Your Life Is Closer To Over: The Week That Was by Brian Phillips

In case you missed the first in our series last week, this is essentially a digest of various things I found interesting enough to pollute my Facebook feed with last week. Don't worry though, no Farm House game invites or whatever the hell that is. Farm House isn't correct. That was an ag major frat at Washington State. The only thing I can recall about Farm House was the Farm House Rodeo. I heard they put hay bales in the front yard and members would sit on the them and drink until they fell over. Last man on his bale won the rodeo. Sounds about right.​

News

​Speaking of bales.... The President Of The Graveyard of Empires says "hey America, thanks for the bales of cash!" In fairness Afghan President Karzai called the payments a "small amount," which is probably horseshit. What do we get for our C.I.A. funneled cash payments? I'm sure some of the money ended up with people who used the funds to kill American soldiers. And I can't imagine all that dough sloshing around Godforesaken Afghanistan without some of it washing up against the heroin trade, but I'm just spitballin' here.  

I found this backgrounder on the Boston Bomber's family interesting. ​Meanwhile The Daily Mail reports the Saudis warned the U.S. about the elder brother after they refused him entrance for a pilgrimage to Mecca. As we learned with 9-11 the Saudis like Jihadis best when their someone else's problem. We'll see if we ever get any satisfactory answers as to why this clown wasn't kicked out of the country. Also, what friends young brother had!

Want to read a really scary article about fracking? Read it anyway. ​

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi had yet another dispatch this week. This one is just as depressing as the others. The cleaning up of mortgage malpractice never really happened.

Did you read about this survey? An alarming number of Americans believe we may need an armed revolution soon. There are two problems with this. 1. At some point having a revolution involves effort. 2. What do you think is going to happen when you start said revolution? I know we can become frustrated when things don't seem to be right, but seriously calm the fuck down. Also of note a large minority of those surveyed believe they're being lied to on Sandy Hook. Again, seriously... calm the fuck down.

Sports

​Deadspin has it about right. The NBA is using Seattle just like the NFL uses L.A. Seattle is the league's arena boogeyman! "Build us a new joint or we're going to Seattle!" The Sacramento Kings will likely not be headed north after the NBA's relocation committee voted against recommending a Seattle ownership group. Here's the fun part! The chair of said committee is Oklahoma City Thunder owner and all around creep Clay Bennett. Watch this movie, it's pretty good.

Not to be outdone the owner of the Cubs has threatened to move his shitty team out of Wrigley if he doesn't get a new scoreboard. That's laughable on it's face. What this is really about is the 17% revenue share the Cubs cut with building owners across the street. The proposed scoreboard would kill their business. The Cubbies kind of painted themselves into a corner with this one. ​I smell Oklahoma City Cubs!

Even with Jason Collins dominating the news, perhaps you didn't take the time to read his self-penned Sport Illustrated cover story. Don't miss it. ​Years ago former major league journeyman Billy Bean (not the A's GM) wrote a great book about his life as a closeted athlete. 

Great piece in USA Today last week on the Braves' Evan Gattis. What a road for this 25 year old rookie. Clinically depressed, wandering America working a series a dead end jobs only to make the Braves out of spring training and rake. ​

​I'll be writing more soon on baseball and specifically the weird first month and change of the season. If you're wondering as I am about the collapse of Josh Hamilton read this. Yes it's filled with mind numbing sabermetrics, but the conclusion is unmistakable. Hamilton is swinging his bat like a lab rat pushing the cheese lever. 

Jet fan! Feeling great about Geno Smith? Everything about this kid is screaming head case. Perfect for Rex Ryan's "confused quarterback-centric" offense. ​Tim Tebow got the gas pipe of course and it didn't take the wise acres long to have their fun. 

And lastly in sports why was this kid wandering across an NBA court with his pants down? ​

And Finally Tonight

​A 14 year old Chicago teen learned a valuable life lesson when the prostitute he hired online stole his Ipad and Piggy Bank. She's been arrested. Yes I choose to believe he was going to pay her by cracking open his piggy bank.

