Victory in Iowa

With a season of high expectations turning into a season of nervous plank-pacing, Northwestern waltzed into Iowa City and managed to ruin Iowa's perfect season.

A team learns from its coach as the entire team unholsters its fists like 85
Judd Nelsons.

The Wildcats got a gutty performance from an injured Kafka unable to unleash the Kafka Smash play, but sticking in the pocket knowing that if it broke down he would be forced to let an Iowa defensive lineman run into him while running very fast for some horrible reason. On the other hand, Northwestern reached into its bag of tricks on the lone offensive TD by having quarterback Dan Persa pass the ball, the type of innovation that fuels Northwestern's "spread offense."

The idea of a quarterback passing started in the first football game when Yale
quarterback Walter Camp allegedly attempted one only to have its legality
decided by coin flip. The referee did sanction Camp's muttonchops by ruling
"what the hell, it's the nineteenth century." Passing did not return until
1906, after a brutal attack on football by college administrators such as
University of Chicago Divinity Dean Shailer Matthews, who argued in this
New York Times article that "Football to-day is a social obsession-- a boy-killing,
education prostituting, gladiatorial sport. It teaches virility and courage, but
so does war. I do not know what should take its place, but the new game should
not require the services of a physician, the maintenance of a hospital, and the
celebration of funerals."

Despite a shaky start, the defense locked down Iowa's offense aided by the unfortunate injury of Ricky Stanzi, whose season shared the volatile mix of success and grotesque incompetence of Rex Grossman's 2005 season with the Bears and Jackie Chan's take on the drunken master, whose erratic kung-fu baffled both opponents and audiences attempting to find any semblance of a plot in a Jackie Chan movie from before, say, 1995. Losing Stanzi seemed to suck the air out of the Iowa offense under the somewhat overwhelmed freshman Vandenberg, who threw a pick on his first pass and went 9-27 for the game while being harried by an inspired Northwestern d-line picked up by a resurgent Wootton who may finally be shaking off the lingering effects of offseason knee surgery and a troublesome ankle.

The Wildcat victory was only part of a glorious football weekend as Michigan lost to Purdue and Navy again got the better end of Notre Dame, which got Fitz fired up enough to start taking some shots at the Irish in the media. Fitz then piloted a giant fist-shaped blimp over South Bend for six hours, bombarding the town with scrolling taunts about 1995 and the sound of mechanized cackling.

VICTORY OVER IOWA A COUP

Perhaps the only person who had a better week than Fitz was Simon Mann, the ex-SAS commando who led an ill-advised coup attempt to sieze Equatorial Guinea's oil supply and then ended up on a festive tour of third world prisons, an event of crucial interest to BYCTOM. Mann, originally arrested in Zimbabwe, was extradited to Equatorial Guinea's infamous Black Beach prison, where rumor has it that the government looks down harshly upon people who assemble inept mercenary forces in an attempt to violently overthrow it and install a puppet regime that will give them control over the country's lucrative oil resources. According to this excellent Times article, Mann came out of Black Beach looking better than one would expect after enjoying steaks and fine wines. Overall however, the mercenaries did not take to captivity, as the article relates:

“I thought these guys were tough guys,” one South African source said last week. “Yet they were all squealing like canaries. They really rather let down the names of mercenaries.”

The only phrase perhaps more apt at describing Mann's hopeles coup
attempt than "they really rather let down the names of mercenaries"
is "if Matrix were here, he'd laugh too."

Mann came out of prison in good spirits, beardless, and promising vengeance on his foes, vowing that those who abandoned him can expect an "ice-axe between the eyes" in a startlingly Stalin-esque embrace of both vengeance and ice axes. The only thing more chilling would be the involvement of a shirtless Tom Berenger believing that he is making a sequel to Dogs of War or Major League IV (not even Tom Berenger at his most shirtless could believe that anyone was making another Sniper movie.)

Berenger succeeds where Mann failed in Dogs of War, although it is worth noting
that Walken is surprisingly unconvincing as a soldier as he runs through the
fictional Equatorial Guinea as if he is filming part of a Fatboy Slim video,
therefore proving that Christopher Walken should not be a soldier unless the
order to kill comes from the disturbing demons that live in his psyche and
spacious forehead

