and there is no living writer whose prose I’d rather read. Saying a writer writes “from the heart” can be like saying a player “sees the ball well,” but Robinson produces some of the most moving, heartfelt scenes and passages I’ve ever seen and does so without the excess of sentiment or cloying language that could turn a book with a similar setup into mass-market chick lit.

Home, currently on sale for $10 through that amazon link, is the parallel novel to Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Gilead. (It’s worth mentioning that Robinson’s three novels have each won a major award – Housekeeping won the PEN/Faulkner award for the best debut novel of its year and Home won the Orange Prize for the best English novel written by a female author.) Gilead was a series of notes or journal entries from an older priest named Ames who, nearing his death, wishes to leave a testament for his young son. That journal also showed scenes of his complex relationship with his friend and fellow preacher Robert Boughton and Boughton’s prodigal son Jack, named for Ames, who returns to Gilead after a twenty-year absence. That return is the subject of Home, as Jack, a lifelong alcoholic who didn’t even come back for his mother’s funeral, shows up carrying two decades’ worth of secrets and memories, with arguably four decades’ worth of loneliness and sorry as well. His timing is propitious, with his father’s health declining even more rapidly than Ames’, and Jack’s sister, Glory, living at home again after a disastrous courtship that has left her resigned to spinsterhood.

Despite the presence of just three characters for most of the book, with everyone else accounting for maybe 10% of the dialogue and whatever passes for action in a Robinson novel (she has never in three books resorted to plot twists or other tricks of the trade to spice up the story), Home is Robinson’s most complex work. The developing relationship between Jack and Glory, separated by enough years that they were never close as children, is one side of a highway where the other direction contains the gradual yet accelerating deterioration of the relationship between Jack and the dying father who has confused decades of worry over his wayward son with decades of love; it’s not clear that anyone was or is capable of helping Jack, who has what would today most likely be diagnosed as depression, but Boughton, already starting to lose control of his emotions in the earliest stages of dementia, faces the crushing disappointment of seeing the failure and tragedy of Jack’s life incarnate, in his kitchen or his living room. And yet Jack, first welcomed and then rebuked by his own father, draws closer to the old man and to his sister … but never so close that he can make the place he refers to as “home” his actual home, instead revisiting the childhood feeling that he wished he lived there in spirit rather than simply in body.

That dualism symbolizes one of Robinson’s central themes, the gulf between our spiritual selves (or souls) and our corporeal existence. Robinson writes honestly of religion, or more specifically of religiosity, as her many religious characters are neither caricatured nor placed on pedestals; religion is simply intrinsic to their lives, and Home is suffused with conflicts between religious tenets and human behavior, as well as the doubts that have plagued Jack for his entire life, further isolating him (although it was far from the main reason) from a family of believers.

And part of Robinson’s gift is that she can write about religion without creating an overtly religious novel. Home is very much about life on earth, about the weight of memories, about choices gone awry in the distant past with ramifications in the present day. Glory’s broken engagement has left her back at home, unemployed, and without romantic prospects; one of the most heart-rending scenes comes near the book’s end as she remembers her own daydreams about her own future family, about children that will probably never exist, a warmth and happiness that she feels is now permanently denied to her. (I don’t believe the characters’ ages are mentioned, but Glory is probably in her early 30s, and I suppose in a small Midwestern town in the 1950s this would make her marriage prospects fairly slim.) Jack, meanwhile, slowly exposes layers of his sorrow to Glory, but not to his father, a permanent barrier to the old man understanding his son; the woman who helped Jack get back on his feet and remain at least partially sober for the past ten years is now denied to him, a severance that seems to have driven him back to Gilead and, in his mind, has cut him off from salvation in this life or any other. Unfolding these relationships in a way that gets at the heart of family dynamics, of loneliness, of regret, and of the ultimate comfort of home without ever relying on unrealistic plot twists to force characters into false corners is more evidence of Robinson’s mastery of language and of character. She went 25 years between her first and second novels but just three years between Gilead and Home; I can only hope the gap before her next novel is as short as the last.

–

Flannery O’Conner’s first short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, is even more theologically-minded than Robinson’s work, combining stories about the meaning of faith, salvation, and what it might mean to be “good.” The stories are largely twisted, even macabre, as in the title story where an escaped convict wipes out an entire family so O’Conner can show us the difference between saying you’re a good person (or, more specifically, a good Christian) and actually being one. O’Conner dreams up killers and con artists, thieves and rascals, putting “good” people in bad situations to see how they might react.

