A Salacious Posting

August is traditionally a time for quiet reflection, meditation, and installing seatbelts on your couch before spending the rest of the autumn rocketing around your living room from the endless excitement of Northwestern football action. But this August has been chock-a-block with innuendo, Zambrano meltdowns, and scandal so salacious that it would even raise the eyebrow of the most inbred Bourbon aristocrat preternaturally inured to acts of drawing-room depravity beyond comprehension in the New World.

I speak, of course, of the quashing of the plan for Northwestern to intimidate basketball opponents with a hideous all-purple basketball court.

Behold! Who dare enter the Wildcats' fearsome Fortress Dimetapp?

This abomination came from that hated scourge democracy when the athletic department gave fans a chance to vote for their favorite of several new court surfaces. The purple court naturally grew popular as the Internet invariably gravitates toward the ridiculous or the potential site of a Grimace atrocity. The athletic department, however, got skittish and approved a more traditional design that looked more like a basketball court and less than the last thing seen by Mike Teevee. This engendered speculation that the department gleefully ignored the results of an online poll, like a group of Facebook Soviets. Lake The Posts reports that the poll was close enough to run lighting tests on the purple court, which turned out unfavorably because have you taken a look at this thing, it's a giant purple eyesore.

Northwestern's bland new court, shown next to a picture of Leonid Brezhnev,
someone who (like Northwestern's athletic department) would also disregard an online
poll with an iron digital fist, although admittedly my evidence of vote meddling is based
entirely on how much I enjoy using the word quash and socialist-realist paintings of
Brezhnev

Regardless of the courageous attempt by the athletic department to prevent Northwestern from becoming a national joke in basketball with a garish court design, let us not forget the fact that Northwestern is already somewhat of a college hoops punchline. After all, Northwestern basketball is known for the following things:

-Never appearing in the NCAA tournament
-Playing home games in a rustically charming barn
-Fraudulently claiming victory in the 2011 NIT

Therefore, why not gain some national notoriety by playing home games on a fruit roll-up surface (let's assume it's a Fruit Roll-up with a really 1990s-sounding flavor such as BlasterBerry Xtreme Blast)?

YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LAST OF CARLOS ZAMBRANO (THAT IS WHAT CARLOS ZAMBRANO THINKS)

This could be the last opportunity to bust out this classy Zambrano Meltdown Recap graphic as the once-brilliant, now mediocre, always entertaining right-hander may have tossed his last pitch as a Cub. Let us remember by clumsily ruining:

Zambrano!

Big Pitcher for the Cubs,
Switch-Hitter, Clubber of Balls,
Player with Rosin and the North Side's Ace Hurler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
Pitcher of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your two-seam fastballs under the park lights whiffing the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the bats smash and go free to smash again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of beverage dispensers I have seen the marks of wanton anger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my pitcher, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another pitcher with pointed hand yelling so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic bee bees amid the toil of piling pitch on pitch, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft rubber;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a batter pitted against the gatorade,
Blonde-headed,
Arguing,
Whacking,
Planning,
Fanning, breaking, re-fanning,
Under the vines, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant umpire laughs who has never lost a strike zone,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the bleachers, Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, blue-jerseyed, sweating, proud to be Big Pitcher, Switch-Hitter, Clubber of Balls, Player with Rosin and Ace Hurler for the North Side.

A MOST CURIOUS SCANDAL

The last BYCTOM entry featured a list of phrases that it would take to get my attention in an NCAA scandal, callously dismissing NCAA scandals as unworthy of my Victorian outrage. A few days later, Charles Robinson broke the Miami scandal, describing a spectacular set of allegations set amongst a swashbuckling display of NCAA-defying derring-do.

This a photo of me after neglecting to mention that
I'm also interested in articles about allegedly using
a yacht to facilitate off-shore prostitution

My favorite of the allegations involves the bounty system--not only because I enjoy bounties on both the Lee Van Cleef level and as the setting for coconut-based mutinies (according to Arthur Herman's To Rule the Waves, the mutiny on the Bounty ignited after Captain Bligh antagonized his crew with the accusation "Damn your blood, you have stolen my coconuts!"). Devin Hester, now on the Bears, allegedly racked up thousands of tainted booster dollars as a reward for returning kicks and celebrating excessively. I fully support compensating players for drawing hectoring celebration penalties from zebra-striped killjoys, a practice I will encourage when I start my own doomed upstart football league and force boring players to wear jerseys bearing the slogan "HE CELEBRATE INADEQUATELY."

