BRING YOUR CHAMPIONS, THEY'RE OUR MEAT

Another Bowl Loss

2012-01-10T10:41:00.019-06:00

After a roller-coaster football year that looked lost, Northwestern's tenacity, determination, and the rather lax standards of bowl game selection committees ensured a triumphant return to the post-season. But once again, the Wildcats faltered in bowl play. Pat Fitzgerald attempted to use the bowl drought as motivation in a traditional way by using a plush monkey as a literal manifestation of the proverbial monkey on the program's back, but even this elaborate psychological ploy was unable to overcome the Wildcats' struggles on defense this season.

Niko Mafuli urges the Wildcats to win the Meineke Car
Care Bowl any which way they can

The Northwestern defense remained vulnerable to long passes as the Aggies took advantage of the Wildcats' depleted secondary. Like last year's bowl game, they managed a late rally. Like last year, they also could not get the stop they needed for one more shot to tie the game. A bowl loss puts a cap on what was a disappointing season for Northwestern that started with an ill-fated Heisman campaign, crushing losses to Army and Illinois, and an inability to close out games in the second half. Nevertheless, Northwestern at least had a signature upset against Nebraska that helped catapult them towards bowl glory.

Perhaps the saving grace of the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas was the fact that the ESPN broadcast seemed to have a single camera focused exclusively on Pat Fitzgerald. This practice, which I'm calling "Pump-vision" captured every flying fist, chest bump, and expression of utter incredulity worn by Fitz on the sidelines. My favorite moment was when Fitz suspected an Aggie player of faking an injury in an attempt to slow down Northwestern's whirlwind offense in which he used the two handed "get out of town" gesture about six times in rapid succession. If Northwestern is going to lose a bowl game, I can take at least small comfort in the fact that the coach seems to be unwilling to believe that such a disastrous turn of events can possibly take place as he appeals to the heavens to grant him clarity on why he must suffer the misfortune of a defensive pass interference call.

THE CAROUSEL OF COACHES

The end of college football season has gone out with a flurry of clandestine hirings and furious sackings. An already maligned bowl season has been rife with interim head coaches overseeing benighted programs decapitated of their leadership. Northwestern fans, for example, saw future A&M head coach Kevin Sumlin overseeing the chaos from a swanky luxury box while departing Aggie interim coach Tim De Ruyter dried off his gatorade bath and hopped in a moving van to Fresno State. The Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl in San Francisco featured no head coaches. Meanwhile, eager alumni of these programs have flooded the internet with rumors about impending hires, which leads to an increased amount of perceived betrayal and double-dealing. This process gives college football fanatics the bearing of medieval tyrants forever executing their hapless ministers.

Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the
Ming Dynasty, consolidated his power
through bloody purges of his officials
in the late fourteenth century whereas
today university athletic departments
consolidate power by firing Rick
Neuheisel

Fortunately, fired coaches rarely stay fired unless they did something dastardly such as breaking into science labs to stage illegal bacteria devouring contest gambling rings. Therefore, rumors are swirling that former Illini head coach Ron Zook has been linked to several prominent defensive coordinator jobs. Unfortunately, hiring him would rob the people of Earth of an opportunity to see what Ron Zook would do with a life outside the game of football.

A return to coaching would scuttle plans
for new PBS television series "Ron Can Zook"

NBA

In the midst of college's bowl crisis and the NFL playoffs, the NBA has returned from an owner-mandated hibernation to bring us 66 action packed games that dozens of people will care about before the beginning of the eight month long NBA playoffs. The Bulls chose to stay to course this year by only rescuing shooting guard Rip Hamilton from exile in Detroit. Most importantly, the start of an NBA season means that it is time to check in on where NBA journeyman Drew Gooden is currently playing.

The Drew Gooden Relocation Guide shows an unexpectedly clean-shaven Gooden
in Milwaukee. Note that the faded line indicates that the Mavericks traded
Gooden to the Wizards, but he lasted all of four days in DC and never suited up.
I recommend perusing the map while listening to the
theme song from the Jeffersons, although I would be thrilled if an enterprising
BYCTOM reader was willing to create an Indiana Jones-style map tracking
Drew Gooden movement

WHO WAS THE GREATEST OUTLAW CANNIBAL MOUNTAIN MAN OF THE AMERICAN WEST?

During the mid-nineteenth century, westward-drifting Americans came into conflict with harsh natural barriers, the Native American tribes upon whose territory they encroached, and, of course, the other desperate, quixotic, or otherwise deranged fellow settlers on their path. It was inevitable that these conflicts would breed tall tales, bushy beards, and the almost certain turn towards disturbing acts of cannibalism.

According to Wikipedia, both legendary mountain man and murderer Liver-Eating Johnson and robber, murderer, and cannibal Boone Helm are associated with the same almost certainly apocryphal story of kidnap, escape, survival, and eating people. The story alleges that either Johnson or Helm had been kidnapped by Blackfoot to be sold to the Crow. Instead, one of these men (although probably neither) escaped and then killed and chopped off the sentry's foot for nourishment for a 200 mile journey. An important part of the historical process to figure out which of these men may have been the one most accurately tied to this story involves discovering frontier sources, arduously investigating records, and cross-checking the legends with available data and how stories about each man were constructed. On BYCTOM, however, I am dedicated to being as irresponsible as humanly possible with these stories and shall attempt to use an arduous 25 second google search to determine who ate that guy by examining such important criteria as:

NAME: While the Liver-Eating moniker is a good get for a mountain man, Johnson's actual name is fairly unremarkable. He may have been born John Garrison and changed his name to John Johnston. On the other hand, someone named Boone Helm was essentially born in buckskin. Even better, he was apparently associated with someone named "Littlebury Shoot." Boone Helm, in fact, not only sounds like the likely name of someone involved in an apocryphal nineteenth century cannibal scenario, it also could equally serve as a hat worn as part of a nineteenth century cannibal ritual as in "Won't be startin' the cannibalizin' 'til I put on my Boone Helm."

Robert Carlyle could very well be wearing a Boone Helm in the
1999 nineteenth century western cannibal movie "Ravenous,"
which I remember mainly for the bizarrely jaunty soundtrack
during a desperate cannibal chase scene

BEARD: I can't find an actual photo of Helm, so unless his beard was so glorious that he eschewed clothing in favor of covering himself in beard, I will assume that Johnson's more grizzled look increased his likelihood of being a part of this story.

Liver-Eating Johnson

CANNIBALISM: Both Johnson and Helm were no strangers to acts of cannibalism. Helm is one of the most notorious serial-killing cannibals in the history of the United States. According to Nathaniel P. Langford 's 1912 Vigilante days and ways, Helm was "one of those hideous monsters of depravity whom neither precept nor example could have savred from a life of crime." Helm killed his cousin (the aforementioned Littlebury Shoot), but escaped from an asylum to blaze his trail of murder. Langford relates one example of a murder from an encounter in a saloon between Helm and a man known only as "Dutch Fred." According to Langford, Helm taunted the Dutch Fred with "many oaths and epithets and flourishes of his revolver." To what extent is Langford a trusted source with regard to Helm? I have no idea, but the chapter ends with an anecdote about Helm's brother named "Old Tex" who made a close friend by threatening to shoot him on sight and then offering to let his erstwhile enemy shoot him. That section closes with the helpful note that "Tex was killed by being thrown from a horse, in Walla Walla, in the year 1865," and there is nothing about that sentence that sentence that is not impossibly grizzled.

Liver-eating Johnson earned his nickname by supposedly eating the livers of the Crow men that he killed in his blood feud. As his Wikipedia entry elegantly describes: "There were three Johnsons, nicknames were commonplace, and with Johnson's show of eating the liver, he received his name." Most of what we know about Johnson, however, comes from a long tradition of genuine frontier mularky, and therefore his liver-eating may have sprung from his own attempt to intimidate people or the drunken campfire of a whiskey-fueled cowpoke. The fact that Johnson lived until 1900 and was apparently content to be known as a consumer of human liver without even the decency to whip up some fava beans makes me more inclined to believe that he was less likely to sustain himself on a leg.

MONKEY REMOVAL

Northwestern's bowl loss has only magnified the other major embarrassment on its athletic record by failing to qualify for the NCAA basketball tournament. Like the football team, the Wildcats came up short in two crucial Big Ten games against Illinois and Michigan and seem unlikely to make a tournament run this year. Carmody, however, has no stuffed monkeys for his basketball team. Instead, the Wildcats must hope to catch fire in the second half of the season or win the Big Ten Tournament outright for the dream of an NCAA berth. Or wait for the inevitable distortion of history that will pile the 2012 Northwestern athletic teams with either unearned accolades or unsubstantiated stories about Fitz consuming a plush monkey on the sidelines of a bowl game while protesting a penalty.

The Texas Bowl

2011-12-30T19:12:00.012-06:00

Since the last post, the Northwestern football team lost its final game against Michigan State, leaving it in a precarious bowl position with a 6-6 record. Fortunately, bowl berths are not determined by precise formula, rationality, or by a giant wheel of non-BCS bowl games as I would prefer; instead it is through the much more entertaining process of intrigue, betrayal, and payola.

"It is he who has the most RVs that travels to the sunniest bowls," is something that
Machiavelli may have said if he was in the feudal position of NCAA President Mark
Emmert (shown at right demonstrating how to crush his enemies)

The chaos of the Big Ten season left several teams scheming against each other for the plum prize of mediocre bowl games played in barren stadiums to meager television audiences consisting of airport denizens and barflies. Northwestern took advantage of its network of international operatives and no doubt a sordid dabbling in horse-trading, bribery, and subtle threats scrawled on wax-sealed parchments to ensure that the Wildcat football team will once again return to its winter home in Texas. Since the 2000 season, the 'Cats have played all but two bowls in the Lone Star State.

APPROACHING A TEXAS UTOPIA

Texas is known for its fierce independent spirit, its frontier lineage, and its prominence in pickup truck commercials that air constantly during NFL games. My favorite Texas residents, however, were a colony of French and Belgian followers of Charles Fourier. Fourier was a major French socialist thinker in the early nineteenth century but, according to historian Rondel Davidson in an article on the colony, the "tedious, ambiguous, and often preposterous nature of his writings" prevented them from catching on until after his death in 1837. His ideas centered on the creation of communal societies as a reaction to the social ills of early industrialization, but his plans for these societies contained the sort of hyper-specific mathematical precision of an delightfully off-the-rails social alchemist.

Fourier is commonly mocked for his grand pronouncements that, once society had been perfected, the natural world would respond by turning the seas into an ocean of lemonade. This reductionist view on Fourier as a mad lemonade prophet is understandably irresistible, especially considering his influence on utopian communities throughout the nineteenth century. Fourier scholars, however, would add that there is far more to his theories, for example his hatred of saltwater ecosystems as he wrote in his 1808 Theory of the Four Movements:

This breaking down of the sea water by the boreal liquid is a necessary preliminary to the development of new sea creatures, which will provide a host of amphibious servants to pull ships and help in fisheries, replacing the ghastly leions of sea-monsters which will be annihilated by the admixture of boreal fluid and the consequent changes in the sea's structure. The sudden death of all of them will rid the Ocean of these vile creatures , images of the intensity of our passions which are represented by the bloodthirsty battles of so many monsters.

Fourier (l) shared with other important philosophers an intense hatred of sea
creatures

The Texas colony at La Réunion was founded by a Fourier disciple named Victor Considerant. As Davidson relates in "Victor Considerant and the Failure of La Réunion" from the Jan 1973 edition of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Considerant found in Fourier's communal societies the solution to the social problems of mid-nineteenth century industrialization. He headed the Fourier Society and did far more to promote Fourierism than Fourier himself. His visions of social order saw a more gradual transition to communal society through government reform. In 1849, Considerant became involved in a plot to overthrow the newly-crowned Louis Napoleon and found himself in Belgian exile. Considerant could handle Belgium for less than three years; the American Fourierist Albert Brisbane invited him to America to plan a community in 1852.

Considerant's first preparation to
colonize Texas involved growing this
mustache

Considerant became quite taken with the climate of Texas and the spirit of the American frontier. By 1854, he had published two works outlining his plans for a colony called La Réunion outside of Dallas and began to raise subscribers in Europe. Colonists arrived in the summer of 1855, but it quickly fell apart. Davidson identifies several major causes for the failure of the community. For one, Texas land became a hot commodity while Consdierant was off raising funds, and the colonists were left with considerably worse land with a far greater price tag. He also had problems with his settlers, having failed to construct a Venn diagram showing the yawning chasm between hardy frontier people and people interested in the ideas of Fourier. Instead, he found that the main group of settlers were intellectuals almost completely bereft of the skills needed to survive in the wilderness. In addition, these settlers faced nativist anger from other settlers not particularly keen on an influx of European socialists, and beside that, the settlers found their French mostly useless. Even the winters were unusually severe. Considerant found the situation increasingly hopeless and grew despondent. He left for Europe in 1858 and, by the time he returned in 1859, La Réunion had become Le Abandon as colonists melted into Dallas or elsewhere.

Today, the frontier settlements of La Réunion have been swallowed up by downtown Dallas, its floundering farms and inept smiths and barren general stores entombed by shopping malls and interstates. And now, the idea of a French utopian socialist colony in Dallas seems as unlikely as a Northwestern bowl win after a decade of bowl results akin to the colonists' miserable crops.

TRIUMPH IN THE MUFFLER BOWL

Northwestern fans have come to Houston elated at securing a bowl berth from a disappointing season. Texas A&M started the season with grander ambitions and fell into the Texas Bowl after a comically disastrous string of second-half collapses. This season saw several bitter ends for the Aggies. They lost an opportunity to leave the Big 12 with a victory over arch-rival Texas on a last second field goal. Head coach Mike Sherman was fired, and interim coach Tim DeRuyter will leave for Fresno State. The Aggies and their paramilitary fanbase will make the short trip down the road hoping to end the season on a more positive note.

Mike Sherman Judd Nelsons his way
out of College Station

Despite these pressures, there is no doubt that a bowl victory means more to the Wildcats. Anyone reading this already knows and is sick of being reminded that they have yet to hoist a postseason trophy since 1949. Winning a bowl game, along with making the NCAA tournament, are the twin bogeys preventing Northwestern from fully ascending from its reputation as the worst athletic major college athletic program in the history of college sports to the comfort of mediocrity.

Nevertheless, the Wildcats face a tall task. A&M has an excellent passing attack led by quarterback Ryan Tannehill, and the Wildcats have struggled to stop big plays in the air all season. On the other side, Northwestern fans hope a recovered Dan Persa and the dynamic playmakers on the offense can keep up with their counterparts.

A lot of people grouse about the meaningless outcome of bowl games, but why scoff at more college football? I guarantee that no fan base has ever wanted to win the Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas more than Northwestern wants a win tomorrow, even if all it means is that Northwestern was slightly better at football this year. And I'm sure that when the final whistle blows and the Wildcats pump their fists in victory in homage to their fist-pumping coach, they won't be celebrating being number 50. They'll know in their hearts that they are number 49.

VICTORY IN TEXAS

The idea of French intellectuals flailing helplessly about the Texan countryside while spending evenings consulting their sea creature removal manuals is fairly amusing, but the nineteenth century utopian commune movement also demonstrates an admirable confrontation with the monumental task of finding ways to create a just and equitable society. And though some of their philosophers had loony passages in their works, or their communities may have failed to account for the logistics of actually creating a colony, we should take the mantle of Considerant and declare that it is Texas where the impossible shall become reality, the oceans shall turn to lemonade, and Northwestern will win a bowl game.

Bowl Eligible

2011-11-23T21:03:00.016-06:00

Northwestern defeated Minnesota in a tense LEGENDS DIVISION showdown with Minnesota, smashing the six win barrier, and securing a golden ticket that can potentially lead to a phenomenally crappy bowl game in the desolate outer reaches of the bowl landscape.

Far-flung Bowl officials were on hand to scout Northwestern in
their 28-13 victory over the Golden Gophers

But six wins is not enough to guarantee a bowl berth, especially in the topsy-turvy mediocrity of the Big Ten this season. At six wins, the 'Cats can be left out in the cold. In 2004, the Wildcats' 6-6 record was not enough for them to get to a bowl game after faltering against Timmy Chang's Hawaiian Juggernaut. This year, it seems the football team can still squeak their way to the type of bowl game mocked by people inexplicably angered by the presence of more college football, but nothing is certain.

Northwestern got to their sixth win thanks to a seemingly improving defense. Minnesota effectively moved the ball, but had trouble scoring-- one threat was neutralized by a Brian Peters interception despite the fact that his broken left hand is swaddled in a club cast reminiscent of the tail end of an anklyosaurus.

The stopping power of an ankylosaurus is accurately modeled
in this scholarly comic from something called lesdinosaures.net

DINOSAURIA

The discovery of dinosaur bones in the nineteenth century led to a predictable amount of scientific intrigue, back-biting, and accusation that occurs in the volatile confluence of a nascent scientific discipline, rough exploration, and Cretaceous grave-robbing. The enmity between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh has been well chronicled (most entertainingly in Bill Bryson's wonderful A Short History of Nearly Everything) as a reliable source of comical dinosaur rivalry, as their competition to extract and identify dinosaur species fueled an incredible advancement of both dinosaur knowledge and academic pettiness.

The relationship between Cope and Marsh contained spectacular examples of skullduggery in the name of science. Marsh outclassed his rival at dinosaur-based espionage. At an early collaboration in New Jersey in the 1860s, Marsh apparently stabbed Cope in the back by bribing site workers to send fossils only to him. A Cope expedition in the 1870s included two men in Marsh's employ; one of them apparently claimed that he planned to lead Cope away from fossil sites in a classic act of dinosaur perfidy. Marsh, however, suffered a reversal of fortune when one of his men sent some fossils to Cope.

Dino-rivals Cope (l) and Marsh. Marsh is the bearded man in the top center of
the photo at right, shown with his phalanx of armed assistants no doubt
wielding rifles should they meet a rival fossil-collecting gang or should they
dig deep enough to uncover less deceased dinosaurs

The two sniped at each other in newspapers and scholarly journals, disagreeing over taxonomy and other scientific concerns. Throughout the 1870s, they struggled to keep major fossil finds from each other, going as far as using hush money, accepting tips from pseudonymous fossil hunters, and keeping tabs on each others' fossil collecting henchmen. This secrecy was encouraged by their increasing reluctance to travel to fossil sites themselves, instead funding teams of mercenary diggers and "dinosaur rustlers" that attempted to steal fossils from rival camps. I like to imagine that they also sent telegrams to each other gloating over their ruthless thefts, threatening each other, and using the word "bones" as often as possible such as "When you awaken tomorrow, you will find that it is I who controls the greatest sum of bones," or "I shall never forgive this treacherous act of bone-thieving and you should hope that you do not live to see how I avenge my bones," or ""I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I will break your bones. A bone for a bone, that is how I account for my bones."

An 1896 Marsh illustration of a Stegosaurus that in the best of
possible worlds would have been mailed to Cope with the phrase
"Feast your eyes upon these glorious bones" scrawled triumphantly
underneath

Marsh held the upper hand throughout the 1870s and 1880s. He ascended to the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences in 1883 and secured a position with the U.S. geological survey. Cope struck back when he began attacking Marsh and John Wesley Powell, the head of the Survey. The rivalry continued to their death, when Cope ordered his skull preserved and measured against Marsh's in order to prove that he literally had the largest brain. Marsh did not accept this phrenological challenge. Their legacy lives on, however, in my new publication called The Smallest Stakes: A Journal of Comical Academic Arguments featuring articles such as "I'm laughing at your use of the term 'trope': a catalog of my colleagues' bumbling ontology, 1991-present," and "I am bringing my burliest graduate students to our next conference."

THE CHAMPIONS OF CHARLESTON

Not only has Northwestern attained bowl eligibility, but the brave Wildcat basketball team has managed to win a pre-season basketball tourney of dubious prestige. Northwestern avenged an NIT loss against Tulsa, beat LSU, and downed Seton Hall in the championship game to win the Charleston Classic.

The Wildcats, resplendent in their new uniforms, jubilantly
hoist the hardware

The tournament win augers well for a veteran team. They will struggle to fill the shoes of Northwestern basketball legend Juice Thompson. John Shurna will attempt to lead the 'Cats to the promised land with a familiar cast of characters such as tournament MVP Drew Crawford, Alex Marcotullio, JerShon Cobb, and the unstoppable lumbering of Luka Mirkovic. Northwestern also returns last years successful formula of a high-scoring variant of the Princeton Offense and the disruptive 1-3-1 zone defense. The team is 4-0 after the tournament and a win over inexplicable perennial season-opener Texas Pan-American with whom the Wildcats must have some sort of intense bone feud.

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

The Chicago Bears collected another convincing win against San Diego last week. But they also lost Jay Cutler for the season, just as he began engineering an effective passing game fueled by his cannon arm and elusive mobility honed by running for his life. The offense will instead turn to relatively unknown backup Caleb Hanie. The Bears came close to reuniting with Chicago fan favorite Kyle Orton, who seemed poised to ride into town and help the squad Bears their way to victory with his array of acceptable mediocre professional passing after being unceremoniously dumped by a Denver Broncos team enthralled by their 1940s quarterback play.

"ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?" Kyle Orton wins the crowd
with another 6 yard out

Instead, Orton was snapped up by the Kansas City Chiefs through the arcane waiver process that reportedly saw the Dallas Cowboys attempt to claim him specifically to prevent him from helping potential NFC playoff rivals in a move that Jerry Jones learned from the treacherous Cardinal Richelieu. As a final indignity, the Bears signed one of the McCown brothers. Though they can still make the playoffs by thrashing a weak AFC west slate, the odds of seeing Cutler triumphantly return for a Bears playoff game and sulk the squad to victory seem as remote as they did after their early season losses.

THE MICHIGAN STATE OF THINGS TO COME DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE WITH THAT STATE PUN

Meanwhile, Northwestern's football squad faces off Saturday against a Michigan State team with essentially nothing to play for. This is an unexpected result given the apparent reluctance for any team to win the Big Ten this year, suggesting that the divisions should have been named Chaos and Entropy (in all seriousness, that would still be less dumb than Legends and Leaders). Instead, the new Big Ten Championship game has unexpectedly taken the drama out of the last week of the season. The Spartans have already clinched a spot in the game and are unlikely to position themselves for a BCS spot unless they win the inaugural Big Ten Championship game. State, therefore, has little to gain by beating Northwestern. Mark Dantonio claims the Spartans will go all out to win, though it would be surprising to see him risking injury to some of his more important or most battered players.

For Northwestern, a victory guarantees an elusive bowl spot and moves them up the rank to a more prestigious game in the vague hierarchy of crappy bowls. They'll also be playing an emotional last home game for the seniors and attempt to wipe away the disastrous five game losing streak with a five triumphant victories, a point that Fitz will not publicly make, although I suspect he feeds his monotonous "one game at a time" nonsense to the press while secretly filling his players' heads with odes to their greatness and portraits of himself leading them to glory across the Alps while perched on an elephant that is stomping rival Big Ten mascots like so much Alp detritus.

SENIOR DAY TUSSLE

Northwestern's program has entered another spectacular year with a bowl eligible football team and a Charleston Champion basketball squad. For some other programs, these accomplishments are risible but given the historical performance of both teams, these are titanic victories. Northwestern can make this a historical year by winning a bowl game and (dare I dream it) making the NCAA tournament on the back of Shurna's deadly chest heave. There is nothing to stop them, accept for jealous rivals who attack them in academic journals of sporting success and try to get their hands on their precious bones.

Minneosta

2011-11-18T00:22:00.014-06:00

The Wildcats took care of business against Rice last weekend and head into a crucial showdown with Minnesota for bowl eligibility at Ryan Field on Saturday. The Wildcat defense contained Rice, the offense rolled as Persa connected with Ebert for a 90 yard score, and Northwestern managed to win a game it was supposed to win without causing spectators any undue heart palpitations.

A Northwestern fan prepares for a game
against a plucky non-conference opponent

The seemingly-revitalized Wildcat defense held Rice scoreless for most of the game. Their resolve will be tested against Minnesota, who gamely stepped into Northwestern's traditional role of upsetting Iowa, and retained possession of their hideous pig-trophy. The Gophers also hung in against Michigan State, but fell apart against a Wisconsin team that decided that the best way to avoid losing on a fluky hail mary was to completely annihilate their opponent. Minnesota QB Marqueis Gray has battled through injuries this season as well as some seemingly inexplicable benchings in favor of his freshman colleague Max Shortell, but looks to be at full strength against Northwestern.

The Wildcats are favored this weekend, but beating Minnesota has rarely been easy, even as their program has veered comically off the rails since the end of the Glen Mason era. The 'Cats suffered a defeat to the Gophers in 2009, and have found victory by the narrowest of margins; they squeaked by last year and in 2007 by a single point, and needed a near walk-off interception return in order to secure victory in 2008. No one on either side is taking anyone for granted.

Minnesota's first-year head coach Jerry
Kill relies on the ancient motivational art
of bellowing to ensure excellence from his
players

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL UPDATE

The Chicago Bears have been surprisingly decent. Like last year, the Bears spent the early season on a quest to punish quarterback Jay Cutler by subjecting him to an unending series of sackings. And again like last year, the offensive line has found some semblance of cohesion and Mike Martz has either been convinced or cajoled at the point of a bayonet into calling more rushing plays and short passes in his Greatest Show on Sludge offensive attack. In short, we've seen the Bears return to winning in spite of themselves with good defense, a great running back, and phenomenal special teams.

For most of their existence, the Bears have had the same identity, and it is amazing how, no matter what players or coaches end up on the team, the Bears remain the Bears. My favorite Bears season was probably the 2001 season, where a mediocre Bears team careened into the playoffs thanks to two consecutive Mike Brown overtime interceptions. The most Bears victory of all time, however, probably was this 2004 game against the Tennessee Titans. Chicago quarterback Craig Krenzel passed for 116 yards and two interceptions, and the Bears scored in regulation on an interception return by defensive end Michael Haynes, an R.W. McQuarters punt return, and a field goal. They won in overtime with a safety.

Announcers enjoyed reminding viewers that Krenzel
majored in molecular genetics at Ohio State. In this photo,
a number of Dallas Cowboys science enthusiasts happily
indulge his wish to get a closer look at Cowboys Stadium
grass ecosystem

Last Saturday's game against the Lions was another classic Bears win, as they scored touchdowns on two interception returns, a Devin Hester punt return, and a Forte run set up by a Detroit fumble. The game was also notable for a comical brawl ignited by a Matt Stafford tackle on an interception return, which emptied both benches.

The Lions are lucky that Martz coaches from the
press box and is not allowed to bring his
gladiatorial implements to Soldier Field

Though the Bears are unlikely to win the North unless Aaron Rodgers decides to spite Packer fans by inexplicably retiring mid-season, purchasing a large tract of land in Mississippi, and contentedly drive a lawn mower around its premises for several months, they remain in the mix for a Wild Card berth.

THE WHITE SMOKE SAYS THE CUBS HAVE A NEW MANAGER

Theo Epstein has emerged from his Wrigleyville lair to proclaim that Dale Sveum will be the Cubs' new manager. He will replace Mike Quade, who lost favor with the organization because he refused to intimidate the opposition with an array of false eyebrows patterned on historical figures.

Quade models the "Eyebrows of Yalta" collection

The exact impact that a manager has on a baseball team is not completely certain. Unlike football head coaches, who spend a week devising their team's overall strategy, or basketball head coaches who expertly use timeouts to slow the last minute of a close game to a crawl and contort comically along the bench for our amusement, baseball managers affect a game mainly through setting lineups, devising pitching changes, foolishly calling for bunts despite concrete evidence that sacrificing outs is more often than not detrimental to a team, and occasionally berating umpires in a manner that compromises the dignity of everyone involved. It seems in the modern game, the manager's job largely involves controlling the clubhouse and eating shit from the media, especially in Chicago, where pundits blast managers for not leading their teams to play better. On a team bereft of major league talent like the Cubs, this means that the media expects the managers to emit baseball improvement rays in order to force his players to hit and field better.

I don't know anything about Sveum. I'm working on making sure I pronounce his name correctly so I can most accurately hurl epithets at my television when he does something order a hit and run with Alfonso Soriano batting or call Jeff Samardzija to pitch, or any of the million other minor decisions a manager will make during the course of the endless season as the Cubs inevitably sputter through a rebuilding year. I mostly know him as the third base coach of the Red Sox who was often criticized for his ambition in sending runners home.

