Hoops Hindered

With the football team squaring off against cross-border rivals to determine bowl position, Wildcat basketball players have been going down like the chimps in Project X, only instead of radiation poisoning through shady government flight simulators, they have been suffering from battered tendons that come from playing basketball.

Carmody calls Northwestern's newest play this season, the call for the
ambulance. Hopefully the call will not be answered by Hemingway as it would
expose players to inadquate World War I-era concepts, such as brandy as a
legitimate medical technology, short, terse tourniquets, and the possibilities
of face-punching wholly inconsistent with the mission of the Red Cross

Northwestern lost its best player in Kevin "Mantis" Coble who seems like the only player in college basketball who could actually play on one leg if his teammates carried him Leftwich-like up and down the court and let him heave weird-looking jumpers off of a single spindly limb as he leans awkwardly in any number of possible directions and continues to score. Jeff Ryan also went down leaving Jeremy Nash as the only senior, although he has been struggling with a troubling heart issue that he thankfully has under control.

Henry "Poo" Yee demonstrates the southern praying mantis
style of Kung Fu, showing clearly that while the horrible
Coble injury may have been a serious blow to Northwestern
Hoops, it will almost certainly spare readers of this blog
any more allusions this season to the Mantis nickname and
then the inevitable run-on sentence somehow justifying it
as the sentence balloons up like a giant dwarf star before
violently exploding and engulfing every bit of sense in its
meager orbit and by the way since we're already in the middle
of a sentence that apparently has no beginning, middle, or
end anywhere in sight I might as well mention that
according to "Poo" Yee, "in the southern praying mantis
system, circles are everything and everywhere" so in case
anybody pulls your sleeve on the street asking you which
simple shape best fits into southern praying mantis kung-fu,
you can you know what let's just end this right here before
somebody blows out an ACL

On the one hand, Northwestern's season has gotten a lot more bleak, and pre-season hopes of finally getting to the promised land of the NCAA tournament have dwindled. On the other hand, this season is all about watching young players develop, especially sophomore center Kyle Rowley who will hopefully do to Big Ten frontcourt players what the USC marching band did to Ricardo Montalban at the end of The Naked Gun.

MOVING THE CHESSPIECES: A WINTER OF BASEBALL

Baseball's winter rumor mill is in full swing as a nation recovers from the joyless inevitability of another Yankee title. No doubt the Cubs brain-trust is hard at work peering over a giant baseball field and pushing little plastic players around with instruments used only by croupiers and four-star generals.

Jim Hendry scans the playing field for free agents
and bargain trades. Incidentally, this picture is not
only notable for inexpicably being the second Bill
and Ted reference on BYCTOM in as many posts, but
also for being part of a series of Bill and Ted trading
cards as referenced on this site. In case you are
curious, the back side, instead of having Napoleon's
risk statistics or maximum water-slide speed, lists
this crucial plot point: "While Bill and Ted continue to
round up subjects for their report, Deacon entertains
Napoleon. Napoleon devours the ice cream and wins the
Ziggy Piggy award"

Job number one for the Cubs is getting rid of cantankerous right fielder Milton Bradley. Bradley's power did not come around, he hit a paltry .257 for the year, and his defense in right bordered on comical, climaxing in his memorable posing and throwing the ball into the stands then watching helplessly as baserunners unsportingly took advantage of his temporary lack of knowledge about the exact number of outs. On the other hand, Bradley managed to finish with a .378 on-base percentage for the season, which is fairly remarkable considering his batting average. He was also extraordinarily entertaining, wearing a Bluto-style beard, coming up with umpire conspiracies, feuding with combustible manager Lou Piniella, complaining about fickle Cub fans, and bludgeoning reporters with the phrase "what else you got" to the point where the Cubs were forced to suspend him for insubordination, truculance, and redundancy. Obviously, Bradley has to go from an everybody in the organization hates him standpoint, but from a baseball standpoint, Bradley was an effective offensive player who was starting to put up scary numbers towards the end of last season and is going to rebound into a nice year unless he disappears into the Los Angeles underground during the offseason and becomes a soldier of fortune.

