Debacle Trojan Style

Last Saturday, the Wildcats channeled former head coach Dennis Green in an excruciating loss to Big Ten front-runners Michigan State. Thoughts about State were proven correct. Hooks were let off. Asses may possibly have been crowned.

Although Northwestern fans might react to the game by gnashing their teeth and thrashing their footmen (the old gnash and thrash is a Northwestern tradition), I suggest they stay their hands, their canes, and their sharpened monocles. The Wildcats looked very good against a legitimate Big Ten title contender and have traditionally finished strong in the Pat Fitzgerald era. In particular, the emergence of freshmen Venric Mark, Rashard Lawrence, and Adonis Smith are encouraging, not least because an outstanding game from Smith has crusty sports editors on high pun alert.

A consortium of sports editors stand at the ready to
deploy Adonis-related headlines comparing the
Wildcat running back to the mythical figure
conceived by some sort of combination of incest and
trees

DIABOLICAL TRICKS

The turning point of the game came on a Michigan State fake punt in which the Spartan offense took a delay of game penalty to disguise their duplicitous intentions, then had the punter heave a strike to a wide-open receiver. Dantonio masterminded a similar trick play against Notre Dame earlier this season. It is no fun to be the victim of a trick play, but losing a football game is a minor consequence compared to some more underhanded trickery. You could, for example, find yourself stranded in a jungle on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras with only your wits and piles of the nineteenth century equivalent of arcade tokens.

That is what happened to the victims of Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish adventurer who managed to sell off large parcels of prime coastal real estate to hopeful would-be colonists whose adventure soured when they realized that the country they had hoped to colonize did not technically exist.

Gregor MacGregor (left), shared with Lord Gordon-Gordon a penchant for
redundantly-named Scottish swindlery, although he came by his name
honestly. Gordon-Gordon was one of many aliases for a nineteenth
century confidence man who also went by Lord Glencairn and the
Honourable Herbert Hamilton

MacGregor was a military adventurer at a time when one could simply traipse over to the Western Hemisphere and start annexing territory with nary an admonishment. MacGregor successfully raised enough money and men to fulfill the reasonable dream of invading Florida in 1817 to remove it from the yoke of Spanish oppression. Instead, he spent the money, his men deserted and he mustered only enough of a force to take Amelia Island (off the coast of Florida near present-day Jacksonville) and set up a republic under the charge of Louis-Michel Aury, who had been building his leadership credentials by running a nest of pirates out of Galveston. The island fell to the United States several months later as part of the U.S. campaign to seize East Florida.

Florida divided into East and West in 1810 during the reign of Napoleon's
brother Joseph over Spain. By the time of the U.S. took over Florida in 1819,
Bourbon Monarch Ferdinand VII (right) had taken over. Ferdinand,
imprisoned for six years during the Napoleonic rule of Spain, fell again to a
coup in 1820, before coming back to power after which, in the words of the
author of his wikipedia page, "he revenged himself with a ferocity which
disgusted his far from liberal allies." The same page notes that he later
became "torpid, bloated and unpleasant to look at" which is sort of a default
Bourbon monarch setting

But MacGregor's greatest coup came after his return to Britain in 1820. There, he ingratiated himself into the horse-racing, muttonchop-growing, rabble-scattering, society types and began telling people that he had become Cacique (prince) of the Principality of Poyais off the coast of Honduras by the blessing of King Frederic Augustus II of the Mosquito Shore. He published a book describing the region as developed and friendly to British settlement and began selling land to colonists eager to live in this earthly paradise.

In 1822 and 1823, two ships full of would-be settlers left for Poyais, but instead of a glistening settlement friendly to the British, they found a jungle friendly mainly to tropical disease and the occasional hermit and nowhere to redeem their worthless Poyais dollars. The wretched survivors escaped on a ship that had come to give gifts to Frderic Augustus (or, as contemporary documents referred to him, the Mosquito King) to Belize. This document is chock-full of details of the Poyasian scheme, with transcripts from a lawsuit against the British Honduran authorities accusing them of seizing property from the Poyais settlers. It not only serves as virtual handbook of eighteenth century synonyms for wretchedness, but also serves as a handbook of miscellaneous Poyasian documents.