Sveum (l) performs the vital third base coach role of congratulating a player
hitting a home run. Reed Sox fans' venom for the occasional out at the plate
was matched at the time for Cubs fans' consternation with then-third base
coach Wendell Kim. Kim earned two derogatory nicknames: "Wavin' Wendell"
and "Send 'em in Kim"

Sveum joins a long line of Cubs managers dating back to Albert Spalding in in 1876. The position of manager was in flux in the nineteenth and early twentieth century with managers who were either active players or retired players more akin to modern managers. The Cubs' nineteenth and early twentieth-century squads used a mixture of player-managers such as Cap Anson, Frank Chance, Silver Flint, and the dashing Bob Ferguson, who had not only one of the most swashbuckling middle names in baseball history (Vavasour), but also one of its best nicknames ("Death to Flying Things"). In the years between Anson and Chance, Cubs managers did not play, but directed their teams from the bench, content to spit, smoke, and encourage their players' general baseballmanship.

Cubs managers from 1878-1905 (clockwise from top left) Bob
Ferguson, Cap Anson, Silver Flint, Tom Burns, Tom Loftus,
and Frank Selee. The clean-shaven Frank Chance took over in
1905, shattering baseball's mustache ceiling

BOWL ELIGIBILITY ON THE LINE

Northwestern has looked greatly improved on defense the last two weeks and will be looking to prove that their defense is not merely the result of an inadequate Nebraska coaching scheme and playing Rice. Otherwise, they will have to rely on a traditional Northwestern game plan to outscore the opposition. Minnesota fans certainly see this as a winnable game for their reeling squad after a slate of disappointing early losses.

A win here puts the Wildcats into technical bowl eligibility. Unfortunately, with the rest of the Big Ten likely to fill its berths, the 'Cats will need some teams on the precipice of eligibility to fall apart and hope that the bowl fatcats come a-callin' with their wads of cash, their silver topped canes, and their promises to do their stadium up all pretty. Otherwise, the Wildcats will be ineffectually waiting by the phone in the cold before challenging the University of Chicago to some sort of Quiz Bowl in order to satisfy bowl-starved Northwestern students and alumni. Yet all of this prognostication is for naught without a win against the plucky Gophers and perhaps even an upset against Michigan State to ensure a place at some miserable bowl and turn fans' frowns upside down.

Husked Corn and Other Staple Crops

2011-11-11T19:43:00.017-06:00

Northwestern beat Nebraska. Northwestern beat Nebraska. Northwestern went into Lincoln, Nebraska, beat the #10 team in the country, and has begun an inexorable march to a Pizza City bowl to wreak havoc against another middling team that has also slunk into the postseason, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Pat Fitzgerald can smile again after a rough stretch for his Wildcat football squad

The Northwestern offense once again rallied around jack-of-all-trades Kain Colter after Dan Persa's injury in the second quarter. Colter hit Jeremy Ebert on an 81 yard pass and led the 'Cats on a game-clinching seven minute drive against Nebraska's fearsome "Blackshirt" defense that got its name from Husker football coach Bob Devaney's hatred of former Italian Prime Minister Luigi Facta.

Luigi Facta is best known for stepping down during Mussolini's March on Rome in
1922. He initially gained power for a perceived positive attitude due to his perennially
smiling mustache, among the most spectacular of Europe's interwar mustaches. I
found the logo on the right on Nebraska's official page and not an ill-fated Nebraska
video game for the Atari Jaguar where the Husker defenders were forced to prove they
were bad enough dudes to rescue the president

More importantly, Northwestern's defense played its best game of the season. Though they allowed a career day in the air for Husker QB Tyler Martinez, they kept the Nebraska running game in check, even though they have a running back named "Rex Burkhead," a running back name that would only be topped by something like Truck Shoveler. The Wildcat defense stopped Martinez, Wrench Lunchhandler, and the Husker offensive line repeatedly and caused two key fumbles as the Nebraska coaches stubbornly stuck to the their run game against a stout Northwestern front that I now know would make these Wildcats unstoppable in 1904.

RICE

Northwestern must hold steady as Rice comes to Evanston to avenge last years 30-13 loss in Houston. Though Rice has had a tough year at 3-6 and sports one of the most porous defenses in college football, Northwestern fans know first-hand the danger of taking an opponent for granted. A home loss to Rice after last week's monumental victory in Lincoln would be a profound reversal of fortune that could end Northwestern's bowl hopes.

Rice is itself coming off a momentum-swinging victory over Conference USA foes UTEP. Rice quarterback Nick Fanuzzi came off the bench to lead the Owls with 405 yards passing and three touchdowns, as noted in this article from the Rice Thresher student newspaper that is now making me mildly disappointed that their football team is not also named The Threshers with a correspondingly violent Texas football hand gesture. The Owls have also managed a Big Ten upset this season as they defeated Purdue and helped move the Danny Hope regime to "embattled" status.

Purdue Coach Danny Hope has become more haggard with every
loss

Dan Persa will return as quarterback for the Wildcats after suffering a shoulder injury that forced him out of the Nebraska game. Persa will add that to his growing list of ailments that he has shrugged off like a nineteenth century strongman who plays through injury because science has yet to diagnose them properly, for example shrugging off a hernia induced by excess triangular weight lifting as a bowel malady cured only by snorting lizard powders and applying electrodes to his person.

GOING TO THE MOON

Rice Stadium was the famous venue of President Kennedy's 1960 Moon Mission Speech, where he likened space travel to the difficult feats of climbing the highest mountain, flying across the Atlantic, and attempting to defeat the University of Texas at football. Northwestern has unfortunately as far as I'm aware been the site for any presidential moon grandstanding.

Kennedy returned to Rice a year later for his lesser
known follow-up speech entitled "I Hate the Moon,"
where Kennedy got tough on the moon, characterizing
its alteration of American tides as suspiciously
communist in nature, casting suspicion upon the 1961
lunar eclipse, and earning a rousing ovation for claiming
that "if the man in the moon were to come into this
stadium right now, I would punch him his smug lunar
face"

Kennedy wanted to send astronauts to the moon as quickly as possible, but space travel created complicated legal issues over moon sovereignty. In 1967, United States, United Kingdom, and Soviet Union signed the Outer Space Treaty to regulate acceptable uses for outer space. The Treaty banned launching nuclear missiles from space or storing them on the moon or other celestial bodies. It also banned setting up lunar military installations. The Treaty's provisions unfortunately served as a direct provocation for Bond villains who spent the remainder of the century constructing moon bases and threatening the Earth with all manner of space-borne attacks such as missiles, weather disruptions, and, in up to 65% of Bond movies, some sort of space laser.

The Treaty was in part a reaction to American meddling in space for defense purposes. The 1967 West Ford project launched 480 million cooper diodes into orbit in order to construct an artificial ionosphere in order to facilitate global radio communications. The project was created as an alternative to conventional cable or radio communications that the government feared were vulnerable to Soviet disruption. British and Soviet scientists protested, with Pravda chipping in with a headline reading "USA Dirties Space." The project inspired a clause in the treaty to provide for international consultation to alert other nations to space experiments. Satellite technology quickly rendered the West Ford project obsolete, although remnant diodes remain in orbit.

A 1979 Moon Treaty attempted to subject space and all celestial bodies to international control. The treaty banned exploration of celestial bodies without notifying other nations or consulting the UN Secretary General and forbid claiming sovereignty over other planets, moons, and the like. This treaty has been approved by Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, and Uruguay, none of which have managed to successfully put a person in position to either peacefully explore the heavens or exploit space for nefarious means or tell other to stay the hell away from Ganymede.

An important array of laws governing the use of outer space exist
specifically to prevent this from happening

CAN NORTHWESTERN GO BOWLING

Last Friday, the Northwestern football season appeared over. Now, the Wildcats have renewed hope. A victory over Rice and either Minnesota or Michigan State will make Northwestern eligible for spectacularly awful bowl game/tractor expo and I can't possibly be more excited. Of course, at 6-6, Northwestern can go to a bowl only if other conferences cannot fill their allotments or the teams bow out of the bowl from shame or some sort of ridiculous NCAA infraction such as punishing players for high-fiving too vigorously for the NCAA's liking. Winning out will guarantee a bowl berth in some god-forsaken wind-swept land. Northwestern fans like the team's chances more against Rice and Minnesota, although the Gophers have been dangerously scrappy lately. Michigan State remains the toughest game on the schedule, though one can never underestimate the Spartans' predilection for unexpected localized ineptitude.

After being mired in the doom and gloom of a losing season, Northwestern has hope again. And if we can play a basketball game on an aircraft carrier, why can't Northwestern play a shitty bowl game on the moon? We do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard.

Husks

2011-11-03T21:43:00.016-05:00

A victory for Northwestern at last. The Wildcats recorded their first win since trouncing Eastern Illinois and snapped a five-game losing streak by beating Indiana and then stepping on them to get inches above the Big Ten cellar. It was a remarkable offensive performance against Indiana's matador defense as the Wildcats put up 59 points. Along the way, Drake Dunsmore set a Northwestern record with four touchdown catches, setting off a hailstorm of horrible commentator puns such as "Drake Duns-score," "Drake Dunsfour," and others too ghastly to dignify with a mention in this august online publication. As a professional supplier of ape-related puns to car dealerships using giant inflatable monkey marketing, I urge Big Ten Network television crews to holster their puns and leave it to the pros.

"Our prices are bananas," "This A.P.R. will
make you go A.P.E.," and "Let this orangutan
sell you a tan Durango," are the ones I'm
giving out for free

No one doubts that Northwestern can put points on the board. The Wildcat offense confused Indiana with a variety of looks, as the versatile Kain Colter lined up at quarterback, running back, wide receiver, superback, and right tackle as well as kicked an extra point, coordinated the defense, took a turn inside the Willie costume, liaised with the media, organized the Athletic Department budget, and participated in a psych 110 experiment during media timeouts.

Fitz and Mick McCall sent Colter on a mission to represent
Northwestern football at the European Sovereign Debt Crisis
summit after handing the offense to Trevor Siemian and the
reserves

Northwestern's defense, however, still gave up 38 points to the Hoosiers and had difficulty tackling their dynamic freshman quarterback Tre Roberson. While Northwestern's defense allowed the offense to outscore Indiana, they will have a tougher task as they travel to Lincoln to begin their rivalry against divisional foes Nebraska.

HUSKED

Northwestern will be looking to try to save their season against the newcomers who mark the first step in Big Ten expansion towards 64 teams. As most Wildcat fans know, the last meeting with Nebraska ended in an Alamo Bowl routing appropriate for its location near the actual Alamo. The defeat has been seared into the minds of Wildcat fans thirsting for vengeance and Nebraska fans, some of whom can recall playing in something called the "Alamo Bowl" in the year 2000.

This year, unfortunately, the possibilities of revenge seem slim for the Wildcats. They face a 7-1 Husker squad ranked #10 in the BCS standings that has only lost to a seemingly unstoppable Wisconsin team that had not yet exposed its vulnerability to the hucking the ball 50 yards into the endzone with no time remaining play. Northwestern, on the other hand, limps into this game quite literally, with Dan Persa suffering from a painful turf toe injury. The Wildcats also must win in Lincoln's creatively-named Memorial Stadium against 80,000 screaming Husker fanatics hoping to intimidate the Northwestern offense with noise and their horrifying mascot who lurks in the shadows with his frozen grin belaying a confidence in all manners of sinister uses for corn farming implements.

Nebraska's mascot was created as a composite of popular
children's nightmares

How will the game shake out? On the one hand, the Huskers don't pass the ball particularly effectively, which helps cover up some defensive struggles against the long ball. On the other hand, Northwestern's run defense has been closer to Maginot than Thermopylae, and they will be facing a far stouter defense than Indiana's feeble unit. No one but Pat Fitzgerald seems to think the Wildcats have a chance. But Northwestern football thrives as the underdog with no expectations, and Nebraska may be looking past the 'Cats to a meeting with potential inaugural Big Ten Championship opponents Penn State the next week. Anything can happen in the Big Ten, and Northwestern has yet to notch their annual signature upset by failing to beat a surprisingly weak Iowa team. Hopefully, the Wildcats can catch an overconfident Nebraska team unaware as they prepare mainly by choreographing elaborate touchdown celebrations designed to flout the spirit but not the letter of stringent NCAA restrictions to prevent football players from enjoying themselves.

PRODUCTION OF THE CORN

Nebraska joins the Big Ten as a vital corn-producing region with a team nickname paying homage to their connection to the crop. The American mastery of maize continued to fascinate corn's greatest 20th century enthusiast, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. In the 1955, Khrushchev implemented a wide-ranging program to jump-start corn production in the Soviet Union. His enthusiasm grew after visiting the United States and, in particular, the vast Iowa cornfields of Roswell Garst, who then sold the USSR thousands of tons of seed to help rectify the Soviet Union's wretched state of cornlessness.

Comrades! We will crush the imperialist Redenbacher

There's a wonderful report on Khruschev's corn program in Central European University's OSA records of intelligence reports filed for Radio Free Europe about the goings-on behind the Iron Curtain. According to a 1958 report entitled "Khrushchev and Corn," the author has noted that Khrushchev had championed the crop since 1939. The document points out that "Almost every foreign speech...pays tribute to corn and often yields such bon mots as 'Corn in the hand means a pork chop in the mouth.'" The corn campaign, however, failed to live up to its expectations. The directive ordered growing corn in less than optimal conditions, and collective farm administrators dragged their heels in corn planting. The Politburo blamed problems on resistance from farm authorities and appointed corn inspectors, which the report incredulously describes as "another echelon of farm authority." "Only a Gogol could do justice to the Khrushehevian kolkhoz [collective farm] corn inspector," the report concludes.

The Radio Free Europe reports are a fascinating source of Soviet statistical misinformation and bureaucratic rapaciousness. The writer of the reports demonstrates a simultaneous cynicism and appreciation for the absurdity in these accounts, describing Soviet actions invariably as "malfeasance and skullduggery." In a report entitled "Butter and Egg Man-- Soviet Style," the author describes the results of a Soviet drive to catch up to the United States in livestock products such as meat, milk, and eggs. It reproduces a story (from where, it is unclear) about a Kirghiz collective farm where the chickens and cows began to double and triple egg and milk production over the amount they would normally produce when bound by traditional restrictions such as the laws of physics and biology. The reason for the increase was not the development of a Soviet super-cow (which surely would have ended the Cold War and begun a reign of worldwide Soviet hegemony), but through what the report describes wonderfully as "the swindler's machinations" of the farm administrator. Inquiries revealed similar statistical anomalies at nearby farms. The administrator, however, remained in his position.

Another report that must have been filed by the same author entitled "Kolkhoz Cash And Carry Operators" from 1959 discusses the corruption of state farms. The author attributes the problems to the practice of consolidation of farms into larger entities, reflecting a Stalin-esque "gigantomania" with enormous projects that led to opportunities for large-scale corruption among the "conniving cadres." The boodle involved inventing fictitious orders for supplies and pocketing the excess. As the annex notes "all sorts of business operators (deltsy) and intriguers are being attracted, as flies are by honey, by the chance to make profits" in acts of brazen misappropriation of state resources that would stagger even the most sticky-fingered Chicago machine bosses. The one significant weakness in this sort of Soviet boondoggle is that the Communist Party's faceless bureaucracy left these men unaccountable to the people and therefore unsuitably lacking in the nicknames necessary for the perpetration of acts of swindlery and corruptitude. Think of how much more impressive the reports would be if these acts of larcenous bureaucracy were perpetrated by people named "Tractor" Ivan Stepanovich or Grigory "Little Lenin" Pavlovich.

This poster celebrates the triumphant ordering of 100,000 fake
tractors by crooked kolkhoz operators

THIS SEASON IS NOT YET TECHNICALLY OVER

It is true that Northwestern is facing long odds against Nebraska. But it is also true that this is college football where the improbable and the unlikely occur on a weekly basis. Northwestern is still technically fighting for a bowl spot and a major upset this Saturday can turn the season around and ensure a berth in whatever god-forsaken bowl game would have the Wildcats. But should Wildcats yield to inevitability and the football team falters in its upset, I have no problem falsifying reports of victory and spreading them across the Big Ten. And then pilfering money meant for the purchase of vast swathes of Soviet capital goods.

Hoosier Weekend

2011-10-28T00:12:00.017-05:00

Northwestern again looked good in the first half before falling apart in the second against Penn State. On the other hand, they did so while joining the trend of using Future Uniforms meant to invoke the gradual transformation of college football into an underground arena blood sport where defensive backs are allowed to use implements such as pruning shears and laser cannons to slow down offenses.

Northwestern's special alternate
uniforms irritate Wildcat football
purists

The Northwestern defense once again had holes. Penn State QB Matt McGloin wasted no time bombing it to the endzone, and Silas Redd carved up the Wildcats for 164 yards, averaging 9.1 yards per carry while sporting a name befitting a Dickensian villain. The Northwestern offense, prolific in the first half, failed to score a point in the second half. Dan Persa left the game with a turf toe injury, making him questionable for the Indiana game. Joe Paterno won his 408th game and tied the record for most wins for a Division I coach and continuing his undefeated streak against Pat Fitzgerald. The Wildcats lost their fifth game in a row and now need to all but win out to make it to the post-season. A cyclone has ripped Ryan Field from the ground and deposited it in the lake. Pat Fitzgerald has been spirited away by pirates and is being held ransom for chests of doubloons and spices from the Orient. A Big Ten shaman has placed a curse on the team rendering them unable to wear cleats for the rest of the season. The indoor practice facility has become sentient and turned evil, held at bay only by a mob of Evanston citizens with torches. It has been a rough week for Northwestern football.

Even Air Willie has been mysteriously swapped out for Evil Air
Willie

A LAKE BATTLE

For the Wildcats to make it to a bowl, they'll have to use all of the cunning, strategy, and daring British eccentricity of Geoffrey Spicer-Simson to pull off the seemingly impossible. Spicer-Simson led one of the strangest naval campaigns in modern history during the First World War when he and his men transported two motor boats named the Mimi and Toutou overland from Cape Town to engage with German gunboats in a battle for supremacy over Lake Tanganyika. Spicer-Simson's adventures are chronicled in Giles Foden's Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Taganyika, which details how Spicer-Simson led the expedition, successfully destroyed two German vessels, and inspired the C.S. Forrester novel and John Huston movie The African Queen.

Spicer-Simson was an unlikely candidate to lead the expedition. He did not exactly fit the model of an early twentieth century naval officer. His body was covered in an extensive array of butterfly and snake tattoos and, once deployed on his African mission, he eschewed the tyranny of pants in favor of more breathable khaki skirts. Still, if he had he been the second coming of Nelson, the Admiralty would have probably forgiven his unbecoming epidermal decorations. His naval record, however, revealed a dangerous propensity for incompetence in all manners of sea-borne combat. As Foden relates, Spicer-Simson had already been twice court-martialled: once for smashing his destroyer into a liberty boat bringing sailors ashore for leave; another time he drove his boat onto a beach. Spicer-Simson also nearly sank a British submarine during a periscope hunting exercise and during the war he abandoned his coastal flotilla for an evening reverie with his wife only to watch from a hotel window as German torpedoes destroyed one of his ships. By the time the Admiralty planned to launch an expedition, they seemed wary of allowing Spicer-Simson to command a fleet of rubber animals patrolling a bathtub.

Spicer-Simson shown in naval uniform and as a tin soldier
in his more familiar khaki skirt get-up

The British government had learned of the German presence from a big game hunter named John Lee who spotted the Kaiser's legions aboard a fearsome gunboat called the Hedwig von Wissen while stalking an elephant. First Sea Lord Henry Jackson ordered an attack on the German ships at Lake Taganyika, declaring with the cartoonish hubris of a nineteenth-century British naval officer that "it is both the duty and the tradition of the Royal Navy to engage the enemy wherever there is water to float a ship." At the same time, Lake Tanganyika was hardly a priority for the war, and the Navy had a difficult time finding someone to lead the expedition. Eventually they settled on Spicer-Simson who, according to Foden, was either the last man left or simply in the right place at the right time, sitting at his desk where the Navy hoped he could inflict minimal damage upon their war effort.

Foden wonderfully describes Spicer-Simson's merry band of outcast adventurers that included a Chief Engineer who had been a Grand-Prix-winning race car driver who with limited knowledge of engines, a medical officer described by Foden as having "an odd way with sideburns," an adventurer-reporter who had already been declared dead once, and two enormous kilt-wearing Scotsmen who joined the expedition directly from the tavern. Of course my favorite of the officers was C.T. Tyrer, who affected a monocle, consumed Worcestershire sauce as a beverage, and referred to everyone as "Dear Boy." The plan was to arrive in Cape Town and transport the two eight-ton boats overland through the use of rails, oxcarts, and the occasional pulling power of the beefy Scotsman 10,000 miles to the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.

The map at left shows the distance from Port Elizabeth to where the boats eventually
launched. The transport of the boats went mainly by locomotive, although used a variety
of means of transportation in a military version of Fitzcarraldo

The British operation's absurdity meant it attracted ample attention. As Foden relates by using both British and German sources, the Germans knew of the expedition well before Spicer-Simson reached the lake. Nevertheless, the expedition proved remarkably successful. The expedition captured a German vessel and added it to their flotilla (renaming it from the Kingani to the more terrifying Fifi). They sunk the Hedwig and captured her crew. Spicer-Simson considered his mission completed. The Allied Forces, however, did not yet rule Lake Tanganyika's waves. Another German ship, the massive 1200 ton converted ferry Graf von Götzen, still patrolled its waters. Spicer-Simson was reluctant to engage the larger ship with its imposing 105 mm gun. He sought to counter by adding a larger vessel to his fleet. The naval battle, however, never came to fruition. While Spicer-Simson schemed, British and Belgian forces successfully attacked German positions by land. When ordered to support an attack on a German harbor, he instead ordered his fleet to flee in fear of the fort's guns. British forces captured the fort without him. Spicer-Simson returned to meet with the victorious British army, who, as Foden relates, revealed that he had fled from fake wooden artillery, mocked his cowardice, and, most painfully, cat-called him for his skirt-wearing proclivities. It was a low moment.

As for the Graf von Götzen, Belgian airplanes had damaged it and the German commander had it scuttled. Investigations later showed that the German forces had removed the ship's guns and it too sported wooden decoys. Defenseless, the Mimi and Toutou could have easily sunk it.

Spicer-Simson was rewarded with medals from both Britain and Belgium, but the Navy had apparently seen enough of him. As Foden relates, he was never given command of a ship again and immediately returned to his desk job.

Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure does not stop there, though. Foden appends the book with an entertaining depiction of the making of The African Queen, where apparently Huston descended into directorial madness and earned the nickname "The Monster." The crew suffered tropical illnesses and star Humphrey Bogart self-medicated with an abundant supply of scotch. Foden closes the book with his own journey on the Lake on the Liemba, a cargo ship reassembled from the Graf von Götzen itself.

This still from The African Queen perhaps suggests why Hepburn
later wrote a book called The Making of the African Queen: Or How
I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My
Mind

INDIANA

The Wildcats travel overland to Bloomington this weekend to take on another Big Ten cellar dweller in Indiana. This should be a favorable match-up for the 'Cats, but these two teams have a recent history of close games, and Indiana's first-year coach Kevin Wilson must also see this as a winnable conference game for his squad. Wilson, of course, had been instrumental as Northwestern's offensive coordinator, unleashing of the spread offense in the first years of Randy Walker's tenure. Logic says to expect a shoot-out against a similar offense-first opponent, although given how things usually turn out when I predict them, the game will almost certainly end as a 4-2 slugfest with all scoring achieved via safeties and blocked extra point returns.

A loss here effectively ends Northwestern's season, but a victory sets up the possibility of going 6-6 by beating Rice and Minnesota, miraculously upsetting one of Michigan State or Nebraska, and possibly sneaking into a bowl game by stealthily huddling under canoes. Although this season has been maddening through the squandering of many leads, Wildcat fans can at least enjoy watching younger players such as Colter, Siemian, and Smith begin to solidify the offense of the future. A future where Northwestern uniforms include gray helmets and utility belts, and the NCAA is controlled by an even more blatantly corporate cabal of bloodsport-peddlers hoping to harness our amusement for their nefarious double-dealing.

Enjoy your Inevitable Future NCAA Football Dystopia

Homecoming

2011-10-20T22:30:00.017-05:00

The Wildcats will head home from Saturday's loss against Iowa to face Penn State under the lights. Though Northwestern mounted a comeback from 17 down to tie the game and menace Iowa fans with the specter of another game slipping through their fingers in the manner of a suave international jewel thief continually foiling a dogged Interpol agent, the 'Cats ran out of mojo in the fourth quarter. Hawkeye fans hope that a win against Fitzgerald will finally break the Wildcats' spell over their snake-bitten program, but I suspect that Northwestern lost the game to lure them into a false sense of security. Next year, Iowa fans will not only face a Northwestern team hell-bent on vengeance, but a rival patriotic card display promoting Soviet industry by filling the stands with gigantic pictures of Lenin and tractor factories located in the former Tajik SSR.

Jubilant Hawkeye fans storm Iowa City to celebrate finally
defeating the indomitable Wildcats

Iowa now prepares for a cross-divisional showdown with Indiana as they attempt to stay in the lead for the division. The loss, meanwhile, marks the fourth consecutive defeat for the Wildcats as they cling precariously to the cliff of bowl eligibility while the prospect of contending for a divisional crown has been tied to the railroad tracks and no doubt gruesomely eviscerated by a passing locomotive.

I GAVE UP ON BASEBALL IN EARLY AUGUST

Watching the World Series is bittersweet since its very existence evinces the Cubs' masterful futility. This year, instead of retreating to their traditional October irrelevance, the Cubs are busy completing a complicated Morris Dance with the Boston Red Sox and San Diego Padres in an attempt to sign Theo Epstein, Jed Hoyer, and, perhaps tomorrow, exhume the corpse of Branch Rickey in order to bring the Cubs a front office that uses modern baseball analysis instead of relying on some sort of arcane wizardry that hopes to enable the likes of Aaron Miles to successfully play Major League baseball.

Famed Elizabethan clown Will Kempe claimed to have Morris
danced from London to Norwitch over nine agonizingly
annoying days

As the drama unfolds, the only pleasure left for the bitter husks of Cub fans is to root against the St. Louis Cardinals and the machinations of Tony La Russa. La Russa, who fancies himself the type of manager who plays chess while the others play checkers, enjoys doing things like using back-up catcher Gerald Laird as a pinch-runner and playing the matchups to the extent where I'm fairly sure he would alternate pitchers every pitch if it was allowed by the rules. Unfortunately, watching the World Series also means being subjected to Fox coverage, bringing with it the dynamic duo of Tim McCarver and Joe Buck who combine an emotionless blasé delivery with inane gibberish. By the end of the game, it is no longer possible to distinguish McCarver's words from this Italian fake English go-go song. Fox has yet to unveil its baseball robot yet, but has treated fans to a special infrared camera that achieves the same effect achieved by Rowdy Roddy Piper when he put on the They Live glasses.

The Fox infrared camera in action. After the game, Buck and
McCarver pummeled each other in a parking lot for seven solid
minutes

Even when it comes to the facile world of sports fandom, there's nothing noble about watching a game specifically hoping for a rival team to fail. It feels somewhat seedy, not unlike going to a bullfight secretly hoping to see a goring, rooting for the Apes to neutralize Charlton Heston, or watching a demolition derby wishing for the cars to escape with nary a scratch. At the same time, sports provides a rare arena to guiltlessly wish misery upon a group of people with whom I have no other quarrel other than the color of their jersey and I hope that the good people of St. Louis are forced to endure an offseason reliving a horrible World Series moment such as losing a game because of an unnecessary headfirst slide by Nick Punto whose lack of a basic grasp of the laws of physics ends up dooming the Cardinals.

COME TO EVANSTON

Just as Kirk Ferentz finally exorcised his Northwestern demons, Pat Fitzgerald will attempt to finally beat Penn State. Fitz is 0-3 against the Nittany Lions, including last year's stunning loss where the Wildcats blew a 21-0 lead, which served as a helpful preview of every loss this season. Northwestern has only beaten Penn State three times since they began playing them in 1993. At least that is one more than Penn State's early twentieth century rivals Washington and Jefferson College, who managed only two victories against Penn State from 1894-1917. It should be noted, however, that the Jaymen as they were then known (now their nickname is the vastly more satisfying Presidents although it is not clear whether it refers specifically to Washington and Jefferson or extends to all presidents, even crappy ones such as Chester A. Arthur) tied them twice, including an 1899 contest ended by the referee for fighting. Considering that football in 1899 was largely indistinguishable from the pleasant meeting of a pair of angry mobs, I'm assuming that the game descended into manly displays of pugilism and cudgelmanship.