Aside from the notable title story, the most interesting to me was the longest story in the book, “The Displaced Person,” about a rather high-minded Southern widow named Mrs. McIntyre who takes in, under some duress, a family of Jewish refugees from Poland who fled the Nazis. Her ignorance of conditions in Europe at the time is particularly stark to us now, given the passage of time and our deeper understanding of the extent of the genocide and the horrible conditions in and outside of the camps for Jews. But her lack of charity and her unusually defined ideas on race/origin stood out for her post hoc construction of ethnic identities; even as the Jewish husband works harder, without complaint, than anyone else she’s ever had on her farm, she is appalled to find him trying to bring over relatives trapped in German death camps and potentially marry them off to black workers on the farm. The priest who organized the placement of the refugees is no help, as he’s a single-minded, simpering man who sees Mrs. McIntyre only as a shell, as a person to be saved and as a settlement place for the refugee family but not as an individual, an oversight that leads to the story’s ultimate tragedy. That climax is one of the strongest depictions I’ve seen of the banality of evil, a phrase which, not coincidentally, was coined to describe the complicity of German citizens with the Nazi’s plans for extermination of Jews and other minorities.

Anyway, the title of this collection inspired me to create my second Tumblr post.

Next up: Haruki Murakami’s English-language debut novel, A Wild Sheep Chase.

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→ April 20, 2011
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Taft.

Just recorded my one Baseball Today podcast of the week – I’ve had to skip two due to early-morning flights. Also, Thursday’s chat will take place after I get off the College Baseball Live set, at either 7:30 pm or 8 pm EDT, because (weather permitting) I’m seeing Javier Baez play at the usual chat time.

—

In an afterword to her second novel, Taft, Ann Patchett laments its status as her least-known novel even though she’s extremely fond of it, a situation she credits to everything from the title (admittedly not the optimal choice) to the way it was superseded by her later works, notably the mesmerizing Bel Canto. But Taft showcases Patchett’s skill for characterization as well as her beautiful yet readable prose, and compares favorably to the novels that came before and after it. (Her most recent novel, Run, was by far her worst effort.)

The Taft of the book’s title is already dead before the book begins. Ray Taft was a husband and father of two in a rural town in eastern Tennessee who died of a heart attack, leaving his family emotionally adrift and buried in bills. His wife, daughter, and son move to Memphis to live with their wealthy aunt and uncle, but the daughter, Fay, chooses to work and ends up in the bar run by the narrator, former blues drummer John Nickel, a black man more than ten years her senior. Nickel gives Fay a job and ends up enmeshed in her new domestic drama, largely revolving around her brother, Carl, for whom the loss of his father has meant the loss of an anchor and a descent into increasingly serious trouble. Meanwhile, Nickel himself is grappling with his own loss, as his ex-girlfriend has moved to Miami with their seven-year-old son, Franklin, leaving him with limited contact with his only child.

The present-day stories of Fay/Carl and Nickel/Franklin are interrupted by what are either flashbacks or Nickel’s own interpolations of Taft’s story, including the switch in Fay’s and Carl’s personalities after their father’s death and a poignant scene where Taft interacts with a local boy selling candy door to door to raise money for his school science class.

If there’s a reason for Taft‘s relative lack of success, it might be that the book seemed less substantial than her other novels. The Patron Saint of Liars revolved around a terribly broken woman and the daughter she is destined to disappoint. The Magician’s Assistant is about a woman dealing with the death of her longtime business partner, who could never requite her affection for him. Bel Canto is a masterpiece, a story of hostages and terrorists in a Latin American embassy where, over time, the barrier between captor and captive begins to break down. Major things happen in Taft – if you’re familiar with Chekhov, you’ll see the biggest event coming a mile away – but the results aren’t that different from what preceded the big stuff. Characters aren’t much changed, and little is resolved at the end of the book. I was fine with that because it’s a well-written slice of life, but if you like your novels to come with firm beginnings and ends and a cherry on top, this isn’t the book for you. And that’s fine too.

Next up: Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. She might have been the original Debbie Downer.

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→ April 17, 2011
→ By

Wabash Cannonball app.

Wabash Cannonball ($1.99) is the app version of the boardgame more commonly sold as Chicago Express (which I’ve never tried), and it’s a very clean implementation of what seems to be a strong, smart game. Outside of the lack of networked play, the Wabash app is outstanding.

