Dog days of summer

The Wildcats are in Kenosha firming up the depth chart and preparing for the fearsome Tigers of Towson. As the 'Cats shape up for the season by running through tires, hitting blocking sleds, doing that running in place really fast and changing direction drill, and coming together through the ageless magic of Motown sing-alongs, why not get in the spirit by heading over to Nusports.com and reading Skip Myslenski's colorful dispatches? Myslenski, who worked previously for the Tribune until he could no longer handle the fact that being a reporter with a colorful nickname like "Skip" generally entails being targeted by inept mobsters who enjoy punching people in the stomach and ineffectually throwing their guns at Superman, has been completely unleashed by the freedom gained by writing about the 'Cats to break out his most appropriately purple prose. For example, in this piece, entitled "The Passion of the Trenches," Skip whips out alliteration and dance metaphors frenzied enough to serve as copy for the late John Facenda:

They toil always in a world called The Trenches. But there, in a maelstrom of mean-spirited behemoths, they must perform with the precision of a prima ballerina...

Little, of course, is easy in The Trenches, where far more than brute strength is needed to thrive and survive. This is often lost in the crescendo of the crashing bodies, in the cacophony of the grunts and groans. But the work done here in the midst of mayhem is choreographed carefully and constantly the lineman must perform a complex dance, a dance that demands constant adaptation, a dance that must be presented with the hot breath of the enemy blowing in his face...

Sixty, 70, 80 times in an afternoon they dance their disco of destruction, their minuet of mayhem, and each time they pit their bodies, their minds, their wills against those toiling across from them. The hand out jolts, accept jolts, trade jolts and, in the midst of this all, they are adjusting, adjusting their hands and their feet and their steps and their angles in a desperate search for an advantage.

The judges, the measurers, the surveyors, focusing on their fervent
foxtrot on the field, a chaotic conga line careening on course to close
calls. These men become the Fates of football, determining plays, games,
seasons, not by the spin of the thread, but by the link of the chain.
Teams are delayed, delivered, delighted, destroyed, damned as downs
are dialed, dialed into corybantic conquest, dialed into cruel capitulation.
I crunch into a peanut shell, dispatching the innards into a moribund
Morris dance across the teeth and tongue to the terrible pulsing
peristalsis that awaits.

HOME ADVANTAGE

A week ago, the United States predictably lost again at Mexico's doom fortress and national stadium Estadio Azteca. The elevation, smog, and crowds that react like Eastern European villagers to the threat of another unholy symbol of man's hubris in the eyes of nature rampaging through the countryside before turning harmlessly into Lon Chaney have all been well-chronicled.

Model of Estadio Azteca. Incidentally, the best Temple of Doom character is the random
Chinese guy with the Tommy Gun at the beginning who cackles with a lunatic glee as he
fires helplessly at a gong shielding Indiana Jones, as if he is discovering for the first
time the joy of uselessly firing automatic weapons at Harrison Ford.

El Tri's astounding home advantage naturally leads to Northwestern and its somewhat tamer environment, where the stands are inundated alternately with belligerent visiting fans during Big Ten games and tumbleweed for the Towsons and directional state opponents. This excellent article by David Ranciman examines the changing nature of home field advantage in the age of professional sports. Naturally, being a British source, the article focuses on soccer, although it also touches on football, hockey (surprisingly little home field/ice advantage), basketball, and baseball (where home field advantage evidently counts the least despite the fact that baseball fields allow for far more variation in their size and shape than in any other major sport). More importantly, he lists his "fortresses of sport" at the end: Old Trafford Stadium, Eden Park (home of the All Blacks), Pakistan National Stadium (a 45 year unbeaten streak in test cricket), and inexplicably Greece Olympic Stadium. This was frankly a disappointment as I was hoping to know Australia's most hostile Aussie Rules oval or where one might as well pack up their hurling sticks or slamballs.

The streets of the Running Man, however, proved an
insufficient home advantage for Dynamo, the Electric Rapist

In college football, the most hostile environments have traditionally been down South where fans allow their blood to be properly angried up by rivalry and pageantry. The mighty information power of the internet, despite providing some speed bumps, reveals that Miami holds the record for consecutive home wins with 58 from 1985 to 1994, taking the crown from Alabama who managed 57 from 1963 to 1982.

Home team advantage in college football is real, as home teams win approximately 59% of home games. I would actually expect a larger advantage looking at FBS schools, not because college football stadiums are more likely than any other sport to house nearly six figures worth of braying drunken maniacs, but because power conference teams traditionally schedule most of their cupcake non-conference games at home. For Northwestern, home field advantage is more palpable than one might think. Take a look at this data set:

Northwestern road wins 1979-1982: 0
Northwestern home wins 1979-1982: 1

With an increase of infinity percent, perhaps I've misjudged Ryan Field's home advantage.

