The collected thoughts of sportswriter, bookworm, & food critic Keith Law
The first article in the top prospects series is up on ESPN.com; I think the top 10 are free and the remainder is Insider, although I’m not certain.
Tomorrow’s content includes the global top 100, with capsules on each player (averaging 190 words per player); the top 5-10 prospects in each organization; and the top 10 by position. I’ll also be chatting in English at 1 pm EST and in Spanish on ESPNDeportes.com at 4 pm EST.
I’m not huge on brownies with nuts, but this “luxury brownies” recipe, from a woman who sells them in a London market stall, looks amazing. (Hat tip to Chocolate & Zucchini.)
It Is About the Money, Stupid’s series on “Commissioner for a day” ideas starts with one from yours truly about territorial rights.
I’m mildly hooked on Mental Floss quizzes, and today’s is appropriate: Can you name all of the U.S. Presidents in under eight minutes?
My friends at River Ave Blues join the chorus of proposals to alter free agent compensation.
So someone pointed out that my blogroll didn’t make it through the database export/import, which means the list of reader blogs is kaput. If you’re a regular reader/commenter and your blog was listed in my old blogroll – or should be in the new one – drop a comment here. As long as your content isn’t obscene or highly objectionable, I’ll add it.
…to get your tongue stuck to a metal light pole.
It’s worse when the incident makes the news.
UPDATE, June 2012: I no longer recommend Swap.com (formerly known as Swaptree), as their customer service is nonexistent. They have lost their BBB accreditation in part for failing to respond to a complaint I filed.
—
Last December reader Robert asked me if I’d tried the bartering service Swaptree, which I had not. I signed up that week and now, about 40 trades later, I can offer a pretty strong recommendation.
The site’s concept is very simple: You enter a list of books, CDs, DVDs, or video games that you own and would be willing to trade, entering ISBN/UPC info plus a note on the item’s condition. Then you enter a list of items you wish to receive in trade. Swaptree looks for matches between users – direct one-for-one swaps as well as three-person swaps – and notifies all parties when it finds one, giving you a chance to reject the deal if you don’t think it’s fair. You pay the shipping cost, and can print labels directly through swaptree (media mail unless it’s not a book or the package is so light that first-class is cheaper), usually running between $2.20 and $2.80. I send all items in padded envelopes, so my cost per item runs to around $3.50, but some people just wrap books in brown paper or take other shortcuts.
My wife and I went to clear some stuff out of our storage space on Saturday, and I went through a few boxes of books, pulling 20-25 with which I was willing to part. By Wednesday, I’d swapped 15 of them.
I’ve only had one bad experience on swaptree, with an item that was (allegedly) lost in the mail. The sender didn’t use swaptree or another trackable service, so we can’t confirm that the item was ever sent, and there’s really no recourse for me – I was just SOL, having sent a book but not received one. Swaptree’s customer service was close to nonexistent: they contacted the other user, and I guess they’ll suspend someone who has too many complaints, but after receiving their initial automated response to my “I didn’t receive an item” complaint, I didn’t hear back from them again. Looking at feedback for other users, I don’t think non-receipt is a big problem, and I haven’t had any problems with other trades.
Swaptree doesn’t do much to help you browse the often lengthy list of items you can get in trade but that aren’t on your “Items I Want” list. There’s no way to filter books by genre or to tell the system that you already own a book, and since the most popular books on swaptree are, of course, popular books by James North Patterson and Patricia Cornwell and Nora Roberts, browsing really means sifting through a lot of crap in the hopes that you’ll find something that catches your eye. In fact, right now, I can get Snow Falling on Cedars
On the plus side, I’ve executed some rather absurd swaps that worked out great. I traded an old computer game someone bought me a few years ago – a very bad RPG called Temple of Elemental Evil – for a Janet Evanovich book for my wife. I traded a brand-new Angelina Ballerina DVD that we already had (and watch every night…) for a copy of Lonesome Dove: A Novel (Lonesome Dove)
It’s worked out well for us so far – we’ve gotten rid of a bunch of books that we didn’t want, which is good, since our book collection is rather out of control, while we’ve gotten a number of books that we might otherwise have bought new or not bought at all. It’s easy to use, at least in terms of entering your “have” and “want” lists, but you’re relying on the honor system to some degree to get your books, and it can easily take a week or more for a book shipped media mail to traverse the country. (This doesn’t matter to me, since I usually have a backlog of at least a dozen books to read.) Item conditions have nearly always been at or above what was promised. And the cost is slight, even including the $1 monthly fee swaptree charges in months where you use their shipping-label service. They’re currently running a promotion that gives you a free shipping credit if you invite a friend to swaptree who then makes a trade by the end of November. So give it a whirl.