Tom and Randy, Pool Detectives

We really were like a couple of mismatched detectives. Randy, a tall, athletic, light-skinned African American dude from Findlay, and me, a pale, scrawny, long-haired kid from Powell. Randy looked most of the time like he was coming from a basketball game but had had time to shower, and I, most of the time, looked like a Third World freedom fighter who had been sniffing glue and needed sleep and was wearing more clothing than the weather called for.

Randy was well-spoken, and I was a bit of a mumbler who didn’t like to look you in the eye. If we were on the trail of the same killer, like most mismatched detectives, I would not have survived the scene where we get into a brawl. But we weren’t on the trail of the same killer – it was just that we met in college, and had found that we had a lot more in common than you’d think. Mostly, what we had in common was icy cold beers, poker, and pool.

See, the way it worked back then was, we didn’t have telephones in our pockets. We had them in our apartments, and there were little boxes attached to the phones which recorded messages on cassette tapes. Right about then, they were coming out with these “answering machines” which did not use tapes, but instead made digital recordings. That was the kind of thing that could flat blow my mind.

So what we’d do was, while we were throwing cards around on a picnic table the night before, we’d compare notes about class schedules, work schedules, and papers due, and we’d determine when we could both stop doing productive things, and we’d say, okay so that’s when we’ll meet at the Drake Union, where they had cheap pool tables, and draft beer for a buck and a quarter.

That particular day, the time we figured we could stop being productive was three o’clock. Yes, it was a Monday – so what?

We’d simply get a table and then play game after game of eight ball, usually balancing out pretty evenly, sometimes slanting over toward an embarrassingly one-sided ass kicking, and then slanting back. We’d play for beers so, that mattered.

Frequently, the money would then slide back over the card table later that night, finding its way home. It was a lot like we drank the same twenty bucks for several years, just rolling back and forth between us.

Ostensibly, the reason the Drake Union on the OSU campus had a pool hall was that you could take billiards classes. There were a few bowling lanes, too, if you were into that sort of thing – which we weren’t. Now, why was there also beer for sale in the OSU building? I have no idea.

I’m not sure, but my guess would be, they probably cut that out by now.

The Drake Union was on the north side of campus, not too far from the Horseshoe. It was a fairly complicated building, and you had to know your way around to find the basement pool hall, cutting through several study rooms – bristling with students who were not there to drink beer in the middle of the afternoon - and then down a quiet, tiled hallway with a couple of bathrooms to one side, and then you’d open a door. There was barely even a sign.

Inside, it was so relaxing that it made us suspicious the first time we found it. A dozen or so decent tables, a sound system that was perfectly adequate but easy to talk over, and a little bar with a bored guy behind it, who only sold draft beer. Was this some kind of trap?

Nope, not a trap. Just tip that bartender a few bucks right off the bat, and buddy, you owned the place.

That afternoon bled into the early evening pretty smoothly, and resulted in a half dozen trips to the bathroom. Both Randy and I clearly noticed each time we went in that there was somebody sitting in one of the stalls, on the toilet. You might think that after six times or so, we’d say, man, there’s always somebody in that same stall, or maybe, gee, I wonder if that’s the same guy sitting in that stall all this time?

Since I can’t smell, I couldn’t tell you if there was an odor, but if there was, Randy didn’t pick it up, or he thought to himself, unpleasant smell in the Men’s Room, not exactly a big news story.

So we rocked in and out of there for several hours, taking leaks, washing hands, and despite our heightened Pool Detective skills – you see things, we observe them – it did not occur to us for a second that there was a dead guy in there, until the cops showed up.

Apparently there an elderly man who had been an usher at every home OSU game for thirty or forty years, who followed the same routine every game. He’d go to the campus McDonald’s, get a breakfast sandwich and coffee, and then he’d walk across campus to the game. He was a remarkable figure, apparently, to the general Horseshoe community; they recognized him and thought of him like a minor folk hero. A true Buckeye, they’d say.

