{"id":8139,"date":"2019-12-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-21T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=8139"},"modified":"2019-12-19T17:26:06","modified_gmt":"2019-12-19T22:26:06","slug":"stick-to-baseball-12-21-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2019\/12\/21\/stick-to-baseball-12-21-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Stick to baseball, 12\/21\/19."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I wrote two ESPN+ pieces this week, on <a href=\"https:\/\/klaw.me\/2YP10ei\">the Madison Bumgarner contract<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/klaw.me\/2EiAFf9\">the Corey Kluber trade<\/a>. I didn&#8217;t chat this\nweek as I&#8217;m preparing for the holidays and had a lot of personal business that\nrequired my time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On the board gaming front, I ranked the <a href=\"https:\/\/klaw.me\/2Exg3Qw\">top ten games of 2019<\/a> for <em>Paste<\/em> and the\n<a href=\"https:\/\/klaw.me\/2M6SpOX\">best board games of 2019 by category<\/a> for Vulture.\nI&#8217;ll have a piece up this weekend on Ars Technica ranking the best board game\napps of the year. Also for <em>Paste<\/em>, I ran down <a href=\"https:\/\/klaw.me\/35gb4PT\">the best games I saw at PAX Unplugged<\/a>\nearlier this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My second book, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.harpercollins.com\/9780062942722\/the-inside-game\/\">The Inside\nGame: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About\nOurselves<\/a><\/em>, comes out on April 21<sup>st<\/sup> from William Morrow\n(Harper Collins). You can pre-order it now through that link or wherever\ndelicious books are sold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And now, the links\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>The Mormon Church <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/investigations\/mormon-church-has-misled-members-on-100-billion-tax-exempt-investment-fund-whistleblower-alleges\/2019\/12\/16\/e3619bd2-2004-11ea-86f3-3b5019d451db_story.html?arc404=true\">has built up a $100 billion fund<\/a> they claimed was for &#8220;charitable&#8221; purposes, but has hoarded much of the money and only made distributions to two for-profit businesses owned by the church, which if true is a massive case of tax fraud. <\/li><li>Professor Julie Sedivy writes about <a href=\"https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/the-strange-persistence-of-first-languages\">rediscovering her parents&#8217; native tongue<\/a>, Czech, after her father died, and how the process reconnected her with her roots.<\/li><li>I&#8217;ve been listening to the audiobook version of <em>Surely You&#8217;re Joking, Mr. Feynman! <\/em>and have been struck by just how much of a creep Richard Feynman appears to be in his own telling. It turns out <a href=\"https:\/\/thebaffler.com\/outbursts\/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-feynman-mcneill?fbclid=IwAR2iHXFz3N0VtkUXoTq_6WtxAnma5q8z0V95vDMSdTE0KcPlsL9H5CoNuOQ\">I&#8217;m far from the only one who noticed<\/a>, and, worse, his second wife accused him of physical and verbal abuse. To make it worse, the audio version has its own problems, such as the narrator trying to imitate non-American accents, with an especially cringey version of a Japanese accent that might make Krusty the Clown blush.<\/li><li>Over at the <em>Atlantic<\/em>, Amanda Mull says <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/health\/archive\/2019\/12\/enough-with-the-rankings\/603829\/\">enough with the year-end rankings<\/a>, and while I agree there are a lot of those posts, I think she misses a large part of the point: They become both conversation starters, which is one of the main reasons I post rankings here, and ways to find new music or books or movies you might not have heard about previously. <\/li><li>Clint Eastwood is clearly a chauvinist asshole, with his new film, <em>Richard Jewell<\/em>, fabricating a story about a real journalist offering sex in exchange for information \u2013 a story that never happened, about a journalist who has since passed away and can&#8217;t defend herself. Ankita Rao writes in the <em>Guardian<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2019\/dec\/16\/clint-eastwood-richard-jewell-female-journalists?CMP=share_btn_tw\">how harmful this pervasive stereotype<\/a> is.