Stick to baseball, 1/30/16.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the very strong Warhammer Quest card game, which I liked even though I don’t play any Warhammer anything and don’t do much with RPGs. My usual Klawchat schedule resumed this week now that I’m not bedridden with plague.

The top 100 prospects ranking and the organizational rankings are still scheduled to post the week of February 8th. We may push back the org top tens and reports to the following week because I lost so much time to illness this month.

And now, the links…

  • Luke Bonner, former pro basketball player (and brother of Spurs power forward Matt Bonner), pens a vicious op ed for VICE Sports on how raw a deal NCAA athletes are getting.
  • Uganda receives billions of dollars in foreign aid, yet has one of the most corrupt “democracies” in the world, with President Yoweri Museveni – who used public money to buy himself a $50 million Gulfstream jet a few years ago – running for certain re-election to extend his already 30-year term in office.
  • This isn’t getting much play that I’ve seen, but the Texas investigation into those “fetal harvesting” claims against Planned Parenthood had an unexpected outcome: the grand jury indicted the two people who made the videos, but not PP. There was a tremendous amount of time and money wasted on these investigations across the country, none of which found anything except political gold, and these two “activists” should be asked to pay those costs.
  • Peyton Manning is playing in the big game! Remember when he sexually assaulted a trainer in 1996? No? Wow, I’m surprised that just slipped everyone’s minds. Maybe I should turn it into a jingle. “Pey-ton Man-ning is a creep.”
  • The Supreme Court ruled this week that the federal government can regulate demand response in electricity/energy markets, or “negawatts,” just as it regulates production. This is potentially a huge deal for consumers (in the form of lower wholesale prices) and for our energy usage and thus production of climate-changing emissions, reducing loads on power-production facilities during peak periods. I still don’t understand why there’s a single rooftop in Arizona that isn’t covered with a solar panel, other than the laws that so actively discourage this.
  • Ted Cruz was thrilled to announce an endorsement from Tony Perkins this week. That’s cool, except that Perkins is a longtime gay-basher with ties to white supremacy groups.
  • The Guardian looks back at the influence of the 1996 cult hit film Big Night, which it says helped spark an American food revolution. I found the film so frustrating to watch – it was well-made and well-acted, but how could you not want to throttle the chef who’s cooking the restaurant into bankruptcy?
  • Craig Calcaterra talks some sense on ballpark security. Here’s the truth: MLB probably can’t do anything to stop a terrorist attack at one of its stadiums. But they can pretend to do stuff, like confiscating your bottles of water when it’s 105 degrees at field level so they can sell you $6 bottles of tap water taken off a Native American reservation in drought-stricken California.
  • She died for saying no: Janese Talton-Jackson was shot and killed by a man whose advances she’d rejected. That appears to be all there is to it: He approached her at a bar, harassed her, and then shot her when she continued to say no, according to police documents.
  • I wish this piece had been a bit longer, but it’s still a great topic: tourists who deliberately seek out forbidden or repressive destinations, and the way such tourism might actually help change policies.
  • A six-year-old the Chianti region of Italy suffering from an immunodeficiency disorder can’t go to school because eight out of her eighteen would-be classmates are unvaccinated. These are my people, and still, I say, what the fuck is wrong with them? (Article in Italian.)

Stick to baseball, 1/23/16.

My lone Insider piece this week was on the Tigers’ deal with Justin Upton. I’ve been sick pretty much since noon on Monday and am still down with disease, trying to do as little as possible this weekend.

