Hoosier Weekend

Northwestern again looked good in the first half before falling apart in the second against Penn State. On the other hand, they did so while joining the trend of using Future Uniforms meant to invoke the gradual transformation of college football into an underground arena blood sport where defensive backs are allowed to use implements such as pruning shears and laser cannons to slow down offenses.

Northwestern's special alternate
uniforms irritate Wildcat football
purists

The Northwestern defense once again had holes. Penn State QB Matt McGloin wasted no time bombing it to the endzone, and Silas Redd carved up the Wildcats for 164 yards, averaging 9.1 yards per carry while sporting a name befitting a Dickensian villain. The Northwestern offense, prolific in the first half, failed to score a point in the second half. Dan Persa left the game with a turf toe injury, making him questionable for the Indiana game. Joe Paterno won his 408th game and tied the record for most wins for a Division I coach and continuing his undefeated streak against Pat Fitzgerald. The Wildcats lost their fifth game in a row and now need to all but win out to make it to the post-season. A cyclone has ripped Ryan Field from the ground and deposited it in the lake. Pat Fitzgerald has been spirited away by pirates and is being held ransom for chests of doubloons and spices from the Orient. A Big Ten shaman has placed a curse on the team rendering them unable to wear cleats for the rest of the season. The indoor practice facility has become sentient and turned evil, held at bay only by a mob of Evanston citizens with torches. It has been a rough week for Northwestern football.

Even Air Willie has been mysteriously swapped out for Evil Air
Willie

A LAKE BATTLE

For the Wildcats to make it to a bowl, they'll have to use all of the cunning, strategy, and daring British eccentricity of Geoffrey Spicer-Simson to pull off the seemingly impossible. Spicer-Simson led one of the strangest naval campaigns in modern history during the First World War when he and his men transported two motor boats named the Mimi and Toutou overland from Cape Town to engage with German gunboats in a battle for supremacy over Lake Tanganyika. Spicer-Simson's adventures are chronicled in Giles Foden's Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure: The Bizarre Battle of Lake Taganyika, which details how Spicer-Simson led the expedition, successfully destroyed two German vessels, and inspired the C.S. Forrester novel and John Huston movie The African Queen.

Spicer-Simson was an unlikely candidate to lead the expedition. He did not exactly fit the model of an early twentieth century naval officer. His body was covered in an extensive array of butterfly and snake tattoos and, once deployed on his African mission, he eschewed the tyranny of pants in favor of more breathable khaki skirts. Still, if he had he been the second coming of Nelson, the Admiralty would have probably forgiven his unbecoming epidermal decorations. His naval record, however, revealed a dangerous propensity for incompetence in all manners of sea-borne combat. As Foden relates, Spicer-Simson had already been twice court-martialled: once for smashing his destroyer into a liberty boat bringing sailors ashore for leave; another time he drove his boat onto a beach. Spicer-Simson also nearly sank a British submarine during a periscope hunting exercise and during the war he abandoned his coastal flotilla for an evening reverie with his wife only to watch from a hotel window as German torpedoes destroyed one of his ships. By the time the Admiralty planned to launch an expedition, they seemed wary of allowing Spicer-Simson to command a fleet of rubber animals patrolling a bathtub.

Spicer-Simson shown in naval uniform and as a tin soldier
in his more familiar khaki skirt get-up

The British government had learned of the German presence from a big game hunter named John Lee who spotted the Kaiser's legions aboard a fearsome gunboat called the Hedwig von Wissen while stalking an elephant. First Sea Lord Henry Jackson ordered an attack on the German ships at Lake Taganyika, declaring with the cartoonish hubris of a nineteenth-century British naval officer that "it is both the duty and the tradition of the Royal Navy to engage the enemy wherever there is water to float a ship." At the same time, Lake Tanganyika was hardly a priority for the war, and the Navy had a difficult time finding someone to lead the expedition. Eventually they settled on Spicer-Simson who, according to Foden, was either the last man left or simply in the right place at the right time, sitting at his desk where the Navy hoped he could inflict minimal damage upon their war effort.

