stick to baseball

→ April 9, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/8/16.

My standings and awards predictions for 2016 went up last Saturday, in case you missed those. My one Insider piece since then was a draft blog post, co-authored with Eric Longenhagen, covering Jason Groome, Bryson Brigman, and more. We will have a top 50 draft prospect ranking up on Tuesday.

I held my usual Klawchat on Thursday, going a bit longer than normal because I was so busy answering your questions I lost track of time.

And now, the links…

Best longread of the week comes from the Guardian, which explains how nutrition scientists pushed low-fat advice and ignored science for decades, even to the point of destroying the career of the first scientist to sound the anti-sugar bell. A Harvard professor is cited within the piece as demanding the retraction of a peer-reviewed article published in BMJ on the topic; I exchanged emails with him, and he said that the author of the article, Ian Leslie, was “clearly not interested” in hearing a contrary opinion.
The NCAA isn’t just a group of corporate fat cats and millionaire coaches profiting off the unpaid physical labor of college athletes; it’s a giant wealth transfer from black to white.
Amy Schumer’s “plus-sized is okay but I am not plus-sized” imbroglio got thinkpieced to death this week … but the A/V Club did do the subject justice by pointing out the damage of labeling women at all. Men don’t really face this – there’s “big and tall,” but hell, tall is considered good for men. (I am not tall; I’m 5’6″, very short for an adult American male, and trust me, I’ve long heard how this is not a good thing.) Why do women have to be plus-sized or minus-sized or whatever-the-fuck-sized at all?
From the “look at this idiot” department: A vaccine-denier mom gave her newborn whooping cough. She regrets being an idiot now, apparently. If you think vaccines are not safe, you are wrong, and should listen to every reputable scientist and doctor in the world who says to vaccinate your kids.
Eephus is a new sports-themed online magazine (do I even have to say “online” any more?) and one of its first pieces was by my friend Will Leitch, who waxes nostalgic over baseball boardgames.
A great interview with culinary icon Alton Brown from Bitter Southerner.
A state senator in Virginia wants Beloved out of public schools because it’s “smut,”, and he told a high school English teacher that he knew better than she did. Read his emails to see his ignorance at work, as he calls the greatest American novel of the last 40 years “vile,” “smut,” and “moral sewage.”
Facebook now has a tool to report users who might be about to harm themselves and try to get them help.
All this talk about the various laws raising the minimum wage to $15/hour led me to this takedown of a WaPo editorial criticizing the laws, in which the author contends (among other things) that the rise in wages for the lowest income bracket will lead to greater increases in demand, because when you have very little money, you spend each additional dollar you get.
This JAMA editorial argues that we may be reaching the financial limits of pharmaceutical innovation. I think he’s half right, in that we are approaching that limit, but do not believe it will stop or even slow innovation, but must drive new price models. A fundamental problem of health care is that our demand for services that will improve, extend, or save our lives is essentially inelastic: You can raise the price and we’ll still want as much, and eventually we will simply pay everything we have if it means continuing to live.
The chefs at Nashville’s wonderful izakaya and ramen joint Two Ten Jack read and respond to negative reviews in this funny 90-second video. I brought a group of writers to TTJ in December (Jess Benefield came out to chat while we were there) and had an unbelievable and very reasonably priced meal.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: alton brown, Economics, science, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ April 3, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 4/3/16.

A rather unproductive trip to Florida (thanks in no small part to rain and high school coach decisions) is over and I’m heading home before my first TV hit of the new season, on this week’s Wednesday Night Baseball Telecast of the Phillies at the Reds. I’ll be on roughly for innings four through six, discussing the teams’ farm systems and strategies as well as this year’s draft, in which the Phillies pick first and the Reds pick second.

I had three Insider pieces over the last eight days: my status updates on the top 50 prospects; my full standings and award winner predictions for 2016; and a scouting blog on Detroit and Atlanta prospects, led by Michael Fulmer.