And now, the links…

  • J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is back with another great post on 22 things you should never buy at the supermarket, meaning you should make them at home instead. I’d add mayonnaise to the list myself, because store jars are huge and I never finish them.
  • Ruhlman weighs in too, by pointing out that no food is actually “healthy,” not even kale. Some of this is semantics; people are healthy, but food, by virtue of being already dead, is not. Food can be healthful – full, or not, of nutrients – but not healthy. The bigger problem, however, is the rush to categorize foods as good or bad for you when there’s a huge range in between, something that depends on what else you eat and your individual genetics.
  • Most of you have likely seen this, but the BBC/Buzzfeed joint investigation on possible match-fixing in tennis is damning, even though it seems like much of this will be difficult to prove to an extent where we’ll see suspensions or expulsions.
  • Ted Cruz isn’t up to speed on the Flint water crisis, even though Flint officials knew about the tainted water over a year ago, per this New Yorker editorial on politicians’ “contempt” for their constituents. Al-Jazeera America, which is about to shut down, ran a damning exposé on Flint water an entire year ago … and still Flint did nothing. And Michigan did nothing. Flint’s Director of Public Works, Howard Croft, refused to admit that there’d been any mistake made whatsoever in that piece; he resigned his post in November.
  • EDBDS’s Spencer Hall gets a bit personal about his own depression.
  • The Atavist has the story of Jewish-American lawyer who successfully sued the government of Iran for funding terrorism, including the attack that killed his daughter in 1995.
  • The half-billion-dollar battle over the toy rights to Disney’s princess characters saw Disney (my employer) pull a license Mattel had held for twenty years and hand it to Hasbro. The reasons are complicated and fascinating.
  • You can become a math person, mostly because the whole “math person” thing is bullshit. Point #4, about teaching math as a language, is the most important in my view – math is like the world’s easiest language because it lacks the irregularities and colloquialisms that trip up most language learners.
  • A heartbreaking story of fetal alcohol syndrome in a 43-year-old woman.
  • Liz Finnegan, erstwhile video game writer for The Escapist, explores the unbalanced nature of “consent” on college campuses, especially once alcohol is involved. I don’t see how you can say that an inebriated person (the woman, in these examples) is incapable of giving consent, but that the other inebriated person (the man) is capable of determining whether the first person is capable of giving consent – that is, not so drunk that clear, affirmative consent is still not sufficient. You couldn’t use that standard in court, but colleges play by their own rules when policing student behavior on campus.
  • Loved Melinda Gates calling out Donald Trump on his anti-science vaccine denial views. Of course, I don’t think he’s got much of a shot with the intellectual crowd anyway, but it would be nice to get this particular lie out of the press for now.

Stick to baseball, 1/16/16.

I traveled to Puerto Rico this week to see the MLB draft showcase in Cayey, featuring likely top-5 pick Delvin Perez, so I haven’t written much anywhere, with just one Insider post, on the Wei-Yin Chen and Gerardo Parra signings. Klawchats will resume this upcoming week, and no, I haven’t seen this week’s episode of Top Chef yet. I did finish The Executioner’s Song on the flight home, and that has to be one of the most addictive books I’ve ever read.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 1/9/16.

No new Insider content this week as I was mostly busy with phone calls for the top 100 prospects package, which will run the week immediately following the Super Bowl. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday, and I have another new game review up at Paste, for the family-oriented game Skyliners, which I thought was kind of mediocre overall.

And now, the links…

  • That TV show about a “special victims unit” is hot garbage, but this NY Times piece on a real-world sex-crimes police unit is gripping, if disheartening, reading.
  • Rakim discusses how John Coltrane influenced his vocal flow in a brief clip with KRS-One.
  • Remember that whole “CDC Whistleblower” meme that the vaccine deniers liked to throw around? Well, a review of the actual documents from that scientist showed there’s no whistle to blow because there’s nothing scandalous or untoward here.
  • A harrowing first-person piece from the brother of the Unabomber, on realizing that the mail-bomber terrorist was actually his sibling.
  • Kevin Folta, who was hounded offline by anti-GMO and anti-science shills claiming the scientist was secretly in the pocket of Big Ag, is resuming his biotech podcast next month.
  • Bill Gates has a blog! Okay, it’s a blog where he posts book reviews and only a total dork would do that.
  • Sports Illustrated ran a puff piece on child-abuser Adrian Peterson, who seems to want no part of the redemption effort.
  • Why the U.S. – and other countries, of course – should stop bidding to host the Olympics. I wouldn’t be opposed to a law that prohibits any U.S. jurisdiction from paying an international organization (like the IOC or FIFA) for the “rights” to host a global sporting event. They’re negative-ROI deals that tend to be boondoggles for the organizers.
  • Eater covers how Texas restaurants are dealing with the state’s open carry law. In a related story, I’m very glad I don’t live in a state with an open carry law. If I’m eating dinner in a place where there’s even a moderate chance I’ll need a gun during the course of the meal, I probably should eat somewhere else.

Stick to baseball, 1/2/16.

Happy New Year! I’d say it’ll be a great one, but there’s an election coming up so damn it all to hell.

I wrote two Insider pieces this week, one on the ethically-challenged Yankees trading for Aroldis Chapman and one on how obvious it should be that Trevor Hoffman is not a Hall of Famer.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the complex strategy game Orleans, which was one of two runners-up for the 2015 Kennerspiel des Jahres award.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 12/26/15.

I only wrote one new Insider piece this week, on Mike Leake contract with St. Louis, although I got a nice response from readers on my 2009 article on the shameful, insidious exclusion of Tim Raines from the Hall of Fame.

