Those Were The Things That Happend Then Part II

Like most Bears fans, I had assumed after the Bears preseason that they would scratch their way to maybe eight wins tops in front of an aging defense and a comically ineffective offensive line.

Bears plans for the offensive line went horribly awry early in the
2010 season

And, for the beginning of the season, that prediction looked solid, as Cutler darted for his life behind the group of matadors, turnstiles, and maitre d's that allowed him to be pummeled into a swollen-brained incoherence that interfered with his Rex Grossman-like desire to deliver the ball to the opposition. But football is a game that changes fluidly, governed by the whims of fate more than the whims of spittle-emitting fans calling for the heads of everyone even vaguely involved with the organization after every loss, and somehow the Bears became the top team in the NFC North by the end of the season. The defense regained its fierce Chicago pedigree that terrorized a wide assortment of third-string quarterbacks, the offensive line became at least functional, and Devin Hester began Devin Hestering people enough to demonstrate the comical ineptitude of my football prognostication skills.

Pretty much my only skill in prediction
games like fantasy football is picking up
Kyle Orton as my main quarterback and
then taunting the unfortunate people in
my league with endless digital reams of
Orton-related propaganda as I lose game
after game because my entire team is built
around Kyle Orton

IS THE KAISER INSANE?

One of the most exciting things I've come across in the past several months the fact that a book exists entitled Is the Kaiser Insane? A study of the great outlaw published in Britain in 1915 by Arnold White.

Perhaps if Wilhelm wanted to avoid an unceasing
string of Kaiser-bashing from ramshackle sports
blogs in the next century, he would have made more
of an effort to adorn himself with slightly more
restraint than other major world leaders such as
Victor Von Doom

I have not read the book yet, but according to one contemporary review, "the author has gathered no little evidence regarding the Kaiser’s genius, egotism, insensitiveness, obsessions, and cunning, and seeks to prove that he is a dangerous megalomaniac." I trust this reviewer's opinion implicitly because it comes from a 1915 edition of the spectacularly titled British Journal of Inebriety (which suffered an unfortunate series of name changes and exists now as Addiction).

I am taking this opportunity to launch my own
publication called the Journal of British Inebriety
featuring articles such as "Oi, the fuck you lookin' at:
a history of lookin' at me, 1931-1946" and "1984: A
Year in Headbutts"

The publication of a book like that is not at all surprising, considering that the British war effort focused on liberating the world from the Kaiser's brand of Teutonic tyranny and not the various ism-based causes of war found in AP history textbooks; White's book certainly seemed to have filled a void for British readers who found comfort in taking to the trenches against a cackling madman hell-bent on world domination.

IS JAY CUTLER A JERK?

Despite my enjoyment of the unexpected success of the Bears' season, it still ended on a sour note with a loss to the hated Packers in the NFC Championship game. The Packers were a particularly irritating team last season since they demonstrated intolerable amounts of pluck after most of their team went down with injuries. By far the most annoying subplot before the game, however, was the endless comparisons between Packers' likable happy-go-lucky quarterback Aaron Rodgers grinning and flaunting his Butte College merchandise, and the Bears' churlish, sour-faced signal caller Jay Cutler.

The images of a carefree Rodgers contrasted with Jay Cutler, here shown
wearing an expression comparable to this photo taken from an Onion article
with the headline "Whaler Sandwich 'Not Sitting To Good' With Area Man"

The Bears-Packers rivalry naturally raised the question of how players are portrayed in the media and whether or not I should care if evidently the quarterback for my favorite team is consistently presented as kind of a jerk. And obviously, I don't. Even if Cutler is as unpleasant in the comical 1980s fingerless glove enthusiast bully way that reporters allege (which reached its zenith with this Rick Reilly attack column that opens with the unmistakably groan-inducing zinger "For a man from Santa Claus, Ind., Jay Cutler is one of the least jolly people you've ever met."-- if anything Jay Cutler does momentarily angers Rick Reilly, then he should be immediately canonized by someone with lax canonization standards), it has zero effect on how I enjoy the Bears. In fact, it would not irritate me at all if Cutler decided to give in to his reputation and toured schools knocking lunch trays from the hands of impressionable students, stood around on street corners only to laugh in the faces of elderly women attempting to cross, and started an offseason game show entitled "Don't You Know Who I Am?" inviting various Chicagoland service industry personnel to test their knowledge of whether they know who Jay Cutler is, do they know how much money Jay Cutler makes compared to them, and what are they going to do to stop Jay Cutler from just walking into this club right now with like eight or nine other dudes.

(I'd like to pause for a moment here to recognize the guy responsible for the Lyttle Lytton writing contest who singled out probably the platonic ideal of a Rick Reilly shame on you-style column opener:
"Some things are so small, so miniscule, so atomically insignificant, they can be seen only from three feet away using the Hubble telescope. The heart of Jean Musgjerd is one of these things.")

Cutler fell further under fire by getting injured in the championship game, leading to thousands of Chicagoans to evidently take online courses to become amateur videographic orthopedists allowing them to question the severity of his injury and his willingness to play through pain. Some NFL players even joined in the fray, which implied a certain unpopularity among his peers.