So when he didn’t show up that day, it made the news. The guy had been in the news before, in a little human interest piece – he’d been an usher a really long time and looked like he was going to do it until the day he died, the piece said. A little column, I think, in the Dispatch.

And it was right. Two days before Randy and I cracked the case – well, practically cracked it. I mean, we were there, when it was cracked, and we’d been in the room with the dead body quite a few times, taking a leak, thinking, man, I love playing pool and drinking a few icy cold beers.

So anyway, two days before Randy and I practically cracked the case, the usher came into the Drake Union to use the bathroom, and he died in a stall, and he sat there for two days.

Our investigation later revealed that the cleaning guy had encountered him Saturday night. He’d been wearing a Walkman – which was an iPod the size of a brick that used cassette tapes like the answering machines did – and so when he opened the door, it hit someone’s knee and he just said, “Oh, my bad, sorry dude.”

And since he was wearing his Walkman, he didn’t register that the guy didn’t answer. He certainly didn’t think to himself, better check and see if that guy’s dead.

Eventually, the bartender found him. You probably think that means the bartender cracked the case, but don’t be ridiculous. Bartenders pour beers, they don’t crack cases. To crack a case, you have to be a pool detective. That’s where me and Randy came in.

Sure, our investigation began after the cops arrived, and sure, they hogged the collar. They were all like, we’re cops and you guys are half in the bag and you didn’t even notice he was in here and one of you isn’t even twenty-one.

We were used to it. We knew that cops and pool detectives should be on the same side, but there was always infighting. Posturing. Look at me, I’m an actual law enforcement officer, and you’re a not-very-serious-or-observant college student.

Sometimes you hit the mean streets, we’d found, and sometimes the mean streets hit you back.

But that’s how it is, the life of a couple of pool detectives. No one thanks you, everyone’s out for themselves, everyone’s focused on who actually detected stuff. I mean, sure, our methods were unorthodox. Damn straight, we ruffled some feathers, broke a few rules. Stepped on a few toes, you know what I’m saying?

But we got RESULTS. Or at least, we were frequently hanging around with beers in our hands, when the results showed up.

One time a guy stole Randy’s ID, and then four months later the guy came into the bar I worked in, recognized me, and said, “Hey man, I stole your pal’s ID. Here it is.” Then me and Randy and him sat down and had a few beers and a couple of laughs about it.

That’s kind of like cracking a case, although again, the case did just sort of crack right in front of me, while I was thinking about something else.

You know what, I’m tired of talking about this. We were super duper pool detectives, I’m telling you.

Jeez.

Your Life Is Closer To Over: The Week That Was. by Brian Phillips

Our editor Colin Gawel has been on me, and with good reason. I haven't written a damned thing in weeks. We've given up on my finishing the baseball preview. I got through the American League in March, and started the NL. Now we're a month into the season, and it seems pointless now. To get on the record regarding the senior circuit I'll go with Atlanta, Cincinnati, and San Francisco with the Nationals and Cardinals nabbing the wild cards. Atlanta and Detroit in the series. Detroit wins it all. The Marlins will lose 115 games. 

Anyway the idea Colin had over the weekend was for me to draw from my Facebook feed and come up with a digest of the week that was. And why not, though I should warn you that we'll cover everything from interest rate swap rigging to a Wal Mart employee turning tricks in the can during work hours. I'll leave it to you to decide which is worse, though your answer no doubt tells us a lot about you.​

​Sports

​What a run by the Columbus Blue Jackets! The CBJ came up a tie-breaker shy of qualifying for the playoffs for only the second time in franchise history Saturday. The CBJ completed a furious 8-2 finish with Saturday's 3-1 win over Nashville at Nationwide Arena. I was there. The atmosphere was electric. Now the Jackets move to the Eastern Conference with it's somewhat softer competition, and many fewer trips out of the Eastern time zone. Behind goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky the Jackets will make some racket next season. Just to cause trouble check this out. Were the Jackets robbed? Most likely. 