MURDERING THE 2009 CUBS: YOU'LL NEVER CATCH ME, COPPER

The Cubs seem to be out of the NL Central at six games back and only three left to play against division-leading St. Louis. The difference between the NL and the AL is that the National League clubs spending ludicrous amounts money have apparently been doing so on less talented players, although the Mets have the excuse of suffering through the baseball version of the Battle of Ypres during the course of the season. At least Lou has had the good sense to bench Kevin Gregg, who is either part of an elaborate double cross engineered by rival baseball teams hoping to sabotage the Cubs in a conflagration that will end in a Viennese sewer or a lousy pitcher in the glamor role on a terrible bullpen. Few of the Cub relievers have decent nicknames, so I've decided to pitch in by turning to the colorful world of Chicago's most brutal mobsters. Why not bring in Kevin "The Scourge" Gregg, named for the murdered Capone consigliere Antonio "The Scourge" Lombardo as he allows a veritable tommy gun spray of baseballs launched by opposing hitters into unsuspecting grandstands?

Ozzie Guillen vowed retaliation earlier this month for
hit batsmen, claiming, "If I see somebody hitting my
players and I know it's on purpose, two guys are going
down," Guillen said. "I don't care if I get suspended,"
which demonstrates a thorough understanding of the
Connery Doctrine of the Chicago Way.

Chicago gangster nicknames are pretty much the pinnacle of human nickname innovation. Of course, not all are winners; for every "Scourge," there was a "Momo" or a "Big Jim" or the almost disastrously banal "Milwaukee Phil" which is possibly the least chilling gangster nickname of all time, unless you are dealing with a gangster with a pathological fear of mullets, bratwurst, or people who pronounce the letter O in a comical fashion. I like evocative gangster nicknames that let you guess their role such as "Jackie The Lackie" Cerone or Frank "Tight Lips" Gusenberg, which is like being "The Whammer" of the gangster world. Unfortunately for Gusenberg, he had an unpleasant Valentine's Day in 1929. My favorite of these is Vincent "The Schemer" Drucci who sounds less like a Jazz Age mobster and more like a lesser Batman Villain.

The Schemer would fit right in with Batman's redundant battles against the Riddler
and the Puzzler. The best of the Adam West Batman villains is definitely King Tut,
a fat guy dressed approximately like a Pharaoh whose special ability seemed to
mainly consist of doing the Egyptian walk over to the fridge to see if there were
any more eclairs

Probably the greatest gangster nickname belongs to Murray "The Camel" Humphreys. Humphreys was an adept political fixer who was allegedly able to put the screws to Harry Truman, a feat that few others could claim at the time including Joseph Stalin. He pressured Truman by threatening to reveal the role played by gangsters in elevating Truman through the Kansas City political ranks. Born Llewellyn Morris Humphreys, the Camel is possibly the second most powerful Welsh gangster of all time.

Humphreys was also known as "The Hump." The gangster-looking photo of Lloyd
George and Churchill is one of my favorite photos of anything

The connection of gangster nicknames to sports does not have to be limited to shaky Cubs relief pitchers. What about Pat "The Fitst" Fitzgerald, Ron "The Piece" Santo, Kevin "The Mantis" Coble (that's not really a gangster nickname but it's a reminder that a random mention of "The Mantis" as a nickname for Kevin Coble is going to remain coiled up like a cobra at the bottom of a burlap sack ready to pop out at inconvenient and unpredictable times) and "Brian Urlacher." Of course, other nicknames already have a Chicago sporting legacy.

Paul "the waiter" Ricca and his prodigal, nicknamigal son

Northwestern Football is Back

With the first week of practice, it's nearly college football season and it cannot come soon enough. After watching the Cubs' inevitable descent back into mediocrity due to untimely injuries (for example, take a look at this Tom Gorzelanny injury where he gets hit in the foot with the ball and then tries to feebly throw a man out at the plate only to wobble backwards like Lee Van Cleef trying to get off a last shot at Clint Eastwood before Eastwood shoots him and then his hat into a convenient open grave), stranding base runners, and incompetent relief pitching, I am more than ready to see purple helmets smashing into things.

A visual representation of the Cubs bullpen this season. The worst whammy in the 'pen
has been Kevin Gregg, who in the month of August has blown leads in 3 of his last five
appearances (including giving up back-to-back home runs for a walkoff in hated
Dolphin Stadium.

The most fascinating pitcher on the Cubs' roster is Carlos Marmol, the ace set-up man whose command apparently evidently got honked out of him at the World Baseball Classic. Since the Cubs seem reluctant to send him down to the farm or buy him some Ricky Vaughn glasses, it's time to reevaluate how they use him. I suggest inventing a new role for him, which I call the Base-Open One-Out Specialist (or BOOOS). Imagine that the Cubs have somehow managed to allow baserunners to score instead of vanishing into the ether of strikeouts, popouts, and poorly-timed double plays, and they are winning a close ballgame in the late innings. Aaron Heilman, fresh from practicing throwing meatballs or accidentally setting forest fires or feeding gremlins after midnight has managed to put runners on second and third with Carlos Lee or Prince Fielder, or Jose Valentin coming up to the plate. This is the time for Marmol.