If Wabash Cannonball was a Hollywood script, I’d call it Acquire meets Ticket to Ride but directed by Reiner Knizia. It’s a luck-free train game with an economic component that also reminded me of Power Grid. Players buy shares in four railroad lines in an auction, then can use their turns to extend those railroads west across the country toward Chicago. The map is covered in various kinds of hexes, with different hex types providing different bonuses or recurring income amounts to railroads that cross them, with city hexes giving the biggest boost.

On each turn, a player can choose one of three options for his move: auction, build, or develop. In an auction move, the player picks one railroad and one share of that railroad goes up for auction; each railroad has a small, fixed number of shares, and it’s also possible for a player to choose the auction but then decline to auction off any shares (the ‘null’ play). The build move allows the player to choose one railroad and lay tracks on up to three tiles, as long as the railroad still has tracks remaining. Developing certain hexes raises their income or provides a one-time bonus to the railroad(s) occupying it. Because each player will hold shares in multiple railroads, and railroads will be owned by multiple players, choosing your action will depend not just on how much you’ll benefit from the move but on how to minimize the benefits to other players, or perhaps even block another railroad if that’s in your best interests.

When the first of the four initial railroads reaches Chicago, that railroad receives a sizable one-time dividend, and a fifth railroad, the Wabash (gray) line, opens up, with an immediate auction of the first of its two shares. The railroad’s home city is actually Fort Wayne, so within a few turns it can expand to Chicago (triggering another one-time dividend to its shareholders) and Detroit, the two most profitable cities on the board.

A round ends with a General Dividend, meaning payments to all shareholders, when two of the three turn options (auction, build, develop) are exhausted for that round; at each General Dividend, Detroit is developed automatically, increasing its income by $1. The game ends when one of four conditions is met, with nearly every game I’ve played ending because three of the railroads have no more shares available for auction. At game end, there’s a final General Dividend, after which the player with the most money is the winner.

The app’s design is very clean and plays well on the small iPod Touch screen. You can access several screens of information on the players, railroads, and progress toward game-end conditions in a popup window that you can minimize when you need to see more of the game board itself. The AI players are solid, playing intelligently and even using some strategic moves like the null play, with a particular strength in the auction. The AI’s weak spots are a lack of offensive play – they never block or otherwise sabotage other players – and a strange conservatism around the Chicago line, perhaps due to an incorrect valuation of its shares.

The game’s developers told me there are plans for networked play, but no release date for it yet. Beyond that, my criticisms of the app are minor – the “Chicago or bust!” popups are annoying, and it doesn’t save all the player settings from game to game – and I’ve had just one crash, the first time I used the app, which never recurred. For $1.99 it’s an excellent value with plenty of replayability.

Next up, I’ll do a ranking of my favorite boardgame apps. As for books, I bailed on Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy, but ripped through Ann Patchett’s underrated second novel, Taft.

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→ April 6, 2011
→ By

New ESPNU show + Through the Desert app.

As you might have heard on Wednesday’s podcast, I’ll be appearing on a new studio show on ESPNU called College Baseball Live, every Thursday night at 7 pm EDT/4 pm PDT from now until May 12th. (There’s one more show on May 19th but I had a scheduling conflict.) The show will cover college baseball in general, with an emphasis on the SEC, as well as a modicum of draft chatter, and will be followed by an SEC game of the week, beginning this week with South Carolina vs. Tennessee. I’ll appear again on a brief postgame show.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I’ve also signed a new contract with ESPN, which has made much of this year’s extra content across all media possible. I have always appreciated the comments from readers who ask me if I’ll join their favorite team’s front office, but this is where I want to be right now, not least because life on the media side has always worked better for my family.

My weekly Tuesday column yesterday was on some rookies who were surprising Opening Day roster additions.

–

Reiner Knizia has been as aggressive as any game designer in licensing his games for iOS app development, producing a few of my favorites so far (notably Samurai and Battle Line). His two- to four-person boardgame Through the Desert is now available in a beautifully rendered app, but on the iPod Touch there are some implementation issues that have made the game trickier to play.

Knizia’s Through the Desert ($1.99 for the regular game, $2.99 for the iPad/HD version) is played a board of hexes with several oases and watering holes scattered more or less evenly throughout it. During the setup phase, each player places one camel in turn, with players rotating until each player has placed all five of his starting camels. (Players begin with five camels, each a different color.) After the setup, players place additional camels (drawn from a communal pool) adjacent to those they have already placed, building “caravans” that can accumulate points in three ways:

* By abutting an oasis, which is worth five points.
* By crossing a watering hole, which is worth three points for a large hole and one for a small hole.
* By fully enclosing an area within the caravan; between the caravan and the edge of the board; or between the caravan and the small, impassable mountain range within the board. The player receives one point for each enclosed hex, plus any bonuses for surrounded watering holes.