Of course, no football game could roil nineteenth century American pugilists more than the works of Shakespeare. In the 1840s, a feud between actors Edwin Forrest and William Charles Macready took a violent turn as partisans for each actor pummeled each other in the streets of Manhattan. Forrest had taken to following Macready's American tour, taking the same roles as a way to prove himself the superior soliloquizer. As wikipedia suggests, their rivalry became a proxy battle for tensions between the United States and Britain; working class Americans favored the American Forrest as their own, while Anglophile upper classes preferred Britain's Macready. Feelings ran so strong that even virulently anti-Irish nativists joined with their emerald brethren in the time honored nineteenth century American tradition of hating British people.

Macready endured taunts, sheep carcases, and cries of "Down with the codfish aristocracy." In May 1849, Macready endured heckling at a performance at the Astor Opera House filled with angry pro-Forrest factions stoked by fliers distributed by Tammany Hall Boss Isaiah Rynders invoking patriotic rhetoric to quell this Shakespeare insurgency. The hostile crowd, who had earlier pelted Macready with offal, including what the wikipedia page describes as "bottles of stinking liquid," boiled over. The police surrounded the opera house as the mob attacked, and the state militia fired into the crowd.

The Astor Place Riot, May 7, 1849. It is odd for modern readers
that a performance of Shakespeare could trigger such violent
partisan fighting since Shakespeare today is associated with
the turtleneck and half-glasses set who are unwilling to
disagree with their fists and sword-canes. Instead, riots today
can stem from far more reasonable origins such as the outcome
of sporting events

The Astor Place riot was one of many violent disturbances in New York in the 1840s and 50s. In 1857, another major riot broke out among various gangs with names such as the Bowery Boys, the Dead Rabbits, and the Roach Guards in what has been called the Dead Rabbits Riot. On July 4, the Irish Dead Rabbits and the nativist Bowery Boys became enmeshed in a series of street fights that began when Dead Rabbits broke into a Bowery hangout, destroyed it, and drained it of its precious booze stocks. This act escalated into a street battle involving hundreds of gang members and associated looting enthusiasts. The fight deleteriously affected Rynders's career when his attempt to reason with the gangs to stop fighting was met with a riposte of stones throne at his top-hatted person.

Despite his stoning and removal from machine power, Rynders remained a
factor in American politics as shown in this 1859 cartoon. According to
this Harper's Weekly article by Robert C. Kennedy, the cartoon is satirizing
US Secretary of State Lewis Cass for his volte-face on the issue of forcible
German conscription of naturalized German American citizens visiting
Germany. On the left, Cass derisively blows his nose as a legion of
mustachioed Prussians drag a German American away to do their
Hohenzollern dirty work. On the right, Cass warmly protects a German
man while Rynders waves the flag in celebration of the government's
humane policies brought about by a sincere concern for capturing the
votes of German American citizens

The Dead Rabbits refused to accept responsibility for the riot and instead attempted to blame their rivals, the Roach Guard, clearly betting on the public siding with the gang that sounded slightly less likely to serve as the main antagonists for a cheap Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knockoff. They issued this statement to the New York Times:

We are requested by the Dead Rabbits to state that the Dead Rabbit club members are not thieves, that they did not participate in the riot with the Bowery Boys, and that the fight on Mulberry street was between the Roach Guards of Mulberry street and the Atlantic Guards of the Bowery. The Dead Rabbits are sensitive on points of Honor, we are assured, and wouldn't allow a thief to live on their beat, much less be a member of their club.

A BIG TEN VICTORY

The Wildcats will be facing another tall task in handling the vicious Penn State defense. Their hope is that the inconsistent Nittany Lion passing attack will stall against the heretofore porous Wildcat pass defense and that Persa, Colter, Ebert, and the rest of the Wildcat Gang can manage to outscore them. A win in front of a hopefully rabid homecoming crowd could hopefully give Northwestern enough momentum to salvage the season, terrorize the rest of its Big Ten opponents and Rice, and send Pat Fitzgerald Morris dancing towards Bloomington while belting out a soliloquy about his young men in a way precisely calculated to rally the Wildcat faithful and disparage the codfish aristocracy.

Iowa Week

2011-10-12T20:26:00.011-05:00

The Wildcats followed up the crushing hat debacle with another defeat against an irritatingly resurgent Michigan team last week. I came in expecting an insane high-scoring quarterback shootout, and the first quarter did not disappoint as both teams flew up and down the field. Fitz even successfully used the passing quarterback/running quarterback alternation strategy with Persa and Colter, hoping to confuse the Michigan defense by getting them think that they would obviously pass with a hobbled Persa and run with the dynamic Colter, but maybe they'll switch things up and run with Persa but maybe they already thought about that so they'll really pass with Persa, but no, that seems to obvious, what if they run with Persa but then he flips it back to Colter who then laterals to Former High School Quarterback Jeremy Ebert who bombs it to a wide open Rashad Lawrence streaking down the sideline.

Mick McCall's game plan is based on a solid foundation of
dastardliness

In the second quarter, though, the offenses tapered off. The Michigan offense came prepared for a shootout in the second half, but Northwestern could not score at all, and now the Wildcats stand at an alarming 2-3 at the precipice of missing a bowl game. So let us turn our attention away from this worrying development in Northwestern football to make fun of hilariously corrupt colonial officials.

IN AN UNDER-HAND AND CLANDESTINE MANNER

British India in the early nineteenth century was sandwiched in between a trade monopoly ruling through the accepted traditions of the regions and an aggressive expansionist global power. The East India Company technically administered British India, but the British government controlled the region's political and strategic affairs. The small British bureaucracy maintained influence indirectly through alliances with the myriad Princely States under British protection. The British government sent Residents to their courts, political agents who kept an eye out for treacherous anti-British alliances, advised the rulers, and generally maintained British interests. Throughout the eighteenth century, these Residents often existed within a familiar context of conquest and occasionally adopted Mughal customs (this phenomenon is wonderfully chronicled in William Dalrymple's White Mughals).

By the early nineteenth century, a reforming tide had arrived. British officials in India began promoting English-language education, civil service reforms, and a joyless Victorian moralism. Civil service reform began in earnest with the appointment of William Bentinck, a utilitarian under the influence of a pre-taxidermied Jeremy Bentham who sought to modernize the Indian government. The case of the British Resident at Delhi, Sir James Edward Colebrooke, gives a fascinating look at the intersection of the British and Indian worlds meeting at the crossroads of universal pocket-lining corruption.

Governor-General Bentinck (l) was influenced by UK Stare Champion
James Mill (center) and Jeremy Bentham, shown here in stuffed form
worshiped by an evil utilitarian cult apparently appeasing his logical
wrath by bringing him a fresh head

The accusations against Colebrooke can be found in this October 1932 edition of Asiatic Journal. Colbrooke, by then an aged official in the prime of his venality, stood accused of dozens of incidents of corruption mainly concerned with giving and receiving gifts from various leaders of Princely states, a practice which had been banned in 1828 as part of a reform initiative. In one sense, Colebrooke's crime had been not adjusting to the new bureaucratic regime and conducting affairs through a more Mughal mode. On the other hand, Colebrooke had been caught in the great tradition of nakedly buying and selling influence for a variety of nineteenth century bounty that left him condemned by nineteenth century language vituperative enough to enable the construction of the world's highest horse. Here is an arbitrary sample of charges against Colebrooke:

Accepting nuzzurs (a ceremonial offer of money and gifts prohibited by the 1828 law) from "every native above the lowest rank who has been introduced to him, with hardly any exception"
Embezzling public property
Allowing Lady Colbrooke to receive at her durbar the agents of the independent states and to maintain "an intimate and corrupt understanding with many of them"
Not paying his manservant but allowing him to accumulate wealth through "corrupt and criminal practices"
Improperly receiving an elephant
Illicit trading of shawls
Selling furniture, carriages, and other articles of property to "natives of considerable rank...some of those transactions being of a highly disgraceful and fraudulent description"
Receiving tantalizing vague "trays of stuffs"

The report concludes that Colbrooke was guilty of "gross misrepresentations," deprecated his defense as "discreditable," and was summarily removed from office. The case was prosecuted by Charles Trevelyan, a young official in India who later went on to a famous career in the British Civil Service. Bentinck praised him for doing his job "ably, honourably, and manfully" despite his "most painful and invidious task." Bentinck also praised the judges and used the case to show his civil service reform at work, hopefully in the dulcet plummy tones of this fictional colonial official (I know I keep linking to this clip, but I have yet to point out how much I love the way that actor chews up the phrase "from smuggling to swindling to receiving stolen goods to baldfaced blackmail." So sue me in the disciplinary courts of the Raj).

Charles Trevelyan contemplates
throwing the book at Colbrooke, but
worries that Colbrooke will sell it to
Nawab Shumsooddeen Khan for an
egregiously inappropriate number of
trays of stuffs

IOWA WEEK

Iowa and Northwestern fans have developed a deep mutual antipathy this century that has been deepened by their proclivity to dash each others' Big Ten title hopes. Northwestern fans certainly remember the 2000 game at Kinnick where a two-win Hawkeye squad demolished the Wildcats' Rose Bowl hopes before gleefully storming the field, a loss that set in motion through mysterious machinations (that I suspect involved an illicit exchange of scarves involving Michigan boosters and bowl representatives) a berth in the far less prestigious Alamo Bowl. At least the loss in that bowl game has set the scene for the vicious LEGENDS DIVISION showdown in Lincoln where the Wildcats will face a hostile crowd of Nebraska fans suddenly remembering that they play Northwestern each year. In recent years Northwestern has paid the 2000 loss back with interest, defeating Iowa three years in a row, and five of the last six, occasionally ending their BCS ambitions.

Pat Fitzgerald loads his equipment from the last Iowa-
Northwestern game

This year the stakes are lower. Both the Wildcats and Hawkeyes bring sputtering squads to their clash at Kinnick. The disappointing record of both teams, however, may make this game even more important. Northwestern desperately needs a win to get back on course to make the illustrious Pizza City Bowl, and finally beating Northwestern may give the Hawkeyes the boost they need to become contenders in the mild division (which division? Ah, yes the LEGENDS DIVISION, thanks for reminding me that that's a thing). A clash of struggling teams may produce a swelling of enthusiasm that parallels the proclivity of these two fanbases for arguing with each other on the Internet.

The civil and gentlemanly discourse regarding a difference of
opinion on the subject of the superiority of a college football
team

This game seems like it may also be a shootout, with Iowa's defense less staunch than it has traditionally been and with Northwestern's defense struggling against the unsporting chicanery of the forward pass. Given Northwestern's struggles against Illinois and Michigan, the combination of Vandenburg and McNutt is as terrifying, and Iowa fans have nightmares of Dan Persa, the latest in what seems to be an endless parade of mobile, accurate Northwestern quarterbacks.

ACCEPTING A NUZZUR OF VICTORY

The excitement of another Iowa-Northwestern game raises the question of why these new rivals cannot play for some sort of awful trophy now that they play every year (at least until the next round of conference expansions leads to a a massive 119-team conference called the Uncontemplatably Gargantuan Ten and Notre Dame). Either that, or the teams should play for lucrative control of all four Quad Cities or at the least the ability for each university to station a Resident there to bleed the region dry of its most valuable commodity--trays of stuffs.

No Hat, No Problem

2011-10-07T00:23:00.011-05:00

The Wildcats will be taking on Michigan under the lights at Ryan Field on Saturday with the goal of getting past last week's wrenching loss to the Illini in a contest of grave hat-related consequences.

The Northwestern football program is as bareheaded as this
mildly terrifying Lincoln model I found without context on the
internet, although thanks to BYCTOM it will now come up in
google image searches for "creepy Lincoln murder stare"

Though the Wildcats managed to bottle the fearsome Illinois rushing attack that treated the defensive line like a well-trodden welcome mat in Wrigley Field, they had no answer for vowel enthusiast Nathan Scheelhaase and his wartime consigliere AJ Jenkins who lit up the Northwestern secondary for 268 miserable yards.

It is pointless to linger on unpleasantness of watching a team you root for give up a big comeback, especially for Northwestern teams that have developed a propensity for squandering leads with the relish of a spendthrift eighteenth century aristocrat pumped full of brandy, snuff, and an inbred overconfidence in his own abilities to outsmart the Continent's most determined baccarat hustlers. That, I suppose, is the danger in doing something as foolhardy as allowing oneself to become emotionally attached to the fortunes of sports teams whose members occasionally have the impudence to do something as insensitive as lose, and lose when the stakes are unfathomably high-- in this case, the retention of a crappy hat trophy and apparently some sort of vague seigniorial rights over Chicagoland.

Zook's Illini make an advance in the never-ending battle to
determine who gets to be Chicago's Big Ten team

In two consecutive games the Wildcats have taken late leads only to give the opponents just enough time to come back [correction: as pointed out in the comments by jhodges, Northwestern never actually blew a lead at Army, but the Wildcats did tie the game on a quick drive that allowed Army to methodically move down the field for the go-ahead score, which was also crummy] There are many unpleasant ways for a team to lose a football game: getting completely run over from start to finish, losing on a diabolical trick play or dubious penalty, realizing that they were secretly working for the opposing team the entire time and thus scoring against themselves through some confounding act of treachery. But scoring too soon knowing that the Sword of Damocles is hanging over the defense in the form of AJ Jenkins scampering through the secondary with nary a care in the world is a not particularly enjoyable way to spend several minutes on a Saturday afternoon.

Nevertheless, fans should take heart knowing that the season is still young and there is still ample opportunity for this team to shower spectators with the glory of associating with them or give fans the opportunity to grow as human beings through experiencing pain, heartbreak, and agony with our purple-clad friends as we all learn that the only game that matters is the game of life

ON SECOND THOUGHT, I WANT MY HAT

MICHIGAN

One heartening thing to take from the Illinois game was the return and strong play of Dan Persa, who helped the 'Cats seemingly take over the game with a career-high four touchdown passes. Unfortunately, he left the game, leaving Kain Colter to lead the last drive, but all indications he will play against Michigan this week. Like most Northwestern fans, I've been excited about this game for awhile. The Illini game showed that Persa is still fun to watch as he deftly escapes from the enormous men repeatedly attempting to drive him into the ground. Michigan quarterback Denard Robinson is the most exciting player in college football. And given both teams' recent struggles on defense (Michigan's shutout of Minnesota notwithstanding), this could be a game with enough scoring to roil great Big Ten coaches of old disgruntled with the chicanery of the forward pass enough to possess the body of Jim Delany and run rampant through the Central Street business district.

I have it on good authority that Jim Delany's fist names are
Legend and Leader

The Wildcats will be starting a streak of three consecutive night games this Saturday. They'll be traveling to the friendly confines of Kinnick Stadium next week and then hosting Penn State. With a traditional ubiquitous Big Ten hatred of Michigan football, the recent enmity towards Iowa, and a desire to avenge last year's collapse against Penn State, there is the hope of gaining some momentum towards another bowl game.

BURGLARY BY RUSE AND ESCALADE

No Northwestern win would be as daring as a manuscript robbery at Mount Saint-Odile in Alsace. This article, sent to me by reader and self-described Central Asian enthusiast Asher, involves a man who would stop at nothing to liberate the monastery of valuable rare books. The culprit, one Stanislas Gosse, found a map of the monastery in a public archive that revealed that all he needed to do to gain access to the library was to climb the monastery's steep walls, ascend a scary monk staircase, and then trigger a secret door hidden in a cupboard. It is not certain whether or not the map has revealed any additional hidden passages to a deadly conservatory.

Mont Saint-Odile had generally been resistant to
thievery because of the whole precipice of a sheer
cliff thing. In keeping with the clumsy Clue
reference in the last paragraph, the part of the
game that always left me mystified was
determining the weapon that killed Mr. Boddy.
I'm relatively confident that even the bumbling
Inspector Gregson would be capable of assessing
whether someone was shot, stabbed, hanged, or
bludgeoned to death without extensive police scrutiny

Between 2000 to 2002, Gosse allegedly made off with more than 1,100 volumes in this madcap monk mischief. He was caught by cameras planted in the library as he picked through volumes by candle-light, showing an impressive dedication to medieval burgling tactics. Fortunately, the courts resisted the urge to throw the book at him, although I should almost certainly be detained for what just happened in this sentence. Gosse was fined 17,000 Euros, but instead of prison he was sentenced to helping the monks restore their books. He was charged with burglary by ruse and escalade, although that charge seems wasted in this instance and should only be leveled against crimes involving seduction, absconsion, and escape from the Bridge of Sighs.

THE BEARS ARE ALSO PLAYING FOOTBALL, SORT OF

The Bears will also play in a high profile night game as they travel to Detroit for a rare Monday Night Football appearance in the Motor City. They are coming off a less than convincing win over the Carolina Panthers, who deserve no sympathy after cutting Tyrell Sutton. Detroit's vaunted defensive line may get a boost from rookie sea monster Nick Fairley, who may make his debut against the Bears' injury-riddled and competence-averse offensive line. Given that the Bears stand a far greater chance of seeing Jay Cutler turned into a pinkish smear on the Ford Field turf than actually winning the game, I suggest that the Bears turn to a surrogate quarterback willing to Sydney Carton himself into a number six jersey while Cutler remains safely esconsed across the lake and free from the marauding likes of Suh, Fairley, and Vanden Bosch. Perhaps they can contact that Jay Cutler body builder guy who always unexpectedly turns up mid-flex in an otherwise innocent google image search for the Bears quarterback used to mock his peerless sideline dourness.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have
ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than
I have ever known. Flex.

TURN ON THE LIGHTS

Usually after four games, you have a pretty decent idea of what a team is like. Thanks to a Persa-less non-conference schedule that included a win over an increasingly unimpressive Boston College team, an FCS foe, a mind-boggling loss to Army, and the Illinois debacle, I admit I have absolutely no idea what is in store for the Wildcats this season other than it should be interesting. Nevertheless, I hope that the game against a ranked Michigan team is as exciting as billed. If the game is boring or disastrous, I'd like to encourage Wildcat fans to liberate university papers from the university's most inaccessible library in order to assuage another week of football grief.

Two Minutes Hat

2011-09-30T19:47:00.018-05:00

Hat Week has arrived, and Northwestern is poised to take on Illinois in the high-stakes Battle for the Land of Lincoln Trophy, the Champaign-Urbana Campaign-Urbana, the Uproarial at Memorial, The Donnyzook against the Fistgerald.

I can only use Don King language to express the pugnaciosity of the
hatritude of these two teams. Incidentally, a cursory google image search
for pictures of Don King reveals that apparently he now makes public
appearances only in air-brushed patriotic jackets, although the image to
the right from a Spanish-language version of his wikipedia page
demonstrates perhaps Don King's most audacious publicity strategy yet

One of the first BYCTOM posts expressed the thesis that the Northwestern-Illinois rivalry (then contested for the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk) was the wost rivalry in all of college football. Things have apparently gotten a bit more intense in recent years. One reason for the ratcheting of tensions between the Illini and the Wildcats is the national attention from the Wrigley Field game. Of course, most of that attention stemmed from the setting of the game at the Friendly Confines and because eleventh hour safety concerns caused the creation of the Forbidden End Zone. People tuned into that game for the novelty and to see if straying near the Forbidden End Zone would trigger some sort of Indiana Jones trap that would cover center field with an array of impaled corpses, impossibly disgusting Hollywood insects, and an unnecessary Kate Capshaw musical number made entertaining only by the presence of the guy who has some sort of modified tommy gun that only fires when he is also maniacally cackling.

Despite any recent intra-nois feuding between the two teams, this is a rickety shell of a rivalry game for a number of important reasons. For one, the Illinois-Northwestern game, as far as I can tell, has never had any bearing on the Big Ten title, at least not since college football has abandoned archaic rules such as the Musket Point or the Falconry Circle. Nor has a loss for one team been catastrophic enough to knock them out of any serious contention, with the exception of maybe the last Big Ten slot in a bowl game so lacking in prestige that it was the undercard to an illegal monkey wrestling championship.

"The saber pierced the monkey's liver. He howled for a minute
then lay on the ground, done for. Jake was also done for. He had
1300 pesetas on the big one. The one called El Apuñalador. Jake
swallowed his whiskey. He stopped only to punch his monkey-
minder on the way out of the door. 'Bad advice,' Jake said."
Hemingway ended up cutting the entire monkey stabbing
scene from the The Sun Also Rises.

A college football rivalry should stir up inexplicable passion in both fanbases. There should be the feeling that a crappy season can at least be salvaged a victory over your team's rival. As a Northwestern fan, I do not really get that feeling about the Illini, who I tend to support in Big Ten games out of Big Ten former cellar-dweller solidarity. And I'm certain that no fan of a team in the Big Ten has ever uttered the phrase "at least we beat Northwestern" to console themselves because Northwestern, despite its recent run as a respectable college football team is still historically the worst team in the history of big-time college football, and Big Ten teams are still reeling in disbelief that they can lose to Northwestern under any circumstance, even blatant Northwestern chicanery such as surreptitiously replacing the offensive line with farming equipment or switching out an opponent's regular hypnotist with an evil hypnotist.

There are some sources of rising tensions between the teams and fans (I enjoy using the diplomatic reporters' phrase "rising tensions" when I'm talking about something as hilariously inconsequential as college football, as if Zook has given some sort of saber-rattling speech on the steps of the Illinois athletic department announcing a tariff on crew cuts or Fitz has recognized the Illinois backup as their legitimate quarterback and will only agree to play defense against him). On this Champaign-area radio show, for example, the co-hosts play a clip of Illinois coach Paul Petrino complaining about Pat Fitzgerald's description of Northwestern recruits followed by one of the hosts heroically attempting to get angry about Northwestern (the callers, for their part, don't seem to share his enmity about Northwestern and are mostly cautiously optimistic about the 4-0 Illini in a shocking display of reasonableness by callers to a sports talk radio show). Chicagoland Illini players led by Martez Wilson seem to take exception to Northwestern's "Chicago's Big Ten Team" slogan after the 'Cats's marketing strategy has successfully managed to make Northwestern a household word in Chicagoland households filled with Northwestern alums or fans of a Big Ten team that is currently playing Northwestern.

An Illini fan takes exception to the self-proclaimed
"Sausage King of Chicago" noting that there are
representatives from the finest Midwestern sausage
factories all throughout the Chicagoland area

I'm always fascinated by athletes such as Wilson applying ex post facto bulletin board material to their wins. After all, it takes an exceptional amount of skill, dedication, and focus to become a college athlete. I'm assuming that Martez Wilson would have played well even if Northwestern's athletic department had marketed the team as the Mewling Feeblemen of the Big Ten because he's Martez Wilson and he tends to play well in football games because he is a very good football player. This effect, however, permeates football on all levels. Perhaps the most dramatic examples come from the Patriots episodes of NFL Films's excellent America's Game Superbowl retrospectives. Patriots players constantly talk about getting motivated by slights such as a team packing its luggage to the next playoff game. In one hilariously melodramatic scene before the 2005 Super Bowl, Bill Belichick's pregame speech consists of reading out the Eagles' planned parade route. The players claimed in interviews how much this speech motivated them, although I suspect that most of their impetus to win came from their life-long dedication to excelling in football culminating in the most important game in their professional lives. What I find great about these slights is that players and coaches are apparently furious about foresight and logistics more than anything, as if Boston did not have plans for a championship parade and at the last minute just found a bunch of cars and ticker tape sitting unused in a basement in Faneuil Hall.

A respectful lack of preparation left Boston
desperately lacking festive implements for
the Patriots' championship parade left
players triumphantly waving around
artifacts such as Gouveneur Morris's leg
stump

Another factor weighing against this inconsequential rivalry game is the Land of Lincoln Trophy, which I've taken to calling The Hat. This is clever because the trophy is literally a hat. But in a college football world littered with hat-based trophies, it is the worst of all possible trophy hats. The Land of Lincoln trophy is a hat trophy permanently attached to a base. This is disastrous. If your team is saddled with a hat trophy, the least you can do is go whole hog and make it into an actual hat that you can put on your head in triumph. Instead, all players can do with this trophy is hold it up or, more satisfyingly, rip it violently from its base and then parade around with it in all of its goofy hat trophy glory while yelling Lincoln slogans such as "A hat trophy divided against itself can be worn." On the other hand, at least it is not as ridiculous as the trophy ideas up for vote for the Iowa-Nebraska LEGENDS DIVISION showdown.

Options include a corn bowl FILLED WITH REAL CORN or a corn cob shyly
waving a husk arm

Of course, possibly of more interest to Northwestern fans is how the team rallies around all-everything quarterback Dan Persa. If Persa can return to last year's impressive form, the Wildcats could be a factor in the Big Ten, but if it sputters against the impressive Illini defense, it may be a short season.

AMERICA'S GAME FOR AMERICANS

If you do choose to check out the America's Game retrospectives, I highly recommend watching the 1976 Raiders episode. It captures the essence of the 1970s raiders: a fully functioning Al Davis in his prime, John Madden calling refs "jerks" before succumbing to the sweet life of luxury buses and multi-fowl meat concoctions, players alighting from buses wearing full-length mink coats, and this guy.

Raiders announcer Bill King spent the 1970s nearly indistinguishable from a
Get Smart villain called the Groovy Guru

I would say that the 2000 Ravens one is also notable for Trent Dilfer's appearance and the comical discrepancy between the amount of credit he gives himself for the Ravens' victory versus everyone else in the entire universe, but now you can watch ESPN and get the same effect with the unfortunate omission of Shannon Sharpe soliloquies.

CLASSICAL MUSIC RIOT

Hopefully the spirited rivalry between Northwestern and Illini fans will remain in check this weekend and no major riots will ensue. Of course, while a Wildcat-Illini imbroglio seems relatively unlikely, there are all sorts of triggers to incite crowds, such as operas and ballets. Wikipedia has helpfully compiled a list of classical music riots, although the writer of the page serves as a wet blanket to the whole thing by noting that "the usual respectful and sedate manner of classical music audiences means that any sort of rough behavior, ranging from catcalls to shoving, can be seen as a comparative 'riot'."

Probably the most famous of these disturbances is from the Paris premier of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The combination of the music and Vaslav Najinsky's choreography apparently stunned the crowd, who reportedly began yelling, and inevtiably descended into fisticuffs in the aisles, as one does. There is even a disputed account of French composer Camille Saint-Saëns taking umbrage at the use of the bassoon and storming out. The most influential opera riot is certainly the 1830 performance of Daniel Auber's La Muette de Portici, which ignited national sentiment and spurred opera lovers into the streets to rebel against their iron-fisted Dutch overlords.

This 1831 Jacobus Schoemaker Doyer
painting depicts Dutch ship captain Jan
Van Speyck detonating his gunboat before it
can be captured by Belgian rebels. Van
Speyck can't believe it either

Few of the other riots seem as dramatic. For example, one of these riots involves a 1927 performance of George Antheil's Ballet Méchanique, a piece that utilized mechanical sounds, such as fans simulating airplane propellers. According to the wikipedia page, "the fans were positioned to blow into the audience, upsetting the patrons." Another ended poorly for composer Erik Satie. His surrealistic ballet Parade involved collaboration with Picasso who built the sets, and Serge Diaghilev Ballets Russes company. Satie took exception to a poor review and sent an angry postcard to the reviewer. The reviewer then sued him and, again, as whoever wrote this wikipedia page put it "at the trial Cocteau was arrested and beaten by police for repeatedly yelling "arse" in the courtroom. Satie was given a sentence of eight days in jail."

LESS CHAT, MORE HAT

They're coming for the Hat, Illinois. You'd better be prepared because when Fitz knows there's hat on the line, he's going all out. All out for the hat. For weeks, he's thought of nothing but hat. And now it is upon him. Him and the team. Two coaches. Two teams. One state. One hat. The entire nation is watching, and they only want to know one thing: at the end of the day, who is going home with the hat? Nothing else matters other than the hat.

Hat.

March of the Steel-Man

2011-09-23T20:19:00.016-05:00

After a strong showing against Boston college and Eastern Illinois, the Wildcats ran into trouble at West Point and conceded their first defeat to the Black Knights. The Wildcats had difficulty containing Army's treacherous triple option chicanery led by their quarterback Trent Steelman, who has immediately become part of a secret army cryogenics program that will allow him to run the 2150 Army robot football team as triple-option robot quarterback T.R.E.N.T. Steel-Man.

