Tom Brady and the mommies, with an unrelated introductory guide to non-stop flights

For you world travelers, this map shows the farthest you can go from O'Hare non-stop. So that business trip to Antarctica will require some sort of layover (probably in Atlanta). The dark patches are where the FAA won't let you fly because it's over 180 minutes from an airport, and the big darker oval is the maximum range of a 777-200LR flying 18 hours in a straight line from ORD. Which may not be feasible.

For you football and/or racism fans, am I the only one who finds a bit of a double standard around Tom Brady's boy scout image and the mild reaction of the press to the fecund lair that is his bedroom? Despite his clean image he currently has two women pregnant at the same time, including one of Leondardo DiCaprio's former playmates. It's not that I think this is such a terrible thing, provided he supports his progeny, but I wonder why the man who could do no wrong isn't being skewered for this, compared to Shawn Kemp's illegitimate children, or the Vikings Sex Cruise, or the heat Randy Moss took for pretending to drop his pants to Packer fans (who actually moon the Vikings bus every year). If he didn't have three superbowl rings the situation might be different, but I honestly believe that the reason he gets complimented rather than castigated for his prowess in bagging Bridget Moynahan and Giselle Bundchen in the same week (maybe not the same week but I guess we'll see from their due dates) is he's white. If Tiger Woods or Daunte Culpepper had to rush out and buy two baby carriages this fall, it would be heralded as confirmation of the breakdown of the family in the black community, and his failure to be a role model. That may just be my own white guilt and paranoia talking.

The fine art of selling... er, nothing

I hear that on the eve of a Cavs-Knicks game, Lebron James took some shots at Stephon Marbury's shoe line, saying that he would never stoop to sell his shoes for a tenth of their current price tag, because his corporate paymasters Nike set such a high standard for their product.  Stephon Marbury's shoes sell at a 90% discount to Lebron's, $14.99 for a pair of Starburys, against about $150 for the Zoom Lebron Force or whatever it's called (despite being such a salesman, Lebron's online store is down, so I couldn't verify the name of his shoes).  Marbury responded, but to put his response in context, let me briefly explain what Mr. Starbury's shoe line is all about.  Shoe companies throw an incredible amount of money into basketball at all levels, sponsoring camps and events, and a lot of NBA stars get a truckload of cash in exchange for slapping their name and image on a pair of shoes.  This puts a lot of pressure on poor kids and their parents to buy $150 shoes, or steal them.  Some people, like Marbury and Ben Wallace, have decided to instead promote and wear affordable gear, and Marbury wears $14.99 sneakers in NBA games, to prove to kids you don't need to let King James and Phil Knight to pocket the $135 markup.  Poor mothers have come to Marbury to tearfully thank him for making it possible for them to give their kids quality gear with superstar cachet, and ending a juvenile arms race over expensive shoes.  To a segment of the population that few care about, the Starbury shoe line makes a difference, and he's the one who sought out a partner and put this venture together, using his own money as capital.  So when corporate shill Lebron James sneered at his affordable shoes, Marbury said "It's better to own than to be owned," then took the game-winning shot in his $15 Starburys.  I'm so sick of King James, who's great at selling Sprite but not so great in the fourth quarter, and as it stands, he'd be facing another affordable shoe baron in B-b-b-Big B-b-b-Ben Wallace and the Bulls.

I also love that Coldwell Banker has struck a deal to sell property in Second Life.  In a game where there are no construction costs and the amount of land is impermanent and controlled by a video game company, this definitely sounds like a rock solid move.  The entire virtual property market is getting insane, as people are actually capable of amassing assets in excess of $1,000,000 by trading proprietary video game assets.  I keep saying there's got to be a way to securitize a World of Warcraft gold-farmer's revenue, and I think I know the man to do it.  Unfortunately he's too busy working on putting together a business trip to Antarctica to pitch his CDO^3 scheme to naive scientists and crafty penguins.