Foden wonderfully describes Spicer-Simson's merry band of outcast adventurers that included a Chief Engineer who had been a Grand-Prix-winning race car driver who with limited knowledge of engines, a medical officer described by Foden as having "an odd way with sideburns," an adventurer-reporter who had already been declared dead once, and two enormous kilt-wearing Scotsmen who joined the expedition directly from the tavern. Of course my favorite of the officers was C.T. Tyrer, who affected a monocle, consumed Worcestershire sauce as a beverage, and referred to everyone as "Dear Boy." The plan was to arrive in Cape Town and transport the two eight-ton boats overland through the use of rails, oxcarts, and the occasional pulling power of the beefy Scotsman 10,000 miles to the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.

The map at left shows the distance from Port Elizabeth to where the boats eventually
launched. The transport of the boats went mainly by locomotive, although used a variety
of means of transportation in a military version of Fitzcarraldo

The British operation's absurdity meant it attracted ample attention. As Foden relates by using both British and German sources, the Germans knew of the expedition well before Spicer-Simson reached the lake. Nevertheless, the expedition proved remarkably successful. The expedition captured a German vessel and added it to their flotilla (renaming it from the Kingani to the more terrifying Fifi). They sunk the Hedwig and captured her crew. Spicer-Simson considered his mission completed. The Allied Forces, however, did not yet rule Lake Tanganyika's waves. Another German ship, the massive 1200 ton converted ferry Graf von Götzen, still patrolled its waters. Spicer-Simson was reluctant to engage the larger ship with its imposing 105 mm gun. He sought to counter by adding a larger vessel to his fleet. The naval battle, however, never came to fruition. While Spicer-Simson schemed, British and Belgian forces successfully attacked German positions by land. When ordered to support an attack on a German harbor, he instead ordered his fleet to flee in fear of the fort's guns. British forces captured the fort without him. Spicer-Simson returned to meet with the victorious British army, who, as Foden relates, revealed that he had fled from fake wooden artillery, mocked his cowardice, and, most painfully, cat-called him for his skirt-wearing proclivities. It was a low moment.

As for the Graf von Götzen, Belgian airplanes had damaged it and the German commander had it scuttled. Investigations later showed that the German forces had removed the ship's guns and it too sported wooden decoys. Defenseless, the Mimi and Toutou could have easily sunk it.

Spicer-Simson was rewarded with medals from both Britain and Belgium, but the Navy had apparently seen enough of him. As Foden relates, he was never given command of a ship again and immediately returned to his desk job.

Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure does not stop there, though. Foden appends the book with an entertaining depiction of the making of The African Queen, where apparently Huston descended into directorial madness and earned the nickname "The Monster." The crew suffered tropical illnesses and star Humphrey Bogart self-medicated with an abundant supply of scotch. Foden closes the book with his own journey on the Lake on the Liemba, a cargo ship reassembled from the Graf von Götzen itself.

This still from The African Queen perhaps suggests why Hepburn
later wrote a book called The Making of the African Queen: Or How
I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My
Mind

INDIANA

The Wildcats travel overland to Bloomington this weekend to take on another Big Ten cellar dweller in Indiana. This should be a favorable match-up for the 'Cats, but these two teams have a recent history of close games, and Indiana's first-year coach Kevin Wilson must also see this as a winnable conference game for his squad. Wilson, of course, had been instrumental as Northwestern's offensive coordinator, unleashing of the spread offense in the first years of Randy Walker's tenure. Logic says to expect a shoot-out against a similar offense-first opponent, although given how things usually turn out when I predict them, the game will almost certainly end as a 4-2 slugfest with all scoring achieved via safeties and blocked extra point returns.

A loss here effectively ends Northwestern's season, but a victory sets up the possibility of going 6-6 by beating Rice and Minnesota, miraculously upsetting one of Michigan State or Nebraska, and possibly sneaking into a bowl game by stealthily huddling under canoes. Although this season has been maddening through the squandering of many leads, Wildcat fans can at least enjoy watching younger players such as Colter, Siemian, and Smith begin to solidify the offense of the future. A future where Northwestern uniforms include gray helmets and utility belts, and the NCAA is controlled by an even more blatantly corporate cabal of bloodsport-peddlers hoping to harness our amusement for their nefarious double-dealing.

