Winter Meetings

With Northwestern football safely ensconced in the bosom of the off-season and the basketball team facing a gauntlet of Big opponents and basking in national media attention celebrating their historical futility, it's time to turn attention to the convoluted baseball offseason. The winter meetings tend to be rife with speculation and innuendo. With the news cycle's emphasis on immediacy, reporters and bloggers scatter rumors like the buckshot from a grizzled prospector's blunderbuss, giving fans even more opportunities for premature outrage or smug condescension toward anyone who mentions RBIs. On the one hand, I enjoy increased opportunities to work myself into a rabid frenzy about the failings of baseball executives; who doesn't? On the other hand, the intimate coverage of the winter meetings takes the mystique out of them. I would enjoy it if baseball executives gathered in an exotic, secluded location such as an Austrian castle, or the site of Paul Gaguin's pleasure-dome, or in a submarine in the Indian Ocean for three silent days and emerge with a parchment list of all transactions read out on a wind-swept cliff to a throng of reporters in the gully below reacting like those CBOT guys who somehow found a profession involving yelling and shoving and making dramatic gestures outside the orbit of professional wrestling.

I refuse to recognize the legitimacy of any financial institution that
does not also resemble a rousing Bollywood production number

The Cubs's offseason has been tepid, marked mainly by the titanic trade of Milton Bradley for Carlos Silva. Seattle Weekly's Caleb Hannan not only described Silva as "a sad lump of clay," but he has helpfully compiled rave reviews of the trade from media outlets comparing it to trading a root canal for a punch in the mouth or swapping venereal diseases. Although the Chicago media has been turning cartwheels for the exile of Bradley, they have forgotten the key difference that although Bradley may have been surly, always wary of umpire conspiracies, and apparently the type of person who abandons his apartment making him a sort of rent scofflaw except he's not really scoffing at the law but more accurately at his former landlord so maybe he'd be best described as an alleged scoff-lord, unlike Silva he's also capable of playing baseball at the Major League level. Silva, on the other hand, has been abominable and though the Cubs are saving some money, in baseball terms they should consider using Silva only to restrain Carlos Zambrano from further damaging their Gatorade dispensing infrastructure.

While Silva may be troublemaker in his own right, once
threatening to "grab someone by the neck and throw him into the
wall," there's no way he can possibly be as cool as Bradley, a switch
-hitting baseball Vesuvius to whom nothing is impossible such as
an unexpected mid-season retirement where he vanishes to hunt
down umpires who have thwarted him and then keeping their
stuffed corpses in a hidden lodge in an uncharted area of North
America

One of the reasons that I am gutted about losing Bradley is not only because of his on-base percentage, antics, and Vaudeville partnership with Soriano entitled "Where The Hell's The Ball? Fuck if I Know," but because he must be awesome by default due to his standing with reporters. Baseball reporters, as we all know, are by and large the crustiest curmudgeons wielding word processors who not only display a willful ignorance for what makes baseball players good or bad but enjoy riding an irritating moral high horse about maintaining the sanctity of a dirty and spectacularly rotten game; therefore, anyone who irritates reporters that much must be doing something right. You can calculate exactly how much to appreciate a player via a statistic I have just invented called Reporter Antagonism Percentage or RAP. By snarling at reporters, excelling at aspects of the game not measured by traditional nineteenth-century baseball statistics, occasionally attempting to physically assault announcers, and needing to be sedated before getting on a team plane, Bradley's RAP is around 98, a number that could only be eclipsed if Todd Hundley is brought on as a bench coach and then in his first game wades into the stands aiming a bat at children and elderly veterans.

The Cubs will be replacing Bradley in the outfield with Marlon Byrd, a more genial presence who hopes that working with new hitting coach Rudy Jaramillo will replicate his career year on the Rangers. While I'm looking forward to rooting for Byrd and seeing if this man will bring his Byrd Dance to the North Side although to be honest it looks less like a bird and more like some sort of grounded avian creature futilely flailing its vestigial wing limbs in a fruitless attempt to attain flight, I'm not optimistic about his chances of winning over the Wrigley faithful. Byrd is a career .279/.340/.422 hitter. Which popular Cubs outfielder has a similar career statline of .277/.326/.448?

You guessed it: Jacque Jones

At least the Cubs have had some more positive news this offseason with the election of Andre Dawson to the Hall of Fame with the BBWA thankfully ignoring his borderline stats in favor of rewarding him for being my favorite ballplayer growing up. More importantly, Greg Maddux will now be working for the Cubs in a variety of roles as he learns scouting, general managing, coaching, and instructing rookies how to grow a spectacular two-part Errol Flynn mustache that he evidently grew during a disastrous facial hair escalation with his brother, Mike.

Though Greg became the sure-fire Hall of Famer, Mike clearly was the
Maddux Brother with the greatest accumen in mustache growing and
picking up truck stop waitresses

I WILL RUIN YOU

Recently, my attention has been drawn to William Walker, the diminutive Tennessean who briefly succeeded in taking over Nicaragua, a striking achievement watered down by the fact that there are few people who have not briefly held control over Nicaragua. Walker was part of the Filibuster movement in the mid-nineteenth century where private American citizens traveled to Latin America for sunshine, beaches, and unsuccessful attempts to foment revolution and overturn governments to their own ends.

Other filibusters include Aaron Burr, William S. Smith, and
David G. Burnet, who later became president of the Republic of
Texas had had two spectacular versions of nineteenth century
facial hair, shown here modeling rug-style mutton-chops and
the crazy chin beard that resembles an upside down Redd Fox

In the mid-nineteenth century, these wholesome military incursions became intertwined with American sectional politics, as filibusters such as Walker sought to use these territories as outlets for slavery. Walker's adventures in Nicaragua also led him to cross swords with Cornelius Vanderbilt, then attempting to ferry passengers across Nicaragua to allow them to get to San Francisco and its gold fields more rapidly. In Walker's defense, it seems only slightly easier get on Vanderbilt's bad side than Charles Bronson's. This time, Vanderbilt's associates Charles Morgan and C.T. Garrison conspired with Walker to betray Vanderbilt; they would fund Walker's overthrow of the sublimely named Nicaraguan president Fruto Chamorro and Walker would give them exclusive transit rights through Nicaragua. Surprisingly, in 1855, Walker and a motley crew of 58 succeeded, Walker set himself up as the President of Nicaragua, and Morgan and Garrison gained their monopoly. According to this account from Vanderbilt University, the Commodore sent an all-time great threat to perfidious partners: "Gentleman: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. Yours, Cornelius Vanderbilt."

