Damn the Hessians, an Independence Day Update

As the summer chugs along into our Fourth of July celebration over the British Empire and her unstoppable Hessian legions allowing us our own football code, Northwestern football is still laying dormant and preparing to liberate the Big Ten title.

Fist-pumping across the Delaware in order to ham-handedly desecrate famous paintings

The Hessian soldiers that fought in the American revolution were a mixed bag. Some were subjects of George III, who retained the title of Elector of Hanover and therefore shared with all four George monarchs the ability to call upon German troops to fight their dirty imperialist wars (the title did not carry to Queen Victoria, as women could not serve as Electors of Hanover; Hanover lost its independence shortly after as part of the German Unification). Other troops came on loan from other German aristocrats, who eagerly sent their paupers, petty criminals, and press gang victims over to the American colonies.

A group of Hessian reeanctors draw the short straw at the reenactment lottery.
The uniform of the Hessian soldier is the inspiration behind the popular
Revolutionary War slogan "Do not fire until you see the reflection of their
giant golden party hats"

Corey Wootton was named to the Playboy Preseason All-American team. It's good to see Wootton recognized for his excellent season last year, and although the proliferation of sponsored college football awards has rendered them a less meaningful as corporations turn out a chum of sponsored watch lists covering approximately 38 percent of all college football players, this particular award can fortunately be taken advantage of as a thin justification for running this wonderful picture:

Hugh Hefner showing off the cravat, puma, and femme fatale henchmen he
purchased from the 1970 Bond Villain skymall catalog

THE MADNESS OF A.J. III

Though interleague play has finished, the Cubs and Sox still have a game to make up, which could be a factor since both teams are still afloat in their crappy divisions. One of the players always in the mix during the series is White Sox catcher A.J. Pierzynski, who remains despised by Cubs fans largely because Michael Barrett inexplicably decided to introduce his knuckles to his face several years ago. Pierzynski is not a popular player around baseball; he left both Minnesota and San Francisco on somewhat bitter notes (this article is full of classic baseball post-trade character assassination by nameless Giants players who accused him of being a "cancer in the clubhouse" and accused him of continuing to play cards instead of going over hitters with Brett Tomko in the grand baseball tradition of innuendo about playing cards in the clubhouse undoing a player's repuatation).

Pierzynski gets a lot of negative attention from fans because he has a reputation of a provacateur, and his face defaults to the "who, me?" expression of an Edwardian public school boy caught red-handed going slightly too far with one of their homoerotic flogging rituals. Most of his antics, however, are simply an attempt to squeeze every possible advantage out of baseball's occasionally arcane rules. His greatest feat was getting on base through the dubious application of the dropped third strike rule against Anaheim in the 2005 ALCS (by immediately bolting to first, he put the onus on the befuddled umpire to decide whether it was indeed a dropped third strike). Last year, he convinced the same umpire to call him safe after drawing a shady interference call by falling down and letting Willy Aybar sort of bump into him as the Sox announcing crew work themselves into a Pravda-style lather. My favorite Pierzynski antic is his automatic appeal to the first or third-base umpire on any checked swing. In essense, on a checked swing, he now catches the ball and points to the ump in a single fluid motion.

Pierzynski in a state of nature

These sorts of antics, however, are pretty much harmless. Pierzynski has a decent bat for a catcher (he has a career OPS of .754; last year, league average for MLB catchers was .715-- I assumed he had better numbers than that because I see him mostly against the Cubs, when he carries an .832 OPS for his Cub killing resumé) and augments that with a roguish attempt to get an extra call here and there, certainly nothing to cause a cascade of boos upon his person. If you must hate A.J., you can hate him for somehow getting involved with professional wrestling while displaying an acting ability that even for wrestling is shocking. Fortunately, Ozzie steals the show by hitting a guy with a chair (evidently something that happens in an alarming frequency in pro wrestling matches along with the announcer referring to a villainous woman as a "jezebel.") In fairness, Alfonso Soriano had his own run-in with a pro-wrestling antagonist that involves him reacting to the interminable yakking of some guy in a glitter hat with the mixture of confusion and indignation that comes with not being aware that attending a professional wrestling event might mean getting yelled at by a guy in a glitter hat (I don't follow wrestling, so I have no idea what Glitter Hat is on about, although I admire that the telecast game him more screen time than Meet the Press would allow for Rep. Ron Paul to rant about fiat gold).

JOIN, OR DIE

The U.S. put on an admirable display in the Confederations Cup, overcoming two embarrassing losses at the hands of Italy and Brazil and qualifying due to an improbable combination of a 3-0 defeat of Egpyt and a 3-0 trouncing of Italy by Brazil. Despite the euphoria of playing world-class soccer for 135 minutes, ending Spain's undefeated streak and leading Brazil 2-0 at the half, the U.S. came up short in its bid to win its first major international tournament. True, the Confederations Cup is not the most prestigious tournament in the world (it started as the King Fahd Cup as a showcase for the Saudi Arabian team), but Spain and Brazil both played almost all of their regulars.