Enjoy your Inevitable Future NCAA Football Dystopia

Big Ten Home Opener

Northwestern hung in there in a tense win against Minnesota, battling not only the Gophers, but a litany of turnovers, special teams miscues and thoughtless penalties, similar how the French and British faced not only the fearsome forces of the Tsar but also the true winner of the Crimean War: cholera.

This website identifies the soldier
pictured as Colour Sergeant "Willie"
McGregor of the Scots Fusilier Guards
modeling a uniform meant to evoke
the sentient mound of hair look that
fell out of favor in British military
uniforms but later became de rigueur
for Joe Cocker's back-up band

The game must have been an infuriatingly frustrating loss for Gopher fans already disillusioned with the Brewster era and I'm tempted to feel sorry for them except that this is the Big Ten so not only do I feel no pity for down on their luck programs unable to defeat the Wildcats, but I fully expect the NU Athletic Department to sack the offices of their counterparts in a demonstration of merciless bureaucracy and carry off their valuable spices from the Orient away on ships cleverly named "The Marriageable Daughters" because that would sure confuse the barbaric raiding parties involved in this analogy that is finishing up right here at the end of this sentence.

PURDUE PREVIEW

The 'Cats open up under the lights at Ryan Field against a battered Purdue squad attempting to prove false the common medical assumption that knee injuries are not contagious. The Boilermakers were attempting to turn this season around and produce a winning season for second-year head coach Danny Hope. Even if this season does not pan out, Hope has plenty of opportunity to build a winner at Purdue for obvious reasons.

Fig. 1

On paper, Northwestern should have the advantage over this injury-ravaged squad, but we can throw out the record books because it's Big Ten Football under the lights and the last annual meeting of these two squads in an Inexplicably Protected Rivals Showdown. Next year, Northwestern and Purdue will of course be separated into two divisions, but I contend that it will only marinate this bitter rivalry between two conference rivals whose mutual antipathy dates back to the time some Big Ten official decided that we should play each other all of the time and not even dignify the game with some sort of embarrassing knick-knack trophy featuring a hat, a medieval weapon, or the contents of Joe Paterno's desk circa 1967.

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

The Bears game last Sunday night was spectacular for fans of sacks, concussions, and ineptitude, spear-headed by the matadoric offensive line gracefully stepping out of the way of onrushing defensive linemen that clumsily crashed again and again into Jay Cutler.

Cutler showed a need to spend more time working
on fleeing for his life drills such as the one shown
above from training camp in Bourbonnais

The Bears announced today that Todd Collins is starting, joining the endless list of random quarterbacks who have started for the Bears including Moses Moreno, Craig Krenzel, Henry Burris, Jonathan Quinn, Kordell Stewart, Adlai E. Stevenson, Mike "Hinky Dink" Kenna, Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan, Abe Froman, and Bonesaw McGraw. If anything, the Bears have been an entertaining team this season either by winning through nonsensical referee pedantics, an absurd flurry of opponent penalties, or losing in a way reminiscent of falling victim to the diabolical and unethical nosetackle dive play in Tecmo Super Bowl. The only reliable thing we've learned about the Bears this season is that overwrought post-game radio shows have convinced me that the phrase "nine sacks in da first half" is a surprisingly reliable Chicago accent shibboleth.

LET'S HAVE THOSE XYLOPHONES PLAY US OUT

There's a dearth in popular mallet-percussion bands barnstorming around the country these days performing jaunty tunes for our amusement, so fortunately we have a relic of happier times with Reg Kehoe and His Marimba Queens. I'm greatly disappointed to live in a time where the odds of someone existing named "Reg Kehoe" are remote enough, let alone someone with that name in charge of an all-female Marimba band. Take a look at this 1940 film clip featuring his song stylings, although the show is stolen by the flamboyant bassist flailing uncontrollably slightly out of sync with the music which makes it seems like he's whaling on an upright bass while an unrelated bass solo plays in the background in some sort of Roosevelt-era Millie Vanilli situation.