One target may be Sir Mark Thatcher who became involved in helping the plotters secure a helicopter and an associate that was even by the loose standards of those involved, a complete disgrace to any sort of international intrigue and black-sheep children. Thatcher's almost comical attempt to play everyone against each other despite fumbling his cloak-and-dagger schemes more ineptly than could be imagined by the broadest, Frenchest farce has left him few friends in the mercenary world and exile from South Africa. Easily ensnared in the coup's paper trail, the South African anti-corruption team known as The Scorpions arrested him and he immediately attempted to betray his co-conspirators in an outcome that can be described as less than executive. Thatcher probably should have known better than to mess with the Scorpions, who were enjoying a brief window as the world's most dangerous organization of Scorpions between waning twenty-first century Mortal Kombat popularity and the German rock band's inevitable resurgence in 2009 to stick it one more time to the late Erich Honecker. Though the Times speculates that Mann could testify against Thatcher as the main financier, likely nothing will happen to Mann other than staring vacuously into his Spanish compound, bumping into things, and becoming involved in a dangerous network of white van schemes and multi-level marketing promotions that ultimately involve a penniless Thatcher stumbling into Parliament with a catalogue of upmarket knives.

Thatcher instinctively strikes a beatific pose looking optimistically
towards a sunny future

LINCOLN LOOMING

Like Thatcher, Northwestern will find itself in the sights of a jilted enemy in traditional rival Illinois on Saturday. What looked like the surest Big Ten win a few weeks ago now looks more difficult as the Illini have been frisky, winning their last two and energized by the desire to seize the first Land of Lincoln Trophy in this red-hot rivalry that is no longer predictably played at the end of the season when rivals have a chance to spoil each others' seasons or play for championships but more intriguingly at some random point that the Big Ten promises will be "some time during football season" as a way to add even more intensity to this contest.

The Land of Lincoln Trophy is part of an NCAA initiative for all rivalry trophies to be
entirely hat-based by 2034

Northwestern, though technically bowl-eligible, needs another victory to ensure itself of a post-season berth and keep alive the possibility of an eight win season. Let's hope Mick McCall is working on new wrinkles such as the T-formation or the Bloodless Coup which involves Sir Mark Thatcher accidentally lighting himself on fire and running about the stadium unable to express his predicament while a Northwestern takes advantage of the chaos and calmly strides into the end zone.

Spring Game

Northwestern played its Spring Game yesterday, a traditional life-or-death exhibition struggle between the offense and the defense as they tune up, get ready for position battles, and allow Coach Fitzgerald to begin regaining his intense fist-pumping form after a winter lacking intense fist pumping opportunities.

Pat Fitzgerald can't keep his exuberance
bottled up on President's Day

SPRING GAME OBSERVATIONS

The offense performed well in the Spring Game, with presumed starter Mike Kafka going 12-21 for 134 yards and an extra 18 on the ground. More importantly, converted wide receiver Jeravin Matthews rushed for 90 yards on 15 attempts, which puts him in a prime position to compete for the starting job over Stephen Simmons. The defense was missing four key starters including Corey Wootton and Brad Phillips. As everyone knows, the outcome of the Spring Game is extremely significant in college football, so I advise readers to either celebrate by overturning cars and setting them on fire in anticipation of an amazing season or panic by overturning cars and setting them on fire.

ILLINOIS RIVALRY UPDATE

In other news, Northwestern and Illinois have finally come up with a replacement for the Sweet Sioux Tomahawk trophy for the rivalry game. Illinois cannot be trusted with anything resembling Native American imagery lest their pro-Chief sleeper cells emerge to unofficially don an embarrassing buckskin outfit in flagrant defiance of the NCAA, the Wildcats and Illini will play for the Land of Lincoln trophy. The trophy has not yet been designed, but naturally BYCTOM has a rational and workable suggestion.


At thepost-game ceremony, I encourage Lincoln-centric trash
talking such as "It shall take four score and seven years to
bring forth my foot from your ass"

Hopefully, both teams will be in contention to make the Land of Lincoln game a real annual rivalry game instead of the pointless Sweet Sioux game. At any rate, the trophy cannot possibly be as lame as the Land Grant Trophy between Penn State and Michigan State, which looks like the desk of a 1960s office worker.

Opening up the trophy reveals a
bottle of brandy, a carton of cigarettes,
and a reel-to-reel tape recorder
filled with conversations among
suspected communists

AFRICAN COUPS AND YOU

Although this blog has been favoring East Africa due to the pirate situation, it is now time to turn to West Africa and the plague of coups. Specifically, the failed attempt in 2004 to overthrow Obiang Nguema, the the President of Equatorial Guinea, a tiny nation in the Bight of Benin (Beware, beware the Bight of Benin, for few come out though many come in, claims the old saying) in what Adam Roberts decribes as the "armpit of Africa." Roberts is the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Economist who wrote The Wonga Coup, a fascinating account of the bungled coup attempt. He describes Equatorial Guinea:

Almost nobody has a good word for the place. If you see a man limping on both legs, quipped the American embassador, you know he has been to Equatorial Guinea. 'Devil Island', as it is sometimes known is unlike most of modern Africa. Senior churchmen and leaders talk of the 'magical powers' of the rulers; there are said to be regular witch-burnings. It is both sleepy and sinister, where the vicious rivalries of village politics are elevated to the national level.