Cutler was also targeted by a wide variety of sports columnists

With more access to athletes than ever before, modern sports fans have to decide the extent to which how they perceive athletes off the field colors their enjoyment of sports. As a football fan, I enjoy watching gigantic people smash into each other in an organized fashion for my amusement; I'll support anyone who helps the team I like smash the other team more effectively regardless of churlishness, smarm, sass, or blandness. On the other hand, I would prefer that none of these people does anything so unreasonably heinous that supporting them becomes uncomfortable-- unless they commit a crime so spectacularly grandiose that it falls into the category of heist, or involves doing something like stealing the Great Pyramid of Cheops and then attempting to ransom it back to the Egyptian Government with a series of opaque riddles designed to foil international police agencies. Unless that plan involves a dastardly attempt to crush Europe with the spike covered fist of megalomania.

This Website is Surprisingly Funct

BYCTOM may have missed all of the exciting sports action, hurriedly-researched history, and of course gratuitous mustaches from the past several months. Nevertheless, sports certainly don't lend themselves to immediacy; it's far better to experience sporting events through the magic of hindsight after they are no longer so boringly relevant, so please join me for a new BYCTOM feature entitled:

THOSE WERE THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED THEN: PART I

Northwestern managed its most successful post-season run in the history of Wildcat basketball by making it within one overtime period of the vaunted NIT Final Four at Madison Square Garden (I'm going to exclude the Big Ten champion teams from the 1930s because, while I recognize that team's accomplishment, I also am pretty sure that basketball in the 1930s did not involve recognizable aspects of the game such as the 24 second clock, leaping, and passing-- ball movement at that time primarily revolved around encouraging a teammate to give up the ball through cogent argument and rhetorical flourishes).

Modern basketball players are more quick to dismiss claims for
the ball as spurious without strong enough evidence. Here Aaron
Gray is shocked by a teammate admitting to the irresponsible
use of hearsay and anecdote

The quarter-final game against Washington State was a heartening comeback led by Northwestern basketball legend Juice Thompson, with the last minute being one of the most astounding endings to a basketball game that I've ever witnessed, in which the following occurred:
1. Northwestern ties the game on a Washington State goal-tend
2. With no time remaining on the clock, Northwestern is called for a foul giving Washington State a rare opportunity for a walk-off free throw.
3. The Washington State player improbably bricks both free throws, sending the game into OT.

The last minute of this game therefore featured two of the three worst ways to possibly end a basketball game-- on a goaltend or foul with no time left (the third worst way is of course to have one or several players wade into the stands and begin pummeling spectators. I suppose the absolute worst way to end a game would be to have the basketball court annexed by a hostile nation that does not play basketball and immediately have the players replaced by a team handball squad or a triumphant troupe of net-ball all-stars, but that's unreasonably hypothetical).

An illustration of a problematic end to a basketball game also doubles as a tribute to
the world's most placid cameraman. Nenad Krsitc would probably have benefited
from Troy Hurtubise's Project Troy armor, a suit that came initially from his
never-ending quest to stave off rampaging bears, but, as his Wikipedia page
succinctly put it, "the process has developed ideas and technologies whose purposes
go beyond simple bear attack protection"

Unfortunately, the Wildcats faltered in overtime, disappointing Northwestern fans, but relieving the Evanston Police Department from having to plan for quelling an NIT victory riot that would grind the city to a halt with a deafening chorus of huzzahs and unrefined sherry guzzling.

PRETENDERS TO THE CROWN

With a decade of increasingly improbable bowl defeats and three consecutive losses in the NIT, Northwestern fans are getting hungrier for a title of some kind in football or basketball. The Athletic Department deserves recognition for bringing the historically woeful programs to the post-season, the very upper tier of mediocrity. Therefore, Northwestern fans should demand a fraudulent NIT title.

From now on, as far as I am concerned, Northwestern is the 2011 NIT Champion. No one remembers who actually won the NIT, outside of a few fans of the winning schools, most of whom keep their NIT Champion merchandise in a closet with their Worldcom stock certificates. Northwestern can hoist a fake banner to the rafters, print up t-shirts, digitally alter the homepage of the Daily Northwestern, make every reference to the team feature the phrase "2011 NIT Champions," and use connections at ESPN to burn tapes of the actual NIT championship game and replace it with a game featuring the Wildcats squaring off against a group of theater students told that they are staging a dramatization of the tragic story of the Washington Generals. The university can rent out Madison Square Garden for a morning and encourage New York-based alumni to masquerade as a raucous NIT crowd by moving them around the arena and exchanging false mustaches. Within a half-decade, who would you believe: the university that actually won the NIT or Northwestern, endorsed by the American Association to Resist Shams as the nation's third most hoax-averse university, although it should be pointed out that I've just made everything in this sentence up, and my AARS link goes to the American Association of Railroad Supervisors, which offers derailment investigation seminars and promises that "our members are able to get the inside track on the latest in the railroad industry."

Juice Thompson and Northwestern fans celebrate a completely
legitimate and fairly earned NIT title as far as you know

PROUD TRADITION OF PRETENDERS

By taking up the mantle of a false NIT championship, Northwestern would fit into a proud tradition of pretenders to the throne. There are a variety of ways to claim legitimacy. All of them involve finding thousands of sword wielding accomplices. One particularly strong move is to wait for a child in line for power to die and then pretend to be him or her several years later. Another is to revive an older usurped bloodline that had been usurped by a new throne or some sort of popular government, like the swinging pendulum of the French Monarchy in the nineteenth century.