John Grabow, the least terrifying lefty out of the pen, will be back, while the reviled Aaron Heilman gets to ply his dark arts for the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for reliever Scott Maine and outfielder/first baseman Ryne White, who Hendry compared favorably to journeyman slugger and 2003 MLB wing-eating champion Matt Stairs, disguising his attempt to placate testy Cubs fans by getting another Ryne into the Cubs's system.

In other Cubs news, Carlos Zambrano won his third Silver Slugger award as the best hitting pitcher in the National League and presumably all of baseball unless the American Leagues are lying in wait for some sort of terrible turning of the tables. Carlos Zambrano is the reason why the National League should continue to exist without a designated hitter. There are few things more riveting during a baseball game, especially a baseball game where the Cubs are playing and therefore actively stomping on the dreams of an either desperate or drunken fanbase, than a Zambrano at-bat. The possiblilities are tantalizing: a launch onto Waveland or Sheffield, a base hit followed by an ill-advised head-first dive into second, a swing-related injury, a strikeout followed by an assault on a bat (purists will note that Zambrano's wrath at Gatorade-dispensing products is limited to poor pitching performances), charging the mound, throwing his helmet to reveal an ill-conceived Zambrano hairstyle such as blond frosted tips or a jheri curl or even a blond jheri-curl, running out into center field and lighting a giant Z on fire, grabbing the home plate umpire and lashing his wrist to the official and initiating a mutual thrusting at each other with butterfly knives while a handful of shirtless vest-wearers come out of the bullpen to idle in the background; I'd much rather watch Zambrano strike out on three straight pitches with runners in scoring position than watch the likes of Aaron Miles pick up a bat in the general vicinity of the batter's box.

The myriad potential consequences of a Zambrano at-bat

SPECULATION SEASON

Saturday marks the end of the football regular season, but marks the beginning of endless bowl speculation, back-biting, and preparing for conference championship games for those conferences burdened with unnecessary features such as even numbered teams, divisions, and occasionally titles that accurately reflect the number of teams in said conference. Not for the Big Ten, an ascetic conference where the season's conflagrations on the muddy midwestern gridirons settle the championship except most years when they don't and it's a festive conucopia of various Big Ten teams, some of whom will lose in lucrative BCS bowls. But hopefully the 'Cats will prevail in a stadium sure to be painted with the crimson hues of the fearsome badger.

Northwestern Escapes to Victory

My hopes were high after Northwestern finally stepped up and crushed an FCS team the way a bowl-caliber team should as dozens of Wildcat fans worked themselves into a blood-crazed lather, rallying the 'Cats with their fearsome cry of "how's the market, Stu?" Kafka looked sharp, Brewer had a career day which offsets my mild disappointment that he named his spring blog "What's Brewin'" instead of "Strange Brew," and the defense maintained control, although it gave up two touchdowns.

The robust thrashing of a Football Championship Subdivision opponent is just the
thing to replenish and invigorate a Northwestern alumni base before returning
to their shirtwaist factories and Dickensian orphan abuseotoriums

Northwestern seemed to carry the momentum into Sunday's showdown against Eastern Michigan as they took a 21-3 halftime lead, consistently rolling into Eagle territory with the impunity of the Duke of New York cruising across the apocalyptic prison landscape in his chandelier-covered limousine.

The Duke of New York was rivaled in his power over the city only by Peter
Stuyvesant, the last Dutch Director-General of the colony of
New Netherland, who earned the derisive nickname of "Duke of New
Amsterdam" for his autocratic, peg-legged style of governing

Peter Stuyvesant was not shy about razing houses, sending in soldiers to rough up his political enemies, and persecuting hated Quakers. Radio Netherlands Worldwide has a show about him and his reputation as a scowling martinet of the seventeenth century colonial world who had a propensity to make political enemies and probably strut about, albeit awkwardly considering the peg leg and its known effects on proper strutting form. The show is worth listening to for its arresting theme song (a combination of kettledrums, early 90s rap beats, what sounds like a synthesized jaw harp, and an approximation of a vocal break stolen from the Family Stone all cobbled into a genre known as NPR-core) and the mystifying banter of the Dutch and Canadian co-hosts. Stuyvesant's style of government is best summed up in his declaration that "We derive our authority from God and the company, not from a few ignorant subjects," which is inscribed on the Daley family crest at Chicago's City Hall.

