Tuesday night’s hit on AllNight.
Today’s hit on The Herd. That was a really fun bit, at least for me.
Today’s chat transcript.
I’m waiting to hear from mental_floss about today’s quiz – might have been pushed back to tomorrow.
The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
Tuesday night’s hit on AllNight.
Today’s hit on The Herd. That was a really fun bit, at least for me.
Today’s chat transcript.
I’m waiting to hear from mental_floss about today’s quiz – might have been pushed back to tomorrow.
Sorry for the lack of action over here – I’m tied up writing reports and making phone calls. I’ve even ground to a halt in Gone With the Wind.
Klawchat tomorrow will be at 1:30 pm EDT and I’ll probably have to stop at 2:30.
Today’s quiz on mental_floss is on The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Interesting piece on why more roads may not reduce traffic.
My updated top 100 ranking for this year’s draft is up. My first-round projection will be up later tonight is up now as well.
And I’m on mental_floss as a guest quizmaster for the week. After I sent them a suggestion for a “Name X in Y” quiz, they actually asked me to write four more and make a big thing of it. I’m not sure if this represents slumming for me or for them, but the first quiz, on geography is up now: Can you name the ten countries in ASEAN? There will also be quizzes on baseball, books, and music, but I couldn’t come up with a viable one for food (at least not in the “Name X in Y” format), so the fifth one is on politics.
I’ll also be on AllNight tonight with Jason Smith, although we tape it before the show so I don’t know exactly when it’ll air.
Before I get to the eats:
* ESPNEWS hit coming up in a few minutes here at 3:40 pm EDT. It’s via phone.
* I filed a revised top 100 last week but it was never posted. A revised revised top 100 will go up on the draft blog tomorrow.
* Erik over at FutureRedbirds has a long and well-researched post on drafting prep pitchers in the first round. I don’t agree with his conclusions – among other reasons, I think his dataset is too old – but it is well worth your time.
* Liza Minnelli might be the next lead singer of Queen.
I only hit two new spots this trip, in part because I wanted to go back to two places where I ate last year (Jim n Nick’s and Bogues), and in part because I only ate one meal after breakfast on each of the two days of the tournament. There’s a Publix right up the road from Regions Park where I could grab yogurt and fruit to tide me over, and really, a pulled pork sandwich at Jim n Nick’s with a side of collard greens was enough to keep me full for hours.
I tried two new restaurants for breakfast. The better of the two is Edgar’s, a bakery that I guess only recently added a full breakfast menu, with everything made to order. I went with the usual EMPT, and oddly enough, the T wasn’t so hot but the EMP parts were excellent; the breakfast potatoes were small red potatoes, parboiled, then sauteed with onions and herbs (rosemary and thyme, I think), and, for once, they actually had enough salt on them. The biscuit was inedible; it was more of a biscuit-cake than a soft, Southern-style biscuit, so I bought a blueberry scone for the road. The scone was solid-average, which is weird given how bad the biscuit was, since the difference between a biscuit and a scone is minimal. They had a wide selection of cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and muffins, with two or three varieties of scones and a few other baked goods, while the breakfast menu includes breadier fare like French toast. They get bonus points for some seriously high-end bagged tea.
Klingler’s is a German bakery with a breakfast menu that is heavier on the, um, heavier fare. I went with the pecan waffle, because I find waffles very hard to resist; it tasted of pecans and a little bit of butter, but it was still on the heavy side for a Belgian-style waffle. (Belgian waffles should be light and airy with a crisp exterior and usually contain whipped egg whites to provide that lift.) The side sausage was a smoked bratwurst, split in half and grilled, kind of spicy and savory for a breakfast sausage. It was adequate but unremarkable, and I’d rather drive the extra five minutes or so each way to eat at Edgar’s.
There will be a Klawchat today at 1 pm EDT … as far as I know, it’s the first in-flight ESPN chat, as I am currently somewhere over South Carolina.
Sorry for the lack of posts this week, but I’ve been slammed with draft content and travel. I do have some fun stuff coming up next week, but I’ll hold off on announcing any of it till later.
You’re probably not familiar with the name Edna Ferber – I wasn’t until I saw it on the list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel – but you’ve probably heard of her work by way of the movies. She wrote the novels behind the films Showboat, Cimarron, Saratoga Trunk, and Giant, the last perhaps more notorious for being James Dean’s last work than for anything else. So Big, the novel that won Ferber the Pulitzer, has been adapted three times for the big screen but, by all accounts, never successfully, and given its leisurely pace and deep characterizations, I’m not terribly surprised.
