Updates

It's been an eventful week in Chicago Sports. The Bears have traded BYCTOM favorite Kyle Orton and a bunch of draft picks for Denver QB Jay Cutler. Until he got hurt, Orton and Forte carried the Bears despite the awful defense. During this stretch of games, Orton was developing into the rich man's Jim Miller, who was the best quarterback the Bears had in decades. Unlike Miller, who sported a goatee that his chinstrap turned into the handlebar mustache of a man who would end up on the business end of a Seagal-wielded pool cue and Orton's legendary neckbeard, Cutler fits in much better with the Bears' groomin' standards.

Cutler offers no mustache for the Bears to have to police, lest their quarterbacks
look like a bunch of Elvises

The Bears' cavalier lack of attention to facial hair makes them a significantly less classy organization than the New York Yankees or the Russian Empire, where Peter the Great famously demanded that his courtiers shave their beads or face a ruinous 100 Ruble Beard Tax. His eventual successor Paul I was more worried about clothes, sending soldiers into the the streets of Moscow to rough up anyone caught wearing round hats, top boots, long pants, or shoes with laces.


Paul I's face contorted due to a
combination of Typhus and his intense
hatred of pants

Cutler, of course, comes from Vanderbilt, along with Hunter Hillenmeyer, Chris Williams, and Earl Bennett; Vandy is represented more than any other school on the current roster presumably related to Mike McCaskey's need for choo-choo time.

When the trains come out, Mike
McCaskey insists on his Vanderbilt
players, his frock, his muttonchops,
his string tie, and his knee puppets

THE CUBS: A FACIAL HAIR UPDATE

The Cubs have just gotten their first heartbreaking bullpen collapse out of the way in Houston. Just before Opening Day, the Cubs faced a pitching logjam. David Patton had a good spring and cannot get sent to the minors because he is a Rule 5 draft pickup (Rule 5 picks must remain on the 25-man roster the entire season) which left no room for Gaudin in theory. In reality, Reed Johnson demanded the removal of Gaudin, asserting that there can only be one on the team with a ridiculous chin beard, despite the fact that Gaudin's chin beard was the only thing stopping him from looking like an adult version of the fat kid from The Sandlot.

The illustrated version of the previous paragraph

The Cub bullpen looks vulnerable this season, but the bats should help. Expect a breakout season from Mike Fontenot, who put up a .909 OPS in 243 at-bats last year, and solid bench production from Micah Hoffpauir who will be a much better left-handed pinch hitter than Daryl Ward. The season comes down to whether Milton Bradley can stay healthy and compensate for Derrek Lee's declining power. Bradley is prone to both injury and comical fits (here he is memorably combining both for the San Diego Padres), so in the worst case scenario he'll play five games before spending the rest of the season in a custom made iron lung device that punches children. Of course, in the best case, he'll team up with Carlos Zambrano to fight crime.

SOMALIAN PIRACY UPDATE

BYCTOM favorite pirate reporter Jeff Gettleman is on the case once again, reporting that Somali pirates have reasserted themselves after luring authorities into a false sense of security into an unstoppable "pirate surge."

BYCTOM has already covered Somali pirates in depth as part of the natural territory of a Northwestern sports blog, but the pirates have this time seized five ships in 48 hours, sending Gettleman to once again marvel at the pirates' seeming invinceability on the Horn of Africa.

"The pirates, apparently, are back."

"Most of last year’s 120-plus pirate attacks were centered on the relatively narrow Gulf of Aden, a strategic waterway between Yemen and Somalia at the mouth of the Red Sea. That is where most of the navy patrols are, too, and several recent attacks on merchant vessels have been thwarted by helicopters and frigates speeding to the rescue...But the pirates are adapting, going farther out to sea."

"Lt. Nathan Christensen, a United States Navy spokesman, called the rash of attacks “unbelievable.”"

New York Times Africa bureau
chief Jeff Gettleman on his beat

RUSSIAN CAR FACTORY UPDATE

Today's New York Times also has an excellent story on the state of the Russian Auto industry, describing a government desperate to save what may be one of the world's least efficient car factories. As Andrew E. Kramer reports, the average worker in Avtovaz, which makes the Soviet icon Lada, turns out an average of eight cars per year, compared to 36 produced by a worker in a GM plant.

"The factory, a monument to Soviet gigantism in industrial design, is a panoramic sprawl of pipes and smokestacks on a bank of the Volga River, 460 miles southeast of Moscow. It employs 104,000 assembly line workers, many of whom still toil with hand-held wrenches."

Yet, the Russian government will pay billions to aid Avtovaz with no strings attached. Why?

"...[I]ndustrial discontent is stirring in the most hardscrabble Russian factory towns.

On March 11, 16 Russian steelworkers announced a hunger strike to protest wage cuts at a Ural Mountain mill. (The same week Severstal, one of Russia’s largest steel makers, announced it would lay off 9,000 to 9,500 workers.)

Here in Tolyatti, when a G.M. joint venture laid off 400 people in December, riot officers were called in to disperse an angry crowd that had gathered in the plant parking lot."

In addition, riot police were used in Vladivostok in order to silence protests against tariff barriers to foreign cars because the city has become a center for importing and servicing secondhand Japanese Cars.

The Ladas produced now, of course, are sleek modern machines, not the boxes we remember from the Andropov era.

The models unveil the Lada while simultaneously demonstrating
perfect conformity with Tsar Paul I's dress standards at the popular
Lada, Onion Dome Hat, Silver Age Superhero and Tron exhibit at
the Russian museum We Found Things in Warehouse

These are all of your crucial updates from the week in sports, grooming standards, piracy, and the effect of the global financial meltdown on Soviet-designed auto works.

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.