Fueled by vengeance, Vanderbilt undercut his rivals by creating a route through Panama, bankrupted Morgan and Garrison, reacquired control over Accessory Transit Co., and convinced Honduras, Guatemala, San Salvador, and Costa Rica, and the United States to refuse to recognize the Walker administration (earlier in 1856, Franklin Pierce recognized the government in a shocking moment of activity for the oft-inebriated Executive who was famously slandered by the opposition as the hero of many a well-fought bottle). Despite Vanderbilt's fury, Walker clung to power, changing the official language of Nicaragua to English and encouraging immigration from the U.S. and slavery. Finally, Vanderbilt enlisted a private army of Costa Ricans to oust Walker, and the U.S. Navy thwarted his attempts to return. Finally, in 1860, out what seems to be some sort of habit, he attempted to attack Honduras, but got stopped by the British Navy who delivered him to Honduran authorities and their ace firing squad.

One of the curious things about Walker is his height. His short stature is all over this well-done podcast about Walker and even gets a mention in Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express where Walker is described as a "five-foot Tennessean" and ends the story with "this midget was shot in 1860" as if there is some sort of "you must be this tall to invade" sign in front of Central America.

Walker, like other famous short men, overcame his height to become the
Littlest Conquistador

Incidentally, The Old Patagonian Express contains the Paul Therouxest passage ever printed:

At the time, I did not think Wendy was crazy in any important sense. But afterwards, when I remembered our converastion, she seemed to me profoundly loony. And profoundly incurious. I had casually mentioned to her tat I had been to Upper Burma and Africa. I had described Leopold Bloom's love of 'the faint tang of urine' in the kidneys he had for breakfast. I had shown a knowledge of Buddhism and the eating habits of Bushmen in the Kalahari and Gandhi's early married life. I was a fairly interesting person, was I not? But not once in the entire conversation had she asked me a single question.

which is perhaps rivaled only by the part in his latest Ghost Train to the Eastern Star where he meticulously studies the facial expressions that a young woman makes on a train as he watches her reading The Mosquito Coast as if he expects her recognize him and swoon appropriately; as this wonderfully scathing New York Times review by Jennifer Schuessler puts it:

Visiting regions transformed by war, genocide, imperial implosion and runaway development, Mr. Theroux at times seems to have just two really burning questions on his mind: Do you like George Bush, and have you heard of Paul Theroux?

STANDING PAT

With the Cubs remaining relatively quiet this winter, the 'Cats will take on a tough Purdue team and try to make some noise in the Big Ten season. And with the season unfolding as improbably as the Walker administration in Nicaragua, Wildcat fans have only one question on their minds, or at least one that has nothing to do with Paul Theroux.

Good Grief

Northwestern treated America to another overtime thriller, cementing its status as the country's most consistently exciting bowl team with its roller-coaster theatrics. Of course, this being a bowl game involving Northwestern, the roller-coaster ride traditionally ends with the bar lifting off as stunned patrons are then pummeled with festive carnival implements such as giant plush gorillas or foam cowboy hats by disgruntled carnies. From now on, Northwestern will be required to have a cardboard Yosemite Sam on the sidelines to make sure that only the most calm and serene fans can watch the games in order to prevent nervous breakdowns, heart palpitations, and acts of violence fueled by Heston Scale-breaking incredulity.

The plucky Kafka led comeback after comeback in an astounding five-interception performance that at times resembled the mythical Shane Falco meltdown from late night basic cable staple The Replacements starring Keanu Reeves, whose fictional Sugar Bowl performance apparently ended up with him living in a houseboat, which in movies is a clear sign of hitting rock bottom since you never see a movie organized around the theme of successful, well-adjusted, clean-shaven people living and prospering in a happy neighborhood of houseboats.

Keanu Reeves in the first two parts of his planned
"Quarterback Trilogy" loosely organized around the themes
of being a former quarterback and Keanu Reeves. On a vaguely
related note, I strongly believe that while people are willing to
accept Keanu Reeves characters named Shane Falco and
Johnny Utah, if Keanu attempted to play a quarterback named
Colt McCoy from Texas back in 1997, Keanu would have entered
the Uncanny Valley of fake quarterback names that are too
ridiculous even for someone willing to pay money for a Keanu
Reeves performance meaning that we are now living in a world
where quarterbacks can legitimately have names that would have
been too over-the-top for Keanu Reeves only ten years ago

The Outback Bowl had everything-- gut-wrenching reversals of fortune, multiple lead changes, crazy offenses, writhing kickers, inexplicable costly penalties, and the fake field goal that everybody knew was coming. If Northwestern was ever going to win a bowl game, it would seem that the most appropriate way would involve some sort of ludicrous comeback. After all, every single NU bowl game this decade has been in the same mold (except for the 2000 Alamo Bowl) including the Debacle in Detroit, the UCLA Onside Fiasco, and the Missouri Why Are You Punting To Maclinstravaganza. And while watching the 'Cats lose in increasingly excruciating ways may put a bit of a damper on a New Year's hangover, it is far better than not making it to bowl games at all.

EXPLORING THE OPTIONS

I was recently thinking about the Age of Exploration and the extent to which explorers' lust for fame, fortune, spices from the orient, and just plain regular lust led them to set off on a death wish of a journey into parts unknown armed only with some swords, crude muskets, and Western disease. And, in the competitive, international, anti-Olympic spirit of conquest and intrigue, where could one go to meet a gloriously horrific end, what country was most likely to kill its explorers, and other such important information germane to an irregularly published college football blog.

