The Grid... It Is Immaculate!
Hello, again. I have big news: My novel is published! It’s called “A Hell of a Wedding”. If you want to buy it in paperback, here’s where you can get it, and if you want a digital copy, you’re welcome to buy it, but I’m also happy to send you a free copy if you request it here. I’m proud of making this and hope it will find at least a few readers, so I hope you enjoy!
Recently, I have been appreciating Immaculate Grid and lamenting Americans’ seeming disregard for due process. I also read a really gossipy book about Elon Musk and read another book that deals with time travel in a satisfying way. LFG.
What I’ve Learned From Immaculate Grid
Immaculate Grid is a perfect casual game for me because it lands right in my sweet spot of sports love, trivia love, nostalgia, and flexible time commitment. But even better, once Sports-Reference added the ability to log in and save your progress, I was able to easily start over and play the baseball grid in a very specific way that is just the right level of challenging. (There are basketball, football, hockey, and soccer grids available, but I don’t play them anymore, so for simplicity’s sake, I’m not going to specify it, but I’m talking about baseball.)
I started out trying to just get 9/9 every time, but that proved too easy for someone who basically memorized the 1987 MLB rosters and read The Ballplayers for fun when he was in grade school. Then, I moved on to trying to get 9/9 as fast as possible, but that ceased to be a real challenge. When the accounts came and I was able to reset, I also reset my goals.
Today, I play with the limit of using only players who were onetime New York or San Francisco Giants. This means some grids are impossible to get perfect — like when they specify that a player must only have played for the Cincinnati Reds — but that’s OK! If I have guesses still remaining and those squares are the only ones empty, I decide in the moment if I’m going to answer.
In order to play this way, one must have a certain mix of sicko obsession with baseball (*raises hand*) and the discipline to examine Baseball-Reference and Wikipedia lists (Don Robinson!) in order to learn why I failed to correctly name a qualifying player. And I’ve learned a ton.
Before playing this way, I had zero recollection of Miguel Tejada or Joe Carter playing for the Giants. I was under the mistaken impression that Charlie Hayes had played for the Cubs. I knew Rick Reuschel was really good for a long time, but I didn’t realize he was *that* good. I didn’t know that Carl Mays had played for the Giants. I knew Rogers Hornsby had put in time with the Giants when he wasn’t playing for the Cardinals and Cubs, but did not know he also played for the Boston National League club and for the St. Louis Browns.
Did you know only four Hall of Fame players have appeared for the Kansas City Royals? Just four! And of those four, only George Brett was *not* in the final flickering moments of an otherwise stellar career. The other three? Harmon Killebrew, Gaylord Perry, and Orlando Cepeda.
Speaking of Perry, I didn’t know he won Cy Young Awards with Cleveland and San Diego. I’ve gotten far too familiar with different teams’ Silver Slugger awards — Orel Hershiser is my guy when I need a Dodger — and I’m still mostly feeling my way through the Gold Gloves — Reuschel and Steve Carlton won in the era before Greg Maddux monopolized the NL Gold Gloves, and Jake Peavy won while with the White Sox. Oh, man, the White Sox… Peavy, Carlton, Kenny Lofton, A.J. Pierzynski, George Foster, Billy Pierce, Rich Gossage, Ellis Burks, Danny Darwin, Roberto Hernandez, Keith Foulke, and Omar Vizquel are a good base of Giants/White Sox for just about any Grid conditions.
Aside from the top-line guys with big statistical profiles — Willie Mays, Barry Bonds, McCovey, Mel Ott, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Christy Mathewson — there are a few guys who played for a bunch of teams and prove to be valuable nodes: Lofton, Gossage, Reggie Sanders, Steve Finley, Terry Mulholland, and Kevin Mitchell are all among my most-used players.
I fully understand this is more involved than it has to be, but it’s also precisely involved enough to be extremely fun. Because remembering Rob Deer played for the Giants, Brewers, Tigers, Red Sox, and Padres is a very specific kind of fun I can’t really prompt any other way.
Tyler Soderstrom is a First Baseman
Tyler Soderstrom has hit a bunch of home runs for the (Sacramento) Athletics this year. He was up with the big club before this season, and his track record in the minors suggested he was a powerful hitter, albeit with a lot of swing and miss in his game. And then there was the matter of his defense, given that he spent time behind the plate, but most sources I’ve read over the years kept saying it was an extremely long shot to expect him to stick there full-time if his bat got him to MLB.