In this situation, the ideal outcome is a strikeout and the favored strategy is an intentional walk. Carlos Marmol basically only walks or strikes people out. In 249 plate appearances, he's given up only 30 hits with a single home run. On the other hand, he has struck out 64, walked 52, intentionally walked 3, and hit a National League-leading 11 batsmen, comprising a total of 52% of all plate appearances. Of the remaining 119 plate appearances, hitters have only turned them into hits or sacrifices about 26% of the time. Marmol gets batters out a shaky 62% of the time, but in a situation where a walk is not not detrimental, he gets a favorable outcome (an out, walk, or hit batsman) approximately 88% of the time (PA/100-(hits+sacrifices)) by my shoddy, misleading, and irresponsibly extrapolated calculations. The remaining twelve percent chance of disaster, of course, does not include the possibility of wild pitches or massive suspensions resulting from the bench-clearing donnybrook caused by an errant Marmol fastball.

It's called playing the percentages. It's what smart managers
do to win ballgames.

NORTHWESTERN FOOTBALL WITH LESS DUBIOUS MATH

With camp beginning, the Northwestern stories have begun trickling in, including this one about Freshman running back Arby Fields, another small back hoping to follow in the footsteps of Tyrell Sutton. With Arby Fields and Mike Kafka, the Wildcat backfield is among NCAA leaders in terrible headline pun potential as national sports editors cackle over their carefully constructed groaners about sandwiches and existentialist bohemian literary figures.

Hard-Bitten Editor: Run with this: Kafka leads Northwestern metamorphosis into
BCS contender
Brezhnev-eyebrowed news consumer: I cannot wait for mutually-assured nuclear
destruction

NORTHWESTERN RIVALRIES

Northwestern has been playing (and generally flailing helplessly against) its hated Big Ten conference foes for well over a century. I decided to look into the College Football Data Warehouse as well as the excellent NU historical information at Hailtopurple in order to determine the Wildcats' (and, the Fighting Methodists' and The Purple's) greatest foes outside the Big Ten. The University of Chicago, of course, counts as a Big Ten member as they left the conference in 1939 and last played Northwestern in 1926. Perhaps it's best that they're gone, as NU went only 8-26 against the Maroons, a college football power whose onfield prowess vanished with the men's hat.

Northwestern's greatest non-conference enemy remains contempible Notre Dame, who holds an 8-37 record against the Wildcats. Four of the Northwestern wins came in a row, from 1959-62 during the Ara Parseghian era, after which he moved onto Notre Dame, and the Irish took the next 14 in a row. Northwestern were Notre-Dame natural early rivals, competing for the Chicago area and to determine which group has the fiercest "Fighting" mascot after the Fighting Shakers were no longer able to field a competitive side.

The Fighting Shakers intimidate the competition with a fearsome dance known
for its elegant simplicity

Although Northwestern's football past is often maligned by college football pundits and Big Ten opponent fanbases, a look at the schedule reveals some remarkable successes. For example, in terms of academic might, the Wildcats are undfeated against the Ivy League, having defeated Darthmouth, Cornell, and Harvard Prep School. NU has also beaten hated rivals Chicago Dental College twice, with an erroneously-recorded loss rectifed by Hailtopurple detective work. Wins over programs such as Northwestern Dental, Illinois Physicians and Surgeons, and Hahnemann Medical college leaves the 'Cats 11-2 over all medical schools, and undefeated against all dental schools, leading to forgotten nineteenth century fight song "Bring your dentists, they're our meat."

A recreation of nemesis Chicago Dental College's logo based on
the Iron Law of Dental Logos, which requires
anthropomorphic teeth.

The most wins by a Northwestern team over a non-conference opponent is sixteen against Lake Forest College followed closely by twelve over Beloit College, and ten against Evanston High School. For more legitimate wins against opponents that still exist, are colleges in the FBS, and played Northwestern since the fallout from the Teapot Dome scandal had comfortably subsided, Northwestern has eight wins against Duke, seven against Iowa State, and is undefeated at 6-0 against Northern Illinois, who ought to be on the schedule more often so that Husky fans can gear up for the game by ritualistically draping Wildcat effigies in barbed wire.

Joseph F. Glidden looks disdainfully upon
Northern's football performance against the Wildcats

Without Northern Illinois, Northwestern is 7-9 against the MAC, including a heartbreaking Motor City Bowl loss to Bowling Green and an uninspiring 2-6 record against Miami (Ohio), who dealt the 'Cats their only regular season loss in the 1995 season.

