Monthly Archives: December 2012
Humanity’s pinnacle achieved
Reply
I don’t want to oversell this, but I’m pretty sure this kid who calls himself HandFartMaster on YouTube is the greatest artist since the dawn of human ears and hands. He’s got versions of “The Cave,” “Hallelujah,” “Comfortably Numb,” “Let it Be,” and Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” all performed with hand farts. Can this possibly be real?
Via Vulture.
Bold Flavors Snack of the Week
My wife thinks sushi is overrated and overpriced. I like sushi, but not enough to buy it for myself when my wife’s not around. And what I like most about sushi, I’m pretty sure, is the flavor of soy sauce and wasabi combined. Hence this sandwich.
Bold Flavors Snack of the Week: The Sushi Sandwich. It’s based on a California roll because those contents seemed like convenient enough ingredients to turn into a sandwich/delivery method for soy sauce and wasabi.
Directions:
1) Have a whole conversation with your wife about how you’d like to eat sushi more often even though she’s not that into it. Decide that you really just like the taste of soy sauce and wasabi. Conceptualize a sandwich.
2) Have mayo, soy sauce and Sriracha in your fridge.
3) Have that very same wife stop by the grocery store on her way home from her friends’ house and pick up a baguette, a ripe avocado, wasabi and crabmeat. Use real crabmeat even though it’s a bit more expensive. The sandwiches are only going to work out to like $4 each even with the good stuff.
4) Be surprised to learn that wasabi comes in powder form when you buy it at the store. Who knew? Maybe you, but not me. This is the first time I’ve owned my own wasabi. Pretty exciting day.
5) In a small bowl, stir wasabi powder into a large dollop of mayonnaise. I used about a heaping teaspoon of wasabi powder and maybe a third of a cup of mayo, but play around with it. If there’s too much wasabi, add mayo. I made it so the wasabi flavor is very evident in the mayo, but don’t worry about getting it spicy from wasabi. Too much wasabi will probably overpower the rest of the sandwich. At least that was my rationale.
6) Add soy sauce to the mayo. This one you want to be careful with: Soy sauce packs a lot of flavor and it’s a liquid, so if you add too much you’re going to have soupy mayo on your hands (literally; it’s a messy sandwich). I probably used a half a tablespoon of soy sauce, but I didn’t measure. It’s jazz baby, jazz. When you taste your wasabi/soy mayo, you should be able to taste wasabi and soy sauce and mayo. Pretty straightforward. I thought it would be a nasty color but it turns out it’s just beige.
7) Cut avocado into slices. Eat one, because avocado is delicious. Reserve the rest for, like, 30 seconds from now.
8) Cut baguette into appropriate sandwich-sized pieces. Slice them open, preferably without fully splitting them.
9) Assemble sandwich. Mine went like this: a thin layer of the mayo on the bottom part of the bread, a layer of avocado, a scoop of crabmeat, another drizzle of the mayo to keep the crabmeat moist, then a shot of Sriracha. You probably don’t want to go nuts with the crabmeat, since that stuff’s expensive and the sandwich is going to get some bulk from the avocado. I suppose you could add the mayo mixture to the crabmeat before you put it on the sandwich to create a crab salad, but I was concerned about the color of the mayo making the whole thing look unappetizing.
10) Eat sandwich. We boiled some edamame to accompany them, since it’s both delicious and thematically relevant. Same deal for the candied ginger we had for dessert.
This is a really good sandwich, and something I think I prefer to a California roll for no more money. It captured the wasabi/soy sauce flavor I wanted, but with more crab and avocado taste than I typically get when eating sushi and the added benefit of Sriracha spice. Plus it’s got a nice mix of textures, with the crunchiness of the baguette’s crust, the chewiness of the crab and the creaminess of the avocado. Next time I might try to incorporate some thinly sliced cucumbers for a little more crispiness and moisture, but I’m not sure they’re necessary.
The only issue with the sandwich is that it was kind of a mess. Use napkins, and maybe ready a fork to scoop up fallen crabmeat.
One more note on Pelfrey
Lost in this weekend’s trade hoopla: Jordany Valdespin’s instagram is incredible
Remember when I noted that every photo Jordany Valdespin has tweeted has been a photo of Jordany Valdespin? It turns out he’s way more prolific but no more diverse on Instagram. He has instagrammed 88 photos, and 75 of them have been of himself — most of them alone, posing. It’s like Jordany Valdespin is curating his own archive of embarrassing photos of Jordany Valdespin:
Huge thanks to @DylanAbruscato for the heads up.