Anyway, he’s a first baseman, now, and it’s early in the season, but his Statcast page is a delight. Look at all that red! Somehow, he has easily above-average foot speed, but is a bad baserunner and a terrible fielder? Anyway, a catcher-first base guy who is struggling in the field seems like a designated hitter candidate to me, and that seemed to be the plan, given that the Athletics’ top prospect is Nick Kurtz, a first base-only guy, and he’s going to be with the big club sooner rather than later. But the A’s are apparently considering a more… radical solution, putting Soderstrom at third base.
This seems like a bad idea all the way around — trying to learn a new position at the highest level while also growing as a hitter feels like asking too much of a young player. It’s the kind of thing I would’ve done playing Out of the Park Baseball, just to see if I could get as much offense as possible in the lineup. It almost certainly won’t happen, but I’m old enough to have seen Carlos Santana “play” third base, so maybe the A’s will choose the adventurous path and give it a go.
Due Process is for You — Yes, You
In case you missed it, the Trump administration is openly proclaiming that they don’t want to extend due process to anyone they determine is a bad person they want to send to a foreign gulag. Instinctively, you might feel queasy about that, but there’s a specific reason due process is so important for governments that seek legitimacy and consent of the governed.
What these dumbasses don’t understand is that due process is as much a protection for people exercising the power of the state as it is for people being subjected to the power of the state. Obviously, having a rigorous formal process of accusing someone of a crime, and then determining they are guilty of said crime, protects people who might be accused because it forces accusers to have their shit together and not just make accusations willy-nilly.
But it also protects those in power because having their shit together and going through the formal process signals to the public they are making an effort to get it right, thus avoiding the wrath of the masses. If wielding state violence is a matter of whim, when they inevitably get it wrong, the catastrophic consequences can only be blamed on the people who didn’t have their shit together, instead of the institutions and rules that were supposed to provide guardrails. And you don’t want to be on the wrong end of a populace upset that you wielded state violence at whim the wrong way.
Separation of Church and State is for You — Yes, You
In case you missed it, the Trump State Department is openly proclaiming that they want employees to report on each other for “anti-Christian bias.” Instinctively, you might feel queasy about that, but there’s a specific reason separation of church and state is so important for governments that seek to protect freedom to worship as one sees fit.
What these dumbasses don’t understand is that separation of church and state is as much a protection for people exercising the power of the state as it is for people being subjected to the power of the state. (OK, OK, you get the bit…) I should want to protect your freedom to worship, or not, because if any of us do not have that freedom, then it is conditional for all of us.
One Sentence to Explain Why Colleges Bend the Knee to Trump
I don’t know how well this will hold up medium-to-long-term, but, “Where the money is in charge, the institution will capitulate,” feels like a pretty solid analysis of how to frame academia’s reaction to the Trump administration pressuring universities to end DEIB initiatives and otherwise convert themselves into conservative propaganda farms. Where smaller state schools seemed to be less likely to comply with the Trump demands, prominent institutions, such as Columbia University, moved to kiss the ring in order to avoid the mad king’s wrath, and got the thumbs-down anyway.
Maybe Harvard University telling the Trump admin they could pound sand inverts the notion of “money will capitulate,” in the sense that Trump’s overall agenda is now messing with Harvard’s money, and so they’re protecting their assets. But I think the fundamental insight is correct, that schools which are guided by aspirational values will protect their ability to operate by those values, and schools guided by wealth will protect their ability to create and pass on wealth.
AI as “Mid Tech”
This Tressie McMillan Cottom essay (gift link) on the use of artificial intelligence in academia says a lot of what I’ve been trying to express about the rise of the technology in the mainstream. Here is the key paragraph that I want everyone, in every field — not just education! — to memorize:
Of course, A.I., if applied properly, can save lives. It has been useful for producing medical protocols and spotting patterns in radiology scans. But crucially, that kind of A.I. requires people who know how to use it. Speeding up interpretations of radiology scans helps only people who have a medical doctor who can act on them. More efficient analysis of experimental data increases productivity for experts who know how to use the A.I. analysis and, more important, how to verify its quality. A.I.’s most revolutionary potential is helping experts apply their expertise better and faster. But for that to work, there has to be experts.
There has to be experts. You do not become expert in a field by letting a generative artificial intelligence fill in the blanks where you have little knowledge or skill.
The Looney Tunes Movie is Really Really Really Really Weird
If you have not yet seen “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” the following includes mild spoilers, although it’s kind of impossible to spoil this movie on a plot level. In this instance, a “spoiler” is explaining just how darkly weird it is at times, because that’s where most of the laughs originate.