I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

And now, the links…

A North Korean defector describes growing up in one of the country’s prison camps, the mere existence of which Pyongyang has long denied. The Daesh gets the headlines right now, but among formal states in the world, is there any more dangerous than this one?
This Bloomberg BusinessWeek piece about an operative who claims to have rigged several Latin American elections is riveting and entirely disturbing, such as the claims about manipulating public opinion via social media sockpuppet accounts. He’s now in prison in Colombia. I know the Cold War CIA no longer exists, but one wonders if an unscrupulous government intelligence agency might find use for this hacker’s skills in disrupting elections in hostile states.
Nature discusses the black-hole collision that reshaped physics, because it produced gravitational waves that we could detect, thus providing direct observational evidence of Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
A charter school – of course – in California has reopened after an unvaccinated student caught the measles, but some stupid, selfish parents still won’t vaccinate their kids.
The Netherlands is going to have to close some prisons because they don’t have enough criminals to fill them. A focus on rehabilitation for nonviolent offenders plus decriminalization of personal drug use are factors behind the drop in crime.
Donald Trump and his now-charged campaign manager used classic victim-blaming language to try to evade the consequences of an assault caught on video.
Climate change – which is actually happening, and caused by man, no matter what every remaining GOP Presidential candidate tells you – is affecting the Antarctic ice shelf more than previously forecasted, which could lead to sea level rises of up to three feet by the end of the century. On the bright side, there’s an enormous financial opportunity right now in future beachfront property near the South Pole.
From last year in the New Yorker, can reading make you happier? I’d certainly argue yes; reading is my daily meditation, although I sometimes indulge in the more traditional breathing meditations as well.
Why do we teach young girls that it’s cute or even expected to be scared? I’m guilty of this too, although I might be equally guilty if I had a son. I’ve always tended to be a nervous person anyway.
This rant by author LaMonte M. Fowler comes unapologetically from the left side of the political spectrum, but his targets are those on the far right, so I imagine many of you will find at least some of his points amusing, as I did.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: climate change, heavy reading, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 26, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/25/16.

My one Insider piece this week covers my breakout player picks for 2016. I also reviewed the simple abstract strategy game Circular Reasoning for Paste. I was unable to chat this week due to travel and attending games in Florida.

And now, the links…

Well this is some bullshit: The Tribeca film festival is screening a vaccine-denial “documentary” directed by Andrew Wakefield. Yes, Wakefield, the guy who faked the MMR/autism study that helped land us in this mess in the first place. Fuck you, Robert Deniro, for being a denialist and spreading this garbage.
Meanwhile, Uganda will jail parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids.
Drew Magary on why he’ll never quit Twitter. It’s the same reason I probably won’t either: We have audiences there, and tweeting to those audiences gets people to read our writing.
Patrick Saunders of the Denver Post wrote a piece on Tyler Matzek and how they’re both battling anxiety disorder.
Under Crazy Scott Walker, the state of Wisconsin gutted tenure at public universities, which led to foreseeable yet unforeseen consequences at UW-Madison. Tenure is a bad system, but Wisconsin replaced it with something worse.
The Atlantic points out how the Republican party, which professes to be the party of business, passed a law businesses hate this week, just to screw with gay people. If your bigotry runs that deep, then you’re not the party of business – and you’re going to let the Democrats, long seen as the party of higher taxes and more regulations, seize some of that reputation.
There might be a vaccine for dengue fever – which kills over 10,000 people each year – on the horizon, and that in turn could lead to a vaccine for the related Zika virus.
I loved this NY Times profile of both Natasha Gregson-Wagner and her mother Natalie Wood. I remember watching the atrocious Two Girls and a Guy and finding it totally ridiculous that Gregson-Wagner was supposed to be playing the unattractive (or at least less attractive) girlfriend.
Reader Reggie passed along this interesting piece on our brains’ evolution may be related to anxiety, in that our brains evolved (he uses the “were designed for” phrasing, which isn’t scientifically accurate) to handle a different type of stress than we typically face today. I also recommend the site Sick Not Weak, founded by TSN personality Michael Lansberg to promote understanding of mental illness, including depression and anxiety.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 19, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/19/16.

I had a big scouting blog post from Arizona for Insiders this week, leading with Dodgers outfielder Yusniel Diaz, plus a draft blog post on UVA’s Connor Jones and Matt Thaiss, including thoughts on why the Cavaliers have never churned out a big league starter. My weekly Klawchat transcript is up as well.

