Seventh Inning Stretch

Tonight's ALDS Game 5 between the Blue Jays and Rangers will, forever, be reduced to one inning. It's already happening, on websites, social media, in the minds of reporters. By tomorrow, the process will be complete. It wasn't a game the Blue Jays will have won; it was the seventh inning.

Many great accomplishments will be glossed over in the process. Great pitching performances by Marcus Stroman, Aaron Sanchez and Roberto Osuna. Amazing defence from Kevin Pillar, Ryan Goins and Josh Donaldson. A sixth inning, game-tying home run from Edwin Encarnacion that looked for about twenty minutes like it would be the story of the night. Too bad for Eddie, I suppose. There was a bigger myth to be made.

You've heard the story already I'm sure. Russell Martin receives a strike from Sanchez and as he moves to toss it back, he accidentally bounces it off Shin-Soo Choo's bat. It looks like the home plate umpire calls time, but Rougned Odor scores from third anyway. Then follow eighteen-minutes of screaming, debating, bench-clearing and (shamefully) garbage throwing from Toronto's fans. Police come onto the field. Calls are made to New York. The safe call for Odor is upheld and Toronto continues the game under protest. Sanchez promptly strikes out Choo.

Then comes the bottom half and the myth is written in stone. Two groundballs and a well-charged bunt on the part of the Blue Jays. What should have been three outs for the Rangers. But Elvis Andrus misplays all three. Three outs are instead three baserunners. One comes in on a pop-up from Josh Donaldson that finds a hole in shallow right. The slide from Dalton Pompey is questionably dirty, so there's another review. Tension grows. The call is upheld for the Blue Jays – tie game again.

Then comes Jose Bautista. Nobody else you'd rather have at the plate right now and he proves why. The ball rockets off his bat and lands deep in the left field bleachers. When it flies over the fence, he flips his bat, shouts and offers the world a stare that shames anybody for ever thinking he might not be able to do this. Undoubtedly, that will go down as one of the biggest home runs in Blue Jays history.

More outs, more hits, another bench-clearing came after that. But it all felt like a formality. The Blue Jays had stared losing in the eye and they shot the notion into the bleachers. From now until forever, that game will be about a ball bouncing off a bat, three balls bouncing out of a glove and a bat smashing away all the tension in the building.

What's the Deal with Medicine Cabinets?

I was filling a prescription today and naturally began thinking about medicine cabinets. At least, this seems natural to me. They're not a piece of furniture I've ever paid much notice. I always avoid taking pills when I can. Not out of some distrust of pharmaceuticals, but out of a dislike of routine daily tasks. Any medicine, prescription or not, is another thing I have to remember in the morning – the time of day when I'd most like to forget everything. And since, unlike couches, chairs and desks, medicine cabinets never accompany me on moves, I've never had to think about they're construction or position in a house.

But today at the pharmacy, the thought struck me: why is the medicine cabinet in the bathroom? Obviously, much of what it holds is bathroom-related: shaving cream, toothpaste, q-tips. I see why those belong there. But it's not called a “shaving cream cabinet” and there's no obvious reason to me why medicine should be stored in the same place that I shower.

I'm sure other people have asked this question before. Why shouldn't medicine be stored in the kitchen or bedroom. It would be no more accessible to underage hands in either of those places. And many medications are taken in the morning, before bed or after meals. A trip to the bathroom just to take a pill seems silly.

The only thing I can think of for why we, in North America at least, store our prescriptions behind the mirror above the sink is privacy. The bathroom is where we go to do things everybody's aware of but nobody talks about in polite company. There's a certain logic that would put medication in that category. Nobody wants other people peeping at their pill bottles, wondering what they're afflicted with. I know I don't. So we we store them behind a closed door behind another closed door and open them with the fan and faucet running. All our secret, daily, bodily tasks stay confined to the same room.

But I'd love to know if other places do it differently. Are medications in Japan or Germany or South Africa stored in different rooms, in different ways or with different associated taboos? A book on the history of medicine cabinets would be fascinating.

Google is no help. All I can find there are furniture retailers and blog posts about the relative benefits of recessed shelves. Wikipedia is similarly useless, offering only the assertion that “Although a bathroom tends to be generally the smallest room is the home, it is the busiest place second only to the kitchen.” Citation needed. 

P.S. I was told that the font on the blog is too small, so I've increased it. Hopefully it makes things easier to read.

Soy You Think You Can Plant?

Way back when I started this blog, I was making a list of my favourite games. Weirdly, that list is still the same two years later, so I'm going to finish that series. Starting today, with :

#4 - Bohnanza

I love games about negotiation. Haggling over properties in Monopoly and pleading for peace treaties in Risk are what brought me into the hobby as a child. So it's no surprise that Bohnanza, the best negotiation game out there, places so high on this list.

Negotiation is a remarkably difficult game mechanic to get right. Co-operative and team-based games bypass it completely, since the rules force players to work together rather than fluidly bringing them into and out of alliances through play. That leaves competitive games, but since most have a single winner, opponents have little incentive to help each other. A good trade implies value for both sides, which makes trading a bad idea in situations where competitors want to win at all costs. Conversely, if a deal is truly equitable between participants, then nothing has changed and it may as well not have happened. Game designers seeking to encourage negotiation have to offer opportunities for deals where players benefit unequally but each individual thinks they themselves came out on top. It's not easy.