Robot football is only a small part of Future Congress's robot
sports initiative

The loss was at least timed well, giving the Wildcats an extra week to prepare for an in-state showdown with hated rival Illinois during Hat Week. Northwestern fans can at least take solace in the fact that the 'Cats will not face the triple option again this season, that Dan Persa may return against the Illini to spark the offense, and that it's nearly fox hunting season.

WHAT ON EARTH ARE YOU ON ABOUT, KEN BURNS

Over the past several months, I've been gradually working through the Ken Burns Baseball documentary. The documentary, which ran in nine two-hour "innings" on PBS in 1994, covers the growth of baseball from its cloudy apocryphal origins to a billion dollar sports empire. In an unfortunate coincidence that veers close to actual irony, Burns's 18-hour paean to the National Pastime began airing four days before Bud Selig announced the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, the most damaging blow to baseball in my lifetime with the exception of its development as a platform for red-faced sports columnists to bloviate about steroids and wage a war against empiricism.

The beginnings of Baseball enjoyably captured the anarchy of the early game, where spectators lined the field just over the foul line ready to interfere with games in progress, celebrate victories with riots, and deal with defeats by also rioting (imagine a nineteenth century Billy Crystal wistfully recollecting the first time he got elbowed in the face at the nineteenth century equivalent of Yankee Stadium).

It's hard to go wrong with early baseball. In case you were
wondering, I would classify the mustaches in this picture as
(counterclockwise from top) malevolent, disdainful, resigned,
and despondent

But despite the mayhem of early baseball, the early chapters did not always hold my interest. Part of it, no doubt, came from the difficulty of describing a kinetic game without the use of film, relying instead on still photographs, document readings, and music. Despite this setback, Burns does nothing to enliven the film; he uses a music and actor template as monochromatic as his faded sepia photographs. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the music of the first four or so hours of Baseball consists of three pieces: a solemn accoustic guitar version of the Star Spangled Banner, a mournful piano rendition of Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and Irish ditty The Minstrel Boy, which I actually enjoyed because I associate it with Sean Connery plummeting down a 60,000 foot canyon (Connery's singing the tune to the Minstrel Boy, but the words to the hymn "The Son of God Goes Forth to War"). So the film experience consists mainly of listening to one of those three tunes under the mellifluous voice of inescapable public radio gadfly Garrison Keillor, whom I've always suspected of using his folksiness as a cover for his true nature as a ruthless Midwestern media mogul.

You tell the Williams Sisters Jug Band that
if they want to play the Pella County Jug
Band festival, I'm going to need to see some
Williams Sisters jugs

But if Baseball had merely consisted of repetitive music, photographs, and documents read by people such as Garrison "I own the fucking autoharp circuit" Keillor, it would still be fairly edifying. Instead, Burns pads probably half the film with unnecessary talking head interviews with pointy-headed mythology of baseball folks who drone endlessly about the beauty of the game of baseball and the pace of baseball and the rhythms of baseball and how baseball is a metaphor for doing things in American way with this, our national (American) pastime, baseball. This, in my opinion, is a disastrous choice. With few exceptions (such as Buck O'Neil), most of these people have no connection or insight into baseball beyond their desire to display their bow-tie collections and book-lined studies. At least George Plimpton is there to liven things up with his mystifying quasi-British accent.

"Tally ho, chaps, who is up for a rousing game of foot-ball?" I've
always been curious how Plimpton expected to fit into a group of
Detroit Lions that included Alex Karras (below), who seemed prone to
less literary flights of fancy. In the book, he noted the accent made
him stand out, describing it as "an eastern seaboard cosmopolitan
accent that they thought was 'British.' They delighted in imitating
my quarterback signal-calling. After practice, I'd hear them
yelling the numbers in the shower: '...fawty-foah, fawty tew.'"
The moral of this story is to read Paper Lion if you have not already,
it's a really good book.
UPDATE: Plimpton on Karras's wrestling career (see comments)

The point at which I stopped watching Baseball is in the seventh inning, in which Burns chooses to focus on the rivalry of the New York teams in the early 1950s, which meant that he is responsible for unleashing upon the world Billy Crystal's baseball nostalgia. Crystal is one of an apparently endless army of baby boomers ready to pounce from the shadows at any moment with a disarming array of the same fucking story about Mickey Mantle. This is the point where I realized that, with the exception of the Cardinals' Gashouse Gang and the Kansas City Monarchs, a film whose oft-stated theme is baseball as the national pastime had not covered a team outside of New York or Boston at length for the past several hours.

The talking head segments also date the film as Burns's nostalgia peddlers discourse for hours about aspects of evaluating baseball players that are hilariously anachronistic. This is not Burns's or the commentators' fault-- it is unfair and frankly ludicrous to expect any mainstream baseball person in 1994 to have any doubt in the holy trinity of the Triple Crown statistics. At the same time, it is somewhat amusing for noted baseball expert Mario Cuomo to go off for several minutes about how the essence of the game lies in the sacrifice bunt, which imbues players with the (American) virtue of selflessness, while any knowledgeable baseball fan watching the film now knows that the sacrifice bunt is in most situations an unproductive waste of an out that imbues players with a penchant for making dumb decisions for the sake of hide-bound tradition. The problem comes from interviewing a panel of writers hell-bent on spinning nonsensical narratives about How Baseball Is America instead of focusing on mustaches, cheating, and riots.

As a showcase for Burns's meticulous research and ability to unearth an incredible array of documents, photographs, and rare films about baseball, the film is a an undoubted success. But by strategically luring the likes of Bob Costas, George F. Will, and parade of yammerers into a practice field by sending them a telegram that he had sighted an open microphone but then filming them eluding a series of line drives hit by vengeful fungo enthusiasts and then filming this for my amusement, Ken Burns would have made a far stronger film. Or, he could have dropped the talking heads who did not directly participate in baseball and made an amazing 10 hour series.

BYE

It is an unfortunate week for a bye. Not only is it a sudden break in football season just when things are starting to get exciting, it's also an extra week to stew on the Army loss. On the other hand, that is plenty of time to somehow convince yourself that Northwestern has a rivalry with the University of Illinois that anyone cares about. Perhaps Ron Zook can ignite things and give his team a psychological advantage by closing one endzone in order to recall last year's disastrous contest at Wrigley Field. I would not put this past Ron Zook, a master of mind games who always has an extra card up his sleeve, although that card appears to often be enthusiastically yelling a lot (perhaps I'm unfairly mischaracterizing Zook's motivational ploys and he bends spoons with his mind-- if so I apologize, the TV mainly shows the yelling).

Although there's no college football, at least the Bears play the Packers in a historic NFL rivalry game and rematch of last year's NFC Championship game. But, the Bears will start two backup safeties (including Craig Steltz, who I had no idea was still on the team, let alone playing organized football), and are starting an offensive line that is so terrifying even by Chicago Bears standards that there is a decent chance that Sunday's broadcast becomes a Jay Cutler snuff film. Perhaps, however, the Bears will rise to the challenge despite their injuries and defeat the Packers with American pluck and resiliency showcased in this, our national pastime.

Week 3

2011-09-16T00:14:00.010-05:00

Northwestern heads to West Point on Saturday to try to maintain its unbeaten 2011 campaign. And, as you may have already noticed, playing Army allows writers to throw caution to the wind and break out every hackneyed military metaphor that we can think of as the Wildcats break camp in Evanston and march to New York, with Coach Fitz surveying the game tape, preparing his strategies, and mustering his young men and by the time I'm finished with this sentence I'm pretty sure Coach Fitz will have shot someone in the chest with a Napoleonic war cannon.

Football presents a rare opportunity to use the word "army"
without any pesky articles

This is the first time the Wildcats have played Army since 1988, a 23-7 loss at West Point. That represents a better mark against Northwestern than the Black Knights' bitter rivals Navy who have never beaten the 'Cats in three tries. Air Force, on the other hand, has beaten Northwestern twice this decade, including a hideous 52-3 thumping in 2002 and a 22-21 heartbreaker that was at the time excruciating, but given that since then Northwestern has lost at home to an FCS team, conceded the largest comeback in the history of major college football, lost two bowl games in overtime and another by blowing a 22-0 lead and allowing two consecutive onside kicks run back for touchdowns by the same player, the pain of the Air Force loss has dulled considerably.

PROUDLY BEATING THE FCS SINCE 2006

The Wildcats' victory over Eastern Illinois was heartening as Northwestern ran over the Panthers. Backup quarterback, Northwestern folk hero, and action movie protagonist Kain Colter had a magnificent day with 109 rushing yards, three rushing touchdowns. Colter's dynamic running is a fantastic asset for the Wildcat offense, but his propensity for taking a pummeling is worrying. I'm not the only one concerned; according to this Skip Myslenski article, after the BC game, Yankees manager Joe Girardi called up Fitz to congratulate him on the win, but also advised Colter to slide more. "He said, 'My nine-year old son taught (New York Jets QB) Mark Sanchez how to slide and he'll be able to teach you too.'" In exchange, Pat Fitzgerald will serve as Joba Chamberlain's fist pump mentor during 2012 Spring Training.

THE AUSTRALIAN RULES

The AFL season is heating up with the Grand Final slated to take place on October 1. I would like to start watching more Australian Rules football, but I'm afraid that too much exposure to it will cause me to inadvertently figure out the rules of the game and stop enjoying it as a celebration of tank-topped mayhem where anything goes and the only rule is survival.

A typical Australian Rules Football match

While Australians play their football without pads, unique armor forms a bizarre footnote in Australian folklore. In 1880 the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly and his men staged one of the most famous shoot-outs in the history of modern banditry. Surrounded by police in the Glenrowan Inn, they emerged wearing overcoats covering thick, plated armor made from scrap metal. The police were initially shocked that their bullets bounced off the gang. As this intricately detailed wikipedia article describes, one constable whose training to fight outlaws contained no section on terrifying berserker helmets shouted "Look out, boys, it’s the bunyip. He’s bullet-proof!" temporarily confusing Kelly with a horrifying mythical creature. The Kelly armor, however, left the legs exposed and soon the constables shot them down with the precision of a band of mustachioed Parises.

Ned Kelly's armor from the State Library of Victoria (l) and the
understated monument at the Glenrowan tourist attraction Ned
Kelly's Last Stand

Kelly survived the shootout, but only long enough to stand trial and hang. Before the shootout, Kelly left a document explaining where he had come from and how he had turned to his life of crime. The letter is fascinating for a number of reasons, not least because it is entirely bereft of punctuation, making the entire narrative essentially a run-on sentence that dwarfs anything that appears here. The National Museum helpfully provides an audio version. Unfortunately, the actor reading the manuscript pauses in seemingly logical places instead of breathlessly rushing through the document as it was clearly intended to be consumed.

It's also the inspiration for a wonderfully bizarre novel by Peter Carey called True History of the Kelly Gang. The whole novel is written as a sprawling letter by Kelly to a fictional daughter telling his life story. Working off of the Jerilderie Letter, Carey apes Kelly's colorful language and his ramshackle syntax in order to paint a portrait of mid nineteenth century Australia and the desperate circumstances of Kelly's impoverished Irish family that ultimately led him to deadly combat while dressed as a robot from a a 1950s television show with limited robot costuming resources.

Proposed cover for possible sequel True Story of the
Teapot Dome Gang. Albert Fall (l) the Secretary of
the Interior jailed for accepting kickbacks for
granting drilling leases for oil companies, had
earlier successfully defended a man accused of
murdering one of his key rivals. Henry Sinclair,
an oil magnate involved in the affair, served six
months in prison for contempt of court after hiring
detectives to spy on each member of the jury.

A FINAL TEST BEFORE THE BIG TEN

The Army game will be the Wildcats' last opportunity to prepare for conference play (for some reason, Northwestern will play Rice in November). It may also be the last of Kain Colter as the starting quarterback if Persa manages to come back against Illinois and play effectively. But I'm looking forward to Saturday's game most of all to see how the Wildcats cope with Army's unconventional play-calling. Army runs the triple option on offense and double eagle flex defense that Fitz describes as similar to the Bears' old 46 and I describe as an organization that a Wesley Snipes character has likely worked for in a direct to video motion picture. As fun as it is to watch the flexbone in action, it will be far more satisfying to see the Northwestern defense stifle it and for Colter to work his magic without earning the ire of Joe Girardi. I have to like the 'Cats' chances this week, but as the Kelly gang has demonstrated, even the strongest defenses have their weak points, even if your head is covered by discarded plowing equipment.

Home Opener

2011-09-08T21:55:00.020-05:00

Northwestern is undefeated after a heartening victory against Boston College despite a complete lack of Dan Persa, who, as we all know, is Chicago's Heisman Candidate Persastrong of Your Greater Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana College Football Programs Near Chicago. I understand that Northwestern is trying desperately to appeal to the Chicago market, but surely this is a slap in the face to to the good city of Evanston.

Evanston has more to be proud of than
being the current home of Chicago's
Persastrong Heisman Candidate. It was also
the home of temperance advocate and
suffragist Frances Willard, shown here in
this 1911 poster by Henrietta Briggs-Wall
creating what appears to be the Village
People of Disenfranchisement

The Wildcats had solid although typically uncomfortable victory led by backup quarterback Kain Colter, freshly arrived from the Northwestern Scrambling Quarterback factory that is located next to factory providing the 'Cats with spindly, jump shooting forwards. Colter ran and passed effectively; his day was marred mainly by a spectacular one-handed Luke Kuechly interception. This was fortunate since Kuechly is a threat not only to to sack a quarterback, but gather a gang of merciless horsemen and sack a quarterback's entire home town, plundering their least fortified grocery stores and taking control of strategically located big box retail outlets-- then I bothered to look it up and saw that Colter is from Denver, which I think is a tall order to sack even for a linebacker as talented as Luke Kuechly, but maybe his band of rough brigands can effectively plunder the city by purchasing unwanted Tim Tebow merchandise at discount bulk prices.

The success of the running game led by Mike Trumpy and Adonis Smith against Boston College's lauded rushing defense was also encouraging. Even the Northwestern defense held firm, shutting down the BC running game in the second half, although they were often victimized by BC's excellent receiver Ifeanyi Momah. On the other hand, if a tall receiver is going to rampage through the Wildcat secondary, I would prefer that he has a name I can shout to the heavens in a blood-curdling cry for vengeance.

MOOOOOOOOOMMMMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH

NEXT UP: EASTERN ILLINOIS

The Eastern Illinois Panthers make their way to Chicago's Big Ten Stadium on Saturday for what has become an annual showdown with a Football Championship Subdivision Team. The Panthers suffered through a 2-9 season last year, but have come on strong with a victory over last season's FCS opponent Illinois State. Like Northwestern, Eastern Illinois has a generic cat mascot, although I have to admit I like the sleek design of their logo.

A subtle adjustment to the EIU logo makes it even more menacing

A convincing win over the Panthers would be an excellent way to start the season, but Northwestern rarely denies its fans the thrill of minor cardiac episodes in its non-conference schedule. Given the fact that students are not yet on campus and the Wildcats' typical draw against non-conference foes, expect Northwestern fans to confuse Panther quarterbacks with deafening silence and use cleverly positioned mirrors to confuse the opposing coaching staff, who will be unable to figure out which section of the stadium contains the real crowd.

THE OCCIDENTAL POTENTATE

The East drew Westerners in the nineteenth century for a number of reasons. Many sought their fortunes. Others were drawn by the prospect of adventure in exotic and unknown countries. Still others sought to overthrow the Emir of Afghanistan and carve out their own kingdom in the Hindu Kush.

Ben Macintyre's Josiah the Great: The true story of the man who would be king follows Josiah Harlan from his youth as a Pennsylvania Quaker to Oriental Potentate. As implied by the title, Harlan likely served as an inspiration for the Kipling story "The Man Who Would Be King" about a pair of British soldiers who establish a kingdom in a remote region of Central Asia using their wits, army training, and the mystical arts of the Masonic Order. The story also became John Huston's epic film of the same name starring Michael Caine and Sean Connery. The movie features a top-5 Michael Caine rant, useful for times that you may find yourself in an impromptu Michael Caine impression contest.

Here are three movies that you would incorrectly assume would
be more likely than The Man Who Would Be King to contain
Sean Connery yelling "THE SLUT BIT ME"

Harlan left Philadelphia on a merchant ship bound for India in 1822 prepared to return home and marry a local girl to whom he wrote awful nineteenth century poetry (it is literally flowery in the sense that Harlan, an amateur botanist, seem to base most of his poetic imagery off of plants). But by the time he reached Calcutta, he received word that his betrothed had spurned him and married another man (sample from a poem lamenting the spurning: How strange thought I so fair a flower/Fit ornament for a Lady's bower/Emblem of love in beauty's form/Should in its breast conceal a thorn.) He vowed he would never return to the United States and took up with the East India Company as a war surgeon despite lacking any sort of training in medicine whatsoever. Given that this was 1824, he likely missed out on becoming an expert on which sort of brandy to offer to musket victims or how to dig around inside a person with a blunt, rusty object.

But Harlan soon grew restless and eventually made his way to the border of British India in Ludhiana. Another Ludhiana resident was Shuja Shah, the exiled Emir of Afghanistan who had been deposed in 1809. Harlan decided he would gather a small force of men, travel through Afghanistan, and secure a network of alliances that would enable Shuja Shah to topple Emir Dost Mohammed Khan and take back his throne. He set off in 1827 with a rag-tag group of mercenaries, stopping to threaten local warlords, heal villagers with his amateur medical techniques, and even progress on his mission of intrigue. But his army soon evaporated and Harlan somewhat unsuccessfully disguised himself as a Muslim holy man in order to get to Peshawar. He found supporters in Peshawar and later Kabul, but Shuja Shah's plan came to naught, and Harlan decided to enter into the service of someone with an actual emperor, Maharajah Ranjit Singh of the Sikh Empire.

Harlan wore down rivals with his
glower power

One of the great strengths of Macintyre's book is its fascinating depiction of the politics of Harlan's Central Asian adventures. Harlan's navigation of court intrigue and easy discovery of willing conspirators form a fascinating snapshot of major rivalries. Harlan himself initially sought to overthrow Dost Mohammed for Shuja Shah. He then served as a general in Ranjit Singh's army in a campaign against Dost Mohammed, narrowly avoiding capture by the Emir thanks to a well-timed act of treachery by one of Dost Mohammed's inner circle. He rose in Ranjit Singh's Court to become a provincial governor, but fell out with the Maharajah over a dispute involving allegations of forgery and a failed attempt to galvanize the infirm emperor with a strong electrical current. Harlan fled in 1836 and, swearing revenge, entered the service of Dost Mohammed Khan.

Rival emperors Dost Mohammed Khan (l) and Ranjit Singh. The
one-eyed Ranjit Singh was particularly fond of all sorts of
drunken bacchanalia using a by all accounts foul alcoholic
concoction based on fermented raisins and possibly containing
small quantities of ground pearls.

It was under the service of Dost Mohammad that Harlan became the Prince of Ghor, although to call him a ruler is overstating things. He acquired the kingdom while on a military maneuver to suppress the Uzbek slave trader and head-chopping enthusiast Murad Beg. On the way, he passed through the Hazarajat, where one chief named Mohammed Reffee Beg offered Harlan his kingdom in exchange for training his troops. Harlan drew up an agreement and then left to confront Murad Beg. He returned to Kabul in 1838, just in time for the British invasion of Afghanistan where his emperor was deposed, he lost his title, and his Kabul home became occupied by an impudent British official. He quit Afghanistan in a huff, decrying the evils of the British Empire. He had been Prince of Ghor for about a year.

The British invasion of Kabul brought Harlan in contact with his old enemy, Alexander Burnes. Burnes gained fame for establishing contact with Bokhara and quickly rose through the Company ranks as an expert in Asian intelligence. Their contact was not surprising; despite the enormous scale of Central Asia, Westerners active in the region all seemed to know each other, and Macintyre revels in describing the often headstrong lunatics that sought their fortunes in the East. Another Harlan enemy, for example, was the explorer Charles Masson, who traveled with Harlan on his initial foray into Afghanistan, but abandoned him at the first sign of trouble. Harlan later informed the British authorities that Masson was an army deserter named James Lewis; Masson was then forced to spy for the British. Burnes met a more grisly end. In 1841, a Kabul mob voiced their displeasure with British government by marching to Burnes's residence and tearing him to pieces.

"Bokhara" Burnes in all his glory (l). Harlan got along better with
truly eccentric figures such as Joseph Wolff, a Jewish-born
Christian preacher who wandered the globe as an apostle of various
Christian faiths to often little effect. According to Mcintyre, Wolff
cut such a ridiculous figure that the fearsome Emir of Bokhara,
who was fond of throwing people into pits, spared Wolff because he
could not stop laughing at him. Finally on the right is
Jean-Francois Allard, Ranjit Singh's top foreign general who
Harlan respected, I suspect, because his facial hair was
ridiculous even by nineteenth century general for the Sikh
Empire standards.

Harlan returned to the United States eventually and hatched schemes to secure federal funding to import camels and grapes. When the Civil War broke out, however, Harlan eagerly joined the Union side because his name was Josiah Harlan and there was a little-known law enacted that said if you had a really Civil-Warry name like Josiah Harlan, you had to fight in the Civil War, no exceptions. Harlan's attempts to bring his expert knowledge of telling Afghan soldiers to stab each other unfortunately led to disaster; his officers did not appreciate his haughty attitude and his complete lack of knowledge of modern military tactics, and Harlan faced a court-martial. Though acquitted, Harlan was old and ill and returned home unable to fight. Harlan never returned to Central Asia.

MAKING SENSE OF SEVERAL UNRELATED ITEMS

Before last week, I assumed that Coach Fitz was an open book, bereft of guile, gamesmanship, or intrigue, unless the repetition of the phrase "our young men" was some sort of Masonic code. Fitz, however, made Persa's availability before the BC game a mystery, obfuscating his intentions with oblique references to pimp walks. He is again remaining somewhat coy about this week, although it seems fairly clear that Persa will not play, especially considering Colter's heroics last week. Nevertheless, the world of college football is second in skulduggery and plotting only to nineteenth century Central Asian diplomacy to the point where I expect slippery characters like Lane Kiffin or Nick Saban to switch teams at halftime parading jewel-bedecked elephants around the stadium in celebration of their perfidy or someone to leave Happy Valley after unsuccessfully galvanizing Joe Paterno.

Week 1

2011-08-30T22:43:00.015-05:00

The 2011 football season finally arrives this Saturday with the Wildcats jumping right into the fire against a BCS opponent. Though Northwestern opens on the road against Boston College, the Athletic Department has prepared frenzied Wildcat fans by putting up an enormous 44-foot tall mural of Coach Fitzgerald on the South Tower to terrorize opponents, Evanston residents, and passers-by.

The Athletic Department plans to use the giant Fitz poster to disseminate
crucial information to Wildcat supporters. I'll be honest, even I thought it
was excessive to go back to the Lenin poster well on this one, but I could not
possibly resist-- the only way the Athletic Department could possibly goad
me into Soviet propaganda cliché more easily is if they announced they
were immediately changing the mascot to a tractor

Northwestern fans have been in a minor panic over the quarterback situation between a hobbled Dan Persa and near Ticket City Bowl hero Kain Colter who makes up for his inexperience under center with moxie and an alliterative 1950s superhero secret identity name. Northwestern will catch a break by dodging the Eagles' excellent running back Montel Harris who is nursing a knee injury and will not be plying his dark arts against the Northwestern defense. More worrying is the possibility of linebacker Luke Kuechly getting to Persa (if he plays) and sacking him hard enough to cause a minor disruption to the Earth's rotation that wreak meteorological havoc across the surface of the entire planet. This is because Luke Kuechly is 37 feet tall, carries an NCAA-approved battle-axe, is mostly made of malevolence, and trains in the off-season by supping upon the bones of the impertinent who dare disturb him in his lair.

The Dark Curse of the Kuechly can only be lifted if Lou Holtz
can successfully pronounce his name during a live telecast

The Wildcats will hope to set the tone early this year by avoiding erratic performances in non-conference games. This is a Northwestern tradition, dating back to contests against nineteenth century arch-rival Chicago Dental where Northwestern emerged barely victorious and covered with a series of worrisome bite marks.

FIBA BASKETBALL
This week, the FIBA European Championships begins in Lithuania. The tournament also goes by the colloquial title EuroBasket because the only way for it to be more European would be if the logo was a man wearing Capri pants jumping over a Trabant that is blaring disco music. Which would be better than the current theme song, featuring a lively group of Lithuanians belting out the exact sort of bland pop song designed by computers for international sports tournaments instead of a more satisfying Eurovision style imbroglio. At least Marijonas, Montas, and Mia have included the mystifying lyric "Who's gonna weep about losing?/Raise your glass it's time for a bruising," which is the motto of the world's most menacing Toastmasters chapter.

This year, the tournament has expanded from 16 to 24 teams. Unfortunately, FIBA Europe based their decision on how teams fared in qualifying rounds to determine seven of the teams that got their berth instead of a more entertaining system of payola and skullduggery. EuroBasket will also do away with the festive trapezoidal zone to use the more familiar American rectangle. Other new EuroBasket rules have made it illegal to temporarily reform Yugoslavia for the duration of the tournament, split into smaller teams after geopolitical crises, earn victories by promising bail-outs or otherwise take advantage of the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crisis, or throw up the barricades. Everyone also must have Detlef Schrempf haircuts.

Bourbon intrigue is still legal at Eurobasket provided a
team can provide successfully provide a Bourbon

With the NBA lockout, there will be more NBA participation than usual. France boasts a roster including the NBA's Tony Parker (T.J. didn't quite make the cut), Joakim Noah, Nicolas Batum, and Beethoven in the Age of Romantics. Other notable NBA players include fake German Chris Kaman who was last seen challenging Indiana Jones to fistfights underneath rotating propeller blades, and a powerhouse Spanish team featuring all of the known Gasols, Rudy Fernandez, the mysterious Ricky Rubio, and Serge Ibaka. Of course, the most glorious revelation of Eurobasket is that the Slovenian team not only features 2009 playoff hero Goran Dragic, but also his brother Zoran.

A catastrophe divides Slovenia's team against itself

The team I'm most interested in is Great Britain's squad. The British squad features Chicago Bulls iron man Luol Deng, who is hoping to lead the newly-unified British team to a respectable enough record that they will be allowed to play in their home Olympics. His task will be harder this summer though. Former Bull and master of the difficult Ben Gordon why the fuck are you taking that shot there's 18 seconds on the shot clock and you are falling out of bounds with eight dudes surrounding you because you are literally on top of the opponents bench, oh you made it shot, Ben Gordon, will not be joining Team GB this summer. Unfortunately, it's not part of some long-delayed Reverse Benedict Arnold scheme on the part of Gordon or even part of some sort of insane triple-cross where he starts dunking on his own basket and then announces that he has Bosnian citizenship. Apparently, he's decided he'd rather not risk playing. The British team is also missing its talisman Pops Mensah-Bonsu, who is apparently unstoppable in low-level FIBA tournaments.

The other reason why I'm interested in the British team is because it is not only battling Europe's toughest basketball competition, but also the complete apathy of 99% of the population of the United Kingdom. Fortunately, youtube has a repository of videos from an organization called Back British Basketball that feature street interviews with people uninterested in basketball, and a heroically chipper young man with a megaphone who is attempting to shout at British people until they care about basketball. Here he is, for example, at the Britain-Macedonia game unleashing a Deng chant to the tune of Seven Nation Army in front of a group of bemused spectators. Surely such an effort is worth it to cheer for the team to not embarrass itself so badly as to be forced from the Olympics like a surly bar patron.

RAISE YOUR GLASS, IT'S TIME FOR A BRUISING

The excitement of Wildcat football is almost unbearable this time of year. Feel free to paint all of your unexposed skin purple at your place of business or erect enormous Pat Fitzgerald monuments at your home. They'll understand, unless the neighborhood children are afraid of crew cuts, intensity, and fists.

A Salacious Posting

2011-08-18T23:28:00.019-05:00

August is traditionally a time for quiet reflection, meditation, and installing seatbelts on your couch before spending the rest of the autumn rocketing around your living room from the endless excitement of Northwestern football action. But this August has been chock-a-block with innuendo, Zambrano meltdowns, and scandal so salacious that it would even raise the eyebrow of the most inbred Bourbon aristocrat preternaturally inured to acts of drawing-room depravity beyond comprehension in the New World.

I speak, of course, of the quashing of the plan for Northwestern to intimidate basketball opponents with a hideous all-purple basketball court.