A copy of the oath to be taken by Poyasians to swear
loyalty to MacGregor. Other correspondence in the
Proceedings reveals that MacGregor took, among
his various bogus royal titles, the wonderful alias
Baron Tinto

Undaunted, MacGregor attempted to run the same Poyasian scheme in France, this time calling in the big guns by turning to someone actually named Gustavus Butler Hippisley. The alert French authorities, curious as to why French citizens were attempting to obtain documents to travel to a country that as far as they could tell did not exist, halted the expedition and arrested MacGregor associates including Hippisley and eventually MacGregor himself. Still undeterred, MacGregor continued to fashion Poyasian constitutional documents and sell Poyais-related land and stock until the lat 1830s. The most fascinating part of the story is his investment in the fictional land of Poyais; it seemed not to occur to him that after being caught in a grandiose scheme of making up a country, he could just as easily pull another fake country out of thin air without having to deal with the baggage of the Poyasian legacy of not being a place on the surface of this planet, Earth.

OTHER FRAUD

Perhaps the greatest British confidence man was William Chaloner, a forger, counterfeiter, and purveyor of dildos in late seventeenth century London. Chaloner excelled in three main schemes: counterfeiting coins, fabricating Jacobite plots in order to muster government rewards, and turning on associates. Chaloner was not shy about becoming an informant about criminal schemes which he was involved in just before the authorities came in; he named names, he blackmailed accusers, and he funded whimsical bucolic holidays for witnesses that could finger him.

This would normally be the part of the story where I describe how Chaloner went too far and crossed the Royal Mint, but I don't think it was possible for Chaloner to go too far. It's not as if he was some sort of scheming heist mastermind planning one job at a time. Instead, Chaloner existed as the eye of a whirlwind of spectacularly multifaceted and continuous criminal activity on a remarkable scale, and his undoing came from circumstances leading him into the crosshairs of a Sir Isaac Newton.

A BYCTOM estimation of a typical week of Chaloner activity

Newton ran afoul of Chaloner when he became warden of the Royal Mint in 1696 with the job of investigating counterfeiting. He broke up a machine coining operation and arrested one of Chaloner's associates. Chaloner attempted to infiltrate the Mint himself by cooking up false conspiracies of corruption among Mint officials, going so far to name one of his own aliases as a co-conspirator in a flamboyant display of criminal confidence. While gallivanting around Parliament, denouncing schemes that he would certainly take part in if he got a job at the Mint, Newton recognized him as a counterfeiting suspect. By 1699, Newton swore to take Chaloner down and recruited an underworld network of spies and Chaloner associates. Chaloner deployed an unstoppable three-step defense: feigning madness, peppering all particpants in the trial with a barrage of insults, and finally claiming that his operations fell outside of the court's London jurisdiction. He was hanged.

LOOKING TOWARDS THE HOOSIERS

Northwestern will be looking for redemption and continuing a quixotic quest for bowl eligibility on Saturday against Indiana. The Hoosiers will test Northwestern's defense with their prolific offense, and hopefully Pat Fitzgerald will test the Hoosiers with a variety of trick plays and confidence schemes that will baffle the Indiana defense and defraud supporters. When the dust settles, Wildcat fans will be hoping that no one will be who anyone thought they were, there will be no hooks for anyone to be let off of, and asses will remain blissfully crownless.

Michigan State Preview

The Wildcats are looking for redemption after a loss to a gutty, injury-ravaged Purdue squad, the Spartans are looking to remain undefeated and looking toward a Big Ten championship run, Coach Fitz is looking for a sixth win, bowl birth, and an upset, Coach Dantonio is looking for a return to the sidelines after recovering from a heart attack, orphan Timmy is looking for a father figure he never knew, wealthy industrialist R. Pickering Fossbottle is looking for the child he never knew he wanted, young Maude Fossbottle is looking for love in all of the wrong places, and everyone is looking for priceless artifacts from the Orient before it's stolen by a Peter Lorre type.

A lot is at stake.

Fitz makes the long hitchhike from Ryan Field after the gutting
loss to Purdue

The Wildcats have not won convincingly against an FBS team with the exception of Rice. On the other hand, the Spartans have beaten Notre Dame, Wisconsin, a resurgent Michigan team, and frisky Illinois. Of course, it would be foolhardy to assume a Michigan State win; Northwestern tends to surprise teams and it's hard to count out an offense led by Dan Persa. This has the makings of a potential trap game for Michigan State as they look forward to a big game in Iowa City.