Been collecting a few of these links over the last week with some intent to write a short column about the topic, but that’s not happening, at least not in a timely fashion, so here are the links for those of you looking for further reading.
A Thumbs Up From the Ivory Tower: In general, econ professors approve of the idea of injecting capital into the banks rather than a government purchase of bad assets, although the new plan is far from perfect.
Gordon Does Good: Grumpy Paul Krugman gives credit to UK Prime Minister (and former Chancellor of the Exchequer) Gordon Brown for pushing the recapitalization idea when the U.S. was pushing the bad-asset purchase plan. I generally don’t agree with Krugman, but he presents a very strong argument here until he goes off the rails by saying that “All across the executive branch, knowledgeable professionals have been driven out; there may not have been anyone left at Treasury with the stature and background to tell Mr. Paulson that he wasn’t making sense.”
How did it all happen?: A sort of pop-psychology take on the fallacies and (bad) thought processes that played into the real-estate bubble and subsequent credit-market meltdown. It’s thought-provoking, but it’s all argument and no evidence.
Denmark Offers a Model Mortgage Market: George Soros is certainly not among my favorites – his attempts to buy the 2004 election for Kerry and his gleeful puncturing of Asian market bubbles in the 1990s come to mind – but he’s positively tame here in describing a safe, strong way to continue the securitization of home loans.
On my ESPN blog.
Milwaukee writeup soon.
Those of you looking for a live blog for the final day of the regular season should check out Vegas Watch, where our favorite degenerate gambler will be providing commentary on the four games of relevance.
Interesting read from the Wall Street Journal on cutting-edge cuisine in Spain, which has become the vanguard of the cooking-as-lab-experiment movement over the last five to ten years. The famous El Bulli restaurant is mentioned, but the focus is on some of the other culinary standouts in Catalonia.
And I suppose as long as you’re on their site, you might want to check out their banking bailout FAQ, aimed at active investors but useful for everyone.
I’m not going to lie: I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription is more Karalyn. (She’s the blonde, second from right … as if you noticed anyone else in the pic.)
Karalyn West is one of the models on Project Runway – the drop-dead gorgeous one, to be specific. Turns out she’s also blogging about the show, and she’s not afraid to dish a little dirt. For example, her post on that weird car-parts challenge has her dumping on two designers:
On the topic of stupid designers…. THANK THE LORD KEITH IS GONE! AGH! it’s about damn time, don’t you think? His cocky attitude was getting really old… I mean come on.. Its one thing to be cocky and talented, but cocky and UNTALENTED is another thing. …
Shannone (Kenleys Model) Left the show on her own will because the girl booked an ass-kicking (well paid) job! If you ask me, Kenley deserved it. Me no Likey Kenley, and you cant nack Shannone for going where the money is…
Outstanding. We need more Karalyn (and more skin on Project Runway).
We watched this week’s episode last night … I know sweet F.A. about fashion, but the winning dress was fugly. The model’s hips looked a mile wide; the eye was drawn directly to the freaking test pattern across her pelvis. I don’t know many women who are looking for that kind of shape in a dress.
I was fascinated to see how the judges ripped into the two designers who ultimately went home, but when it came time to criticize that weird thing Kenley made (were there turbines in the shoulders?), their words, tone, and body language all softened. Obviously, they already know who’s going home before they go through their trashing of the bad designs, but it was also clear that they liked Kenley and were disappointed in her design, whereas they could take or leave the two they sent home.
