Time is an artificial construct. Unfortunately, escape rooms have clocks.
The Riff
Time is an artificial construct.
In my aged state, I’ve chosen to stop looking at life as one continuous timeline. That seems unnecessarily dangerous. Instead, I now experience life through vignettes—short improv sketches with no established chronology, very little character development and no reliable way to determine what day anything happened. Maybe John Candy shows up.
Ergo, I don’t age.
I simply appear in new scenes.
In one vignette, I’m in Page, Arizona, drinking a pickle beer.
That is exactly what it sounds like. Beer, but somebody introduced it to a pickle, and neither of them knew when to end the conversation.
I ordered it because I was traveling, and travel creates a temporary legal exemption from your regular personality. At home, I would never order a pickle beer. In Page, Arizona, I apparently became a frontier food scientist.
This may have contributed to a later vignette involving an escape room.
I’m not suggesting the pickle beer was still physically affecting me. I’m suggesting it may have opened a small briny portal in my brain through which certain words escaped permanently.
Words like “cowl.”
The escape room was built entirely around the aggressive enforcement of time.
A large clock counts down and reminds you every 10 minutes how you should be in the next room already.
A dry-erase pen that did not erase—or write—becomes an excuse for failure. And I’m glad I didn’t moisten the tip with my tongue. That thing may have been like that for a while.
Meanwhile, the clues arrived slowly.
Not slowly because we were stupid. That remains an open investigation. Slowly because the person operating the room apparently believed clues should be distributed like limited-edition sneakers.
We would stare at a lock for seven minutes. Somewhere behind the wall, an employee was watching us on a monitor and thinking, Let’s give them another six. They’re developing character. (Clearly he knows the vignette rule)
Then the room required me to recognize that something any normal person would call a mask was actually a bat cowl.
A cowl.
Who the hell cowls these days?
We kept asking for a clue about the mask. Nothing happened because there was no mask. There was only a cowl, sitting there smugly while the clock continued counting down and our pencil maintained its principled refusal to participate.
Eventually, a clue appeared:
THE BAT COWL.
The what?
Just say mask. Batman wears a mask. An ambitious mask, certainly. A mask with significant real estate above the eyebrows. But still a mask.
Nobody has ever walked out of a Batman movie and said, “Excellent film. Loved the cowl work.”
I should have known. Perhaps because I’m the old person. Perhaps I came from a time when people regularly wore cowls while drinking pickle beer and writing with functional dry-erase pencils.
I did not know.
And this is how the escape room vignette of time was a failure—not because of the puzzle, but because someone who believes Batman shops in the medieval outerwear department wrote it.
The pickle beer did not help.
But neither did the cowl.
Yesterday’s Autopsy
Yesterday went 3-1, which is starting to create the dangerous impression that we know what we’re doing.
Paul Skenes and the Pirates won the first five 1-0, with Henry Davis supplying the only run of the entire game in the third inning. The Red Sox beat Baltimore 3-1, and the Diamondbacks handled Houston 3-2.
Then came the Dodgers/Nationals first-five under.
Washington scored four runs in the fourth inning. The Dodgers had three by the end of five. That produced seven first-five runs on an under 4.5, which is not particularly close unless time—and apparently mathematics—are also artificial constructs.
The full four-team round robin therefore finished 3-1. No revisionist history. No declaring the under a winner because the clocks on the wall disagreed.
The scoreboard is sacred.
The jokes are allowed to lie. The record isn’t.
The Giant Scoreboard
ALL SPORTS: 1,050-1,076-7
TENNIS: 1-1
Who the hell bets on tennis?
Today’s Picks
Today we have four, because four is allowed when four earns it. The Marlins moneyline gets Eury Pérez at home against Jonah Tong and his developing relationship with walks. The Phillies moneyline gives us Jesús Luzardo, who has allowed no more than two earned runs in each of his last six starts. We’re taking the Blue Jays -1.5 because Dylan Cease against Jacob Lopez creates a real pitching edge, but Toronto’s full-game moneyline has been placed behind museum glass with the expensive antiques. Finally, SMU -2.5 gets added from college football. The Mustangs have the quarterback and offensive-line advantage, while Florida State looked considerably less impressive against New Mexico State than the final score would like you to believe.
Marlins ML
Phillies ML
Blue Jays -1.5
SMU -2.5
Four picks. No ceremonial fifth.
Time is artificial. The bets, unfortunately, will still be graded.
Bad Picks. Better Stories.
This isn’t called Pick What I Pick.
It’s called Don’t Pick What I Pick.
Please wager accordingly.