The Portuguese were somehow the greatest explorers, expanding remarkably throughout the early modern world in a short-lived burst of relevance. Yet, their explorers did not fare particularly well, with Vasco da Gama dying of malaria in Goa and Magellan losing to the invincible forces of Lapu-Lapu in Cebu. Both explorers are memorialized by logos-- da Gama as part of a Brazilian soccer team entitled Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama and Magellan by the inclusion of a victorious Lapu-Lapu on the official seal of the Philippine National Police.

Lapu-Lapu provides a reminder that exploration and conquest
provides a rare attempt to list getting hacked to pieces by indigenous
groups in a failed attempt to extract armed tribute as a valid
occupational hazard

The Spanish-funded explorers fared better. Both Columbus and Cortes died in Spain-- the fact that Cortes survived despite making war upon the entire Aztec Empire and was able to return to Spain twice and even take a shot at the Ottomans for good measure is fairly remarkable. After his death, his remains were even more mobile, moved at the whims of Dukes who needed space, lackadaisical enforcement of his last wished in his will, and attempts to avoid desecration in the heady aftermath of Mexican independence.

Being an English explorer, however, seemed to invite the most trouble. Henry Hudson found himself on the business end of a mutiny-- although some suspect that the crew dispatched of their captain, they claim that they merely abandoned Hudson, his son, and his loyal lieutenants in a boat in uncharted and foreboding waters with every chance of not dying from hunger, thirst, scurvy, or attack by some sort of comical Bay Monster that seems like something that early modern sailors might believe in. Sir Walter Raleigh, the warrior/poet/explorer/ruffle enthusiast did not even get the pleasure of being hacked to pieces by a warrior in his search for El Dorado or killed by a crazed Roanoke survivor that had latched onto the back of his boat like a sort of Elizabethan Cape Feare (I'm adding the extra e for an authentic Shakespeare touch) but instead got beheaded by the order of James I for a complex web of reasons involving everybody hating Sir Walter Raleigh by the seventeenth century. And Drake had dysentery.

An official explorer death map indicating (from left to right)
1 Hernando de Soto: died of a fever, putting a minor wrinkle in his plan to convince
Native Americans that he was an immortal god
2 Hudson and the Mutiny
3 Cortes and a dysentery related death
4 Raleigh's beheading
5 Da Gama's malaria
6 Magellan's encounter with Lapu-Lapu

PULLING THE FOOTBALL

Northwestern's basketball team has also struggled in Big Ten play, losing in overtime (why not) to Illinois and struggling against a tough Michigan State Team at home. Hopefully, they can pull together against UT-Pan-American and gain some momentum for the rest of the Big Ten season and avoid mutineers, dysentery, and the N.I.T.

Pre-Bowl Anticipation

The New Year's showdown against Auburn is looming for the Northwestern football team. You can get into the spirit by spray-painting your possessions purple, vandalizing any Bo Jackson billboards you come across, and learning the 1929 Wildcat song through sheet music and lyrics that somebody has inexplicably put on Ebay so you can make sure each one of your yows is pitch perfect.

As the team gears up for the trip to Florida, the news is obviously stagnant, aside from the usual reminders of Northwestern's bowl futility. In a shocking change of pace, the Chicago media has been dominated by Notre Dame Intrigue, which now features torchlit booster meetings, clever use of improbable doppelgangers, and stair-bound swordplay (incidentally, there's a factoid that you always get on tours of medieval fortresses and the like about spiral staircases being designed for the advantage of right-handed defenders in sword fights which naturally brings up the question of how many staircases they could have had in the House of La Russa). The college coach swapping procedure seems designed to force false denials and betrayals that seem more at home in the Congress of Vienna than in, say, South Bend, Indiana.

The Duke De La Russa signals for a
lefty staircase to optimize the matchup
between his stalwart guard and
marauding invaders

In any event, there is something extraordinarily unsavory about a coach who changes jobs for whatever reason before finishing the season. No one likes a demoralized team rallying feebily around a lame-duck coach, especially in a BCS game. The situation badly needs to be injected with some semblance of rationality and sanity, so here is a workable solution: Teams may not hire another team's coach until both teams have finished bowl play. In return, the team firing its coach is allowed to literally run the coach out on a rail or parade him through town in one NCAA-sanctioned medieval punishment device as disappointed boosters pelt him with offal. In addition, schools would almost certainly circumvent the rules to make sleazy under-the-table offers to other coaches before bowl season, which will maintain the vital levels of sleaze, dishonesty, and hypocrisy that currently fuel college football and keeps pitchfork-wielding journalists employed.

One approved coach humiliating device would be the pillory,
used here against highwayman and convicted perjurer John
Waller in this 1732 engraving where enterprising mob members
re evidently pelting him with mice. According to the Newgate
Calendar,"This profligate wretch, Waller, to robbery added the
still greater sin of accusing the innocent, in order to receive the
reward in certain cases attending conviction" and he was also described as an
"abominable dealer in human blood" which also seems like a phrase
that has escaped the lips of Michael Buffer at some point

NORTHWESTERN IS A NATIONAL BASKETBALL JUGGERNAUT

The Wildcats are an astounding 10-1 heading into a Big Ten showdown with Illinois after holding on against Stanford and beating Central Connecticut. As reported in this article, flabbergasted Central Connecticut coach Howie Dickenman labeled Northwestern as one of the top three teams in the Big Ten and claimed that he will now refer to Carmody's version of the Princeton Offense as the "Northwestern Offense" before stopping to hand out a bunch of Gobots and Mr. Pibb to disappointed youths.

It's a good thing that the Wildcats are winning with the Chicago Bulls squandering last year's playoff momentum by turning into a truly awful basketball team. The season's futility climaxed in an epic, NBA-record 35 point choke job against the equally inept Sacramento Kings that will almost certainly end with Vinny Del Negro pretending to sell computers out of Frank Constanza's garage.