I reviewed the simple abstract strategy game Circular Reasoning for Paste.

And now, the links…

Jessica Jensen put together a series of tweets recommending female voices on baseball to follow if you’re looking for some diversity in your Twitter feed. Baseball Twitter is indeed very white male dominated (says the white male).
Why big-name chefs are getting into the coffee game. It’s not a huge profit center, but I do think it’s a way for chefs who are passionate about coffee to share that with their clientele.
The biggest junk science stories of 2015 includes more shots at the so-called FoodBabe, whose ignorance and fraud reached bigger levels than I’d realized.
No, vaccines do not lead to more food allergies, no matter what the Internet tells you.
Stella Parks, aka bravetart on Twitter and Instagram, shows you how to make real Irish soda bread, which is nothing like the crap usually labelled with that name.
I keep linking to School of Seven Bells stories because Alejandra Deheza is such a good interview; here’s one from WNYC on her work to finish the album after her partner died.
Andrew Wiles just won the Abel Prize for his mid-1990s solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem, a story that has always fascinated me because it seems impossible that Fermat himself had the solution he claimed to have. I recommend Amir Aczel’s slim book on the topic, Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem.
The Zika virus preferentially kills developing brain cells in utero. Lovely.
A Rockland County, New York, high school censored the swastikas for a school production of The Producers, although the school’s superintendent says the school’s actions were mischaracterized.
The chief U.S. district judge for Washington D.C. faces an allegation that he raped a 16-year-old woman in 1981. It’s not statutory rape, because the age of consent in Utah at the time was 16 (good job, Utah!). The judge submitted his letter of resignation after the news of the victim’s lawsuit emerged.
I don’t agree with the melodramatic conclusions here, but it certainly presents food for thought: how “deep learning” may put more and more people out of work. It’s certainly true that many jobs long reserved for people will be better done by computers, and preparing for that shift should be a priority for our education systems, public and private, over the next twenty years. I don’t think that a computer learning to play Go, which, despite incredible complexity is still a game with specific rules and thus predictable outcomes, means that three quarters of our workforce is about to become obsolete.
A Chinese fraudster uses a puppet “news” site to defame his critics, including Bloomberg journalist Dune Lawrence, then tries to hide behind the First Amendment. He’s facing criminal charges related to securities infractions, but his manipulation of Twitter and Google as well as his 1A defenses should be worrisome to anyone whose career takes him/her online.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, links, math, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 12, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/12/16.

Couple of Insider blog posts this week from Arizona, one on Kenta Maeda, Jose De Leon, and Sean Manaea, and on Cody Ponce, Casey Meisner, Daniel Gossett, and Trent Clark. I also held my weekly Klawchat from the Cartel Coffee Lab location in Tempe. Many thanks to the barista with purple hair.

I appeared on Tor.com’s Rocket Talk podcast, discussing science fiction, the Hugo Award, and a little baseball.

My most recent boardgame review for Paste covers the fast-moving deckbuilder Xenon Profiteer.