Bohnanza may as well be a blueprint for how to do it right. The game consists of a deck of cards, each representing a bean. There are about a dozen different kinds, from the commonplace Wax Bean to the unfortunate Stink Bean. Players are farmers, trying to plant, grow and sell their beans as efficiently as possible to make the more money than their rivals. The ridiculous premise hides the depth of the system underneath. Every element of Uwe Rosenberg's design pushes players toward arguing over exchange rates, undercutting prices and dangling future profits in front of each other. You've never heard of such cutthroat bean farmers.

Sometimes I Wish I Lived in New York

Not because of the shopping or the Yankees or the subway system. No, if I lived in New York I would go to see musicals all the time. Toronto has plenty of musical theatre, but rarely are the really big shows in first runs, so it can be a long time from Broadway to Mirvish.

So I satisfy myself with soundtracks for the shows that I hear about through the news. Back in June, when Fun Home swept the Tonys, I bought that album and listened to it non-stop for a week. Over the past couple days, I've been doing the same with Hamilton, a hip-hop musical about the life of the American revolutionary and politician Alexander Hamilton. It's incredible.

For a taste, check out this video. I think I may write up my thoughts more thoroughly when I've settled down a bit - I'm still in the love-at-first-listen phase right now. There's just so much energy and originality through the whole thing. Most musicals have points where they drag, especially "sing-through" musicals like Les Mis, where most of the dialogue is sung. It's just hard to explain plot, develop characters and have interesting music all at the same time. Hamilton never runs into this problem. Pretty much every song is killer, from the slam-poem overture "Alexander Hamilton" to King George acting like a jilted lover in the pop ballad"You'll Be Back" to the rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson in "Cabinet Battle #1".

I think the reason everything works so well is that there's so much rap and hip-hop in the music. I feel like I complete idiot that I never considered how perfect rap is for a musical. Whereas other musicals struggle to have their characters sing mundane dialogue,  Hamilton just takes dialogue and fits it into a rhythm and rhyme. Everything's understandable and everything keeps moving forward. There's still plenty of melody in some of the numbers, but allowing the connecting bits between songs to be mostly rapped means they never feel out of place. It's really brilliant.

Clinch

Just a short one tonight. I've been watching the Blue Jays since I was eight years old. I've witnessed nearly twenty seasons of disappointment. Tonight, they clinched their division. There's still the playoffs left to worry about. But that's exactly the point - there's still the playoffs to worry about. I've never been able to write that before. I can't explain how happy I am.

Late

Okay, so technically it's already Wednesday, but I'm going to count this as Tuesday's post because it's only half an hour late.But because I want to go to sleep, it will be short.

I just want to recommend Song Exploder to everybody. It's a podcast that has been recommended to me several times over the last month and which I finally checked out yesterday. I listen to a lot of podcasts - too many - but when a new one gets its hooks into me, I binge on it hard. Song Exploder, with episodes running only ten to twenty minutes, makes bingeing easy.

The premise is simple: every episode, a musician or group of musicians takes a song of theirs, breaks it into its component parts and explains the thought process behind each one. It's fascinating. I'm not a musician by any means, but I like music and I especially like listening to different parts of songs that I know well to try to hear new things each time I listen. Song Exploder appeals to that part of my brain. Better yet, it works even when I don't know the song or the artist, which is almost every episode, because my musical horizons are horribly limited. In that way, the podcast seems like a great way to hear new stuff.

Over and above the appreciation for music, though, I just really love listening to talented people talk about their creative process. I can't exactly explain why. It just reminds me that any artist is first of all a person and like any person, anything they create is a mixture of careful planning, wild experimentation and blind luck. I find that comforting.

Back in the Saddle

Wow, it's been nearly two years since I last updated here. Seems like a good time to start it up again.

As some of you know, I'm taking some time off from school this fall for personal reasons. While this was definitely the right decision, it has left my days rather wide-open and that's scary. I deal with life a lot better when my time is structured than when it's formless. So I'm going to use this blog as an anchor for my days.

Here's the plan: from now until at least the end of December, I'll be posting here every day. Although this started as a purely game-related blog, such a demanding schedule will mean that I'll be writing about whatever thoughts pass through my head. A lot of those thoughts will be about game, just because I am who I am, but I'm certain to write about the other myriad topics that catch my interest.

I'll definitely be writing with an audience in mind – not much point of a blog otherwise – but because this is more of a personal mental health project than a means of self-promotion, I don't much care if people actually do read any of it. Of course, I'll be happy if anyone does and I'm receptive to feedback and critique. Just understand that anything I write here is meant as practice and therapy. I'll try not to sound authoritative and hope that nobody assumes that I mean to be.

Speaking of structure and routine, it's appropriate that my first returning post should be a link to a story I wrote for Elephant Words. Elephant Words is a website that provides an image prompt for writers each week and then shows of the writing the image inspired. Anybody can submit, so when I saw a call for more participants last week, I decided to take a shot. The only stipulation is an 800 word limit. (In my day, a picture was worth 1000 words, but I guess that's inflation for you.) That's just a maximum, but because I write best under strict limitations, I've decided that every piece I write will be exactly 800 words long.

My first submission, titled “A Piece of the Sky,” fits that self-imposed rule. It's a short story, and most of my entries probably will be, but I'd like to try other forms too.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Reading over it again now that it's been posted, I can see a few things I'd change. I probably could have varied the sentence structure more to get a better rhythm and I wish I hadn't repeated words so much – the sixth paragraph is only three sentences, but I use the word “through” in each of them. My vocabulary could be broader. But that's what practice is for.

I'll be posting links to my pieces once they're put up on the Elephant Words website. I also recommend that anybody else interested in the site submit their own writing, or at least check out what others have written. My favourite piece from last week is Isle of Spice by Amanda Bird.