TURKMENISTAN UPDATE

The legacy of Turkmenbashi, the late Leader of All Ethinc Turkmen and official BYCTOM post-Soviet Central Asian strongman, lives on in another insane public works project. According to this article by Luke Harding, Turkmenistan president Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov is attempting to build a giant lake in the middle of the Karakum desert. The, project, dubbed the "Golden Age Lake," was dreamed up in 2006 by Turkmenbashi and glorified in state-run newspaper Neutral Turkmenistan. The difference between a run-of-the-mill report of an ill-conceived lake in the middle of nowhere story and one set in Turkmenistan is that other articles don't contain this sentence:

"The president then rode off on a jewellery-bedecked horse, climbed into his helicopter and flew back to the capital, Ashgabat."


Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov only makes an appearance at press
conferences after the audience has satisfactorally unfocused their
eyes and stared at the backdrop long enough to see him or lie about it

In comparison to building a lake in the middle of nowhere without causing a highly expected ecological catastrophe, Northwestern's task of getting to another bowl game seems easy. On the other hand, a careful analysis of the schedule involving a jeweler's eye and a green accounting visor reveals that there are zero dental colleges on the roster. On the other hand, Northwestern can expect a
(hard-bitten editor's note: KAFKA EXPECTS FIRST GAME WILL BE A TRIAL/ARBY FIELDS SAYS HE HAS NO BEEF WITH TOWSON see kid, that's how you sell papers)

Wrigley Game

The possibility of a Northwestern-Illinois game at Wrigley Field heated up this week as Chicago Cubs president Crane Kennedy met with officials from both schools. According to this Sun-Times article, Coach Fitz remains hesitant about giving up a home game in front of what will certainly be an overwhelmingly pro-Illinois crowd.

Wrigley set up for Bears football-- the padding on the ivy gives it the feel of some sort of
jungle based arena league where you don't just play football but hunt the
ultimate prey: man

The argument about giving up a home game on the surface has merit, but on the other hand a decent Illinois team traditionally draws a crowd that dwarfs or at best matches the mustering of Wildcat fans at Ryan Field. More importantly, the Illinois-Northwestern rivalry is traditionally the worst rivalry in college football. A game at the Friendly Confines will surely provide the morale-boosting taunting, shouting, and potential drunken donnybrooks that will fuel this rivalry for years to come. More importantly, the game will attract both local and national attention to Northwestern football which may even distract from a media-created snit between Bears players rumored to equate teammates with various female genitalia. Giving up a home game is one of two ways to focus attention on the Land of Lincoln Trophy (the other involves dressing both coaches as Lincoln with Zook assuming the presidential beard and stovepipe hat look and Fitz as the younger clean-shaven Lincoln fist-pumping Stephen Douglas into a tiny submission).

A Wrigley Field game would give the Illinois-Northwestern game the cachet
and excitement depicted on this 1927 poster found at this blog full of vintage
football posters, including a 1936 clash between the Wildcats and the
Prisoner of Zenda

BASEBALL STEROIDS CONTROVERSY

This week, another bombshell broke in the never-ending national dirge about steroids in baseball as investigative reporters continued to name names and columnists began orgasmically quaking with moral outrage. The last round several rounds of outings have been spectacularly underhanded as players who thought they were submitting to anonymous tests have been ambushed by the pointed finger of the media. On the one hand, the test results continously demonstrate that the steroid problem has been endemic and that there absolutely nothing that anyone can do about it. On the other hand, it looks like it will continue providing hilarity as names continue to get leaked and eventually the steroid train gains enough momentum to crash resoundingly into the baseball's fortress of stodgy overreaction in the Hall of Fame.

The BBWA examines the credentials of a steroid-era player

The steroid scandal has pretty much everything one can hope for in a sports scandal: a posse of high horses riding out from major metropolitan newspapers, inevitable "what about the children" backlash, and the wonderful side effect that steroids occasionally made players develop comically swollen heads that has turned baseball fans into amateur phrenologists. The best part involves a player high-handedly denouncing steroid users before inevitably getting caught red-handed, like a bear reaching into a trap filled with salmon that would make it larger and more dangerously omniverous.

Rafael Palmeiro's "Never. Ever. Period." speech was the highlight of grandstanding
leading to invitable guilt, whereas Sosa attempted to make language learning a fun
adventure. According to this site, the text on Palmeiro's poster says: "Capital: I will
crush Soviet Russia in my fist!/But it only clenches its fist in impotent anger!"