Fig. 2: Chart of Bassist Enthusiasm

One of the all-time great situations where a marimba takes over a song occurs in the Herb Alpert tune Tijuana Taxi that, interestingly enough, relies equally on helpless flailing to sell the song in what appears to an attempt to approach the platonic ideal of silly 1960s dancing. Serapes are also involved. This video is at least a step up from his attempt to throw a monkey wrench into the gears of capitalism by annoying hard-working instrument factory workers with a shockingly square version of the Nate Adderly classic Work Song (it does not hold a candle to the Oscar Brown, Jr. version where he's added lyrics such as "left the grocery store man bleeding/when he caught me robbing his store).

The dancers in the Tijuana Taxi video demonstrate one of three
possible dancing facial expressions: the frozen smile (designed to
cover up resentment at being forced to perform the jerk), intense
glowering, and, of course, relentless hunger for brains

Finally, enjoy a wonderful version of one my favorite tunes, The World is Waiting for the Sunrise performed by Benny Goodman while ignoring the vibraphone player's eerie resemblance to a gregarious, mallet-wielding Lenin.


NATIONAL RANKING

Northwestern's spotless record has earned it the #25 position in the Coach's Poll. A strong victory against Purdue will not only possibly move into a consensus ranking, but also make Northwestern technically bowl eligible before moving into a tough second half of the season. Hopefully, the Wildcats will defend Ryan Field from the Boilermakers and prevent any pillaging from the Purdue Athletic Department. Otherwise Northwestern will be forced to break out its toughest defense yet: typhus.

Baseball Draft

Tuesday is baseball's draft, which tends to function as a minor event in the baseball world. It certainly has less flash than the NFL and NBA drafts; Major League Baseball got the draft televised this year by taking control of its own network, taking a page out of the Silvio Berlusconi playbook.

Selig's Forza Baseball policy hinges on retroactively changing baseball rules that effect
him, but has been hampered by the publication of nude photos of aged Czechs taken at
his villa, an ugly public feud with his wife over the appointment of former beauty
queens and television personalities to European Parliament (over which Major League
Baseball evidently has no authority), and a photo posing strategy based on a complete
misunderstanding of the Jowellgate scandal.

Interest in the MLB draft eludes all but the most hardcore baseball fans for several reasons: the relative unpopularity of college baseball coupled with the fact that so many prospects come from high school, the concept of "sandwich picks" and other vagaries resulting from the loss of different types of free agents graded by a shadowy cabal of of Freemasons, the fact that few ever make the majors, and the fact that the draft is restricted to American and Canadian players while the teams stock their foreign talent through some sort of shady process spinning a web of treachery and deceit across Latin America.

A strategic meeting of baseball scouts in Santo Domingo

The success of a player rarely has anything to do with his position in the draft, with first rounders floundering about in the minors unable to deal with tougher opponents, or succombing to injuries or gunshot wounds from mysterious women in black who follow them onto trains, an injury that accounts for a startling 14% of prematurely ended careers. Northwestern's own J.A. Happ avoided this fate after going in the third round to the Phillies in 2004 and is enjoying his first season as a full-time starter.


J.A. Happ joins Northwestern alums Joe Girardi and Mark Loretta in
the Bigs

SUPERPROSPECTS

The exception to the rule is the few highly hyped prospects at the top of the draft, expected to charge through the minor leagues and serve as cornerstones of the franchise. This year, San Diego State ace Steven Strasburg is touted as the can't-miss prospect that could help change the fortunes of the Washington Nationals who have been afflicted by the "Curse of the Youppi" caused by their hasty departure from Montreal as well as the team's brazen taunting of all of the city's soothsayers, monkey skull retailers, crusty old hermits, and Indian grave yards.

Talk of a can't-miss pitcher coming out of college naturally engenders painful comparisons to Mark Prior, whose brilliant 2003 season gave way to an improbable series of shoulder injuries and the occasional freak injury such as when he took a line drive to the elbow, collided with Marcus Giles, and rented an apartment in Chicago's hanging piano district. None of these skeptics have thought about the improbability of a pitcher repeating Prior's career cycle of brilliance matched by an alternating series of freak accidents and the replacement of his shoulder with a cylinder of Cream of Wheat. After speculation of a comeback with the Padres, Prior has been unable to return to the mound; take a look at this list of his recent activity and take a shot every time you see the phrase "Dr. James Andrews."