The only restriction on placement is that a player cannot place a camel next to a camel of the same color placed by another player.

There are also game-end bonuses of ten points apiece for the longest caravan (most camels) of each color. The game ends when there are no more camels available in any of the five colors.

The game offers a lot of decision-making with zero randomness involved. I’ve found the bulk of my thinking during the game is spent trying to anticipate each opponent’s next move or two, both to see if I can block anyone and to make sure I’m not going to end up blocked. The problem is ultimately one of resource constraints – you can only place two camels per turn, your number of turns is finite (but not known exactly), and your number of possible moves is restricted by the board and opponent placement – with the board big enough that the game is different every time, especially with three or four players.

The app itself is perfectly stable, but the way the developers implemented the game has proven frustrating. For one thing, there’s no way to tell whose turn it is, and there’s no way to see the current score of any player other than the one whose turn it is. In the four-player game, the bottom row of hexes on the board is obscured by the silly waving carpet at the bottom of the screen, and I couldn’t figure out how to place a camel there. I’ve also found the hard AIs to be a little light – in at least a dozen games, I’ve only once had an AI player make a move to block me, and that came in a four-player game where one of the other AIs was about as challenging an opponent as a sack of hair.

The AI problem isn’t a huge deal since the game allows for network play, and the hard AIs are good enough to make the game a nice diversion. It’s just not as challenging as it could be, and the lack of any kind of scoreboard or indication of who’s up is annoying and completely avoidable. I’m hoping at some point there will be an update to at least fix the bottom-row glitch and provide a score option, although the AIs probably are what they are for the long term. I’d recommend the game if you’ve already grabbed the two I mentioned above as well as Carcassonne and Ingenious and are looking for a change of pace; if I see any improvements come down the line I’ll repost with a stronger recommendation. And if any of you should try the iPad version, let me know if any of these issues are resolved.

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→ March 31, 2011
→ By

Top Chef All-Stars finale.

So I’m happy with the result, both because I think Blais showed that he was the best chef there over the course of the regular season (not just the playoffs), but because I like a good redemption story, and I didn’t want to see him implode after another last-second loss. I thought the sous-chefs gave him a pretty good advantage – for all the talk about Spike as a Marcel-esque anchor, he seems to be great on a team and more Machiavellian when it’s an individual challenge – and he showed more leadership than Mike, who listened to what his team proposed and then did what he wanted anyway. (It’s the fake-listening that bugs me; either you’re listening, or you’re not. If you want to be a dictator, that’s fine. Dictators who insist they’re not dictators are in the news enough these days without another one on Top Chef.)

Ultimately, though, it seemed like the better food won out. Both chefs slipped slightly on their desserts, but Richard (with big help from Spike) made the adjustment between serving one and serving two. The editing at Judges’ Table seemed to downplay the problems with Mike’s custard, but the shot of Marcel and Stephen eating it (mostly conveying their dislike through facial expressions) spoke volumes to me, since neither one of them is going to hold back. And Richard’s food seemed much more inventive across the board; even the short rib dish that was “conventional” had a purpose, showing he can do more straightforward cuisine but do it better than anyone else there.

* Loved seeing more Restaurant Wars. And I love how all the chefs involved seem to get so into it, even last night when the sous-chefs had nothing riding on it for themselves but pride. It proved an ideal way to end a great season.

* Carla, who won fan favorite, has to get her own show at this point, right? The villainous Marcel may have technical skills, but likability and accessibility matter as well, and Carla has both to spare, while her style of cooking – kicked-up comfort food – is extremely trendy and yet taps into a fundamental aspect of the American food experience. Blais offers the food I’d most want to travel and pay to eat, but Carla’s food is the kind I’d want to eat night-in and night-out.

* I appreciate knowing that the way to Gail Simmons’ heart is via pepperoni sauce … even though I have to say that it doesn’t sound appealing to me at all. I associate the flavor of pepperoni with how I ate when I was younger and didn’t really know food or the vast array of alternatives available; I’d reach for chorizo or andouille or linguica or about a dozen cured Italian meat products before I’d ever ask for a slice of pepperoni. But I’ll take Gail’s word for it that Mike’s “crazy business” was the real deal.