In the second half the game, lackluster play from Northwestern's vaunted defense, offensive miscues, and no doubt an inspiring half-time speech from EMU coach Ron English consisting of feats of strength and derring-do led to a dangerous Northwestern collapse. Fortunately, the 'Cats rallied and gave Stefan Demos the opportunity to salvage the debacle with a 49-yard field goal in the closing seconds.

It is an odd phenomenon as a Northwestern fan to be disappointed with a victory, but the second half collapse throws up some red flags for the coming season. Then again, the Wildcats were able to pull out the win, and, as Northwestern official chronicler/bard/warrior/poet Skip Myslenski puts it, "It was a win and, in the record book, style points don't apply."

Like Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone (in
my opinion far too much Stallone and not
nearly enough Caine, although that's neither
here nor there), the Wildcats were able to escape
to victory against a determined EMU squad. In
Victory (the studio apparently felt the "Escape to"
part was too much for Americans, much like the
apocryphal story about how "The Madness of
George III" would confuse Americans accustomed
to trilogies about porphyria-ridden maniacs),
the Allies use soccer as a way to stick it to the
Nazis, demonstrating a sporting decision not
to box them and take advantage of their
disproportionate cantaloupe-sized fists

ESCAPE AS ART

Northwestern's blood-pressure-raising adventure at Ryan Field calls to mind other daring escape acts, none more impressive than the legendary Harry Houdini. According to his Wikipedia page, Houdini escaped from "nailed packing crates (sometimes lowered into the water), riveted boilers, wet-sheets, mailbags, and even the belly of a Whale that washed ashore in Boston," and his escapes are credited partially to "being able to regurgitate small keys at will." Please note that I've left in Wikipedia's link to its article on "professional regurgitators," which in my opinion is not so much the end of a career path as a career chasm.

Houdini's act depended on believable shackles, impossible escapes, and
the cooperation of hundreds of mustachioed policemen.

Houdini also made a side career in films and in debunking spiritualists, igniting a rivalry with avid Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who devoted the first two parts of The Edge of the Unknown to revealing the magician's closely guarded spiritual powers as the secret to his act as opposed to good old-fashioned regurgitation. Despite his frustration with Houdini, Conan Doyle did admit that Houdini performed a valuable service in going after fraudulent mediums:

The unmasking of false mediums is our urgent duty, but when we are told that, in spite of our own evidence and that of three generations of mankind, there are no real ones we lose interest, for we know that we are speaking to an ignorant man. At the same time, the States, and in a lesser degree our own people, do need stern supervision. I admit that I underrated the corruption in the States. What first brought it home to me was that my friend Mrs. Crandon told me that she had received price lists from some firm which manufactures fraudulent instruments for performing tricks. If such a firm can make a living, there must be some villainy about, and a more judicious Houdini might well find a useful field of activity. It is these hyenas who retard our progress. I have myself had a hand in exposing more than one of them.

Houdini's movie career chronicled his endless struggles with malevolent closet
robots. He also debunked spiritualists, shown here demonstrating how illusions
could be used to make it seem as if he is mollifying the vengeful ghost of Abraham
Lincoln with a book on modern rail splitting techniques

REVENGE OF THE DIRECTIONAL MICHIGANS

Northwestern is not the only Big Ten school to suffer at the hands of a Michigan-based university outside of the conference. Indiana also nearly gave up a solid lead to Western Michigan in Bloomington, although in the past two years the Broncos beat Illinois and Iowa (in the claustrophobic Kinnick Thunderdome). Central Michigan defeated Michigan State in East Lansing thanks to a heads-up onside kick recovery. Of course, the Chippewas won the MAC championship two of the last three years and have appeared in the last three Motor City Bowls, a feat which has led CMU fans to relabel Ford Field as "Kelly-Shorts South." In fact, all three of the MAC Michigan teams have tremendous stadium names with the aforementioned Kelly-Shorts, Eastern's Rynearson, and Western's impenetrable fortress Waldo Stadium.