Fifty years of French politics, c. 1800-1851

One of my favorite pretender stories involves seventeenth century Russia, where a variety of False Dmitriys kept cropping up to menace the Russian throne during the Time of Troubles. The original Dmitriy was a son of Ivan the Terrible. Ivan's death led to the ascension of Feodor I, Dmitry's older brother, and figurehead for the machinations of professional intriguer Boris Gudunov. Gudunov had sent Dmitriy and his family into exile, as one does with politically inconvenient toddlers in 1584, but perhaps that was not enough--Dmitriy died in exile at the age of eight after being either assassinated or accidentally stabbing himself in the throat with a knife while suffering an epileptic seizure (what modern historians label the "Derrick Rose scenario"). As Gudunov learned, however, sometimes conveniently dead relatives can cause problems in entirely non-zombie related ways.

In 1600, a man claiming to be Dmitriy appeared, proclaiming that he had escaped from exile and returned to claim the throne. He gathered up a loose coalition of Poles, Jesuits, and miscellaneous enemies of Gudunov and began marching against Russian forces. Gudunov's forces successfully held off Dmitriy, but the death of Gudunov in 1605 allowed False Dmitriy to take the real throne. He lasted about ten months. Angered by rumors of his impending conversion to Catholicism, his enemies stormed the Kremlin, killed him, and fired his remains from a cannon.

False Dmitriy displays the same incredulous
expression that is on my face because I am not
right now forming a rock band called The False
Dmitriys

That was not the end of the Dmitriys. In 1607, another False Dmitriy popped up and began gathering his forces in future Moscow suburb Tushino. Like his predecessor, False Dmitiry II gathered support from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Don Cossacks, and various assorted rebels and overthrow enthusiasts. His forces were defeated by Russians with the help of their Swedish allies. He continued to campaign around Russia, but in 1610, a drinking companion and resentful flogging victim shot him, chopped off his head, and left behind a legacy of obvious there can be only one Highlander references.

False Dmitriy III appeared in 1611. He garnered Cossack support and, in the great False Dmitry tradition, began an assault on Moscow. He managed to stay upright for another year before captured and executed by Moscow authorities. The False Dmitriy phenomenon was part of vast power struggle in the first decade of the seventeenth century among various Russian dyansties that played out like a game show awarding the crown to whoever could stab the most people. By 1613, this chaotic time stabilized with the rise of the Romanov dyansty, and the Russian populace appeared Dmitriy'd out.

Apparently some Russian commentators have poked
fun at Medvedev as a "false Dmitry," but, as
this Economist article points out, "over the past few
weeks he has taken to sporting a khaki rollneck and a
bomber jacket emblazoned with the words 'Russia’s
Commander-in-Chief', perhaps to remind people of his
status"

As Wikipedia's List of Current Pretenders notes, there are a significant number of descendants to various monarchical lines floating around the world, ready to gather their forces and retain control of their families' empires. For example, Georg Friederich, the current head of the Dread Kaiser's House of Hohenzollern has chillingly threatened that "I do not see any reason for the political system in Germany to be changed," and "I have as head of the House of Hohenzollern no political role −- and neither do I aim at such."

THAT WAS A THING THAT HAPPENED BEFORE

Stay tuned for future BYCTOM updates on stuff that happened a few months ago clumsily compared to things that happened several hundred years ago as well as several more productive ideas about using falsehood and chicanery to claim things that no one could ever possibly want.

Northwestern Hoops

In December, Northwestern fans believed that this could be the year that Northwestern finally broke through its moribund sporting reputation and burst into mediocrity by winning a bowl game and qualifying for the NCAA basketball tournament. The bowl bid bust into a thousand bits of awkward alliteration despite a valiant comeback led by Freshman QB Kain Colter and the befuddling coaching of Tommy Tuberville, who coached the second half with the shaky overconfidence of a cartoon supervillain.

Tuberville inexplicably orders an onside kick in the third
quarter of the Inaugural Ticketcity Bowl over the advice of
more cautious assistants, who acquiesced after being threatened
with being cast into something that has the word "doom" in it

WILDCAT BASKETBALL

As of now, a tournament spot for Northwestern looks unlikely after the strong non-conference start, despite blowing heartbreaking losses to Michigan State and missing the upset of Ohio State by only one. Nevertheless, the win over arch-rivals Illinois at a significantly more purple Welsh-Ryan arena this weekend means that Northwestern isn't technically out of it yet, although my knowledge of bracketology, bracketometry, braxonomy, or any other bracket-related science or vaguely sinister alchemical pseudo-science is not up to par.

A stunning upset in the Southland Conference
Tournament provokes a dangerous unbalancing
of critical NCAA bracket humours

The Wildcats spent the early part of the season propelled by the deadly chest shooting of John Shurna and senior Juice Thompson, who, with over 4,000 minutes logged, has technically played more Northwestern basketball than anyone ever. I'm also impressed by freshman Jershon Cobb and The Masked Adventures of Luka Mirkovic in the paint.