* How about Padma showing so much emotion in these last few episodes? First she tears up when they send Antonia packing. Then she gets choked up when Hubert Keller points out how hard it’s going to be to choose between Blais and Mike. And the hug she gave Blais at the end had a real “thank God you won” look to it. I’m not complaining, but I’m surprised after seeing her seem so much colder in the last two seasons. New Padma is much better to watch – these are real people competing, after all, and it’s perfectly fair to be emotional as long as your decisions remain objective. I’ve seen the fembot act from Heidi Klum on Project Runway, and it’s tired.

* And credit due to Tom for giving props to Mike after the loss – and the editors for including it. But I could have done without the shot of Mike’s wife looking so downcast after Blais won. It seemed mildly exploitative. Show the contestants; the family never asked be in that position.

* I’ve got an upcoming trip to Atlanta, so if anyone there scouts out Blais’ Flip burger place, I’d love an advance report – including whether the line is a mile long after his big win.

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→ March 31, 2011
→ By

Five Equations that Changed the World.

My predictions for 2011 went up yesterday. Podcast and chat on Thursday.

Somehow I forgot to review Michael Guillen’s Five Equations that Changed the World
, a very strong look at five equations and the scientists who developed them that’s explained with very little math at all. Guillen’s target is the lay reader, a term which, since I haven’t taken a physics class since 1990, would include me.

The five equations aren’t hard to guess – they are, in the order in which Guillen presents them, Newton’s Universal Law of Gravity, Daniel Bernoulli’s Law of Hydrodynamic Pressure, Faraday’s Law of Electromagnetic Induction, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (discovered by Rudolf Clausius), and, of course, E = mc2, courtesy of Albert Einstein. But rather than just give the reader the equations and their derivations, Guillen crafts a short story around each, with background on each scientist’s life before the discovery*, the process that led to the development of the equation, and a brief epilogue on some major event or subsequent discovery that hinged on the equation itself. (For example, Newton’s law led to the manned mission to the moon, while Einstein’s led, of course, to the atom bomb.)

* So, does a scientist discover an equation, develop it, or something else? He doesn’t invent it, certainly; these are, as far as we know, immutable laws of our universe. I thought about using “unearth” to describe this process, but it seems to mundane, especially for Clausius’ and Einstein’s contributions. I’m open to suggestions here.

Newton’s and Einstein’s stories are rather well-known, I think, so I would say the most interesting sections of the book were the three that those two bookended. Clausius’ story was probably the least familiar to me, as I probably couldn’t have named him if asked. And what made his story interesting was how many other discoveries or developments had to happen along the way for him to be able to articulate his equation – including the invention of the thermometer, the creation of the calorie as both a unit and as a theory for the source of energy, and the life’s work of Julius Robert Mayer, a Bavarian doctor who first expostulated that all the energy in the universe had to add up to the energy that existed at the universe’s start (that is, the First Law of Thermodynamics), only to find himself rejected and ostracized by both the scientific and religious establishments of the time.

The final section of the book, on how Einstein’s theory of relativity led to the development of nuclear weapons, is a bit poignant as Einstein lived to see the destruction and regretted his role in encouraging President Roosevelt to order the development of the bomb. (I would imagine Einstein realized, however, that since the Germans would have eventually developed it themselves, the Manhattan Project was as much as a defensive move as an offensive one, even though it became an offensive weapon when we figured it out first.) Slightly less interesting, to me at least, was the extent of the family squabbles in the section on Bernoulli, where a pattern of fathers becoming jealous of talented sons tended to repeat itself in a way that would probably land them on Maury Povich today.

If you like the sound of this book but want something mathier, check out my review of Prime Obsession, a book about the development of the Riemann Hypothesis, perhaps the leading unsolved problem in mathematics today.

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→ March 28, 2011
→ By

Dog Soldiers.

Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers won the National Book Award in 1974 and made the TIME 100 ranking, although I haven’t seen or heard it mentioned outside of that context. I’m going to guess it’s because the subject matter and setting feel very dated, making its relevance to today’s reader a lot less obvious, but that didn’t make it a less interesting read for me.

The book is populated by hippies, cheats, losers, dropouts, and freaks, set in the waning days of the Vietnam War and the dissolute California society of the age. John Converse is a writer/journalist of dubious credentials based in Vietnam who allows himself to get roped into a transoceanic heroin deal using a friend he calmly describes as “a psychopath” and his own wife as part of the supply chain. When the psychopath, Ray Hicks, and Converse’s wife Marge connect in California it sets off a chase by some bad guys who moonlight as good guys on their days off and an increasingly desperate and irrational attempt to sell the drugs in territory controlled by other suppliers.

