Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Partial score: Illuminati 0

BULLETIN: The Illuminati Bowling team did not perform well Monday night.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Strikeaholics 5, Illuminati 2

The Illuminati Bowling Team put in two and a half humorless hours at Historic Stone's Lanes Monday night and took home a 5-2 loss to Tavern League rival The Raging Strikeaholics.

Two games were close: the IBT took the second by eight pins and dropped the third by the same count.

Illuminati anchor Don Corathers paced the home team with a 193, 189, 151: 533, a team season high series. The team's record reached equilibrium at 21-21, six weeks into the thirteen-week season.

The lines
Kennedy--134, 105, 90: 329; avg 108 (+1)
Hunt--114, 176, 112: 402; avg 141 (-1)
Peitz--155, 138, 137: 430; avg 139 (+2)
Corathers--193, 189, 151: 533; avg 152 (+6)

Next week
Illuminati vs. Arthur's Angels

Monday, October 09, 2006

Lanes infested with tiny mimes

Stone’s Lanes Tavern League play was suspended for about forty-five minutes Monday evening when a colony of two dozen tiny whiteface mimes was discovered living inside the bowlng alley’s pinsetting equipment.

Before and after the mime delay, the Illuminati Bowling Team carved out a hard-fought 3-4 decision against a wildly unpredictable Stoned team. The Illuminati narrowly lost the first two games but won big in the third on the strength of a Jim Huneke 192, which was enough to give the I-Team a one-point margin in total pins.


A screen capture from the Lane 25 scoring camera
reveals one of the Stone's Lanes mini-mimes posing
as the headpin. Posted by Picasa

The mimes, each about eighteen inches tall and able to do a very convincing impression of a bowling pin, were discovered when one of them got his foot stuck in the thumbhole of a bowling ball and was carried up the ball return. Clearly injured, the mime nevertheless extricated himself from the ball, performed a brief glass box illusion for the startled bowlers, and escaped into the women's restroom, where he was later found hiding in a tampon dispenser.

Once the infestation was discovered, at least twenty other mimes were flushed from the pinsetting racks by Gutterballs, the disgraced bowling alley dog (see “League commissioner: Dog ate it,” October 6), now a hero.

Where the mimes came from, why they settled in the noisy and dangerous machinery, and how they have survived there for, apparently, several months are all mysteries that Stone’s vice president of operations Neil Bush says an internal investigation will attempt to solve. A retired Norwood police officer has been retained to lead the probe but so far has been stonewalled. “The mimes aren’t talking,” Bush said.

Investigators are pursuing a theory that the mimes might have been working for one or more of the Tavern League teams, attempting to affect the outcome of games by deflecting opponents’ balls away from the pocket, knocking down extra pins for friendly bowlers, and miming pins to confuse the scoring cameras.

Amitai Etzioni, a retired Xavier University anthropologist who hopes to study the Stone’s mime colony, was dubious. “Elementary physics argues against that scenario,” he said. “Those mimes weigh about a pound and a half apiece. For one of them to try to change the trajectory of a sixteen-pound bowling ball… well, if you think of it on a normal scale like you and me, it would be like standing in front of a ball the size and mass of a Volkswagen that’s coming at you at 220 miles per hour. If they are trying to control the ball these are very brave little mimes. Not very bright, but brave."

The Illuminati, who are leading the league's Split Division, improved their record to 19-16.

The lines
Kennedy--116, 105, 115: 336; avg 107 (+1)
Hunt--159, 113, 150: 422; avg 143 (unch)
Huneke--156, 135, 192: 483; avg 161 (new)
Corathers--131, 157, 173: 461; avg 146 (+1)

Friday, October 06, 2006

League commissioner: Dog ate it

A "normally very reliable" dog who was employed to maintain scores and statistics for the Stone's Lanes Tavern League has apparently eaten four weeks of bowling records, according to Tavern League commissioner Fay Vincent Jr.

Vincent said the league is working to reconstruct team records and individual averages and handicaps by interviewing bowlers "and through other means." Concerns about the reliability of the interview results were raised after it was revealed that more than forty of the league's 112 regular bowlers had claimed 300 games.

Efforts by a Homeland Security forensic team to recover the score sheets from the dog's waste output were unavailing, Vincent said.

The dog, a Yorkie-Labradoodle mix named Gutterballs, has been reassigned to work as a pinsetter technician and is receiving counseling, according to a Stone's Lanes spokeswoman.

The best available estimate of the Illuminati Bowling Team's record over the first four weeks of the fall season is 16-12. The unofficial league reconstruction of the record shows the following results:

September 11--Team with No Name 5, Illuminati 2
September 18--Mammy's Boys 5, Illuminati 2
September 25--Illuminati 7, Senor Exhaust 0
October 2--Illuminati 5, Having a Bawl 2