Although one could probably become exhausted from the way that the steroid scandal is being played out in its predictable pattern of a leaked list, accusations, denouncements, tearing of the hair over the sacred history of a game marked by spitballing, sign-stealing, fake handshakes, trick mustaches, brawls, intentional vigilante beanings, segregation, Dominican birth certificates, and constant crotch manipulation in full view of polite society, the scandal has provided some bizarre sideshows. Take, for example, ex-White Sox pitcher Jim Parque's astounding 3,139-word confession to taking HGH printed in the Sun-Times last week. To say that Parque emerged from the shadows of anonymity granted to middle of the order pitchers is an understatement-- he tobaganned down from a Himalayan yurt of anonymity to a series of canoes, hand cars, dirigibles, and other obscure modes of transport in order to spray his mea culpa across the pages of a semi-reputable daily newspaper. In order to capture the full breadth of Parque's confession, I'll be placing it next to passages from Bukharin's confession of crimes against the Soviet state from his 1937 show trial:

Parque: I know that in admitting to this, I am a cheater, a villain and nothing more than a drug user in the eyes of the media and some fans.

Bukharin: I first of all wish to concentrate on my own theoretical anti-Leninist and anti-Marxist errors, in order to give a clear, general theoretical basis for the following exposition and in order not to repeat myself in my consideration of individual questions.

Parque: It was the sixth inning. There were two outs, and John Olerud was up. I had retired the last nine batters I had faced and was on my way to securing a Chicago victory. I threw a slider, striking him out looking, but I felt a pop in my left shoulder.

Bukharin: The substitution of dialectical flexibility and of the greatest degree of concreteness by abstract schemas of a renovated “theory of equilibrium”, with all assurances of mobile equilibrium, in reality meant a fixation on dead abstraction and stasis that hindered me from seeing the concrete changes in all of their multifarious and complex interweaving of appearances.

Parque: So, Kenny, as I have stated personally to you, I publicly apologize for putting you through what I did, mainly because you were the one responsible for giving me a chance. Your ability to separate the personal relationship we shared from business is a testament to why the White Sox won a World Series and have continued to be productive.

Bukharin: According to this notion the main road, the highway to the development of socialism in the countryside lay not through the productive unification of peasant households, but through a process of management, through attracting them by the market, by cooperation in trade, credit, the banking system, etc., during which the “kulak nests” would peacefully grow into socialism. In this way the most important question of the relationship between the proletariat and the peasantry was treated by me in a fundamentally incorrect manner.

Parque: Work harder, you say? Take vitamins and get in better shape? Did it, and I was rewarded with pathetic Triple-A stats, a fastball now in the low 80s and an average high school curveball.

Bukharin: Thus I was already beginning to create for myself cadres for the following struggle with the Party leadership headed by Stalin. In place were special ideological formulations, people, and their consolidation. The sense of closedness, fractional loyalty, conceitedness, anti-Party talks about Stalin’s supposedly low theoretical level, petty criticism, gossip and anecdotes about the leadership of the Party were made more serious by the fact that I, in a criminal manner, initiated the nucleus of this fraction to all the most intimate affairs of the Party leadership, acquainted this nucleus with secret Party documents of the CC, Politburo, Executive Committee and Presidium of the Comintern; I praised these young people and thereby corrupted them politically, sowed the seeds that would bring their own criminal fruit

Parque: I prided myself on working hard every day, eating properly and taking care of my body. For those of you who think otherwise, have you ever seen me in person? I stand 5-11 and weigh 185 pounds. I graduated high school at 5-5, 132 pounds. I looked like William Hung, another reason I spent many a dateless night in high school.

Bukharin: We gathered all possible information about the opposition to collectivization, about the various manifestations of peasant dissatisfaction, about the slaughter of farm animals, about the lack of bread, about the growth of price inflation, about various economic paradoxes (this was called “the economy rearing up”), we carefully gathered together facts such as that wagon-drivers were feeding their horses with baked bread because that was cheaper, etc. without end.


Jim Parque, mediocre baseball starter. Nikolia Bukharin, Bolshevik theorist,
communist fashion icon

Steroids in baseball are bound to continue popping up for quite some time. And, as each predictable revelation begets another round of breast-beating from baseball's self-proclaimed guardians, hopefully the Jim Parques of the world will come out of the woodwork and throw a monkey wrench in the proceedings until I get my wish of a Hércule-Poirot style j'accuse from one prominent player to another, igniting a hilarious Jose Mesa/Omar Vizquel-style blood feud that in the best of possible worlds involves Kyle Farnworth, leading to my surefire money-making scheme.

Enshrinement, Presdiential Voice and Mustache Update

Coach Fitz officially entered the College Football Hall of Fame last Saturday in South Bend Indiana, the home of the Hall and the site of the rebirth of Northwestern football.

Fitzgerald extends a fist over South Bend while leaning on a parade float device
that makes it look like a railroad hand car demonstrated in the photo at right,
where a railroad official comforts a young man who cannot join the hand car
crew after failing to measure up to a sign saying "you must be this grizzled"

Asked if he hoped to one day make it back to the Hall as a coach, Fitzgerald replied in the affirmative, claiming that by the time he had finished he would "drive other Big Ten programs like so many snakes into the sea except for the really landlocked schools in which case I will crush them with the ever-pumping might of my iron fist."