Along the way, there’s a healthy dose of unhealthy drug consumption, copious vomiting, and more than a smidgen of violence. Ray and Marge end up in a hippie commune with the dope and more weapons than a Libyan rebel camp, while Converse tries to avoid the dirty cop who wants to bust Ray and Marge but take the drugs for himself. It’s a nihilistic, unsparing look at compromised people descending into a hell of their own making.

Aside from my inability to really place myself in the story – I’ve never tried a drug stronger than alcohol, unless you count chocolate, which I do – I struggled to find a deeper theme below the story. Maybe the heroin isn’t really heroin, but symbolized something deeper, like a search for meaning in something consumable and disposable like money. Maybe the battle over the heroin stands in as a metaphor for the war, a conflict with questionable and short-lived objectives where the cost in lives can never be justified by the results. Maybe it’s about the fickleness of man, how quickly we’ll sell out our friends for a quick fix or financial gain. All of these occurred to me as possibilities while I was reading the book but none were fully developed as themes, leaving Dog Soldiers as a compelling read but one whose plaudits I couldn’t fully explain.

Next up: Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse.

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→ March 26, 2011
→ By

Vegas, Phoenix, and Oklahoma eats.

New draft blog entry is up on Texas RHP Taylor Jungmann. Yesterday’s chat transcript is up. And I was on the Baseball Today podcast (link goes directly to the downloadable mp3) on Friday.

Anyway, time for another omnibus food post, since I haven’t had enough in any one spot for a blog entry.

I made two trips to Vegas this month, but focused on old favorite spots like Firefly and Lotus of Siam (try the tamarind beef – it’s plus). The one new place I tried was Mon Ami Gabi, a French restaurant in Paris Las Vegas (and in Chicago, which I believe is the original) that manages to slide in under the price point of the typical fine-dining experience on the Strip. I can only speak to one dish, the trout grenobloise ($18), which was excellent – a great piece of fish perfectly cooked if a little lightly sauced, with a big pile of sauteed haricots verts on the side. I was quite impressed by their version of the premeal bread basket, a crusty warm baguette brought to the table in a white paper bag. They’re apparently known for their steak frites ($23-ish), but I can’t pass up a good piece of fish, which is my favorite dish.

Back to Phoenix, I finally made it to Barrio Cafe on 16th, a frequent recommendation from readers that’s just located in an area I never hit. It’s upscale Mexican, somewhere between Los Sombreros and real fine dining but with clear ambitions toward the latter. The chips and bread come with a spicy, vinegared tapenade that’s more Mediterranean than Mexican and that I could have eaten all night. The guacamole is made tableside – a pointless, showy exercise that cuts off any flavor development, but salvaged somewhat by extremely high-quality ingredients, including the unusual addition of fresh pomegranate seeds. (Between those and the avocado the bowl could have made a nutritionist smile.)

For my main course, I couldn’t pass up the seared duck breast in a sweet and sour tamarind sauce, featuring two of my favorite ingredients (although I’m more of a leg man than a breast man … still talking about duck, people). The duck breast had to be at least briefly roasted after the sear as it was cooked medium rather than the standard medium-rare, but stopped short of drying out, something no sauce on the planet can save. That sauce, by the way, wouldn’t have been out of place in an Asian restaurant, neither too sweet nor too sour and with a dark, savory note underneath to keep it from becoming cloying. My colleague Matt Meyers went with the cochinita pibil, a slow-roasted pork shoulder that, judging by the empty plate in front of him, was probably something north of adequate.

I’ve been reluctant to try much sushi in Arizona given some mediocre raw-fish experiences around the Valley over the last few years; our distance from actual water and lack of real high-end restaurants downtown to support the kind of fresh-fish business you’d find in most comparably-sized cities leads to a lot of mediocre product sold as sushi to unsuspecting consumers. Otaku in Chandler (on Gilbert Road south of the 202/Santan) is promising, at least by my tempered expectations, with some highs and lows in a recent lunch visit. I placed two orders for nigiri in addition to a bento box, just to expand my sample size. The maguro was nothing special, definitely fresh but on the bland side, but the sea bass with a light ponzu sauce was well-balanced, the fresh flavor of the fish coming through* with the texture of fish that’s not just fresh but handled properly.

* I know I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: If the sushi has a sauce on it, don’t dip it in the soy sauce. The chef has already taken care of seasoning for you.

