My take on the Evan Gattis trade is up for Insiders, and this week’s Klawchat transcript had some other thoughts on that deal and the Clippard/Escobar swap.

Lots of links this week…

• The Green Bay Packers love to play Settlers of Catan. But can we stop saying “a boardgame called Settlers of Catan?” It’s sold about 20 million copies worldwide. It’s well beyond some fringe obsession.
• Can an exiled, corrupt Russian oligarch take on Putin? This New Yorker longform piece doesn’t exactly make me feel better about the future of one of the world’s largest countries.
• Neither does this: Russia has listed transsexual and transgender people among those who will no longer qualify for driving licences. Remind me again why FIFA hasn’t pulled the 2018 World Cup yet?
• I tweeted this earlier in the week, but this EW story on the final season of Parks and Recreation is magnificent.
• My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward. A difficult read, and not one with which I entirely agree, but I still recommend it for the writer’s ability to capture the partner’s experiences in a situation where we typically hear about the patient’s.
• Another difficult read: A mother’s farewell to her daughter, who died at 36 on Christmas morning. Kate Gross fell to colon cancer, leaving a husband and five-year-old twins behind.
• Cooking dried beans? Don’t soak them. There’s no benefit, regardless of what the old wives tell you.
• Astronomers measured the space-time warp in the gravity of a binary star by using a neutron star just before it winked out of view.
• Why Ava DuVernay’s Oscar Snub Matters, from a decidedly not-left-wing outlet. When good work by people of color gets swept under the rug, we all lose.
• The Accidental Outing of Rwanda’s Most Powerful Troll. A podcast (with transcript) from August that is shocking for its exposure of how the Rwandan government harasses its critics via social media.
• And on a lighter note, Texas actually has a statute, Lauren’s Law, that allows parents to bring in cupcakes or other treats to school for their kids’ birthdays. It’s a sad day in America that such a law is necessary.

This is up a bit late, due to the holiday, travel, and a visit with family that includes seeing my grandmother, who is now in hospice after renal failure and is not expected to live more than a few more days. She turned 100 in June and in many ways was a third parent to me, there for most of the significant events of my childhood, the person I woke up to see when I was three years old and my mother had left for the hospital during the night to give birth to my sister. I’ve known this day would come for a long time, but it hasn’t made seeing her like this any easier.

I haven’t had any ESPN content this week, but my top ten new boardgames of 2014 ranking is up for Paste. There’s some overlap with my overall top 60 boardgames ranking from November, but the Paste list includes a few I hadn’t played enough to include in the global list.

This week’s links:

• Quantum physics just got less complicated. That might be overselling it – we’re not about to start teaching it in kindergarten – but the study discussed here claims that wave-particle duality (that a particle can behave like a wave, or a wave like light can behave like a particle) is just one manifestation of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
• An amazing video collage of twisted snowmen from Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson’s strip was brilliant across the board, but I don’t think I enjoyed anything as much as Calvin’s demented snow sculptures.
• This woman collected all her trash from a single year and fit it into a mason jar. I think it’s amazing that anyone could cut down on her trash production to this extent, although the woman also clearly has no kids or pets, and she must go through a lot of water to clean all of the reusable cloths she has to use. It’s still a great thought experiment – you can recycle more stuff than you think, and you can absolutely cut down on your trash with some effort. I’d even argue, based mostly on my own experience, that the 80/20 rule applies: 20% of the effort will cut down on 80% of your trash. Composting, better recycling, and smarter shopping do it pretty painlessly.
• The science behind catnip’s effect on cats. The best part here was the embedded video of big cats getting high off the stuff.
• Twitter doesn’t think these rape/death threats are harassment. I love Twitter for a lot of reasons, but their response to obvious harassment of women is inadequate if not embarrassing. The company has every right to sweep these trolls right off their service, but they hide behind a vague concept of free speech. Save that stuff for anti-government activists fighting autocratic regimes, not for anonymous cowards trying to scare women.

The hot stove was cooking with gas this week, so I managed to get a fair amount of writing done about the various deals, such as …

* Friday’s three-way trade involving the Yanks, Tigers, and Dbacks
* The Andrew Miller contract with the Yankees
* The Nick Markakis deal with Atlanta, with smaller deals like the Happ/Saunders trade included in this post
* The Nelson Cruz deal with Seattle, maybe the worst of the offseason so far

I also posted a review of the two-player deckbuilding game Star Realms late Friday night.