BY JINGO

BYCTOM soccer coverage tends to favor international competition because soccer does global competition better than any other sport unless Bill Walton is unleashed upon a FIBA tournament with a microphone and a CIA World Factbook. It is also essentially the only soccer that I even tangentially follow, largely to satiate my jingoistic bloodlust against hapless Caribbean CONCACAF teams.

The 2009 Confederations Cup, a triumph
against Treacherous Spain

Personally, interest in international soccer has not translated into support for the MLS. The ever-tiresome whither American soccer question assumes a bizarre patriotic dimension for MLS fans versus those who prefer to exclusively follow the bigger European leagues, as if eschewing the MLS for the Premier League is an unforgivable act of crumpet-waving Toryism.

Loyalist Thomas Jones (left) assailed General Howe for the failure of Britain to
quash the nascent American Revolution, claiming that wasted time "diverting
himself in New York, in feasting, gaming, banqueting, and in the arms of Mrs.
Loring," whom he described as the Cleopatra of the American Colonies. Jones
alleges that Howe dallied because "the General's favourites were not yet
enriched; the rebellion was to be nursed, the General to continue in command,
and his friends, flatterers, mistresses, and sycophants to be provided for"

The Chicago Fire is currently and tenuously in first in the Eastern Conference and does feature Brian McBride, the America's Iron Forehead, at forward, as well as a nickname carefully chosen by MLS to evoke a local tragedy along with the San Jose Earthquakes and future expansion team the Gary, Indiana Gary Indianas. This comes from a soccer tradition, which is why the English enjoy teams such as Suffragette Tramplers United and FC Thatcher-era Industrial Blight.

Incidentally, there was a sudden an unexpected attempt to unearth the true cause of the Chicago fire several years ago. Further investigations put the blame on Mrs. O'Leary's neighbor, the suspiciously named Daniel "Peg Leg" Sullivan, a name suited to an accidental arsonist, emergency dike repairman, or Cook County trash commissioner candidate. Ald. Ed Burke took time to officially clear Mrs. O'Leary's cow as part of his role on the prestigious Bovine Exoneration Committee, a crucial piece of Daley patronage.

Possible causes of the 1871 Chicago Fire

VOICES OF THE PEOPLE

Major League Soccer is back in the headlines again due to volatile star/international prettyboy David Beckham who has brought the glitz, glamor, and scotch-tossing soap opera melodrama to American soccer. Hailed just two years ago as the most important thing to happen to the sport in America, he has returned to LA to insults, effigies, and a hostile Home Depot Center vibrating with a cacophony of lusty booing by fans taking advantage of the fact that booing is one of very few acts that can be performed lustily in public without fear of arrest or recrimination. He even exchanged words with a hostile spectator, and another leaped from the stands to challenge him to a fight before being engulfed by security-- when in doubt, always leap from great heights to challenge professional athletes, it's right there in chapter 4 of the book Tremendous Ideas by Mitch "Blood" Green.

More importantly, Beckham's lunge at the American spotlight has done more to illuminate his membership in the Unexpectedly High Voice Society along with charter members Mike Tyson, Avery Johnson, and Joseph Stalin, shown here augmenting his speech with unending cascades of stormy applause.

The Castrato and Pesci, members an expectedly high voiced counter-
organization

Michigan State has a wonderful searchable collection of audio at the Vincent Voice Library, and many of the shorter clips are listenable online. Crucially, the archive provides an excellent base for proving that Theodore Roosevelt does not belong to the legions of the unexpectedly high-voiced, but to the Theodore Roosevelt-voiced. Anyone who manages to replicate his impossible lilt can gain entry to a Teddy Roosevelt Valhalla, spending his days trust-busting, lion hunting, and aggressively grinning. The archive also provides this astoundingly creepy clip of David Lloyd George as he gives a speech encouraging war-time singing while what sounds like a tortured poltergeist or digitally disguised mob witness wails mournfully in the background.

Audio recordings of presidents showcase a palpable shift in pronunciation in America. Politicians, regardless of accent, spoke with a clipped, almost over-articulated way, forming vowels in ways that echo oddly in contemporary ears. Going back, it is tough to determine the first president to lose this diction. The task is more difficult when clouded by regional accents such as Calvin Coolidge's Foghorn Leghorn accent that drips from his mouth and wraps its thumbs through his suspenders. Harding comes much closer than anyone before World War II, but it is Eisenhower who may be the first contemporary-sounding president before a run on regional accents with Kennedy's Massachusetts braying, Johnson's close-leaning Texas twang, and Nixon's distinctive growl native to jowl country.