Meanwhile up I-71 The Columbus Crew shook off a disappointing performance in Chicago to rip DC United 3-0. I think we'll see a lot more of Jairo Arrieta and newcomer Dominic Orduro running up top together. Unfortunately you'll see none of their fine work on Sport Center. You will however see the Crew Stadium scoreboard on fire. ​

​It appears the blaze started in the scoreboard's speaker system and should be a pretty easy fix. 

The NFL Draft concluded Saturday. My criticisms of Seattle's picks last year only proved my ignorance. I'll leave the punditry to the McShay's and Kuiper's of the world. I will only say that the Bills probably got a steal in undrafted wide receiver Da'Rick Rogers out of Tennessee Tech. Rogers was on his way to a stellar career at Tennessee when he got himself into a bit of drug trouble. For more on the value of so called "weed guy" players see Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi's hilarious third annual "The NFL Draft Decoded." 

News

​George Jones died at the age of 81 Friday. "No Show Jones" lived a hard life, and yet made it to 81 and toured almost to the end, proving once more that booze, cocaine, pills, a fully fueled riding lawnmower, and access to firearms are the key to a long life. For a jaw dropping read, seek out Jones' 1997 autobiography "I Lived To Tell It All." I cannot do it justice here. (Yes, they duct taped him to a mic stand once so he could stand up and perform. Yes, he did leave his Cadillac running, doors open, on the sidewalk in front of the Nashville airport.)

Prediction: The Boston Bombings are about to become an embarrassment for our Homeland Security establishment. ​This idea that older brother had aroused attention up to two years ago raises many questions. Most of those questions will be answered no doubt by subjecting you and I to more cavity searches and x-rays. Yay! 

On a side note, I read that the older brother was influenced by Alex Jones and his Infowars site. Jones took 3.9 seconds after the bombings to Tweet that they were an inside job. To help focus your thinking on the more fringe aspects of the story, I present this helpful chart. 

This may have slipped by you with everything else going on last week. The Steubenville School Board extended a giant middle finger to the rest of America by quietly renewing the contract of head football coach Reno Saccoccia for another two years for something called "Director Of Administrative Services." This gig has nothing to do with his head coaching job and probably doesn't have much to do with anything at else either. Take heart though, by the end of last week the Attorney General's office was executing search warrants at ol Steubenville High. Coach Reno will have to answer for what he did and didn't do yet. 

Late last week Matt Taibbi (yes the same guy who wrote the NFL piece above) published on Rolling Stone.com his latest on more unimaginable corruption, this time the investigation into the manipulation of interest rate swaps. As arcane as this material can be, Taibbi has a real gift for making it understandable. Read it as I do; with the knowledge that nothing will be done. Our economy and government has been captured by what is essentially organized crime, and it costs everyone more so these few can take a healthy skim from everything. 

Remember the Mississippi Elvis Impersonator arrested on suspicion of sending ricin tainted letters to the White House and Senate? Well you know what the King said about Suspicious Minds. Just today another man, who had perhaps had some sort of feud with the fake Elvis, has been arrested. ​In 2007 James Everett Dutschke lost a Mississippi State Senate election. One of the folks who received one of his ricin direct mail pieces was allegedly the mother of the man who beat him. I'll be following this one because I love weird shit.

I almost hesitate to post this as we've had so many false leads in this story over the decades. Authorities are investigating whether remains found in the wall of a Cleveland bar may be those of long missing Teamster head Jimmy Hoffa. The previous owner found some years ago, and police curiously told him to throw them out. Hey that was the 70's and if you remember that decade people were throwing out body parts all the time. ​

And Finally Tonight

​You won't find this offer in your Sunday circular. An upstate New York Wal Mart associate has been charged with prostitution. Police say the 22 year old was turning tricks in the mens room during work hours. Foster Bills advertised his services on Craigslist. 