Cool things about Mike Pelfrey
The Mets said goodbye to another, less-heralded member of the 2012 Opening Day starting rotation yesterday when Mike Pelfrey signed a one year, $4 million contract with the Twins. Incentives included in the deal mean Pelfrey could earn up to $5.5 million, which puts into perspective how much of a steal R.A. Dickey is at $5 million. Also, the Dickey trade could have opened up a rotation spot for Pelfrey to start 2013 if the Mets wanted to bring him back, but presumably they wouldn’t have paid him what the Twins did and for all we know he wanted to get the hell out.
Anyway, with Pelfrey’s departure, it seems appropriate to for once stop lamenting all the things he is not and celebrate the cool things about Mike Pelfrey. I mentioned a bunch of these a couple weeks ago, but I figured I’d hash them out a bit better. Here are some:
– He introduced me to the term “the yips.” Before Pelfrey balked three times in one game in 2009, I don’t think I had ever heard anyone refer to “the yips.” But it’s a great phrase, and perfect to describe what happened that day.
– He’s pretty funny.
– He’s braver than he gets credit for. Pelfrey spoke openly about consulting a sports psychologist because he wanted to combat the stigma against psychology in sports. The same psychologist treated Greg Maddux and Roy Halladay, both of whom are frequently praised for their bulldog mentalities. But Pelfrey’s reward for admitting it was constant undermining of his mental health whenever anything went wrong.
– He was remarkably consistent, year over year. I’ve joked that you could set your watch to Pelfrey’s xFIP. His ERA bounced around, but his peripherals stayed the same. Across Pelfrey’s four full big-league seasons from 2008 to 2011, he struck out exactly five batters per nine innings and walked exactly three. His lowest strikeout rate was 4.9 and his highest was 5.2. His lowest walk rate was 2.9 and his highest was 3.2. Pelf gonna Pelf, as we say.
– He warmed up to Nirvana’s Unplugged cover of “Lake of Fire.” Doesn’t seem like a traditional choice for walk-up music, but it’s a good groove and Pelfrey wore it well. A guy from Kansas could easily go country with it, so credit Pelf for bringing grunge to the park.
– One time he spent a few minutes talking to me about sandwiches. He pronounces bologna like “bo-low-nya.” It’s great. He’s a really nice dude.
– This happened:
– This zombie face, too:
I can say (and have already said) without hesitation that I’ll be rooting for Mike Pelfrey as hard as I will any ex-Met not named Carlos Beltran.
The R.A. Dickey trade and you
Given the amount of vitriol being spewed about the Internet following the news that the Mets agreed to trade R.A. Dickey (and Josh Thole and a “non-elite prospect”) for Travis d’Arnaud and Noah Syndergaard (and John Buck and another non-elite prospect), I was surprised to see that over 70 percent of those polled on this site since yesterday feel good about the deal.
From my perspective that makes things easy, as it means I don’t need to talk most of you into the rationale behind the deal. It’s pretty straightforward: The Mets trade a guy who’s very good now for a couple of guys who might be very good in the future. Thole, who can catch a knuckleball better than most, goes to Toronto as Dickey’s caddy. Buck comes to New York presumably to serve as an Opening Day stopgap to allow d’Arnaud to spend a month in the Minors for an extra year of team control.
This is all assuming Dickey signs an extension with Toronto and the deal gets done, of course. Unless Dickey really hates the idea of pitching indoors in half his games, I’d guess he inks something within the window. Sure, he stands to make a lot more money if he can pitch like he did in 2012 in 2013 and hit the open market after the season, but Dickey seems like a pretty smart guy who realizes how fickle baseball can be. And though I can’t say for sure as I never expect to make close as much money for anything as Dickey already has for pitching, I’d bet for a guy with four kids, the difference between the $13 million he’ll have made through 2013 and the extra $26 million or so he stands to earn in an extension is the difference between “OK, great, we have a lot of money now,” and “we’ll never have to worry about money again ever.” (UPDATE: While I was writing this, reports came out that Dickey and the Blue Jays reached an extension.)