The classic Prior injury cycle in which Prior reports to camp, claims that he is
feeling better than ever and ready to pitch, and then falls into unforeseen tragedy

The 2001 draft was seen as a symbol of baseball's financial inequity, as Minnesota passed up drafting Prior because they could not afford all of the marriageable daughters and spices from the Orient demanded by Prior's representation of agents and traveling Khanate administration. Instead, the Twins had to get by with Joe Mauer and his batting titles. Who else was available in the first round in 2001 instead of Prior? Mark Teixeira, for one, as well as a surprising number of serviceable major leaguers. The Cubs' roster includes the eighteenth and nineteenth picks of that draft, although Aaron Heilman may still be on the payroll of a competing team in an effort to sabotage the club with his shoddy relief pitching and attempts to convince Cubs that the umpires plan on seizing their children through the aid of an apparatus hidden in the gatorade dispenser.

Other drafts do not seem to have as fruitful of a first round. For example, the 2004 first round seems to lack many bona fide major leaguers, although it does reveal that the St. Louis Cardinals spent the nineteenth pick on Christopher Lambert.

Christopher Lambert's epic rise from the
Quad Cities River Bandits to AA
Springfield to player to be named later in a
trade for Mike Maroth

VERCINGÉTORIX

Christopher Lambert, best known as Connor Macleod in the Highlander movies where he would chop off enemies' heads before being showered in sparks as opposed to when he was in the Mortal Kombat movie and shot showers of sparks at his enemies, also starred in Druids about the life of Gaul leader Vercingétorix. The trailer for the movie covers the requisite Roman war movie motif, alternating shots of clanking soldiers marching across a field and hairy men shouting in slow motion while tantalizing potential viewers with two snippets of dialogue ("You wanna fight? You wanna live forever? Then I will lead you!" and "We have made an enemy. And it would have been much better to have him as a friend.") in French accents so comical that at special screenings, the movie would pause occasionally to batter the audience with baguettes.

Vercingétorix rose from the Gallic province of Gergovia in the middle of present-day France and led an army against Caesar's invading legions. Unfortunately for Vercingétorix, he came down on the wrong side of a besiegement, a common barbarian ailment along with haunch rot, goblet rash, and battleaxe elbow. Though Vercingétorix lost and was subsequently paraded around as a trophy by the victorious Caesar while his land was enslaved to the Romans and then subsequently executed, he became a nationalist symbol under Napoleon III who commissioned a suitably violent statue of him trampling a hapless Roman as he rides to his death. Napoleon III emulated his hero a bit too closely as he discovered that Kaiser was German for Caesa. The Emperor led Frenchmen to glorious surrender as well, although luckily for him, by nineteenth century, captured heads of state merely spent time waxing their Van Dyke beard and getting deposed by unruly French mobs eager to declare another republic.

An illustration from Guizot's 1883 History
of France depicts Vercingetorix either
surrendering to Caesar or accepting a quest
to find the Sword of Foreboding that he will
use to destroy Ceasar when he turns into a
giant snake

The Cubs have the 23rd pick in the draft. Whoever they end up selecting, let's hope that Hendry offers each selection the proper words of encouragement: You wanna play forever? Then I will draft you!

Reviewing the Big Ten Bowls

The Big Ten football season has come to a disappointing close, which is bad news for a conference on the ropes in desperate need of some redemption, but good news for those who enjoy watching conference rivals humiliated by vastly superior out of conference competition in the manner of a rakish Duke absconding with the conference's marriageable daughters and spices from the Orient.


This is to therefore give you all notice, reptiles,
scoundrels, ragamuffins, poltroons, lank-jaw'd
herring-gutted plebians, that if you, or any of
you, set foot in my boats, or any part of my
property, I will send my myrmidons, like Tritons,
who shall assail you in the deep or plunge you into
the great abyss known as Aul'shole.