Brad Miller was unable to get his vengeance on the Kings for forcing him
to participate in a misguided Evil Sheriff Day promotion at Arco Arena

PACIFIC INTRIGUE

This week's New York Times had a fascinating story on the Pacific island nation of Nauru and its game of high stakes diplomacy. Nauru became the fourth country to recognize the Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia along with Russia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Nauru evidently did not have the struggle of the peoples of the breakaway regions under the boot of Georgian oppression in mind, nor a desire for general world-wide recogition of Nauru as a contry that exists. Instead, Nauru claimed $50 million of aid from Russia's Department of Whimsical Foreign Affairs. Times Reporter Ellen Berry describes the Russian reaction as not quite a diplomatic coup:

The news provoked waves of mirth from Russian commentators, some of whom broke down the per-capita cost of lobbying various nations to recognize the enclaves: roughly $3,500 a head for every resident of Nauru, $100 per Venezuelan, $200 per Belarussian, etc.

Of course, this is not Nauru's first endeavor in the aid-for-recognition game. Nauru earned $130 million from China by refusing to recognize the independence of Taiwan in 2002 (I have no idea how this happened, but I like to imagine an uncomfortable confrontation at the U.N. where someone gets a face full of martini) only to stab China in the back three years later by reestablishing relations. These incidents of micro-treachery stem from economic issues instead of the more pleasant rationale that Nauru's foreign relations department is filled with people who run their foreign relations strategy based on the board game Diplomacy, where it is far more satisfying to betray people for no apparent reason than to watch your flank from an unexpected attack from the relentless Ottoman war machine. These diplomatic moves, as well as other strategies such as providing disreputable offshore banking and accepting aid from Australia to take in their unwanted refugees, are part of a strategy to make up for the drying up of the phosphate supply that powers the Nauru economy.

Nauru achieved independence in 1968 under President Hammer DeRoburt, as noted on this helpful Late Twentieth Century Hammer Achievement Chart:

On this graph, the X-Axis represents time and the Y-Axis general
Hammer progress in HAUs (Hammer achievement units) with data
points demonstrating key Hammer moments: president of a pacific
island nation, home run king, hard-boiled, mustachioed detective,
parachute pants enthusiast

Nauru is not the only troubled country in region. Consider Palau, a fellow Mircronesian island, which spent the 1980s embroiled in murderous controversy over the ratification of the Compact of Free Association with the U.S. that would end trusteeship on the island. In 1985, its first president, Haruo I. Remeliik, was gunned down outside of his home, leading to the arrest and conviction of three suspects related to his oppostition which was later overturned, as detailed in this New York Times article as well as an excerpt from Embattled Island: Palau's struggle for independence by Arnold H. Leibowitz. A later investigation led to the conviction of Remeliik's former Minister of State John O. Ngiraked for aiding and abetting the assassination. Meanwhile, other investigations focused on bribery and intimidation surrounding the Compact ensnared president Lazarus Salii-- in one incident, a party of government employees including Salii's own assistant had a frank exchange of bullets with an opposition leader's house. As the net closed in on him, Salii died in 1988 of gunshot wounds in an apparent suicide as noted in this chaos filled excerpt from a section of the Europa World Year Book that can be easily confused for the back of a Graham Greene paperback.

A guide to Palau intrigue from left to right: Remeliik, Salii,
Ngiraked, the inevitable Walken intervention or Walkentervention
as it is known in the mercenary business

With the football team poised for its first New Years Bowl since 1996 and the basketball team on the precipice of hope against hope for the gossamer chance at making the NCAA tournament though there's still a long way to go let's not jinx anything before we get into the high-flying excitement of Big Ten baseketball season, it's an exciting time to be a Northwestern fan. And with the rest of the non-hockey Chicago teams breaking new depths of incompetence (I will be ready to discuss the concept of Carlos Silva in 2010), the Wildcats are essentially the only game in town leading perhaps to Chicago fans recognizing them as a legitimate home team and getting some locals into the stands to the cheer on the team with a furious intensity that is slightly unsettling. If not, perhaps a generous gift from the Athletic Department can earn some recognition overseas.

Bowl Finalized

By now, you know that Northwestern will play on New Year's Day against the Tigers of Auburn at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa. This time Northwestern leapfrogged a 9-3 Wisconsin team fresh off of a demolition of Hawaii, a stunning reversal of fortune for the Wildcats who have been twice scorned by the Outback Steakhouse people in what could have been the biggest controversy in Australia-U.S. relations since the American Revolution ended transportation to Georgia and thus flooded Australia with confidence men and bacon thieves.

I would enjoy it if Outback Steakhouse was actually owned by
Australians instead of a bland American conglomerate so that
they could force flummoxed coaches to play on a rounded Aussie
Rules cricket field such as the Brisbane Cricket Ground, home of
the Brisbane Lions and known colloquially as "The Gabba"

The Big Ten's bowl hierarchy after the selection of BCS teams is sort of nonsensical as playing in a better bowl has virtually no consequences except the prize of playing on New Years and not going to Detroit to entertain Mike Illitch's Praetorian Guard. That is why instead of it being up to corporate boards and attendance figures and the sort of backroom cronyism that involves suspenders, brandy, and hearty chuckling through clenched teeth locked in a vice grip on the most malodorous cigars on the market, the remaining bowl-eligible Big Ten teams should throw in their lot with Lady Luck and spin a Wheel of Bowls to determine their location. Fate cares not for alumni populations or which fan base owns the most Winnebagos and it spares everyone the bleating and hand-wringing of boosters who would have no recourse to complain about the machinations of a soulless wheel. Better yet, why not throw all of the non-BCS bowl games into a giant World Cup-style draw and watch as, for example, Penn State misses out on a BCS game only to be thrown into the Meineke Car Care Bowl as Charlize Theron tries valiantly to appear simultaneously jocular and not afraid of a rampaging Paterno?