<\/li><li>I guess one good thing about the ongoing measles epidemic in the U.S. is that it is waking up more media outlets to the existential threat anti-vaxxers pose. <em>Men&#8217;s Health<\/em> has a column from Jacqueline Detwiler on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.menshealth.com\/health\/a29861284\/measles-outbreak-epidemic\/\">how scientific BS has brought measles back<\/a>, and how we can fight for science against denialists.<\/li><li>A bill in the New Jersey legislature to end non-medical exemptions to mandatory schoolchild vaccinations \u2013 which is only rational, since there are no religious prohibitions on vaccinations, and if you have a &#8220;philosophical&#8221; objection to vaccination then you can just home-school your kid \u2013 stalled in the Senate <a href=\"https:\/\/www.mic.com\/p\/new-jersey-vaccination-fight-shows-how-health-care-is-being-co-opted-19493066?emci=2e30eca0-c821-ea11-a601-2818784d6d68&amp;emdi=6d06a8c7-c821-ea11-a601-2818784d6d68&amp;ceid=6545598\">after vocal protests from anti-vaxxers<\/a>. The Newark Star-Ledger&#8217;s editorial board commented by saying that the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nj.com\/opinion\/2019\/12\/the-anti-vaxxer-movement-has-gone-off-the-rails-editorial.html\">anti-vaxxer movement has gone off the rails<\/a>, comparing vaccinations to &#8220;hate crimes.&#8221; Do you live in New Jersey? <a href=\"https:\/\/www.njleg.state.nj.us\/members\/legsearch.asp\">Find your legislators<\/a> and call them Monday to let them know you support this bill. <\/li><li>The <em>Washington Post<\/em>&#8216;s Dave Sheinen profiles <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/sports\/2019\/12\/17\/mlb-minor-league-contraction-proposal-bernie-sanders\/\">fringe relief prospect Gabe Klobosits<\/a> to talk about how the proposed cuts to minor league baseball might impact players at the margins of organized baseball. It&#8217;s a good piece, but I think it&#8217;s an anecdotal argument that doesn&#8217;t consider how many other players like Klobosits never pan out (and he hasn&#8217;t yet) and what the overall cost is to employ and develop those players, and additional coaches and staffers, in the hopes you&#8217;ll find one or two hidden big leaguers.<\/li><li>A disabled artist designed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/entertainment-arts-50670333\">a hotel room that is deliberately difficult to stay in<\/a>, trying to mimic the experience disabled people have in rooms designed solely for the non-disabled, for the Art B&amp;B in Blackpool, England.<\/li><li>I do like my elite status when I get it, so this <em>New Yorker <\/em>piece on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/business\/currency\/the-madness-of-airline-elite-status\">the madness of airline elite status<\/a> hit rather close to home.<\/li><li>The Department of Agriculture listed <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/world-us-canada-50849559\">Wakanda as a trade partner<\/a>, trading ducks, donkeys, and dairy cows with the U.S., even though Wakanda is a fictional country. We have handed the keys to our government to the dumbest possible people.<\/li><li>China responded too slowly to a pig virus called African swine fever, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/12\/17\/business\/china-pigs-african-swine-fever.html\">leading to an epidemic<\/a> and fears it will spread beyond China&#8217;s borders.<\/li><li>I&#8217;d never heard of Bolze, a French-German hybrid language spoken in a small town in the canton of Fribourg, before finding this BBC Travel post about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/travel\/story\/20190422-the-swiss-language-that-few-know\">the language and its associated culture<\/a>.<\/li><li>The Anti-Defamation League now lists <a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/2019\/09\/26\/764728163\/the-ok-hand-gesture-is-now-listed-as-a-symbol-of-hate\">the &#8216;ok&#8217; hand gesture as a symbol of hate<\/a>, depending on context, of course.<\/li><\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wrote two ESPN+ pieces this week, on the Madison Bumgarner contract and the Corey Kluber trade. I didn&#8217;t chat this week as I&#8217;m preparing for the holidays and had a lot of personal business that required my time. On the board gaming front, I ranked the top ten games of 2019 for Paste and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[821,1140,131,849,190,215,807],"class_list":["post-8139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anti-science","tag-china","tag-food-safety","tag-languages","tag-links","tag-movies","tag-vaccines","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8140,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8139\/revisions\/8140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}