The bento box option was a mixed bag, although I have to say it’s a lot of food for about $11-12. The server recommended the chicken with curry, more of a southeast Asian dish than Japanese, like a brown Thai curry, featuring a lot of fresh red bell pepper and white meat chicken but a little mild overall. The box comes with eight pieces of California roll featuring shredded crab and a small amount of mayonnaise, two gyoza, and a spring roll; the gyoza were the only positive of that group, as the others were just ordinary, nothing you couldn’t find at a hundred other sushi joints in the area. My main concern was the mesclun salad, with a couple of leaves that had started to go bad, just a sign that someone in the kitchen isn’t paying attention when he grabs them out of a drawer.

Re-reading that I’m probably giving you the sense that Otaku was worse than it actually is; nothing was unpleasant or badly cooked or poorly seasoned, and the fact that the raw fish was fresh is a positive. It’s at least worth another visit, which is more than I can say for most of the other sushi places I’ve tried in Arizona, but it’s not going to live up to most of the California sushi I’ve had. I’d give Otaku a preliminary grade of 50, but more like a 45 on the bento box.

I’m writing this on the plane back from Tulsa, which was as disappointing for the food as it was rewarding for the prospects. The two best spots were in Bartlesville, about 45 minutes north of Tulsa, where Dylan Bundy pitched in a high school tournament. Dink’s Barbecue on Frank Phillips Rd had good brisket and fried okra but the hot links were just weird, with a hard red casing like you’d find on a wheel of gouda and a rubbery texture inside, while the green beans were stewed into grey mushiness. Jared’s Frozen Custard on Nowata was outstanding, though, comparable to good Wisconsin frozen custard in texture and flavor – I had one of the special flavors of the day, mocha, which tasted like a light and sweet Dunkin Donuts coffee (bad flavor for hot coffee, good for ice cream), in a concrete with Oreos. Duds in Tulsa itself included breakfast at the Wild Fork, where the food was mediocre but better than the service; and Albert G’s, a well-reviewed and popular Q joint on Harvard, where I got a big serving of bone-dry brisket with absolutely zero smoke flavor. I’ll pass along a reader rec for breakfast that I never managed to hit, The Old School Bagel Factory on Peoria, which would be on my list if I ever happen to be back in Tulsa – not that unlikely, since I didn’t get Broken Arrow’s Archie Bradley this time around.

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→ March 25, 2011
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Reiner Knizia’s Medici app.

Chat today at 3 pm EDT. New draft blog post on Dylan Bundy is up. I’m back on the Baseball Today podcast today; we just finished recording slightly before noon Eastern, so I expect it’ll be posted at that link shortly.

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The iOS game Medici is just 99 cents until April 4th and since it’s another Reiner Knizia game there was a zero percent chance I would let that sale go by. It’s worth far more than that, a clever auction game that in typical Knizia fashion uses simple game play to create complex results. The scoring is a little trickier than other great Knizia games like Lost Cities or Battle Line, but after botching my first game I was able to grasp the concept.

Each player represents a trader in Renaissance Italy, bidding on lots of goods to fill up the five spots on his ship in each of three rounds of scoring. There are six goods available; on a player’s turn, he selects a box from the right side of the screen, after which it’s opened, revealing one to three goods in any combination, with each good carrying a value of 0 to 5 (or, for gold, a fixed value of 10). Players bid on the set of goods in a single-round auction, with the player who selected the box getting the final bid. Bidding can be fierce early, but as players’ ships fill up, players can score bargains later in a round … or they could be stuck with goods that don’t help as much in the scoring.

That scoring is the one slightly difficult part of the game to understand, at least from the in-game rules (I’ve never played the physical board game), but it’s also what makes the game brilliant. You earn points in three ways:

* The ship with the most value in each round earns 30 points, with declining bonuses after that depending on the number of players; the player with the least valuable ship receives no bonus at all, but all other players receive at least 5 points. A ship’s value is merely the sum of the values of each of its five goods, but those values are only applicable to this type of scoring. They lose all meaning when it comes to shipping goods.

* After ship values are scored, players ship their goods other than gold, which is only counted towards the total ship values. The player who has shipped the most of any specific type of good up to that point in the game receives 10 points; the player who ships the second-most of that good receives 5 points; everyone else gets zero. That is, the scoring for the quantity of, say, dye shipped is cumulative. Players tied in goods shipped split the available points, rounded down.

* Players who have shipped at least five goods of a specific type get a five-point bonus in each scoring round. Six goods shipped yields a ten-point bonus, and seven goods shipped yields twenty points. These bonuses are not split in case of a tie.