I don't particularly have an interest in the consequences for Miami; I'm mainly enjoying the brazenness of the (alleged) defiance and reveling in the (alleged) sordidness of the whole affair. It would be horrifying to live in a time when a credible fictional scandal concerned the King of Bohemia attempting to cover-up a dalliance with a profligate opera singer that would dash his betrothal to a Scandinavian princess on the rocks of Victorian propriety.

In this Josef Friederich illustration
from A Scandal in Bohemia, Wilhelm
Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein,
the Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein
avoids notice with this casual
diguise.

ALL OF THIS IMPROPRIETY IS MAKING MY HEAD SPIN

NCAA enforcement is part of a long tradition of trying to make some sort attempt to define amateur sports; after all, even the great shamateur cricketer W.G. Grace had been bankrolled with pound notes secreted in his spectacularly bushy beard, and I would be shocked if there wasn't some sort of outcry over a fin de siècle rugby scandal involving illicitly attained top hats, monogrammed handkerchiefs, cane toppers, fox hunting privileges, dirigible tours, or seigniorial rights. Somehow, we will solider on, burdened by the shocking revelation of (alleged) booster malfeasance in college football, brave baseball less a Zambrano, and futilely pretend to enjoy basketball without a garish purple court to serve as the landing point of a thousand Wildcat dunks.

Hey, it's almost football season

August for Chicago sports is in the doldrums, with the Cubs fighting to finish above the hapless Astros. The only thing worth watching is the restarting of the inevitable Zambrano meltdown cycle of yelling, apologizing, anger management, vows to stop getting so angry, and everything building up again to the point where he crosses the line and attempts to wield Mike Fontenot like a weapon.

The odds of this graphic coming out again were approximately
equivalent to the odds of nineteenth century Parisians throwing
up the barricades. According to Ohio University's
Encyclopedia of 1848 Revolutions, the barricades went up in Paris's
east side no less than eight times between 1827 and 1848, the latter
revolution which targeted, one assumes from the painting on the
book cover on the right, a hated Bourbon Ministry to Prevent
People from Sporting Insane Hats

Meanwhile the Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks have been dumping players left and right in order to adhere to the NHL's draconian salary cap restrictions, losing key supporting players such as goalie Antti Niemi, center John Madden, speed demon Kris Versteeg, and, most tragically, cement-mixter Dustin Byfulgien who will now be subjected to awkward Pierre McGuire interviews in Atlanta.

Thankfully, the Wildcat football team returns to practice this week, attempting to go for an unprecedented third bowl in a row and claw to the top of the soon-to-be obsolete eleven member Big Ten conference (I suppose we've lived long enough with the brain-jarring fiction that a conference called the Big Ten has more than ten teams, but I demand an indication that there are more teams in it next year-- anything less than the Enormous Ten is completely unacceptable and I recommend writing to your local congressperson to register your disgust at this potential outrage against pedantry).

In order to learn something about the actual Northwestern football team instead of a series of over-written run-on sentences that invariably end in a tired reference to mustaches or epaulets, why not check out Paul Myerberg's excellent in-depth preview where he has the Wildcats ranked #42 going into the season. You can tell that Myerberg has a greater insight than most national college football writers because the Wildcat preview is headed by a picture of Fitz in the middle of a furious fist pump.

Looking back to a golden era where politicians were not afraid of
fully shaking their fists in order to make a point, unlike the vastly
less satisfying thumb-button technique. On the left, Warren G.
Harding angrily asserts the etymological correctness of the word
"normalcy"

