I will happily back away from this bit of weirdness when it is disproved! But the other day, someone named “James” called in to The Mark Levin Show and recounted his story as a survivor of the BP/Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig. “James” sounds like he spent a lot of time referring to the disaster as an act of God, essentially-which, how legally intriguing! And, you know, assuring everyone there was no gross negligence. Um, so who’s “James”? A lawyer representing the family of a Deepwater Horizon worker is not buying this. “After 8 days of ‘silence,’ all of a sudden, an unnamed ‘caller’ calling himself James, who says that he was actually on the Deepwater Horizon [DWH], calls into a radio show in Dallas, Texas and wants to ‘clear the air.’ This, I am sure will be proven to be a planned effort on the part of the lawyers at Transocean and BP.” Is there anything lawyers love more than scare quotes?

Jim Jones is not a virtuoso rapper. He’ll never be able to rhyme with the likes of Jay-Z or Lil’ Wayne or his old friend and Diplomats partner-with whom he’s recently gotten back together–Cam’ron. Rather, Jones gets by on charisma-inflection, tone, and giving the general impression that he’s the coolest dude at the party. Without a great beat, that’s not usually enough. But with one, sometimes, it really works.

Produced by Jokey Ent, the song “Hit ’Em Up,” from Jones’ latest mixtape, The Ghost of Rich Porter, is an example.

In news regarding another famously charismatic Jim Jones, the cult leader from the 1970s, the Times reported yesterday

that there’s a push to turn the site of his old Jonestown, Guyana compound into a tourist attraction. This is where 900 people were murdered or instructed into suicide 32 years ago. And where Jones apparently kept a caged chimpanzee named Mr. Muggs to “terrorize disobedient followers.” (He picked the right animal, as we know.) Now, if we can just get the rapper Jones to play a Dipset reunion at the opening of the theme park, with special guest DJ Muggs from Cypress Hill on the turntables…

It’s like something out of the movies: “Armed robbers fled after discovering the home they had broken into belonged to ‘tough guy’ actor Dolph Lundgren. The masked raiders tied up the star’s wife and terrorised her into handing over cash and jewellery by threatening her with knives. But they cut short their raid on the house near Marbella, Spain, after spotting a family photo of the action star and his children in one of the bedrooms.”

by Will Leitch

Will Leitch’s Are We Winning?: Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball is out today. The book is one of those rare blends that conveys both the excitement of sports fandom and the importance of family. While there is certainly plenty for even the casual baseball observer to enjoy, Are We Winning? is at its strongest when it examines the bonds between fathers and sons, the rituals and shared experiences that make up our personal histories. (It is pretty much a slam-dunk Father’s Day gift, should you need one of those.) If you can put up with Leitch’s shameless St. Louis Cardinals boosterism, you will find yourself unexpectedly moved. Here’s a taste.

After every Cardinals game, I call my father. I’m in New York, he’s in Mattoon, Illinois. I’m living a dramatically different life from him, having wildly divergent experiences, not better, not worse, just different. I’m still years away from a child of my own. When he was 34, my age, I was eight. We have a picture of Dad, and the whole family, from that very year. Our insurance agent was a friends with then-Cardinals-general-manager Dal Maxvill, and the agent had secured us dugout passes before the game. We met Whitey Herzog, and Ozzie Smith, and Darrell Porter. But for whatever reason, we only secured photographs with two players: Lefthanded reliever Ken Dayley and fourth outfielder Tito Landrum.

The photos are still on our wall at home, right next to the bar with the liquor bottles filled with water to make them look real. I’m carrying a scorebook and have a pencil in my ear, my socks pulled up to my knees, wearing a T-shirt that reads “I Root For Two Teams: The Cardinals And Whoever Plays The Cubs.” My sister is wearing oversized sunglasses and a big toothless smile. My mom has a camera around her neck and large bangs. And there’s my dad, young, fit-fitter than I am today, at 34-with a tank top, short black hair, and a mustache. He’s staring into the sun, wincing, waiting for whoever to just take the picture already. The kids are surely antsy. Jill probably needs to use the bathroom, and the Astroturf field holds the heat like a catcher’s mitt. Pete Rose, playing for the Montreal Expos, is shagging balls at first base, and he’s my favorite player not on the Cardinals. I want to watch him. Dad’s just trying to keep everybody together. The Cardinals do that. But only for a short while. Eventually, everyone will scatter.

Ken Dayley is one picture, and Tito Landrum is in the other. Dayley is only 25 years old and has just started his Cardinals career. He’ll play in St. Louis for six more seasons, then head to Toronto for two before retiring at the age of 34. Landrum began his career with the Cardinals, was traded in August of the season before to the Baltimore Orioles, where he won a World Series, and then was traded back to the Cardinals that March. He plays two-and-a-half more seasons with the Cardinals, then rattles around Los Angeles and Baltimore before retiring. He’s also 34 when he hangs up the spikes.

It is a tiny snapshot of one tiny moment, the Leitches as close to their family obsession as they will ever be, actually on the field at Busch Stadium. And dad looks like he’s about ready to run out the door. He looks happy. We all look happy. But there are more adventures out there, and besides, it’s really hot and look there’s Pete Rose.