CHAMPS SPORTS BOWL
Wisconsin got the ball rolling particularly poorly with a 42-13 drubbing at the hands of the Florida State Seminoles. The Badgers' play in this game resembled the Bucky Badger kept at Madison zoo: listless, complacent, engorged on ground-dwelling rodents. Incidentally, badger baiting was made illegal in Britain in 1835, although the game of "drawing the badger" became immensely popular, where a dog was unleashed into a simluated badger den and the badger and dog become locked in a festive biting exhibition. The owner of the dog then pulled the dog out of the den, with its jaws hopefully clamped on the badger's tale, and owners attempted to see how many times the dog could draw the badger in a minute. A capital sport for a more civilized age.

According to this drawing, a standard badger-bait included either biting the dog's
tail or inflating it like a kiddie pool while a top-hatted henchman stood in the
corner simulating the illusion of forward movement

VALERO ALAMO BOWL
Thoughts on this game have already been noted at great length, so let's pull an ESPN and show a gratuitous picture of Chase Daniel's family.

Chase Daniel's great-great-great-great-great grandfather
signs a letter of intent to enter His Majesty's Service in the
Hindu Kush.

INSIGHT BOWL
Kansas clobbered Minnesota in the last season of Gopher football in the Metrodome. I'm going to miss the Hubert Horatio Humprey Metrodome for Minnesota football, and I think the Gophers will as well, since it will be difficult for the Brewster-led spread offense to function in November without a full complement of Sherpa guides and because they'll lose the noise advantage of several thousand Minnesotans spelling the state name at the end of the Minnsesota Rouser as the O continues to linger in the dome for weeks at a time. I will miss the Hubert Horatio Humprey Metrodome not only because it was home to two of the greatest plays in Northwestern history (Victory Right and the crazy Brendan Smith interception-touchdown from this year) but also because Humphrey is forever linked in my mind with the 1972 presidential election and Hunter S. Thompson's claim that Edmund Sixtus Muskie was hooked on Ibogaine. Incidentally, googling the terms muskie hunter led to this unexpected result.


Errant google search for the terms Muskie Hunter
inadvertently provides video trolling excitement

CAPITAL ONE BOWL
Michigan State managed to keep Georgia quarterback Matt Stafford in check for the first half, but was unable to contain him in the second half. Georgia also did a pretty good job of bottling up Javon Ringer, who only rushed for 47 yards. This game failed to be a good enough effort to bolster the conference's flagging reputation or a spectacular enough failure to make this guy take to the airwaves in a display of berserker rage. I've always been disappointed that State is in East Lansing rather than Sparta, Michigan, which eschews the ancient city-state's ethos of militarism and helot slavery, instead boasting on its website that "The Village of Sparta is nestled near the big city lights which contain the entertainment districts and shopping venues of Grand Rapids, yet is tucked into the traditional way of life with friendly neighborhoods and traditional community values." This is Sparta.

An East Lancing

OUTBACK BOWL
Laugh it up, Iowa. You're the only Big Ten team to win a bowl game this year, stomping on Steve Spurrier's South Carolina juggernaut 31-10. Iowans also traveled in droves to the game, as their traditional hunting and forage routes took them to Tampa Bay and the Hillsborough County area. The last thing we need is a resurgent Iowa football program, not with Drago's development of the largest corn head in the world. Joe Bollig, the DragoTec director of marketing, claims Iowans "are turning to Drago to reduce ear bounce, butt-shelling and overall shelling loss."


An Iowa fan enjoys the Hawkeyes'
butt-shelling of South Carolina

ROSE BOWL
Another Rose Bowl, another clobbering at the hands of USC. This time, it was Penn State who lost 38-24. Similar one-sided results have resulted in the end of football at the Rose Bowl. In 1902, Michigan beat Stanford 49-0, resulting in the replacement of football with chariot racing. This Sports Illustrated article from 1968 chronicles the development of chariot racing in the Tournament of Roses. My favorite character is the sublimely named Ed Off, whom SI describes as "chariot racing's Man of La Mancha." Of course, any article that has a sentence start with the phrase "When his rampaging horses finally were brought under control" is worth reading. I suggest, therefore, that the Tournment of Roses bring back chariot racing. Since the Big Ten can no longer compete with USC, they should allow two current players to fling themselves around the Rose Bowl with bull penis whips and those spikes that come out of wheels in gladiator movies. This year, for example, it could have been Penn State DE Aaron Maybin versus USC's Rey Maualuga. Or, they could have let JoePa take on Pete Caroll, with JoePa negating Caroll's youth and fully functioning hips with his first-hand knowledge of chariot combat. I would pay to see this, although USC would probably still win every year.