AMATEUR BASKETBALL

The basketball team was poised for its first NCAA tournament run by adding Kevin Coble to a team that nearly made it to the promised land last season. Instead, Coble has decided not to rejoin the team after foot surgery knocked him out of what was supposed to be his senior season. Although this news is disappointing to those looking forward to watching Coble on the floor with Shurna, Thompson, and Crawford as well as national fans of ungainly yet devastatingly effective jump-shooting, the silver lining for regular readers of this site is that they will now be free of references to an ill-advised attempt to nickname Coble "The Mantis" followed by thousands of words in a run-on sentence in defiance of good writing, grammar, and respect for the English language as a means of communication, instead bandying about semi-colons and commas in the manner of a lion tamer ineffectually brandishing a stool and whip against a lion that cannot possibly be impressed by such a useless display of anti-lion weaponry, and also including asides in the middle of a sentence such as the fact that the praying mantis may be the only example of an animal where one part of the name can be replaced with a homophone ("preying") and the description of the animal doesn't suffer one iota for it (off the top of my head, I can't think of another one-- for example "bawled eagle" does not even really make sense except to someone really intent on finding homophones for animal names which I would hope would only be a pastime for a wrongfully imprisoned Count as a diversion from endless vengeance fantasies), although one might wonder: will the Mantis mantle get passed to similarly spindly forward Shurna who will spearhead the Wildcat attack and simultaneously allow for more seemingly unending geysers of unreadable nonsense?

No.

Here's something completely unrelated: a study of the subgenre of music videos themed
around the premise "Arnold Schwarzenegger is at this concert and wielding weaponry"

Though the loss of Coble (and also Kyle Lowry, who transferred) will create a more challenging path to the tournament, the 'Cats still have the talented nucleus of Thompson, Shurna, and Crawford that nearly got them there last year and will hopefully remain based on making impossible yet timely 30-footers.

PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL

In other basketball news, the Bulls missed out on adding one of the big three free agents, but put together a good-looking team by acquiring Carlos Boozer, alliterative three point specialist Kyle Korver, C.J. Watson, Keith Thomas (not to be confused with former Bull malcontent Tim Thomas), and literal Young Turk Ömer Aşık to take a shot at the South Beach juggernaut in the Eastern Conference. Bulls fans will get to take a look at Aşık at the FIBA World Championships in Turkey at the end of this month. Of course, BYCTOM fully supports Turkish attempts to use mustaches to define political viewpoints. This 1998 BBC article alarmingly titled "Moustashes Under Threat" describes various styles of mustache that mark the wearer as a right-wing nationalist, old-fashioned leftist, intellectual, or someone "yearning for the Ottoman past." Chris Morris then drops the terrifying bomb that the Turkish government in 1998 had issued a troubling edict for civil servants that "specifies the exact length and shape of the bureaucratic brush - it has to be clipped straight, and it must end above the upper lip." Fortunately, this more recent article from Qantara is more reassuring, as correspondent Marielle Esvant reports on women attempting to break into Turkish politics:

To convey their message, the activists do not hesitate to burst onto political properties, brandishing moustaches and chanting the slogan 'Do you have to be a man to get in Parliament?'

I am in favor of any political movement or activity that encourages brandishing mustaches (in fact, until ten minutes ago, I was shamefully unaware that a mustache could actually be brandished and my life is now significantly richer) and hope that womens' political movements in other nations might co-opt, let's just reach for an example here from thin air, epaulets in order to shatter the glass ceiling.

In case the Bulls' season does not go as planned and ends in disappointment, Chicago basketball fans can be mollified by Jordan Challenge Mode in the NBA 2k11 videogame, where players get to humiliate digital versions of Craig Eloh, Clyde Drexler, and Greg Ostertag. The Jordan challenge is all well and good, but I would prefer if video game companies would focus on the more compelling elements of the 1990s Bulls.

Of course, for the post-Jordan era, we would all be playing Brad
Miller's Armpit Thunderdome

COUNTING DOWN

It's less than a month before the 'Cats kick off the season in Nashville to ruin the Commodores, so depress your fist buttons, throw up the barricades, and grow yourself an Istanbul-style mustache.

Sports Update for a Sports Website

It's a slow time for Northwestern football news. If you are really desperate, you can follow Coach Fitz on Twitter, although it doesn't give me the Coach Fitz news I really need such as him getting fired up about an optimal oat to water ratio in a bowl of instant oatmeal or whether or not he chest-bumps his barber after another successful crew cut.