Oh, plus there are still some details we don’t know, most notably the names of the non-elite prospects and whether the Blue Jays will give the Mets another prospect or salary relief to compensate for the $6 million owed to Buck in 2013. The non-elite prospect swap seems like an odd particular of the trade, and could mean a variety of things. It could be as simple as the Mets wanting more outfield depth deep in their system and the Blue Jays preferring pitching, or maybe there’s an unheralded guy in the Toronto farm system the Mets really like and vice versa. Or the players could be — and this I’m hoping for — near-ready non-prospect types aimed to address each big-league team’s specific needs. But I’ll hold off on speculating any more on the subject, since presumably we’ll find out soon.
Instead, let’s assess the guys we know are part of the deal to figure the ways it could pay off or blow up for the Mets.
Dickey: Trading for Dickey makes a lot of sense for the Blue Jays, a club decidedly in win-now mode with a rare window opening up in the American League East. And Dickey seems a safe bet to pitch well in 2013, if not quite as well as he did in 2012. If he can pitch like he did in 2010 and 2011 (ie, excellently) from 2013-2015, Toronto has a great pitcher on what we assume will be a reasonable deal. But by now you know all the risks: He’s 38, and his style of knuckleballing is unprecedented. Those risks, it should be noted, are part of what makes Dickey so awesome and fun to root for: He’s 38 and his style of knuckleballing is unprecedented! Also, everything else.
Thole: I’m a pretty staunch Thole apologist and willing to bet he bounces back in 2013. He’s not about to emerge as a superstar, but a lefty-hitting catcher that can get on base is a rare and valuable thing. And Thole’s now under the Blue Jays’ control for the next four seasons. Look for him to start the year working primarily when Dickey’s on the mound, then steal at-bats against righties from J.P. Arencibia as the season moves along. Many Mets fans seemed to give up on Thole after his awful 2012, but I don’t think he’s an insignificant part of the deal.
Next, the guys coming to the Mets.
d’Arnaud: By most accounts, d’Arnaud is the best catching prospect in baseball. The concerns — all coming out now from many who clamored for him weeks ago — are that he has struggled to stay healthy and that his offensive numbers in Triple-A were bolstered by the hitting environment in Las Vegas. On the other hand, he has a rare lowercase d at the beginning of his name (his older brother Chase uses and upside-down “P” on his jersey) and he has had shirts made in honor of tacos. So he’s alright by me.
Syndergaard: Y’all know I’m not a prospect guy, but Syndergaard’s the type I like — a guy whose results match his hype. As a 19-year-old in Single-A Lansing in 2012, he struck out tons of guys, walked very few of them, and allowed only three home runs in 103 2/3 innings. I’ve read that Syndergaard’s ceiling is a No. 2 starter, but to me, if a 19-year-0ld is throwing in the upper 90s (as he reportedly does) and showing good control, his ceiling is the moon. It’s hard to find a lot of recent teenage pitchers who dominated the Midwest League the way Syndergaard did, and every pitching prospect is his own unique snowflake susceptible to all sorts of injuries. But Shelby Miller and Tyler Scaggs both reached the Majors in 2012 after tearing through the Midwest League as teenagers in 2010. Expect Syndergaard to start the season in High A at St. Lucie, and if all goes well, finish it in Double-A. If he stays healthy, he could be in the Majors as soon as late 2014.
Buck: John Buck is a legit Major League catcher, and the Mets have precious few of those. He’s not a great Major League catcher by any stretch, but he rates out pretty well on defense and can hit a home run every now and then. His batting average dropped below the Mendoza Line in 2012, but on paper it looks a bit like a fluky BABIP thing. He’s here to hold down the fort until d’Arnaud is ready, but I wouldn’t be surprised if his offense moves back toward his career mean and he hits about as well as the coveted Arencibia in 2013.
As for the rest of this…
Off-field stuff and whether it factored into the deal: Honestly, who cares? If we agree the trade is a good one for the Mets, there’s no real point delving into the he-said, they-said, he-reported drama. Because I work at SNY, anything I write about it will be assumed by someone to be coming straight from the Wilpons even if that’s 100-percent never the case. So it’s just not really worth my time.
How many seasons are the Mets “punting”?: At the New York Times, Tyler Kepner wrote this:
By trading Dickey to the Toronto Blue Jays, pending the negotiation of a contract extension, the Mets essentially told their fans that they do not expect to contend for the next three years. The Mets have already staggered through four consecutive losing seasons, three shy of the franchise record. Now the wait to be relevant drags on.