I call Dad after every Cardinals game. We bitch and we moan and we cheer and we make plans to get together, every season, one weekend at the new Busch, just the two of us, drinking and watching baseball, our Cardinals, in quiet. It’s my favorite weekend of the year, and I suspect it’s his. I don’t know for sure. I wouldn’t dare ask.

But it can only be that one weekend out of the year. I have business in New York, and he has his home in Mattoon, and the phone calls can only do so much. The Cardinals are our one constant, and our one tether. But the rest of the world is chaos, and it is much bigger. Eventually there will be a family of my own, and we will start our own traditions, our own constants. I’ll still be in New York. He’ll still be in Mattoon. And time will keep going.

Then he will grow old, and then he will die. I can’t talk about it.

Are We Winning? is available now! Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine and the founding editor of Deadspin. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Good news about the existence of the hybrid grizzly bear/polar bears known as “grolar bears” or “pizzlies.” (Grolar bears is definitely the better name, by the way, at least until the things shrink down to the size of hummingbirds and grow wings and learn to use magic wands.) With our environmentally destructive ways, we human beings are killing off the animals that predated us so fast-even though we repeatedly promise ourselves that we’ll stop-it’d be good if some new species started cropping up.

“The forces destroying biodiversity are huge,” says Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, a leading fisheries scientist and co-author of the report. “Human economic expansion, shoving everything out of its way. The forces working against that are tiny. This won’t change until a force emerges that is similar in strength to the forces spreading destruction.”

Things like grolar bears and ligers and leopons are awesome. But even they probably don’t possess the kind of strength Pauly is talking about. Also, like most other hybrid animals, they are often sterile and so probably won’t survive in whatever small pockets of wilderness might be left ten or fifteen years from now. We need stronger new animals, ones better-adapted to flourish on the post-apocalyptic oil blob we’re remodeling our planet into. We should be combining the few species that seem to be thriving in our increasingly contaminated world with the ones most endangered with extinction. Someone should breed, like, a cockroach/Sumatran rhino. Or an Asian carp/Snow leopard. Or a Humbolt squid/leather-back turtle. Or bed bugs! They’re doing great! What endangered animal can we combine bed bugs with?

Or maybe combining animals with other animals isn’t even good enough. Maybe we’re at the point where we need to start making bionic animals-organic/robot hybrids. In this light, sculptor Mike Libby is on to something with his Insect Lab series: “Borrowing from science fiction and fact, Insect Lab customizes real insect specimens with antique watch parts and other technological components. From ladybugs to grasshoppers, each is individually hand adorned, and original- a unique celebration of the contradictions and confluences between nature and technology.” These things look beautiful, and also pretty hardy. The better to weather the gray, oxygen depleted, vegetationless future we have in store.

With two days left before voters head to the polls in The Race To Run Knifecrime Island, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, which is desperate to see David Cameron and the Conservative party take office with a working majority, has published a package of the terrible stories showing how Britain has become a hellhole from which there is no escape during the 13 years of Labour rule. “The Dossier That Shames Labour” is actually worth examining, because it shows exactly what that country’s papers are good at: scaremongering and sensationalism. It’s all there: the failures of the NHS (722 objects left inside patients after surgery in one year!), the handout economy (1 in 4 Britons do no paid work!), and, of course, the knife crime (knife crime!). Presumably this will all change under a Conservative government. I’m particularly hopeful in the area of education, because no one wants to see another horror story like the one the Sun runs today about the nightmare of the naive student who stripped to pay for university.

The adult entertainment trade group known as the Free Speech Coalition has put together the above public-service announcement in which the likes of Lisa “Not Sarah Palin Or Tina Fey” Ann, Joanna Angel, and Ron Jeremy implore people to pay for their porn, because without money coming in, arousing entertainment will not come out. While the somber, clothed atmosphere of this PSA is probably there to remind viewers of the grim, malware-infected future that awaits them should they continue to freeload their pornographic entertainments, there is also a variant with near-toplessness for those people who need to get aroused before they can get angry. [Via]

The latest installment of Vice’s “hanging with chefs after hours” series “Munchies” is an Italian extravaganza. Locanda Verde’s Andrew Carmellini knocks around with the kids from Brooklyn’s Char 4 and meets up with Mario Batali lieutenant Mark Ladner and Italian cuisine “godfather” Cesare Cassela. Drunkeness and bad language ensue, plus the food looks amazing. Check it out.

Massive rainstorms in Tennessee over the weekend have caused the Cumberland River to crest at an estimated 52.5 feet and killed at least 19 people. Among the sites in Nashville that have been washed over by the floodwaters are the Grand Ole Opry, the country-music mecca that is slated to kick off its 85th-birthday celebration on May 25, the home fields for the Tennessee Titans and Nashville Predators, and the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, which has lost two grand pianos and a $2.5 million organ to the rising waters. (There’s also this startling image from the front page of the Tennessean.)There’s also worry about floodwater contamination of the local water supply, with officials advising residents to cut back on showers, boil their water before drinking it, and come in for tetanus shots if they haven’t received one in the past 10 years. (Why: “People are more likely to get cut, scraped, bruised or torn from flood cleanup than they are to contract an illness from murky floodwater.”) [Pic via]

Today In Dubious Baseball Milestones

“For the first time in Phillies history, a fan running on the field at Citizens Bank Park was subdued by a Philadelphia police officer using his Taser gun.” (And hey, what do you know: It might be the first time in MLB history as well.)