Scrubber Girls, Undermined Valets and Likeable Lords: The World of 'Downton Abbey'

Downton Abbey is one of those shows that people are really proud of watching, like the way people tell you that they heard something on NPR as opposed to just having heard it on the radio or the news. NPR equals Smart. Usually folks tell you what they heard on NPR like it’s a story about their own smartness. 

“Saturday I was listening to NPR while I made my own organic suet for the local woodpeckers? Because they're endangered? And I heard XYZ.”

There even used to be bumper stickers for NPR that read “Get out of your car smarter than when you got in!” That’s Downton Abbey, it’s like a fucking intellectual gang sign. You down with the D. A.? You know it, dawg. (Not really, don't really say that)

The first thing I learned about the show is that a fun thing to do is find people who love it, and then talk to them eagerly about it but call it Downtown Abbey. ​Blithely dismiss their corrections, wear a smugly bemused smile, and just confidently keep at it til they snap. Good times.

Now. It turns out that listening to NPR may have failed to make me smart. I simply could not pay attention to Downton Abbey the first several runs I made at it.

It’s dry. Leftover pork chop with no gravy dry. You turn it on and it’s playing NPR music at you and showing you a roughly Sherlock Holmes-era setting but without murder or Sherlock Holmes. No dragons, no explosions, no heists — why isn’t this thing a book sitting around in a library someplace?

​Even the Masterpiece Theater logo at the beginning seems proud of it. What you're about to watch will be like watching a book!

Instead it’s just showing me what all these people do. And fairly quickly, they fall into two categories, those who scrub and those who sit around eating fine food in freshly scrubbed rooms. You really get a sense of how many metric assloads of scrubbing would have to get done by how many people, back in the Pre Vacuum Cleaner Era.

But you can tell the show is smart as shit so you don’t want to fast forward through the eating and scrubbing because maybe they reveal something important and smart.

Eventually I used the Clockwork Orange Method, and my overall impression was like in The Dark Knight Rises when Catwoman blarneyed with alarming ease past Alfred to go try and steal something from Bruce Wayne, and you realize that cane’s real, Bruce Wayne is so out of shape he needs a cane, and you’re thinking, My God, this is going to be a long-ass movie.

Except here it’s not Oh Crap I Have To Watch Him Retrain To Be Batman Again; it’s just the sheer number of characters prancing around, and how many of them talk. Do I have to learn all of their names? Do they all have to speak Hobbit?

But I’m getting the hang of it now. The whole opening scene is more than just Who Scrubs and Who Gets To Eat. Instead, it follows the delivery of a telegram containing news that the Titanic sank. 

The telegram takes a Billy-From-Family-Circus-style journey all across the grounds from the telegraph office through the manor all the way to Lord Grantham, who is basically King Shit. And even though he has the same title as a certain Dark Side Jedi, Lord Grantham is an all right guy.

Like when they tell him the Titanic went down, and they reassure him that they got most of the ladies off of it first, it occurs to him that there were hundreds of poor people below deck and that they weren’t included in the term “ladies,” even if they were ladies. So okay, you don’t need to have a doctorate to get that message – We Like Lord Grantham. Got it.

But I doubt he’s the good guy, because he’s the Lord. You can’t say, “I’m pulling for the Lord of the Manor,” because what are you pulling for? That he’ll become a God King? I’m not seeing much of a journey ahead of him.

And yes, here’s the answer: Bates. He’s a grizzled, limping, well-spoken fellow who has just been hired as the new valet — a pretty sweet gig in the scrubber world, it seems — even though his leg is injured from the war. Turns out not much has changed — even a hundred years ago, people don’t like it when you get hired above them.

Suddenly we're in Mean Girls without Lindsay Lohan. Thomas the footman wanted to be the valet, it turns out. He's bad news, you can tell by looking at him. He's going to be trouble. If anyone gets murdered anytime soon, my money's on this guy.