That’s absurd. Three years? We’re mostly Mets fans here — does anyone feel like this trade sent the message that the Mets don’t expect to contend until 2016? Anyone?
If d’Arnaud’s healthy and hitting in Vegas, he should be in the Majors by May. He’ll be 25, nearing his peak, by Opening Day of 2014. If by then he can emerge as a top-10 regular catcher — what the Mets are banking on in making this trade — he could very well be worth more to the Mets that season than Dickey will be to the Blue Jays. Throw in the stark difference in their likely salaries — money that we hope the Mets will allocate elsewhere — and the organization’s depth at starting pitching relative to its stock of legitimate Major League hitters, plus the fact that Dickey is a 38 year old man, and the idea that the deal implies punting three seasons seems stark raving mad.
This deal, if it goes through, makes the Mets significantly less likely to contend in 2013. They have sacrificed Dickey’s near-term value for players they hope will provide more in the future, trading from what appears to be an organizational strength to address what is certainly an organizational weakness. It’s more smart than it is scandalous.
Is this happening?
By most accounts, it seems the Mets will send R.A. Dickey, Josh Thole and a prospect to the Blue Jays for Travis d’Arnaud, Noah Syndergaard, John Buck and a prospect. Both prospects have been described as “non-elite.”
I’ll have way more tomorrow, obviously. But assuming the deal actually happens and those are actually the terms of the deal, what say you?
Friday Q&A, pt. 3: The randos
Brief note: I am shocked, horrified and generally miserable after what happened in Connecticut this morning. It’s a shocking, horrifying and miserable thing. I’ve got nothing insightful to say about the subject.
I’ve seen several people suggest that anything written about anything else today is unnecessary and/or unimportant, and I certainly hear that. But nothing I ever write about here is necessary or important, and I don’t really know what else to do this afternoon but answer some silly questions about silly topics in a silly fashion. Is this the time for that? Of course not. But if you think about it that way, it’s never the time for that.
In other words: Please don’t take this stupid blog post as a lack of respect for the awful gravity of a shooting that killed 27 innocent people, 18 of them children. It’s not meant that way; it’s just a stupid blog post. I don’t blame you if you don’t feel like reading stupid blog posts today, so if that’s the case just click away. There’ll be plenty of stupid blog posts here whenever you feel up to returning.
https://twitter.com/robValcich/status/279608690229796865
Meggings, Rob has explained to me, are leggings for men. I don’t know why they need their own distinct name, since the term “leggings” is not at all gendered to begin with.
Regardless, they’re not for me. Maybe they’re comfortable, but my issue with pants isn’t their name but how constricting and unventilated they are, and that doesn’t seem likely to change with meggings.
Also, you guys can’t see my lower half on the web videos, but I’ve got disproportionately large legs. It’s a weird family thing. My brother held our high school’s squat record until I broke it eight years later. It’s a useful body type for pushing stuff around, but it’s decidedly the wrong build for tight pants of any sort. What I’m looking for is more of a toga or muumuu.
https://twitter.com/thekaterer/status/279609914006052864
That is an outstanding article about a $26 chicken sandwich, and I’m far too vain to callously recommend lengthy sandwich reviews besides my own. This one’s funny and well written, and it demonstrates a very strong understanding of the nature of sandwiches. Kudos to J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, whose Food Lab posts are also consistently interesting.
These sentiments should sound familiar to TedQuarters faithful:
…the First Rule of Sandwich-Making: a sandwich must be greater than the sum of its parts.
There are implications to this statement. In order to achieve sandwich greatness, you don’t necessarily need to start with great ingredients—so long as when you add those ingredients together and put them between bread, if they are thus improved, then you have succeeded at the art of sandwich-making.
https://twitter.com/JoeBacci/status/279631890162528256
I didn’t watch the whole thing; I got home late and fast forwarded through most of it, breaking when I saw Adam Sandler, when I noticed that Kanye was wearing a skirt, and then when I caught up with the DVR during Billy Joel’s set. As a Long Islander, I am oddly comforted by the music of Billy Joel and found myself getting a cup of warm milk and taking out my contact lenses during his performance — Billy Joel was literally putting me to sleep.
I don’t particularly like Coldplay and I thought Chris Martin sounded like he might have had a cold or something, but Michael Stipe’s appearance was great. It made me think of what other R.E.M. songs I would have liked to hear, which made me think of “Stand,” which made me realize “Stand” is probably too cheery for the occasion, which ultimately made me turn down the volume during Chris Martin’s last song so I could see if there was a way to sing a sad version of “Stand.” It’s not really possible. If you slow it down a lot you can make it sound sort of wistful, but without changing the melody you’re not really going to make it full-out sad.
