Words, Words About Sports

The Cubs have made it to late July and they have managed to go through nearly 60% of a baseball season without dissolving into a Cubbish morass of ineptitude.  They have hit baseballs in the right direction.  They have thrown baseballs at a regulation strike zone.  Most of the outfielders have managed to show up with regulation baseball gloves and not oversized novelty gloves and propeller beanies.  It's a new world.

The Cubs remain in contention for one of the dozens of available wildcard playoff spots this season because of the sudden influx of young, talented Cubs.  Anthony Rizzo has matured into one of the best hitters in the National League.  Jake Arrieta is pitching like a legitimate ace.  Kris Bryant was an instant all-star, Addison Russell has become an excellent fielder, and Starlin Castro is being the best Starlin Castro he can, which means he is swatting ineffectively at baseballs with a pool noodle.  And every time one of these guys starts to falter or slump they bring up another bat.  This week, it was Kyle Schwarber, a neckless stump-person who treats baseballs like they are a nameless bar hooligan in a Steven Seagal movie.

Cincinnati detectives at a crime scene where two baseballs were brutally schwarbered

Schwarber had a brief cameo as a DH-- he nominally plays catcher the way Russell Crowe is nominally the front man for 30 Odd Foot of Grunts-- but came up this week after a thumb injury to Miguel Montero. And, in a series with the Reds in which the teams played baseball nearly ceaselessly for 24 hours, Schwarber exploded. On Tuesday, he blasted a ninth-inning home run to tie the game, knocked the go-ahead dinger in the 13th, and then exploded into a supernova firing bats across the cosmos.

For the first time in years, the Cubs are fun. That is not to say they are a juggernaut. They play in the same division as the red-hot Pirates, and the St. Louis Cardinals continue to grimly march towards the division crown, replacing injured pitchers like a gritty Midwestern hydra regenerating heads so it can devour Ancient Greeks the right way.
"Seeing that Heracles was winning the struggle, Hera sent a large crab to 
distract him. He crushed it under his mighty foot."
I would read a book of myths as told by a Wikipedia Editor

Even though the Cubs are headed towards almost certain Cubs disaster, summer is infinitely better with a relevant baseball team that has not yet crushed us.

BEARS FOOTBALL IS BLEAK AND HOPELESS

The Chicago Bears, on the other hand, appear to be moving towards the season with the graceful dignity of Peter Lorre from the first five minutes of Casablanca.  They have installed a new GM, a new coach, a new offense, and will run a heretical 3-4 base defense.  Fortunately, the hands at the wheel are steady, with the McCaskey family committed to running a professional football team in their image, which is currently confused, vacuous mustache staring.

George McCaskey's hero is Ludwig von Reuter who also has a mustache and runs things into 
the ground

The greatest lightning rod for Bears criticism remains quarterback Jay Cutler.  Cutler is entering his sixth year with the Bears, during which he has become as popular in Chicago as a crooked politician dumb enough to get caught.  Cutler arrived with a reputation as a big-armed malcontent who was just good enough to disappoint you.  This was welcome in Chicago's barren quarterback wasteland where fans cheered Rex Grossman for his mastery of the fling-it-up-to-Bernard-Berrian play, where Kyle Orton became a folk hero for managing to look competent nearly as often as he looked like he had grown a beard so he could walk into one of those dingy Chicago bars identifiable only by a faded Old Style sign and order one for him and one for his beard, and where fans cheered Rex Grossman again as he replaced Kyle Orton and this had been going on with a series of interchangeable Grossmen and Ortons since time immemorial.

Cutler had a few seasons of promise and excuses.  The Bears fielded a five-man OSHA complaint as an offensive line and a squardon of interchangeable undersized punt returners at receiver.  When the Bears turned their receivers into a fleet of hulking dreadnoughts and approached competence on offense, the defense turned into a performance art piece about launching oneself gracefully at the air behind a running back. Nevertheless, Cutler has failed to transcend the team's shortcomings and torpedoed the offense with infuriating interceptions.  Every quarterback throws baffling interceptions from time to time; Cutler throws picks so ill-conceived that they appear almost spiteful.  Bears fans have given up on him.  The team gave up on him last season when they benched a healthy Cutler for Jimmy Clausen, a quarterback who had failed to look like a functioning NFL player for even a single snap in his short, miserable career and also he has a baby head.