If you’re familiar with Ren & Stimpy, and the John Kricfalusi style, like I am, watching this movie might also be like an out-of-body experience in which you realize that they’re really going for it and referencing the Kricfalusi aesthetic about as directly as a major studio can given the allegations section of the man’s Wikipedia page. But even if the origins of the movie’s influences weren’t distressing, some of the gags they included are so ballsy I questioned whether this movie was approved by an utterly reckless person, or someone who had no idea what they were approving.
Just to pick three examples, there’s a woman whose breasts are so big she has to dramatically maneuver herself in order to slide in and out of the driver’s seat in her car; Daffy shows his bare butt while repairing a concrete path and Porky tells him, “I said no cracks”; and then there’s the scene where Porky absolutely goes to town with his mouth on Petunia Pig’s bare foot.
Given all that, and how it’s more “demonstration of wacky animation” than anything else, I don’t know if it’s a “good” movie, or whether I should recommend it or not.
Elon Musk is Really Really Really Really Weird
(Sorry about the header.) Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, “Character Limit,” has a lot of information that Terminally Online Sickos probably have already absorbed, but there’s also a ton of information in it that draws a fuller picture of why Musk bought the social network and how he operates.
There are obvious parallels between Musk's Twitter acquisition and our present, but the thing about Musk, post-offer but pre-close, fighting for access to the Twitter firehose of tweets — as in, all of them, in one stream, an *incredibly* valuable resource for someone who had recently threatened to start a competing social media company — only for Twitter techs to discover, once Musk’s people had access, that they didn't query anything of consequence, is incredibly on the nose. Also on the nose: all the examples of Musk ordering changes, sometimes literally unplugging things on his own, contra the advice of people who actually knew the systems in place, and then skating away from the wreckage with a sneer.
I could go on, but in lieu of paraphrasing or quoting the whole book, the other big takeaway for me was a renewed appreciation for how many supposed luminaries of Silicon Valley are actually just mediocrities who mistake their wealth for skill. That’s not a novel observation, but it might be the book’s lasting contribution: giving us multiple illustrations of these cloistered and sheltered dumb dumbs demanding reality bend to their perspectives when pointing to their money won’t do the trick.
Related: NPR reported that Musk’s DOGE minions went to the National Labor Relations Board, snooped around in a bunch of data that they had absolutely no business snooping, and then subsequently NLRB staff “started detecting suspicious log-in attempts from an IP address in Russia,” and a whistleblower whose concerns led to this report also received a threatening note and photos of him walking his dog. Concerning. Will look into it.
A Time Travel Novel That Rocks
I don’t have a particular position on time travel in the art I consume. “Back to the Future” kicks ass; “Predestination” is tedious. Mainly, I find myself wishing that time travel, in whatever direction, were more grounded in the quotidian, perhaps in parallel to my fascination with hard sci-fi in the Kim Stanley Robinson style.
“The Ministry of Time,” by Kaliane Bradley, scratches that itch for me. I fully understand why some people would bail on it, since it blends several different genres — romance, sci-fi, spy thriller — in a way that can be disorienting if you enter with expectations. However, I went in with nearly zero expectations and granted a torrent of grace because the time travelers in this story — primarily, one going from 1847 to the near-future — directly address issues that I have long thought time travelers would need to deal with.
Remember “Sleepy Hollow,” the Fox TV drama about a guy who passes out in 1781 and then wakes up in 2013? I watched the pilot, and when the guy got into a car and it drove away, all I could think was that he would absolutely freak out before getting in a car, let alone freak out at the sounds and speed of the thing. Karl Marx realizing we sent men to the moon, et cetera.
While I don’t recall bits about space travel, the people pulled from the distant past to the present in “The Ministry of Time” struggle and grapple not only with the reality of internal combustion engines, powered flight, and computers, but with their language, clothing, dramatically changed norms around modesty, sexuality, and the very concept of individual freedom in the present-day United Kingdom, and the harsh realization that everyone they’d ever known was dead. The assimilation processes are skillfully woven into the plot, so it was a pleasure to see the time travelers adapt and evolve with their circumstances.
There’s a sort-of twist I saw coming from 50 miles away, and I think that element of the story was weak because it was entirely unnecessary unlike, say, the twist in “Sea of Tranquility,” by Emily St. John Mandel, completes the story in an arc that feels as if it is the only way it could be completed. But no matter. It’s a cracker, with sharp ideas about here-ness, there-ness, and being conscious of history as a process that tells a story about people in a way that cannot approach actually knowing them as people.
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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime. (One more time: Read “A Hell of a Wedding”!)