Game Preview: Iowa

Going into Kinnick, the Wildcats have a tall task ahead of them. Iowa is ranked #4 in the country and undefeated, with a convincing win over Penn State. On the other hand, Iowa have not exactly been a juggernaut schything though the opposition. The fact that Iowa remains undefeated despite their close wins to mediocre, unranked, and extraordinarily unranked teams remains a remarkable feat of overcoming sloppiness, showing killer instinct, and posessing luck and ingenuity.

Using Trojan Corn, an ancient Iowan tactic highlighting
the cunning, unconventional battle plan that allowed
the Iowans to fill Des Moines with the pillaged
artifacts of the Middle West's most cherished treasures

The game may be the biggest of the season for the Wildcats. With only one home game remaining against an underrated Wisconsin team, Northwestern has to play like its bowl chances are on the line in every game. Beating Iowa would set Northwestern up for another bowl appearance and gain some momentum from displacing the Big Ten's top team, a team which has incidentally developed a bit of bad blood-- not quite Sharks vs. Jets, but more like the Sharks versus a different ethnic gang that they're not afraid to pull the switchblade combs out on. Otherwise, the hope of the season rests on beating an abysmal Illinois team for the first Land of Lincoln Trophy or face watching Zook smash it to smithereens before ripping off his track suit to reveal either a skintight buckskin suit or a tatooed facsimile thereof and reclaiming the Sweet Sioux in the name of all past and future Zook.

Kneel before Zook

TAKING OVER

What Northwestern needs is a transcendant statement game, taking it over and making it its own. The musical equivalent of the takeover probably comes from Stan Getz's classic Captain Marvel album from 1972 that's completely dominated not by the venerable Getz, but by pianist Chick Corea. Corea, who is perhaps best known now for thanking L. Ron Hubbard in his liner notes and looking as much like Chief Wiggum as an actual human being can, composed all of the tunes (except a cover of Billy Strayhorn's Lush Life), and put together a the beginnings of his first iteration of Return to Forever.

Chick Corea from his newest double-album
Book 'em Lou: One Count of Being a Bear,
and One Count of Being an Accessory to
Being a Bear

Return to Forever quickly changed in the 1970s from a Brazilian-tinged fusion outfit to an out and out arena rock outlet with songs about wizards and album art developed from the same studio that painted rides for traveling carnivals that made the pitiful dragon ride sort of look vaguely fearsome.

It would take a team of quantum theorists dozens of pounds of goatee, clipboards, and
medium sized hadron colliders decades to somehow puzzle out an equation on how what
is going on on the right somehow contributed to the album to the left

THE NBA RETURNS

While very actively not commenting on college football, BYCTOM has been equally neglectful on the rest of the Chicago sports scene, including the forgettable and mediocre Chicago Bears and the promising Bulls who let an inspiring opening-night win over the Spurs get overshadowed by a loss on the road to last year's conference rival Celtics. It was an disappointing loss for the Bulls who finally had to contend with international chin model Kevin Garnett, whose suit-based chest-pounding and jaw jutting vacillated between distateful and transcendantly distasteful, a phenomenon perhaps best exemplified by the decision to have John Lithgow speak the King's English with nary a comment from another character during the entirety of Cliffhanger, even managing to throw out an acceptably Shakespearan "AAAAUUUGGGH" as he plummets into a cliff while trapped in a non-functional helicopter.

The only way that Garnett can thrust his chin out further is
if it were to split open and a stalk with another, smaller
chin comes shooting out of the aperture

Another aficionado of the chin jut is no other than a young Joseph Stalin, here seen mean muggin' in the back center of his class photo back when he was known as Soso Djugashvili the choirboy.

This photo has been run solely to attract people who have
been simultaneously google searching for the phrases
"Joseph Stalin" and "mean muggin'"

Stalin's progression from son of the town drunk to the Bolsheviks' preeminent bank robber, extortionist, and eventual confidant to Lenin is told brilliantly in Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin. Montefiore, who already wrote the Stalin in power tome In the Court of the Red Tsar confidently reconstructs the dictator's young life by unearthing sources that had somehow remained hidden in dusty Georgian archives to survive the purges, although Montefiore is a bit showy with this information, revealing each new manuscript with the same subtlety as a carnival barker revealing never before seen freak show acts such as a bearded lady that also wrestles bears (the actual footnotes are amazingly not part of the paperback edition although they are available at Montefiore's website).