COME TO PENN STATE

TOSTITO'S FIESTA BOWL
Another "moral victory" for the Big Ten as Ohio State hung with the Longhorns until a heartbreaking touchdown with sixteen seconds left sealed the victory. Ohio State could not handle the Horns' hurry-up offense, short passing game, and inspired mullet dancing, and lost their third BCS game in a row. Texas, is, of course, led by Colt McCoy, who has been largely celebrated for his astonishingly Texan name, a name so good that he forced Jevean Snead out of Austin. Yet, in my opinion, Colt's teammate Lamarr Houston has him beat with a name celebrating Republic of Texas presidents Sam Houston and Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar.

Lamar's middle namesake loses at Risk to his
archenemy Bill S. Preston, esq.

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was president of the nascent Republic, which, by 1840, was in dire financial straits. Houston, Lamar's predecessor and rival, pushed for the passage of the Franco-Texian Bill, which would have granted the French rights to colonize and develop parts of Texas while maintaining a military garrison. The problem lay with the self-proclaimed Comte de Saligny, a French diplomat who took up residence in the French Legation in Austin. De Saligny took exception to a neighbor's pigs who ran rampant through the legation grounds, and the legation nearly became the site of a violent altercation between De Saligny's butler and the neighbor. Needless to say, the pig grazing quickly became an international incident. Eventually, de Saligny took his poofy wigs and toher French finery with him and went home, which led to the halting of diplomatic relations between Texas and France for a year as part of the Austin Pig War, one of two Pig Wars in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, proving that pigs cause more wars than Jenkins' body parts.

NFL Profile: The Giants

Technically, Northwestern's bowl destination is still in the air, although everybody knows that it will be the Alamo Bowl. In the meantime, a brief digression about the NFL.

You may think it a sheer coincidence that the Giants will be going into Sunday's contests with a kicker tandem of placekicker John Carney and punter Jeff Feagles came into place by the vagaries of injury, availability, and the like. Perhaps you also believe that circus strong-men aren't all mustachioed agents of the Kaiser. Instead, this particular set of circumstances hides a chilling secret.


The 2008 New York Giants kicking specialists


In 1991, Tecmo created the greatest sports video game of all time, Tecmo Super Bowl. The game allowed you to control real NFL players, edit your playbook, play an entire season with stats, and use a virtual Lawrence Taylor to blow out Don Majkowski's fragile knees. Even with more advanced games out there, stalwarts continue to play Tecmo Super Bowl, updating the roster to keep up with today's game.


Amateur programmers modify the Bears playbook to
represent the talents of Rex Grossman

As the NES has gone the way of the wooden man-o-war, the horse-driven plough, global Communism, and the Amish, the NFL players featured in the game have retired, vanished, or assumed false identities. Of them all, only Feagles and Carney remain. The reason for their intransigent refusal to retire comes with a prize far more valuable than a few more years of semi-autonomous glory and an unguaranteed paycheck for the veterans' minimum.

THE NFL: AN ORGANIZATION OF THE OCCULT

Much has already been written about football's long-standing connections with the occult. Originally devised by cultists as a spectacle of violence to appease a vast array of demon deities spanning virtually every type of known cosmogony and a few others invented on the spot, football evolved into a modern, family friendly event that rarely involves occult rites and general demonry.


Although divorced from its occult roots,
football players still occasionally perform
dances to exhort Hapi-ankh, the ancient
Egyptian manifestation of burial god Ptah,
who according to an obscure NFL rule, may
intervene to interfere with opposing players
by blighting their harvests.