Behold! Who dare enter the Wildcats' fearsome Fortress Dimetapp?

This abomination came from that hated scourge democracy when the athletic department gave fans a chance to vote for their favorite of several new court surfaces. The purple court naturally grew popular as the Internet invariably gravitates toward the ridiculous or the potential site of a Grimace atrocity. The athletic department, however, got skittish and approved a more traditional design that looked more like a basketball court and less than the last thing seen by Mike Teevee. This engendered speculation that the department gleefully ignored the results of an online poll, like a group of Facebook Soviets. Lake The Posts reports that the poll was close enough to run lighting tests on the purple court, which turned out unfavorably because have you taken a look at this thing, it's a giant purple eyesore.

Northwestern's bland new court, shown next to a picture of Leonid Brezhnev,
someone who (like Northwestern's athletic department) would also disregard an online
poll with an iron digital fist, although admittedly my evidence of vote meddling is based
entirely on how much I enjoy using the word quash and socialist-realist paintings of
Brezhnev

Regardless of the courageous attempt by the athletic department to prevent Northwestern from becoming a national joke in basketball with a garish court design, let us not forget the fact that Northwestern is already somewhat of a college hoops punchline. After all, Northwestern basketball is known for the following things:

-Never appearing in the NCAA tournament
-Playing home games in a rustically charming barn
-Fraudulently claiming victory in the 2011 NIT

Therefore, why not gain some national notoriety by playing home games on a fruit roll-up surface (let's assume it's a Fruit Roll-up with a really 1990s-sounding flavor such as BlasterBerry Xtreme Blast)?

YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LAST OF CARLOS ZAMBRANO (THAT IS WHAT CARLOS ZAMBRANO THINKS)

This could be the last opportunity to bust out this classy Zambrano Meltdown Recap graphic as the once-brilliant, now mediocre, always entertaining right-hander may have tossed his last pitch as a Cub. Let us remember by clumsily ruining:

Zambrano!

Big Pitcher for the Cubs,
Switch-Hitter, Clubber of Balls,
Player with Rosin and the North Side's Ace Hurler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
Pitcher of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your two-seam fastballs under the park lights luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the bats smash and go free to smash again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of beverage dispensers I have seen the marks of wanton anger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my pitcher, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another pitcher with pointed hand yelling so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic bee bees amid the toil of piling pitch on pitch, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft rubber;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a batter pitted against the gatorade,
Blonde-headed,
Arguing,
Whacking,
Planning,
Fanning, breaking, re-fanning,
Under the vines, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant umpire laughs who has never lost a strike zone,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the bleachers, Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, blue-jerseyed, sweating, proud to be Big Pitcher, Switch-Hitter, Clubber of Balls, Player with Rosin and Ace Hurler for the North Side.

A MOST CURIOUS SCANDAL

The last BYCTOM entry featured a list of phrases that it would take to get my attention in an NCAA scandal, callously dismissing NCAA scandals as unworthy of my Victorian outrage. A few days later, Charles Robinson broke the Miami scandal, describing a spectacular set of allegations set amongst a swashbuckling display of NCAA-defying derring-do.

This a photo of me after neglecting to mention that
I'm also interested in articles about allegedly using
a yacht to facilitate off-shore prostitution

My favorite of the allegations involves the bounty system--not only because I enjoy bounties on both the Lee Van Cleef level and as the setting for coconut-based mutinies (according to Arthur Herman's To Rule the Waves, the mutiny on the Bounty ignited after Captain Bligh antagonized his crew with the accusation "Damn your blood, you have stolen my coconuts!"). Devin Hester, now on the Bears, allegedly racked up thousands of tainted booster dollars as a reward for returning kicks and celebrating excessively. I fully support compensating players for drawing hectoring celebration penalties from zebra-striped killjoys, a practice I will encourage when I start my own doomed upstart football league and force boring players to wear jerseys bearing the slogan "HE CELEBRATE INADEQUATELY."

I don't particularly have an interest in the consequences for Miami; I'm mainly enjoying the brazenness of the (alleged) defiance and reveling in the (alleged) sordidness of the whole affair. It would be horrifying to live in a time when a credible fictional scandal concerned the King of Bohemia attempting to cover-up a dalliance with a profligate opera singer that would dash his betrothal to a Scandinavian princess on the rocks of Victorian propriety.

In this Josef Friederich illustration
from A Scandal in Bohemia, Wilhelm
Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein,
the Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein
avoids notice with this casual
diguise.

ALL OF THIS IMPROPRIETY IS MAKING MY HEAD SPIN

NCAA enforcement is part of a long tradition of trying to make some sort attempt to define amateur sports; after all, even the great shamateur cricketer W.G. Grace had been bankrolled with pound notes secreted in his spectacularly bushy beard, and I would be shocked if there wasn't some sort of outcry over a fin de siècle rugby scandal involving illicitly attained top hats, monogrammed handkerchiefs, cane toppers, fox hunting privileges, dirigible tours, or seigniorial rights. Somehow, we will solider on, burdened by the shocking revelation of (alleged) booster malfeasance in college football, brave baseball less a Zambrano, and futilely pretend to enjoy basketball without a garish purple court to serve as the landing point of a thousand Wildcat dunks.

A Return to Wildcat Football in the Month of August

2011-08-12T22:14:00.015-05:00

Rejoice, friends! Professional sports may have tainted themselves with tedious labor disputes, the Cubs may be helplessly flailing themselves into oblivion (as I'm writing this, twitter rumors are flying that Carlos Zambrano has cleared out his locker and announced a professional wrestling style non-retirement retirement); a Dickensian bleakness surrounds Chicago sports. But no longer! Wildcat football begins in earnest as players return to Camp Kenosha next week and expectations are high. Fitz has said he has expectations beyond making another "Pizza City Bowl," the excellent presnapread.com has NU ranked #35 in the nation, and Northwestern's marketing department has begun an actual Heisman campaign for senior quarterback Dan Persa.

Persa Strong billboards have appeared throughout the
Chicagoland area trumpeting "Chicago's Heisman Candidate"
although I'm disappointed that none of them feature him
uncomfortably wielding tools within some sort of purple Tron
landscape like this iconic 2005 poster. Clearly the most
menacing Wildcat is Tim McGarigle, who is unfairly given a
chain saw which is overkill on par with allowing Bill
Laimbeer to traverse basketball courts using a fully equipped
war chariot

I have to admit, while I am excited about seeing what Persa can do, I'm worried about the athletic department's potential for hubris in constructing their Ozymandius website. Let's hope that Persa does not become the Northwestern football equivalent of the Palace of Soviets, an enormous Stalinist edifice designed to terrify Moscow residents with a glowering cloud-guzzling Lenin statue.

A drawing of Boris Iofan's winning design for the Palace
of Soviets. The Palace was to take the place of the Cathedral
of Christ the Savior. The German invasion, however, halted
construction on the building and the site was turned into
an enormous public swimming pool

WILDCATS AT CAMP

The return to Camp Kenosha also means the return of media days and interviews. Here is a particularly fascinating passage from Skip Myslenski's interview with Coach Fitz, mentioning Superback Drake Dunsmore's bold statement that he expects the 'Cats to win the division:

"We've got it on our goal board. Our goals are simple. After consistently preparing, we want to win the Legends, win the championship and win our bowl game. I don't think that's unique to just us, though. So now what are we going to do about it? I got no problem with you asking a question and him answering it directly. I'd rather have him do that than sugar coat it and give a B.S. answer and then he walks away and says, 'No, this is how I really feel.'"

I prefer that too, we tell him, attempting to make a joke.

"At the end of the day, guys, we're not starting over here," Fitzgerald goes on, totally ignoring the lame effort. "There's a lot of teams in our league starting over, trying to reinvent themselves. We're far away from there. We crossed that bridge a long time ago. There's a certain set of expectations and if you don't get that kind of stuff done, we should get a little ticked off about it. I think that's the way everybody feels around here."

First off, I'm concerned that Fitz has slipped into casually mentioning the LEGENDS DIVISION like it is a real thing. I'm greatly concerned about slipping into LEGENDS AND LEADERS complacency and firmly believe that every mention of the unbearable division names should come with a bracketed discalimer that LEGENDS AND LEADERS are dumb names for divisions and are greeted by Big Ten fans with Heston-like incredulity. At the same time, I admire Commissioner Delaney's Soviet response to seeing the nearly universal rejection of the names and deciding to force them upon us anyway.

My favorite part of this passage is in the middle where Myslenski gives play-by-play of Coach Fitz artlessly no-selling him on a feeble joke. In Myselnski's defense, I'm fairly sure that Fitz does not have a sense of humor beyond carving giant pumping fist runes into Iowa cornfields and then cackling as he circles them in one of Patrick Ryan's helicopters.

"The aristocrats," concludes Myslenski. Fitz is
unmoved

Fitz's ability to bulldoze anything vaguely interesting with a barrage of inspiring coach-talk is nearly superhuman; if the United States were to fall victim to some sort of horrible catastrophe that involved a large wave of radioactive mutants overrunning our state capitals, he could coolly appear on television and assure us that not only are our young men are doing the best they can to bludgeon enough radioactive mutants with blunt objects to secure a cordon around, say, Lansing, Michigan until the National Guard arrives, they were ticked off at the mutants and were bludgeoning them with chips on their remaining shoulders.

NCAA INVESTIGATIONS

Another college football season comes with another set of scandals of players on the take, clandestine coaches gleefully shattering NCAA regulations for sport, and revelations involving shadowy figures. The largest one caused the removal of longtime Ohio State coach Jim Tressell this spring. To be honest, I have not been following these stories particularly closely even if it means the weakening of a successful rival program. For one, doing so involves taking the NCAA and its byzantine code of regulations seriously while their enforcement and the bizarre half-measures designed by schools to artfully elude them are farcical.

A group of recruiters from an unnamed program evade the
watchful eye of NCAA regulators by meeting high school
underclassment on Berlin's Gelinicke Bridge

I also find these sorts of scandals tiresome because they're not particularly interesting. I refuse to read anything about NCAA scandals unless articles describing them include a close approximation to the following phrases:

a network of international operatives
as he ignited another NCAA rule book and flung it from a fifth-story window
was given a collection of colorful capes
he proclaimed from his self-constructed throne
but the briefcases were filled with useless confederate dollars

SLOUCHING TOWARDS WRIGLEYVILLE

The Cubs, meanwhile, stood pat at the deadline except trading Kosuke Fukudome to the Indians for a pair of lowly regarded prospects. I was crushed by the trade because Fukudome is one of my favorite Cub players-- he was the only Cub with an on-base percentage over .370 (only two Cubs currently sport OBPs over .350: Reed Johnson and Carlos Zambrano. In fact, using the weighted on-base average metric, Johnson and Zambrano are the Cubs' most effective bats), but more importantly, I really enjoyed the fact that his name was Fukudome.

In Wrigleyville did Jim Hendry
A stately Fuck You Dome decree

HERE COME THE CATS

Football is here! As we speak, the Bears are prepared to attempt to deploy an offense featuring the battered remains of Roy Williams, an offensive line designed for one purpose: murder, and the fearsome spectre of Corey Wootton in the exciting NFL preseason. The 'Cats, meanwhile, hope to improve on last year's withering end to the season en route to a well-deserved bowl victory in Pizza City, Potato Town, the Duchy of Pre-Owned Tires, or even Pasadena in what Delaney is trying to call the Heroic Victory of the Conference Cadres Bowl.

July Is A Desert of Northwestern-Related Sports News

2011-07-26T15:59:00.015-05:00

Summer has descended, the invincible Northwestern women's lacrosse juggernaut has unsurprisingly laid waste to all challengers, the Cubs' have plummeted into an unsurprising death spiral of injuries and the fact that the team is not very good to begin with, Carlos Zambrano has yelled at someone (the only reason why I would want to be a columnist for a Chicago sports newspaper would be to see how many times I could use that sentence as the lede in a sanctimonious demand to trade the hot-tempered hurler), and this blog will contain an unprecedented third straight reference to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

THE CUBS: A MASTERPIECE OF COMICAL BASEBALL INEPTITUDE

The Cubs' season is best summed up by this photo of reliever Jeff Samardzija getting
posterized by Albert Pujols in the first of Pujols's two consecutive walk-offs, which is
disappointing since he showed up to camp with eighteenth century count facial hair
which led me to believe that he would successfully fool batters with a series of
dastardly machinations and intrigue

Pretty much all that is left for Cubs fans is the hope for a truly epic Zambrano meltdown to make it worthwhile to even watch their games. As an avid amateur chronicler of Carlos Zambrano outbursts, I have to say I'm fairly disappointed at the miniature media frenzy that greeted his comments about Marmol's decision to throw a slider to Ryan Theriot in the Cubs-Cardinals series earlier this summer (as an aside, I'm really disappointed that Theriot did not get his hit off of Samardzija, because it would almost certainly lead to a replica of this conflagration-- in case you were wondering the number of times the hey this baseball player has early modern facial hair joke is funny it is decidedly less than two).

How can anyone be upset with a mere poor choice of words by Zambrano? Absolutely zero Gatorade containers were smashed with bats, not a one. As a Carlos Zambrano fan, I demand escalation, and this blog will no longer cover any Carlos Zambrano incident that does not involve him using some sort of anger-based sorcery to destroy every single Gatorade dispensing product within 3 square blocks of Wrigley Field, quenching neighborhood in an ocean of orange, lemon-lime, and blue, proclaiming he no longer answers to the authority of the umpires before ceremonially stripping the home plate umpire of his chest protector and giving it to the nearest bat boy, usher, or Ronnie Woo-Woo, and then disappearing into the clubhouse only to emerge riding a white stallion around the stadium as grateful patrons shower him with rose petals and valuables.

ANOTHER TIMELY UPDATE THAT HAS TO DO WITH KAISER WILHELM II

Many thanks to a sharp-eyed BYCTOM reader who sent me a spectacular article from New Zealand's Poverty Bay Herald from October 20, 1914 entitled "Is the Kaiser Insane? Russian Papers Quote Good Reasons." The article alleged that German prisoners, captured by Russian troops, divulged that the German press had not reported the Kasier's speech to rally the troops before the war:

Remember that the German people are the chosen ones of God. On me as German Empire the spirit of God has descended. I am His weapon, His sword, and his vice-regent. Woe to the disobedient. Death to cowards and unbelievers.

The article concluded that "Russian newspapers remark that his speech goes far to prove that the German Emperor is suffering from a familiar form of insanity."

What the article did not mention, however, is that I plan on using the final three sentences to end all presentations, job interviews, first dates, and casual conversations for the foreseeable future.

A medley of Kaiser hats, in order of aggression

RETURN OF THE NFL

Sound your ceremonial gongs, release the doves, and don your fanciest tunics, the NFL lockout is over. And, as if to compensate for subjecting fans to endless nonsense about arcane collective-bargaining nonsense, dozens of pictures of Jeff Saturday's suit collection, and an unfortunate reminder that the NFL is run by a cabal of tophat-wearing, cane-sporting plutocrats who spend most of their free time attempting to resurrect ineffective nineteenth century presidents in order to manipulate them into forming an unfathomable interlocking directorate that will allow them to take possession of the Moon and rotate amongst themselves for display in hastily constructed Moon atria in their favored summer palaces, the following week of free agency is going to be comically madcap.

The NFL players protested the lockout with a smart bulk
purchase of Soviet propaganda, giving them the ability to
denounce the owners as capitalists so greedy that they would
wear top hat/crown combinations, but occasionally mystifying
football fans with the poster on the right advocating that
"We will change the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan into a
republic of abundant literacy"

Lost in the shuffle is the fact that two Northwestern players finally made it to the NFL after going undrafted. Quentin Davie will be heading to the Lions, hoping to contribute to their terrifying defensive front, while Corbin Bryant will be staying home with the Bears to join fellow Wildcat Corey Wootton. The Bears are also trying to re-sign Nick Roach lest they start the 2011 season with the unfathomable possibility of only having one Wildcat on their roster.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE RATIO BETWEEN INEPTITUDE AND COMEDY IN PROFESSIONAL SPORTS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO POSITION

The return of the NFL means that I can get excited about my favorite subplot of the 2011 season-- the camp battle between John Beck and Rex Grossman for the Washington Redskins' starting quarterback job.

As much as I enjoy Grossman's confusion at being handed a football helmet at
what appears to be the world's fanciest Lite Brite enthusiast convention,
Redskins fans should be more concerned about John Beck, who seems poised to
try to swindle dozens of them with counterfeit fan boat tickets

The reason why I'm so excited about this battle is because it further cements my theory that by far the funniest position in professional sports for someone to fail at is NFL quarterback. Every year, I run a fantasy football team that I call the Matt Millen Championship with the goal of putting together the most inept roster possible, and the idea of first overall pick Derek Anderson producing week in and week out, or taking a late round flier on Jimmy Clausen only to cheer as he fires pass after pass into the welcoming arms of the oppositions' defense, or racing to claim inexplicably starting Rex Grossman off the waiver wire makes me giddy.

Quarterbacks don't just have bad games. They self-destruct. They melt down. Maybe the only other position where comical meltdowns can occur is with crappy relief pitchers who usually have the decency to be morbidly obese or have stupid facial hair or extra digits (or, in the case of Antonio Alfonseca, have all of these combined).

Antonio Alfonseca, the platonic ideal of shitty relief pitcher. The photo at right was
supposed to be some sort of visual representation of the pouring gasoline onto the fire
cliche, but I admit that I got completely sidetracked google image searching for the
phrase "stuntman on fire" (it's mesmerizing) and then came across this bizarre
photograph of a man sprinting around on fire for a perfect number of spectators
(there are enough people there for people to know about it, perhaps through a blurb in
the local paper announcing "man to light himself on fire, flail around for our amusement,"
but not so big that it looks like it would be sanctioned by any sort of responsible organization).
It turns out that the man is Scotland's Keith Malcolm, valiantly setting a world record in
fire running, which apparently consists of donning a flame-retardant suit and then
seeing how long you can sprint, while on fire. I do not want to know how someone gets into
this activity or how the first record was set

There is something to be said about watching some guy waddle out from the bullpen, walk a couple of guys, and give up a backbreaking home run, but it is empirically less funny than a guy throwing interception after interception with a glazed look in his face. Goalies in soccer and hockey I suppose can also be subject to comical meltdowns, but their failures more often come from subtle lapses in their teammates that they have to do something utterly ridiculous and uncoordinated in order to be as funny.

PHILIPPINE PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL

The NBA lockout is possibly even more depressing and almost certain to lead to the cancellation of at least part of the NBA season. Fortunately, NBA players stayed in the public eye by playing an exhibition in the basketball-mad Philippines against their staunchest opposition. I would say that this fact caused me to look into PBA basketball, but that would be a naked lie since I came to look up the league because I was curious as to what happened to Cedric Ceballos. Ceballos, a former All-Star Swingman, played for the venerable San Miguel Beermen of the Philippine Basketball Association in 2004, which is rare even for a globe-trotting NBA washout.

The best thing about the PBA is that teams take their names directly from their sponsor-- not content to veil team sponsorship with underhanded nonsense such as "Chicago Bears Football Presented by Bank One," the teams take their names directly from the product that they are associated with. This naturally leads to convoluted name changes as they are acquired by new companies or are shifted to promote different brands. The Beermen are now known as the Petron Blaze Boosters while also serving stints as Magnolia Quench Plus, and the almost unbeatable Magnolia Beverage Masters.

The Petron Blaze Boosters are owned by the ubiquitous San Miguel
Corporation, a large global conglomerate that does global
conglomerate things such as operating out of a giant plant
ziggeraut

The San Miguel Corporation owns two other PBA teams: the the Bangaray Ginebra Kings and the B-Meg Llamados, acquired in a merger with Purefoods. Unfortunately all of this corporate consolidation has created a nadir in Philippine Basketball team names. The B-Meg Llamados under Purefoods sported such spectacular names as the Purefoods Corned Beef Cowboys and, until last year, the Purefoods Tender Juicy Giants. The league this year sports significantly lamer teams such as the Powerade Tigers. The only fantastic names left are the Rain or Shine Elasto Painters or the Talk 'n Text Tropang Texters, which brings to mind a bench riddled with repetitive stress injuries to thumbs.

The Tender Juicy Giants jersey: a
casualty of corporate consolidation
if there ever was one

THERE IS NO NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL NEWS YET

Stay tuned for occasional BYCTOM updates on Cub futility, European basketball championships, and any major breakthroughs in Kaiser-related topics in the coming weeks.

Those Were The Things That Happend Then Part II

2011-05-18T14:50:00.012-05:00

Like most Bears fans, I had assumed after the Bears preseason that they would scratch their way to maybe eight wins tops in front of an aging defense and a comically ineffective offensive line.

Bears plans for the offensive line went horribly awry early in the
2010 season

And, for the beginning of the season, that prediction looked solid, as Cutler darted for his life behind the group of matadors, turnstiles, and maitre d's that allowed him to be pummeled into a swollen-brained incoherence that interfered with his Rex Grossman-like desire to deliver the ball to the opposition. But football is a game that changes fluidly, governed by the whims of fate more than the whims of spittle-emitting fans calling for the heads of everyone even vaguely involved with the organization after every loss, and somehow the Bears became the top team in the NFC North by the end of the season. The defense regained its fierce Chicago pedigree that terrorized a wide assortment of third-string quarterbacks, the offensive line became at least functional, and Devin Hester began Devin Hestering people enough to demonstrate the comical ineptitude of my football prognostication skills.

Pretty much my only skill in prediction
games like fantasy football is picking up
Kyle Orton as my main quarterback and
then taunting the unfortunate people in
my league with endless digital reams of
Orton-related propaganda as I lose game
after game because my entire team is built
around Kyle Orton

IS THE KAISER INSANE?

One of the most exciting things I've come across in the past several months the fact that a book exists entitled Is the Kaiser Insane? A study of the great outlaw published in Britain in 1915 by Arnold White.

Perhaps if Wilhelm wanted to avoid an unceasing
string of Kaiser-bashing from ramshackle sports
blogs in the next century, he would have made more
of an effort to adorn himself with slightly more
restraint than other major world leaders such as
Victor Von Doom

I have not read the book yet, but according to one contemporary review, "the author has gathered no little evidence regarding the Kaiser’s genius, egotism, insensitiveness, obsessions, and cunning, and seeks to prove that he is a dangerous megalomaniac." I trust this reviewer's opinion implicitly because it comes from a 1915 edition of the spectacularly titled British Journal of Inebriety (which suffered an unfortunate series of name changes and exists now as Addiction).

I am taking this opportunity to launch my own
publication called the Journal of British Inebriety
featuring articles such as "Oi, the fuck you lookin' at:
a history of lookin' at me, 1931-1946" and "1984: A
Year in Headbutts"

The publication of a book like that is not at all surprising, considering that the British war effort focused on liberating the world from the Kaiser's brand of Teutonic tyranny and not the various ism-based causes of war found in AP history textbooks; White's book certainly seemed to have filled a void for British readers who found comfort in taking to the trenches against a cackling madman hell-bent on world domination.

IS JAY CUTLER A JERK?

Despite my enjoyment of the unexpected success of the Bears' season, it still ended on a sour note with a loss to the hated Packers in the NFC Championship game. The Packers were a particularly irritating team last season since they demonstrated intolerable amounts of pluck after most of their team went down with injuries. By far the most annoying subplot before the game, however, was the endless comparisons between Packers' likable happy-go-lucky quarterback Aaron Rodgers grinning and flaunting his Butte College merchandise, and the Bears' churlish, sour-faced signal caller Jay Cutler.

The images of a carefree Rodgers contrasted with Jay Cutler, here shown
wearing an expression comparable to this photo taken from an Onion article
with the headline "Whaler Sandwich 'Not Sitting To Good' With Area Man"

The Bears-Packers rivalry naturally raised the question of how players are portrayed in the media and whether or not I should care if evidently the quarterback for my favorite team is consistently presented as kind of a jerk. And obviously, I don't. Even if Cutler is as unpleasant in the comical 1980s fingerless glove enthusiast bully way that reporters allege (which reached its zenith with this Rick Reilly attack column that opens with the unmistakably groan-inducing zinger "For a man from Santa Claus, Ind., Jay Cutler is one of the least jolly people you've ever met."-- if anything Jay Cutler does momentarily angers Rick Reilly, then he should be immediately canonized by someone with lax canonization standards), it has zero effect on how I enjoy the Bears. In fact, it would not irritate me at all if Cutler decided to give in to his reputation and toured schools knocking lunch trays from the hands of impressionable students, stood around on street corners only to laugh in the faces of elderly women attempting to cross, and started an offseason game show entitled "Don't You Know Who I Am?" inviting various Chicagoland service industry personnel to test their knowledge of whether they know who Jay Cutler is, do they know how much money Jay Cutler makes compared to them, and what are they going to do to stop Jay Cutler from just walking into this club right now with like eight or nine other dudes.

(I'd like to pause for a moment here to recognize the guy responsible for the Lyttle Lytton writing contest who singled out probably the platonic ideal of a Rick Reilly shame on you-style column opener:
"Some things are so small, so miniscule, so atomically insignificant, they can be seen only from three feet away using the Hubble telescope. The heart of Jean Musgjerd is one of these things.")

Cutler fell further under fire by getting injured in the championship game, leading to thousands of Chicagoans to evidently take online courses to become amateur videographic orthopedists allowing them to question the severity of his injury and his willingness to play through pain. Some NFL players even joined in the fray, which implied a certain unpopularity among his peers.

Cutler was also targeted by a wide variety of sports columnists

With more access to athletes than ever before, modern sports fans have to decide the extent to which how they perceive athletes off the field colors their enjoyment of sports. As a football fan, I enjoy watching gigantic people smash into each other in an organized fashion for my amusement; I'll support anyone who helps the team I like smash the other team more effectively regardless of churlishness, smarm, sass, or blandness. On the other hand, I would prefer that none of these people does anything so unreasonably heinous that supporting them becomes uncomfortable-- unless they commit a crime so spectacularly grandiose that it falls into the category of heist, or involves doing something like stealing the Great Pyramid of Cheops and then attempting to ransom it back to the Egyptian Government with a series of opaque riddles designed to foil international police agencies. Unless that plan involves a dastardly attempt to crush Europe with the spike covered fist of megalomania.

This Website is Surprisingly Funct

2011-05-06T22:20:00.012-05:00

BYCTOM may have missed all of the exciting sports action, hurriedly-researched history, and of course gratuitous mustaches from the past several months. Nevertheless, sports certainly don't lend themselves to immediacy; it's far better to experience sporting events through the magic of hindsight after they are no longer so boringly relevant, so please join me for a new BYCTOM feature entitled:

THOSE WERE THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED THEN: PART I

Northwestern managed its most successful post-season run in the history of Wildcat basketball by making it within one overtime period of the vaunted NIT Final Four at Madison Square Garden (I'm going to exclude the Big Ten champion teams from the 1930s because, while I recognize that team's accomplishment, I also am pretty sure that basketball in the 1930s did not involve recognizable aspects of the game such as the 24 second clock, leaping, and passing-- ball movement at that time primarily revolved around encouraging a teammate to give up the ball through cogent argument and rhetorical flourishes).

Modern basketball players are more quick to dismiss claims for
the ball as spurious without strong enough evidence. Here Aaron
Gray is shocked by a teammate admitting to the irresponsible
use of hearsay and anecdote

The quarter-final game against Washington State was a heartening comeback led by Northwestern basketball legend Juice Thompson, with the last minute being one of the most astounding endings to a basketball game that I've ever witnessed, in which the following occurred:
1. Northwestern ties the game on a Washington State goal-tend
2. With no time remaining on the clock, Northwestern is called for a foul giving Washington State a rare opportunity for a walk-off free throw.
3. The Washington State player improbably bricks both free throws, sending the game into OT.

The last minute of this game therefore featured two of the three worst ways to possibly end a basketball game-- on a goaltend or foul with no time left (the third worst way is of course to have one or several players wade into the stands and begin pummeling spectators. I suppose the absolute worst way to end a game would be to have the basketball court annexed by a hostile nation that does not play basketball and immediately have the players replaced by a team handball squad or a triumphant troupe of net-ball all-stars, but that's unreasonably hypothetical).