So Big is the story of a mother and a son, starting from the mother’s sudden thrusting into the world after her father’s sudden (and somewhat comical) death and running into the son’s late twenties and early thirties. The mother, Selina Peake, is admonished by her father that life is an adventure if you get after it, but lets life lead her along until she’s forced to take the reins, after which she shows herself as a woman of spirit and initiative:
Youth was gone, but she had health, courage; a boy of nine; twenty-five acres of wornout farm land; dwelling and out-houses in a bad state of repair; and a gay adventuresome spirit that was never to die, though it led her into curious places and she often found, at the end, only a trackless waste from which she had to retrace her steps painfully. But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.*
*I’m about 90% certain I read a passage similar to this one that used almost identical wording at the end in Lonesome Dove, used to describe Clara, but of course, I didn’t write down the page number and I’m not likely to find it by skimming through a 900-page book. If any of you choose to tackle that tome in the future, keep an eye out a phrase like “Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”
Selina, widowed with her young son Dirk (nicknamed “Sobig” after the “How big is baby?” game played with him as an infant), takes over the family farm and, with the help of the novel’s one substantial coincidence, carves out a living and eventually a life for the two of them, making Dirk’s well-being her driving force, ensuring that he receives an education and can start life with the advantages she lacked. It is, along those lines, a bit of a love story in the way that Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is – a parent, alone, who will do anything for his/her son.
Somewhere past the novel’s midpoint, the focus shifts from Selina to the adult Dirk, first in college, then in his aimless early adulthood both in work and in his personal life. He starts out in a career he likes but finds no success, then in a career in which he finds success but no pleasure. He is good-looking and inadvertently charming, but almost apathetic towards women, with no interest in the type of woman he “should” be seeing:
The Farnham girl was a nice girl. She was the kind of girl one should fall in love with and doesn’t. The Farnham girl was one of the many well-bred Chicago girls of her day and class. Fine, honest, clear-headed, frank, capable, good-looking in an indefinite and unarresting sort of way. Hair-coloured hair, good teeth, good enough eyes, clear skin; sensible medium hands and feet … Her hand met yours firmly – and it was just a hand. At the contact no current darted through you, sending its shaft with a little zing to your heart.
It’s a pleasant read with dry wit like that of the passage about (I found “hair-coloured hair” rather clever) and an incredibly compelling and well-drawn character in Selina, for whom one must root as she faces adversity, although her one big low moment ends prematurely with the aforementioned coincidence (you could even call it a deus ex machina). Dirk is less compelling, by design, although it slows the book’s final third considerably until he meets someone who, more than anything, is spirited like his mother. The book also slowed a bit for me for the unclear theme – what are we looking at here: Selina’s trials? The rise of an independent woman? Her dedication to her son? Her son’s lack of lust for life? The rural/urban divide of Chicago in the early years of the 20th century? I couldn’t tell you; all of the above are present, none is dominant. I like my novels to be about something; this was about many things, but perhaps it was about too many things for a novel so short.
Next up: From the seventh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel to the second-most recent winner of its successor award, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
I’ve mentioned many times that my daughter is a big fan of PBS Kids programming, both on WGBH, our local PBS affiliate, and on the cable channel Sprout, which airs kids’ shows 24 hours a day. (That doesn’t make me a fan – I can’t stand Caillou, and I think Angelina is a mean little drama queen.) A reader who works at WGBH noticed this and asked if I’d be willing to donate some time to help the station raise money, and the result is this entry in their current auction: Scout with ESPN’s Keith Law. The winner gets to tag along with me to a minor-league game (or a Cape game, if that’s more convenient) at some point this summer. Proceeds, of course, go to WGBH.
Back on the baseball front, I’ve got a draft gossip piece up on the site, and I’m assuming most of you saw my first top 100 ranking for this year’s draft, which was posted just in time for #3 James Paxton to show up for his last start missing 2-4 mph on his fastball. Good times.
This high school coach should be fired. (Hat tip: BBTF.)
Apparently, dish hero Alton Brown will be appearing this weekend at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to talk sustainable seafood. If you go, I want a report.
Jack Kerouac was kind of into sim baseball. Go figure. (HT: BBTF and Shysterball.)
No radio/TV for me this weekend due to a very important birthday party today.
Klawchat at noon EDT today. EDIT: Link.
You can hear my hit from last night on Baseball Tonight Radio, but the AllNight hit isn’t up yet.
I’ll be on our Atlanta affiliate today at 4:30 pm.
Sorry the posting here has been light, but I’ve been sick and busy with the draft content, which should start to show up on the Four-Letter today, including a top 100 draft prospects ranking with reports on 35+ guys already.
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