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with the
previous paragraph other than proving my
superhuman resistance to the obvious Waldo joke
telegraphed in the last sentence and therefore blowing
your mind so effectively that you can see into
dimensions that exist only after the inevitable
Fermilab accident rents a hole into
the solar system

The rest of the Big Ten got a black eye as Ohio State sputtered against USC, although I think that the game revealed that the Big Ten can at least hang with the Trojans instead of trotting out the usual tactic of putting up the resistance of an inept Seagal antagonist or a Tokyo subway patron reacting to the endless shadow of Mothra. The Big Ten gained some face when an underrated Michigan team defeated an overrated Notre Dame team, a result that is at least good for the conference although the ideal ending involves a blimp slowly displaying an emergency government proclamation preventing each school from playing high-level football, cuing an endless looping video of the late Charlton Heston cackling at their misfortune on the jumbotron, causing the bewildered and devastated fan bases to pour mournfully out of Michigan Stadium.

The last remnants of Wolverine and Fighting
Irish football in an ideal world, incidentally
the same world where BYCTOM can continue
drawing from the Charlton Heston well with
no consequences

Hopefully, the 'Cats can learn from the near-stumble against a never-say-die MAC opponent as they travel up to the Carrier Dome to take on a potentially spunky Syracuse team in a contest that as far as I can tell is available as an internet pay-per-view exclusive for $5.95, although if you get the $79.95 yearly package, you can get access to the Jim Boeheim Show. A less stressful outing requiring no fancy illusions, where small keys can be successfully digested will be a bit more soothing for Wildcat fans looking to go 3-0 and possibly lead to an increased gruel ration for the orphans in their employ.

Reviewing the Big Ten Bowls

The Big Ten football season has come to a disappointing close, which is bad news for a conference on the ropes in desperate need of some redemption, but good news for those who enjoy watching conference rivals humiliated by vastly superior out of conference competition in the manner of a rakish Duke absconding with the conference's marriageable daughters and spices from the Orient.


This is to therefore give you all notice, reptiles,
scoundrels, ragamuffins, poltroons, lank-jaw'd
herring-gutted plebians, that if you, or any of
you, set foot in my boats, or any part of my
property, I will send my myrmidons, like Tritons,
who shall assail you in the deep or plunge you into
the great abyss known as Aul'shole.


CHAMPS SPORTS BOWL
Wisconsin got the ball rolling particularly poorly with a 42-13 drubbing at the hands of the Florida State Seminoles. The Badgers' play in this game resembled the Bucky Badger kept at Madison zoo: listless, complacent, engorged on ground-dwelling rodents. Incidentally, badger baiting was made illegal in Britain in 1835, although the game of "drawing the badger" became immensely popular, where a dog was unleashed into a simluated badger den and the badger and dog become locked in a festive biting exhibition. The owner of the dog then pulled the dog out of the den, with its jaws hopefully clamped on the badger's tale, and owners attempted to see how many times the dog could draw the badger in a minute. A capital sport for a more civilized age.

According to this drawing, a standard badger-bait included either biting the dog's
tail or inflating it like a kiddie pool while a top-hatted henchman stood in the
corner simulating the illusion of forward movement

VALERO ALAMO BOWL
Thoughts on this game have already been noted at great length, so let's pull an ESPN and show a gratuitous picture of Chase Daniel's family.

Chase Daniel's great-great-great-great-great grandfather
signs a letter of intent to enter His Majesty's Service in the
Hindu Kush.

INSIGHT BOWL
Kansas clobbered Minnesota in the last season of Gopher football in the Metrodome. I'm going to miss the Hubert Horatio Humprey Metrodome for Minnesota football, and I think the Gophers will as well, since it will be difficult for the Brewster-led spread offense to function in November without a full complement of Sherpa guides and because they'll lose the noise advantage of several thousand Minnesotans spelling the state name at the end of the Minnsesota Rouser as the O continues to linger in the dome for weeks at a time. I will miss the Hubert Horatio Humprey Metrodome not only because it was home to two of the greatest plays in Northwestern history (Victory Right and the crazy Brendan Smith interception-touchdown from this year) but also because Humphrey is forever linked in my mind with the 1972 presidential election and Hunter S. Thompson's claim that Edmund Sixtus Muskie was hooked on Ibogaine. Incidentally, googling the terms muskie hunter led to this unexpected result.


