Uncategorized — Page 92

→ December 8, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/8/18.

I had five pieces for ESPN+ subscribers this week, on the Robinson Cano trade, the Paul Goldschmidt trade, Washington signing Pat Corbin, the Yan Gomes trade, and the Jean Segura trade. I did not hold a chat this week due to other demands on my time.

I have updated my annual posts of recommendations of cookbooks and gifts for the cooks in your life. My top board games of the year columns for Paste and Vulture should both go up next week; I’ll post my year-end music rankings here the week of the 17th.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The New York Review of Books looks at the plight of undocumented farm workers in California, under the increased pressure to deport them going back more than ten years, even though these workers are the reason we have affordable (or, more accurate, artificially underpriced) food on our tables.
The Guardian ran an excerpt from a 2016 book called The Spy Who Couldn’t Spell, a fascinating story of a master sergeant in the Air Force who decided to try to sell thousands of pages of classified documents to the governments of Iraq and Libya.
GQ ran a long tribute to the late Anthony Bourdain.
The New York Times‘ Ross Douthat wrote a column lamenting the loss of our ruling class of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men that would have been funny were it not so utterly ignorant; Splinter’s Libby Watson had the best excoriation of the column I saw.
As bad as the Times‘ regular editorial writers are, their investigative journalists continue to churn out good work, like the revelation that Trump employs illegal immigrants at his golf course in New Jersey, including the Guatemalan woman who made Trump’s bed.
Jane Coaston explains the Jeffrey Epstein case, and how he got away with serial rapes of underage girls, over at Vox.
Jennifer Rubin writes in the Washington Post that we’re now seeing the “Trump economy,” and it ain’t good. The President inherited a strong economy, and his advocacy of protectionist policies in particular is helping to weaken it.
There’s an actual voter fraud case going on in North Carolina right now, and the perpetrators are – in a shocking twist! – Republicans. The Washington Post has pieces on the operative with a criminal history at the heart of the scandal and on the old-fashioned investigative reporting that has helped uncover it.
Slate’s Jamelle Bouie looks at Republicans’ lame-duck power grabs in Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina. The national party’s tacit support of these moves should tell you all you need to know about its moral rot.
Author David Neiwert posted a long Twitter thread on the history of the Aryan Nations and related white supremacist groups, in part a response to convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza’s regular claims that “liberals are the real Nazis.”
New York has a piece arguing that Uber’s business model is unsustainable and probably unfixable.
Adminstrators and faculty members at Temple University wanted tenured professor Marc Lamont Hill fired for his advocacy of statehood for Palestine, specifically for using the phrase “free Palestine from the river to the sea,” which some groups use as a code for the destruction of Israel.
The Philippines may be on the verge of a measles outbreak, the result of anti-vaxxer disinformation and conflict between the state and Islamist rebels in the archipelago.
Italy’s pseudoscience-spouting health minister sacked the board of the country’s main committee of scientists, who advised the government on health policy. Giulia Grillo has opposed mandatory vaccination laws and supports the “Five-Star Movement,” which also opposes those laws and has pushed quack ‘cures’ for cancer.
The Weekly Standard‘s David Shabtai argues that vaccine denialists are hurting efforts to protect ‘religious freedom’ by using it as a backdoor way to avoid mandatory vaccinations. There’s a simple solution to this: Ban all nonmedical exemptions to childhood vaccination requirements.
The simplest way individuals can fight climate change is to stop wasting so much food. Food waste is the #1 contributor to landfills, and landfills contribute 14% of U.S. methane emissions. (Methane is a far more potent contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide.)
Climate scientist Michael Mann pre-empted an attempt by a coal industry front group to obtain his emails from the six years he spent at the University of Virginia by releasing them all himself.
New Jersey taxpayers paid $18 million to build a beautiful minor-league ballpark in Camden that was supposed to host an independent league team, which folded a few years later after they couldn’t agree to a new lease. Now taxpayers will spend another $1 million to tear the stadium down.
Parker Molloy explains in the New York Times why Twitter’s ban on deadnaming trans people will promote free speech rather than hindering it.
Utah Representative Chris Stewart (guess) defended the state-sponsored murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by saying “journalists disappear all the time,” which is a hell of a way to encourage people and governments to kill or just ‘disappear’ reporters who are bothering them.
This won’t make anyone mad: A Yale psychiatry professor says Trump supporters exhibit emotional patterns most children outgrow by age five, notably the “might makes right” mentality, which I’d argue also defines most of U.S. foreign policy of the last hundred years. There’s actually a lot more in this piece about how demagogues like Trump manipulate their bases to attain and hold on to power.
A man thought he would put one over on advice columnist Amy Dickinson and the #MeToo movement in general, but he forgot that Dickinson would get the final say, and she drags him appropriately.
The Good Place‘s Jameela Jamil wrote an op ed for the BBC arguing that airbrushing in adverts should be illegal.
The Cut’s “I Think About This a Lot” series is back with a piece by Karen Geier on the parody account PrinceTweets2U’s epic response to Time Warner Cable.
Board game news: Dire Wolf announced the fall 2019 release of Clank! Legacy Acquisitions Incorporated, a joint development with Renegade (publishers of Clank!) and Penny Arcade.
CMON announced a seven-day Kickstarter for a digital adaptation of their game Blood Rage, and it has funded at 1000% already through day five.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board games, climate change, food waste, free speech, links, north carolina, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ December 6, 2018
→ By keith

Gift guide for cooks, 2018 edition.

As usual, this is a repost of the previous year’s list, with new items I’ve added clearly marked, and some minor edits to the rest. I’ve added a new paragraph at the time rattling off a few things I’ve gotten in the last year, or that I had already but never thought to include in this post. Enjoy and feel free to ask questions in the comments.

I’ve seen a few “Christmas gift guides for the cooks in your life!” over the last couple of years, but most of them are like this 2014 gem from Grub Street, with recommendations for things that no one could possibly need – a “rosemary stripper” (I have two of those; I call them “hands”); a “banana slicer” (use your paring knife, genius); a $140 toaster (makes toast); and a $1600 set of Thomas Keller-branded pans, which, unless he forged them personally out of pure adamantium, are a colossal fucking waste of money. These are not gifts to by the cook in your life; these are gifts to buy the person in your life who pretends to cook but really just likes playing with toys. Toys don’t make you a better chef; they just make you a less socially responsible one.

I do have a few pricier toys in my kitchen, but aside from one, they’re all highly functional, at the middle to low end of the price range for their jobs, and built to last a long time. I’ve had my chef’s knife for over a decade, my food processor for 17 years (my next upgrade – looking at this Cuisinart model), my Dutch oven for about eight years, and just replaced my 18-year-old stand mixer when we moved in 2013. You are free to call me cheap, but I think I’m just prudent. I’ll spend money in the kitchen if it gets me something I need. I will not spend money to get a famous name, a fancy design, or a paperweight to live at the back of a gadget drawer until we move again. If I can make do with something I already have in the house – binder clips, a (clean) putty knife, a (clean) paintbrush – I’ll gladly do that instead.

Therefore, what I recommend here – for your cheffy friends or for yourself – is largely what I own and use. If what I own isn’t available, or isn’t good value for the price, I recommend something else. I am also willing to answer any and all questions about these or other suggestions; if I include it here, that’s an endorsement that it’ll be money well spent. I will post an updated list of cookbooks I recommend in the next few days; in the meantime, here’s last year’s list.

New stuff in 2018: About two years ago, I picked up this $18 bamboo cutting board and have used pretty much nothing else since then. It’s safe for any knife, easy to clean, and just requires occasional oiling (use mineral oil) to keep it smooth. Wood is better than plastic for several reasons, one of which is that bacteria like the grooves that knives put into plastic boards … I’ve actually owned a Rabbit corkscrew for years, but never thought to put it on this list. It’s the easiest way to open a bottle of wine short of sabrage, using leverage rather than requiring you to twist while applying downward force. … I own this OXO stainless steel bench scraper/pastry cutter and use it all the time, both for cutting doughs and for cleaning countertops of anything fine or that might have stuck to the surface – such as flour left on the counter after you kneaded dough or shaped cookies. … I use this amazon basics electric kettle several times a day, boiling water for tea, coffee, and often for cooking… And finally, I received one heck of a gift for my birthday from a longtime friend: A santoku by Yu Kurosaki, made in Echizen, Japan. It is by far the sharpest thing I’ve ever owned, which means I have to cut more carefully than before, but can also make smaller cuts (mincing, julienning) and can use less force when cutting. I’ve seen his knives on specialty sites for varying prices.

The most important tool for any cook is a good chef’s knife, and I love my Henckels 8″ chef’s knife, although I have a discontinued model with a different handle. It’s a workhorse, has only needed professional sharpening once, and is a comfortable grip and weight for my rather small hands. Henckels seems to have cut its list prices, so that knife lists at $52 and is on sale now for $42, so while in past years I’ve steered readers towards the $43 Victorinox 8″ chef’s knife, which America’s Test Kitchen has long recommended, there’s no good reason to skip the Henckels when it’s a buck cheaper.

The basic knives any home cook must have are a chef’s knife, a paring knife, and a bread (serrated) knife. The bread knife is good for more than just slicing bread – serrated blades are safer for slicing tomatoes, and they’re excellent for chopping chocolate and other hard foods. I have another Henckels four-star model, also eight inches, but the same blade is available with a different handle for just $13. You might look at a 10” blade if you get a lot of large, artisanal loaves. Any strong paring knife will do, such as this Victornix 3.5″ paring knife at just over $7. With a modicum of knife skills, you can tweak and hull strawberries with one of these without any risk to your fingers or waste of fruit. It’s also good for cutting citrus supremes, slicing apples and pears, pitting olives and cherries, and other fine-motor-skills work.

I do have two other knives I use frequently, but they’re not essential for most cooks. One is the santoku, a very sharp knife with a thin edge but wide body that’s ideal for slicing vegetables and hard fruits; I recommend a 7” blade, which you can get in this two-santoku Henckels set for $22 and just … I don’t know, regift the 5” version or something, because I can’t see any use for it. The boning knife I own, from Henckels, appears to be discontinued, but there’s another Henckels 5.5″ boning knife for $26 that looks like it has the same blade. A boning knife is ideal for breaking down a whole chicken – it’s substantially cheaper to buy a whole chicken (sometimes called a broiler-fryer, usually 3-5 pounds total weight) and cut it into parts, and you get the bones to make stock – or for deboning other cuts of meat like short ribs. Some folks recommend a flexible blade instead, but I have never used that kind so I can’t give an opinion.

I finally caved and bought a home knife sharpener in 2015, buying this Chef’s Choice Diamond Hone 3 Stage Sharpener, a manual sharpener that turned out to be both easy to use and very effective; I sharpened every knife I own and even a few pairs of scissors, including the kitchen shears some of you’ve seen me using to spatchcock my Thanksgiving turkeys.