And now, the links…

A vaccine-denier couple in Canada let their baby die of meningitis rather than get him medical attention, choosing instead to give him natural treatments like maple syrup. They’re now facing criminal charges, as they should, but they’re claiming they’re being persecuted for being anti-vaccine morons. Adults who contract viral meningitis usually recover on their own, but infants are at serious risk and require medical intervention and sometimes must be hospitalized. The article doesn’t specify how their child ended up with meningitis, but it can be caused by a number of viruses, some of which – like measles, mumps, and influenza – are vaccine-preventable.
The BBC asks if Starbucks can succeed in Italy, where espresso is ingrained in the culture. The answer is of course they can, because Starbucks doesn’t really sell coffee: They sell highly caloric coffee-flavored drinks, food, wifi, clean bathrooms, but coffee is just a tiny part of the business. And what they’re selling more than any of that is a brand that has global cachet despite the poor quality of their products.
Also from the BBC, feeding young children peanuts reduces the risk of peanut allergies. So that naturalist vaccine-denier cousin of yours who didn’t give her baby peanuts till he was six probably increased the chances he’ll end up with a serious peanut allergy. Whomp, whomp.
Guardian sportswriter Marina Hyde with some highly intelligent fire-dropping on Maria Sharapova and why we shouldn’t believe her story.
Nancy Reagan died this week at age 94; her legacy includes the failed “Just Say No” campaign and associated war on drugs, as well as her part in encouraging her husband to cut funding for AIDS research as the disease was spreading fast in the U.S. Buzzfeed ran a piece from last year on how she turned down Rock Hudson’s plea for help just a few weeks before he died. The Guardian also recounts the Reagans’ refusal to commit resources to fighting the disease.
The New York Times with an excellent piece on the debunking of a fake CIA analyst who appeared on Fox News. While the fraudster himself, Wayne Simmons, is fascinating, the bigger question is how Fox let this guy go on air so often, saying so many inflammatory things, without anyone suspecting that his resume was inflated. We’re all susceptible to believing people who tell us what we want to hear.
The lawyer who controls Harper Lee’s estate – and has been accused in recent years of manipulating the author to her own benefit – has informed the publisher of To Kill a Mockinbird that the estate will no longer permit the publisher to produce the mass market paperback version. That’s the cheapest version of the novel, the one most schools and schoolkids bought. Does anyone else think Harper Lee would never, ever have permitted this? Yet I see no legal recourse, unfortunately.
Lot of Downton Abbey recaps, remembrances, and thinkpieces this week; this piece on Lady Mary as the series’ strongest and most central character was my favorite.
I did not care for this Sports Illustrated feature story on Blackhawks star and accused rapist Patrick Kane, but I will post the link here for you to judge for yourselves. I thought that it underplayed the seriousness of the accusations, and the fact that the lack of charges was due to procedural issues and the difficulty of proving rape cases rather than exonerating evidence, and didn’t sufficiently debunk the ‘theory’ it broaches about the connection between the incident and his career year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, downton abbey, links, stick to baseball, vaccines

→ March 5, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 3/5/16.

My one Insider piece this week covered the Ian Desmond deal with Texas. I also held my regular Klawchat.

I have two pieces up on Paste this week too: my review of the cool, quick-playing deckbuilder Xenon Profiteer, plus a recap of games I saw at Toyfair. The price has varied a bit, but Xenon Profiteer is $26.49 right now on amazon.

And now, the links…

A reader sent this along – an interview with Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer, who worked on the Spotlight team that uncovered the Catholic Church’s cover-up of priests sexually abusing children.
The EPA is catching flak from industry for trying to pull a pesticide from the market over environmental concerns – that is, doing their fucking jobs. This should only be the start, given what neonics appear to be doing to the bee population.
Julie Dicaro had an excellent breakdown of Erin Andrews’ testimony about ESPN’s treatment of her after she was the victim of a stalker.
Turns out many doctors can’t tell a spider bite from a hole in the ground. If you got bitten, odds are good it wasn’t a spider.
Julieanne Smolinski, a popular comedienne who tweeted as @boobsradley, wrote an excellent op ed on why she quit Twitter. The short answer – Twitter still won’t do jack about the rampant harassment of women on the site.
What does it say about Donald Trump that white supremacists are coming out to endorse him? A lot, I’d say, at least about the xenophobic policies he’s espousing.
The Oscar-winning film A Girl in the River, which won for best short documentary, may be spurring a long-overdue change in Pakistani law. What does it say about your country if you have any way for a family that commits an honor killing to escape judgment.
Could cutting the price of produce save 200,000 lives? That’s a start, surely, but you have to get people to eat them, which may require time that many folks don’t have.
A podcast episode I highly recommend: The BBC looks at America’s “angry cowboys”, the ranchers in eastern Oregon whose grazing rights on federal lands may disappear if that territory is declared a national monument. It’s a nuanced, balanced look that was absent in the coverage of those idiots who took over a federal building late last year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: environment, links, stick to baseball

→ February 27, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/27/16.

My ranking of the top 25 prospects for impact in 2016 is up for Insiders. I also held my Klawchat on Thursday.

I updated my Arizona dining guide for those of you heading to the Valley for spring training.

I also joined the boys of Cespedes Family BBQ on their podcast for an hour of silliness and a lot of prospect talk.