Now the U.S. moves onto the Gold Cup, which they won in 2007 thanks to this fantastic goal by BYCTOM favorite Benny "The Jet" Feilhaber against Mexico at Soldier Field. The U.S. is sending out its "B" team to this year's Cup, along with many other CONCACAF sides (with the exception of Costa Rica), but will be anchored by veterans Brian Ching and Steve Cherundolo and give Freddy Adu watchers something to get excited about.

The U.S. goes up against Grenada on the fourth, and the former British Crown Colony forfeited upon independence the ability to recruit German mercenaries like Michael Ballack, future Luc Besson movie villain Bastian Schweinsteiger, and Oliver Kahn, the frightening half-ape version of Klaus Kinski.

A German experiment goes horribly wrong

Grenada has been a place where Europeans have come to plunder spices in the Western Hemisphere for hundreds of years-- first the French, then the British after the Seven Years War. It briefly was a member of the short-lived West Indies Federation, a Commonwealth organization dominated by Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

Trinidad and Tobago's Eric Williams and Grenada's Sir Eric Gairy

Grenada's official website provides a host of important information, such as that the flag contains a nutmeg which "signifies that Grenada is one of the world's largest producers of nutmeg," an excellent flag design strategy of getting straight to cash crops that I wholeheartedly endorse instead of flogging around with abstract symbol bullshit. The site also creates a mystery around what visitors can eventually expect from the Fish Friday page that could possibly surpass what is already there.

Enjoy your weekend by watching the Cubs battle the insolent, shirt-untucking Brewers, jingoistically lashing out against the good people of Grenada, and ordering man-apes from the James Bond villain catalog. Of course, it wouldn't be Independence Day without a gratuitious Jeff Goldblum mention, so here's an article about him being needlessly weird on Law and Order: Criminal Intent or unexpectedly not dead.

Dance hopes still alive

Northwestern's big win over Purdue in the Keadydome on Wednesday has kept hopes for a tournament bid alive, and garnered national attention. Though I will still consider the season a massive success if Northwestern makes it to the NIT without suffering a travesty of justice like in 2002, the tournament talk has made this the most memorable Northwestern basketball season of this decade.

Mirkovic celebrates Wildcat
basketball and defies Principal
Vernon

Northwestern needs a win on Sunday in Columbus as well as an impressive performance in the Big Ten tournament in order to bolster its bubble, but the NCAA tournament selection process remains a mystery. As Jeff Goldblum might say if he wasn't making discrete phone calls to Sam Neill about his availability for a fourth Jurassic Park movie in order to make a yacht payment, god help us we're in the hands of bracketologists.


Jeff Goldblum and the S.S. Ah um ha uh yes a um yacht?

BRACKETOLOGY

Determining the teams and the seeding for the NCAA tournament has spurred its own cottage industry of experts, most notably ESPN's Joe Lunardi, who coined the term "bracketology." Of course, bracketing has inspired a number of different disciplines, such as David Mihm, who calls himself a bracketographer. "I kind of got tired of Joe Lunardi's schtick," Mihm said in this article about his motivation to challenge Lunardi. The article gives the impression that Lunardi is under siege from a host of underground bracket analysts who want to seize his throne as the foremost bracketologist and will no doubt suffer the same fate as Edmond Dantés's thousands of enemies on which he has sworn vengeance if he is ever betrayed and imprisoned on a desolate Mediterranean island.

Bracketology implies some sort of science and I always picture bracketologists toiling away at the sort of analogue computers with whirring tape machines that Bond villains are always using to set up their space lasers (and it's always a space laser-- I estimate that at least 35 percent of Bond villain plots involve a space laser of some kind possibly because the space laser company purchases the largest amount of advertising space in the Bond villain skymall catalogue that sells one-piece jumpsuits, eye patches, and glass furniture).

Bracketologists busily at work breaking down the
bubble teams, predicting seeding, and threatening the
United Nations with a laser apocalypse

Steve Rose wrote a fascinating article last November about Bond villains and architecture. Fleming evidently despised modernist architecture, which is why his motley collection of potential mass murderers always had swanky Le Corbusier-inspired bachelor pads in the middle of dormant volcanoes. Fleming even named Goldfinger after architecht Erno Goldfinger, who incensed Fleming by knocking down two Victorian buildings. In his defense, Erno Goldfinger did not help his case by posing like a potential Bond villain in publicity photos and menacing Fleming with an array of colorful, ethnic henchmen.