Coach Fitz successfully comes in under the
140-character limit

In other NU football news, The Bears signed linebacker Pisa Tinoisamoa. While this is potentially good news for the Bears' linebacker depth, Tinoisamoa will probably get the starting nod over NU alumn Nick Roach who will compete with Hunter Hillenmeyer for a roster spot. Meanwhile, Tyrell Sutton, John Gill, and Eric Peterman are all competing to secure roster spots for NFL teams.

Peterman tries on a Bears helmet while Sutton dons the hated green
and gold

CHICAGO CUBS MELTDOWN UPDATE PART 1

The Cubs are just starting to crawl out of a disastrous eight-game slide where the entire team has been beset by injuries and the complete inability to hit. Fortunately, the Cubs have responded not with complacency or quiet determination, but demonstrative tantrums and the occasionally brouhaha with umpires. Milton Bradley has been, as expected, a clubhouse leader in arguing balls and strikes and getting ejected and suspended. In this article, Bradley claims that the umpires have it out for him, summing the umps' dastardly plan up as "let's try to ruin Milton Bradley." By dipping into the third person when describing a league-wide umpire vendetta, Bradley has gained BYCTOM Most Favored Cub status. The pitching staff, however, has gone above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to mixing it up with umpires and punching inanimate objects.

The stage was already set for the Cubs' Memorial Day Massacre with the MLB-wide mandated wearing of red hats and the fact that this actually happened:

The presence of Mr. T ensured the prediction
of pain for the Cubs and their gatorade
dispenser

Mr. T actually joined the broadcast booth for the bottom of the seventh inning (MLB.TV users are not only encouraged but divinely mandated to watch the broadcast available here) during which Mr. T rambled on about being a Dean's List scholar at Prairie View A&M, growled at the Pirates, displayed a surprising amount of expertise on the Cubs' disabled list, shockingly declined to use the phrase "I pity the fool" for upwards of ten minutes, and, most surprisingly, laughed, a hoarse throaty chuckle reminiscent of Muttley from "Wacky Races" and a completely unexpected development from a man who spent his entire career, choosing only to express the emotion "I ain't gettin' on no plane, sucka."

Mr. T displays his range

Earlier in the game, Ryan Dempster erupted after lasting only 4 innings and giving up six earned runs and promptly pummeled the Gatorade dispenser with his left non-pitching hand in a savvy veteran move. In the fifth, Ted Lilly came sprinting out of the dugout like Mel Gibson going over the top at the end of Gallipoli in order to protest Bob Davidson's strike zone, needing to be restrained by two Cubs coaches. This was perhaps most surprising because Lilly usually has the placid composure and painted-on eyebrows of a bored action figure.

Firebrand Theodore Roosevelt Lilly in action

The Cubs ended up losing 10-8 to the Pirates, cementing an eight game losing streak. In response, the Trib wonders: is it time for Lou Piniella to do something drastic? The article recalls his great dirt and hat kicking exhibition from 2007. There are few things in baseball more satisfying than a Lou Piniella ejection largely because of his build resembling a spindly man that is inexplicably carrying a fetal hippopotamus to term, and the sight of a manager getting in an umps' face is always hilarious because he tends to jerk his head in a way that normal people never do, giving the effect of the slightly sped-up footage of old newsreels.

CHICAGO CUBS MELTDOWN UPDATE PART 2

On Wednesday, a wild pitch from Carlos Zambrano got away from Geovany Soto. Zambrano rushed to cover the plate and seemed to get Nyjer Morgan speeding in from third apparently on the way to check his birth certificate and confirm that he's actually named "Nyjer Morgan." Then, fireworks. You have all probably seen the video by now, but here's the blow-by-blow as part of a BYCTOM official Zambrano meltdown recap:

Zambrano immediately rushes over to the ump to protest the call in a dignified manner by standing less than three inches from the ump's face and showering him with a mixture of spittle, sunflower seed casings, and miscellaneous eyebrow detritus. The umpire takes in the tirade for upwards of seven seconds and then, after making some sort of barely perceptible incidental contact, tosses Zambrano with the "you're outta here" gesture. Zambrano whirls around. "No YOU'RE out of here," yells Zambrano who then throws the ump out; this gesture is unsuccessful, largely because of a little-known baseball rule that rampaging players cannot under any circumstances eject umpires from games. If Zambrano was a detective, he would have at this point turned in his badge and service revolver in order to get to the bottom of the case by playing by his own rules because he'll be damned if lets another killer slip through the system because his unorthodox and violent investigative techniques caused the case to get thrown out of court. Piniella gets between the ump and Zambrano, who is visibly restrained by Lou's superhuman belly, a force so powerful that he occasionally lends it out to third world nations in order to quell corruption riots. Zambrano picks up the ball and hurls it towards the bleachers, displaying his warning track power, and then stalks over towards the dugout, escorted by an embarrassed Larry Rothschild who has the look of someone either escorting a screaming child or an agitated senile relative from a place of business. Zambrano rips off his glove and spikes it into the ground before alighting into the dugout. Immediately upon entering the dugout steps, he grabs a bat, which means that at some point before entering the dugout, probably just after throwing his glove but possibly from the very minute he got tossed from the game, Zambrano had made the premeditated decision to whale on the Gatorade dispenser in the a display of berserker rage. He hits the machine a couple of times then appears to either stumble or be carried by his angry momentum down a series of stairs towards the clubhouse. Undaunted, he regains his footing and finishes the dispenser off, as Rothschild half-heartedly attempts to stop him while cautiously deciding to not get in between a bat-wielding Zambrano and a gatorade-dispensing product. Zambrano exits.

This is not the first time Zambrano's temper has flared, which is why instead of the insipid and uninspired "Big Z" nickname (he's big and his last name starts with Z, how appropriate), he should be known as "El Bombástico" or at the very least, "El Toro," which is apparently what he calls himself in calmer moments. The Trib's Paul Sullivan, their Cubs beat writer, prepared a surprisingly amusing Five Greatest Big Z Explosions, including him throwing at the contemptible Cardinal Jim Edmonds twice ("This is not a baby's game. This is a man's game," yells Zambrano while wearing his pajama-like baseball uniform), destroying water coolers by hoisting them over his head and throwing them like Donkey Kong as his teammates adopt the blank stares into the distance favored by figures on Soviet socialist-realist posters, and memorably beating up catcher Michael Barrett in the dugout and in the clubhouse. I had actually forgotten about the Michael Barrett incident, but Barrett had the distinction of having a Forrest Gump-like presence in Major League face punching incidents over his career.

Michael Barrett's career makes me really disappointed that I used up a Kumite joke
in the last post

ENTER THE KUMITE

The movie Bloodsport starring Jean-Claude van Damme, that bearded guy from Revenge of the Nerds, and that enormous Chinese guy with pecs the size of dinner plates (Bolo Yeong, who evidently has played characters named Thunder, Moon, and Ice) is both likely to be on Spike TV sometime within the next 3 hours and based on the supposed true story of Frank Dux (as was The Quest, another Kumite movie starring Van Damme that was basically the same as Bloodsport, except that Van Damme for some reason spent the beginning of the movie as some sort of French clown) .

Bloodsport: practically a documentary

Dux claimed that he entered the Kumite, a secret no-holds-barred fighting tournament sometime in the late 1970s and won it. He is a controversial figure in the martial arts world, claiming to be a Kumite champ, an expert in ninjitsu, and a CIA operative.

Frank Dux, self-proclaimed superspy
and Van Damme muse, phrases that often
appear on my personal resumé.

Since the 1980s, however, a number of publications have questioned the veracity of his claims, setting off a long chain of questions about his age, military record, and ability to break through bulletproof glass with his bare hands. One of the most bizarre accusations came from the L.A. Times, which alleged that he had purchased his Kumite trophy from a trophy shop in Southern California. The allegations go back and forth between Dux and his detractors; Dux is evidently not shy about suing people or writing interminable rebuttals to websites questioning or supporting his claims and the amount of nonsense generated by a shady character like Dux, and the martial arts enthusiast/soldier of fortune types that go after him is grimly tiresome enough to take the fun out of a guy living out some sort of Ninja Gaiden fantasy. All that matters is that hopefully, somewhere there is a secret underground fighting tournament where people shake money, and some guy adopts a monkey fighting style, and Chong Li has secreted some secret powder in his shorts that allows him to blind an opponent but does absolutely no harm to his sweaty genitals.

And if somewhere there is a Kumite involving gatorade dispensers, the CIA needs to get on the Cubs' bullpen phone immediately.