Mirkovic should not only keep the mask next year, but experiment with
different masks to terrify opponents into costly turnovers

As far as I'm aware, the Wildcats are still clinging precariously to the bubble, but even if they slip they can of course still get to the NCAAs by winning the Big Ten tournament. In fact, winning the Big Ten Tournament would be the most satisfying way for Northwestern to finally kick in the doors of the NCAAs, although at this point I would also accept a Northwestern NCAA appearance wrought by storming the United Center and handcuffing themselves to a piece of infrastructure like the scorer's table or Bill Wennington until let into a game or cleverly disguising themselves as Kansas State.

THE FUTURE OF SPORTS

A significant controversy coming into this weekend's Super Bowl involves calls to improve player safety as we come to better understand the deleterious effect of armored men smashing into each other at maximum speed on the brain. This year has seen the NFL in particular make concussions a point of emphasis. But, despite attempts to decrease the violence of football, a trend dating back to the first decade of the twentieth century when a more barbaric game saw the use of stampedes, cudgels, and blimp bombardment as legitimate methods to stop ball-carriers, football is still rife with concussions. In a recent New Yorker article, Ben McGrath questions whether football as we know it can persist as doctors get a better picture of just how much damage concussions can cause.

Attempting to find better equipment is a logical step
to keep athletes safe unless it looks goofy I mean
come on that thing looks like it has space for auxiliary
heads

You can argue about the effectiveness of the NFL's increasing use of flags against big hits or rail against the league's hypocrisy, but the new policies at least demonstrate a growing popular concern for athlete safety in complete contrast with what we'd expect from movies. Instead, future sports in movies invariably become more violent, culminating with The Running Man in which participants are encouraged to maul each other to death with colorful, themed implements. Even in the latter-day Arnold opus The Sixth Day, future football involves a quarterback dying on the field, only to be surreptitiously replaced by a clone (the Sixth Day is a pretty bad movie, but at least watchable as shown on this graph charting the enjoyability of Schwarzenegger movies since 1996):

The hardest part of making this chart was deciding whether End of Days or Collateral
Damage represents the nadir of the Arnold Schwarzenegger experience. Although End of
Days is absolutely abysmal, I decided on Collateral Damage because the movie ends with
Schwarzenegger killing a guy with an axe and letting the guy die with nary a pun. He
didn't need to axe-cuse himself? There was no need to axe the guy a question? This is
coming from the same man who once quipped "you're luggage" after shooting a crocodile
at point-blank range

There are more helmets (the fact that people once played hockey bareheaded is absolutely mind-boggling), more padding, body armor in baseball, more goggles in basketball, and I'm sure race car drivers are doing things such as trying harder not to crash into each other. We don't have rollerball or state-sponsored game shows that involve hunting the ultimate prey: man; it's 2011 and we've not seen a single death race. Bill Laimbeer is being closely monitored. So, even though there is a lot of soul searching to do about the costs of football, compared to a fictional dystopia where deadly gladiator games mask the ever-stomping bootheels of authoritarianism, we're doing pretty well.

TO MARCH MADNESS

The rest of the month of Wildcat basketball should be a thrill ride, as the team clings to hope of amassing enough victories to finally make the tournament. Even if the 'Cats don't get in, they'll hopefully get another shot to at least make a decent run in the NIT, which would almost certainly gain popularity if it was turned into a chaotic mess of Running Man-style basketball. I'll turn the end of this post over to the NBA D-League's Maine Red Claws promotions department:

There's no better way to tell someone you care than through the
use of a make-shift anthropomorphic crustacean Cyrano de
Bergerac

TicketCity Bowl

This Saturday, Northwestern takes on Texas Tech in the inaugural TicketCity Bowl at the Cotton Bowl in Texas. This is because the Cotton Bowl is now played at Jerry Jones's Ozymandius-like Texas Stadium while the Wildcats and Red Raiders now get to play under the watchful eye of Big Tex as the Texas State fairgrounds.

I prefer the original Big Tex from 1956
which showcases a look of wide-eyed
homicidal fanaticism that I prefer from
state fair gargantuans. Here, Tex's body
language can be best described as hastily
explaining to the authorities

Northwestern will be seeking to avenge two blowout losses to end the season and capture the team's first post-season victory since 1949. Texas Tech will be looking for a bowl win to cap its first season under Tommy Tuberville after the program's messy divorce from Mike Leach. In Tuberville, Tech found a name coach, by which I mean that he has a spectacular name that is wasted in college football coaching and should immediately be loaned out to the leader of a 1950s doo-wop revival group featuring matching garish blazers. Contrast Tuberville with Minnesota's hiring of Northern Illinois coach Jerry Kill, whose name is far more suited to the martial pretension of football, probably because there wasn't a qualified person available named Trench Bludgeoner.

Tech will be playing without former defensive coordinator James Willis, who left after Tuberville learned that he had clandestine talks with the University of Florida, according to the spectacularly named Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. The departure of Willis reiterates the ridiculous notion of coaching searches that occur during bowl season, with coaches hired, fired, departing under the dead of night, and inundating their rivals' residences with untraceable poisonous reptiles all before and during the preparation and playing of bowl games. This intrigue is one of the best parts of college football season as it involves fickle fans either braying for the head of an unfavored coach or shouting perfidy as a beloved coach leaves for greener pastures as well as the activities of cabals of shady boosters manipulating the purse strings and plotting in their festive team-logo festooned neckties.

Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands is seen leaving a meeting
where he was rumored to call for the replacement of Mack Brown,
but when questioned by reporters replied "I am above that."

LEGENDS AND LEADERS

The Big Ten finally unveiled the names of the divisions to great fanfare and even greater derision. Northwestern will compete for the 2011 Legend Division Title. There is absolutely no reason why division titles should ever be anything other than cardinal directions-- the idea of striving for some sort of geographical accuracy is absurd when absolutely no one cares about the Dallas Cowboys being in the NFC East, the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks playing in the same building but competing in their league's Eastern and Western conferences respectively, or the Big Ten containing 20 percent more teams than advertised. Every other sport uses some sort of vague and inaccurate geographical signifier for divisions and there is no need to start breaking new ground by attempting to bring in abstract concepts. In that case, why not go with the Pop and Soda divisions based on what to call sugary fizz-water since, as any Midwesterner can attest, more people invest fierce ideological attachment to their regionalism than almost any other opinion they have ever held for no apparent reason instead of some more crucial issue such as the constitutional validity of the King-Byng controversy.

Major players in the King-Byng Canadian Constitutional Crisis of 1925 (l to r):
Mackenzie King, Lord Byng, Arthur Meighen. The controversy came about when
attempting to transpose a nineteenth century political crisis into the twentieth
without the aid of duels to sort things out properly. Instead, all Commonwealth
constitutional problems involving Governors-General ought to be settled by some
sort of stodge off, where a politician must endure 65 minutes of hectoring from a
crowd while attempting to respond in the most humorless and stiff possible manner,
while the winner is assessed from a scientific measurement of the crowd's dour
glumness

Of course, I'm predisposed to criticize Jim Delaney after my calls for renaming the conference the Enormous Ten have evidently fallen on deaf ears.

WIKILEAKS UPDATES

Like most of you, I've been fascinated by the leak of U.S. diplomatic cables free for our perusal because I've been desperate to catch up on diplomatic gossip, such as how many nightclubs Lola Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan President Karimov, currently owns and favors with her late night disco dancing. Actually, the leaks are a font of Central Asian political discotheque intrigue, such as this depiction of Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov at Chocolat, described as Astana's trendiest nightclub from a cable entitled "Lifestyles of the Kazazhstani [sic] Leadership":

Masimov led his companions on to Chocolat's dance floor soon after their arrival. The dance floor holds approximately 100 people, and at the time perhaps 50 patrons were dancing. However, Masimov himself chose to dance on an empty stage above the dance floor. His companions quickly tired but Masimov remained, dancing alone and animatedly on the stage for another 15-20 minutes.

Massimov (center) with Belorussian Premier Sergei Sidorski
(right) and beloved Russian crooner Vladimir Putin

Another revelation is the rollicking Duke of York, who charmed a gathering of British and Commonwealth business leaders and officials in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan by assailing Kyrgyz corruption, comparing it to France and anorexia, respectively. The American Ambassador described the Duke as being an "equal opportunity Great Game player" and soliciting cries of "hear, hear" which makes me worried about him spontaneously growing mutton-chops.

The most troubling revelation comes from stories published side-by-side at the New York Times web site about Russia and Canada. See if you can spot the pattern:

A trove of diplomatic cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to a number of publications, disclose a perception by American diplomats that Canadians “always carry a chip on their shoulder” in part because of a feeling that their country “is condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman.’ ”

Asked about a cable that described President Dmitri A. Medvedev as “playing Robin to Putin’s Batman,” he said the author had “aimed to slander one of us.”

The State Department cables also reveal which countries'
economies move at a penguin-like pace, which are riddled by
corruption, and raise troubling questions about United States
relations with Egypt

DALLAS BOWLING

Although this time of year is when college football comes under assault for the nonsensical bowl system with prestige-bereft bowls such as the TicketCity Bowl used as prime examples of the inscrutable nature of the FBS post-season, Northwestern fans are clamoring to see Fitz finally hoisting a bowl game trophy. With the basketball team looking like a potential threat to finally breach the NCAA tournament, this could potentially be the year for Northwestern athletics in getting over the hump to mediocrity outside of the field of women's field hockey and most Big Ten equestrian sports.

Almost 50 years ago, President Kennedy asked why Rice plays Texas when pledging to put on a man on the moon stressing its difficulty, emphasizing perseverance, and tactfully not mentioning the possibility of igniting a terrifying war with subterranean Moon-Men that would certainly side with Khrushchev. Today, we ask why does Northwestern play Texas Tech and the answer is so that a bunch of corporations make money. Having said that, and politely ignoring what the hell just happened in those last couple of sentences, let us hope that Evan Watkins can lead the Wildcats to a 21st century bowl victory. And if anyone around you disparages the necessity of winning the Inaugural TicketCity Bowl in the grand scheme of things, you punch them right in the face and say "I am above that."

Iowa and Illinois

Another year, another close, exciting, Big Ten Championship-ruining victory over Iowa in what is turning into one of the secretly most exciting rivalries in the Big Ten. For three consecutive years, Iowa's season effectively ended at the hands of Northwestern, including last year's BCS-busting win over a team with national championship ambitions in Iowa City (the game was also notable for the unfortunate injury of Iowa QB and super-patriot Ricky Stanzi whom I fully expect to see ripping up pictures of the late Ayatolla Khomeini or headbutting the Soviet flag in the near future as in this encapsulation of the platonic ideal of American patriotism).