And now, the links…

Folks of a certain age will remember the awful Atari video game E.T., or at least its catastrophic release; the BBC talked to its designer about the entire debacle.
A former University of Tennessee football player testified that coach Butch Jones called him a “traitor” for helping a woman who said she was raped by other players. He also says he was assaulted by another player on the team for the same reason. If we want problems like this one or the similar issues at Baylor to go away, just cancel the football team’s season for a year or two. Nothing will get a school’s attention like taking away its cash cow.
School of Seven Bells’ final album, SVIIB, came out yesterday (here’s my review), so here’s yet another interview with Alehandra Deheza – with a detailed history of the band – from the Guardian.
OpenTable interviewed longtime food critic Ruth Reichl, who received two James Beard awards for her writing. I always found her style a little off-putting, but she explains why she wrote the way she did and offers numerous insights on food criticism and how restaurants should interact with critics.
Coffee capsules, like Keurig’s K-cups, are an environmental disaster and the BBC tells us why. Not mentioned: the coffee in those pods is months old, so what you’re drinking is swill.
Matthew Yglesias writes why Marco Rubio is more extreme than Donald Trump. Slate offers a thoughtful defense of Jeb Bush as candidate and person. FiveThirtyEight tackles John Kasich’s war on abortion rights in Ohio, which cuts against the conventional wisdom that he’s a moderate Republican. (I’d argue that he is a moderate on most issues, with many policies I support. He’s just not a moderate on this.)
A balanced look at the Kesha-Sony lawsuit from Vanity Fair.
And a less balanced look at the ruling, which forces Kesha to continue to record with the man she says raped her.
A single study in Finland found that a high-cholesterol diet didn’t raise heart attack risk, even in persons genetically predisposed to the latter. This seems in line with recent research that says it’s much less about diet than we thought in the 1980s, when cholesterol was suddenly public enemy #1.
The NY Times has an article on how to get more privilege in your coffee, taking a relatively inexpensive process (buy this Hario V60 dripper for $17.50 and some filters and you’re basically there) and making it pricey and complicated for no apparent gain.
The racist roots of facial hair bans in sports. Well, that was totally unsurprising.
How the female editor of Buzzfeed Canada was rape-threatened off Twitter when she asked for story pitches from non-white male writers. Twitter’s non-response to the harassment problem is maddening, but other than continuing to talk about it on the site, I don’t see what users can do.
The Atlantic discusses a study on why we don’t seem to learn from our mistakes.
Tweet of the week:

pic.twitter.com/bCgJT4xc8x

— GeekPharm (@geekpharm) February 19, 2016

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: coffee, links, stick to baseball

→ February 20, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/20/16.

The index to all 30 MLB farm reports and top tens is now up; all reports are Insider except for Baltimore’s, which is free for all readers. Insiders can also read my top 100 prospects ranking and my my ranking of all 30 farm systems.

And now, the links…

The University of Tennessee has a lot of explaining to do about the rape culture on campus.
More SVIIB content, now just six days from the release of their final album. The questions in this interview are generic, but Alehandra Deheza’s answers are always enlightening. She also spoke to DIY about the process of finishing the record, with the tantalizing suggestion that she’ll be embarking on some sort of tour.
The Huffington Post has some actual journalism for a change, with this piece on the horrifying scope of domestic violence in the United States.
Here’s yet another good reason to avoid buying grated cheese: You may be buying fake cheese, or cheese doctored with cellulose. Buy hard cheeses whole and they’ll last for months. I’ve recommended the grana padano, which is virtually identical to Parmiggiano-Reggiano but is produced in a neighboring region of Italy, sold at Trader Joes; it’s 40-50% less than buying whole P-R at Whole Foods but in most applications you’d never notice the difference.
I stand with Apple.
Everybody seems to want their eggs to be “cage-free,” but getting to that point is complicated and expensive. One fundamental problem with our food supply, especially that of products from animals, is that we’ve lost any sense of what eggs or milk or meat really should cost. Factory-farming techniques that weren’t good for the animals drove prices down for consumers, but that model is not sustainable and consumers are increasingly demanding better treatment of the animals as well.
One of my alma maters just reached a $750 million settlement in a longstanding patent lawsuit against Marvell Technology, after two judgments against the company that including a ruling that said infringement was wilful. The best part? The school’s President has said that CMU should “dedicate a substantial majority of this resource to helping qualified students afford a Carnegie Mellon education.”
Meanwhile, another win for the collegiate athletics cartel, as former athletes at Penn lost their case arguing they were analogous to work-study employees and thus should be paid minimum wage for their time. The quote from the NCAA’s lawyer is stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.
Vox interviews the woman who took 47 million academic papers and made them available, free, online. Yes, it’s copyright infringement, but I still see value in what she has to say, even if I can’t approve of what she did. The copyright owners in these cases are not content creators in the sense intended by U.S. copyright laws.
I’ve seen this pitched as a “debunking of seasonal affective disorder,” but if I’m reading the underlying research correctly, it’s really a debunking of the idea that we’re all a bit down in winter. I’d welcome feedback from the more science-literate out there.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: stick to baseball