An illustration of a problematic end to a basketball game also doubles as a tribute to
the world's most placid cameraman. Nenad Krsitc would probably have benefited
from Troy Hurtubise's Project Troy armor, a suit that came initially from his
never-ending quest to stave off rampaging bears, but, as his Wikipedia page
succinctly put it, "the process has developed ideas and technologies whose purposes
go beyond simple bear attack protection"

Unfortunately, the Wildcats faltered in overtime, disappointing Northwestern fans, but relieving the Evanston Police Department from having to plan for quelling an NIT victory riot that would grind the city to a halt with a deafening chorus of huzzahs and unrefined sherry guzzling.

PRETENDERS TO THE CROWN

With a decade of increasingly improbable bowl defeats and three consecutive losses in the NIT, Northwestern fans are getting hungrier for a title of some kind in football or basketball. The Athletic Department deserves recognition for bringing the historically woeful programs to the post-season, the very upper tier of mediocrity. Therefore, Northwestern fans should demand a fraudulent NIT title.

From now on, as far as I am concerned, Northwestern is the 2011 NIT Champion. No one remembers who actually won the NIT, outside of a few fans of the winning schools, most of whom keep their NIT Champion merchandise in a closet with their Worldcom stock certificates. Northwestern can hoist a fake banner to the rafters, print up t-shirts, digitally alter the homepage of the Daily Northwestern, make every reference to the team feature the phrase "2011 NIT Champions," and use connections at ESPN to burn tapes of the actual NIT championship game and replace it with a game featuring the Wildcats squaring off against a group of theater students told that they are staging a dramatization of the tragic story of the Washington Generals. The university can rent out Madison Square Garden for a morning and encourage New York-based alumni to masquerade as a raucous NIT crowd by moving them around the arena and exchanging false mustaches. Within a half-decade, who would you believe: the university that actually won the NIT or Northwestern, endorsed by the American Association to Resist Shams as the nation's third most hoax-averse university, although it should be pointed out that I've just made everything in this sentence up, and my AARS link goes to the American Association of Railroad Supervisors, which offers derailment investigation seminars and promises that "our members are able to get the inside track on the latest in the railroad industry."

Juice Thompson and Northwestern fans celebrate a completely
legitimate and fairly earned NIT title as far as you know

PROUD TRADITION OF PRETENDERS

By taking up the mantle of a false NIT championship, Northwestern would fit into a proud tradition of pretenders to the throne. There are a variety of ways to claim legitimacy. All of them involve finding thousands of sword wielding accomplices. One particularly strong move is to wait for a child in line for power to die and then pretend to be him or her several years later. Another is to revive an older usurped bloodline that had been usurped by a new throne or some sort of popular government, like the swinging pendulum of the French Monarchy in the nineteenth century.

Fifty years of French politics, c. 1800-1851

One of my favorite pretender stories involves seventeenth century Russia, where a variety of False Dmitriys kept cropping up to menace the Russian throne during the Time of Troubles. The original Dmitriy was a son of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan's death led to the ascension of Feodor I, Dmitry's older brother, and figurehead for the machinations of professional intriguer Boris Gudunov. Gudunov had sent Dmitriy and his family into exile, as one does with politically inconvenient toddlers in 1584, but perhaps that was not enough--Dmitriy died in exile at the age of eight after being either assassinated or accidentally stabbing himself in the throat with a knife while suffering an epileptic seizure (what modern historians label the "Derrick Rose scenario"). As Gudunov learned, however, sometimes conveniently dead relatives can cause problems in entirely non-zombie related ways.

In 1600, a man claiming to be Dmitriy appeared, proclaiming that he had escaped from exile and returned to claim the throne. He gathered up a loose coalition of Poles, Jesuits, and miscellaneous enemies of Gudunov and began marching against Russian forces. Gudunov's forces successfully held off Dmitriy, but the death of Gudunov in 1605 allowed False Dmitriy to take the real throne. He lasted about ten months. Angered by rumors of his impending conversion to Catholicism, his enemies stormed the Kremlin, killed him, and fired his remains from a cannon.

False Dmitriy displays the same incredulous
expression that is on my face because I am not
right now forming a rock band called The False
Dmitriys

That was not the end of the Dmitriys. In 1607, another False Dmitriy popped up and began gathering his forces in future Moscow suburb Tushino. Like his predecessor, False Dmitiry II gathered support from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Don Cossacks, and various assorted rebels and overthrow enthusiasts. His forces were defeated by Russians with the help of their Swedish allies. He continued to campaign around Russia, but in 1610, a drinking companion and resentful flogging victim shot him, chopped off his head, and left behind a legacy of obvious there can be only one Highlander references.

False Dmitriy III appeared in 1611. He garnered Cossack support and, in the great False Dmitry tradition, began an assault on Moscow. He managed to stay upright for another year before captured and executed by Moscow authorities. The False Dmitriy phenomenon was part of vast power struggle in the first decade of the seventeenth century among various Russian dyansties that played out like a game show awarding the crown to whoever could stab the most people. By 1613, this chaotic time stabilized with the rise of the Romanov dyansty, and the Russian populace appeared Dmitriy'd out.

Apparently some Russian commentators have poked
fun at Medvedev as a "false Dmitry," but, as
this Economist article points out, "over the past few
weeks he has taken to sporting a khaki rollneck and a
bomber jacket emblazoned with the words 'Russia’s
Commander-in-Chief', perhaps to remind people of his
status"

As Wikipedia's List of Current Pretenders notes, there are a significant number of descendants to various monarchical lines floating around the world, ready to gather their forces and retain control of their families' empires. For example, Georg Friederich, the current head of the Dread Kaiser's House of Hohenzollern has chillingly threatened that "I do not see any reason for the political system in Germany to be changed," and "I have as head of the House of Hohenzollern no political role −- and neither do I aim at such."

THAT WAS A THING THAT HAPPENED BEFORE

Stay tuned for future BYCTOM updates on stuff that happened a few months ago clumsily compared to things that happened several hundred years ago as well as several more productive ideas about using falsehood and chicanery to claim things that no one could ever possibly want.

Northwestern Hoops

2011-02-06T22:12:00.013-06:00

In December, Northwestern fans believed that this could be the year that Northwestern finally broke through its moribund sporting reputation and burst into mediocrity by winning a bowl game and qualifying for the NCAA basketball tournament. The bowl bid bust into a thousand bits of awkward alliteration despite a valiant comeback led by Freshman QB Kain Colter and the befuddling coaching of Tommy Tuberville, who coached the second half with the shaky overconfidence of a cartoon supervillain.

Tuberville inexplicably orders an onside kick in the third
quarter of the Inaugural Ticketcity Bowl over the advice of
more cautious assistants, who acquiesced after being threatened
with being cast into something that has the word "doom" in it

WILDCAT BASKETBALL

As of now, a tournament spot for Northwestern looks unlikely after the strong non-conference start, despite blowing heartbreaking losses to Michigan State and missing the upset of Ohio State by only one. Nevertheless, the win over arch-rivals Illinois at a significantly more purple Welsh-Ryan arena this weekend means that Northwestern isn't technically out of it yet, although my knowledge of bracketology, bracketometry, braxonomy, or any other bracket-related science or vaguely sinister alchemical pseudo-science is not up to par.

A stunning upset in the Southland Conference
Tournament provokes a dangerous unbalancing
of critical NCAA bracket humours

The Wildcats spent the early part of the season propelled by the deadly chest shooting of John Shurna and senior Juice Thompson, who, with over 4,000 minutes logged, has technically played more Northwestern basketball than anyone ever. I'm also impressed by freshman Jershon Cobb and The Masked Adventures of Luka Mirkovic in the paint.

Mirkovic should not only keep the mask next year, but experiment with
different masks to terrify opponents into costly turnovers

As far as I'm aware, the Wildcats are still clinging precariously to the bubble, but even if they slip they can of course still get to the NCAAs by winning the Big Ten tournament. In fact, winning the Big Ten Tournament would be the most satisfying way for Northwestern to finally kick in the doors of the NCAAs, although at this point I would also accept a Northwestern NCAA appearance wrought by storming the United Center and handcuffing themselves to a piece of infrastructure like the scorer's table or Bill Wennington until let into a game or cleverly disguising themselves as Kansas State.

THE FUTURE OF SPORTS

A significant controversy coming into this weekend's Super Bowl involves calls to improve player safety as we come to better understand the deleterious effect of armored men smashing into each other at maximum speed on the brain. This year has seen the NFL in particular make concussions a point of emphasis. But, despite attempts to decrease the violence of football, a trend dating back to the first decade of the twentieth century when a more barbaric game saw the use of stampedes, cudgels, and blimp bombardment as legitimate methods to stop ball-carriers, football is still rife with concussions. In a recent New Yorker article, Ben McGrath questions whether football as we know it can persist as doctors get a better picture of just how much damage concussions can cause.

Attempting to find better equipment is a logical step
to keep athletes safe unless it looks goofy I mean
come on that thing looks like it has space for auxiliary
heads

You can argue about the effectiveness of the NFL's increasing use of flags against big hits or rail against the league's hypocrisy, but the new policies at least demonstrate a growing popular concern for athlete safety in complete contrast with what we'd expect from movies. Instead, future sports in movies invariably become more violent, culminating with The Running Man in which participants are encouraged to maul each other to death with colorful, themed implements. Even in the latter-day Arnold opus The Sixth Day, future football involves a quarterback dying on the field, only to be surreptitiously replaced by a clone (the Sixth Day is a pretty bad movie, but at least watchable as shown on this graph charting the enjoyability of Schwarzenegger movies since 1996):

The hardest part of making this chart was deciding whether End of Days or Collateral
Damage represents the nadir of the Arnold Schwarzenegger experience. Although End of
Days is absolutely abysmal, I decided on Collateral Damage because the movie ends with
Schwarzenegger killing a guy with an axe and letting the guy die with nary a pun. He
didn't need to axe-cuse himself? There was no need to axe the guy a question? This is
coming from the same man who once quipped "you're luggage" after shooting a crocodile
at point-blank range

There are more helmets (the fact that people once played hockey bareheaded is absolutely mind-boggling), more padding, body armor in baseball, more goggles in basketball, and I'm sure race car drivers are doing things such as trying harder not to crash into each other. We don't have rollerball or state-sponsored game shows that involve hunting the ultimate prey: man; it's 2011 and we've not seen a single death race. Bill Laimbeer is being closely monitored. So, even though there is a lot of soul searching to do about the costs of football, compared to a fictional dystopia where deadly gladiator games mask the ever-stomping bootheels of authoritarianism, we're doing pretty well.

TO MARCH MADNESS

The rest of the month of Wildcat basketball should be a thrill ride, as the team clings to hope of amassing enough victories to finally make the tournament. Even if the 'Cats don't get in, they'll hopefully get another shot to at least make a decent run in the NIT, which would almost certainly gain popularity if it was turned into a chaotic mess of Running Man-style basketball. I'll turn the end of this post over to the NBA D-League's Maine Red Claws promotions department:

There's no better way to tell someone you care than through the
use of a make-shift anthropomorphic crustacean Cyrano de
Bergerac

TicketCity Bowl

2010-12-29T19:38:00.015-06:00

This Saturday, Northwestern takes on Texas Tech in the inaugural TicketCity Bowl at the Cotton Bowl in Texas. This is because the Cotton Bowl is now played at Jerry Jones's Ozymandius-like Texas Stadium while the Wildcats and Red Raiders now get to play under the watchful eye of Big Tex as the Texas State fairgrounds.

I prefer the original Big Tex from 1956
which showcases a look of wide-eyed
homicidal fanaticism that I prefer from
state fair gargantuans. Here, Tex's body
language can be best described as hastily
explaining to the authorities

Northwestern will be seeking to avenge two blowout losses to end the season and capture the team's first post-season victory since 1949. Texas Tech will be looking for a bowl win to cap its first season under Tommy Tuberville after the program's messy divorce from Mike Leach. In Tuberville, Tech found a name coach, by which I mean that he has a spectacular name that is wasted in college football coaching and should immediately be loaned out to the leader of a 1950s doo-wop revival group featuring matching garish blazers. Contrast Tuberville with Minnesota's hiring of Northern Illinois coach Jerry Kill, whose name is far more suited to the martial pretension of football, probably because there wasn't a qualified person available named Trench Bludgeoner.

Tech will be playing without former defensive coordinator James Willis, who left after Tuberville learned that he had clandestine talks with the University of Florida, according to the spectacularly named Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. The departure of Willis reiterates the ridiculous notion of coaching searches that occur during bowl season, with coaches hired, fired, departing under the dead of night, and inundating their rivals' residences with untraceable poisonous reptiles all before and during the preparation and playing of bowl games. This intrigue is one of the best parts of college football season as it involves fickle fans either braying for the head of an unfavored coach or shouting perfidy as a beloved coach leaves for greener pastures as well as the activities of cabals of shady boosters manipulating the purse strings and plotting in their festive team-logo festooned neckties.

Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands is seen leaving a meeting
where he was rumored to call for the replacement of Mack Brown,
but when questioned by reporters replied "I am above that."

LEGENDS AND LEADERS

The Big Ten finally unveiled the names of the divisions to great fanfare and even greater derision. Northwestern will compete for the 2011 Legend Division Title. There is absolutely no reason why division titles should ever be anything other than cardinal directions-- the idea of striving for some sort of geographical accuracy is absurd when absolutely no one cares about the Dallas Cowboys being in the NFC East, the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks playing in the same building but competing in their league's Eastern and Western conferences respectively, or the Big Ten containing 20 percent more teams than advertised. Every other sport uses some sort of vague and inaccurate geographical signifier for divisions and there is no need to start breaking new ground by attempting to bring in abstract concepts. In that case, why not go with the Pop and Soda divisions based on what to call sugary fizz-water since, as any Midwesterner can attest, more people invest fierce ideological attachment to their regionalism than almost any other opinion they have ever held for no apparent reason instead of some more crucial issue such as the constitutional validity of the King-Byng controversy.

Major players in the King-Byng Canadian Constitutional Crisis of 1925 (l to r):
Mackenzie King, Lord Byng, Arthur Meighen. The controversy came about when
attempting to transpose a nineteenth century political crisis into the twentieth
without the aid of duels to sort things out properly. Instead, all Commonwealth
constitutional problems involving Governors-General ought to be settled by some
sort of stodge off, where a politician must endure 65 minutes of hectoring from a
crowd while attempting to respond in the most humorless and stiff possible manner,
while the winner is assessed from a scientific measurement of the crowd's dour
glumness

Of course, I'm predisposed to criticize Jim Delaney after my calls for renaming the conference the Enormous Ten have evidently fallen on deaf ears.

WIKILEAKS UPDATES

Like most of you, I've been fascinated by the leak of U.S. diplomatic cables free for our perusal because I've been desperate to catch up on diplomatic gossip, such as how many nightclubs Lola Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan President Karimov, currently owns and favors with her late night disco dancing. Actually, the leaks are a font of Central Asian political discotheque intrigue, such as this depiction of Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov at Chocolat, described as Astana's trendiest nightclub from a cable entitled "Lifestyles of the Kazazhstani [sic] Leadership":

Masimov led his companions on to Chocolat's dance floor soon after their arrival. The dance floor holds approximately 100 people, and at the time perhaps 50 patrons were dancing. However, Masimov himself chose to dance on an empty stage above the dance floor. His companions quickly tired but Masimov remained, dancing alone and animatedly on the stage for another 15-20 minutes.

Massimov (center) with Belorussian Premier Sergei Sidorski
(right) and beloved Russian crooner Vladimir Putin

Another revelation is the rollicking Duke of York, who charmed a gathering of British and Commonwealth business leaders and officials in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan by assailing Kyrgyz corruption, comparing it to France and anorexia, respectively. The American Ambassador described the Duke as being an "equal opportunity Great Game player" and soliciting cries of "hear, hear" which makes me worried about him spontaneously growing mutton-chops.

The most troubling revelation comes from stories published side-by-side at the New York Times web site about Russia and Canada. See if you can spot the pattern:

A trove of diplomatic cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, disclose a perception by American diplomats that Canadians “always carry a chip on their shoulder” in part because of a feeling that their country “is condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman.’ ”

Asked about a cable that described President Dmitri A. Medvedev as “playing Robin to Putin’s Batman,” he said the author had “aimed to slander one of us.”

The State Department cables also reveal which countries'
economies move at a penguin-like pace, which are riddled by
corruption, and raise troubling questions about United States
relations with Egypt

DALLAS BOWLING

Although this time of year is when college football comes under assault for the nonsensical bowl system with prestige-bereft bowls such as the TicketCity Bowl used as prime examples of the inscrutable nature of the FBS post-season, Northwestern fans are clamoring to see Fitz finally hoisting a bowl game trophy. With the basketball team looking like a potential threat to finally breach the NCAA tournament, this could potentially be the year for Northwestern athletics in getting over the hump to mediocrity outside of the field of women's field hockey and most Big Ten equestrian sports.

Almost 50 years ago, President Kennedy asked why Rice plays Texas when pledging to put on a man on the moon stressing its difficulty, emphasizing perseverance, and tactfully not mentioning the possibility of igniting a terrifying war with subterranean Moon-Men that would certainly side with Khrushchev. Today, we ask why does Northwestern play Texas Tech and the answer is so that a bunch of corporations make money. Having said that, and politely ignoring what the hell just happened in those last couple of sentences, let us hope that Evan Watkins can lead the Wildcats to a 21st century bowl victory. And if anyone around you disparages the necessity of winning the Inaugural TicketCity Bowl in the grand scheme of things, you punch them right in the face and say "I am above that."

Iowa and Illinois

2010-11-19T22:45:00.012-06:00

Another year, another close, exciting, Big Ten Championship-ruining victory over Iowa in what is turning into one of the secretly most exciting rivalries in the Big Ten. For three consecutive years, Iowa's season effectively ended at the hands of Northwestern, including last year's BCS-busting win over a team with national championship ambitions in Iowa City (the game was also notable for the unfortunate injury of Iowa QB and super-patriot Ricky Stanzi whom I fully expect to see ripping up pictures of the late Ayatolla Khomeini or headbutting the Soviet flag in the near future as in this encapsulation of the platonic ideal of American patriotism).

Pat Fitzgerald broadcasts taunts of Northwestern invincibility
on the Kinnick Stadium jumbotron

Instead, Northwestern played its best game of the season, with the defense rallying from another suspect third quarter and Dan Persa doing Dan Persa things such as eluding tacklers, completing accurate passes, accounting for the majority of the entire offensive output, and leading a heroic fourth-quarter drive to win the game. For Iowa, attempting to beat Northwestern recently has become like trying to invade Russia from the West-- tempting, seemingly doable on a giant map filled with tin cavalry units, but ultimately unconquerable.

Pat Fitzgerald's orders to incinerate of Evanston dining and
grocery establishments forces Kirk Ferentz to lead Iowa back
west to resupply in the Quad Cities

For Northwestern fans, the victory has a sour aftertaste. Although it is always satisfying to continue to be a gigantic spear in the side of Iowa, and the Wildcats finally closed out a game against a good program, the win came at the cost of Dan Persa. It's a shame for Persa to get down just as he was attracting national attention as one of the best quarterbacks in the country. Persa set the Big Ten record for completion percentage and also led the team in rushing, making him as invaluable to Northwestern's offense as Giuseppe Garibaldi to the Italian risorgimiento.

Persa faces down Big Ten foes just as Garibaldi such dominating powers as
Napoleon III and the Pope. Of course, Garibaldi had one thing that Persa
lacks: A GREAT BIG, BUSHY BEARD

LAND OF LINCOLN REVISITED

By the mid-nineteenth century, Garibaldi had earned a peerless reputation as a military leader to the extent that none other than Abraham Lincoln had offered him a commission in the Union Army. This article describes the process by which Garibaldi seriously contemplated taking an American command post. The offer came not initially from the State Department, but from a more traditional source of American foreign policy: the self-aggrandizing actions of a rogue American consul based in Belgium. James W. Quiggle approached Garibaldi in 1861, hoping to distinguish himself by bringing the Italian hero to the Union cause. Despite Quiggle's insubordinate actions, Secretary of State Seward and Lincoln remained intrigued by getting Garibaldi on the their side and attempted to take over recruiting efforts and shove Quiggle aside before he could inadvertently damage negotiations such as by parading around European capitals with a sash reading "Garibaldi Assistance Requester USA #1."

Seward calling Quiggle into his office to
dress him down, no doubt letting him
know that the President was on his ass
and threatening to bust him down to
Guatemala consular duty so fast it would
make his head spin

The plan, of course, did not work out. Garibaldi sought to command the entire army and to declare the aim of the war as ending slavery. Lincoln could not at the time do either of those things and Garibaldi would soon be wounded and imprisoned after a failed invasion of Rome, guarded by French troops and the indomitable Swiss Guard. Meanwhile, news of the approach had leaked, leading to British taunts against the President's military prowess. By the time the Emancipation Proclamation sufficiently assured Garibaldi of the war's anti-slavery credentials and he had recovered, the United States no longer felt a pressing need for his services. The Union War effort had come into the hands of generals such as Ulysses Grant. In case you were wondering, Grant biographer Marie Kelsey has put up this impassioned defense of Grant's alcoholism as an apocryphal smear campaign created by jealous rivals in the military and contains more information a person would ever want to know about Ulysses Grant's drinking habits, a goal of gung-ho revisionism:

Here then is a humble and modest man who had but one goal, that of saving the Union. And he accomplished this goal! The debt owned him by this country can never be repaid, except by everlasting honor and respect. That respect can be bestowed by eliminating the "drinking comments" from conversation about Ulysses S. Grant and by eradicating that image from the American consciousness. Grant deserves nothing less. Through the technological marvel of the Internet the U.S. Grant Network is working ceaselessly toward achieving that goal!

A WRIGLEY FIELD DOOM FORTRESS FIELD TRIP

This Lincoln talk brings us to the upcoming game against the University of Illinois in the annual Land of Lincoln Rivalry Showdown. The game has attracted national attention because it is being held at the Purple Confines of Wrigley Field, bringing ESPN's Gameday crew, and attracting a festive, bowl-like atmosphere to add to the traditional overwhelming interest across the Big Ten and all of college football for how this game will play out.

Vandals from the Athletic Department took the Paint the Town
Purple Campaign from several years ago to its logical conclusion

Wrigley Field is my favorite sports venue, so I'm naturally over the moon to see it deployed for Northwestern purposes. Of course, Wrigley is no longer designed for football since the days when it served as the Bears' home stadium before they moved to Soldier Field in 1971. Instead, the east endzone crams up against the padded Ivy, leading to criticism of the field as less than ideal for football, beginning a snowball of warnings about the dangers of the field to the point where one expected a description of how the east endzone wall was now being used to guard Mayan idols from treasure hunters and grave robbers.

Multifarious dangers lurk in the East End Zone

In a bold step, Big Ten officials announced today that the field would only use the West endzone, allowing the East to lay fallow as grass grows on the blood of lesser football teams. This change makes sense; no one wants to see players catching touchdown passes only to be tackled by a brick wall, and the shifting of all play to a single endzone won't really change the complexion of the game much unless you paid for bleacher seats in right field. Obviously, no one consulted noted Wrigley Field safety expert Ozzie Guillen to also make light of terrifying dangers such as crumbling concrete blocks and large aggressive, rodents. If anything, single end zone adds to the carnival-like atmosphere of the game, giving the forbidden end zone an air of menace that curses all players who break its harrowing plane for all eternity with football-related plagues such as fumbilitis, alligator arms, jock itch, and sexual-assault allegations.

THE ACTUAL FOOTBALL GAME: KEEP THE HAT IN EVANSTON

The Illini have continued their struggles under Ron Zook, becoming the first Big Ten team to succumb to the hapless Minnesota Golden Gophers last week. The Illini have looked formidable on defense at times this season and will be looking to contain Evan Watkins, who replaces Persa. One concern about the game is how Watkins will respond to being thrust unexpectedly into action. In the past, Fitzgerald has gone ultra-conservative with back-up quarterbacks. Two years ago, Kafka spent most of the time running the Kafka Smash play instead of passing when he filled in for the injured Bachér (which worked as he broke the Big Ten single game rushing record), and last year Persa rarely threw when he filled in for Kafka, with the notable exception of his TD pass against Iowa. Northwestern has not had much success running the ball this season and has lived by the short passing game, so it will be interesting to see how much they let Watkins air it out.

For Zook, this might be his last stand at the helm of the Illini. For Northwestern, another win would notch another eight win season, improve bowl positioning, and build momentum to ruin Wisconsin's BCS aspirations in the Madison tundra. That is, of course, assuming that both teams survive the death trap of Wrigley Fields ivy, log traps, and gigantic hall of mirrors installed earlier this week to confuse defenses as to who is the real quarterback. Hopefully, Northwestern seizes this rare opportunity as a game of national interest to affirm its status as a program on the rise and keep the hat in Evanston for another year until next year's game at a Schaumberg area Discovery Zone.

Iowa Week

2010-11-12T19:17:00.022-06:00

It's Iowa Week, and Wildcat fans are buzzing about the looming showdown with recent rivals from the Corn Capital coming in caravans and hoping to avenge Northwestern's consecutive upsets ending the Hawkeyes' Big Ten title hopes. It's been an interesting couple of weeks for Northwestern. Throughout the year, Northwestern has had trouble putting games away, really only beating ISU and Rice comfortably.

The game against Indiana naturally involved letting the Hoosiers back in when underrated Indiana QB Ben Chappell hit Duwyce Wilson to narrow the margin to three points. Of course, a Northwestern-Indiana close score is not a particular surprise to anyone paying attention to recent Northwestern/Indiana clashes, a section of the population limited to Northwestern fans, Indiana fans, and angry Big Ten Network subscribers who would ordinarily watch these teams play only if the game occurred on their front yard. These games always come down to the final moment, as if Northwestern and Indiana find themselves in a sort of football stalemate.

Experts on stalemate warfare: (left to right) Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, Field
Marshal Horatio Kitchener, the tyrant-Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Field Marshal
Paul von Hindenberg. In Britain, the war was frequently referred to in the
1920s and 1930s as the Great War, as a way of describing the mustaches of
all participants political and military. The exception, of course, was
Woodrow Wilson, whom I suspect remained clean-shaven to avoid association
with the greatest conflict of mustachioed persons in the history of humanity,
a tactic that certainly hurt his 1916 rival Charles Evans Hughes (far right)

With the victory over Indiana, Northwestern took its bowl eligibility swagger into Happy Valley and played 29 minutes of inspired football. Instead of discussing the Wildcats' painful collapse at the hands of the ageless Paterno, why not take a gander at this germane video presentation that essentially boils the second half of the game into less than four minutes.

Congratulations to Joe Paterno on his astounding 400th win and mastery of
gestures used solely to demonstrate an intense hatred of snakes. HE HATES THEM

FIST SHAKING

The official BYCTOM position on fist shaking in American political discourse is very clear: politicians should do everything they can to get rid of inferior, meeker, and more television-friendly gestures such as the Bill Clinton button thumb, and return to angrily shaking their fists in the direction of their opponent in order to demonstrate derision at their positions and the dire danger that opposition policies will rain down upon the nation. Note that I'm not advocating a Ukrainian-style legislative riot (kudos to the clever deployment of umbrellas into impromptu egg and debris shields); speakers' fists should abuse only air molecules or possibly comical effigies of political rivals.

Progressive Wisconsin Governor and later senator Robert LaFollette was a master at using his fists for political purposes. Though he earned the nickname "Fighting Bob" for his tenacious pursuit of reform and dogged anti-corruption efforts, it's also apt for his pugilistic speaking style.

The most impressive thing about LaFollette's fist-shaking is that in two
pictures to the right, including the impressive double-barreled action
at the end, LaFollette deploys his fists on the radio, the medium
traditionally most resistant to fist-shaking

LaFollette is an impressive figure in terms of being able to dish out a fist shaking as well as take one. I'll let the author of LaFollette's wikipedia page explain:

After the speech, Senators Frank B. Kellogg (Minn.), Joseph Taylor Robinson (Arkansas), and Albert B. Fall (N.M.) in turn attacked La Follette's position on the war. Senator Robinson was a combative and fiercely partisan defender of Wilson and the Democratic Party. His speech "synthesized the scattered attacks on La Follette that had been filtering in for seven months...as the speech progressed, he became more agitated and abusive. The virulence of Robinson's attack shocked the floor and galleries into complete silence." A United Press correspondent described Robinson's speech as "the most unrestrained language that ever has been heard in the Senate." La Follette sat motionless in his chair, even when Robinson began shaking his fist at him.