INEVITABLE FACIAL HAIR DETOUR

On a similar and more easily definable note, William Howard Taft was the last American president to sport any sort of facial hair, going with a mustache fashionable among gunfighters, strongmen, and Purdue coaches. The last time the U.S. even fielded a major-party candidate with any sort of facial hair was in 1948, when Dewey was unable to ride his mustache to victory over Truman, although the last candidate with truly epic facial hair was 1916's Charles Evans Hughes, whose unruly beard seemed poised to explode from his face and throttle Woodrow Wilson during debate.

Neither Thomas Dewey nor Charles Evans Hughes will stand for this
bullshit

The greatest presidential facial hair of all time remains an open debate. Certainly, Lincoln's beard remains an iconic part of his legacy and hopefully an integral part of the Land of Lincoln trophy. Beards, however, remain far too pedestrian for the American presidency. Instead, the key question should focus on Chester A. Arthur or Martin Van Buren in the muttonchop department. Both were elected directly from the Vice Presidency into a second-rate presidency at best (Arthur is notable for being particularly undistinguished in a post-Civil War era of undistinguished presidents known as the Grover Cleveland Vortex).

Arthur's chops hang off his face like a graceful waterfall or a stage curtain draped in front of his cheeks and neck made plump through the plunderous office of New York Port Collector. His cascading muttonchops give him the grave and stately air of grazing cattle, gently chewing its cud and resisting its most arsonous urges. Van Buren, on the other hand, has the advantage of male pattern baldness, which makes it look like the left and right sides of his hair got into an irreconciliable dispute and separated by sliding halfway down his face. Van Buren, known as the "little magician" for his diminuitive stature, has more violent muttonchops, as if they can lurch from his face without warning and strangle an opponent like two hairy tentacles. Clearly, Van Buren has the superior muttonchops and the greatest presidential facial hair in history and, if this clean-shaven trend continues, possibly all time.

Arthur boasts a stately curtain while Martin Van Buren lives under the sea; he
eats plankton and octopi and even you and me

Further updates on these and other crucial topics as college football season continues not to happen for the rest of the month and BYCTOM is forced to examine the Van Dyke beards of the conquistadors.

What is to be done?

First off, a note that the New York Times preview of Northwestern is up at their college football blog, The Quad. They have Northwestern ranked #47 going into the 2009 season, above #105 Indiana, #62 Minnesota, and #57 Michigan. Paul Myerberg's preview is excellent and accurately assesses the 'Cats strengths and weaknesses going into next season. Although Northwestern does not play Michigan this year, the home games against Indiana and Minnesota will be vengeance games: Northwestern will be looking to reconcile its disappointing loss in Bloomington, and Minnesota will try to avenge the Wildcat walk-off and walk-out interception that saw that the Gophers would never win in the Metrodome again.

Alexandre Dumas, literary patron saint of
vengeance, vows revenge on Henri Meyer for
this
unflattering caricature

SECOND HALF CUBS PREVIEW

Instead of running away with a flawed division as predicted by most media outlets and at least three of Milwaukee's racing sausages, the Cubs are desperately fighting for third place in a miserable division behind Milwaukee and a St. Louis team that is winning because Albert Pujols is playing like Bugs Bunny against the Gashouse Gorillas. As they would say in the title of three-fifths of everything published in nineteenth century Russia, what is to be done?

Chernyshevsky, Lenin, and Tolstoy, all authors of works
entitled What is to be done presented here in beardal order

The Cubs' struggles on offense this season have been well-publicized without a good explanation; should a Cub manage to safely reach base, his teammates immediately begin striking out, popping up, waving their bat around like they are trying to put out some sort of broom fire, and suffering Jose Cardenal-like problems with depth perception.

Cardenal had problems in his Cubs
career with mysteriously shut eyes,
renegade grasshoppers, and inferior
baseball cap technology

The amazing thing about the Cubs has been the curious synchronization of slumps. Both Alfonso Soriano and Milton Bradley are having their worst years since 2001 and 2002, their first full seasons in the bigs (considering that Bradley has only played in more than 100 games three times in his ten year career, I'm counting 98 games as a full Milton Bradley season, much like a full Milton Bradley injury does not count unless he's being restrained or surreptitiously sedated for plane travel). Bradley, at least, is getting on base, whereas Soriano's OPS is currently identical to utility man Geoff Blum and backup catchers Chris Coste and Gregg Zaun, who at least has an amazing webpage combining Rush with a searing hatred of unjust commandantes.

Mike Fontenot, who put up a .909 OPS in limited duty last year has become nearly useless, and Geovany Soto has been unable to stand up to the pressure of his rookie of the year season and the WBC's reefer madness witch hunt. Of the healthy Cub regulars, only Derrek Lee is producing at almost his exactly his career average. By OPS+, only Lee, Theriot, and Fukudome are producing at league average (and Fukudome only because of his insanely hot April and May is balancing out a terrible June and fumbling July). So what is to be done?