And now, the links…

  • Lots of vaccine-denier bullshit out there this week, like the mom in Texas who hosted an infection “party” for unvaccinated kids and said the illness is “meant to eliminate the weak.” Aside from how callous this is – one would presume she thinks her own kids are not among the weak – meant by whom, exactly? Did God send us the measles to wipe out a bunch of toddlers?
  • Meanwhile, a nurse and other vaccine-deniers in Australia have been ripping down vaccination posters in hospitals. If you catch someone doing this, stop them. Report them to security. Do whatever it takes. Idiocy like this breeds faster when rational people stay silent.
  • Some vaccine-denier tried to “argue” with me by citing the so-called “fourteen studies” on vaccine safety, a site and claim that originates with Jenny McCarthy. Well, as you might have guessed, it’s science-denying doggerel.
  • The Washington Post tried to name the country’s ten best food cities by sending its food critic to 30 20 13 cities this year. Yeah, I get that travel is expensive, but this would be like me listening to 108 songs and then giving you my top 100 for the year. Also, the list itself has a lot of very dubious opinions in it – the author goes out of his way to dump on New York City, which has about 8.5 million people in it, and dwarfs almost every other good food town in the country on sheer quantity. I asked the author on Twitter what he had at the amazing Cosme that didn’t impress him, but he hasn’t responded. If you don’t like Cosme’s food – the prices are another matter, but that’s Manhattan for you – I absolutely question your taste.
  • Iceland has an awesome Christmas tradition: giving and reading books.
  • The title of this thinkpiece, “We Are All Martin Shrkeli,” is rather clickbaity, but the message within, about how the modern pharmaceutical industry and its pricing structure deny critical medications to the poor and sick around the world.
  • The new Netflix series Master of None, starring Aziz Ansari and co-created by Ansari and Alan Yang (“Junior” of FireJoeMorgan fame, and MouseRat’s bass player), is phenomenal: funny, sweet, insightful, and different. One episode dealt with racism in Hollywood, and Ansari penned an editorial last month expounding on the same topic.
  • Slate has a somewhat scary piece on the evolution of creationism bills in state legislatures. If you live in a state where this garbage is legal, get active. Creationism and its Trojan horse of intelligent design are not science, and teaching them in any fashion in a public school violates the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the Constitution.
  • Boy does the Guardian ever do a number on Sepp Blatter and his corrupt fiefdom.
  • Speaking of corruption, the Las Vegas Review-Journal is embroiled in a scandal that combines plagiarism and a conflict of interest, which has led to more than one situation like this, where a longtime reporter has quit over these ethical violations.
  • Another thinkpiece, but a worthwhile one: What the Mast Brothers scandal really means to those of us reveling in it. I’m only in agreement with the author to a point; even if the victims are rich, or stupid, or both, does that make a particular fraud any less of a crime? It may color our opinions of the people who perpetrated it, but the nature of the fraud itself – in this case, Mast Brothers’ likely lie about how and where they sourced their chocolate – is unchanged.
  • The Atlantic discusses the schism within the Republican Party in a balanced way, without exulting in the party’s potential for self-immolation.
  • The New Yorker looks at the rise and ongoing fall of for-profit colleges, which takes advantage of our already horribly broken student-loan system.
  • Via a reader, Quartz gives us (and fixes) the most misleading charts and graphs of 2015.
  • My adopted hometown of Wilmington called in the CDC to help stem the gun violence epidemic. Of course, the CDC’s ability to help is limited because the NRA has essentially bought budget clauses that prevent the CDC from researching this topic too heavily or promoting anything that might lead to tighter gun control.
  • Tweet of the week – enjoy these fake yet highly credible thinkpiece titles:

Stick to baseball, 12/19/15.

For Insiders this week, I wrote about the Giants signing Johnny Cueto and the Todd Frazier three-team trade. I also held my usual weekly Klawchat.

Here on the dish, I compiled lists of my top 100 songs of 2015 and my top 15 albums of 2015.

Folks have been asking about my year-end gift guides, so here they are, once more:

Top 80 boardgames of all time
My 2015 gift guide for cooks
My updated cookbook recommendations
My all-time top 100 novels (from February 2013)