My pots and pans aren’t a single set any more; I have some remnants from an All-Clad anodized aluminum set I got with rewards points in 2001, but have swapped out certain pieces to get better nonstick (coated) skillets. What you really should get for your loved one (you may include yourself in that category) is a a 12″ Lodge cast-iron skillet, an absolute workhorse that can handle about 90% of what I need from a skillet or a saute pan. I still use a nonstick skillet for egg dishes, and a saucier (sadly one that’s no longer made) for sauces or custards, but the Lodge skillet is past a decade old and just keeps getting better. The work of seasoning them is nowhere near as arduous as you’ve heard.

I got a Lodge 10″ carbon steel skillet for Christmas in 2015, and I love it. It’s not as nonstick as the cast-iron one, which I’ve had for years and thus has built up more of a coating, but for getting a pan rocket-hot quickly and working fast on something small, it’s great. I’ve found that the more I use it, the more resistant the surface becomes to sticking – even eggs – and it is the ideal skillet for making the dramatic, puffy pancake known as a Dutch baby.

If you want to splurge on something, get an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven, great for soups, stews, braises, deep-frying, jam-making, and caramelizing huge batches of onions. Cast-iron doesn’t distribute heat well, but it holds heat for a long time. These pots are heavy, but I use mine for every saucepan duty that doesn’t involve boiling water or cooking grains on their own. They go stove to oven (as do the skillets) and can take the hours of low heating required for a proper braise. I own a Le Creuset that I got on sale at an outlet store because the color was discontinued; if you’re not quite that fortunate, try the 7.5 quart Lodge model for $80.

I upgraded my stockpot last year with this $36 Excelsteel 16 Quart Stainless Steel Stockpot. I make stock constantly throughout the year; I buy whole chickens, break them down myself, and freeze the carcasses and necks for future stocks. I also made a turkey stock after Thanksgiving with the backbone, neck, and the picked-clean roasted carcass, and the result was so full of gelatin that it was solid at room temperature. (It made an unbelievably rich turkey and soba noodle soup.) I needed a good stockpot since my previous one’s pseudo-nonstick finish had started to fade; this pot is also taller and heavier so it holds the heat in more effectively and I can do a double batch with two chicken carcasses and plenty of aromatics. I usually have to get at the interior bottom with a little Bon Ami, though. It’s also been my go-to pot for sous-vide cooking, since it’s deep enough to hold my circulator.

I don’t own a proper mandolin slicer, but I do pretty well with a handheld mandolin for under $20 that works great for things like root-vegetable chips or thinly slicing onions. I use my digital instant-read thermometer almost every night, and I’ve run through at least three of them over the last ten years. Amazon tells me that I bought my Microplane classic grater in November of 2003, and I’ve had their coarse grater for almost that long. The former is great for zesting citrus fruits or grating nutmeg; the latter is ideal for creating a snowfall of hard cheese over a pasta dish. I now own four silicone baking mats, two of which are amazon brand, now listed at two for $14 but which I got cheaper on Prime Day a few years ago – but I find I’m using them less and parchment paper more, especially for cookies, where the silicone seems to retard browning.

I own two scales – a chef I’m friends with on Twitter made fun of me for this – one, this AWS Digital Pocket Scale for weights up to about 2 kg, which is ideal for precise measurements like grams of coffee (more on that in a moment), and a larger scale that’s long discontinued. I picked up this $13 Ozeri scale for weighing larger quantities, measuring up to 12 kg; I rarely need to measure more than about two pounds of anything, maybe a little more for some large-batch baking but that’s about it. You need at least one good scale if you’re serious about baking, though; the best bread and pastry recipes all use grams, not cups or liters. I finally killed my digital candy/frying thermometer this year, replacing it with an old-fashioned, $7.50 analog frying thermometer. I use it for jam, macarons, and my various deep-frying experiments (see the sous-vide discussion below). You absolutely must have one of these to make caramel, any kind of jam or preserves, or true buttercream frosting.

I haven’t included this on past lists, but I do use my OXO potato ricer for mashed potatoes – it’s much better than a so-called “masher,” which is otherwise useful for guacamole or for crushing fruits while making jam but makes lumpy mashed potatoes.

Other things I always appreciate getting or often end up buying for myself: Wooden spatulas (not spoons), silicone spatulas, good (not decorative) metal measuring spoons, Pyrex or similar measuring cups for liquids (never measure liquids in a plastic cup designed for measuring solids).

I don’t have this exact brand/model, but I love having a few silicone ingredient cups in the kitchen. I use one for measuring and pouring out coffee grounds, and I often have another one next to the stove with salt or freshly ground pepper or toasted sesame seeds to add to something right before serving.

Now, for the expensive stuff:

* In 2017, I finally caved and upgraded my food processor to this 14-cup Cuisinart model, although mine is black and has a slightly different model number (which I can’t find on amazon). You can get a 7-cup model for $100, and it will probably be fine for most home cooks. I have a few recipes I make regularly that require the larger capacity. But you kind of need a food processor for things like pesto, hummus, mayonnaise, pie or biscuit doughs (if you don’t want to or can’t do them by hand), and my favorite pumpkin pie recipe. The blade on this is extremely thin and sharp, so wash it very carefully; the manual recommends putting it on the top rack of the dishwasher so you don’t risk your fingers.

* I’ve gone full geek, getting an Anova sous-vide immersion circulator (pot not included) and using it frequently for cooking chicken legs, chicken breasts, steak, and pork. Serious Eats has many recipes for it, and I’ve used their chicken thighs recipe many times, often cooking entire chicken legs that way. (I’ve discovered that, if you can handle some spattering, you can take the drumsticks, pat them dry, then bread and deep-fry them for some of the juiciest fried chicken you’ll ever taste.) I’ve cooked skirt steak, which can be tough even when cooked medium-rare, sous-vide and it melted in our mouths. Sous-vide cooking takes time, and some up-front investment – I caved and bought a FoodSaver vacuum-sealer, although you can do it with zip-top bags too – but once you use it you’ll find it indispensable.

* I have this Vitamix 1782 TurboBlend “food preparing machine” (it’s a blender, stupid), and it’s amazing. I can make smooth vegetable soups with it, no cream required; don’t toss those broccoli stalks, just peel, quarter, and roast them, then blend them with some vegetable stock and season to taste, maybe with some basil oil and toasted pumpkin seeds on top. I used it at Thanksgiving 2015 to make the carrot soup in Hugh Acheson’s The Broad Fork. The blender is down to $328 (from four bills), but that’s too much if you’re just making milkshakes and smoothies (and there is nothing wrong with just making milkshakes and smoothies). You’ll probably be fine with just a basic blender and the food processor.

* I have the 5-quart KitchenAid stand mixer, which is about $270 right now. I kind of wish I had the next model up, mostly for bread-baking, which is still a bit of a chore for this model, but it’s great for everything else – mixing up cookie dough, brownie batter, quick breads, whipped cream, and Italian meringues (for macarons). The pasta-maker attachment is overpriced, but it does the job, and the grinder attachment has been good for me in a handful of uses, especially for turning stale bread into bread crumbs.

* Coffee is my big kitchen weakness, at least when it comes to spending money; I’m fortunate to have a few friends in the industry (whom I met through social media) who work for direct-trade roasters and have tipped me off to good sources of coffee and helped me pay for the gear I own, which is wonderful but expensive. The Baratza Virtuoso burr grinder is the least expensive grinder of its kind and caliber; when my first one had an issue with the motor, I sent a quick video of it jamming to Baratza and had a new machine within two weeks. I do make pour-over coffee at home using this Hario V60 ceramic dripper, but my preference is espresso, for which I use a Rancilio Silvia machine that is a wonder. The boiler is huge, so it bounces back quickly between shots and you can heat up the steam wand before your shots go cold. (You can probably beat that price by $30-40 if you shop around.) If you get your ratios right – for me it’s 17.5 to 19 grams per double shot, depending on the bean and roast – you’ll get great crema, 30-32 grams of output in 25-30 seconds, with almost no bad pulls. I use it every morning and I miss it when I travel. I weigh the beans, grounds, and output on the AWS digital scale I mentioned above, which came recommended by a barista at Lord Windsor Roasters in Long Beach, California.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Cooking, gift guides

→ December 5, 2018
→ By keith

Cookbook recommendations, 2018.

This post has become a bit routine now, with the same changes I make each year, adding one or two new titles I own and can recommend; I’ve also added notes on some newer titles I don’t have yet or haven’t sufficiently tested. As usual, I’ve grouped my suggestions into categories: The essentials, which any home cook regardless of experience level should own; the advanced books for expert home cooks; a few cookbooks from Top Chef-affiliated folks that I recommend; and bread-baking books, all by one author because I’ve never needed any others.

New for 2018

I’ve got a strong recommendation this year for those of you who like baking, especially sweets: Brave Tart, from Stella Parks. Brave Tart‘s real emphasis is homemade recreations of popular American dessert items, especially branded ones – Parks’ versions of Oreos, Thin Mints and Trefoils from the Girl Scouts, Little Debbie Oatmeal Pies, and so on. Parks also writes for Serious Eats, and their ethos of testing the hell out of every recipe, using weight rather than volume, and offering concise explanations for anything that deviates from the norm carries over into the book. My only quibble so far has been that recipes for rolled cookies (including the Oreos and the Trefoils) called for a thinner cookie than I’d like.

Jeremy Fox’s On Vegetables is definitely one for the experienced home cook, as it requires knowledge of techniques and ingredients that assume quite a bit of the reader. I’ve found it better for giving me ideas than for providing me with specific recipes to make, as so many of them are more involved than I want a vegetable dish to be and/or call for ingredients I can’t easily get. I’ve browsed some lists of the year’s “best” cookbooks, and so many of them are meat-centric or written by celebrities rather than people who cook for a living; any book that can give me more ideas for preparing plant-centric dishes is a boon.

Someone’s going to ask about Salt Fat Acid Heat, so I’ll mention it here: I own it, but haven’t read any of its text or tried any recipes just yet.

Essentials

There are two cookbooks that I insist any home cook have. One is the venerable Joy of Cooking, revised and altered through many editions (I own the 1997, now out of print), but still the go-to book for almost any common dish you’re likely to want to make. The recipes take a very easy-to-follow format, and the book assumes little to no experience or advanced technique. I still use it all the time, including their basic bread stuffing (dressing) recipe every Thanksgiving, altered just with the addition of a diced red bell pepper.