Location of Equatorial Guinea on
Africa's West Coast

In 1973, Roberts describes a similar coup attempt, also led by British mercenaries, who wanted to oust Obiang's uncle Macias Nguema, the president who presided over Equatorial Guinea's colonial liberation from Spain and then became a brutal kelptocratic dictator, following the Mobutu playbook almost to the letter except also including an apparent fascination with the skulls of his enemies.

Mobutu bankrolled and hosted the Rumble in the Jungle, chronicled in the
excellent documentary When we were kings which combines Mobutu,
Ali, and a mustachioed, incoherent James Brown, the best of all possible
James Browns

The 1973 coup attempt was partially financed by author Frederick Forsyth, a thriller novelist perhaps best known for The day of the jackal, which was turned into a phenomenal movie and then butchered by Bruce Willis in The jackal, which inspired a phenomenal Ebert review: "The Jackal strikes me as the kind of overachiever who, assigned to kill a mosquito, would purchase contraband insecticides from Iraq and bring them into the United States by hot air balloon, distilling his drinking water from clouds and shooting birds for food."

Shortly after the coup failed, Forsyth wrote Dogs of war, a novel that was essentially a fictionalized version of the coup. Roberts interviewed Forsyth about his role in financing the coup; Forsyth admits that he donated a large sum and did meet with shady international mercenaries in planning, but only was out for research and information for his novel. Dogs of war became a movie in 1980 starring Christopher Walken and Tom Berenger.

After Dogs of war, Walken demonstrated that bleach blond hair is the hallmark
of a maniac

Though Roberts sympathizes with Forsyth's commitment to ending the lunatic reign of Macias Nguema (or, as one of his official titles labeled him, "Great Maestro of Popular Education, Science, and Traditional Culture"), he points to oil as the chief motivating force behind the 2004 coup attempt. The 2004 coup was led by Simon Mann, a British ex-SAS commando who went on to demonstrate that who dares occasionally ends up in Zimbabweyan prison. Mann headed a private security firm that served as a mercenary force in various African conflicts during the 1990s called Executive Outcomes in the chillingly bland style of mercenary firms that tend to have names such as Fulcrum Services or Business Ventures.

If the A-Team had been called Leveraged Solutions, they
would not have to constantly battle armies of rustic
hayseeds by pummeling them with produce-hurling
tractor equipment that makes pickup trucks harmlessly
explode

Mann planned to lead a team of British and South African mercenaries (including a man named Victor Dracula because, as he put it, "I can only say this: I took blood!" You can verify this quote in Roberts' book by looking in the index under Dracula, Victor) into Equatorial Guinea on a 727, seize the palace, install the ex-priest and leading exile dissident Severo Moto as president, and seize control of oil revenues. The plot is actually vastly more complicated, and Roberts finds that, unlike most coup attempts, the Mann group actually left a significant paper trail stretching from Britain to South Africa, to Equatorial Guinea. The paper trail ensnared Sir Mark Thatcher as a financier, the son of the former British Prime Minister who had apparently been spending his time since the Iron Lady took office in various high-profile efforts to blight his family name.

The two words most associated with Thatcher (code
named "Scratcher" in the plot) seem to be dim and
incompetent, but on the other hand, the man can
wear a scarf.

The Wonga Coup is a very impressive piece of investigative reporting and disentangles a complex web into a compelling narrative, but it is most of all a bizarre insight into contemporary Africa. Of particular note is the role of South African, U.S., and Spanish intelligence services-- they clearly knew about the plot (mercenaries apparently enjoy getting drunk and revealing their plans to overthrow governments to hapless bar patrons), and Spain actually sent warships in the area (the government claimed it was doing training exercises), but then they disavowed all knowledge.

Coup mastermind Simon Mann went from
incarceration in Zimbabwe to being extradited to
Equatorial Guinea, a classic case of going from out
of the frying pan to the country where you
attempted to kill the maniacal head of state in an
ill-planned coup attempt

FOOTBALL IN THE AIR

With the Spring Game finished, BYCTOM will turn to the NFL draft, looking at NU's crop of undrafted free agents and the Chicago Bears' slew of second day picks, where Angelos will attempt to prove that he is less bungling than Mark Thatcher and more cunning than a Nguema. Hopefully, the outcomes for all involved will be, for lack of a better term, executive.