Erno Goldfinger and his modernist towers
named Good Afternoon Gentlemen and
You Have Twenty Four Hours

The Shirley Bassey Goldfinger theme is probably the best known of the Bond title songs, all of which are compiled here with full lyrics. Perusing the site is a powerful reminder of how severely underrated the 1980s Bond themes are, especially A View to A Kill's Duran Duran tune.

In fact, A View to a Kill is violently underrated-- it has Christopher Walken as a maniacal blimp enthusiast, Grace Jones, the horse-racing set, and a henchman who kills people by strangling them with his Walkman. More importantly, it features an aged Roger Moore bumbling through his last Bond movie as he castigates cashiers who keep him waiting too long, successfully completes car chases with his left blinker on, and romances a woman whose own mother is younger than him.

After dispatching Roger Moore, Grace Jones
traveled to Barcelona to steal the Dream Team's
haircut

A-Ha's The Living Daylights theme is also vastly underrated, but generally any Bond who gets upstaged by A-Ha does not deserve to karate chop people or flee from self-destructing buildings or dispatch Hervey Villachez when he sneaks aboard your getaway schooner.

THE BIG DANCE

Making the NCAA tournament would be a tremendous step in the right direction for Northwestern's basketball program, even if it didn't include a memorable upset or classic March Madness moment. Probably the most iconic March Madness event is Laettner's shot against Kentucky in the 1992 East Regional, which is now notable for the number of college basketball's most hated individuals including Laettner, Mike Krzyzewski and the entire Duke basketball program, Rick Pitino, and even Billy Donovan, the non-descript coach of Florida who is notable only for his dos-si-do with the Orlando Magic. Laettner parlayed his March Madness performance into a stint with the Dream Team and this truly ridiculous spread in People Magazine.

Who says white men can't jump? Here's one
who also shoots and rebounds and blocks shots.
Oh, and steals hearts too. After leading Duke
to its second straight college basketball title in
March, Laettner, 22, drove Arsenio's audience
beyond woofs into wild squeals.

Of course, Laettner memorably struggled with injuries and the general crappiness of the Minnesota Timberwolves in the NBA. There's an article about his mini-resurgence with the Hawks in 1996, which reveals that he occasionally busts out a Mutumbo impression as well as owns unusual pets:

In the gym after a recent practice, Laettner is talking about his pet shark, which he keeps at home in a 600-gallon, salt-water tank...It seems Laettner's pet shark died on the move south from Minnesota. The creature didn't have a name. Laettner rolls his eyes. It's not like it came when you called it. So he bought another pet shark, and now it is thriving in Atlanta. In a burst of creativity, he calls this one "Shark No. 2"

NCAA Recruiting

Northwestern delivered a less than convincing win over cellar-dwelling Indiana in Evanston last night. It truly is a remarkable reversal that any Northwestern victory over the storied Indiana program could be seen as unsatisfying. It seems like it was only yesterday that Bobby Knight was prowling about the Indiana sidelines in his red sweater freshly stained with the blood of impertinent freshmen, hurling candy at Northwestern students in a bizarre show of rapprochement after blowing up at Northwestern hecklers. Not that he is the only Big Ten coach to have a problem with the Wildcat faithful. I remember, although cannot find, an article where Gene Keady specifically lamented Northwestern's sharp heckling that raised the hackles of his comb-over. Paleontologists currently speculate that Keady's comb-over is used for internal temperature control, much like the non-dinosaur Dimetrodon's fin.


I talked briefly with Keady once. And,
you know, the thing about a Gene Keady,
he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a
doll's eyes. When he comes at you, doesn't
seem to be living until he bites you, and
those black eyes roll over white and
then you hear that terrible high-pitched
screaming

As much as I enjoy watching a former Big Ten power get its teeth kicked in, it's hard to gloat over Tom Crean's lot after reading this SI piece about the fall of the program in the wake of the Kelvin Sampson dismissal. After Sampson left, IU lost six scholarhip players on top of Eric Gordon, who has been punished by joining the L.A. Clippers. Sampson certainly existed in the thick of college athletics' seedy underbelly with his numerous NCAA violations and his recruitment of players with weak academics and problems with pots. As the article describes:

"A Sampson recruit, Holman had been suspended for a season in high school for shoving a ref; his short temper surfaced in Crean's office. At one point, according to Crean, Holman became so animated that he grabbed a potted plant and threw it against the wall, triggering a call to campus police."


Kelvin Sampson and his assistants hit the recruiting trail in Indiana

It's clear that Sampson violated several recruiting violations in the intricate code that governs interactions between players and recruits, but the current NCAA rules basically institutionalize bizarre and seemingly arbitrary boundaries.


The NCAA recruiting regulations are
somewhat reminiscent of the Lever
ceremonies at Versailles, where the rigid
social hierarchy was clearly delineated by
one's proximity to the Sun King's person.