The other indisputable must-have cookbook is, of course, Ruhlman’s Twenty, by the best food writer going today, Michael Ruhlman. The book comprises twenty chapters, each on a technique or core ingredient, with a hundred recipes, lots of essays to explain key concepts or methods, and photographs to help you understand what you’re cooking. It’s my most-used cookbook, the first cookbook gift I give to anyone looking to start a collection, and an absolute pleasure to read and re-read. Favorite recipes include the seared pork tenderloin with butter and more butter; the cured salmon; the homemade mayonnaise (forget the stuff in the jar, it’s a pale imitation); the pulled pork; all three duck recipes; the scrambled eggs with goat cheese (using a modified double-boiler method, so you get something more like custard than rubber); and the homemade bacon. Many of these recipes appear again in his more recent book, Egg: A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient, along with more egg basics and a lot of great dessert recipes; and Twenty itself builds on Ruhlman’s Ratio, which shows you master formulas for things like doughs and sauces so you can understand the fundamentals of each recipe and extend as you see fit.

I’ve long recommended Baking Illustrated as the perfect one-book kitchen reference for all things baked – cookies, cakes, pies, breads, and more. It’s full of standards, tested to ensure that they will work the first time. You’ll need a scale to get maximum use from the book. I use their pie crust recipe, their peach pie recipe, their snickerdoodles recipe (kids love it, but moms seem to love it even more…), and I really want to try their sticky toffee pudding recipe. The prose can be a little cloying, but I skip most of that and go right to the recipes because I know they’ll succeed the first time. That link will get you the original book from the secondary market; it has been rewritten from scratch and titled The Cook’s Illustrated Baking Book, but I can’t vouch for it as I haven’t seen the new text.

J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s mammoth The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, named for Kenji’s acclaimed and indispensable column over at Serious Eats, is a must for any advanced or aspiring home cook. Unlike many of the books here, The Food Lab is a better resource for its text than its recipes – I’ve made a bunch of dishes from the book, with a few that just didn’t work out (e.g., the pork shoulder ragout), but every page seems to have something to teach you. The one caution I’ll offer is that it doesn’t include any sous-vide recipes, which is something Kenji does a lot on Serious Eats’ site, although he does have a section on replicating the sous-vide technique using cheaper materials like a portable cooler.

If I know someone already has Ruhlman’s Twenty, my next gift choice for them is Nigel Slater’s Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch, a book about vegetables but not strictly vegetarian. (There’s a lot of bacon here.) Each vegetable gets its own section, with explanations on how to grow it, how to choose it at the market, a half-dozen or more basic ways to cook it, and then a bunch of specific recipes, some of which are just a paragraph and some of which are a full page with glorious pictures accompanying them. The stuffed peppers with ground pork is a near-weekly occurrence in this house, and the warm pumpkin scone is the only good reason to buy and cook an actual pumpkin. I own but have barely cooked from his sequel on fruit, Ripe: A Cook in the Orchard, because it’s more focused on desserts than savory applications.

Another essential if you want to cook more vegetables is Hugh Acheson’s 2015 book The Broad Fork, which has become the first book I consult when I have a vegetable and am not sure what I want to do with it. Acheson conceived the book in response to a neighbor’s question about what the hell to do with the kohlrabi he got in a CSA box, and the whole book works like that: You have acquired some Vegetable and need to know where to start. Organized by season and then by plant, with plenty of fruits and a few nuts mixed in for good measure, the book gives you recipes and ideas by showing off each subject in various preparations – raw, in salads, in soups, roasted, grilled, pureed, whatever. There are main course ideas in here as well, some with meat or fish, others vegetarian or vegan, and many of the multi-part dishes are easy to deconstruct, like the charred-onion vinaigrette in the cantaloupe/prosciutto recipe that made a fantastic steak sauce. Most of us need to eat more plants anyway; Acheson’s book helps make that a tastier goal. It’s also witty, as you’d expect from the slightly sardonic Canadian if you’ve seen him on TV. As I write this in December 2017, I just pulled it out again last night for some ideas, and ended up making his roasted shiitake salad with celery, oranges, and ponzu sauce. Acheson also has a new book out, 2017’s The Chef and the Slow Cooker, which I don’t own, but I’ve made recipes from it that were reprinted in Fine Cooking, braising in a Dutch oven rather than using a slow cooker or Instant Pot, and they were unsurprisingly excellent.

You know, a lot of people will tell you go get Julia Child’s classic books on French cuisine, but I find the one I have (Mastering the Art) to be dated and maddeningly unspecific. Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom is a slimmer, much more useful book that focuses on the basics – her explanation of vinaigrettes is still the gold standard, and her gift for distilling recipes and techniques into simple little explanations shines here without the fuss of three-day recipes for coq au vin. Oh, that’s in here too, but she does it in two and a half hours.

Experts

The The Flavor Bible isn’t actually a cookbook, but a giant cross-referencing guide where each ingredient comes with a list of complementary ingredients or flavors, as selected by a wide range of chefs the authors interviewed to assemble the book. It’s the book you want to pull out when your neighbor gives you a few handfuls of kale or your local grocery store puts zucchini on sale and you don’t know what to do with them. Or maybe you’re just tired of making salmon the same way and need some fresh ideas. The book doesn’t tell you how to cook anything, just what else to put on the plate. Spoiler: Bacon and butter go with just about everything.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty is an outstanding vegetable-focused cookbook that uses no meat ingredients (but does use dairy and eggs), although Ottolenghi’s restaurant uses meats and he offers a few suggestions on pairing his recipes with meat dishes. The recipes here are longer and require a higher skill level than those in Tender, but they’re restaurant-quality in flavor and presentation, including a mushroom ragout that I love as a main course over pappardelle with a poached egg (or two) on top and my favorite recipe for preparing Belgian endives (a pinch of sugar goes a long way). Ottolenghi has a brand-new cookbook out called Simple that I haven’t picked up yet but will.

Thomas Keller’s Bouchon Bakery cookbook ($11 for Kindle right now) has long been my standby for high-end dessert recipes, but unlike Baking Illustrated, the recipes are written for people who are more skilled and incredibly serious about baking. Ingredients are measured to the gram, and the recipes assume a full range of techniques. It has the best macaron recipe I’ve ever found – close second is I Love Macarons – and the Bouchon book has also the homemade Oreo recipe I made for Halloween a few years ago (but you need black cocoa to do it right, and I use buttercream as the filling instead of their unstable white-chocolate ganache).

For the really hardcore, Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen is an essential kitchen reference, full of explanations of the chemistry of cooking that will make you a smarter cook and help you troubleshoot many problems at the stove. I haven’t read it straight through – it’s 700-plus pages – but I’ll go to the index and pull out some wisdom as needed. It also explains why some people (coughmecough) never acquired the taste for strongly-flavored cheeses.

April Bloomfield’s A Girl and Her Pig has the duck fat-fried potato recipe that got my daughter hooked on the dish, as well as a good selection of staple sauces, dressings, and starches to go along with the numerous meat dishes, including some offal recipes, one of which (made from minced pig’s heart and liver, with bacon, onion, and breadcrumbs) can’t be named here.

I can sort of recommend Flour + Water: Pasta, a cookbook from the chef/owner of flour + water in San Francisco, although it’s not for everyone. The restaurant is nationally renowned for its fresh pasta dishes, and this cookbook is a grand tour of regional Italian cooking, with just about any style of pasta you can imagine, and the best directions on how to form, knead, and shape the pasta that I’ve come across. Every pasta dish I’ve made from this book has come out great the first time. There’s a catch, however: the non-pasta aspects of the recipes are poorly written and were clearly never tested by any non-professionals. One recipe calls for starting a sauce by cooking onions over high heat … for eight minutes, which is fine if you want to burn them (you don’t). Times and temperatures are off throughout, so if you’re a novice in the kitchen, this isn’t the book for you. If you’ve cooked a lot, especially Italian sauces, then you’ll spot the errant directions and make adjustments as you go. And the pasta is truly spectacular, enough that you might do as I did and spring for a garganelli board (used to shape a specific hand-rolled noodle).

Top Chef Division

Richard Blais’ Try This at Home has become a staple in my kitchen both for about a half-dozen specific recipes in here that we love (sweet potato gnocchi, lemon curd chicken, arroz con pollo, sous-vide chicken breast) and for the creativity it inspires. Blais has lots of asides on techniques and ingredients, and if you actually read the text instead of just blindly following the recipes, you’ll get a sense of the extensibility of the basic formulas within the book, even though he isn’t as explicit about it as Ruhlman is. His second book, So Good, came out in May 2017; I’ve tried four recipes so far, with the chicken thighs adobo and spicy green pozole both hits. I make that adobo recipe, which uses lots of ginger and garlic, a bit of brown sugar, and some vinegar (he recommends pineapple vinegar, but I haven’t found that in any stores yet) for a unique flavor profile.

Hugh Acheson’s first book, A New Turn in the South, and Top Chef season one winner Harold Dieterle’s Harold Dieterle’s Kitchen Notebook are also regulars in my cookbook rotation. Acheson’s book reads the way he speaks, so that it comes off more like you’re hanging out with the guy, talking food, rather than taking instruction. His bacon-wrapped whole fish recipe is unbelievable, more for the powerful aromatics (winner, best use of fennel) than for the bacon itself. Dieterle’s book requires some harder-to-find items, but his side essays on specific ingredients run from the mundane to the esoteric and drop a ton of knowledge on how to choose and how to use.

Bread

I’ve owned and given away or sold a lot of bread-baking books, because nothing has been able to beat the two masterworks by baker/instructor Peter Reinhart, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice and Whole Grain Breads. Reinhart’s books teach you how to make artisan or old-world breads using various starters, from overnight bigas to wild-yeast starters you can grow and culture on your countertop. If that seems like a little much, his Artisan Breads Every Day takes it down a notch for the novice baker, with a lot of the same recipes presented in a simpler manner, without so much emphasis on baker’s formulas, and is a good value at $24.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: cookbooks, Cooking, gift guides

→ December 4, 2018
→ By keith

Music update, November 2018.

My last monthly playlist before I write up my annual top 100 list – some time after next week’s winter meetings – has twenty-two new tracks, including a handful of brand-new (to me) artists likely to appear on that year-end ranking, plus three metal acts who were big when I was still in high school. You can access the Spotify playlist here if you can’t see the widget below.

Jade Bird – Love Has All Been Done Before. This 21-year-old English singer-songwriter has a powerful voice in both meanings of the term, reminding me quite a bit of the similarly-named Jake Bugg. (If they collaborated, would they go by Bird & Bugg?) It’s folk-rock with a dash of Janis Joplin in her all-out singing style. I haven’t been able to stop listening to this song since I first heard it.

Sunflower Bean – Come For Me. This New York trio released second album, Twentytwo in Blue, in March, but they’re already back with a new EP due out in late January, headlined by this rocker that I think makes better use of singer Julia Cumming’s voice.

Piroshka – Everlastingly Yours. Lush broke up for good two years ago, but singer/guitarist Miki Berenyi is back with this supergroup of ’90s alternative figures, with members of Modern English, Moose, and Elastica along for the ride. This first single is wonderfully anachronistic, like we’re back in 1995 and Britpop is still a thing.