The Wildcats prefer getting a drop on unsuspecting
opponents, as demonstrated by these Hessian reenactors
expertly recreating a drop-gotten-on scenario

Northwestern will have to repel an overwhelming force, much like the Syracusians attempting to hold off the Romans in the Siege of Syracuse. The Romans came by sea with the sambuca, which was not a polite gift of occasionally flaming liqueur, but the less polite siege machine used to quickly enable soldiers to climb from ships onto fortress walls and begin stabbing everyone in sight. Syracuse was famously defended by mathematician Archimedes with mirror-driven heat rays of dubious historical authenticity and the Archimedes Claw, the result of an experiment gone wrong resulting in him growing a giant claw instead of a left arm that he used to shake menacingly at the advancing Roman soldiers and snap at anyone that attempted to interfere with his circles.

Attempts to replicate the effect of the Archimedes heat ray have had mixed results on
models of Roman ships, but have elsewhere proven to be devastating

RETURN OF REX

Bears fans will get to see Rex Grossman make an emotional return to Soldier Field with the Redskins this weekend. According to this Tribune article, Grossman expects to be booed should he manage to get into the game, get shown on the JumboTron, or attempt to fling his clipboard downfield after getting confused and thinking that he saw Bernard Berrian running straight ahead wide open. But why would Bears fans boo Rex, the only quarterback to take the Bears to the Superbowl without the aid of flashy message-bearing headbands? I can understand the enmity of Bears fans against Grossman if he had walked around the city scattering citizens with a cane in the haughty Hohenzollern manner of Frederick William I, or bulldozed "Rex Rules OK" into the Meigs Field runways, or pillaged the Field Museum of priceless Egyptian artifacts so he could walk around dressed like Batman villain King Tut with impunity, but he did none of those things as far as I am aware. Instead he merely fit into the Bears tradition of underwhelming quarterbacks, albeit with a particular flair for ineptitude.

In order to properly give Rex his due, here's eight sincere minutes of Rex Grossman highlights set to "Eye of the Tiger."

Bears fans should celebrate both the highs of the Grossman era and the myriad comical
ways that opponents relieved him of the ball

BEGIN THE QUADE ERA

The after months of uncertainty, politicking, intrigue, and the interference of the House of Bourbon, the Cubs have picked a successor to Lou Piniella. The new manager, chosen to trade fame and fortune for a Job-like existence at the helm of a team destined for eternal failure while enduring the jibes of angry fans and a vicious media is Mike Quade. Quade, who spent most of his career in the minor leagues, is best described by the phrase "grizzled baseball lifer" and that is not merely a cliche; expect Quade to erect his own thatch dugout, make his own tobacco juice, and trump all comers in locker room scar-sharing exhibitions.

The Cubs will be less fun to follow without Lou Piniella. Stats-minded baseball fans have raised questions about the importance of managers, many of whom can be argued to do more harm than good by putting hitters unable to get on base in the leadoff position because they are fast, call for unnecessary bunts, make curious pitching decisions, bench promising young players in favor of underperforming veterans, and engage in futile micromanagement for the sake of micromanagement. Of course, that does not take into consideration important motivational ploys such as walking around naked and creating provocative posters of any former showgirl owners. Piniella, of course, excelled at getting angry at umpires, developing the optimal body shape for bellying up to them and taking advantage of having a profession allowing him to scream at people three inches from their face and throw things with impunity. Lou's managerial rapping skills, however, are more dubious.

Lou makes an impassioned demand about either the strike zone
or free silver coinage

TOSSERS

If there's one thing that careful study of European history has demonstrated, it is that aristocrats default to two behaviors: leading armies of musket-wielding infantry against each other and killing animals for their amusement. It was not enough to hunt animals; instead they decided to fling them about their courtyards in the brutal sport of fox tossing. Foxes or other small animals would scurry around a fox tossing arena while hopeful tossers stood about with cloth bands draped on the ground. When the animal found itself on top of a band, the participants would stretch it, catapulting animals into the air and competing for the highest toss. Noted fox tossing enthusiast Augustus the Strong (also apparently nicknamed as "Iron Hand" and "The Saxon Hercules" by an early modern Bruce Buffer equivalent) would toss with a only a single finger.