Pat Fitzgerald broadcasts taunts of Northwestern invincibility
on the Kinnick Stadium jumbotron

Instead, Northwestern played its best game of the season, with the defense rallying from another suspect third quarter and Dan Persa doing Dan Persa things such as eluding tacklers, completing accurate passes, accounting for the majority of the entire offensive output, and leading a heroic fourth-quarter drive to win the game. For Iowa, attempting to beat Northwestern recently has become like trying to invade Russia from the West-- tempting, seemingly doable on a giant map filled with tin cavalry units, but ultimately unconquerable.

Pat Fitzgerald's orders to incinerate of Evanston dining and
grocery establishments forces Kirk Ferentz to lead Iowa back
west to resupply in the Quad Cities

For Northwestern fans, the victory has a sour aftertaste. Although it is always satisfying to continue to be a gigantic spear in the side of Iowa, and the Wildcats finally closed out a game against a good program, the win came at the cost of Dan Persa. It's a shame for Persa to get down just as he was attracting national attention as one of the best quarterbacks in the country. Persa set the Big Ten record for completion percentage and also led the team in rushing, making him as invaluable to Northwestern's offense as Giuseppe Garibaldi to the Italian risorgimiento.

Persa faces down Big Ten foes just as Garibaldi such dominating powers as
Napoleon III and the Pope. Of course, Garibaldi had one thing that Persa
lacks: A GREAT BIG, BUSHY BEARD

LAND OF LINCOLN REVISITED

By the mid-nineteenth century, Garibaldi had earned a peerless reputation as a military leader to the extent that none other than Abraham Lincoln had offered him a commission in the Union Army. This article describes the process by which Garibaldi seriously contemplated taking an American command post. The offer came not initially from the State Department, but from a more traditional source of American foreign policy: the self-aggrandizing actions of a rogue American consul based in Belgium. James W. Quiggle approached Garibaldi in 1861, hoping to distinguish himself by bringing the Italian hero to the Union cause. Despite Quiggle's insubordinate actions, Secretary of State Seward and Lincoln remained intrigued by getting Garibaldi on the their side and attempted to take over recruiting efforts and shove Quiggle aside before he could inadvertently damage negotiations such as by parading around European capitals with a sash reading "Garibaldi Assistance Requester USA #1."

Seward calling Quiggle into his office to
dress him down, no doubt letting him
know that the President was on his ass
and threatening to bust him down to
Guatemala consular duty so fast it would
make his head spin

The plan, of course, did not work out. Garibaldi sought to command the entire army and to declare the aim of the war as ending slavery. Lincoln could not at the time do either of those things and Garibaldi would soon be wounded and imprisoned after a failed invasion of Rome, guarded by French troops and the indomitable Swiss Guard. Meanwhile, news of the approach had leaked, leading to British taunts against the President's military prowess. By the time the Emancipation Proclamation sufficiently assured Garibaldi of the war's anti-slavery credentials and he had recovered, the United States no longer felt a pressing need for his services. The Union War effort had come into the hands of generals such as Ulysses Grant. In case you were wondering, Grant biographer Marie Kelsey has put up this impassioned defense of Grant's alcoholism as an apocryphal smear campaign created by jealous rivals in the military and contains more information a person would ever want to know about Ulysses Grant's drinking habits, a goal of gung-ho revisionism:

Here then is a humble and modest man who had but one goal, that of saving the Union. And he accomplished this goal! The debt owned him by this country can never be repaid, except by everlasting honor and respect. That respect can be bestowed by eliminating the "drinking comments" from conversation about Ulysses S. Grant and by eradicating that image from the American consciousness. Grant deserves nothing less. Through the technological marvel of the Internet the U.S. Grant Network is working ceaselessly toward achieving that goal!

A WRIGLEY FIELD DOOM FORTRESS FIELD TRIP

This Lincoln talk brings us to the upcoming game against the University of Illinois in the annual Land of Lincoln Rivalry Showdown. The game has attracted national attention because it is being held at the Purple Confines of Wrigley Field, bringing ESPN's Gameday crew, and attracting a festive, bowl-like atmosphere to add to the traditional overwhelming interest across the Big Ten and all of college football for how this game will play out.

Vandals from the Athletic Department took the Paint the Town
Purple Campaign from several years ago to its logical conclusion

Wrigley Field is my favorite sports venue, so I'm naturally over the moon to see it deployed for Northwestern purposes. Of course, Wrigley is no longer designed for football since the days when it served as the Bears' home stadium before they moved to Soldier Field in 1971. Instead, the east endzone crams up against the padded Ivy, leading to criticism of the field as less than ideal for football, beginning a snowball of warnings about the dangers of the field to the point where one expected a description of how the east endzone wall was now being used to guard Mayan idols from treasure hunters and grave robbers.