The Wombats – Oceans. The second bonus track on the deluxe edition of the Wombats’ album Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, along with “Bee-Sting,” is among the best tracks from the record; I was lukewarm on the album as a whole before these two new songs came out, but now there are at least a half-dozen great tracks to recommend from the LP.

Sundara Karma – One Last Night On This Earth. This English indie-pop band, which gets a lot of U2 comparisons (I don’t hear it myself), is set to release its sophomore album, Ulfilas’ Alphabet, in March, with this the lead single, boasting a strong melodic hook and their now-familiar, slightly rough around the edges sort of sound.

YONAKA – Creature. The title track from this British act’s latest EP is a little slower and sultrier than some of their harder and more obnoxious (in a good way) songs like “Wouldn’t Wanna Be Ya,” but the driving guitars, which are all over this four-track EP, still really work even shifted down a gear.

Darlingside – Singularity. Darlingside has been around for a few years but are new to me, at least, with their new album Extralife. There’s an Americana element here like we get from the Avett Brothers, the soft harmonies of Fleet Foxes, and a bit of the sampling of multiple genres from the first Mumford & Sons album.

Acid Dad – Living with a Creature. Psychedelic dance-rock that’s heavier on the guitars, boosted by the effects on the vocals that give the whole track a trippy vibe. Their self-titled debut album dropped in March.

Drenge – Bonfire of the City Boys. I keep hoping these singles are pointing towards a new album from the brothers Loveless, with this the third solid one this year, seeing Eoin speaking rather than singing over a droning, heavy bass line.

Preoccupations – Pontiac 87. Preoccupations are touring with Protomartyr, so they released a cover of Protomartyr’s 2015 track “Pontiac 87,” from the latter’s album The Agent Intellect, giving it more stuttering, frenetic percussion, and a spacier vocal line.

Radkey – Junes. Radkey seem to have hit a stride with their last few singles after their 2016 album lost a little momentum from their debut; these tracks have all been a little harder and more uptempo. I feel like they would have been huge in the late 1990s.

Bob Mould – What Do You Want Me To Do. Shouldn’t this be called “What Dü You Want Me to Dü?”

Anteros – Call Your Mother. I loved Anteros’ “Cherry Drop” from last year, but since then they’ve released just two singles, with this the catcher of the two but definitely downshifted from that favorite of mine from 2017.

Swervedriver – Drone Lover. If Pavement released a shoegaze track in 1993, this would be it.

Black Honey – Teenager. A great new track from the deluxe edition of their self-titled debut album, which now includes “Somebody Better,” my favorite of their pre-album singles that didn’t appear on the initial release, and “All My Pride” too.

Body Type – Palms. This is my favorite single so far from this Australian quartet (all women), with the quick pace and the interlaced vocals contributing to the sense of unease permeating the entire track.

Ten Fé – No Night Lasts Forever. I am running out of things to say about Ten Fé, who have figured out what sort of song they write well and then keep churning out catchy songs in that vein.

The Twilight Sad – VTr. The Scottish indie-rockers, who bear an undeniable similarity to other bands that revel in depression like Joy Division and Interpol, will drop their fifth album, It Won/t Be Like This All the Time, on January 19th.

Myrkur – Juniper. Danish chanteuse Amalie Bruun is back with her symphonic/folk/black metal project Myrkur, with this track focusing more on the former elements as well as her ethereal voice, with less of the pure metal elements that sometimes appear in her music.

Flotsam & Jetsam – Recover. The last three tracks on my playlist this month are all from thrash bands whose commercial peaks came in the 1980s and are still producing the same kind of music they did 30 years ago, with this F&J track my favorite of the three. Their 13th studio album, The End of Chaos, will drop in January, but it sounds like they haven’t lost a step or bowed at all to the commercial shift towards the genres that descended from thrash.

Metal Church – Out of Balance. There’s a great riff and generally strong guitarwork here, with really dopey lyrics that lead to an annoyingly catchy chorus.

Sodom – Partisan. Sodom is one of the ‘big four’ of German thrash, along with Kreator and Destruction, both of whom have appeared on my lists before, as well as Tankard. Only one original member of Sodom, bassist and lead screamer Thomas “Angelripper” Such, remains, but this track is still a throwback to the sort of early, heavier thrash that put Sodom at the vanguard of the genre and influenced the first wave of Nordic black metal bands as well. That said, this track itself isn’t that great, more of a curiosity from a band of historical importance whose sound hasn’t aged that well.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 in music, alternative, indie, metal, Music

→ December 1, 2018
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/1/18.

I had two ESPN+ pieces this week, one on MLB’s recent showcase for Venezuelan amateur players and one on the Josh Donaldson and Jesse Chavez contracts. Furthermore, I’ve been busy making calls for my annual prospect rankings, which will run the final week of January into February. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I have a new review up covering the roll-and-write game Welcome To, which uses cards rather than dice, and can play any number of players at once. It’s really fun, probably my favorite light game of 2018.

I suppose I’ll write another edition of my free email newsletter soon, just as soon as my girl finds me an acre of land.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The best thing I read this week was Laura Trujillo’s piece in USA Today about grieving and accepting her mother’s suicide. Trujillo’s mother jumped to her death at the Grand Canyon in 2012, shortly after Trujillo told her mother that her stepfather had raped her for several years while Trujillo was a teenager.
Sociologist and author William Davies writes in the Guardian about how the elites eroded public trust, paving way for the new populism, led by “common-knowledge” liars like Trump and Farage.
Former anti-vaxxer activist David Ayoub is now testifying as an “expert witness” on behalf of accused child abusers. He’s a radiologist who has a history of saying that vaccines cause autism and that mandatory vaccinations are part of a plan of genocide to control population growth, and has no formal training in the areas in which he testifies.
Also from ProPublica, North Carolina was supposed to force pig farmers to come up with an alternative to storing hog waste in open lagoons, but they’re still doing it, and climate change is making it even more dangerous. It’s not mentioned in the article, but this seems tailor-made for a cholera epidemic. For more on this subject you might want to read Barry Estabrook’s book Pig Tales.
Hangin’ Hyde-Smith won the special election this past Tuesday to represent Mississippi in the Senate, but she has to run again for the same seat in two years, so it’s worth sharing that she attended an all-white high school and sent her child to the same to avoid having to go to school with African-American students.
There is no leftist case for nationalism, writes Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in The Nation in response to a documentarian’s apparent defense of the anti-immigrant beliefs of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer.
That Thrillist writer who claimed his ranking of a Portland bar’s hamburger as the best in the country ended up shuttering the restaurant missed all of the owner’s significant legal troubles, including a no-contest plea to charges of choking his then-wife, who at the time had stage 4 breast cancer, and multiple charges related to alcohol abuse.
A New York Times editorial eviscerates the ‘I turned out fine’ argument against restrictions on child abuse.
Anti-vaccine sentiment is spreading in France due to the viral nature of fake news about vaccine safety, possibly further spread by Russian trollbots.
Emory Professor of global health, epidemiology, and pediatrics Saad B. Omer explains how small groups of vaccine refusers can make large groups of people sick. Every state should ban all non-medical exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws for children.
The Forward looks at the battle over vaccines in Orthodox Jewish communities. Philadelphia’s Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetzky and his wife Temi are vocal anti-vaxxers, openly lying to their community about vaccines’ efficacy.
Concerned about climate change, as you should be? Vote against Republicans.
The Trump Administration’s own (mandated) report on climate change was dire, so they tried to bury it by releasing it on Black Friday. Remember that the EPA is currently rolling back regulations that would reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, because the Administration’s policy on climate change is that it’s not real. (Narrator: It is.)
Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange before the 2016 election and before Assange’s decision to dump material hacked from the DNC. Maybe now we can stop pretending Assange is some sort of champion of freedom.
Right-wing violence is on the rise in the United States. In response, Sinclair made all its stations run a segment about the dangers of Antifa.
The British Parliament questioned a Facebook representative this week after seizing a trove of documents related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and it came out that Facebook knew about and ignored Russian hacking back in 2014, two years before Brexit and our last Presidential election.
Four St. Louis cops have been indicted for beating … an undercover officer during the September 2017 protests over another officer’s acquittal for killing an unarmed black man.
France will return 26 statues and other items it stole from Benin, which was part of the former French West Africa colony. Note that they’re not “loaning” the works of art, but returning them to the land from which they were seized during a war on what was then known as Dahomey.
Vox’s Earworm program breaks down John Coltrane’s landmark song “Giant Steps,” explaining why the song is so revered … and ‘feared.’ (Is it the Jim Rice of jazz?)
Ars Technica spoke to a physicist to explain why spin speed and axis make different pitches move the way they do.
British baseball blog Bat Flips & Nerds has some thoughts on the exorbitant ticket prices for MLB games in London next July. The only somewhat inexpensive seats are so far from the field that they would be outside of any MLB stadium, and seeing game action from them might require binoculars. Not great, Rob.
Dr. Mario Elia, a family physician in Canada and a reader of mine, made a video answering all of the common myths and misconceptions about the flu shot.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

→ November 30, 2018
→ By keith

Swing Time.

I didn’t love Zadie Smith’s White Teeth when I first read it, but after reflecting on it, I think it’s because it was so unlike anything I’d read before, and over time it continued to grow on me to the point that I included it the last time I ranked my top 100 novels. I read her third novel, On Beauty, but it looks like I never reviewed it; it was a good read, fast-moving, with well-drawn characters and intelligent themes, but it lacked the power of her debut.

Swing Time is her latest novel, coming out at the tail end of 2016, and covers familiar ground – issues of race, class, gender, and nationality in a global world that would like to tell you that it’s post-racial but is anything but. It bears more of the hyperbolic, frenetic nature of her debut novel – especially compared to the sedate On Beauty x – but there’s a new distance between the reader and the two main characters, the narrator and her friend Tracey, two girls of mixed-race parentage who are joined in childhood by a love of dance and separated by a gulf of class between them.

The narrator, never named in the novel, comes from a higher status than Tracey, in part because Tracey’s father is absent for reasons that are explained during the novel – explained, then revised for accuracy, which is also a huge part of the book. The girls love to watch old musicals, especially those of Fred Astaire*, and try to mimic his dance routines, later adapting those of pop singers they see on TV. Through a couple of coincidences, the narrator ends up a personal assistant to one of those singers, Aimee, some sort of teenage icon who has managed to maintain her following into her 30s, and follows the singer around the world while putting much of her own life on hold for the all-consuming job. Aimee eventually decides to build a girls’ school in The Gambia (never named, but identified as a narrow country, split by a river, ruled by a homophobic dictator, surrounded by Senegal, so there aren’t a lot of choices here), dragging her retinue to the country multiple times, falling in love with a local boy and eventually adopting a baby from the village. The narrator flashes back during this story to her childhood and then intermittent encounters with Tracey after they drifted apart, setting her timeline with Tracey, whose dance career never materializes and ends up in straitened circumstances, against the Africa/Aimee storyline with its absurd use of money and the westerners’ attempts to work with the villagers.

