“Twitter is nearly a required part of advertising campaigns, and it’s ubiquitous among news media. Yet even though it has blanketed the Internet, television and billboards with its hashtags inviting people to log on, four out of five Americans with Internet connections still don’t use it regularly. Facebook, by comparison, has more than half the U.S. online population covered and more than five times the world-wide users of Twitter.”

I don’t think the guy who replaced Bon Scott needs to worry about his job, but there is something about this tribute to the late Bon Scott performed in his home country of Prison Island that delights me. Younger readers, to whom this will just be another example of one guy from the ’70s covering the music of another guy from the ’70s, may be less impressed, but they’ve got an entire world of emoji and Avicii records and Nickelodeon-themed quizzes out there dedicated to keeping them amused now, it’s not going to kill them to let the old people have a few moments of their own. Anyway, if you are of the appropriate vintage, enjoy.

“It will get down to the teens tonight and stay cold through Wednesday. Then comes another storm. If it dumps snow, it could bring 10 inches. If it’s rain, it could be the most we’ve had since December. If it’s something in between, it will be a huge drag.”
 — I saw a weather forecast at the end of last week that ended with, “March 1st is only 3 weeks away!” So that’s where we are. The prophecy was true. When the most optimistic thing the weather people can tell you about the future is that there’s no way we can keep the calendar from eventually turning over you have to realize that we are in a world where winter’s frigid claw refuses to release its harsh, unrelenting grip on our fragile, freezing necks until the sun finally emerges at some distant point we can only dream about. Also our freezing shoulders. My shoulders seem cold all the time now. I hope it’s just this neverending season of cold and not a medical condition. Anyway, there is plenty more unpleasantness ahead in your life, and for once I am just talking about the weather.

“Andrew Vecchio, the co-founder and CEO of Startup and Tech Mixer, wanted to make it absolutely clear that his Friday night event — with 2,500 attendees, a bouncy blowup game of Twister, and a mechanical bull in downtown San Francisco’s W Hotel — was not a party. ‘We don’t use the word “party.” We’re bringing consciously designed spaces and innovative thinkers together to inspire,’

Amazon’s entry into publishing has created an awkward divide, giving some book people a second or a third chance in an imperilled industry while tainting them in the eyes of others. The literary agent, contemplating the future of the editors currently at Amazon, said, “You’d have to consider the time you spent with Vichy when you’re looking for work after the occupation.” Benjamin Anastas, a novelist who couldn’t find an American publisher for his third book, told a friend that he was going to publish his fourth, a memoir called “Too Good to Be True,” with Amazon. The friend, a novelist who had once worked at Harcourt — the house that distributed Amazon’s hardcover editions — looked stricken. “You do that,” she said, and walked away. Anastas found the reaction hypocritical. “If you’re publishing with Penguin Random House, what’s the difference?” he said. “They’re both these massive entities that have totally changed book publishing. There is nothing more demoralizing for a writer than to go into one of these huge towers to talk about your book amid all this product. You feel like a sperm-oil salesman at the Petroleum Club.” Still, finding no copies of his new book in most stores was akin to watching himself disappear, and Anastas said that he would think twice before publishing with Amazon again.

— Well here is a fairly complete history of Amazon from the beginning to now, describing the innovative ways it has pursued “small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”

Jim is the name he uses as a bookie, not the name he uses at his other job, which is something he’d like to not talk about, because he’d like to keep that job. Jim is broad-chested and bearded and built like the kind of kid who’d have been a good linebacker in high school. Jim didn’t play football, though. Hockey was his sport. Still is. But hockey is terrible for betting. Football is basically perfect, Jim says. The week of the Super Bowl was going to be busy for him, but we aren’t there yet. The Pro Bowl is playing on a television way back in the bar and some soccer is on up front, and Jim is sitting right in the middle, next to the kitchen, where the bar narrows and there’s a small window where the barkeeps pick up wings and fries mostly, and the line cooks tap a service bell when an order’s up. Sometimes the ring of the bell punctuates Jim’s sentences, and he pauses after the bell and sips from a glass of ale or a glass of water. Jim does not look like a cautious man but he acts like one. Overhead, over the drone of the kitchen and bar and even the games, a Buddy Holly record plays.

Jim started betting football seriously about five years ago. This was his own thing, he wasn’t running his book yet. But growing up Jim always had stupid little jobs, schemes he’d create for himself, like speakeasies run out of friends’ basements. That kind of thing. When he started betting more seriously he realized the big downside to the websites, and there are basically a million of them, is that it’s so hard to get your money out once you win — of course it’s hard to get your money out, Jim says, of course that’s how they keep you playing, and make money, the websites. Anyway he was like, “I’m just going to provide all my action through my own book. It started as a joke, really.” So Jim started an account on a website, sportsbook.com, and told people they could bet through him, on this account, so they wouldn’t have to go through the bullshit of getting their money out, but if they won he’d take 10 percent of their winnings. And when they lost everything, they’d have to re-up the balance.

This went on for a little bit, more people, friends of friends, came along, and Jim did some loose math and figured if this many people were betting he could just be the house. That’s when it really started. “At this point, it was between seven and ten regular betters, like, every week they’d bet on a few games, at least a few hundred each, that was the magic number.” Then the service bell goes ding.

