If you see skid marks on the way out of St. Louis, that would be me, trying to leave before the creeping FOR LEASE fungus that appears to have infected most of downtown attacks my hotel too. I haven’t had a decent meal here – the breakfast place several readers recommended, Roosters, is opening an hour later than normal this week due to the All-Star Game, with no signage up anywhere at the store to explain this. That’s right: In a week when there are more potential customers than usual in town, Roosters is open for fewer hours. They did not teach us this strategy in business school.
My first Futures Game recap is here on ESPN.com, and I just filed a second one today with notes on more players. I also appeared on Mike and Mike this morning for a segment and a half. Those are so much better when I’m live with the host. We didn’t do Futures Game talk but I thought their question about balancing the future versus the chance to win now was a good one with no clear right answer.
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Anyway, here’s the ridiculous story of the post’s title. I’m allergic to feathers. It’s not a huge deal, just annoying when I go to hotel rooms, since most hotels assume people would rather sleep on feathers (which I don’t like anyway because I’m used to sleeping on foam), and some hotels decide to get all fancy-like and use down comforters too. Like, for example, the Union Station Marriott in St. Louis.
Occasionally, a hotel will see that my reservation has a “no feathers” request and they’ll just prep a room without feather pillows or bedding. It’s great when they do it, but I don’t expect it, and the first thing I do when I get into a hotel room is punch one of the pillows. (If the hole fills back in, it’s foam. Otherwise, it’s down. Either way, it’s fun.) If the room has foam pillows, I’ll just swap them out. I used to call housekeeping when I encountered down bedding beyond just pillows, but what usually happens is a giant production where two or three people come up and detox the room, including an almost choreographed effort to remake the bed with regular bedding, begging the question of how many hotel employees it takes to make a double or queen bed. There’s no reason for me to cause this kind of disruption, since I am perfectly capable of making a bed myself, so when I discovered down pillows and comforters in the St. Louis Marriott, with a cotton blanket in the closet, I fixed everything myself. Each bed had one foam pillow and one regular one, so I took the two foam pillows and put the two feather pillows on the other bed. I threw the down comforter on the unused bed and made my bed with the regular blanket. It wasn’t very complicated.
I come back from the Futures Game the next night to find the room made up … incorrectly. The maid did leave the fabric blanket on my bed, but topped it with the down comforter. Even worse, she took one foam pillow off my bed, moved it to the unused bed, and took one feather pillow from that bad and put it back on my bed. I’m imagining a maid with OCD who was highly disturbed to find anything in a place other than the one in which she had left it 24 hours earlier.
I’m checking out in a few minutes, but I was contemplating the hypothetical situation if I was staying another night or two. Do I call down and have the feather stuff removed, risking an army of hotel employees coming through the room for no good reason? Do I simply play cat and mouse with the maid every day? Do I hide the feather bedding in the closet or under a bed, and see if that’s sufficient to stop her? I have no answers.
is the simplest, even with 
. The game board shows the U.S. and Canada, with about 30 cities connected by train tracks of varying lengths. Each player receives 45 trains and begins with a handful of “destination tickets,” with two cities and a point value that represents the minimum number of trains required to connect them; if you complete a route between two cities on a ticket, no matter how convoluted the path, you receive the number of points shown on the card, but if you fail to complete it, you lose that many points. (You do have some flexibility around the tickets you keep.) The tracks come in different colors, and you have to collect train cards of each color to be able to lay trains on those tracks; the longer the track between two adjacent cities, the more points you receive for placing trains on it. Of course, the tracks between cities are limited, so you may end up blocked from your intended route. There’s also a bonus for the longest continuous route (regardless of tickets), and in the “Mega” game variant, a bonus for completing the most tickets. It’s a pretty simple concept and everyone we’ve introduced to the game has picked it up pretty quickly, but the game is completely different each time because of the mix of tickets you receive and the way the board develops. A complete game with two people takes 30-45 minutes; a complete game with four people takes an hour or so.
, which brings the same basic mechanics to a new map, that of Europe in the early 20th century, but with several twists to make game play more complex. The differences include routes through “tunnels” (where the exact number of train cards required isn’t known until after you start building, so you may have to use as many as three extra cards) and “ferries” (which require the use of locomotives, which are otherwise wild cards that represent every color), and train stations that allow you to use someone else’s route between two adjacent cities as part of your own larger route. I found it to be slower to develop, but it requires more route-planning strategy, and the flexibility of the stations means it’s easier to adjust on the fly.
. This map is smaller, designed for two or three people using 40 trains each (you use the trains and train cards from the Europe set, so the Switzerland expansion just comes with the board and new tickets). It was obviously issued hastily, as the instructions are woefully incomplete. Many tickets are extremely short – some require just two trains – which means you end spending a lot of time pulling new tickets, and you will almost certainly end up blocked by an opponent at some point during the game. A smaller board for a quicker game sounded appealing to us, but this implementation didn’t work for me.
, made the Modern Library 100 (#89) and the TIME 100. It has little plot and can be hard to follow, but the depiction of class differences in World War II Ireland (featuring an English family trying to escape the war and their English and Irish servants) is clever, incisive, and sometimes quite funny. The scattered, snobbish matriarch refers to all butlers as “Raunce,” regardless of their actual names; constantly loses items; and is completely oblivious to the fact that her daughter-in-law is shagging another man under the same roof. The butler who ascends to the title when the previous one dies is a money-grubbing, status-conscious, fatuous man, and is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist. One of the female servants is in love with Raunce; the other seems to have no idea with whom she’s in love, but wants to be in love with someone.