* Yep, somehow I read two straight books, this and Connie Willis’ Terra Incognita, that featured the works of Astaire in a prominent role.

These encounters form a scenario where the distinctions of race, class, and national origin are even starker than what the narrator faced as a black woman in England, allowing Smith to rail against western paternalism and the corruption of African nations. (The dictator described in the book, Yahya Jammeh, lost an election a month after the novel’s publication and was forced from power about six weeks after that.) Nobody in the novel comes off that well; perhaps Fernando, a consultant working with Aimee on the school project who brings some needed cynicism to the circus, is the closest to a sympathetic character, but he’s never fleshed out to the extent that the narrator, Tracey, and Aimee are. Tracey is a sort of train wreck in the distance, facing the consequences of poor decisions, including those made by her parents, while the narrator sails into good fortune and eventually fritters some of it away through immaturity.

Swing Time read to me – and I say that recognizing I may miss much of its subtext – as a novel of big ideas that don’t gel on the page. For example, the narrator visits some tourist sites related to the slave trade, a practice that Smith seems to lampoon, but it’s so tangential to the story that it falls from the mind once the narrator returns to the frantic life of her job with Aimee. The singer herself is a mélange of various disposable pop stars and the second act of Madonna, who set up a nonprofit in Malawi that built a pediatric surgery there; she has since adopted four children from the sub-Saharan nation. Smith is satirizing the do-gooders of the west who would plow money into developing nations without considering whether their efforts are in fact doing good, but the depiction seems to argue that westerners, especially white ones, should stay home, when there are obvious examples of such charitable efforts succeeding as well as failing.

As for Tracey … I’m not sure I got where Smith was going with that character’s arc or her relation to the narrator. That the circumstances of our births, from race to socioeconomic status to the environment in which we’re raised, have enormous and perhaps irremediable effects on our lives is not a new thought, yet that seems to be Tracey’s main purpose in the novel. She was born with greater talent, but was unable to convert it, and much of the blame for that falls on her parents or the world as a whole. The narrator was born with less talent, but into better circumstances, and somehow fell into a successful career (albeit not in dance). The world isn’t fair, but again, Smith isn’t giving us any sense of how we might make it a little more so.

That’s not to say Swing Time is anything less than a good read – this is a smart novel with some thematic ambition, and even if the execution is imperfect, Smith is a glorious writer and even her lesser efforts force the reader to open his (my!) mind and confront uncomfortable issues. I suppose seventeen years on, it’s unfair to expect her to churn out White Teeth again, but I know that’s what I want her to do anyway.

Next up: Richard Flanagan’s A Narrow Road to the Deep North.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: british literature, contemporary novels, novels

→ November 29, 2018
→ By keith

Klawchat 11/29/18.

My latest board game review for Paste looks at Welcome To, a twist on roll-and-write games that can play any number of players – up to 100, even.

Keith Law: No time for nothing, no Patek Philippe. Just Klawchat.

Joe Cleveland: Mets are crazy, right? Getting Cano giving up players like Kelenic or Dunn seems very dumb unless they get another valuable and controllable player like Haniger.
Keith Law: Hey, any time you can trade your #1 and #2 prospects for a 36-year-old second baseman with a bad contract and a volatile commodity like a one-inning closer, you just have to do it.

Adam: I guess Joe Simpsons comments didnt slide by unnoticed
Keith Law: Fox Sports is claiming his comments had nothing to do with the decision to get him largely off TV, which I find hard to believe. But worse is Simpson’s comments (from the AJC): “I have a very strong protective instinct on the game and its customs and history and traditions, so my comments were only intended as a defensive mechanism of the game.” That is not any sort of apology, or even a remote acknowledgement of the tacit (or less than tacit) racism of his comments. It’s an old white man who doesn’t even know that the customs, history, and tradition of baseball include excluding players of color, then allowing them to play while treating them vastly differently than white players. Whatever the reasons, I’m glad Fox chose to turn this page.

Patrick: Keith, with your front office experience, what do you think the Brewers should do this off-season, esp about SP? Go with the young players? Or push for a Bumgarner type (star SP available for a short time)?
Keith Law: Burnes and Woodruff join the rotation, and they’re both good. I wouldn’t view a top-end starter as a priority. Bulk innings, perhaps, but I wouldn’t go spend prospects.

Patrick: Thanks again for all these chats Keith.
Do you have a favorite holiday/seasonal recipe?
Keith Law: Not really. My daughter and I will make some cookies, like the Italian flag (tri-color, rainbow, seven-layer … they have lots of names) cookies made from almond paste, chocolate, and raspberry & apricot jams.

Ryan: Hi Klaw, Thoughts on the rumored Cano/Diaz to Mets trade? I’m confused why the Mets would include Gimenez.
Keith Law: Gimenez isn’t in the class of Dunn or Kelenic. He’s a solid prospect but doesn’t have that kind of upside.

Dave: Thanks for the chat. Does Brian McCann have enough left to be the Braves’ primary catcher in 2019?
Keith Law: No, nor did they sign him to do that.

Jeff: Currently waiting in line at Little Miss BBQ. Got here at 830. Second in line (opens at 11). Good move or GREAT MOVE?
Keith Law: Great move. Get the brisket.

Mike: Have to run to a meeting, so I’ll take your answer off the air. The (purely hypothetical) return of Medina and JoJo Romero for MadBum is fair, right? I get the feeling in the Bay Area that fans won’t be happy with any return given their sentimental attachment to Bum.
Keith Law: Honestly, I’m not sure if I like that for the Phillies, just because Bumgarner isn’t what he used to be, and I feel like you might get something better if you package Romero (whom I really like) and Medina (more stuff than performance) in another deal.

section 34: I can’t decide between two Orioles questions:
1) What’s a reasonable timeline for the O’s to return to contention?
2) If you were in charge, would you DFA Chris Davis, or take some other action?
Keith Law: I think it’s 4-5 years, and I would DFA him. At least get the 40-man spot back.

Dave: Hi, Keith! Thanks for all of your baseball writing! This is non-baseball, though: With the closing of Cocina Lolo, what do you do for quality Mexican food in your area now? Asking for a Delaware friend.
Keith Law: Honest answer: I don’t. I just get my fix on the road now.

Michael Conforto: Would you ever do science and politics chats or writing? Your takes are more well thought out than most political journalists, and watching you torch anti-vaxxers on Twitter is extremely entertaining.
Keith Law: Thank you. I would if there were a serious professional opportunity to do so. Doing it just on my own probably brings more downside than reward.

DH: Does Peter Alonso have the bat to be an above average DH if he were in the AL? Can he hit 30 hr? And does he give all of that value back if he plays at 1st?
Keith Law: Yes, yes, and not all of it, just some.

Jake Albrecht: Do you abandon books if they’re not working for you? I’m slogging through War and Peace and I thought I successfully left it behind but every time I want to quit I feel guilty about it.
Keith Law: I do, usually early on. If I hit page 100 I’m probably finishing it. I got through War & Peace without too much trouble. Les Miserables is the novel of that length I’d advise everyone to skip.

Kasvot Vaxt: How many wins would this Cano / Diaz deal add to the Mets next year?
Keith Law: I’ll say 5-6. Which makes them … a fourth place team.

Jared: How would you rank the Brewers three young pitchers — Peralta, Burnes, Woodruff — going forward?
Keith Law: Burnes well over Woodruff, who’s then over Peralta.

Matt: Hey KLaw, Mark Bowman reported that acquiring Kluber would likely cost the Braves Kyle Wright, Touki, and Pache. Would you make that trade if you ran the Braves?
Keith Law: No way. Especially with some very small signs that Kluber may be declining relative to his peak. You’re paying for three years and it’s likely none of them is 7-WAR Kluber.

Marshall MN: I don’t disagree with your opinion on the ability of Royce Lewis to stick at SS, but if he can’t cut it there at what level would you expect to see the Twins move him to a different position? At AA?
Keith Law: That’s probably right.

Kacey: Did you know that a witch hunt involves guilty pleas from the President’s personal attorney, campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, foreign policy adviser and national security adviser? When will this witch hunt end???
Keith Law: The great part of the joke is that the witch hunt keeps finding more witches.

Dave: Keith, any thoughts on who the Orioles will replace Gary Rajsich with as their scouting director?
Keith Law: I have no idea.

Ciscoskid: Does the market of available 1B options make Brandon Belt a negative value asset?
Keith Law: No, but it certainly limits his return to the point that it likely makes more sense to keep him.

Bobby Bradley’s 40-time: What on earth is the Mets FO doing? Actively searching for Syndergaard trade partners, but deGrom is off limits. Also pushing for an old, $120M 1B and a young RP?
Keith Law: We’re just pretending that the Mets’ GM didn’t represent that old 2b (who might be a 1b) and negotiate that deal, right? There’s nothing weird about that?

matt klentak: isnt the opportunity cost for Diaz too high? I mean, you can get Familia and Miller or some duo like that for ~60M, which probably is less than two top 100 prospects + an MLB player for Diaz
Keith Law: Yes, and also, relievers don’t last. Look at the four-year deals just ending – Miller, Kimbrel, Robertson. None paid off well. The first two are clearly less than they were at the start. And I would feel very comfortable betting that Diaz’s 3.5 WAR last year ends up his career high.

Tom C: Yesterday my work was giving out flu shots (I already had mine). Some people around me were debating whether to get one because they didn’t want to get sick from the shot. Me: You know what makes you even sicker? Them: What? Me: The ACTUAL flu. Them: (Blank Stares). Some went and got the shot.
Keith Law: Excellent answer. Also, you can’t get the flu from the flu shot, because the virus in it is attenuated (weakened so it can’t cause the flu).

Adam: What does Francisco Mejia’s stock look like right now? Is it an exaggeration to say that he’s not a Top 5 prospect in the Padres system?
Keith Law: Yes, that’s an absurd statement. Of course he’s top 5 there.

Matt: Thoughts on a couple of Rays rookies from 2018, Joey Wendle and Jake Bauers? Do you believe in Wendle’s big second half, and are you buying Bauers as a bounceback guy despite his struggles last year?
Keith Law: Don’t believe in Wendle at all. Bauers is better than what he showed. Probably never a 20 homer guy, but can hit for a lot more average than that. Think he’s a solid-average regular at 1b.

Steve from PHL: Keith, what is your prediction as to what the Phillies do this offseason- signings, trades, etc? Thanks!
Keith Law: I really don’t do predictions like that. I leave that stuff and the rumormongering to others. I’ll just react as appropriate when there’s real news like a signing.