A gleeful tossing from 1719. Augustus II of Saxony (right) managed his impressive
feats of strength before the invention of the single-strap unitard

The fox tossing wikipedia page is full of helpful notes about this cultured practice, such as "The Swedish envoy Esaias Pufendorf, witnessing a fox-tossing contest held in Vienna in March 1672, noted in his diary his surprise at seeing the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold Icourt dwarfs and boys in clubbing to death the injured animals...". Boars were apparently more hazardous "to the great delectation of the cavaliers, but to the terror of the noble ladies, among whose hoop-skirts the wild boars committed great havoc, to the endless mirth of the assembled illustrious company."

Big Ten Home Opener

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

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

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

PURDUE PREVIEW

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

Fig. 1

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

PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL

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

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

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

LET'S HAVE THOSE XYLOPHONES PLAY US OUT

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

Fig. 2: Chart of Bassist Enthusiasm

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

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

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


NATIONAL RANKING

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

Nonconference Update

Sometimes, time moves really fast and you wake up and realize that Northwestern is 4-0 against a challenging non-conference slate of mostly FBS teams, quarterback Dan Persa is looking like the best Northwestern signal caller since Otto Graham, and people in the nineteenth century continue to have comical facial hair.

A lot can happen when you're not paying attention

Northwestern survived a nailbiter against Vanderbilt, crushed Illinois State, dominated Rice, and played fairly decently against MAC powerhouse Central Michigan. It was very clear in each of those games that Coach Fitz and Mick McCall wanted to embrace the running game and it became clearer that running the ball might fall by the wayside alongside other foiled plans such as the Concert of Europe or reliable '80s movie villain William Atherton co-opting Val Kilmer's talent with lasers.

Viscount Castlereagh (left), a major voice in the development of the
post-Waterloo Congress system managed to survive a minor political
scandal when he shot rival and fellow cabinet minister George Canning
(the saucily-posed man at right) in a duel in a more civilized age when
politicians were able to cut through the red tape of political disagreement
with firearms. Much like Northwestern's non-conference schedule,
Castlereagh wisely chose an opponent that he could reasonably handle as
Canning had never before fired a pistol; likewise, Northwestern has not only
added ancient rival Chicago Dental back to its non-conference schedule but
is also scheduled to take on a local haberdashery and leading
representatives of the Bull Moose Party at Ryan Field next season.

GAME PREVIEW: MINNESOTA

Obviously the big story for Minnesota is whether or not the Gophers will rally around embattled coach Tim Brewster-- actually, I don't think the unnecessarily martial cliche "embattled" is strong enough for Brewster's position; "besieged" seems more appropriate or alternately "approximating the college football coaching version of the four seconds before a wild-eyed Mola Ram rips out one's heart in an underground amphiteater conveniently located above a giant pit of lava."

Mola Ram thought he got a good deal on Pankot Palace until he realized the upkeep cost
on miles of underground tunnels and shoddy plank bridges

From all accounts, Brewster's style is relentlessly positive, but he might have to assert himself more in order to prove to the school that he still has control of the locker room. Perhaps he can model himself after legendary Paraguayan General Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia y Velasco who became known as El Supremo Dictador of Paraguay 1814 (from a time in the nineteenth century when it was perfectly acceptable to fashion oneself formally as a dictator and have it printed on nineteenth century business cards that one hands out while taunting other leaders at international conferences). According to his Wikipedia page, Francia's reign followed the modern dictator playbook to a T: becoming instrumental in tearing the country from the yoke of Spanish oppression, declaring oneself head of the national Church, closing the borders, antagonizing neighbors, and then coming up with increasingly spectacular demands such as personally conducting all weddings, declaring war on dogs, and demanding that citizens tip their hats to him when he passed or, if hatless, carry a hat brim for tipping purposes. Francia remained in power until 1840.

El Supremo assures you that if he
was not a dictator, he would not
have gotten away with that

The 'Cats will be hoping to take advantage of a discombobulated Minnesota squad on the cusp of a coaching coup and Gopher fans hope that they'll be able to turn around their disastrous start in conference play with a win.

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS OF INTEREST

I recently stumbled upon the miraculously thorough Sword Swallower's Hall of Fame, chronicling the greatest practitioners of this noble art. I have no proof, but I'm willing to wager that if it happened in sword swallowing in the last several hundred years, it appears on that website, with sections for performers with fantastic names like "Veno the Electric Sword Swallower," "The Yankee Yogi," and, tantalizingly, an entry referencing an 1867 work entitled "Bizarre Medical Abnormalities."