I thought Paul McCartney sounded pretty great, and the pyrotechnics during “Live and Let Die” were amazing. I wish he did more Beatles songs and I wish he played more than one song with Nirvana, though. And I need to go back and watch Roger Waters’ set.
https://twitter.com/arrabin56/status/279601490778275841
Maybe. The operative part of this question is “if you were a monkey.” If I’m a monkey, I’m not into the same things that the human me is into. What do we know about monkeys? Monkeys like eating things, climbing things and throwing feces at people. You can do all of those things at Ikea!
Plus, presumably the monkey version of me wouldn’t be holding a lot of cash, both because I don’t often hold a lot of cash as a human and because monkeys are more or less unemployable. And say what you will about the food at Ikea, it’s reliably a pretty great deal. Don’t sleep on those Swedish meatballs.
https://twitter.com/jenconnic/status/279600619449380864
Problem is, you need something that you could stomach for breakfast and something that you wouldn’t get sick of too quickly. My instinct is to say it’d be my mom’s ravioli, but I don’t know that I could handle eating it for breakfast. So it’s probably a cheeseburger, preferably one with lettuce and tomato so I get my vegetables. I could pretty much always go for a cheeseburger.
https://twitter.com/IanBinMD/status/279601000925495296
Oh, ahh… this is going to be sadder than it should be. Growing up, my family had one ornament that was a really tacky gold metallic bird with bendable legs that clamped on to the top of a branch — like a bird, get it? — instead of dangling from the branch. Everyone thought it was pretty ugly, but my brother always thought the bird was the neatest thing. The original got lost or broken or thrown out at some point before he died, but after he died, I got my parents and sister similar birds at a Christmas market in France. After I got married and started getting my own tree, my wife got me one of my own. It’s great; the bird clamps on top of the branch like real birds do. Very neat.
Friday Q&A, pt. 2: More sports
Via email, Bill asks:
What would you name the new seven-team, basketball-focused conference rising from the ashes of the Big East?
Honestly, it’s really hard to keep track of what’s happening with all this, and whether they’ll have the ability to dissolve the conference, to keep the name Big East, to keep their automatic tournament bids, and which teams they’ll be able to bring on from outside the conference. I believe it’ll be more than seven teams when the dust settles though, so you can’t go with “the Magnificent Seven” or anything like that.
If they’re all Catholic schools in the new league, maybe there could be a tie-in there, like “The Big Priest” or something. Alternately, I kind of like “The Medium Sized East.” CATCH THE FEVER!
https://twitter.com/seanadekunle/status/279602892007149569
I do. Dirk Hayhurst’s The Bullpen Gospels was great. It sort of took me a while to get into it, but Hayhurst is a very funny dude and paints a great picture of Minor League life.
Also, Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball is outstanding. I know someone will pep up and say something about Posnanski’s soft stance on Joe Paterno because the Internet, but that obviously has nothing to do with the content of the baseball book.
I mostly read fiction at home, and I’d definitely recommend Bernard Malamud’s The Natural over Chad Harbach’s recent bestseller The Art of Fielding.
https://twitter.com/jeffpaternostro/status/279601387313168385
I’ve actually sponsored a bunch of baseball-reference pages, but I always snooze and let the sponsorship expire. The pages I’ve sponsored in the past are: Tommy Hanson, Fernando Martinez, Val Pascucci, the 2009 Mets, Bris Robotham Lord — “The Human Eyeball” and Buzz McWeeny.
I changed the message for the 2009 Mets a few times, but for a while I went with “Carlos Beltran: Because baserunning blunders happen more frequently when you’re always on base.” I was pretty happy with that, given the early goings-on of that season.
The Tommy Hanson page obviously had to do with his much-rumored relationship to the band Hanson. I don’t remember what I wrote for Martinez or the Scooch. Obviously the pages for Lord and McWeeny had jokes about their names.
I thought about sponsoring Jeff Francoeur’s page, but it turns out Jeff Francoeur’s page costs $265! It’s almost as much as Frenchy’s on-base percentage. It might be cool to sponsor the pages for the other Ike Davis and David Wright as shoutouts to Mets fans who click the wrong link.
Tedquarters 