Paul: Of course if the Mets are stupid enough to trade Kelenic or Dunn then the other moves are irrelevant. However – what were your thoughts on Mets hiring Baird?
Keith Law: That’s the one move there I’ve really liked. I know Allard a little – enough that I know not to shake his hand again, because last time he broke two of my metacarpal bones – but more importantly the people I know well who’ve worked for and with him absolutely rave about him as a baseball guy and a person to work for.

Jon: With the Mets saying they want to “contend” in 2019 and the absurd rumors about trading all their top prospects for Cano and a closer, why do I get the feeling this will be a half baked offseason that drains the cupboards and in a year or two, they’re back in the same spot, only with a terrible farm system?
Keith Law: This feels a bit like the first Preller year in San Diego, when ownership seemed to want him to go all out to try to win, and they traded away a lot of value (especially Trea Turner) while acquiring bad contracts that eventually hamstrung them. The difference is that Preller was able to do a 180 and, with the help of the old international rules, turn their depleted farm system into the game’s best in short order.

JP: Settle a baseball argument: when talking about years of Team Control, is that referring to the Pre-Arbitration years only, or all the years until the player becomes a FA (PreArb+Arb)?
Keith Law: Years until free agency.

Andrew: Given the light return for Paxton, would the Giants be better off holding onto him and taking the comp pick after the season?
Keith Law: Your given is not a given.

Anthony: Hi Keith, thoughts on Andruw Jones and his HoF case?
Keith Law: So I have a vote this year, for the first time, and I have checked off nine names so far. I think I know who my tenth will be, but I’m mulling it over for a few days before I fill out the last one and mail it. I’ll do a column for ESPN+ later this month about it.

Marshall MN: You know what’s crazy, we are only 2 months away from your annual top prospect list, wow does time fly. Are you already hard at work on the top 100?
Keith Law: I am indeed. I’ve spent about 15 hours on the phone since Monday morning, maybe a little more, and have another call at 2 pm sharp.
Keith Law: I do a lot of calls first before I write anything at all.

JR: Does your daughter have a phone? If so, at what age did you get her one? If not, at what age would you feel comfortable? I thought I could hold out until 12/13, but my 10 year old son is already angling for one and many kids younger than him already have one.
Keith Law: She does. It has been really valuable for her to have it to text or call us, and more than once her bus has had a substitute/temporary driver so she’s used the maps to help the driver navigate (which, yes, that’s a whole different set of issues).

Gavin: Is Keston the real deal? He gives me Joe Panik vibes with his lack of power.
Keith Law: Totally dissimilar players, although I don’t think Hiura is a huge power guy. He makes harder contact than Panik.

Jake: Have you ever had BBQ in KC? Thoughts? Q39, Joe’s, Jack stack>>
Keith Law: KC Joes was my favorite. Slappy’s was very good too. Jack Stack is a different experience … BBQ is more of a casual thing, so in a sit-down setting it seems a little weird to me.

Mitch: Do you take much stock in Dominican Winter ball performances? Small sample size, but Heliot Ramos is doing much better than in Augusta. Not sure if that’s growth or he’s facing worse competition.
Keith Law: Ramos is Puerto Rican and is playing in the Puerto Rican Winter League, not the Dominican. I don’t put any stock in numbers from those leagues, though; the level of competition varies far too much even from game to game. I think it’s a positive experience for players, since they get more reps in real game settings.

Andy: It seems like the Braves are valuing higher dollar and shorter year span with contracts. Do you see becoming more common with all teams and move away from the 8 to 10 year deals in the future?
Keith Law: No, because the dynamics of the market will always encourage teams to give that one extra year to land the player.

Chris: Thoughts on Lewis Brinson? That Yelich trade is looking all-time bad right now for Marlins.
Keith Law: Still see upside there. Also, I wouldn’t judge a prospect deal after just one year.

Kyle: Do you think Bryan Reynolds can stick in center field?
Keith Law: I do not.

Mac: We were having a discussion about the most overrated tools and I said arm strength for a catcher. What’s yours?
Keith Law: Velocity. Without any other variables, it’s not all that telling once you’ve hit the major-league minimum (you can’t throw 84 as a RHP and be a major league starter).

AJ: Hi Keith, could you weigh in on a friendly office argument? I told a co-worker I’d rather take Eugenio Suarez (at current deal) over Machado at 8/200 and was called insane. It just seems to be a better use of $, and not even for small market teams only. Am I in fact insane?
Keith Law: Insane is awfully harsh. I just disagree with you.

Jason: Did Reggie Lawson become a prospect this season? Seems like his secondaries improved
Keith Law: He was one before, but he took a nice step forward.

Tony: How can we take strong legislative action on climate change when 1) the Republican base firmly believes scientists are lying, and 2) it’s very hard to take decisive control of the Senate from Republicans, given their demographic advantage in having that same Republican base dominate lots of small rural states?
Keith Law: It would be nice if House Democrats tried a more aggressive tactic of actually pushing bills and forcing the Senate to reject them, but also, the Dems have not done enough to make climate change’s effects a real campaign issue in states like Florida that are going to get seriously fucked by rising seas, more/stronger hurricanes, red tide, etc.

Brian: Do you think Wil Crowe could become a No. 3 starter, or is he more of a high probability 4/5 starter?
Keith Law: I would say virtually no chance he’s a 3.

Chris: Contrarian thought that I think you’d agree with from being in previous chats: Mets would be smart to flip Alonso for relief pitching now at possible peak of his value and roll w Smith at 1B. Thoughts?
Keith Law: Depends on the pitching, but yes, I do agree with that. Have to recognize Alonso has real value to AL clubs, though – I’m not saying you just give him away.

Mike: Love your baseball writing and opinions, as well as your takes on games, food, movies, music and books. I’m curious if baseball wasn’t your primary career, and you could spin any of those (or politics, science, etc) into a new full time writing job, which would you choose?
Keith Law: I’d probably be happy doing any of those. I just love to write.

KeithLawCommenter: Will you dabble in giving out baseball picks for betting? Or ever consider Action Network like Rovell?
Keith Law: No, and heck no.

Larry: What have you heard about Monte Harrison’s adjusted swing? Still hope there?
Keith Law: Saw him in AFL. Not sure what was “adjusted.”

Anthony: Just out of curiosity: what happens to a HOF vote if a qualified writer works for a team? If you took a job as scouting director tomorrow, I assume you’d forfeit your ballot, but if you reenter the public sphere after say, 3 years, do you get it back immediately or have to wait another decade?
Keith Law: No, I’d keep the ballot for ten years.

Dave: Should the Astros trade Tucker+ for Realmuto or sign Ramos or Grandal in FA?
Keith Law: I’d go the free agent route. Tucker may have struggled in his ten minutes in the majors but I think he’s a star.

Sam: What are your thoughts on Trevor Bauer. I’m 99% sure he’s an unbearable human being making a decent point about the arbitration process.
Keith Law: Bauer’s right about a lot of things – he made good arguments about foreign substances on the ball after the initial griping about Houston. He’s just wrong about climate change and immigration and a bunch of other stuff. But I wouldn’t dismiss his views on everything just because he gets a few things wrong.

SC: I am Mets fan but not a fan of Cano but trying to see the big picture– as long as they don’t give up an A-1 prospect and get Diaz and maybe another prospect they’ve improved the team. Then maybe they trade Thor to the Pads for some stud prospects, including Hedges, and fortify up the middle. Can you see that as the play here?
Keith Law: The rumors I’ve seen have them giving up their top two prospects. That’s duh-umb.

TomBruno23: Cardinals need to upgrade the bullpen. For fun, here’s a list of multi-year deals given out by the team to relievers since winning the 2011 World Series: Randy Choate, Seunghwan Oh, Jonathan Broxton, Brett Cecil, Luke Gregerson. I think that’s the full list.
Keith Law: Yeah, maybe change that up a little. They have so many pitching prospects in/near the majors you’d think they could fill out a bullpen internally.

David: Thanks for all that you do, KLaw. Baseball is a better follow because of you.
Keith Law: Thank you. I try to keep it entertaining & informative, and to not be an unbearable human being making decent points.

Mike: Does the Law household open the majority of gifts on x-mas eve, or day?
Keith Law: Christmas morning.

Anthony: Is Swanson going to hit? If not, should they move him for a corner outfield bat and give Camargo or Ozzie SS?
Keith Law: I think he’s going to hit. I’m a bit less confident than I was a year ago.

Zac: Does Daz Cameron make his debut this year and do you think the jump he made last year is sustainable?
Keith Law: Late 2019, and yes.

Adam: Love your game recommmendations. Thank you. Have you every played Coloretto? Simple card game that can be played with kids down to 8 or younger, but also interesting for adults. A nice palette cleanser at a games night.
Keith Law: I have – maybe a bit too light for me? But a cute game. I believe that came first and then the designer turned it into Zooloretto, which won the Spiel des Jahres.

Billy Eppler: Think Arte will let me buy out pujols contract?
Keith Law: He’s another guy who should be DFA’d to get back the 40-man spot. He’s no longer worth it. Whether the owner accepts this is another matter.

Evan: The general feeling among Cubs fans based on last season’s results and comments from Theo is that the cubs need to make serious changes. However, the team won 95 games despite a lost season from Kris Bryant and a underperforming offense. Do you think the level of concern is warranted or we are overreacting to an early playoff exit and a red hot Brewers team in the last month of the season?
Keith Law: I don’t think they need to make serious changes. They changed hitting coaches, which was probably needed. They retained Hamels, which was smart. I thought they should keep Chavez, whom Texas signed rather inexpensively. But they were one win away from leading the league, and if they had hit at all in the last two months of the season they would have won the division.

Danny: If the Brewers non-tender Schoop, should the Yankees go after him to play 2b and move Gleyber to SS? Schoop was worth 3.8 fWAR 2 years ago but just 0.5 fWAR last year
Keith Law: I would think Schoop would get a lot of interest as a free agent for that reason. His approach, never great, cratered last year, but there’s no reason to think he can’t regain what he was prior to 2018 – he’s not old and he’s not hurt.

Bob in Houston: Would you say Josh James is the #3 prospect in the Astros organization?
Keith Law: He’s in their top 5. I would prefer not to commit to a more specific answer now, while I’m still working on the rankings.

Ben: Surprised by Donaldson taking 1 yr deal? Next year’s 3B market is strong with Arenado & Rendon, which will hurt JD. I figured he’d try to get the best he can now.
Keith Law: Always a chance one of those guys signs an extension, and Donaldson will likely do much better next winter if he’s healthy this year.

Marshall MN: If you were the Twins would you look at transitioning borderline starting level pitchers like Gonsalves and Kohl Stewart into relievers? Any additional ceiling for those guys out of the pen?
Keith Law: Stewart yes, Gonsalves no because I think he can start.