The attack came because of misconstrued reports of a LaFollette speech defending the sinking of the Lusitania. In onerous minutes of online searching, I have not successfully located a transcript of Robinson's comments, although evidently he insinuated that LaFollette harbored a loyalty to the hated Kaiser himself, an excellent tactic used to discredit so many American politicians that have used stump speeches as an opportunity to assure constituents of their unswerving dedication to hated foreign monarchs and pledged to work tirelessly to see voters crushed under said monarch's bootheels.

JOUSTING

I always support the inane movement to designate official state things (for example, Illinois's official state dance is the square dance, state fossil is the tully monster, and official type of municipal voter fraud is use of the deceased), so I've always been moderately fascinated that Maryland's official sport is jousting. One would think that the sport went back to some sort of colonial method of feud settlement as practiced by legendary Marylanders such as Lord Baltimore or Omar, eventually evolving in the nineteenth century and codified into a less lethal version much like how modern cockfights include full medical inspections and tiny beak guards. Instead, the joust became the official sport in 1962 encouraged by a group of equestrian enthusiasts enamored with the idea of crowns and pointy maiden hats and left in a helpless situation because Medieval Times had yet to be invented.

From the Maryland Jousting Tournament Association, a photo (left) of a the triumphant
announcement of the adoption of jousting as official state sport. (Right) A depiction of
the type of behind the scenes manipulation, and use of doubloons used to pass the motion
through the intrigue-inundated Maryland state legislature of the 1960s described by a
contemporary local reporter as:
"that nest of the damn'd/the vile reprobate/
A scoundrel's abode/where the rogues machinate/
I bet a few of them are commies"

Unfortunately, Maryland jousting is not a bloody spectacle of impalement. Instead, jousters use their lance-like poles to snare hanging rings, in much the same way that medieval knights would thunder through European countrysides ridding the land of tree-dwelling pests.

Unfortunately for famous joust victim Henry II of France, the
Lord Lorges did not abide by the Maryland Joust Association's
promise to "ENJOY WITH US THE MODERN TREND, WHERE
RINGS ARE SPEARED INSTEAD OF FRIENDS"

IOWA PREVIEW

Iowa comes into town looking for revenge from last year's BCS-busting loss to Northwestern in Iowa City, dropping a second consecutive home game to the 'Cats. Northwestern again represents a classic trap game for Iowa as they host Ohio State next week. But as ESPN's Adam Rittenberg reports, Iowa won't be looking past the Wildcats after recent trouble beating them. As Rittenberg points out, Fitz is 3-1 against the Hawkeyes, and since 2002, Northwestern has accounted for three of Iowa's ten home losses.

This decade, Northwestern and Iowa have split the series 4-4,
evidently as evenly-matched as these large-hatted women
squaring off in late nineteenth century Australia in a type of
fighting which I would like to coin as fancy-boxing. I think the
woman in white has the clearcorner advantage by looking at the
tale of the tape:

(source: The Powerhouse Museum, Haymarket New South Wales)

I like that there is some genuine passion in this rivalry, with Iowa fans reacting to each loss like a Gruber Brother being continually informed of John McClane's incessant survival as they climb to higher levels on the Heston Scale of incredulity (incidentally, the highest Heston scale rating I can find recently is in the trailer for the Russell Crow Robin Hood movie showcasing a blood-curdling "I DECLARE HIM TO BE AN OUTLAW" outburst. I haven't seen this movie, but I have a hard time believing anything else that happens in it can be better than that).

Traditionally, visitors to Ryan field view Northwestern as either a minor speed bump on the way to a showdown with a fellow title contender or a winnable game in the quest for bowl eligibility; it certainly is a change of pace for a team that actually wants to beat Northwestern for the sake of beating Northwestern, to direct a fist pump at Pat Fitzgerald rather be on the receiving end of it, to tear fans' fancy cummerbunds asunder and grind their monocles into dust. It should be an atmosphere approximating that of a Big Ten game in Evanston.

On paper, of course, Iowa has the edge. The Hawkeyes have an excellent defense, an underrated running game to test a vulnerable Northwestern run defense, and a quarterback in Ricky Stanzi having a spectacular year; Northwestern has looked very vulnerable against some very bad teams. On the other hand, I'm going to say throw out the record books. Go ahead and print out a list of every game Northwestern has ever played against Iowa starting with their first contest in 1897 when the rules of football included outmoded features such as pistol duels, knuckle dusters, and used cockfighting in lieu of a coin toss and then throw that stack of paper outside of the nearest window. The Wildcats have had no business beating Iowa most of the time in the Kirk Ferentz era, so hopefully Northwestern will finally be able to put a complete Big Ten game together and continue to inexplicably dominate in this underrated rivalry.

Debacle Trojan Style

2010-10-28T22:03:00.014-05:00

Last Saturday, the Wildcats channeled former head coach Dennis Green in an excruciating loss to Big Ten front-runners Michigan State. Thoughts about State were proven correct. Hooks were let off. Asses may possibly have been crowned.

Although Northwestern fans might react to the game by gnashing their teeth and thrashing their footmen (the old gnash and thrash is a Northwestern tradition), I suggest they stay their hands, their canes, and their sharpened monocles. The Wildcats looked very good against a legitimate Big Ten title contender and have traditionally finished strong in the Pat Fitzgerald era. In particular, the emergence of freshmen Venric Mark, Rashard Lawrence, and Adonis Smith are encouraging, not least because an outstanding game from Smith has crusty sports editors on high pun alert.

A consortium of sports editors stand at the ready to
deploy Adonis-related headlines comparing the
Wildcat running back to the mythical figure
conceived by some sort of combination of incest and
trees

DIABOLICAL TRICKS

The turning point of the game came on a Michigan State fake punt in which the Spartan offense took a delay of game penalty to disguise their duplicitous intentions, then had the punter heave a strike to a wide-open receiver. Dantonio masterminded a similar trick play against Notre Dame earlier this season. It is no fun to be the victim of a trick play, but losing a football game is a minor consequence compared to some more underhanded trickery. You could, for example, find yourself stranded in a jungle on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras with only your wits and piles of the nineteenth century equivalent of arcade tokens.

That is what happened to the victims of Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish adventurer who managed to sell off large parcels of prime coastal real estate to hopeful would-be colonists whose adventure soured when they realized that the country they had hoped to colonize did not technically exist.

Gregor MacGregor (left), shared with Lord Gordon-Gordon a penchant for
redundantly-named Scottish swindlery, although he came by his name
honestly. Gordon-Gordon was one of many aliases for a nineteenth
century confidence man who also went by Lord Glencairn and the
Honourable Herbert Hamilton

MacGregor was a military adventurer at a time when one could simply traipse over to the Western Hemisphere and start annexing territory with nary an admonishment. MacGregor successfully raised enough money and men to fulfill the reasonable dream of invading Florida in 1817 to remove it from the yoke of Spanish oppression. Instead, he spent the money, his men deserted and he mustered only enough of a force to take Amelia Island (off the coast of Florida near present-day Jacksonville) and set up a republic under the charge of Louis-Michel Aury, who had been building his leadership credentials by running a nest of pirates out of Galveston. The island fell to the United States several months later as part of the U.S. campaign to seize East Florida.

Florida divided into East and West in 1810 during the reign of Napoleon's
brother Joseph over Spain. By the time of the U.S. took over Florida in 1819,
Bourbon Monarch Ferdinand VII (right) had taken over. Ferdinand,
imprisoned for six years during the Napoleonic rule of Spain, fell again to a
coup in 1820, before coming back to power after which, in the words of the
author of his wikipedia page, "he revenged himself with a ferocity which
disgusted his far from liberal allies." The same page notes that he later
became "torpid, bloated and unpleasant to look at" which is sort of a default
Bourbon monarch setting

But MacGregor's greatest coup came after his return to Britain in 1820. There, he ingratiated himself into the horse-racing, muttonchop-growing, rabble-scattering, society types and began telling people that he had become Cacique (prince) of the Principality of Poyais off the coast of Honduras by the blessing of King Frederic Augustus II of the Mosquito Shore. He published a book describing the region as developed and friendly to British settlement and began selling land to colonists eager to live in this earthly paradise.

In 1822 and 1823, two ships full of would-be settlers left for Poyais, but instead of a glistening settlement friendly to the British, they found a jungle friendly mainly to tropical disease and the occasional hermit and nowhere to redeem their worthless Poyais dollars. The wretched survivors escaped on a ship that had come to give gifts to Frderic Augustus (or, as contemporary documents referred to him, the Mosquito King) to Belize. This document is chock-full of details of the Poyasian scheme, with transcripts from a lawsuit against the British Honduran authorities accusing them of seizing property from the Poyais settlers. It not only serves as virtual handbook of eighteenth century synonyms for wretchedness, but also serves as a handbook of miscellaneous Poyasian documents.

A copy of the oath to be taken by Poyasians to swear
loyalty to MacGregor. Other correspondence in the
Proceedings reveals that MacGregor took, among
his various bogus royal titles, the wonderful alias
Baron Tinto

Undaunted, MacGregor attempted to run the same Poyasian scheme in France, this time calling in the big guns by turning to someone actually named Gustavus Butler Hippisley. The alert French authorities, curious as to why French citizens were attempting to obtain documents to travel to a country that as far as they could tell did not exist, halted the expedition and arrested MacGregor associates including Hippisley and eventually MacGregor himself. Still undeterred, MacGregor continued to fashion Poyasian constitutional documents and sell Poyais-related land and stock until the lat 1830s. The most fascinating part of the story is his investment in the fictional land of Poyais; it seemed not to occur to him that after being caught in a grandiose scheme of making up a country, he could just as easily pull another fake country out of thin air without having to deal with the baggage of the Poyasian legacy of not being a place on the surface of this planet, Earth.

OTHER FRAUD

Perhaps the greatest British confidence man was William Chaloner, a forger, counterfeiter, and purveyor of dildos in late seventeenth century London. Chaloner excelled in three main schemes: counterfeiting coins, fabricating Jacobite plots in order to muster government rewards, and turning on associates. Chaloner was not shy about becoming an informant about criminal schemes which he was involved in just before the authorities came in; he named names, he blackmailed accusers, and he funded whimsical bucolic holidays for witnesses that could finger him.

This would normally be the part of the story where I describe how Chaloner went too far and crossed the Royal Mint, but I don't think it was possible for Chaloner to go too far. It's not as if he was some sort of scheming heist mastermind planning one job at a time. Instead, Chaloner existed as the eye of a whirlwind of spectacularly multifaceted and continuous criminal activity on a remarkable scale, and his undoing came from circumstances leading him into the crosshairs of a Sir Isaac Newton.

A BYCTOM estimation of a typical week of Chaloner activity

Newton ran afoul of Chaloner when he became warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 with the job of investigating counterfeiting. He broke up a machine coining operation and arrested one of Chaloner's associates. Chaloner attempted to infiltrate the Mint himself by cooking up false conspiracies of corruption among Mint officials, going so far to name one of his own aliases as a co-conspirator in a flamboyant display of criminal confidence. While gallivanting around Parliament, denouncing schemes that he would certainly take part in if he got a job at the Mint, Newton recognized him as a counterfeiting suspect. By 1699, Newton swore to take Chaloner down and recruited an underworld network of spies and Chaloner associates. Chaloner deployed an unstoppable three-step defense: feigning madness, peppering all particpants in the trial with a barrage of insults, and finally claiming that his operations fell outside of the court's London jurisdiction. He was hanged.

LOOKING TOWARDS THE HOOSIERS

Northwestern will be looking for redemption and continuing a quixotic quest for bowl eligibility on Saturday against Indiana. The Hoosiers will test Northwestern's defense with their prolific offense, and hopefully Pat Fitzgerald will test the Hoosiers with a variety of trick plays and confidence schemes that will baffle the Indiana defense and defraud supporters. When the dust settles, Wildcat fans will be hoping that no one will be who anyone thought they were, there will be no hooks for anyone to be let off of, and asses will remain blissfully crownless.

Michigan State Preview

2010-10-21T21:11:00.015-05:00

The Wildcats are looking for redemption after a loss to a gutty, injury-ravaged Purdue squad, the Spartans are looking to remain undefeated and looking toward a Big Ten championship run, Coach Fitz is looking for a sixth win, bowl birth, and an upset, Coach Dantonio is looking for a return to the sidelines after recovering from a heart attack, orphan Timmy is looking for a father figure he never knew, wealthy industrialist R. Pickering Fossbottle is looking for the child he never knew he wanted, young Maude Fossbottle is looking for love in all of the wrong places, and everyone is looking for priceless artifacts from the Orient before it's stolen by a Peter Lorre type.

A lot is at stake.

Fitz makes the long hitchhike from Ryan Field after the gutting
loss to Purdue

The Wildcats have not won convincingly against an FBS team with the exception of Rice. On the other hand, the Spartans have beaten Notre Dame, Wisconsin, a resurgent Michigan team, and frisky Illinois. Of course, it would be foolhardy to assume a Michigan State win; Northwestern tends to surprise teams and it's hard to count out an offense led by Dan Persa. This has the makings of a potential trap game for Michigan State as they look forward to a big game in Iowa City.

The Wildcats prefer getting a drop on unsuspecting
opponents, as demonstrated by these Hessian reenactors
expertly recreating a drop-gotten-on scenario

Northwestern will have to repel an overwhelming force, much like the Syracusians attempting to hold off the Romans in the Siege of Syracuse. The Romans came by sea with the sambuca, which was not a polite gift of occasionally flaming liqueur, but the less polite siege machine used to quickly enable soldiers to climb from ships onto fortress walls and begin stabbing everyone in sight. Syracuse was famously defended by mathematician Archimedes with mirror-driven heat rays of dubious historical authenticity and the Archimedes Claw, the result of an experiment gone wrong resulting in him growing a giant claw instead of a left arm that he used to shake menacingly at the advancing Roman soldiers and snap at anyone that attempted to interfere with his circles.

Attempts to replicate the effect of the Archimedes heat ray have had mixed results on
models of Roman ships, but have elsewhere proven to be devastating

RETURN OF REX

Bears fans will get to see Rex Grossman make an emotional return to Soldier Field with the Redskins this weekend. According to this Tribune article, Grossman expects to be booed should he manage to get into the game, get shown on the JumboTron, or attempt to fling his clipboard downfield after getting confused and thinking that he saw Bernard Berrian running straight ahead wide open. But why would Bears fans boo Rex, the only quarterback to take the Bears to the Superbowl without the aid of flashy message-bearing headbands? I can understand the enmity of Bears fans against Grossman if he had walked around the city scattering citizens with a cane in the haughty Hohenzollern manner of Frederick William I, or bulldozed "Rex Rules OK" into the Meigs Field runways, or pillaged the Field Museum of priceless Egyptian artifacts so he could walk around dressed like Batman villain King Tut with impunity, but he did none of those things as far as I am aware. Instead he merely fit into the Bears tradition of underwhelming quarterbacks, albeit with a particular flair for ineptitude.

In order to properly give Rex his due, here's eight sincere minutes of Rex Grossman highlights set to "Eye of the Tiger."

Bears fans should celebrate both the highs of the Grossman era and the myriad comical
ways that opponents relieved him of the ball

BEGIN THE QUADE ERA

The after months of uncertainty, politicking, intrigue, and the interference of the House of Bourbon, the Cubs have picked a successor to Lou Piniella. The new manager, chosen to trade fame and fortune for a Job-like existence at the helm of a team destined for eternal failure while enduring the jibes of angry fans and a vicious media is Mike Quade. Quade, who spent most of his career in the minor leagues, is best described by the phrase "grizzled baseball lifer" and that is not merely a cliche; expect Quade to erect his own thatch dugout, make his own tobacco juice, and trump all comers in locker room scar-sharing exhibitions.

The Cubs will be less fun to follow without Lou Piniella. Stats-minded baseball fans have raised questions about the importance of managers, many of whom can be argued to do more harm than good by putting hitters unable to get on base in the leadoff position because they are fast, call for unnecessary bunts, make curious pitching decisions, bench promising young players in favor of underperforming veterans, and engage in futile micromanagement for the sake of micromanagement. Of course, that does not take into consideration important motivational ploys such as walking around naked and creating provocative posters of any former showgirl owners. Piniella, of course, excelled at getting angry at umpires, developing the optimal body shape for bellying up to them and taking advantage of having a profession allowing him to scream at people three inches from their face and throw things with impunity. Lou's managerial rapping skills, however, are more dubious.

Lou makes an impassioned demand about either the strike zone
or free silver coinage

TOSSERS

If there's one thing that careful study of European history has demonstrated, it is that aristocrats default to two behaviors: leading armies of musket-wielding infantry against each other and killing animals for their amusement. It was not enough to hunt animals; instead they decided to fling them about their courtyards in the brutal sport of fox tossing. Foxes or other small animals would scurry around a fox tossing arena while hopeful tossers stood about with cloth bands draped on the ground. When the animal found itself on top of a band, the participants would stretch it, catapulting animals into the air and competing for the highest toss. Noted fox tossing enthusiast Augustus the Strong (also apparently nicknamed as "Iron Hand" and "The Saxon Hercules" by an early modern Bruce Buffer equivalent) would toss with a only a single finger.

A gleeful tossing from 1719. Augustus II of Saxony (right) managed his impressive
feats of strength before the invention of the single-strap unitard

The fox tossing wikipedia page is full of helpful notes about this cultured practice, such as "The Swedish envoy Esaias Pufendorf, witnessing a fox-tossing contest held in Vienna in March 1672, noted in his diary his surprise at seeing the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold Icourt dwarfs and boys in clubbing to death the injured animals...". Boars were apparently more hazardous "to the great delectation of the cavaliers, but to the terror of the noble ladies, among whose hoop-skirts the wild boars committed great havoc, to the endless mirth of the assembled illustrious company."

Big Ten Home Opener

2010-10-07T22:38:00.015-05:00

Northwestern hung in there in a tense win against Minnesota, battling not only the Gophers, but a litany of turnovers, special teams miscues and thoughtless penalties, similar how the French and British faced not only the fearsome forces of the Tsar but also the true winner of the Crimean War: cholera.

This website identifies the soldier
pictured as Colour Sergeant "Willie"
McGregor of the Scots Fusilier Guards
modeling a uniform meant to evoke
the sentient mound of hair look that
fell out of favor in British military
uniforms but later became de rigueur
for Joe Cocker's back-up band

The game must have been an infuriatingly frustrating loss for Gopher fans already disillusioned with the Brewster era and I'm tempted to feel sorry for them except that this is the Big Ten so not only do I feel no pity for down on their luck programs unable to defeat the Wildcats, but I fully expect the NU Athletic Department to sack the offices of their counterparts in a demonstration of merciless bureaucracy and carry off their valuable spices from the Orient away on ships cleverly named "The Marriageable Daughters" because that would sure confuse the barbaric raiding parties involved in this analogy that is finishing up right here at the end of this sentence.

PURDUE PREVIEW

The 'Cats open up under the lights at Ryan Field against a battered Purdue squad attempting to prove false the common medical assumption that knee injuries are not contagious. The Boilermakers were attempting to turn this season around and produce a winning season for second-year head coach Danny Hope. Even if this season does not pan out, Hope has plenty of opportunity to build a winner at Purdue for obvious reasons.

Fig. 1

On paper, Northwestern should have the advantage over this injury-ravaged squad, but we can throw out the record books because it's Big Ten Football under the lights and the last annual meeting of these two squads in an Inexplicably Protected Rivals Showdown. Next year, Northwestern and Purdue will of course be separated into two divisions, but I contend that it will only marinate this bitter rivalry between two conference rivals whose mutual antipathy dates back to the time some Big Ten official decided that we should play each other all of the time and not even dignify the game with some sort of embarrassing knick-knack trophy featuring a hat, a medieval weapon, or the contents of Joe Paterno's desk circa 1967.

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

The Bears game last Sunday night was spectacular for fans of sacks, concussions, and ineptitude, spear-headed by the matadoric offensive line gracefully stepping out of the way of onrushing defensive linemen that clumsily crashed again and again into Jay Cutler.

Cutler showed a need to spend more time working
on fleeing for his life drills such as the one shown
above from training camp in Bourbonnais

The Bears announced today that Todd Collins is starting, joining the endless list of random quarterbacks who have started for the Bears including Moses Moreno, Craig Krenzel, Henry Burris, Jonathan Quinn, Kordell Stewart, Adlai E. Stevenson, Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna, Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan, Abe Froman, and Bonesaw McGraw. If anything, the Bears have been an entertaining team this season either by winning through nonsensical referee pedantics, an absurd flurry of opponent penalties, or losing in a way reminiscent of falling victim to the diabolical and unethical nosetackle dive play in Tecmo Super Bowl. The only reliable thing we've learned about the Bears this season is that overwrought post-game radio shows have convinced me that the phrase "nine sacks in da first half" is a surprisingly reliable Chicago accent shibboleth.

LET'S HAVE THOSE XYLOPHONES PLAY US OUT

There's a dearth in popular mallet-percussion bands barnstorming around the country these days performing jaunty tunes for our amusement, so fortunately we have a relic of happier times with Reg Kehoe and His Marimba Queens. I'm greatly disappointed to live in a time where the odds of someone existing named "Reg Kehoe" are remote enough, let alone someone with that name in charge of an all-female Marimba band. Take a look at this 1940 film clip featuring his song stylings, although the show is stolen by the flamboyant bassist flailing uncontrollably slightly out of sync with the music which makes it seems like he's whaling on an upright bass while an unrelated bass solo plays in the background in some sort of Roosevelt-era Millie Vanilli situation.

Fig. 2: Chart of Bassist Enthusiasm

One of the all-time great situations where a marimba takes over a song occurs in the Herb Alpert tune Tijuana Taxi that, interestingly enough, relies equally on helpless flailing to sell the song in what appears to an attempt to approach the platonic ideal of silly 1960s dancing. Serapes are also involved. This video is at least a step up from his attempt to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of capitalism by annoying hard-working instrument factory workers with a shockingly square version of the Nate Adderly classic Work Song (it does not hold a candle to the Oscar Brown, Jr. version where he's added lyrics such as "left the grocery store man bleeding/when he caught me robbing his store).

The dancers in the Tijuana Taxi video demonstrate one of three
possible dancing facial expressions: the frozen smile (designed to
cover up resentment at being forced to perform the jerk), intense
glowering, and, of course, relentless hunger for brains

Finally, enjoy a wonderful version of one my favorite tunes, The World is Waiting for the Sunrise performed by Benny Goodman while ignoring the vibraphone player's eerie resemblance to a gregarious, mallet-wielding Lenin.

NATIONAL RANKING

Northwestern's spotless record has earned it the #25 position in the Coach's Poll. A strong victory against Purdue will not only possibly move into a consensus ranking, but also make Northwestern technically bowl eligible before moving into a tough second half of the season. Hopefully, the Wildcats will defend Ryan Field from the Boilermakers and prevent any pillaging from the Purdue Athletic Department. Otherwise Northwestern will be forced to break out its toughest defense yet: typhus.

Nonconference Update

2010-09-30T20:27:00.016-05:00

Sometimes, time moves really fast and you wake up and realize that Northwestern is 4-0 against a challenging non-conference slate of mostly FBS teams, quarterback Dan Persa is looking like the best Northwestern signal caller since Otto Graham, and people in the nineteenth century continue to have comical facial hair.

A lot can happen when you're not paying attention

Northwestern survived a nailbiter against Vanderbilt, crushed Illinois State, dominated Rice, and played fairly decently against MAC powerhouse Central Michigan. It was very clear in each of those games that Coach Fitz and Mick McCall wanted to embrace the running game and it became clearer that running the ball might fall by the wayside alongside other foiled plans such as the Concert of Europe or reliable '80s movie villain William Atherton co-opting Val Kilmer's talent with lasers.

Viscount Castlereagh (left), a major voice in the development of the
post-Waterloo Congress system managed to survive a minor political
scandal when he shot rival and fellow cabinet minister George Canning
(the saucily-posed man at right) in a duel in a more civilized age when
politicians were able to cut through the red tape of political disagreement
with firearms. Much like Northwestern's non-conference schedule,
Castlereagh wisely chose an opponent that he could reasonably handle as
Canning had never before fired a pistol; likewise, Northwestern has not only
added ancient rival Chicago Dental back to its non-conference schedule but
is also scheduled to take on a local haberdashery and leading
representatives of the Bull Moose Party at Ryan Field next season.

GAME PREVIEW: MINNESOTA

Obviously the big story for Minnesota is whether or not the Gophers will rally around embattled coach Tim Brewster-- actually, I don't think the unnecessarily martial cliche "embattled" is strong enough for Brewster's position; "besieged" seems more appropriate or alternately "approximating the college football coaching version of the four seconds before a wild-eyed Mola Ram rips out one's heart in an underground amphiteater conveniently located above a giant pit of lava."

Mola Ram thought he got a good deal on Pankot Palace until he realized the upkeep cost
on miles of underground tunnels and shoddy plank bridges

From all accounts, Brewster's style is relentlessly positive, but he might have to assert himself more in order to prove to the school that he still has control of the locker room. Perhaps he can model himself after legendary Paraguayan General Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco who became known as El Supremo Dictador of Paraguay 1814 (from a time in the nineteenth century when it was perfectly acceptable to fashion oneself formally as a dictator and have it printed on nineteenth century business cards that one hands out while taunting other leaders at international conferences). According to his Wikipedia page, Francia's reign followed the modern dictator playbook to a T: becoming instrumental in tearing the country from the yoke of Spanish oppression, declaring oneself head of the national Church, closing the borders, antagonizing neighbors, and then coming up with increasingly spectacular demands such as personally conducting all weddings, declaring war on dogs, and demanding that citizens tip their hats to him when he passed or, if hatless, carry a hat brim for tipping purposes. Francia remained in power until 1840.

El Supremo assures you that if he
was not a dictator, he would not
have gotten away with that

The 'Cats will be hoping to take advantage of a discombobulated Minnesota squad on the cusp of a coaching coup and Gopher fans hope that they'll be able to turn around their disastrous start in conference play with a win.

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS OF INTEREST

I recently stumbled upon the miraculously thorough Sword Swallower's Hall of Fame, chronicling the greatest practitioners of this noble art. I have no proof, but I'm willing to wager that if it happened in sword swallowing in the last several hundred years, it appears on that website, with sections for performers with fantastic names like "Veno the Electric Sword Swallower," "The Yankee Yogi," and, tantalizingly, an entry referencing an 1867 work entitled "Bizarre Medical Abnormalities."

An 1899 poster of sword swallower
Chevalier Cliquot found on the Hall of Fame
website. As the poster demonstrates, the
Cliquot act evidently consisted of
swallowing multiple swords, balancing rifles
on his face, and modeling what I'm anxiously
hoping will soon become acceptable attire for
high-stakes business meetings or international
summits

Finally, readers need to be aware of this lost footage of a sadly abandoned Orson Welles project entitled "Orson Welles: the One Man Band" in which he plays a number of elderly and certainly gout-ridden members of a bygone London club. There's no audio on the club scene and I'm having trouble deciding whether that makes this more or less horrifying:

BIG TEN FOOTBALL

Northwestern will be hoping to start of Big Ten play with a big win in the Gopher state, avenging last year's loss and paving the way for a not entirely implausible shot at going 6-0 against the reeling Gophers and knee injury-ravaged Boilermakers. Even with a weak non-conference schedule, that would be quite a coup by Fitz and the team, one worth tipping one's cap or Francia-approved hat substitute to.

Opening Week

2010-09-02T19:09:00.008-05:00

Northwestern is careening into the beginning of football season as the Wildcats travel to SEC country to take on Vanderbilt. Northwestern has never beaten the Commodores, losing to them 0-3 in 1947 and tying them 20-20 in 1952. Teddy Greenstein's preview reveals a Vanderbilt squad riddled with enough injuries to resemble the crooked union P.OW. camp from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Robbie Caldwell taunts Fitzgerald by claiming that the
gangrene has eaten away his legs, not his eyes, before
despondently falling upon a rope-covered spirit.

Paul Myerberg at presnapread ranks Vanderbilt at 107 out of 120 teams, and that was before the unexpected retirement of Bobby Johnson in July and the spate of injuries. On the other hand, Vanderbilt has the upper hand in the crucial race to fill the ranks of the Chicago Bears with its players. The Commodores have five Bears: Jay Cutler, Chris Williams, Earl Bennett, Hunter Hillenmeyer and D.J. Moore, while the Wildcats are down to Nick Roach and Corey Wootton-- Brett Basanez, Eric Peterman, and Zeke Markshausen have all been purged from Halas Hall.