Cutler has also committed the unforgivable sin of making a large amount of money.  He signed a seven-year $126 million contract, although it is important to remember that NFL contracts deliberately obscure, misleading, and fictitious.  It is not uncommon to see NFL contracts include rich parcels of land in Frisland or Poyasian bonds.  Cutler's contract binds the Bears for a shorter period of time and money than indicated, but it's not negligible.  It is too onerous to release Cutler and has rendered him untradeable, and new general manager Ryan Pace seems to regard his quarterback like an elderly person will regard a tribal bicep tattoo in the year 2070.

The Jay Cutler/Ryan Pace relationship reminds me of a version 
of What About Bob, but instead of being charming and ingratiating, 
Bob sits sullenly in the corner, texting pictures of his boat shoes

Jay Cutler also has an unpleasant reputation.  In this ESPN article ranking the NFL quarterbacks (behind their insider paywall), Cutler is invoked like a chain-wielding wraith portending quarterback doom before finally revealing himself at #20 as a bunch of nameless NFL people call him a jerk.  His air of hostile indifference is well-documented.  It does not bother me if my team's quarterback is a churl because I don't imagine I'll ever have to interact with him, but I can understand how a guy theoretically paid a bit less than the GDP of Nauru who looks at any given moment like he might walk out of the stadium before a gleeful opposing cornerback has the chance to finish sauntering into the endzone with one of his errant passes might antagonize fans.  At the very least, Cutler's mediocrity and toxic reputation means we don't have to see him attempt to act in terrible commercials.  His only onscreen role seems to have been as himself in a fantasy football sitcom, which is a shameful miscasting; Jay Cutler was born to play the dismissive sheriff who doesn't believe in chupacabras until it's too late or someone credited as "guy who won't move yacht."

The Bears will, barring an unexpected miracle, be a dreadful team to follow.  They are in the midst of a complete rebuild.  They face a brutal schedule.   Doug Buffone has passed away, leaving an entire metropolitan area of braying, nasal mustard enthusiasts bereft of anywhere to complain about Jay Cutler for hours at a time.  The entire enterprise will be a joyless slog.  And yet, one year one hopelessly miserable team rises out of nowhere to get obliterated by the Patriots or the Packers in the playoffs and it might as well be the Chicago Bears, sucking all around them into their black hole of mediocrity and dysfunction.  It is not likely, but we just sent a probe towards Pluto, discovered a vaguely Earth-like planet 1,400 light years away, and the Chicago Cubs might sneak into the playoffs.

July Is A Desert of Northwestern-Related Sports News

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.

Michigan State Preview

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."

Recruiting and inevitable ornithological backlash

In a happy convergence of Bears and Wildcat news, BYCTOM is happy to welcome Brett Basanez to Chicago. Baz signed a two-year contract with the Bears to compete with Caleb Hanie for the chance to back up Kyle Orton. The Panthers' decision to part with Basanez is somewhat curious; one would think that they would attempt to hold onto as many quarterbacks as possible after Jake Delhomme imploded in the playoffs and has weaved an unparalleled swath of destruction against shacks in the Southeast.

Unfortunately, the Baz signing is bittersweet as it officially ends the Rex Grossman era in Chicago. I will miss Rex Grossman's charming turn as the Clown Prince of Professional football as he turns to hitchhiking the desolate roads of the midwest, contemplating the devastation he has inadvertently caused through his errant passes, inopportune fumbles, and unintentional killing of pet rabbits.


Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

NORTHWESTERN RECRUITING ROUNDUP:

Signing day has come and gone for football, and NU has apparently inked a promising class. I don't follow recruiting particularly closely because it has always seemed to me a process so potentially creepy and sleazy that Sydney Greenstreet is likely somehow involved.


Though Sydney Greenstreet's roles often involved him plotting, he occasionally was seen
plotting with a fez. Incidentally, Greenstreet was often shot from below in order to give him a
more sinister air that was best conveyed by his ability to flare out his jowls when threatened
by predators or Bogart

Every once in a while, however, the sleaze of recruiting comes through for our entertainment. For example, this article from the New York Times about the recruiting battle for tackle prospect Jamarkus Macfarland between Texas and Oklahoma is an excellent read featuring all of the double-dealing, incessant contact, slander, and salaciousness that one demands in a good recruiting story. The best part of the article contains excerpts from an essay that Macfarland wrote for an English class about a UT recruiting party at the Red River Rivalry:

“I will never forget the excitement amongst all participants,” McFarland wrote. “Alcohol was all you can drink, money was not an option. Girls were acting wild by taking off their tops, and pulling down their pants. Girls were also romancing each other. Some guys loved every minute of the freakiness some girls demonstrated. I have never attended a party of this magnitude.”