Multifarious dangers lurk in the East End Zone

In a bold step, Big Ten officials announced today that the field would only use the West endzone, allowing the East to lay fallow as grass grows on the blood of lesser football teams. This change makes sense; no one wants to see players catching touchdown passes only to be tackled by a brick wall, and the shifting of all play to a single endzone won't really change the complexion of the game much unless you paid for bleacher seats in right field. Obviously, no one consulted noted Wrigley Field safety expert Ozzie Guillen to also make light of terrifying dangers such as crumbling concrete blocks and large aggressive, rodents. If anything, single end zone adds to the carnival-like atmosphere of the game, giving the forbidden end zone an air of menace that curses all players who break its harrowing plane for all eternity with football-related plagues such as fumbilitis, alligator arms, jock itch, and sexual-assault allegations.

THE ACTUAL FOOTBALL GAME: KEEP THE HAT IN EVANSTON

The Illini have continued their struggles under Ron Zook, becoming the first Big Ten team to succumb to the hapless Minnesota Golden Gophers last week. The Illini have looked formidable on defense at times this season and will be looking to contain Evan Watkins, who replaces Persa. One concern about the game is how Watkins will respond to being thrust unexpectedly into action. In the past, Fitzgerald has gone ultra-conservative with back-up quarterbacks. Two years ago, Kafka spent most of the time running the Kafka Smash play instead of passing when he filled in for the injured Bachér (which worked as he broke the Big Ten single game rushing record), and last year Persa rarely threw when he filled in for Kafka, with the notable exception of his TD pass against Iowa. Northwestern has not had much success running the ball this season and has lived by the short passing game, so it will be interesting to see how much they let Watkins air it out.

For Zook, this might be his last stand at the helm of the Illini. For Northwestern, another win would notch another eight win season, improve bowl positioning, and build momentum to ruin Wisconsin's BCS aspirations in the Madison tundra. That is, of course, assuming that both teams survive the death trap of Wrigley Fields ivy, log traps, and gigantic hall of mirrors installed earlier this week to confuse defenses as to who is the real quarterback. Hopefully, Northwestern seizes this rare opportunity as a game of national interest to affirm its status as a program on the rise and keep the hat in Evanston for another year until next year's game at a Schaumberg area Discovery Zone.

Iowa Week

It's Iowa Week, and Wildcat fans are buzzing about the looming showdown with recent rivals from the Corn Capital coming in caravans and hoping to avenge Northwestern's consecutive upsets ending the Hawkeyes' Big Ten title hopes. It's been an interesting couple of weeks for Northwestern. Throughout the year, Northwestern has had trouble putting games away, really only beating ISU and Rice comfortably.

The game against Indiana naturally involved letting the Hoosiers back in when underrated Indiana QB Ben Chappell hit Duwyce Wilson to narrow the margin to three points. Of course, a Northwestern-Indiana close score is not a particular surprise to anyone paying attention to recent Northwestern/Indiana clashes, a section of the population limited to Northwestern fans, Indiana fans, and angry Big Ten Network subscribers who would ordinarily watch these teams play only if the game occurred on their front yard. These games always come down to the final moment, as if Northwestern and Indiana find themselves in a sort of football stalemate.

Experts on stalemate warfare: (left to right) Gen. Sir Douglas Haig, Field
Marshal Horatio Kitchener, the tyrant-Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Field Marshal
Paul von Hindenberg. In Britain, the war was frequently referred to in the
1920s and 1930s as the Great War, as a way of describing the mustaches of
all participants political and military. The exception, of course, was
Woodrow Wilson, whom I suspect remained clean-shaven to avoid association
with the greatest conflict of mustachioed persons in the history of humanity,
a tactic that certainly hurt his 1916 rival Charles Evans Hughes (far right)

With the victory over Indiana, Northwestern took its bowl eligibility swagger into Happy Valley and played 29 minutes of inspired football. Instead of discussing the Wildcats' painful collapse at the hands of the ageless Paterno, why not take a gander at this germane video presentation that essentially boils the second half of the game into less than four minutes.

Congratulations to Joe Paterno on his astounding 400th win and mastery of
gestures used solely to demonstrate an intense hatred of snakes. HE HATES THEM

FIST SHAKING

The official BYCTOM position on fist shaking in American political discourse is very clear: politicians should do everything they can to get rid of inferior, meeker, and more television-friendly gestures such as the Bill Clinton button thumb, and return to angrily shaking their fists in the direction of their opponent in order to demonstrate derision at their positions and the dire danger that opposition policies will rain down upon the nation. Note that I'm not advocating a Ukrainian-style legislative riot (kudos to the clever deployment of umbrellas into impromptu egg and debris shields); speakers' fists should abuse only air molecules or possibly comical effigies of political rivals.

Progressive Wisconsin Governor and later senator Robert LaFollette was a master at using his fists for political purposes. Though he earned the nickname "Fighting Bob" for his tenacious pursuit of reform and dogged anti-corruption efforts, it's also apt for his pugilistic speaking style.