JJ: Who would you rather play at 3rd for the next 5 years: Andujar or Devers
Keith Law: Devers.

Liam: How many innings do you think Touki pitches in MLB next year, and what kind of performance would you expect from him? Mid-rotation arm with flashes of a #1?
Keith Law: Your prediction sounds right to me. I think he makes 20 starts.

Rob: Will you be at Pax Unplugged at all this weekend? Anything you’re particularly interested in seeing?
Keith Law: I will be there all weekend. I have some appointments with publishers to see a few new titles, but I think I got glimpses of most of them at Gen Con. There are one or two I know about that might not be public yet but that sound intriguing. I’m hoping to just play more games this year too – at Gen Con I was basically just going to meetings and speaking on panels all day each day.

JJ: Are you writing a ‘Players I Was Wrong About’ article this offseason? Any obvious standouts?
Keith Law: I wrote it in September, as usual.

AGirlHasNoName: Are the Cubs going to non-tender Russell tomorrow, or am I just hopefully reading the Torreyes trade tea leaves?
Keith Law: I would non-tender him, but I don’t know their plans, and I don’t think Torreyes has anything to do with the decision.

Roberto: I have a preschool daughter who enjoys Jaipur but has trouble with other games like Splendor. Are there any other games you can think of that are as simple to pick up as Jaipur?
Keith Law: Lost Cities was the first game like that I introduced to my daughter. She liked Carcassonne when she was four, at least on the app, but at that age she played it more like a puzzle than a real game (and we didn’t keep score with her).

Jack: Would a package of Sean Murphy, Dustin Fowler, and Sheldon Neuse get Syndergaard to Oakland?
Keith Law: No.

Greg: Rumor mill has the Pirates open to trading Cervelli. Do you think Elias Diaz is an every day catcher? Do you think his 2 WAR in 82 games is legit? Thanks!
Keith Law: I think Diaz is a soft regular, probably not a 4 WAR guy but very likely a 2-2.5 WAR guy.

Dr. Bob: I don’t believe that the average Republican lawmaker doesn’t believe scientists down in their hearts. I think they just don’t want to hurt current economic growth and are just trying to push the problem down the road when they will be gone.
Keith Law: Very likely. Or they take money from entities that produce lots of CO2 or methane and figure they’ll be long dead when the earth is hotter.

Harrisburg Hal: It’s time to get rid of our Henckels knife set my wife and I received as a wedding gift 17 years ago. Would you buy separate components or get another knife set? I think you’ve recommended some Victorinox and Wustof knives in the past. Still a good place to start looking? I think I’d like to pick up a couple options to get a feel for weight/material.
Keith Law: Yes, and just do selected knives. A set will give you lots of knives you won’t use.

JG: Do the Twins have any top 10 prospects on your list? Top 20?
Keith Law: I’ll just say I think their system is loaded.

TJ: Klaw, ever had anything from Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI? Great sandwiches, and my wife is going crazy baking stuff out of their cookbook I bought her. Also, and Tigers prospects that we can hope to see in Detroit this season?
Keith Law: Yes, went there ten years ago, really liked it. I think you’ll see Daz, Burrows, and Manning at some point.
Keith Law: Maybe Rogers but he’s not that good a prospect.

Buck Thompsonville: do any front offices use RBI or W’s for evaluation in any capacity anymore?
Keith Law: No. Just broadcasters.

Cthomp: I know you really like Dom Smith. However after what we’ve seen, I have a hard time seeing future impact with his bat. Can you maybe help me see what you see? Sometimes it just doesn’t pan out and I wonder if your confidence in him has dropped at all.
Keith Law: Smith is 23 and has had less than a full season’s worth of major-league at bats.

Betsy: What do you see in Willy Adames moving forward? Does he stick at SS and will his hit/power continue to improve?
Keith Law: Don’t think he’s a SS. Very much think his batting average will improve.

kgbos: Based on your board game list I picked up Ticket to Ride for family Thanksgiving. All of us were playing for the first time but I won every time (small sample size) to the point others lost interest. Do we need to find another game or do I need to sit out in the near future so they can get more accustomed to the game and strategy?
Keith Law: Might depend on how you played – the 1910 expansion isn’t expensive and introduces some better route cards that may balance the game out, again depending on why you won.

Todd: Higher ceiling, Everson Pereira or Estevan Florial?
Keith Law: Probably Florial, but his flaws are bigger.

Daniel: Hi Keith, always enjoy reading your work and as a scientist, I greatly appreciate your continued push against anything anti-science.
Keith Law: With the popular media often unwilling or ill-equipped to do so, those of us with platforms have some obligation to speak out on issues where the science is clear and the opposing view is just bullshit.

Daniel: Oops! Meant to send the following question with my previous statement: as a Reds fan, should I be cautiously optimistic about the team? I think the Bell hiring (and his staff) was really well thought out and he brings a diverse set of experiences to the table.
Keith Law: I like everything I’ve heard about Bell. Pretty good offseason for managerial hirings, I think.

Trevor: You can take Beltre over Chipper, I just don’t agree with it. Does WAR factor in playoff games?
Keith Law: No, it doesn’t, nor should it since players don’t get to play in the same number of games. Remember that the question was where the players ranked AS THIRD BASEMEN. Beltre played 761 more games at third than Jones did, and was substantially better on defense. You can disagree, but you have to come correct.

JJ: If MLB expands, those 2 cities should be: ________
Keith Law: If MLB expands, they should put part of the expansion fees into building stadiums in the new markets. Portland, OR, and Austin have long been the two best answers to that question, but I’d bet neither electorate would support public funding for a stadium.

Adam Trask: Barring any major trades and given that their young talent pans out, when do you see the Padres being a contender?
Keith Law: As soon as 2020.

DH: Can Luis Robert be a 20/20 guy? Is he still 2 years away?
Keith Law: I’m telling you, this player does not exist.

Byron Buxton: Tell me how to fix me.
Keith Law: What’s broken? Buxton wasn’t healthy last year.

kbrown: The A’s aren’t at all likely to replicate 97 wins again next year, but with the other AL West teams in rebuild or hurt (LAA) could you see the A’s repeating as a WC team with 90+ wins?
Keith Law: I would bet against this.

SC: Keith– quick follow-up– Mets said they might trade one of Kelenic, Dunn or Giminez, but not two. Seems like you would rank Giminez last in that group. Would that make a Cano trade (i.e., Cano-Diaz for Bruce, Giminez and filler) more palatable to you?
Keith Law: Yes, that wouldn’t bother me. Then it becomes a question of whether the Mets are right to pursue wins in 2019 at all.

Germolene: Did Jamie Moyer even pump it up to 84?
Keith Law: Jamie Moyer was left-handed, and probably still is.

Mike: What level of prospect(s) could the M’s get in return for Hanniger?
Keith Law: I think he’s their most valuable trade asset. Everyday player with huge production and five years (I think) of control remaining. That’s where you ask for the four-prospect, two of whom are top 100 at least, sort of return

Al: Seigler and Breaux both stick at catcher? Either project as a “guy”? Thanks.
Keith Law: Seigler is a catcher, Breaux is not.

Sam: I have a son that just turned 3. I saw that you said you played Jaipur with your daughter at 4. When did you introduce games to her and what were they? (Sorry if you’ve answered this a million times)
Keith Law: At 4. She’d see us playing games at the table or on our iPods at the time and want to try them. She liked the Carcassonne app because it was a matching game to her and I think she liked the clicking sound she’d get with a correct move. Lost Cities was pretty straightforward – to play that at all, you just have to know your numbers 1 through 10, and then the adult can guide the child through the one big decision (to play a card or hold on).

Jake Lawson: Does Clint Frazier have a future in the Bronx, or would a trade is best avenue to playing time? He still has some pretty good upside, doesn’t he?
Keith Law: He has some upside, not a star, can’t see any role for him in the Bronx.

Nat: Keith, do you have advice for someone who never really had anxiety until the past couple of years? Seems to be worse the past few months and can’t see a counselor until next year either. Any tips?
Keith Law: Try some meditation – simple breathing meditations, sometimes called ‘awareness of breath’ – and talk to your PCP about whether a low dose of medication, like an SSRI, might help.

Todd: Were you high on Brien Taylor as a prospect way back in the 90s?
Keith Law: Brien Taylor is only 18 months older than I am.

Mick: Beautifully named Italian Reds infielder Leonardo Seminati appears to be a clone of Alex Liddi. Hopefully he’s in the bigs much longer.
Keith Law: As do I. Perhaps then I’ll finally get that long-awaited scouting trip to Italy.
Keith Law: Thank you all for the questions this week. I’m planning to chat again next Thursday, and then skip the following week for the winter meetings. I’m back to the phones now to work on the prospect rankings. Have a great weekend and if you are at PAX Unplugged here in Philly, please say hi if you spot me.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ November 29, 2018
→ By keith

Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr.

Holding On: The Troubled Life of Billy Kerr has the best theme – well, the most interesting theme, at least – of any board game I’ve seen this year. It’s a cooperative title where players work together to try to keep the titular patient alive while listening to his deathbed ramblings and trying to assemble his story from the memories you gain. The story aspect is just plain impressive – it’s a serious concept that could go really wrong in the guise of a game, but the writing is solid and does a good job of bringing the sense of partial memories to life. The game around it, however, doesn’t live up to the premise.

The game lets two to four players (although there’s no reason this couldn’t be a solo game) work together as ‘nurses’ in the ward where Billy Kerr is housed, and comes with ten scenarios that are each played over the course of a round of days, represented by the Patient deck of cards. On each round, players draw three Patient cards representing the morning, afternoon, and night shifts, and will choose to give medical care or palliative care for each. If they choose medical care, they expend Care tokens, which are the game’s main resource and not easy to come by, to either stop Billy’s condition from deteriorating, or, if he’s stable, improve his condition. (His condition is marked by a track, with his starting spot at 28; if he reaches 0, you lose.) If they choose palliative care, they may gain care tokens or acquire random partial memory cards, which come in five timelines.

On some cards, players may then expend one care token to Inquire, essentially asking Billy more about any specific timeline to try to get a clear memory. They then draw cards randomly from the clear memory card deck until they get one matching the chosen timeline; if that drawn card matches a partial memory card they’ve already drawn and placed on the table, they keep that clear memory card. Scenario objectives may require players to finish with a certain number of clear memories before the day ends (exhausting the Patient deck) or Billy dies, or to find ten specific clear memories, or to keep Billy’s spirits up with positive memories rather than negative ones.

Each patient card requires one to three staffers, which can be player tokens or neutral assistants, so in some rounds there will be more required staffers than available pawns. Players start the base game with two single-use “on-call” assistants, but otherwise have to ask nurses to pull double shifts, which gives them “stress,” little cardboard rings that go around the player pawns. If a player gets three stress, they must go ‘on leave’ and skip the next round, thus further straining the players’ resources. Thus the game becomes an ongoing resource optimization problem: When to spend care tokens to get more cards, when to choose to let Billy’s health meter slip to gain more tokens or partial memories, whether to choose tokens or partial memories while providing palliative care, and when to send a player or assistant on leave before it’s mandatory.