This week’s links…

• Our Ability To Digest Alcohol May Have Been Key To Our Survival. The common ancestor we share with chimps and gorillas developed an enzyme, ADH4, about 10 million years ago, that enabled them to digest foods that had begun fermentation. You had me at “alcohol,” though.
• Also via NPR, Why did non-GMO versions of cereals lose their vitamins? Maybe the whole GMO/non-GMO dichotomy isn’t as clean and simple as the labeling advocates (with whom I tend to side) argue it is? Besides, I’ve pointed out before that no GMO foods will mean no more bananas some day soon.
• So much for the Big Bang’s afterglow, which confirmed the standard theory of cosmology so well that researchers are actually disappointed. By the way, did you know the Big Bang theory was first proposed by a Catholic priest, the Belgian George Lemaître?
• There were a lot of great (if infuriating) stories this week about hockey blogger/creeper Steve Lepore harassing women via Twitter DMs and Gchat, but this story from the Blonde Side was the best/most infuriating, because it happened so long ago and because Lepore’s boss/editor/some authority figure at the time just blew it off.
• This ThinkProgress piece argues that a 21st Circuit Court judge could appoint a special prosecutor in Ferguson and try to get a new indictment. I fully concede I’m not a lawyer and don’t know if this is accurate, but a fresh grand jury proceeding with an impartial prosecutor sounds like a good idea for the community. I’d love to hear some lawyers in the audience weigh in on whether this is a legitimate argument and/or whether it would be a smart move.

I held my usual Klawchat on Thursday; I’ll have a wrap-up reaction piece on Monday to all the smaller moves from the last few days (Butler and LaRoche in particular). If something huge breaks today or tomorrow, I’ll write a separate piece on that.

If you’re looking for a comment, I’m sorry, but I have none to offer. I appreciate all of the support I’ve received.

• My friend Wendy Thurm discusses the dominance of male followers on sports Twitter. I’m mentioned, and I too was surprised that the ratio of men to women among my followers was that high, given how many women I hear from via Twitter.
• Because I’m a language dork, here are 23 charts and maps about languages from vox.com.
• From Bon Appetit, some tips on not screwing up marinara sauce. I’ll add two more: Don’t add sugar, and add a splash of wine to extract some of the alcohol-soluble (but not water-soluble) compounds in the tomatoes.
• From The Guardian, Hunter Felt writes about transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox’s confrontation with the prejudice of Joe Rogan. There’s some interesting science in here too.
• The report this week from the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate on the failures to treat Adam Lanza’s mental illness is incredibly horrifying. I’m reminded of the result of these mistakes, many of which were from his mother refusing to see her son as severely ill, every time I drive to or from Bristol, right by the I-84 exit for Sandy Hook and Newtown. But reading that piece also made it seem like Lanza was suffering badly and denied treatment that might have helped him (and saved all those kids). We’d never think of refusing treatment, even palliative care, to someone suffering from cancer or MS. Mental illness shouldn’t be treated differently.
• NPR’s food blog goes after what’s really in “pumpkin spice” flavoring. I’m disappointed they linked to Vani Hari, who is wildly anti-science, but I would guess most people who down those drinks don’t know what they’re actually consuming. Eat real food, not facsimiles designed to remind your brain of real food.

And finally, a picture you won’t be able to unsee. What’s worse, the annexation of Crimea, or “Sweating Bullets?”

Dave Mustaine looks like Vladimir Putin. pic.twitter.com/C4pisxu7Gb

— Martha Young (@MarthaYoung) November 21, 2014

I was on vacation through Wednesday of this week, but did post an omnibus reaction piece to the Cuddyer, V-Mart, and Gose deals. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

This week’s links …

• I was arrested for voting. Iowa is ignoring the rules of our democracy.
• I was noodling around, looking for substitutes for cheddar cheese in a dish, and found two good links on the classes of cheese, organized by melting properties, one from Fine Cooking, and one from cheese expert Liz Thorpe.
• Scientists keep learning more about our microbiome, like how bacteria in our GI tracts might help fight off viruses.
• I know you’ll be shocked, but the 2014 All-Star Game didn’t live up to financial projections. Those projections are always pie-in-the-sky claims from people with a vested interest in the event. Ignore them.
• That video of the heroic Syrian boy who rescued a young girl while under fire? It was fake. Even if the creators’ hearts were in the right place, this will do far more damage than good.

I’m still on vacation, enjoying Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade with the family and getting some reading time in too, but all the stuff I filed for ESPN before leaving is going up:

* My top 50 free agent rankings, with scouting reports on each.
* My offseason buyers’ guides to:
→ Starting pitchers
→ Relief pitchers
→ Outfielders
→ Corner infielders
→ Middle infielders

The guide to catchers will go up Sunday, and on Monday my NL ROY ballot column will go up after the winner is announced.

And now, the links…

• Did a Johns Hopkins scientist write a journal article saying that the flu shot is dangerous? Of course not, but some idiots are still repeating that drivel.
• The truth about cast-iron skillets. Mythbusting from Serious Eats.
• A good explanation of the difference between fair trade and direct trade in coffee, featuring one of my favorite local roasters, Phoenix’s Cartel Coffee Lab. Related: The case for drinking as much coffee as you like.
• A New York Times piece on great donuts in New York City. A real public service, I say.
• Why kids sext, from The Atlantic. I’m a few years away from worrying about this crap, I think.
• A non-GMO way to get tastier tomatoes. Genetic modification is one way, just not the only way. Meanwhile, that rumor some moron shared on your facebook page about GMO corn killing 37 million bees in Canada? Bogus. They were probably killed by neonics, a kind of pesticide we need to consider banning.