So you know how when your boss promotes Rachel instead of you because he and Rachel are having a secret affair, and you start sneakily undermining Rachel's job performance? Passive-aggressively not sending her emails to keep her abreast of the project you're working on?​ Inviting everyone out to happy hour except her?

That's what Thomas and his fellow Mean Scrubbers start doing to Bates, but instead of fornicating with the boss, Bates is an injured war veteran who served with Lord Grantham, and instead of sneakily undermining him, they knock stuff out of his hands and say "Oh, look what the crippled guy dropped!"​

​Meanwhile, Lord Grantham's daughter, Lady Mary was supposed to get married to her cousin — totally cool back then — but her cousin died on the Titantic and so did his dad. The first thing Lady Mary wants to do is verify that she doesn't have to formally mourn her cousin because they hadn't announced the engagement, freaking us and her dad out at the same time.

​Later on, Lord Grantham and his lawyer walk around dressed like Frosty the Snowman, and agree that they're screwed if Lady Mary doesn't sack up and marry somebody, I'm serious, I have no idea who it's going to be. I'll bet he'll be pretty hot though, cause a lot of ladies like this show.

​Okay, wait, here's a dude they want her to marry, and he looks like Wilson from House and now he says he's leaving even though Lady Mary kind of throws herself at him. Must be some other dude on the way, someone she's not supposed to marry. Oh, and this dude's blackmailing Thomas. Damn, there's a lot of shit going on around here.

Pretty soon Thomas and the Master Butler (not a ninja) just about have Lord Grantham convinced that Bates should be booted off the job. I get a Main Character vibe off of Bates, so they don't fool me. Also, Lord Grantham's too cool to fire his old war buddy. I feel smarter already watching Lord Grantham stand there in the driveway and realize he's too cool to fire his old war buddy, til he basically says it out loud again. Knock it off, Downton Abbey.

​And then a new Lord-ype guy gets a new letter at a new manor, and the episode ends, so I guess I get to learn a bunch of additional people next episode. Good lord, remember when Homer Simpson got that 12-foot sandwich and wouldn't stop eating it until he could fit it in the fridge? That's how I feel right now, having finished this first episode. Kind of nauseated by the extremely heavy meal, but I can't stay mad at the sandwich.

​How can I stay mad at the sandwich?

Pencilstorm MLB Opening Day Party at the Treebar - Monday, April 1, 4 p.m.

Greetings. Hope you enjoy reading Pencilstorm as much as we enjoy putting it together. We have been running live now for close to a month and are truly humbled at how many people have been checking in on our little endeavor. In addition to providing you with another option to kill time at work or in the car, we also hope to step out of the basement every once and a while and do actual real-life, flesh-and-blood, human-type stuff by hosting events. Or put another way, as much fun as it is to bash Jeff Hassler reviews on Facebook, wouldn't it be so much cooler to tell him in person that Bon Jovi isn't better than the Stones?

​With that thought in mind, between our one-month anniversary and MLB Opening Day, we thought it was time for a celebration. So please join us Monday, April 1, at the legendary Treebar to watch the Cincinnati Reds versus the L.A. Angels. First pitch at 4 p.m. and specials on PBR and Four String Brew the entire game. CD1025 jock/Pencilstorm baseball writer Brain Phillips and myself will be there to judge your fantasy roster. If we approve, we will buy you a beer or at least pass you the peanut bowl.

Haven't you spent enough time staring at a lifeless computer? Why not spend some time staring at cable TV? It's time to step out and talk to actual earthlings. You can do this! Don't be a pussy (talking to you Hassler; It's Opening Day and I'm pretty sure you aren't going to have an Easter hangover), stop by and enjoy some suds with the Pencilstorm crew and watch the Reds win the first of 94 victories on their way to an appearance in the N.L. Championship series. — Colin

​Treebar info here

When Philip Morris Tried to Keep Ashtrays in Restaurants

This is from a 1988 issue of Spy magazine. It's safe to say this campaign was ultimately not a success.