The ideal strategy, of course, is to ship lots of goods that no one else is trying to ship, which is harder to do the more players you involve in the game. (Medici requires three players with a maximum of six.) There’s also an inherent strategic conflict between acquiring goods with high values to grab that 30-point ship bonus and acquiring goods to ship to try to rack up points and bonuses for shipping one or two specific types of goods. Balancing those two goals when you can’t control what goods come up for auction while competing against other players who might want the same goods makes the game interesting and highly replayable.

The implementation on iOS looks good and works reasonably well with a few small hitches. The scoring pyramids where numbers of goods shipped are displayed is quite small on an iPod touch, and selecting boxes from the right side of the screen doesn’t always work on the first try. The app comes with nine AI players with different strategies and difficulty levels; I’ve found the top three or four to be challenging but the ones below that are best left behind once you’ve learned the game. There’s no online play option at the moment.

The mechanics make this game well worth the purchase, and it’s a solid implementation that has proven very stable for me across multiple plays and interrupted games. It also plays very quickly given how many players it can have and how much is going on behind the scenes, and I find the more I play the more I’m getting used to the tiny scoreboard for goods shipped.

I’m still testing out another Knizia app, Through the Desert, that recently came on the market; my initial impression is that it’s a great game but one best suited to the iPad (and there is indeed an HD version) rather than a smaller device.

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→ March 24, 2011
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Pickin’ Up the Pieces.

I first heard Fitz and the Tantrums’ “Moneygrabber” maybe two months ago on XM, but in the interim it seems to have exploded into the mainstream – in the past week alone I’ve heard it in Whole Foods and in a restaurant in Chandler (neither of which was playing an XM feed). It’s the best song on their debut? album Pickin’ Up The Pieces (iTunes) but also a good indication of the sound you’ll get on the rest of this short, tight, ten-song disc.

“Moneygrabber” is an energetic Motown-tinged three-minute burst of vitriol directed at a gold-digging former lover, driven by a rousing chorus that bookends two brief verses that are subdued in comparison. The contrast works because the verses are short and because the song opens with the chorus, putting that energy into your head and creating a calm-before-the-storm feel to each verse before the singer launches into the angry “this is your payback/moneygrabber” chorus. (It’s a bit lowbrow, but I laughed once I realized the second verse concluded with the singer’s statement that he doesn’t “think twice for the price of a cheap dime whore.” Don’t hold back, man.)

Where “Moneygrabber” is primarily a rock song with Motown fringes, the rest of the album presents more of a balance between the two elements (with hints of New Wave), with a few songs that wouldn’t be out of place on an oldies station. The first half of the album is mostly upbeat even when the lyrics aren’t – the soulful organ-heavy opener features the line “ooh what a lovely day/for breaking the chains of love” – and the songs are punchier, with nothing over 3:10 until track five. The very poppy “L.O.V.” features multiple tempo changes and some outstanding hooks in the vocal lines, particularly the melody of “all these words are the sweetest embrace,” one of many riffs on the album that reminded me not of a specific song from the 1980s but of the general feel of pop music from that era.

The back half of the album includes one outright power ballad, “Tighter,” which I could see crossing over and creating the kind of pop success that ends or derails a band’s career because they become associated with love songs (or, in this case, a lost-love song). But side two* is generally slower without becoming understated or subtle, and the album ends with a down-tempo song, “Rich Girls,” that manages to work in some black humor around whether it’s better to date rich girls (who’ll break your heart) or poor girls (who’ll take your money).

*Raise your glass if you’re old enough to understand what “side two” of an album means.

The weakness here, by far, is the quality of the lyrics on some of the lesser songs. “Dear Mr. President” is embarrassing, the one skippable song more for how dated and inane the words are (I think it’s supposed to be some kind of protest about the lack of funding for social services, but the preachiness over a stereotyped picture of American poverty makes me cringe), and the disc as a whole is full of the kind of empty lines that populate most pop records, with very little you haven’t heard before.

I can get over bad lyrics when the music is both catchy and different, and I can’t think of the last time I heard a group meld rock and old-school soul this well. (Little Caesar doesn’t cut it.) The production is clean and I liked how easily I could pick out individual instruments or the two voices when they’re singing in tandem. “Moneygrabber” is the Fitz song I’ll still be listening to for years, but the rest of the disc is wearing well even after a dozen times through it, a solid first effort that will likely prompt a host of imitators once the public catches on to it.

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Incidentally, I see the Roots’ classic Things Fall Apart album is a $5 download this month on amazon. Doesn’t have the standout single but it’s one of the most important hip hop albums of the last twenty years, in my opinion.

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