The BCS selection show in the best of possible worlds

SCOUTING AUBURN

Auburn finished 7-5, dropping five of its last seven and prompting ESPN's Mark Schlaback to claim that "Perhaps no team took more of a back door into a bowl game than the Tigers" while ranking the Outback Bowl the 20th best bowl games of the 34 to be played this year. Hurting the appeal of the bowl games is the mascot matchup, another boring cat-cat contest. Auburn will be looking to confuse the Wildcats both with Gus Malzahn's spread offense and the fact that despite being represented by tigers, Auburn faithful are constantly going on about eagles, which points to a solution that can only be resolved by ace Northwestern reporter Skip Myslenski who was last seen foaming at the mouth at the British Museum.

That, at least, is vaguely more interesting than Northwestern's generic Wildcat, which is pretty much one step removed from simply naming the team "Mascot." The story of how the 'Cats got their nickname (from Tribune reporter Wallace Abbey after a tough loss to powerhouse Chicago in 1924, a more civilized age when teams can get named for a good showing in a loss and reporters had names such as "Wallace Abbey"), lends the name a colorful origin, but it does not change the fact that Northwestern athletics currently share a moniker with, by my count, five other Division 1 programs (including the FCS New Hampshire Wildcats that would have beaten Northwestern in 2006 if the stadium was not covered in tumbleweed). Until that day in 1924, Northwestern was known as "The Purple," taking a page from Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, and the House of Orange and before that as the "Fighting Methodists" as students dressed as the Wesley Brothers held open-air pep rallies to exhort Northwestern's football program and other popular Northwestern tests of strength such as tug-of-war and the thrashing about of one's footmen.

MASCOTS OF THE BIG TEN

Northwestern has by far the most generic mascot of the Big Ten, as illustrated on this official BYCTOM Pyramid of Mascot Ubiquity:

The pyramid flows from the base of specificity to a generic pinnacle and
is broken up by category rather than individual mascot. Just below
Northwestern is the category of animal mascots, although it should
be noted that the Big Ten bucks a national trend by featuring
ground-dwelling pest animal mascots, with the exception of Penn
State, although Penn State gets points for essentially making up its
own wild animal. The next category features specific groups of people,
slightly less generic than animals, although there was unfortunately
not room to shunt the Illini off to a "mascots specifically denigrated
by the NCAA" category. Note that Iowa straddles the animal and
person categories as they're technically named for Natty Bumppo
(who, for those keeping extensive records, fits into the categories
of frontiersmen and musket-wielders), but choose to be represented
by an anthropomorphic tight-wearing hawk. Next on down is flora,
greatly less represented than fauna in the mascot/nickname world.
Finally, the pyramid ends with Indiana, whose Hoosier mascot is obscure
beyond conjecture and is therefore represented by a
grimacing Lou Piniella.

Of course, if the pyramid had swung in the opposite direction, Northwestern could have a mysterious nickname such as "Hoosier" with an entire Wikipedia page devoted to its possible origins including categories such as "Frontier banter" and "Pugilistic Boatmen." I suppose it proves the ancient mascot axiom that the price paid for a unique nickname is the fact that theories about its origin include the phrase "did not become an insult until." Another problem with the Hoosier nickname is its susceptibility to having it turned onto Indiana fans with a "Hoosier daddy" chant, drawing the red-sweatered ire of Bobby Knight and a classic shame on you column from Tribune columnist Eric Zorn entitled "Regardless of Intent, NU Rowdies' Taunt was a Bad Call." Zorn then backed off his criticism of Northwestern, sheepishly explaining to his readers that "I have never heard any of the rap or rock lyrics I'm told employ the phrase 'Who's your daddy?' to mean, in effect, 'Am I not at this time in a position of dominance over you that parallels the position a father has over his offspring?'"

Eric Zorn is one of the Tribune's ace
Metro section columnists along with
Mary Schmich who moonlights as the
writer for the Brenda Starr: Woman
Reporter comic strip best known for
featuring a character with what is
best described as a silk-pajama eye-
patch. Despite this fact and a redesign
that makes the once-proud paper look
like it ought to be called "Hot Rod's
Klout Komix-- 5¢," the Trib is still seen
as slightly more reputable, although the
Sun-Times should get credit for actually
celebrating the firing of Jay Mariotti as
well as this publishing this fantastic
hatchet job by Roger Ebert, although he
still appears on ESPN to expose readers
to his nasal squawk and his giant head
so grotesquely boulbous that if he was a
Dick Tracy villain his nickname would
be "The Head"

Then again, without the Wildcat nickname, Northwestern would never have a fight song with the word "yow" repeated like the mantra of an over-caffeinated toddler, so perhaps an apology is due to the estate of the late Mr. Abbey.

Hoops and Bowls

Northwestern's basketball team has continued to pile up wins against teams with tournament aspirations, beating an undefeated NC State team and making a vital contribution to the Big Ten's victory over the ACC in the Big Ten-ACC Challenge, which allows Big Ten officials to seize tobacco plants and bib overalls after being forced to surrender their corn crops and wretched post-industrial blight to the ACC year after year.

Drew Crawford fouls the Wolfpack's Dennis Horner hard
enough to turn him into a Messerschmidt grotesque

Though the Wildcats entered the year with the goal of wrenching the NCAA Tournament monkey off their backs-- not one of those untrustworthy monkeys that toddles around the houses of unsuspecting eccentric and lonely people in a diaper only to turn into a simian wrecking ball of fur and fang, but one of those full-on shrieking, biting Outbreak monkeys-- but the 'Cats' continued success without Coble is as gratifying as it is surprising. The Wildcats' winning stems from Shurna and Juice emerging as serious threats, Nash wreaking havoc in the 1-3-1, and Bill Carmody finally embracing the occult after no longer getting satisfaction from punishing fans of loose, flowing basketball with his plodding Princeton offense.

Carmody is captured in this grainy footage attempting to make contact with
the Assyrians' most hostile deities, such as this demon whose modus
operandi was sneaking up on a target distracted by his own vigorous fist-
shaking and aching calf tumors

Unlike in the carving depicted above, Northwestern's Big Ten foes will see them coming partly because of Bruce Weber and Tom Izzo's shared passion for applying Near-Eastern mythology to basketball stratagems, but also because Northwestern has made some noise on the national stage. LTP exuberantly predicts a 10-1 nationally ranked Northwestern heading into conference play, although less optimistic fans may still want to prepare for the possibility of the bandwagon crashing into another wagon filled with poison, cutting implements, and poinsonous cutting implements.