As part of its community relations apparatus, the early NFL regularly sponsored a world-wide operation to collect ancient artifacts and attempt to enchant them or call forth occult forces that we cannot possibly understand. The league sent players, coaches, equipment managers, mascots, and a the Lucky Strike Lucky Fan on a journey from the Cape of Good Hope through the treacherous Khyber Pass. The expeditions brought the NFL untold treasures and horrors. Several players did not return, killed by disease, traps, native uprisings after installing themselves as warlord-deities shown to be only too mortal when bitten by Shakira Caine, rival treasure hunters and grave robbers, sea-sickness, consumption, duels, and asbestos (the silent killer). Others were spirited away by demon forces that they had naively disturbed through the unholy combination of mystical incantations and the T formation.


Pete Rozelle gets his start as the NFL's first
Vice President of Competition, Television, and
The Occult

A PACT WRITTEN IN INK

The NFL's treasures were collected and stored in one of many unused NFL obelisks. By 1936, the NFL conducted its last treasure hunt, but something went horribly awry. No one knows what exactly the NFL had found; I've heard speculation that it could be an ancient holy symbol such as the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail, glowing Indian rocks, or some disappointing alien bullshit. The obelisk was sealed and buried, references to the expedition have been destroyed, and the League has discreetly killed off anyone involved that it can get away with. The NFL decided to opt out of the occult artifact business, leaving it all for track and field and professional bowling.

The NFL had long buried its occult business in a mounting pile of corpses, but they could not keep the story under wraps, and the legends circulated amongst the older players. By 1991, only knowledge of the of the obelisk and the untold wonders and fortune that it could bring had disappeared into NFL lore along with the leather helmet and the white running back. Vinny Testaverde discovered a set of incantations that would unlock the obelisk for anyone daring enough to open it when he found a dusty set of reel to reel tapes sitting in the corner of the NFL films office and viewed them on his giant analogue computer. But a generation gap had formed. None of the younger players believed Testaverde, assuming that his were the ravings of a wild old man. This is largely because he had begun carrying a blunderbuss musket.


Vinny Testadverde, from brash rookie to veteran backup.

Sometime around the turn of the century, Testaverde formed a council of veteran players in order to determine what to do about the NFL's occult treasures. Some wanted to destroy the obelisk. Others wanted to use whatever was inside to instigate a reign of unspeakable horror upon mankind. Still others thought that it belonged in a museum, and were willing to throw punches and swing from chandeliers. They determined that whoever managed to make it longest in the League should gain control of the illicitly gained treasures. They divided the incantation into equal parts, each traveling to the obelisk and doing their part immediately after their retirement press conference. Craig "Ironhead" Heyward had discovered the Tecmo Super Bowl link, and the council quietly silenced or assassinated anyone who was not on the roster of the game. That is why Brett Favre continues to unretire, hoping that if he sticks around long enough, he can convince the council that he was in Tecmo Super Bowl as the mysterious QB Eagles or QB Bills and therefore gain access to the treasures in order to build a terribly powerful lawn mower.


Feagles and Carney bide their time.

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE

In 2007, five players remained. Now, there are only two: Feagles and Carney. Both have called in favors and used bribes and threats to end up on the same team where they can watch each other. Feagles has been known to dispatch rivals by lacing their Gatorade with poisonous herbs, whereas Carney is a practitioner of the dark art of Hoodoo.


When they share the field on field goal tries
(Feagles, 18, serves as the holder), there is
potential treachery and sabotage afoot

Feagles and Carney are the last two in a brotherhood fueled by mistrust and villainy. It is one unique to football, but not to sports. In 2007, both Julio Franco and Roger Clemens attempted to hold out as the last stalwarts of RBI baseball, hoping to gain access to a vast trove of lost pirate treasure and spices from the Orient, but both retired, as Franco masterminded the Mitchell Report in order to ensure that Clemens could not outlast him. Do not be surprised if something similar happens to Feagles or Carney, be it a steroid scandal, a mysterious boating accident, or drastic reduction in effectiveness at playing football at a professional level due to the natural progress of age.