The main problem with the game is the way players acquire clues and how they can satisfy objectives. There’s too much randomness involved in the process of converting partial memories into clear ones – if you draw a clear memory card before you have the associated partial memory card, you can’t keep it, and the partial memory cards you get are completely random. When going to the clear memory deck via Inquiry or another method, you can choose the timeline from which you’ll draw cards – the idea is you’re prompting Billy with questions about that set of memories – but whether you get one that matches a memory you already have is entirely random.

The rest of the game is very well designed because it’s tightly balanced: this is a hard game to win, as it should be. You have to choose well throughout a game, or just get incredibly lucky with patient cards, to even have a chance to meet any objective, which is a requirement for any cooperative game to work. The decisions around when to use care tokens and when to forego the chance to gain memories so you can acquire more tokens are reminiscent of the cure-versus-treat decisions at the heart of Pandemic, and the patient deck always seems to be just the right length to make you go down to the wire. I just wish the storyline were better tied into the mechanics in a way that gave players more control over those random clear memory card draws. The only way around that now is to burn more care tokens and keep drawing cards, but you’ll need those tokens if you don’t want to kill the patient on your watch. It’s such a great theme and clever, novel concept that I still think this game deserves a wider audience, but if you get it, consider some house rules to avoid the frustration of losses due entirely to randomness.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

→ November 28, 2018
→ By keith

Green Book.

Green Book might have been a great movie in different hands. Based on the true story of a friendship between African-American pianist Don Shirley and the Bronx-born driver Anthony “Tony Lip” Vallelonga, the movie makes some dubious choices on perspective and sharpens almost every character to such a fine point that the result feels as nuanced as an after-school special. The National Board of Review just named Green Book its best film of 2018, which is entirely fitting for a body that gave the same honor to The Post last year: They favor popular, well-acted films that talk down to the audience with positive, timely messages and avoid answering or even addressing the toughest questions around their topics.

There’s a long prologue centered on Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), a bouncer at the Copa Cabana, showing his boisterous family, pugnacious style at work, and gluttonous appetite, all of which is just character development of a sort before the meat of the movie begins. Shirley (Mahershala Ali, likely to get an Oscar nomination) is looking for a driver and, although he doesn’t use the term, bodyguard to take him on a tour of the Midwest and then American south, which, in 1962, was still highly segregated and thus dangerous for African-Americans traveling there. Tony and the men in his family are all typically racist of the Italian-Americans of the time – the word mulignan, a disgusting Italian-American racial slur, comes up often in the film – but, of course, Tony and Shirley grow to understand each other, becoming friends, even teaming up on a duet of “Ebony and Ivory” in the closing scene. (I may be remembering that last part wrong.)

The film is directed by Peter Farrelly, known for directing gross-out comedies with his brother, and you can see his hand all over the finished product – not in a good way. The film is slapsticky at times and grabs far too many cheap laughs around things like Tony spitting out food he doesn’t like or other peccadillos of personal hygiene. But the biggest mistake is that the script, co-written by Tony’s son, Nick, tells us a story about racism from the perspective of white people. This is not a story about race in America. There’s virtually nothing here about what it’s like to travel while black (a phrase Tony uses in the film), or simply to be black in a white man’s world, or, in Shirley’s case, to be a black man trying to succeed in a career that requires him to, in a sense, suppress his blackness. Beyond the true story of the friendship these two men developed, one that lasted fifty years beyond the time depicted here until their deaths in 2013, this is a movie about a white guy realizing what racism means at a tangible level. When Shirley says he wants Tony to drive him into the Deep South, Tony says there’s going to be trouble, but is still shocked when he sees the visceral effects of the casual racism that characterized the everyday South. (Which is not to say that racism is gone today; it’s merely hiding behind nice furniture.)

The film also plays fast and loose with too many details of the story and history, starting with condensing what was a real-life tour of nearly 18 months into a two-month whirlwind tour that ended on Christmas Eve, punctuating the film with a feel-good resolution that never happened. Shirley’s surviving relatives, including a brother mentioned in the film and a niece, say the depiction of him as estranged from his family and the black community is false, as is the idea that he had never even had fried chicken, which makes for a brief running gag in the film. There are also minor details that get in the way of the core story, such as Tony discussing Aretha as a household name in 1962 (she was only 20 and had yet to become any kind of star) to try to show Don as out of touch with popular culture.

The way the film depicts Italian-Americans is about half right – and the half it gets right is probably the important part. Italian-Americans, at least those in New York, were tight-knit, family-oriented, insular, and definitely racist and even xenophobic, not just due to outright racism – cultural prejudice in Italy was more north versus south, rather than based on skin color – but because of typical othering, the way one class that faces prejudice might find another group on which they can look down. Mortensen and the actors who portray his family members all boast an embellished bada-bing Brooklyn Italian accent, even though they’re supposed to be from the Bronx. Some of the older characters in the film speak Sicilian – I heard travagliari, the Sicilian word for work, rather than the Italian lavorare – but Mortensen speaks standard Italian with a very clean accent when he switches languages. Linda Cardellini plays Tony’s wife, Dolores, but has nothing to do except look pretty, and her accent is even more exaggerated than Mortensen’s. We do fold our pizza to eat it, because we’re not savages, just not the way Tony does in the film.

Ali’s a lock for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and might win the award for the second time (the first was for Moonlight). He’s wonderful, because he always is, and I think he does his best to soften the depiction of Shirley as an overly fastidious, isolated person, so that the character comes across more as a person of color trying to navigate a very narrow path through a white world. Mortensen really loses himself well in Tony Lip, but without the subtlety of Ali’s performance; he might still get a nomination now that the furor over him using the n-word in a discussion about the film seems to have died down. Had the film done better at the box office, perhaps it would be a lock for a Best Picture nomination, and it still might get one, but there are going to be at least ten more worthy movies out there in what looks like a crowded year.

Finally, I didn’t like the film, but I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking this is a terrible film. It’s a bad film compared to what I usually watch, but I don’t watch many really awful films. I skim off the top, because I’m not a professional critic and see only what I want – typically films critics have loved or that are nominated for something major. It had a CinemaScore of A+ last time I looked, and it is absolutely a crowd-pleaser sort of film, and smarter than most films that try to hit those emotional notes. I personally found it sentimental, predictable, and even schlocky at times, and I was bothered by aspects of the film that I think won’t bother most people. Your mileage – and the film has a lot of mileage in it – may vary.

If you want another perspective, Monique Judge reviewed the film for The Root, and within her review there’s a letter from Harry Belafonte praising the film, urging audiences to go see it. He feels it’s accurate to the time and place, since he performed himself across the country in that period, and that “there are many perspectives from which to tell the same story and all can be true.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2018 best actor nominees, 2018 best picture nominees, 2018 movies, movies

→ November 26, 2018
→ By keith

Arkham Horror.

Fantasy Flight Games just released the third edition of its popular Arkham Horror cooperative game this fall to positive reviews, the first new version of the game since the 2005 edition, with somewhat streamlined rules and four scenarios to play in the base game. I had no experience with the previous versions – the original is from 1987, but Fantasy Flight’s 2005 version is considered a major improvement – but played this version a few times and found it easy to get into once you get past the daunting setup. It’s a co-operative game you can also play in solo mode, and follows the typical format of Lovecraft-themed games where you can die or go insane, but that’s not the losing condition in this edition. The balance here is solid and the format allows you to throw up a lot of defenses to try to give yourselves time to solve the mystery, but if you don’t do so in time, allowing too many horror tokens to pile up, you can still lose the entire game.

Arkham Horror is a Cthulhu game, so you’re going to play investigators trying to find and eliminate Lovecraftian monsters before they kill you or drive you insane, but in this game you can just replace a dead or insane investigator with a new one, losing any extra cards or bonuses you’d accumulated. The board has a different setup for each scenario, with five neighborhood tiles, each comprising three districts, and streets connecting them. Scenario cards tell you where to generate new monsters, place clue tokens, or potentially roll for benefits as you move your investigators around the board. Each scenario has you trying to rack up enough clue tokens to trigger the next phase, eventually winning the game by completing some final task – often beating a more difficult monster spawned after you’ve hit the final clue threshold.

The clues themselves are just tokens, not actual clues; you’re not solving a puzzle or mystery here, but accumulating those tokens while you also try to add cards to boost your investigators. Each investigator has a unique profile of health and sanity points, and gets a specific number of dice for each of the game’s five types of tests, which are measured by dice rolls; you roll that number of dice, and if you get at least one 5 or 6 among all your rolls, it’s considered a success. Investigators can add cards that give them items, spells, and even allies who add more benefits and can absorb some types of damage to spare your main character.

Game turns are simple, although you’ll take so many turns that an entire game will probably run two hours or more. You get two actions, including moving your investigator, attacking an enemy, warding off horror tokens (if too many accumulate, bad shit happens), starting an Encounter in your space to draw a neighborhood card, fleeing from a monster, and so on. You’ll spend most of the game moving to new spaces to either defeat a monster or try to draw a clue, since each game phase is triggered by gathering some set number of clues that lets you flip a scenario card to see the next step, or occasionally to go clear out some horror tokens from a space before they cause negative effects specific to that scenario.

Arkham Horror

Setup takes a while, primarily because each of the base-game scenarios has a unique board, tokens, and monsters, the last of which must be separated out from the complete set and shuffled into a game-specific monster deck. Once you’re rolling (pun intended), though, the game can move along as quickly as the players want to play it; game length is then a function of the storyline and the number of things you have to achieve or collect to get to the next stage. Turns themselves don’t take that long, and combat can be resolved with a couple of dice rolls. (One of the best benefits you can get in the game, from items or allies or spells, is the ability to reroll one or more dice.) If there’s a downside to Arkham Horror beyond its length, it’s that the clues aren’t anything more than green discs – you’re not actually putting together a story or solving any sort of mystery, just collecting good things and avoiding bad things. There is narrative text throughout each scenario, both on neighborhood cards and on the scenario cards that dictate the flow and rules of that specific session, but it’s all window dressing – you don’t need to know or follow any of that story to play the game.

I haven’t played the previous editions of Arkham Horror or the related game Eldritch Horror, but from what I’ve read, this third edition of AH borrows much of the mechanics of Eldritch Horror, and has streamlined this game’s design to reduce some of the randomness – investigator characters start with specific items/spells, the ‘mythos’ tokens at the end of each player turn are a bit easier to predict and plan around – while also giving players four scenarios out of the box instead of one. Those all sound like upgrades to me, at least.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: boardgames, cooperative games, horror games

Tags

Archives