An 1899 poster of sword swallower
Chevalier Cliquot found on the Hall of Fame
website. As the poster demonstrates, the
Cliquot act evidently consisted of
swallowing multiple swords, balancing rifles
on his face, and modeling what I'm anxiously
hoping will soon become acceptable attire for
high-stakes business meetings or international
summits

Finally, readers need to be aware of this lost footage of a sadly abandoned Orson Welles project entitled "Orson Welles: the One Man Band" in which he plays a number of elderly and certainly gout-ridden members of a bygone London club. There's no audio on the club scene and I'm having trouble deciding whether that makes this more or less horrifying:


BIG TEN FOOTBALL

Northwestern will be hoping to start of Big Ten play with a big win in the Gopher state, avenging last year's loss and paving the way for a not entirely implausible shot at going 6-0 against the reeling Gophers and knee injury-ravaged Boilermakers. Even with a weak non-conference schedule, that would be quite a coup by Fitz and the team, one worth tipping one's cap or Francia-approved hat substitute to.

Opening Week

Northwestern is careening into the beginning of football season as the Wildcats travel to SEC country to take on Vanderbilt. Northwestern has never beaten the Commodores, losing to them 0-3 in 1947 and tying them 20-20 in 1952. Teddy Greenstein's preview reveals a Vanderbilt squad riddled with enough injuries to resemble the crooked union P.OW. camp from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Robbie Caldwell taunts Fitzgerald by claiming that the
gangrene has eaten away his legs, not his eyes, before
despondently falling upon a rope-covered spirit.

Paul Myerberg at presnapread ranks Vanderbilt at 107 out of 120 teams, and that was before the unexpected retirement of Bobby Johnson in July and the spate of injuries. On the other hand, Vanderbilt has the upper hand in the crucial race to fill the ranks of the Chicago Bears with its players. The Commodores have five Bears: Jay Cutler, Chris Williams, Earl Bennett, Hunter Hillenmeyer and D.J. Moore, while the Wildcats are down to Nick Roach and Corey Wootton-- Brett Basanez, Eric Peterman, and Zeke Markshausen have all been purged from Halas Hall.

Brett Basanez with the Bears brain trust shortly before his
departure

CONFERENCE ALIGNMENTS ARE HERE

The Enormous Ten finally announced its divisions, putting Northwestern into annual contests with Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Michigan State, and Michigan. Obviously, the most important thing to consider is the degree of Northwestern antipathy and by that degree the schedule is adequate, preserving the recent rivalry with Iowa, the inexplicable protected rivalry with Michigan State, and allowing a yearly face off with Michigan, which is not a direct Northwestern rival as much as the Scourge of the Big Ten, Rich Rodriguez's recent failures be damned.

Northwestern Conference Antipathy Scale. The
Y-Axis is in Piniellas, the world's angriest
unit

Fortunately, the Big Ten has chosen to protect the Land of Lincoln rivalry game with Illinois, as Abraham Lincoln would surely appreciate the spirit of two feuding parts of Illinois, much like the friendly rivalry that developed between Northern and Southern states during his presidency. Of course, realignment is for the football-less abyss of the offseason. Why worry about 2011 when it is scant days before Northwestern football players will run repeatedly into Vanderbilt football players for our amusement?

I'll tell you who isn't thinking about
realignment: Mike Hankwitz, here shown
graduating from the Patrick Fitzgerald
Fist Pump Academy

UPDATE ON MODERN BRITISH POLITICS

Today is also noteworthy for the release of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's memoir's entitled A Journey, inadvertently starting an inevitable rash of litigation with the future estate of Steve Perry. Critics have questioned the timing of the release shortly before a crucial Labour election to select the new leader of its party from an ever-increasing number of Milliband brothers. More importantly, it features anecdotes about Prince Charles fearing former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's menacing crotch-pointing, which he suspected was a gesture of class enmity. That link is definitely worth clicking as it contains video of Prescott's frank exchange of punches with an egg-throwing protester, in which Blair provides a startlingly accurate assessment of the incident:

The egg was funny. The mullet was funny. The left hook was funny. The expressions on both their faces were funny.