→ February 13, 2016
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 2/13/16.

So, the first part of the top 100 prospects package is up: the top 100 ranking itself, ten prospects who just missed, and the ranking of all 30 farm systems. My team by team top tens and reports will go up Tuesday and Wednesday. I also held a Klawchat here on Thursday to discuss the top 100.

My latest review for Paste covers Barony, the new game from the designer of Splendor.

I intend to be somewhat scarce over the weekend, and will be visiting Toyfair on Monday to chat with boardgame publishers about their 2016 releases. I’ll post pics of anything interesting on my Instagram account.

And now, the links…

I tweeted this last Saturday, but it bears repeating: A rape victim tells how Baylor University failed her repeatedly and gave undue consideration to her rapist.
Peyton Manning is a creep, and Shaun King goes all in on this longread on Manning committing sexual assault while at the University of Tennessee (yep, same one with the rape problem now), and then spending years blaming the victim.
An “accomplished writer” took James Patterson’s online “MasterClass” in writing novels and was a bit surprised at what she learned.
Ah, Ted Cruz is still dog-whistling anti-Semitism, as if the accusations of unethical behavior in Iowa weren’t enough.
Speaking of Cruzie, a Jezebel writer tried to track down a rumor about him from college and found no end of people who told her they hated Cruz. But I wonder, couldn’t you do this for a lot of candidates? Hillary, sure – an assertive woman in college in the 1970s would have made her share of enemies and detractors. Rubio? Maybe people would say he was more of a dope than a jerk, but still, for almost any politician who’s had some success in life, you’ll find people from that person’s past ready to slam him or her.
Speaking of Hillary, The Nation had a scathing editorial on why she does not “deserve” the black vote. My one discomfort here: To what extent should the policy decisions of her husband work corruption of matrimony and stick to her? She’s not Bill any more than he was Hillary as President.
Journal article warning, but researchers in Canada examining a very large sample found increased suicide risk in people who’d suffered concussions.
There’s a cop in Miami who doxxed a woman who chased and filmed another cop who was driving dangerously fast and then posted her personal info on Facebook, leading to a barrage of harassment. How is this man still employed as a protector of the people?
OK Go’s new video, shot in a plane that uses parabolic flights to simulate zero g, is incredibly clever and fun to watch; you can watch it and see a brief explanation along with links to more info. I also happen to think it’s one of their best songs since Oh No.
At some point I’ll try to update my Arizona dining guide for spring training, but in the meantime, there’s a highly-rated new sandwich place in downtown Mesa, close to the A’s park and not far from the Cubs’ new boondoggle.
Lots of good stuff this week on gravitational waves; I enjoyed this summary and analysis by Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal since 1996.
I discovered two top 100 books lists from the Guardian and editor/writer Robert McCrum, one on the top 100 novels written in English, of which I think I’ve read 72, and an ongoing countdown of the top 100 non-fiction books ever written, where McCrum has only listed two so far, including Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction.
A too-short piece in the New Yorker on Spain’s acclaimed chefs the Roca brothers visiting New York to receive an honor from the UN.
School of Seven Bells’ final album comes out on February 26th, and the early singles have been some of their best work ever. Alehandra Deheza, the lone surviving member after bandmate Ben Curtis died of cancer in 2013, discussed the album on NPR last weekend.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: links, stick to baseball

→ January 30, 2016
→ By keith

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.)

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: links, stick to baseball

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