And now, the links…

  • That $10 Mast Brothers chocolate bar you bought along with your single-origin pour-over coffee at Blue Bottle? Well, it’s bad chocolate and might not even be what they claim it is.
  • Restaurant chain Fig & Olive, which had a salmonella outbreak in the fall, was caught using previously frozen food prepared at a central “commissary” and shipped to their individual locations.
  • What kind of person calls a mass shooting a hoax? Fortunately, Florida Atlantic has moved to terminate that nutjob professor, who has to be suffering from some kind of mental illness to so thoroughly believe these delusions he preaches.
  • Ah, the National Review‘s climate change graph was a big joke, and the Washington Post gives a concise explanation of why. I reviewed a book called Proofiness in June that talks about how organizations like NRO distort and manipulate stats to mislead the public.
  • Meanwhile, the New Yorker talks about how not to talk about nuclear power and climate change. Nuclear power can be a big part of the solution to both climate change and ocean acidification, but it’s already under a renewed attack from people who should probably know better.
  • Hate crimes against Muslims are surging over the past few weeks. It would be nice if we didn’t have an entire traveling circus competing to demonize this entire demographic group.
  • This Times review of the new book Lactivism by Courtney Jung details how unscientific and aggressive the anti-formula movement has become. There are even “ban the bag” movements to try to force hospitals to stop supplying bottles and other free equipment to new mothers – even though there’s little to no evidence to say breast-feeding is better for the baby.
  • A wonderful piece from the Times on the founder of the company behind the Hinge dating app going after the one who got away before it’s too late. (I’m also fairly sure I went to college with the author’s sisters.)
  • CTE isn’t just a problem affecting NFL players – Vice has the story of a D2 college player who died of it at age 26. This is the crux of my argument over Brandon McIlwain’s decision to enroll early at South Carolina: Not only did he pass up a guaranteed payday in June – actually, he passed up the mere chance to have someone offer it to him – but he’s entering an extremely dangerous profession for which he will not be paid for the next three years of his labor.
  • This isn’t new, but I just came across it this week: McSweeney’s imagined letter from Comic Sans.
  • My former residence of Arizona may be shifting from red to blue, thanks to the Latino vote – although I imagine the influx of engineers to work at Intel will contribute as well.

Stick to baseball, 12/12/15.

Paste published my ranking of the top ten new boardgames of 2015 this week, as well as my review of 7 Wonders Duel, the new two-player game based on 7 Wonders.

I wrote a lot for Insider this week, reviewing signings and trades. Here’s the full list:

Jason Heyward to the Cubs
The Bethancourt/Kelly trade
The Brett Lawrie trade
The Walker/Niese trade
The Kenny Giles trade
The Adam Lind trade
The Cubs’ moves with Zobrist and Castro
The Shelby Miller trade
The Jay/Gyorko trade
The Carson Smith/Wade Miley trade
Hisashi Iwakuma to the Dodgers
Jeff Samardzija to the Giants
Zack Greinke to the Diamondbacks

And of course, there was a Klawchat this week.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 12/5/15.

I have written three Insider pieces this week, one on David Price and Chris Young, one on Zack Greinke and John Lackey, and one on Jordan Zimmermann and J.A. Happ. I also held my weekly Klawchat on Thursday.

Top Chef recaps began this week with episode one and episode two.

And now, the links…

Stick to baseball, 11/28/15.

Eric Longenhagen and I posted a too-early ranking of the top 2016 MLB draft prospects, one that highlights the lack of a clear #1 overall prospect.

I reviewed two boardgames for Paste recently, the tile-laying game Cacao and the the family adventure game Mission: Red Planet.

Around these parts, I posted my annual list of recommended cookbooks and a short post listing boardgame app sales for this weekend.

And now, the links…

  • Glenn Greenwald destroyed CNN for suspending reporter Elise Labott for two weeks for a rather innocuous (my opinion) tweet on the Syrian refugee topic. Greenwald even went on CNN to rip them apart for their fearmongering and mishandling of Labott, as covered here by Erik Wemple, whose initial complaint of Labott’s “bias” in her tweet seems to have sparked the suspension. (Wemple has said he opposes such suspensions, but I don’t see why he singled out Labott, a relatively unknown female reporter, among the various more serious breaches of ethics Greenwald listed.)
  • Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks says Syrian refugees are just looking for a “paid vacation.”
  • Is the west’s reaction to the Paris terror attacks the war that ISIS wants?
  • The young Iraqis who are presumably risking their lives promoted evolutionary theory and rational thinking.
  • A great longread on so-called “inauthentic” ethnic cuisine as practiced by Asian-American chefs like Danny Bowien, Dale Talde, and David Chang. Authenticity is great, but isn’t de facto superior to inauthentic food made well.
  • The Guardian weighs in on fad diets that are often light on science, asking what constitutes “healthy eating?”
  • Aziz Ansari appeared on NPR’s The Hidden Brain podcast to discuss findings from his book on love and dating, co-authored with a sociologist, called Modern Romance.
  • Via a reader, a story from June in Slate that describes aquafaba, the possible vegan replacement for egg whites. It’s actually just the brining liquid found in canned chickpeas, and for reasons not yet understood, its protein structure can create a stable foam just like the albumin from chicken eggs.
  • Remember that hedge fund douchebag who bought the rights to a decades-old drug and raised the price fifty-fold, then reversed that decision under public pressure? Yeah, well, they reversed that reversal. It’s a clear situation where the free market – of which I’m a rather ardent supporter – fails, because the market for the drug is so small (the NY Times says that there were only 8821 prescriptions for it in 2014) that it likely wouldn’t support the creation of a competitor due to the high regulatory costs. The only solution I see would be for the FDA to “fast track” a generic alternative, assuming a manufacturer could be found – or, unfortunately, for the federal government to mandate a price cap.