DEFENDING THE BOWLS

Northwestern football is left twisting in the wind until this Sunday, when the creepy cabal of corporate stiffs, NCAA officials, athletic directors, and bald men chained to briefcases full of money (I've always wondered whether the fancy steel briefcase used for illegal monetary transactions is pro-rated into the deal or if the hitman or cop impersonating a hitman to atone for the death of his partner or child skipping happily along in the fuzzy, merrie-go-round music flashback gets to keep the briefcase as an extra bonus, and then you go to his house and he has no space for leather jackets and tight t-shirts and automatic weapons because he has dozens of fancy silver briefcases taking all of his closet space. And surely the briefcase is thrown in, because no drug dealer or arms dealer or South American coup aspirant is going to say something such as "here is $10 million in unmarked treasury certificates for the sniping, less, of course, $654.31 for the fancy briefcase although being thrifty and accountable is the way to the top of the drug, arms, and dictatorship career) decide where everyone gets to go bowling.

This is also the time of the year when the NCAA bowl system comes under the greatest scrutiny, as pundits propel themselves out of the woodwork on homemade woodwork propulsion systems in order to mock the lesser bowl games as money-grubbing wastes of time. Yes, bowl games are money-grubbing and no, they often have no ramifications for the college football world, but BYCTOM has and will continue to embrace all crappy bowl games.

Unfortunately, crappy bowl games have little appeal beyond the competing teams' supporters beyond comical sponsorship names and the occasional power team in an off-year shunted off to some sort college football version of Siberian exile. What these bowl games need is a bit of pizazz to garner interest, much like minor league baseball games with their colorful gimmicks or circus freak shows employing loud people to trumpet the virtues of their particular freak show and get the townspeople lining up for blocks.

For example, for the recently renamed Little Ceasar's Pizza Bowl in Detroit, why not play upon the Caesar imagery to redecorate Ford Field like a mighty Roman coliseum while toga-wearing boosters strut about in their luxury boxes and effigies of Carthaginians are festooned on local trashcan fires? Even officials can get in on the act.

It displeases Mike Ilitch to see holding from #75 on the offense.
Mike Ilitch demands a penalty of 10 yards from the spot of the foul
from #75 that shall be collectively paid by the entire offense. Let
it be known from this day forward: it remains second down

Incidentally, the greatest Roman combat spectacle did not occur in the arena at all. Instead, it featured Emperor Claudius and a beached orca that ended up in a Roman port, attracted to some hides en route from Gaul. As Pliny relates, Claudius had the bloated whale imprisoned in the harbor with a series of nets and ordered his Praetorian Guard to shower it with lances and put on a show for the crowd, although this wikipedia article on gladiators makes it seems like Claudius somehow took on the orca mono-a-whaleo which would have been a far more impressive spectacle because there is pretty much no way to get a single man and killer whale in an arena with both at equal advantage unless there was a half-earth half-ocean arena not unlike the Federer-Nadal glass/clay challenge.

The only thing that stopped whale-baiting from soaring in
popularity is the difficulty of putting together a suitably seedy
underground den where gentlemen can safely wager on civilized
sporting events

Similarly, the Alamo Bowl can feature a half-time recreation of the battle and as an added wrinkle, if a Texas team is involved and loses the game, the winning team gets hoist the standard of Santa Anna and Mexico is allowed to annex San Antonio for the duration of the evening. The Gator Bowl can feature pre-game or half-time gator wrestling for eager tots (the gators are corked for their safety, naturally), the International Bowl can feature a festival of Epcott-style celebrations of worldwide cultural stereotypes, and the Insight Bowl can eschew raucous bands and cheering for some intense group pondering of metaphysical quandaries, such as how we can simply accept the "Insight Bowl" collectively with nary a raised eyebrow.

Each bowl then, instead of being largely interchangeable and forgettable, gains a unique character beyond what local food that ESPN guy can triumphantly discuss eating during the fourth quarter of a rout. Instead of worrying solely about booster vacation destinations or conference matchups, coaches will also have to worry about whether they would be forced to lead their teams onto the field with a bellicose display of military hardware (Bell Helicopter Armed Forces Bowl) or while dressed as an Elizabethan imperial explorer (San Diego Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl, a bowl so uninspiring that it can only benefit from fitting irritable coaches with enormous ruffled collars-- this is so logical I can't believe others have not thought about it first).

NORTHWESTERN'S DESTINATIONS

Although most Northwestern pundits seem to be pointing to the Champs Sports Bowl in Orlando, these ESPN predictions have the 'Cats in Tampa for the Outback Bowl (the losing team will be "transported" home on an aging Victorian sailboat with no access to lime juice). With Friday's World Cup draw, this will hopefully be the most exciting sporting event involving picking teams until Selection Sunday finally putting Northwestern in the NCAA tournament or watching an entire fanbase sink into a Messerschmidt grimace.

Badgers, Bowls, Basketball

Last week's cliff-hanging thriller against Wisconsin to clinch an eight-win season, fifth place in the Big Ten, and set off wild bowl speculation by Henry Bienen's most elite unit of bone diviners (while Bienen has retired from Northwestern in order to serve as Vice Chairman of Rasmussen College, Inc. and chair the executive committee of the UFL as the only man who can control Tim McGarigle's terrible vengeance upon ball-carriers, BYCTOM sources reveal that he remains in charge of NU's secret department of all sports-related occult activities-- for example did you know that the Rebecca Crown Tower turns purple after Wildcat victories not through the use of cheap plastic veneers that are not quite purple as it appears but through a terrible ancient sorcery).