All told today Jim has about 40 in his book — customers, friends of friends of friends. Half of those bet more than once a week, a hundred on this, a hundred on that. He pays out using PayPal but also “I have some people who are a little tin-foil-hat-y and just want cash.” If you go down $250 to Jim, you have to pay it down, that is, you have to go back in to Jim. There’s some math here, and Jim threatens interest on late payments, 10 percent, but honestly almost everyone pays it down. He carries a little book with him, he pulls it out, a little black Moleskine where he keeps track of who’s in for what, flipping through the figures and tables quickly before slipping it back into his back pocket. People email their bets in, he writes it down. The only sort of client who is a pain are a few dudes who bet real heavily, a few grand a week, go up and down all the time, and are always floating between $300 up and $400 down. Unless they hit $500 down Jim’s not making anything off of that, and doing all kinds of calculations.

The ideal customers are the guys who are very fiscally responsible, bet a lot, and lose a lot. They never lose much, it’s just, throughout the season, they’ll go down three times maybe. That’s $750 total. Each time they’re out $250 they just pay Jim back and start again. “There’s not really any amount of money someone can get into me for that’s worth me having someone beat them up. Like, I don’t care. In the worse case scenario someone goes down $500 and doesn’t pay me back. It’s not like I gave him a loan, in a weird way it’s money I didn’t even have. He got into me for it.” Ding, sip, pause. “I try to be as friendly about it all as possible. It all is just through word of mouth. I’ve had a couple people just hit me up and I have no idea who they are but I have to check them out. I have to do a check, you know, that’s just good business. Certainly this is all illegal, but I’m just such small potatoes I don’t have any concerns about the cops coming after me, but, you know, it’s not my full-time business so I’d rather have fewer customers. It’s sort of like, there are the drug dealers who are really smart about it, who won’t talk to you unless they’ve met you, and there are others who’ll give their number to everybody. That’s just a bad business plan.” Pause. Sip. “Not Fade Away” comes on.

“I had a few lunatics bet the Pro Bowl. Normally, the bets come during the week, starting Wednesday. You’re in your office, you’re bored, you start looking at the lines” — that’s the betting lines, the odds — “and sure on game day some people will bet on the coin flip and stupid little prop bets like that. Game day Sunday will be huge, a lot of last minute bets, live betting during quarters, halfs. Probably double what I do midseason, and midseason is probably $3,000 to $4,000 on a Sunday. But the funny thing about football, it’s so perfectly geared toward betting; the beginning of the season is more hectic than the end in a lot of ways. People are just hungry for it. There are more games, first of all, but also, it’s been hyped all summer.

“I had to pay out $2,500 once. A few guys love to bet on, like, college basketball, which makes it harder. I have to research the lines. Most of the guys are in their mid-20s, mid-30s, they’ve got some sort of full-time job, they chase that juice they get out of winning. I know some Teamsters who know some real bookies, and that’s not for me. If you recommended some dude to me who was 45 and had two kids and was, like, betting the mortgage I would just say no. I don’t need the money that badly. And I would feel too shitty if some dude lost his house because of me.

“I don’t have a particular endgame in mind but I know i can’t do this forever. It’s not even the time, really, which is like an hour a day, sometimes more. It’s more just like, I don’t have any serious long-term plans, but I do eventually hope to have something more like a normal life and not be out until four in the morning and doing drugs when I’m 45. And I never want to be like, I can’t read my imaginary kid a bedtime story because I’m staying up late looking at basketball scores because some dude made a bet.”

Ryan Bradley is a writer and editor in New York. Photo by Alper Çuğun

★★ Frozen staleness, made interesting only by its treachery. A long coffee stain stretched across the top of a snowbank. Drips from an idling cement mixer had cut a hole in the ice and washed clean one small spot of the white crosswalk marking. Sixty-sixth Street was still full of grainy brown slush. Downtown at the curbsides, the slush had refrozen, the transitory deep ruts and footprints now locked in stony hardness. The treads of the fire escape were paved with slippery humps of hard ice. An airplane was passing in the daffodil-colored light, and the view from the roof was probably beautiful, if there had been a way to get up to the roof. The evening streets were slick in the most innocuous-looking stretches. Up on Broadway, the used book guy cried out and hacked at the ice pack with the side of a shovel, swinging it in big overhead strokes, with a new cry each time the blade came down.

Do you think future generations will look back at us in horror and disgust because standards will have evolved to the point where we seem like savages for not having erected giant roadside memorials honoring the tragic highway chicken fatalities that happen along our nation’s arteries with regrettable frequency? It’s a trick question, because the odds are there aren’t going to be very many future generations, and even if we somehow do survive as a species for another hundred years I am pretty sure the direction in which our sensibilities are headed is going to be one where we only express emotions about those who can do something for us or those we want to do something to. Sorry, chickens.

“An online survey has projected that almost 39.8% of male internet users in China and 38.7% of female users are obese. Almost half of the remaining internet users surveyed have persistently gained weight over the past five years, reports the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily…. The weight Chinese put on over the past decade is almost equivalent to the weight westerners gained over the past 30 years, said experts.”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

A Life in the Theater

I was wrong,
I shouldn’t have picked up the phone

just to read you the line
you already knew from the review

the reviewer wrote that said you were no good
in the play I can’t remember

and only came to see because it was you
alive somewhere else in it — shining below the fake sun

and I was in love with something
you said or thought or willed into being

because of just being back in the boat with the living
after swimming too far out and for so long just

to meet living again. I struggled to get on board
and join the vessel of time.

I tried to love a man outside the theater
of men who left some other men and found them again.

Michael Klein’s third book of poems is The Talking Day (Sibling Rivalry Press) and work is forthcoming in

Provincetown Arts and Poetry magazine. He writes about poetry books for Los Angeles Review of Books and The Rumpus.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.