Montefiore constructs a vivid world of crime and revolution around the young Soso, who also went by aliases including Soselo (under which he published poems), Koba, Oddball Osip, The Priest, and Pockmarked Oska (Stalin, like Lenin, only stuck with his final name because it is what his best-known work became published under, which is a shame because we could have had an iron-fisted dictator running around named "Joe Pox" which would have perhaps taken an infintessimal amount of sting out of forced collectivization). Even in his early 20s, Stalin was a driven, ruthless operator. The following occurred during Siberian exile in 1915:

At a boozy dinner, Kamenev asked everyone round the table to declare their greatest pleasure in life. Some cited women, others earnestly replied that it was the progress of dialictical materialism towards the workers' paradise. Then Stalin answered: "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There is nothing sweeter in the world."

I only hope there was an elderly fantasy Mongolian there to agree with him.

SLAKING AN IMPLACABLE VENGEANCE

Iowa will be looking for vengeance for last year against the Wildcats as the last thing Iowa fans want to see will be Northwestern ruining their perfect season and hearing the lamentation of the Iowa women. Northwestern can use a bit of chin-jutting swagger or at the very least, the swagger that comes from wearing a southwestern themed rug as an article of clothing. And hopefully, when the dust clears in Iowa City, Northwestern fans can settle in their yurts and determine what is best in life.

Home court advantage

It's been a somewhat disappointing weekend for Northwestern as they dropped a close one to a reeling Iowa team on the road. Coming up next, they have a tough home stretch against Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio State in the friendly confines of Welsh-Ryan, which is sure to be orange, maize, and scarlet for the next three contests. Welsh-Ryan is practically a second home court for the Illini, who will fill the arena with their fans and the possibility that their mascot will swing into the arena like Douglas Fairbanks to thumb his nose at NCAA sanctions before slicing a three-stroke "I" into the shirt of the nearest official and then fleeing the premises as his 1950s here there be Indians theme music blares triumphantly into the background.

Northwestern should be getting a better home court advantage. Granted, I am certainly not suggesting that NU fans should be giving visiting players the Clemson treatment, but there should be a way to get the edge back. Perhaps the Athletic Department can make improvements to the arena to make it more menacing. For one, they can move Welsh-Ryan Arena into the a hollowed out volcano or decorate it with the severed heads of vanquished foes.


Mussolini's Fascist Headquarters subtly evokes the image of a doom fortress

Of course, the Duce had the advantage of intimidating people by riding in on his own personal tank, surrounded by the world's most sullen army.


Mussolini promises Italians the type of government that involves standing on
tanks and yelling

A suitably intimidating Welsh-Ryan Arena would give Northwestern players a psychological advantage over the opposition and the visiting fans. I also believe that Welsh-Ryan could be modernized, marrying the appeal of its low-key glorified high school gymnasium charm with the amenities of a modern major-conference facility, as demonstrated in this crude model:


In this model, Northwestern's antiquated scoreboard with missing dots is replaced
by a giant, fang-bearing snake. Legions of chaos, of course, sold separately

FROM MUGSHOT TO EPAULET

Mussolini grew up to become a journalist and a socialist firebrand, following the in the footsteps of his father (I guess his later rejection of socialism and invention of fascism can be projected as a type of Freudian rejection, although my favorite example of that remains George IV, whose pro-Whig leanings made him the patron of Charles Fox, his father's gravest political enemy except during his porphyritic outbursts when his main political enemies included moon-men. George IV supported the Whigs mainly to oppose his father; after he finally gained control of the throne in 1820 at the age of 58, he mainly continued in the political tradition of George III, as he was more concerned with gorging himself until sufficiently gouted and pursuing increasingly homely royal mistresses as he became almost certainly the most hated modern monarch in British history).