The only logical solution is that the bats, they are very sick. The Cubs should call in a professional. Facing a similar crisis in 2001, rookie Julio Zuleta grabbed an armload of apples, oranges, sunflower seeds, and Flexall and attempted to cleanse the bats using a dark art he invented called "zoodoo." According to this SI story, Zuleta explained his thought process combining his mastery of alchemy, sorcery, and occult books with ornate yet sinister cover designs: "I thought that maybe the bats were hungry, so I gave them some fruit. I put them in the sun so we could get hot." Fortunately, blasphemy does not appear to be a part of the zoodoo process: "I don't practice voodoo. I am Catholic, and I believe 100 percent in God. But the way we were losing, something had to be done," he said as he ordered his manservant to attack Indiana Jones.

Zuleta is currently a free agent after a successful career in Japan with the Fukuoka Softbank Hawks and the Chiba Lotte Marines, earning three all-star appearances, his own supporter song, and the nickname "Samurai." Zuleta was last seen playing for Panama at the WBC where he went 0 for 8 with 3 Ks, which fits him in perfectly with the Cubs' team concept.

Zuleta bats for Panama at the WBC adespite also qualifying to play for an army of
the undead that he raised by his reckless use of incantations from the
Necromonicon to try to change the clubhouse sunflower seeds from regular to
barbecue flavor

TRACKING DOWN THE APOCRYPHAL

I recently came across this odd article for the New Statesman written in 2000 by Nina Khrushchev about her grandfather's famous shoe-wielding outburst at the UN. In it, she claims never to have seen evidence of the incident and wonders whether it might be a too-perfect story designed to inflame cold war tensions:

The shoe banging, it seemed likely, was an anecdote created by public demand, consistent with the political needs of the socialist-capitalist division. In short, I was almost sure it had never happened. My grandfather was innocent, and I had no reason to be ashamed.

Khrushchev sought to test out the process of historical myth-making in an age of mass-media, where apocryphal stories continue to flourish. After all, apocryphal attribution seems to be the source of 99% of material related to Winston Churchill, very possibly including the phenomenal dick joke found at the bottom of this page (an entire web page, for example, exists to debunk the famous "up with which I shall not put" quote, displaying the sort of pedantry, oddly enough, that Churchill would probably not put up with after consulting with his gin cabinet). Khrushchev's search, however, came less from a duty to historical accuracy and more from an understandable desire not to see her grandfather as a shoe-waving maniac, a view with which I cannot empathize.

Mr. K: You ain't tough enough for me

The Khrushchev article did lead me to examine the news coverage of the incident, which happened at the U.N. on October 12, 1960. Khrushchev was already on edge, having confronted an uppity Spaniard the day before who had refused to applaud him. The New York Times described Khrushchev's outburst as "a brief but vivid display of finger-shaking and recrimination," noting that he "indicated his disapproval of the Spanish delegation with a series of vigorous arm gestures." The same day, he threatened delegates by claiming that Soviet factories were producing rockets "like sausages," a combination of factors resulting in an all-time great article subheading:


The shoe incident itself earned another ace headline from our friends at the Times:

Benjamin Welles described the scene: "Mr. Khrushchev thereupon pulled off his right shoe, stood up and brandished the shoe at the Philippine delegate at the other side of the hall. He then banged the shoe on his desk." The story continues, under the subheadline "KHRUSHCHEV ADDS SHOE-WAVING TO HIS HECKLING ANTICS AT U.N.": "Later...Mr. Khrushchev alternately shouted, waved a brawny right arm, shook his finger and removed his shoe a second time." I'm grateful for the attention to detail that indicates Khrushchev goes to his right for all shoe and arm-waving as well as the author's robust vocabulary for describing Soviet outbursts.

Was Khrushchev a madman or did he have another purpose? The article provides further analysis to his motivations: "Serious observers here believe Mr. Khrushchev has a deadly serious purpose in his histrionic excesses. They noted that a standard Communist practice, whenever the Communists believe they cannot win in a court of law, is to destroy the prestige and sanctity of the court."

One thing that Khrushchev did not do at the U.N. is threaten to bury the West or declare that anybody's grandchildren will live under communism. The burial threat occurred in 1956 at the Polish embassy in Moscow as the Western delegates retreated under a hail of abuse, as chronicled in this excerpt from Time, although the New York Times comes through again with the headline "KHRUSHCHEV TIRADE AGAIN IRKS ENVOYS." The idea of grandchildren living under communism comes from an exchange that U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson claims he had with Khrushchev. Here's the anecdote in his own words that is apparently being played during what appears to be a 2008 Republican primary debate as the delegates stand silently demonstrating their displeasure with the Soviet Union, a hot-button issue in the 2008 election.

Perhaps if Zuleta's bat rituals fail, the Cubs can turn to some godless communists to cook up a five year plan for getting some hits or they will be forced to endure vivid displays of finger shaking a recrimination and histrionic excesses from disappointed fans.