HYMENOPTERA ASIDE

In 1957, Warwick E. Kerr, an unassuming bee expert in Brazil, accidentally let 26 Tanzanian queen bees escape from his apiary. Before anyone could do anything about it (one imagines a Brazilian bee war room, where chain-smoking, horn-rimmed scientists in their shirt sleeves pounded helplessly upon their slide rules and pushed around plastic models of honeycombs), the queens had mated with local bee populations creating a terrifying swarm of killer bees. The panic over killer bees caused the release of no less than three killer bee movies from 1967-1978, or, as it is known in Hollywood, the golden age of killer bee movies. These movies came out of a place of scientific curiosity-- for example, the 1976 TV movie The Savage Bees posits what effect a swarm of killer bees would have on Mardis Gras (apparently deleterious), 1968's The Deadly Bees asks whether it would be problematic if a mean-spirited woman gained psychic control over killer bees, and 1978's The Swarm raises the question of whether or not Michael Caine needed a new boat.

G.O.B. is not on board

How much would a killer bee sting hurt? Thankfully, entomologist Justin O. Schmidt has compiled the Schmidt Sting Pain Index to answer your question of whether you would rather be assaulted by a marauding fire ant or a bald-faced wasp. For the sake of science, Schmidt let himself be stung by 78 different species of hymenoptera (the order including bees, wasps, ants, and sawflies) and came up with this agonizingly descriptive list of sting sensations:

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 Pepsis wasp: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.

Don't be fooled by the rival Starr Sting Pain Scale, which also goes from 1 to 4, but lacks panache to let you know whether or not a hornet sting feels like being worked over by a neighborhood street tough dancing triumphantly over your prone, bleeding body in front of your friends and loved ones or running, arms akimbo and hair aflame, from the results of a collision between trucks carrying propane and toy car friction motors.

WEEK ONE

The Wildcats are looking to a strong non-conference performance in order to make it to an unprecedented third bowl game in this last season of this eleven-strong, Nebraskaless Big Ten. Vanderbilt might be suffering from injuries, but they're at home with something to prove for new coach Caldwell and will be seeking to swarm the Wildcats with their relentless defense. The Wildcats look forward to the beginning of the Dan Persa era. Starting the season with a loss would certainly register on the football fan equivalent of the Schmidt Scale or, as Schmidt himself might put it, would feel like being pummeled by a large number of pool noodles which causes you to think, hey, this isn't bad because by Schmidt Scale standards these should be covered in some sort of caustic blistering agent, but really it's to lure you into a false sense of security before being riven in all directions by an unseen assortment of construction equipment.

Hey, it's almost football season

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMATEUR BASKETBALL

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

No.

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

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

PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL

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

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

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

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

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

COUNTING DOWN

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

Mundial

Global commerce has surely ground to a halt as people the world over are hunched in front of their computers, tantalized by the World Cup and paralyzed by indecision over which fist to shake in righteous slightly xenophobic sports anger (ergonomists would say to alternate except when you need double-barreled fist shaking action for particularly odious soccer-playing nations). The World Cup is by far the world's greatest sporting event, with the possible exception of September Northwestern games against uncomfortably plucky FCS teams under the watchful eyes of dozens of fans disguised cleverly as more than 17,000 by the Northwestern Ministry of Comical Soviet Statistics.

Comparison of Northwestern's reported home attendance for the
Towson game versus other important world phenomena. Note
that the Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling Competition and Wake
was canceled last year due to overcrowding after local officials
literally begged people not to attend. An unauthorized cheese
rolling took place to a crowd of only 500 rebellious cheese rolling
enthusiasts.

The Cup has provided plenty of drama so far, with late goals and goal differentials deciding who advances past the knockout stages while the rest of us hold our breath for a breathtaking FIFA lot-drawing ritual. The most entertaining part of the World Cup so far has been the Shakespearean collapse of the French team featuring a brooding madman, insults that are much funnier when comically translated into clumsy English (although nothing can top "I prefer the whore that is your sister" for inelegantly transcribed soccer-related zingers), the always crowd-pleasing division of the team into opposing camps, and the occult mystery of astrology.