Bienen, shown here in garb reserved for academics and the black arts, prefers
divination by oracle bones, as preferred in Shang Dynasty China. Thankfully,
Wikipedia's page on divination has a helpful section on other types of divination
that may be used for bowl projection-related purposes that you can do in the privacy
of your own home or coven including tasseomancy (by tea or coffee grounds),
rhabdomancy (by rods), hydromancy (by water), and gastromancy, which apparently
involves divination by using ventriloquest techniques to convince people that sounds
made by the stomach represent the voices of the dead

The 33-31 thriller continued Northwestern's trend of turning Ryan Field into an impenetrable fortress against invasion from the north, which I chalk up to a clever ruse luring Wisconsin into a false sense of security by flooding the stands with red-clad fans in a move that can best be described as a Reverse Trojan Horse after several blows to the head and exposure to mild psychotropic substances. A road team has not won in this unfortunately not annual contest since the 'Cats claimed the crazy double-OT thriller in 2000.

Bucky Badger certainly ranks tops in the world-wide Badger Mascot ratings, just
above Fulham FC's Billy Badger, shown here delaying the start of a half with his
break-dancing antics, and this generic badger costume described on this website
as the way to have a "fierce, spunky badger to represent your team, school, or
business" although it is unclear what business would be rushing to purchase this
badger unless its mission statement specifically involved terrifying children or
rival board members

Though Northwestern's bowl position is technically in the air, consensus seems to point towards the Champs Sports Bowl in Miami. The bowl selection process seems less rife with intrigue than last year, although I do enjoy that speculation about bowls involves the fact that Wisconsin has been to Florida too many times, a theory that posits that corporate executives who choose bowl pairings operate not unlike a cabal of warlords collaborating on an evening's gladiatorial festivities and dismissing teams with a "send them away they no longer amuse me" gesture.

Penn State LB Paul Posluszny looks to the Capital One executive
suite for guidance on a sack during this 2003 bowl contest

RAISE THE BANNER FOR THE C.I.T. CHAMPS

With all of the doom and gloom surrounding the basketball team after the Ryan and Coble injuries, the young Wildcats have been lining up to take over games. After a tough loss to Butler, the best team in the state, Northwestern rebounded with a 31 point explosion by "Juice" Thompson against Tennessee State and 22 from freshman Drew Crawford against Liberty University in the first round of the Chicago Invitational Tournament. But it has been all about John Shurna in the C.I.T.-- the sophomore led Northwestern to an upset against Notre Dame in the second round of the tournament with 25 and 8 against the nationally ranked squad. Northwestern's 1-3-1 zone stifled Irish All-American and possible anthropomorphic tree trunk Luke Harangody and limited Notre Dame to 31.7 percent shooting. And just like that, the switch on Northwestern's basketball program has been turned back to feisty. Just look at this typically understated post from nusports.com that does not have a byline but was written by someone who is clearly being mentored by Skip Myslenski:

Mark Twain once stated that, "reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." The same holds true for the Northwestern men's basketball team.

The 'Cats went on to defeat Iowa State Cyclones in the tournament championship game, avenging themselves against teams named for violent natural phenomena after last year's NIT loss to the Tulsa Golden Hurricane. Shurna again led Northwestern with 23 points to claim the tournament's most outstanding player award and serve notice that injuries have not ended the Wildcat season, as Bill Carmody continues to assail opponents with a seemingly limitless army of skinny white guys that shoot threes.

This factory churning out malnourished forwards has replaced the Former
Yugoslavia as Carmody's primary recruiting ground

Sure, the Chicago Invitational Tournament is not exactly the Final Four, or even the preseason Chicago-area tournament in the best of possible worlds, but it is also the first trophy a Northwestern basketball team has won in recent memory. The young 'Cats went through two legitimate teams, and it looks like the hoops program is in good hands with the Shurna and "Juice" tandem until the return of Coble to menace the Big Ten.

HIGHLIGHTS FOR CHILDREN

Fortunately, the Big Ten Network managed to muscle in on the game which means that there are video highlights available for the Notre Dame and Iowa State games, the latter featuring an ending so exciting that it evidently derailed the overmatched announcer enough to expect chastising from an unexpectedly materializing Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Online sports highlights have become a crucial part of the twenty-first century sports fan experience, so it is important that they are done properly. The NFL did its highlights best at first, short recaps of every game narrated by a stern-voiced announcer and punctuated by jaunty music taken from albums of free use music used to advertise summer camps in the 1980s. They replaced this system several years ago with radio calls, and now offer either radio calls or the catastrophic result of an NFL board meeting where a misguided executive decided that there are people somewhere in the country that actually want to hear Deion Sanders talk for an extended period of time. Sure, the video quality is better now and streaming more efficient, but does anyone actually believe that this is better than this?

Fortunately for Bears fans, Chicagobears.com puts out its own highlight reels narrated by John Spindle who dips into a proper NFL-level of hyperbole to describe the Bears's lackluster efforts:

For Chicago, and primarily their defense, four days of soul-searching had led to this night, no help was on the way, no cavalry was coming, only they could change their course, only they could give the people reason to believe again.

Unfortunately, the Bears have provided mainly highlights for other teams' defensive backs and wide receivers, but as the late John Facenda would have possibly said, it is better to have watchable football highlights, even if they are of Jay Cutler throwing around interceptions the way that Natty Bumpo would spray buckshot into Native Americans and the French.

BYCTOM fully supports any voodoo programs that resurrect John Facenda to
save NFL.com highlights on the belief that his dulcet moans would be better
than the current setup which is like trying to watch football while being
serenaded by a veritable chorus of Menards Men

The NBA is even worse, as someone has evidently pumped some sort of amphetamines into their drinking water supply to the point where their highlights are essentially 90 seconds of random basketball activities and nicknames when all I want is a vague idea of how the Bulls are playing and whether or not Brad Miller has reason to raise his arms in triumph.

The new goal of this blog is to become a clearing house for victorious Brad
Miller images

Hoops Hindered

With the football team squaring off against cross-border rivals to determine bowl position, Wildcat basketball players have been going down like the chimps in Project X, only instead of radiation poisoning through shady government flight simulators, they have been suffering from battered tendons that come from playing basketball.