Brett Basanez with the Bears brain trust shortly before his
departure

CONFERENCE ALIGNMENTS ARE HERE

The Enormous Ten finally announced its divisions, putting Northwestern into annual contests with Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Michigan State, and Michigan. Obviously, the most important thing to consider is the degree of Northwestern antipathy and by that degree the schedule is adequate, preserving the recent rivalry with Iowa, the inexplicable protected rivalry with Michigan State, and allowing a yearly face off with Michigan, which is not a direct Northwestern rival as much as the Scourge of the Big Ten, Rich Rodriguez's recent failures be damned.

Northwestern Conference Antipathy Scale. The
Y-Axis is in Piniellas, the world's angriest
unit

Fortunately, the Big Ten has chosen to protect the Land of Lincoln rivalry game with Illinois, as Abraham Lincoln would surely appreciate the spirit of two feuding parts of Illinois, much like the friendly rivalry that developed between Northern and Southern states during his presidency. Of course, realignment is for the football-less abyss of the offseason. Why worry about 2011 when it is scant days before Northwestern football players will run repeatedly into Vanderbilt football players for our amusement?

I'll tell you who isn't thinking about
realignment: Mike Hankwitz, here shown
graduating from the Patrick Fitzgerald
Fist Pump Academy

UPDATE ON MODERN BRITISH POLITICS

Today is also noteworthy for the release of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's memoir's entitled A Journey, inadvertently starting an inevitable rash of litigation with the future estate of Steve Perry. Critics have questioned the timing of the release shortly before a crucial Labour election to select the new leader of its party from an ever-increasing number of Milliband brothers. More importantly, it features anecdotes about Prince Charles fearing former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's menacing crotch-pointing, which he suspected was a gesture of class enmity. That link is definitely worth clicking as it contains video of Prescott's frank exchange of punches with an egg-throwing protester, in which Blair provides a startlingly accurate assessment of the incident:

The egg was funny. The mullet was funny. The left hook was funny. The expressions on both their faces were funny.

HYMENOPTERA ASIDE

In 1957, Warwick E. Kerr, an unassuming bee expert in Brazil, accidentally let 26 Tanzanian queen bees escape from his apiary. Before anyone could do anything about it (one imagines a Brazilian bee war room, where chain-smoking, horn-rimmed scientists in their shirt sleeves pounded helplessly upon their slide rules and pushed around plastic models of honeycombs), the queens had mated with local bee populations creating a terrifying swarm of killer bees. The panic over killer bees caused the release of no less than three killer bee movies from 1967-1978, or, as it is known in Hollywood, the golden age of killer bee movies. These movies came out of a place of scientific curiosity-- for example, the 1976 TV movie The Savage Bees posits what effect a swarm of killer bees would have on Mardis Gras (apparently deleterious), 1968's The Deadly Bees asks whether it would be problematic if a mean-spirited woman gained psychic control over killer bees, and 1978's The Swarm raises the question of whether or not Michael Caine needed a new boat.

G.O.B. is not on board

How much would a killer bee sting hurt? Thankfully, entomologist Justin O. Schmidt has compiled the Schmidt Sting Pain Index to answer your question of whether you would rather be assaulted by a marauding fire ant or a bald-faced wasp. For the sake of science, Schmidt let himself be stung by 78 different species of hymenoptera (the order including bees, wasps, ants, and sawflies) and came up with this agonizingly descriptive list of sting sensations:

1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

Don't be fooled by the rival Starr Sting Pain Scale, which also goes from 1 to 4, but lacks panache to let you know whether or not a hornet sting feels like being worked over by a neighborhood street tough dancing triumphantly over your prone, bleeding body in front of your friends and loved ones or running, arms akimbo and hair aflame, from the results of a collision between trucks carrying propane and toy car friction motors.

WEEK ONE

The Wildcats are looking to a strong non-conference performance in order to make it to an unprecedented third bowl game in this last season of this eleven-strong, Nebraskaless Big Ten. Vanderbilt might be suffering from injuries, but they're at home with something to prove for new coach Caldwell and will be seeking to swarm the Wildcats with their relentless defense. The Wildcats look forward to the beginning of the Dan Persa era. Starting the season with a loss would certainly register on the football fan equivalent of the Schmidt Scale or, as Schmidt himself might put it, would feel like being pummeled by a large number of pool noodles which causes you to think, hey, this isn't bad because by Schmidt Scale standards these should be covered in some sort of caustic blistering agent, but really it's to lure you into a false sense of security before being riven in all directions by an unseen assortment of construction equipment.

Hey, it's almost football season

2010-08-08T20:33:00.017-05:00

August for Chicago sports is in the doldrums, with the Cubs fighting to finish above the hapless Astros. The only thing worth watching is the restarting of the inevitable Zambrano meltdown cycle of yelling, apologizing, anger management, vows to stop getting so angry, and everything building up again to the point where he crosses the line and attempts to wield Mike Fontenot like a weapon.

The odds of this graphic coming out again were approximately
equivalent to the odds of nineteenth century Parisians throwing
up the barricades. According to Ohio University's
Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions, the barricades went up in Paris's
east side no less than eight times between 1827 and 1848, the latter
revolution which targeted, one assumes from the painting on the
book cover on the right, a hated Bourbon Ministry to Prevent
People from Sporting Insane Hats

Meanwhile the Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks have been dumping players left and right in order to adhere to the NHL's draconian salary cap restrictions, losing key supporting players such as goalie Antti Niemi, center John Madden, speed demon Kris Versteeg, and, most tragically, cement-mixter Dustin Byfulgien who will now be subjected to awkward Pierre McGuire interviews in Atlanta.

Thankfully, the Wildcat football team returns to practice this week, attempting to go for an unprecedented third bowl in a row and claw to the top of the soon-to-be obsolete eleven member Big Ten conference (I suppose we've lived long enough with the brain-jarring fiction that a conference called the Big Ten has more than ten teams, but I demand an indication that there are more teams in it next year-- anything less than the Enormous Ten is completely unacceptable and I recommend writing to your local congressperson to register your disgust at this potential outrage against pedantry).

In order to learn something about the actual Northwestern football team instead of a series of over-written run-on sentences that invariably end in a tired reference to mustaches or epaulets, why not check out Paul Myerberg's excellent in-depth preview where he has the Wildcats ranked #42 going into the season. You can tell that Myerberg has a greater insight than most national college football writers because the Wildcat preview is headed by a picture of Fitz in the middle of a furious fist pump.

Looking back to a golden era where politicians were not afraid of
fully shaking their fists in order to make a point, unlike the vastly
less satisfying thumb-button technique. On the left, Warren G.
Harding angrily asserts the etymological correctness of the word
"normalcy"

AMATEUR BASKETBALL

The basketball team was poised for its first NCAA tournament run by adding Kevin Coble to a team that nearly made it to the promised land last season. Instead, Coble has decided not to rejoin the team after foot surgery knocked him out of what was supposed to be his senior season. Although this news is disappointing to those looking forward to watching Coble on the floor with Shurna, Thompson, and Crawford as well as national fans of ungainly yet devastatingly effective jump-shooting, the silver lining for regular readers of this site is that they will now be free of references to an ill-advised attempt to nickname Coble "The Mantis" followed by thousands of words in a run-on sentence in defiance of good writing, grammar, and respect for the English language as a means of communication, instead bandying about semi-colons and commas in the manner of a lion tamer ineffectually brandishing a stool and whip against a lion that cannot possibly be impressed by such a useless display of anti-lion weaponry, and also including asides in the middle of a sentence such as the fact that the praying mantis may be the only example of an animal where one part of the name can be replaced with a homophone ("preying") and the description of the animal doesn't suffer one iota for it (off the top of my head, I can't think of another one-- for example "bawled eagle" does not even really make sense except to someone really intent on finding homophones for animal names which I would hope would only be a pastime for a wrongfully imprisoned Count as a diversion from endless vengeance fantasies), although one might wonder: will the Mantis mantle get passed to similarly spindly forward Shurna who will spearhead the Wildcat attack and simultaneously allow for more seemingly unending geysers of unreadable nonsense?

No.

Here's something completely unrelated: a study of the subgenre of music videos themed
around the premise "Arnold Schwarzenegger is at this concert and wielding weaponry"

Though the loss of Coble (and also Kyle Lowry, who transferred) will create a more challenging path to the tournament, the 'Cats still have the talented nucleus of Thompson, Shurna, and Crawford that nearly got them there last year and will hopefully remain based on making impossible yet timely 30-footers.

PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL

In other basketball news, the Bulls missed out on adding one of the big three free agents, but put together a good-looking team by acquiring Carlos Boozer, alliterative three point specialist Kyle Korver, C.J. Watson, Keith Thomas (not to be confused with former Bull malcontent Tim Thomas), and literal Young Turk Ömer Aşık to take a shot at the South Beach juggernaut in the Eastern Conference. Bulls fans will get to take a look at Aşık at the FIBA World Championships in Turkey at the end of this month. Of course, BYCTOM fully supports Turkish attempts to use mustaches to define political viewpoints. This 1998 BBC article alarmingly titled "Moustashes Under Threat" describes various styles of mustache that mark the wearer as a right-wing nationalist, old-fashioned leftist, intellectual, or someone "yearning for the Ottoman past." Chris Morris then drops the terrifying bomb that the Turkish government in 1998 had issued a troubling edict for civil servants that "specifies the exact length and shape of the bureaucratic brush - it has to be clipped straight, and it must end above the upper lip." Fortunately, this more recent article from Qantara is more reassuring, as correspondent Marielle Esvant reports on women attempting to break into Turkish politics:

To convey their message, the activists do not hesitate to burst onto political properties, brandishing moustaches and chanting the slogan 'Do you have to be a man to get in Parliament?'

I am in favor of any political movement or activity that encourages brandishing mustaches (in fact, until ten minutes ago, I was shamefully unaware that a mustache could actually be brandished and my life is now significantly richer) and hope that womens' political movements in other nations might co-opt, let's just reach for an example here from thin air, epaulets in order to shatter the glass ceiling.

In case the Bulls' season does not go as planned and ends in disappointment, Chicago basketball fans can be mollified by Jordan Challenge Mode in the NBA 2k11 videogame, where players get to humiliate digital versions of Craig Eloh, Clyde Drexler, and Greg Ostertag. The Jordan challenge is all well and good, but I would prefer if video game companies would focus on the more compelling elements of the 1990s Bulls.

Of course, for the post-Jordan era, we would all be playing Brad
Miller's Armpit Thunderdome

COUNTING DOWN

It's less than a month before the 'Cats kick off the season in Nashville to ruin the Commodores, so depress your fist buttons, throw up the barricades, and grow yourself an Istanbul-style mustache.

Mundial

2010-06-23T22:15:00.015-05:00

Global commerce has surely ground to a halt as people the world over are hunched in front of their computers, tantalized by the World Cup and paralyzed by indecision over which fist to shake in righteous slightly xenophobic sports anger (ergonomists would say to alternate except when you need double-barreled fist shaking action for particularly odious soccer-playing nations). The World Cup is by far the world's greatest sporting event, with the possible exception of September Northwestern games against uncomfortably plucky FCS teams under the watchful eyes of dozens of fans disguised cleverly as more than 17,000 by the Northwestern Ministry of Comical Soviet Statistics.

Comparison of Northwestern's reported home attendance for the
Towson game versus other important world phenomena. Note
that the Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling Competition and Wake
was canceled last year due to overcrowding after local officials
literally begged people not to attend. An unauthorized cheese
rolling took place to a crowd of only 500 rebellious cheese rolling
enthusiasts.

The Cup has provided plenty of drama so far, with late goals and goal differentials deciding who advances past the knockout stages while the rest of us hold our breath for a breathtaking FIFA lot-drawing ritual. The most entertaining part of the World Cup so far has been the Shakespearean collapse of the French team featuring a brooding madman, insults that are much funnier when comically translated into clumsy English (although nothing can top "I prefer the whore that is your sister" for inelegantly transcribed soccer-related zingers), the always crowd-pleasing division of the team into opposing camps, and the occult mystery of astrology.

The FFF has been blamed in keeping the despised Domenech around
because he carried the burden of the glorious French mustache
throughout his playing days. His reign bears certain similarities
to the also gloriously-mustachioed French President Jean Casimir-Perier,
who lasted only six months as president in 1894 before resigning, claiming
that he had been marginalized by the ministers who taunted him with
unnecessarily mean-spirited legislation such as "resolved: this legislature
moves to level the President's comically lopsided head"

Casimir-Perier only took the reigns of office because of the horrific assassination of Carnot, who I will venture to guess was the last modern head of state that was actually stabbed to death. Carnot found himself enmeshed in an endless whirlwind of anarchist vengeance. The whole episode stems from the guillotining of anarchist bomber Ravochol, which prompted a retaliatory bombing from another anarchist named Auguste Vaillant, who was then executed and avenged by bomber Émile Henry whose death along with Vaillant prompted Sainte Geronimo Caserio to take a dagger to President Carnot in an act of brutal simplicity that would have immensely frustrated a nineteenth century French version of Frederick Forsyth.

BIOPIRACY

It is time to turn from the depressing notion of anachronistic assassination techniques and turn to the far more exciting world of botanical piracy. In 1876, Henry Wickham returned from the Amazon with an unheralded find that would eventually give Britain control of the world's rubber supply and destroy the Brazilian economy. That find was 70,000 seeds of the hevea brasiliensis plant, the world's most bountiful rubber tree.

Joe Jackson's The Thief at the End of the World describes Wickham as a sort of bumbling over-eager botanical agent working for a sinister Kew Gardens hell-bent on gaining control over valuable plants the world over (of course, as far as I'm aware, Kew is no longer an international center of botanical intrigue; the only piracy there is the ridiculous demand of £13 just to get in the place). Jackson excellently evokes the Amazon as a vast cornucopia of horrible tropical illnesses and incessant attacks from tiny organisms that live only to attack or lay eggs in the last places that a human would ever want eggs planted by anything. Wickham's act of piracy itself involved a rather disappointing lack of swashbuckling, as he managed to successfully secret the seeds onto a fortuitously empty freighter-- unlike the gloriously apocryphal Robert Louis Stevenson pirates who menaced people with an eighteenth century Cockney argot or even submarine-using South American drug navies, Wickham's theft involved a lot more monitoring of moisture levels than the futuristic Johnny Mnemonic theatrics that the term "biopiracy" would suggest.

It would in fact be even more shocking if a
nineteenth century person who gained notoriety
for practicing devious botany did not have a
spectacular mustache

Wickham never gained much financially from transporting rubber trees and spent his life moving increasingly to the fringes of the British Empire in a perpetual state of financial ruin. The seeds he brought back eventually became forests in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), while any attempts to tame the rubber tree in the Amazon fell into ruin. The most amazing attempt came from Henry Ford, who purchased 2.5 million acres of rainforest in order to create a massive rubber plantation that he humbly named Fordlandia. In typical Ford fashion, he sought not only to turn the chaos of the Amazon into an efficient natural factory, but also make it a vast city where he could mold workers into his idea of moral and model employees. Inspired by its vast success in the United States, Ford instituted prohibition in his borders; workers and locals cleverly circumvented this by erecting a series of taverns, brothels, and other houses of vice just outside Ford's jurisdiction and hilariously named it the Island of Innocence.

However, the best part of the book is a barely mentioned aside discussing Wickham's family. His great-grandfather, a minor aristocrat, lost his estate due to royal treachery. The comically villainous George IV, who spent most of his adult life as the Prince of Wales fending off his father's bouts of insanity and iron will to live, dealt with his position by becoming a bloated, gout-ridden pox on British society. In this case, the Wickham ancestor foolishly made a wager with the Prince on a horse, in a time when horse racing was so spectacularly crooked that skill in picking the ponies more often than not corresponded directly to skill in hiring unsavory underlings that could most successfully cheat. The Prince's men put weights in the jockey's pockets; even though the cheating was discovered before the race, the hapless punter was done in by either misfortune or, as I would wager, some other sort of undiscovered skulduggery such oat manipulation or using horse psychiatry to rob the horse of its equine self-confidence. The details of the race were published in Gentleman's Magazine, a publication that no doubt prided itself on showing different ways to cheat at horseracing until two people were forced to shoot each other in the most dignified and civilized way possible.

Both George Cruikshank (left) and James Gillroy portrayed George IV as
a corpulent, scheming Jabba the Hutt-like figure, with the title of
Gillroy's painting effective eulogizing the hefty monarch as "A
voluptuary in the horrors of digestion"

Championship and Realignment Emporium

2010-06-10T21:25:00.013-05:00

The big story in Chicago is of course last night's thrilling over-time Stanley Cup victory for the Chicago Blackhawks over the Philadelphia Flyers. This is a good thing for Mayor Daley, who can successfully horde the thousands of pounds of foodstuffs he bet against Philadelphia's elegantly named Mayor Nutter. Apparently, the plan was to assail Philadelphia's food bank-using population with arteriosclerosis; the ridiculously voluminous list of wagered items included 500 slices of cheesecake, at least 60 deep dish pizzas, something called "toasted macaroni," and enough beef to startle the late Upton Sinclair including 1,961 Vienna Beef polish sausages and 2,010 hot dogs. The package also included an appearance by four tommy-gun wielding gangsters, three crooked aldermen, and a personalized dressing-down from Ozzie Guillen.

The win has galvanized a city behind the only competently run professional sports franchise in town compared to the impotent Sox, incompetent Cubs, gormless Bears front office, and coach-punching Bulls brain trust. The Cubs have been maddening to the point where Lou Piniella has developed a spectacular beard implying an enthusiasm for box car-based transportation that should come off when Hawks players shave their grizzled attempts at facial hair.

In the Big Piniella Mountains
The Riot always walks
And Zambrano only smashes
With his left hand after balks

There's a crowd to roar
And a run to score
And you can bellow to an umpire
That his mom's a whore
In the Big Piniella Mountains

Lou would do best to shave the beard but leave his upper lip alone if he wants to join the Chicago Distinguished List of Mustachioed Coaching Champions.

The mustache is a prerequisite for Chicago coaches who want to win it all. Note that
Ozzie Guillen is grandfathered in because although he won the 2005 world series
with a Van Dyke style goatee, he did sport the tremendous 'stache seen on the right
when he played shortstop for the Sox in the 1980s but also out of fear that
neglecting him would somehow land me as a footnote in Guillen's Nixon-like
enemies list including Magglio Ordonez, Jay Mariotti, "Cowboy" Joe West, The Sox
marketing guy tasked with preventing him from making death threats over twitter,
and the late Sonny Dogole.

REALIGNMENT

Nebraska is expected to join the Big Ten and start a complex chain of realignment that will leave the Big 12 a dessicated husk of a conference. Nebraska's membership might be the beginning of more teams in the Expanding Ten until it gains subsidiary conferences across all levels of college athletics including the NAIA and junior colleges (which will be known, of course, as the Littlest Ten). The addition of the Cornhuskers is no doubt motivated largely by the scintillating rivalry with Northwestern ignited at the 2000 Alamo Bowl. And who could blame the fanbases after the teams were pitted against each other with the prestigious Alamo Shaped Trophy at stake to determine a marginal increase in the arbitrary post-season college football rankings?

A chart showing the importance of the Northwestern-Nebraska rivalry to the new
Big Ten with a rating of zero Pacinos indicating a general unawareness of the
existence of Northwestern football

Nebraska has not been to Evanston since 1931, where they suffered a 19-7 defeat at the hands of the Wildcats who no doubt took advantage of the comically archaic 1930s football rules including time fracture wickets and the Pernicious Poem Place. Including the disastrous Alamo Bowl, the 'Cats are 1-3 all time against the Lads from Lincoln, which will give them incentive to finally avenge that 12-0 shutout from 1902.

The Big 12 is essentially gutted, with Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Texas A & M, Texas Tech, and Oklahoma State expected to join the Pac 10. Other major realignments will certainly affect the rest of college football, including Notre Dame, which is expected to disband its football program live up to its Fighting Irish moniker by creating North America's top-flight hurling program and eventually challenge powerhouse Counties Kilkenny and Cork.

THE WORLD CUP

The World Cup may be the world's greatest sports spectacular, but it does itself a great disservice by limiting itself to countries that actually exist. Congratulations are in order to Padania, the winner of the 2010 VIVA World Cup fought amongst nations that have been denied international recognition, bond over a common language across international borders, or incorporated into France in 1486. This year, the VIVA World Cup, designed for national soccer teams not associated with FIFA, involved six teams competing in Gozo: Padania, Iraqi Kurdistan, Occitania (a new-comer that had participated in the Europeada 2008 contest for Europe's national minorities such as Danes in Germany, Catalans, Sorbs, Roma in Hungary, and the North Frisians), Provence, the Two Sicilies, and Gozo.

Obviously, I fully support the N.F. Board and their tournament, but six teams is not nearly enough, especially since someone needs to rise up and challenge the Padanian juggernaut, which has dominated the tournament since they joined in 2008 (the inaugural tournament featured Sapmi pummeling Monaco 21-1). The tournament should expand to absorb non-FIFA competitors such as the 2006 Elf Cup that featured Crimea, Găgăuzia, Tibet, Greenland, Northern Cyprus, and Zanzibar (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan also participated but are actually FIFA members, so they sent their futsal teams). More importantly, the Cup needs to expand to North America so that Newfoundland can send a team.

Newfoundland was, in 1919, technically a British Dominion, equal in status with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Newfoundland never equaled the prestige of its sister dominions, partly because it did not join the League of Nations and send representatives to demand German reparations at Versailles. Hit hard by the worldwide economic crisis of the 1930s as well as a spectacularly corrupt and useless government, Newfoundland was about to default on its loans. With its back against the wall, Newfoundland did what any small country would do in its situation: attempt to sell Labrador to Canada, presumably asking what do we have to do to put this fish and iron-ore rich Atlantic region in within your federal authority today. Canada didn't bite and in 1933, Newfoundland accepted a loan from Britain with the caveat that it give up its Dominion status to a Commission of British and Newfoundland representatives. British representatives found dealing with the shiftless and embattled government taxing, with one frustrated representative writing to a friend that: "I am sorry; I can only say I have done my best, but this infernal place is a hopeless proposition; the sooner it sinks into the sea, the better."

Newfoundland Prime Minister Richard
Squires managed to rebound from a 1923
arrest on corruption charges to regain the
government in 1928. He was ousted from
power again in 1932 when accusations of
corruption sparked a riot in St. Johns.
He was not reelected

Newfoundland joined with Canada in 1946, but can almost certainly put together a powerhouse soccer team that can take on upwards of three Sicilies.

A BOUNTEOUS TIME FOR SPORTING FANS

With the Crosstown Classic, the NBA Finals, the World Cup, and the Rod Blagojevich trial in full swing as well as the pillaging excitement of college football realignment, it's almost too much excitement to handle. Obviously, realignment puts the resurgent Wildcats in a precarious position with the addition of more powerhouse teams to the conference, but worse comes to worse, if things sputter out, they can form a tournament for Conferenceless FBS Teams in non-sanctioned football events.

May Update

2010-05-29T22:02:00.015-05:00

T.S. Eliot's specific problems with the month of April have been well documented by lazy sportswriters on deadline, the same sorts of hacks that cleverly allude to the exact number of acts in American lives, and start out blog posts with obtuse and clumsy references to various English language literary figures. Eliot, of course, had more immediate concerns, as has been noted in this Stefan Collini review of the hotly anticipated volume of Eliot's letters illuminating his struggles with his wife's mental health, the problems of interwar banking, and running The Criterion literary magazine that left him in fear of retribution from neglected contributors as the following quotes reveal:

Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody.

I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street.

Eliot never knew if his next foray to the corner shop could
lead him into a brow-beating from Wyndham Lewis or a
cudgel-wielding Ezra Pound

May, however, is a fairly dry time for a blog concerned with Northwestern and Chicago sports, with the football and basketball teams off and the Cubs enmeshed in early-season doldrums that leave fans with no choice but to decide whether a burgeoning appreciation for Carlos Silva is largely the result of Stockholm syndrome. Late spring is, of course, a time for Finals, with the Northwestern Women's Lacrosse team steamrolling their way into a sixth consecutive NCAA championship game, the geopolitical ramifications of a Slovenia divided against itself in the Goran Dragic/Sasha Vujucic rivalry, and the minor matter of Chicago's ice hockey team playing for the Dominion Hockey Challenge Cup originally created at a time before Canada's Dominion Status would be brutally challenged by the high-handed actions of Governor-General Byng.

This photo, which has been running all over the Chicago Tribune's website all week in
order to drum up interest in the Hawks' Cup run, has revealed the troubling
transformation of Rocky Wirtz into reliable movie villain Eric Roberts. Roberts is has a
top ten menacing IMDB resume as evidenced by the following selection of Eric Roberts
movies consisting of two words: Dead End, Rude Awakening, Blood Red, Descending Angel,
The Grave, Most Wanted, Hitman's Run, Killer Weekend, Depth Charge, Royal Kill (bonus
points for being also known as Ninja's Creed), The Butcher (in which he apparently plays
a character named "Merle Hench"), and Making Sandwiches.

GRAVE ROBBING

In 1875, James "Big Jim" Kenally found his counterfeiting operation threatened by the arrest of Benjamin Boyd, the main source of his fake currency. Kenally had not reached the pinnacle of becoming a minor regional criminal kingpin without being able to hatch schemes, and he soon came up with a cunning plot of elegant simplicity: hire underlings to break into Lincoln's tomb, steal the president's body, and hold it for ransom until the federal government agreed to release Boyd who would then, presumably, resume his position in the Kenally organization.

Thomas Craughwell's Stealing Lincoln's Body enumerates the pitfalls of presidential grave robbing for ransom schemes. The most interesting chapters, though, are the early ones detailing the history of American counterfeiting and the rise of the Secret Service as a way to combat it. The list of counterfeiters involves characters such as Mother Roberts, described by Craughwell as a "shapely widow" who got caught by an undercover Secret Service agent after an inopportune striptease revealed a cachet of counterfeit bills secreted in her bustle.

Chicago became a natural hub for counterfeiters. After all, this was the Chicago of "Bathhouse John" Coughlin and Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna, where the line between politician and criminal mastermind was as porous as the line between Nicolas Cage and human cartoon (incidentally, the two funniest things about Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans other than every single Nicolas Cage facial expression is his consistent inability to constrain his amusement that a low-rent criminal henchman has the street name "G" and his attempt to shake down a goateed, purple-shirted Kool-Aid man).

A collage of Cages for your home or garden. The final Cage is of
course from international blockbuster Zandalee, immortalized
in this fantastic review that contains clips of his spectacular
entrance scene which will forever change the way you use the
phrase "you got the power tie."

Needless to say, the nineteenth century Chicago underground is a goldmine of tremendous nicknames including "Red Jimmy" Fitzgerald, "Hungry Joe" Lewis, who successfully swindled no less than Oscar Wilde, and "Foxy Ed" Cullerton, who completed the crooked alderman decathalon by securing nomination in 1892 by both the Republicans and Democrats, reassuring his constituents that they are in safe hands because he has stolen enough already. Among counterfeiters, the key players included a boodle carrier known only as "The Flying Dutchman" and his arch-rival Lewis "Mysterious Bob" Roberts who successfully created the definitive ambiguous but clearly up to no good nickname-- the only mystery is whether Bob would be most likely found passing dirty money, creating a complex numbers racket, or using a diverse stable of poisonous animals as an undetectable means of assassination, baffling detectives unable to understand how a dozen asps, three funnel web spiders, and a Portuguese Man o'War successfully entered a Cincinnati tenement.

THWARTING GRAVE ROBBERS

The book is also a valuable resource on presidential grave robbing in the nineteenth century. According to Craughwell, a disgruntled gardener made a run at Washington's skull after being fired from Mount Vernon's crew in 1830; in 1878, thieves made off with the body of John Scott Harrison, the son of William Henry Harrison and father of Benjamin Harrison, selling it to a medical college. Vengeance, money, ransoming prisoners-- proof that nineteenth century grave robbing covered the entire gamut of human motivation.

In order to detail the securing of the Lincoln tomb, Craughwell looks at other burials, especially George Pullman. Pullman, known as the inventor of the Pullman Dining Car and a hard-heartedness towards strikers that is tough even by the standards of nineteenth century captains of industry and their truncheonous negotiations, declared that his grave would feature an eighteen inch thick slab of concrete and a steel cage proving that the true measure of the success of a man is if he is so hated at his death that he is actively concerned with corpse desecration.

The Pullman Crypt, c. 1897

With an endless stretch of months until the football season blessedly resumes and a season of baseball mediocrity on the horizon, expect what has been described as by the literary heirs of T.S. Eliot and his Criterion cronies as a "cruel summer."