The FFF has been blamed in keeping the despised Domenech around
because he carried the burden of the glorious French mustache
throughout his playing days. His reign bears certain similarities
to the also gloriously-mustachioed French President Jean Casimir-Perier,
who lasted only six months as president in 1894 before resigning, claiming
that he had been marginalized by the ministers who taunted him with
unnecessarily mean-spirited legislation such as "resolved: this legislature
moves to level the President's comically lopsided head"

Casimir-Perier only took the reigns of office because of the horrific assassination of Carnot, who I will venture to guess was the last modern head of state that was actually stabbed to death. Carnot found himself enmeshed in an endless whirlwind of anarchist vengeance. The whole episode stems from the guillotining of anarchist bomber Ravochol, which prompted a retaliatory bombing from another anarchist named Auguste Vaillant, who was then executed and avenged by bomber Émile Henry whose death along with Vaillant prompted Sainte Geronimo Caserio to take a dagger to President Carnot in an act of brutal simplicity that would have immensely frustrated a nineteenth century French version of Frederick Forsyth.

BIOPIRACY

It is time to turn from the depressing notion of anachronistic assassination techniques and turn to the far more exciting world of botanical piracy. In 1876, Henry Wickham returned from the Amazon with an unheralded find that would eventually give Britain control of the world's rubber supply and destroy the Brazilian economy. That find was 70,000 seeds of the hevea brasiliensis plant, the world's most bountiful rubber tree.

Joe Jackson's The Thief at the End of the World describes Wickham as a sort of bumbling over-eager botanical agent working for a sinister Kew Gardens hell-bent on gaining control over valuable plants the world over (of course, as far as I'm aware, Kew is no longer an international center of botanical intrigue; the only piracy there is the ridiculous demand of £13 just to get in the place). Jackson excellently evokes the Amazon as a vast cornucopia of horrible tropical illnesses and incessant attacks from tiny organisms that live only to attack or lay eggs in the last places that a human would ever want eggs planted by anything. Wickham's act of piracy itself involved a rather disappointing lack of swashbuckling, as he managed to successfully secret the seeds onto a fortuitously empty freighter-- unlike the gloriously apocryphal Robert Louis Stevenson pirates who menaced people with an eighteenth century Cockney argot or even submarine-using South American drug navies, Wickham's theft involved a lot more monitoring of moisture levels than the futuristic Johnny Mnemonic theatrics that the term "biopiracy" would suggest.

It would in fact be even more shocking if a
nineteenth century person who gained notoriety
for practicing devious botany did not have a
spectacular mustache

Wickham never gained much financially from transporting rubber trees and spent his life moving increasingly to the fringes of the British Empire in a perpetual state of financial ruin. The seeds he brought back eventually became forests in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), while any attempts to tame the rubber tree in the Amazon fell into ruin. The most amazing attempt came from Henry Ford, who purchased 2.5 million acres of rainforest in order to create a massive rubber plantation that he humbly named Fordlandia. In typical Ford fashion, he sought not only to turn the chaos of the Amazon into an efficient natural factory, but also make it a vast city where he could mold workers into his idea of moral and model employees. Inspired by its vast success in the United States, Ford instituted prohibition in his borders; workers and locals cleverly circumvented this by erecting a series of taverns, brothels, and other houses of vice just outside Ford's jurisdiction and hilariously named it the Island of Innocence.

However, the best part of the book is a barely mentioned aside discussing Wickham's family. His great-grandfather, a minor aristocrat, lost his estate due to royal treachery. The comically villainous George IV, who spent most of his adult life as the Prince of Wales fending off his father's bouts of insanity and iron will to live, dealt with his position by becoming a bloated, gout-ridden pox on British society. In this case, the Wickham ancestor foolishly made a wager with the Prince on a horse, in a time when horse racing was so spectacularly crooked that skill in picking the ponies more often than not corresponded directly to skill in hiring unsavory underlings that could most successfully cheat. The Prince's men put weights in the jockey's pockets; even though the cheating was discovered before the race, the hapless punter was done in by either misfortune or, as I would wager, some other sort of undiscovered skulduggery such oat manipulation or using horse psychiatry to rob the horse of its equine self-confidence. The details of the race were published in Gentleman's Magazine, a publication that no doubt prided itself on showing different ways to cheat at horseracing until two people were forced to shoot each other in the most dignified and civilized way possible.

Both George Cruikshank (left) and James Gillroy portrayed George IV as
a corpulent, scheming Jabba the Hutt-like figure, with the title of
Gillroy's painting effective eulogizing the hefty monarch as "A
voluptuary in the horrors of digestion"