NCAA RECRUITING VIOLATIONS AND PIRACY: A CLUNKY SEGUE

While Kelvin Sampson's gross recruiting violations have certainly upset basketball at Indiana, he could have been up to more nefarious crimes. In particular, Indiana fans can take comfort in the fact that Kelvin Sampson is most likely not a pirate.

Modern connotations of piracy involve doubloons, chin stubble, parrots, the word "arrr," and truly inept baseball organizations. These romanticized notions of piracy come from several sources. One of the most notable is Captain Charles Johnson who authored A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates first published in 1724. The volume publicized the exploits of several pirates such as Blackbeard and Black Bart and contains the word "sloop" roughly 27,000 times. The most interesting part of Pyrates is the unknown author: no one has identified a Captain Johnson in 1724 that could have published this book; literary scholars, or in this case people who research people who write pseudonymous accounts of eighteenth century pirate books which is probably one particularly tweedy man from a a corner of Britain so remote that his house is still fueled by coal and orphans, believe that Daniel Defoe is a potential author.

The other major source of piratical tales is of course Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Treasure Island is the standard text of the flintlock and cutlass set.


Robert Louis Stevenson (far right) took to the seas himself on this
apparently mustache-themed yacht in 1888

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PIRATES RIGHT NOW

Piracy has been much in the news lately involving the seemingly out of control pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden in Somalia. Piracy has experienced a boom since the collapse of the government in 1991, and the rise of the pirate society in Boosaaso is chronicled in this excellent New York Times article:

"The pirates use fast-moving skiffs to pull alongside their prey and scamper on board with ladders or sometimes even rusty grappling hooks. Once on deck, they hold the crew at gunpoint until a ransom is paid, usually $1 million to $2 million."


Do not bring your florins here

As the author Jeffrey Gettleman who is, I gather, the Times's number one man on the spot for all pirate related information notes, the pirates are not going anywhere:

"The pirates are sea savvy. They are fearless. They are rich and getting richer, with the latest high-tech gadgetry like handheld GPS units. And they are united."

Gettleman then, I presume, donned a colorful bandanna before throwing a smoke grenade and making off with a barrel full of spices from the Orient and the Spanish Crown Jewels.

The most brazen attack came in September, when pirates seized a Ukrainian freighter filled with military hardware including 33 T-72 Soviet-designed battle tanks, 150 grenade launchers, and 6 antiaircraft guns. The crew was unable to fight back due to the apparent difficulties in using tanks in naval battles, and the fact that grenade launchers lose their value when taken out of their collector packaging. In November, the Indian Navy declared that it had sunk a pirate mothership, which I found exciting because it marked the first time that the word "mothership" had been used in popular media since Jeff Goldblum was inexplicably a sci-fi action star in the mid-1990s. Unfortunately, it appears as though the pirate mothership was actually a Thai fishing boat.

For those who want even more information about piracy in the Gulf of Aden, UNOSAT has provided a series of informative hi-res maps charting the 2008: the year in piracy and density of pirate attacks. Do yourself a favor and use these wallpaper your house or van.

WHITE RAJAS: A SOLUTION TO PIRACY?

International cooperation has failed to crack down on pirates for a number of key reasons including the vast expanse of sea in which the tiny pirate vessels operate, the lack of a stable government in Mogadishu, and the continued operation of the mythical pirate mothership which presumably dictates all pirate movements under the control of a single pirate mastermind.

In the mid-nineteenth century, pirate raiders flourished in the river networks within Sarawak in the Borneo portion of what is now Malaysia.



British adventurer James Brooke brought his ship The Royalist, flying the menacing colors of the Royal Yacht Squadron, to the aid of the Sultan of Brunei. Brooke gained control of Sarawak as a gesture of gratitude from the Sultan and also because he trained his ship's guns on the royal palace and threatened to blow it asunder if his demands were not met. Once established as the White Raja of Sarawak, Brooke dedicated his rule to fighting piracy and taxing the hell out of the Chinese population.


Brooke was an early advocate of gunboat .
diplomacy. He reportedly developed an interest
for the strategy immediately after purchasing a
gunboat

Though Brooke acted in the interests of Britain and occasionally used British vessels on his ongoing attacks on Sarawak's pirate community, he never gained official recognition from Britain as the bona fide Raja of Sarawak. In fact, Parliament led by self-appointed Victorian conscience Richard Cobden staged an inquiry into his prize-taking in 1850, but he was exonerated of the charge of inhumanity, which apparently was on the books in Britain in Victorian times despite the metaphysical implications.

Of course, the British Empire is out of white rajas to high-handedly seize territory and menace pirates with top of the line cannon technology. Perhaps to atone for his recruiting sins, Kelvin Sampson can get himself a fighting yacht and use his mastery of cell phones to get in touch with the Sultan of Brunei.