The most impressive thing about LaFollette's fist-shaking is that in two
pictures to the right, including the impressive double-barreled action
at the end, LaFollette deploys his fists on the radio, the medium
traditionally most resistant to fist-shaking

LaFollette is an impressive figure in terms of being able to dish out a fist shaking as well as take one. I'll let the author of LaFollette's wikipedia page explain:

After the speech, Senators Frank B. Kellogg (Minn.), Joseph Taylor Robinson (Arkansas), and Albert B. Fall (N.M.) in turn attacked La Follette's position on the war. Senator Robinson was a combative and fiercely partisan defender of Wilson and the Democratic Party. His speech "synthesized the scattered attacks on La Follette that had been filtering in for seven months...as the speech progressed, he became more agitated and abusive. The virulence of Robinson's attack shocked the floor and galleries into complete silence." A United Press correspondent described Robinson's speech as "the most unrestrained language that ever has been heard in the Senate." La Follette sat motionless in his chair, even when Robinson began shaking his fist at him.

The attack came because of misconstrued reports of a LaFollette speech defending the sinking of the Lusitania. In onerous minutes of online searching, I have not successfully located a transcript of Robinson's comments, although evidently he insinuated that LaFollette harbored a loyalty to the hated Kaiser himself, an excellent tactic used to discredit so many American politicians that have used stump speeches as an opportunity to assure constituents of their unswerving dedication to hated foreign monarchs and pledged to work tirelessly to see voters crushed under said monarch's bootheels.

JOUSTING

I always support the inane movement to designate official state things (for example, Illinois's official state dance is the square dance, state fossil is the tully monster, and official type of municipal voter fraud is use of the deceased), so I've always been moderately fascinated that Maryland's official sport is jousting. One would think that the sport went back to some sort of colonial method of feud settlement as practiced by legendary Marylanders such as Lord Baltimore or Omar, eventually evolving in the nineteenth century and codified into a less lethal version much like how modern cockfights include full medical inspections and tiny beak guards. Instead, the joust became the official sport in 1962 encouraged by a group of equestrian enthusiasts enamored with the idea of crowns and pointy maiden hats and left in a helpless situation because Medieval Times had yet to be invented.

From the Maryland Jousting Tournament Association, a photo (left) of a the triumphant
announcement of the adoption of jousting as official state sport. (Right) A depiction of
the type of behind the scenes manipulation, and use of doubloons used to pass the motion
through the intrigue-inundated Maryland state legislature of the 1960s described by a
contemporary local reporter as:
"that nest of the damn'd/the vile reprobate/
A scoundrel's abode/where the rogues machinate/
I bet a few of them are commies"

Unfortunately, Maryland jousting is not a bloody spectacle of impalement. Instead, jousters use their lance-like poles to snare hanging rings, in much the same way that medieval knights would thunder through European countrysides ridding the land of tree-dwelling pests.

Unfortunately for famous joust victim Henry II of France, the
Lord Lorges did not abide by the Maryland Joust Association's
promise to "ENJOY WITH US THE MODERN TREND, WHERE
RINGS ARE SPEARED INSTEAD OF FRIENDS"

IOWA PREVIEW

Iowa comes into town looking for revenge from last year's BCS-busting loss to Northwestern in Iowa City, dropping a second consecutive home game to the 'Cats. Northwestern again represents a classic trap game for Iowa as they host Ohio State next week. But as ESPN's Adam Rittenberg reports, Iowa won't be looking past the Wildcats after recent trouble beating them. As Rittenberg points out, Fitz is 3-1 against the Hawkeyes, and since 2002, Northwestern has accounted for three of Iowa's ten home losses.

This decade, Northwestern and Iowa have split the series 4-4,
evidently as evenly-matched as these large-hatted women
squaring off in late nineteenth century Australia in a type of
fighting which I would like to coin as fancy-boxing. I think the
woman in white has the clearcorner advantage by looking at the
tale of the tape:

(source: The Powerhouse Museum, Haymarket New South Wales)

I like that there is some genuine passion in this rivalry, with Iowa fans reacting to each loss like a Gruber Brother being continually informed of John McClane's incessant survival as they climb to higher levels on the Heston Scale of incredulity (incidentally, the highest Heston scale rating I can find recently is in the trailer for the Russell Crow Robin Hood movie showcasing a blood-curdling "I DECLARE HIM TO BE AN OUTLAW" outburst. I haven't seen this movie, but I have a hard time believing anything else that happens in it can be better than that).

Traditionally, visitors to Ryan field view Northwestern as either a minor speed bump on the way to a showdown with a fellow title contender or a winnable game in the quest for bowl eligibility; it certainly is a change of pace for a team that actually wants to beat Northwestern for the sake of beating Northwestern, to direct a fist pump at Pat Fitzgerald rather be on the receiving end of it, to tear fans' fancy cummerbunds asunder and grind their monocles into dust. It should be an atmosphere approximating that of a Big Ten game in Evanston.

On paper, of course, Iowa has the edge. The Hawkeyes have an excellent defense, an underrated running game to test a vulnerable Northwestern run defense, and a quarterback in Ricky Stanzi having a spectacular year; Northwestern has looked very vulnerable against some very bad teams. On the other hand, I'm going to say throw out the record books. Go ahead and print out a list of every game Northwestern has ever played against Iowa starting with their first contest in 1897 when the rules of football included outmoded features such as pistol duels, knuckle dusters, and used cockfighting in lieu of a coin toss and then throw that stack of paper outside of the nearest window. The Wildcats have had no business beating Iowa most of the time in the Kirk Ferentz era, so hopefully Northwestern will finally be able to put a complete Big Ten game together and continue to inexplicably dominate in this underrated rivalry.

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.