Carmody calls Northwestern's newest play this season, the call for the
ambulance. Hopefully the call will not be answered by Hemingway as it would
expose players to inadquate World War I-era concepts, such as brandy as a
legitimate medical technology, short, terse tourniquets, and the possibilities
of face-punching wholly inconsistent with the mission of the Red Cross

Northwestern lost its best player in Kevin "Mantis" Coble who seems like the only player in college basketball who could actually play on one leg if his teammates carried him Leftwich-like up and down the court and let him heave weird-looking jumpers off of a single spindly limb as he leans awkwardly in any number of possible directions and continues to score. Jeff Ryan also went down leaving Jeremy Nash as the only senior, although he has been struggling with a troubling heart issue that he thankfully has under control.

Henry "Poo" Yee demonstrates the southern praying mantis
style of Kung Fu, showing clearly that while the horrible
Coble injury may have been a serious blow to Northwestern
Hoops, it will almost certainly spare readers of this blog
any more allusions this season to the Mantis nickname and
then the inevitable run-on sentence somehow justifying it
as the sentence balloons up like a giant dwarf star before
violently exploding and engulfing every bit of sense in its
meager orbit and by the way since we're already in the middle
of a sentence that apparently has no beginning, middle, or
end anywhere in sight I might as well mention that
according to "Poo" Yee, "in the southern praying mantis
system, circles are everything and everywhere" so in case
anybody pulls your sleeve on the street asking you which
simple shape best fits into southern praying mantis kung-fu,
you can you know what let's just end this right here before
somebody blows out an ACL

On the one hand, Northwestern's season has gotten a lot more bleak, and pre-season hopes of finally getting to the promised land of the NCAA tournament have dwindled. On the other hand, this season is all about watching young players develop, especially sophomore center Kyle Rowley who will hopefully do to Big Ten frontcourt players what the USC marching band did to Ricardo Montalban at the end of The Naked Gun.

MOVING THE CHESSPIECES: A WINTER OF BASEBALL

Baseball's winter rumor mill is in full swing as a nation recovers from the joyless inevitability of another Yankee title. No doubt the Cubs brain-trust is hard at work peering over a giant baseball field and pushing little plastic players around with instruments used only by croupiers and four-star generals.

Jim Hendry scans the playing field for free agents
and bargain trades. Incidentally, this picture is not
only notable for inexpicably being the second Bill
and Ted reference on BYCTOM in as many posts, but
also for being part of a series of Bill and Ted trading
cards as referenced on this site. In case you are
curious, the back side, instead of having Napoleon's
risk statistics or maximum water-slide speed, lists
this crucial plot point: "While Bill and Ted continue to
round up subjects for their report, Deacon entertains
Napoleon. Napoleon devours the ice cream and wins the
Ziggy Piggy award"

Job number one for the Cubs is getting rid of cantankerous right fielder Milton Bradley. Bradley's power did not come around, he hit a paltry .257 for the year, and his defense in right bordered on comical, climaxing in his memorable posing and throwing the ball into the stands then watching helplessly as baserunners unsportingly took advantage of his temporary lack of knowledge about the exact number of outs. On the other hand, Bradley managed to finish with a .378 on-base percentage for the season, which is fairly remarkable considering his batting average. He was also extraordinarily entertaining, wearing a Bluto-style beard, coming up with umpire conspiracies, feuding with combustible manager Lou Piniella, complaining about fickle Cub fans, and bludgeoning reporters with the phrase "what else you got" to the point where the Cubs were forced to suspend him for insubordination, truculance, and redundancy. Obviously, Bradley has to go from an everybody in the organization hates him standpoint, but from a baseball standpoint, Bradley was an effective offensive player who was starting to put up scary numbers towards the end of last season and is going to rebound into a nice year unless he disappears into the Los Angeles underground during the offseason and becomes a soldier of fortune.

John Grabow, the least terrifying lefty out of the pen, will be back, while the reviled Aaron Heilman gets to ply his dark arts for the Arizona Diamondbacks in exchange for reliever Scott Maine and outfielder/first baseman Ryne White, who Hendry compared favorably to journeyman slugger and 2003 MLB wing-eating champion Matt Stairs, disguising his attempt to placate testy Cubs fans by getting another Ryne into the Cubs's system.

In other Cubs news, Carlos Zambrano won his third Silver Slugger award as the best hitting pitcher in the National League and presumably all of baseball unless the American Leagues are lying in wait for some sort of terrible turning of the tables. Carlos Zambrano is the reason why the National League should continue to exist without a designated hitter. There are few things more riveting during a baseball game, especially a baseball game where the Cubs are playing and therefore actively stomping on the dreams of an either desperate or drunken fanbase, than a Zambrano at-bat. The possiblilities are tantalizing: a launch onto Waveland or Sheffield, a base hit followed by an ill-advised head-first dive into second, a swing-related injury, a strikeout followed by an assault on a bat (purists will note that Zambrano's wrath at Gatorade-dispensing products is limited to poor pitching performances), charging the mound, throwing his helmet to reveal an ill-conceived Zambrano hairstyle such as blond frosted tips or a jheri curl or even a blond jheri-curl, running out into center field and lighting a giant Z on fire, grabbing the home plate umpire and lashing his wrist to the official and initiating a mutual thrusting at each other with butterfly knives while a handful of shirtless vest-wearers come out of the bullpen to idle in the background; I'd much rather watch Zambrano strike out on three straight pitches with runners in scoring position than watch the likes of Aaron Miles pick up a bat in the general vicinity of the batter's box.

The myriad potential consequences of a Zambrano at-bat

SPECULATION SEASON

Saturday marks the end of the football regular season, but marks the beginning of endless bowl speculation, back-biting, and preparing for conference championship games for those conferences burdened with unnecessary features such as even numbered teams, divisions, and occasionally titles that accurately reflect the number of teams in said conference. Not for the Big Ten, an ascetic conference where the season's conflagrations on the muddy midwestern gridirons settle the championship except most years when they don't and it's a festive conucopia of various Big Ten teams, some of whom will lose in lucrative BCS bowls. But hopefully the 'Cats will prevail in a stadium sure to be painted with the crimson hues of the fearsome badger.