Errant google search for the terms Muskie Hunter
inadvertently provides video trolling excitement

CAPITAL ONE BOWL
Michigan State managed to keep Georgia quarterback Matt Stafford in check for the first half, but was unable to contain him in the second half. Georgia also did a pretty good job of bottling up Javon Ringer, who only rushed for 47 yards. This game failed to be a good enough effort to bolster the conference's flagging reputation or a spectacular enough failure to make this guy take to the airwaves in a display of berserker rage. I've always been disappointed that State is in East Lansing rather than Sparta, Michigan, which eschews the ancient city-state's ethos of militarism and helot slavery, instead boasting on its website that "The Village of Sparta is nestled near the big city lights which contain the entertainment districts and shopping venues of Grand Rapids, yet is tucked into the traditional way of life with friendly neighborhoods and traditional community values." This is Sparta.

An East Lancing

OUTBACK BOWL
Laugh it up, Iowa. You're the only Big Ten team to win a bowl game this year, stomping on Steve Spurrier's South Carolina juggernaut 31-10. Iowans also traveled in droves to the game, as their traditional hunting and forage routes took them to Tampa Bay and the Hillsborough County area. The last thing we need is a resurgent Iowa football program, not with Drago's development of the largest corn head in the world. Joe Bollig, the DragoTec director of marketing, claims Iowans "are turning to Drago to reduce ear bounce, butt-shelling and overall shelling loss."


An Iowa fan enjoys the Hawkeyes'
butt-shelling of South Carolina

ROSE BOWL
Another Rose Bowl, another clobbering at the hands of USC. This time, it was Penn State who lost 38-24. Similar one-sided results have resulted in the end of football at the Rose Bowl. In 1902, Michigan beat Stanford 49-0, resulting in the replacement of football with chariot racing. This Sports Illustrated article from 1968 chronicles the development of chariot racing in the Tournament of Roses. My favorite character is the sublimely named Ed Off, whom SI describes as "chariot racing's Man of La Mancha." Of course, any article that has a sentence start with the phrase "When his rampaging horses finally were brought under control" is worth reading. I suggest, therefore, that the Tournment of Roses bring back chariot racing. Since the Big Ten can no longer compete with USC, they should allow two current players to fling themselves around the Rose Bowl with bull penis whips and those spikes that come out of wheels in gladiator movies. This year, for example, it could have been Penn State DE Aaron Maybin versus USC's Rey Maualuga. Or, they could have let JoePa take on Pete Caroll, with JoePa negating Caroll's youth and fully functioning hips with his first-hand knowledge of chariot combat. I would pay to see this, although USC would probably still win every year.


COME TO PENN STATE

TOSTITO'S FIESTA BOWL
Another "moral victory" for the Big Ten as Ohio State hung with the Longhorns until a heartbreaking touchdown with sixteen seconds left sealed the victory. Ohio State could not handle the Horns' hurry-up offense, short passing game, and inspired mullet dancing, and lost their third BCS game in a row. Texas, is, of course, led by Colt McCoy, who has been largely celebrated for his astonishingly Texan name, a name so good that he forced Jevean Snead out of Austin. Yet, in my opinion, Colt's teammate Lamarr Houston has him beat with a name celebrating Republic of Texas presidents Sam Houston and Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar.

Lamar's middle namesake loses at Risk to his
archenemy Bill S. Preston, esq.

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was president of the nascent Republic, which, by 1840, was in dire financial straits. Houston, Lamar's predecessor and rival, pushed for the passage of the Franco-Texian Bill, which would have granted the French rights to colonize and develop parts of Texas while maintaining a military garrison. The problem lay with the self-proclaimed Comte de Saligny, a French diplomat who took up residence in the French Legation in Austin. De Saligny took exception to a neighbor's pigs who ran rampant through the legation grounds, and the legation nearly became the site of a violent altercation between De Saligny's butler and the neighbor. Needless to say, the pig grazing quickly became an international incident. Eventually, de Saligny took his poofy wigs and toher French finery with him and went home, which led to the halting of diplomatic relations between Texas and France for a year as part of the Austin Pig War, one of two Pig Wars in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, proving that pigs cause more wars than Jenkins' body parts.