George IV possessed the perfect combination of girth and incompetence that made him a
hit among political cartoonists (right) or artists depicting him as the last thing you see
before you die of some horrible nineteenth century illness such as "The Swoons"

The Young Mussolini was arrested in Switzerland for vagrancy in 1902. Pictures of young Mussolini are of course fascinating in examining the transformation of a young, scared, and disreputable looking youth into a strutting dictator with closets lined with comical military uniforms and ill-conceived plans to invade Abyssinia.


Mussolini demonstrates the classic acquisition of dictator accouterments: the
scarf, the mustache/glower combination, and finally the angry fist-shaking that
propelled him into power

Mussolini's arch-nemeses in the Soviet Union also have classic mug-shots. For example, Lenin's baby face in his 1895 mug shot quickly gives way to a revolutionary hardness just two years later.


By 1897, Lenin is prepared to take on all comers in the popular historical table-
top game "Everyone Dies in the Crimea," and he's brought his rule books to
prevent cheating and the development of overseas colonies as a way to continue
rampant monopoly capitalism

The Australian essayist, cultural critic, and sometime television personality Clive James once wrote that "The most exciting way of getting into Russia is to cross Germany in a sealed train and arrive at the Finland Station in St Petersburg to be greeted by a cheering revolutionary mob who promptly name the city after you." Of course, James is already a personal hero for pointing out Arnold Schwarzenegger's resemblance to a brown condom filled with walnuts and for using British television to publicly call attention to Michael Caine's 1978 killer bee opus.

Lenin's sealed train ride to Petersburg apparently included a rigid no-smoking policy enforced by the cigarette-hating Lenin, who exiled all smokers to the lavatories. In this TLS review article, Charles King describes the train ride:

That was how the journey to the Finland Station began: with a band of about thirty carousing Russian intellectuals, fuelled by beer and Swiss bread, occasionally singing the “Marseillaise” and telling bawdy jokes, all led by an allergic, ill-tempered martinet, clicking and jerking their way eastward towards the Revolutionary crowds of Petrograd.

Young Trotsky's mugshot gives off an intellectual bent as well as providing key inspiration for Yahoo Serious's star turn in Young Einstein.


Trotsky's patented pince-nez glasses would unfortunately serve as a damning
mark of identificantion when occasionally charicatured as a massive man-eating
demon being rampaging through Russia

Of course, Trotsky met a bad end in Mexico, depicted here with the utmost historical accuracy:

This depiction shows Trotksy falling for the old there's
two types of spurs, those that come in through the door
and those who come in through the window trick.
Allegedly, Trotsky told his guads "Do not kill him. This
man has a story to tell" after assassin Ramón Mercader
finished whaling upon him with an ice axe.

Stalin has several mugshots, one of a young Stalin in 1902, followed by a 1908 arrest for rampant gangsterism, which led to exiled in Siberia and a dearing escape to his Baku headquarters desiguised as a woman.


Though Stalin was acquitted in 1902, his revolutionary policies of tying women to
railroad tracks and rent-raising led to his exile. By 1912, Stalin was rehabilitated as a
kindly bus driver

One of the bizarre rituals that Stalin demanded once in power was the participation in binge-drinking sessions resembling an insane Communist frat party. Here Simon Montefiore's excellent recent biography In the court of the red tsar provides an invaluable service by explaining which Stalinist lieutenants could hold their liquor:

Sometimes the drinking at these Bacchanals was so intense that the potentates, like ageing bloated students, staggered out to vomit, soiled themselves, or simply had to be borne home by their guards. Stalin praised Molotov's capacity but sometimes even he became drunk. Poskrebyshev was the most prolific vomiter. Khrushchev was a prodigious drinker, as eager to please Stalin as Beria. He sometimes became so inebriated that Beria took him home and put him to bed, which he promptly wet...Malenkov just became more bloated.

Malenkov was also apparentlynicknamed
"Melanie" for his broad hips. There's an .
excellent picture of him in the Montefiore
book walking with Stalin, Beria, and Molotov
in the 1945 victory parade where he's wearing
a sailor suit that transforms him into the
Stay-Puft Soviet Marshmallow Man.