He continued: “The attitude of the people at the party was that everyone should drink or not come to the party. Drugs were prevalent with no price attached.”

This is how English papers are written in this, the best of all possible worlds.

For high-level recruits, signing day comes with a certain opportunity for theatricality. For example, Alabama recruit Dre Kirkpatrick teased the crowd with a Texas hat before tossing it aside for an Alabama hat, evidently because he could not find a burnt orange tank top to rip off in a show of contempt. I don't really have a problem with these antics; in fact, I look forward to the day when a school can gather its top recruits together to jump one by one off of a chain link fence while taunting rival schools (incidentally, the Los Locos poem from Short Circuit 2 will be one of the five last things to remain in my dementia addled consciousness in my advanced age along with the phone number for Empire Carpet).


In one final attempt to antagonize
Longhorn fans, here's a picture of Charles
Fourier, who sent legions of comically inept
socialist utopians to colonize Texas in the
1840s. Fourier's beliefs included a complex
numerology that somehow ended with a
utopia featuring oceans made of
lemonade

AN AGE OF BIRDS AND FRAUD

Yesterday, ESPN had a fairly interesting article about Kevin Hart, an all-state lineman who held a press conference to announce he was going to Cal, despite never receiving an offer. The article, being an Outside The Lines piece, is naturally maudlin and discusses the negative effect of sham press conference on Hart's life and his attempt at redemption at a junior college. In my opinion, Hart did not aim high enough; he could take a cue from Col. Richard Meinertzhagen.

Meinertzhagen was a British intelligence officer who served in Africa during World War I and in Palestine during the Mandate period. His diaries are filled with tales of derring-d0: most famously, Meinertzhagen was known for the "Haversack Ruse," where he claimed to have planted false documents to throw off German troop positions, a famously bizarre relationship with his second wife who, by some accounts, perished in some sort of duel with him, his Zionist lobbying during the 1920s, a claim that he once met Adolph Hitler with a loaded revolver in his pocket but lost the nerve to kill him, and a million other accounts of secret agent intrigue and rampaging elephants named Archibald. His series of diaries maintain an eerie level of prescience about events he was involved in along with a constant criticism of incompetent generals and fellow officers. He was a close friend of Ian Fleming and a rumored inspiration for James Bond.

The reason why Meinertzhagen was so insightful is because he wrote his diaries after the fact, and made up virtually every famous story he was involved in.


This picture was probably a
backdrop in a NASA studio, and
I'm guessing the pipe is fake.

Meinerthagen's claims are fantastic, but the most amazing part of the story is how his sordid tale was unraveled. An avid ornithologist, Meinertzhagen contributed thousands of specimens to the British Museum. Museum workers, however, discovered that he had fraudulently labeled several skins and, in an amazing feat that can best be described as a reverse Indiana Jones, stole many of the specimens from the museum that he later gifted back. Enraged ornithologists now charge him with creating a serious amount of confusion in their community, and began publicly raging against his crimes in the 1990s, most notably with Alan Knox's article "Richard Meinertzhagen-- a case of fraud unraveled" in a 1994 edition of Ibis, which admirably demonstrates restraint in the title. Others would be less resistant to temptation, climaxing in titles such as "Ruffled Feathers: Uncovering the Biggest Scandal in the Bird World" from the New York Times in 2006 and New Scientist's unfathomable New York Post-style "Bird world in flap about species fraud."


That's when the attack comes; swish;
from the side; from the two ornithologists
you didn't even know were there

This story all comes from Brian Garfield's The Meinertzhagen Mystery: the life and legend of a colossal fraud, which painstakingly deconstructs Meinertzhagen's tallest tales with inspired historical detective work. The book, however, is a sort of odd read. Though Garfield occasionally captures the whimsical nature of an epic set of hoaxes undone by the righteous fury of the ornithological community, the tone of the book is more angry than anything else. Garfield is truly upset that Meinertzhagen's tales have badly distorted the historical record, as he's been a reliable primary source for many respectable historians. It seems that every page ought to end with a angrily-bolded "SHAME ON YOU," which is also the name of my proposed local newspaper column on Mondays and Wednesdays, alternating with Tuesday-Thursday columns entitled "THERE OUGHT TO BE A LAW." Garfield even goes so far as to start each chapter with an inverted-color black and white photograph of Meinertzhagen, a technique which is traditionally used to demonstrate how municipal aldermen say they are for public works, but actually supported bills to drill more potholes using the elderly.

In other words, Hart may have made a classic signing day error, but at least he can go to an Audubon society meeting without being stoned with gizzard rocks.