Netherlands 0 - 0 Romania

I didn't see this game, but by some accounts the Romanians came damn close to beating the Oranje at De Kuip. The Netherlands still have a 3 point lead in Group G, but their current top rivals, Romania and Bulgaria, each have a game in hand. Holland plays tomorrow in Slovenia, and needs a result to be sure they'll hold the lead going into the fall, when they face Bulgaria and Romania directly. It's still pretty early, and this isn't that tough a group for Holland to finish in the top two, but I would think that the cream of the group should exploit the psychological advantage of holding the lead all summer.

Netherlands 11pts +5
Bulgaria 8pts* +4
Romania 8pts* +4
Belarus 7pts -2
Slovenia 4pts* -3

By the way, I have no idea what's going on in Group B, the group of death with France, Italy, and the Ukraine, who are now all trailing Scotland. The Scots go to Bari tomorrow, and this could be the beginning of their return to earth, or they could just slap the Italians across the mouth, and leave the defending world champions 5 points back of France and the Ukraine for second place. Should be fun stuff.

Scotland 12pts +7
France 12pts +10
Ukraine 9pts* +3
Italia 7pts* +2

*-game in hand

NASA v Airbus

NASA is apparently planning to cut a thinktank that deals with formulating the theoretical bases for far-off ideas, like navigating a spacecraft on magnetic fields or solar winds. This is a $4m lab doing long-term research, so it's an insignificant amount of money in terms of the NASA budget, and has no immediate tangible effect (unlike slashing funding for geological satellites). As far as I can tell, space exploration has had three areas of benefit to the American people. First, along with the Olympics the Space Race served as a safer outlet for Cold War nationalist competitiveness, beating the Russians on the moon so we didn't have to beat them here, to borrow a phrase. The second benefit was that meeting the grand challenges meant accomplishing a lot of intermediate challenges, for instance looking for signs of life on Mars required a sensitive, rugged device for detecting water vapor that, once someone actually built one, turned out to be useful in measuring water vapor in Earth's atmosphere, critical to predicting the weather. While this engineering benefit is more practical, and theoretically any challenge will do, it seems to be that it takes something so difficult and novel that the intermediate steps are all greenfield sort of challenges... nobody had ever built a lunar lander before the Apollo program, where if you ask Minnesota to try to fix the Crosstown traffic jam on 35W, you've already got a highway so the most innovative solution considered is to just add a couple lanes. The the third benefit is that nobody knows what will come from general scientific research, or what lies beyond the frontiers once we open them. When the speed of light was first measured precisely, and Sputnik was launched, nobody could claim to be envisioning networks of GPS satellites.

So anyways, some of NASA's current predicament and budget cuts are down to politics, and some of it to focusing on Mars, which should be that kind of grand challenge that requires broad innovation, but there's another cause I think is amusing given the current climate in aerospace manufacturing. NASA built all these space shuttles to serve space stations and carry heavy satellites to orbit, and then spent the next thirty years trying to find somebody with a space station or a heavy satellite. We never built a shuttle-ready space station, and electronics tend to get smaller in a hurry, so it turns out satellites and rockets got small enough that a lot of sites could launch them cheaper. Once we had the thing, everything we did had to be planned around it though, hence the exploration of space turned into carrying up a load of windex and paper towels to the Hubble telescope, and hanging out at Mir once the Wall came down. A lot of money and manpower went into keeping the shuttles flying, and a lot more is earmarked for replacing them, since we haven't been steadily innovating and improving our spacecraft like you'd expect over the course of 30 years (unless you count Armageddon in which case Billy Bob's on the job). This is the opposite of the biggest benefit of space exploration: finding new innovations and solutions, not figuring out how to reuse old the same old technology.

So that was kind of silly, but then the Europeans got in on the game and built its earthbound equivalent: the Airbus A380. The money spent on it has crippled the ability of Airbus to build and launch what their customers are actually asking for (a wide-body with lower operating costs), like NASA has to sink their resources into the shuttle. The A380 doesn't have any airports to land at any more than the space shuttles had a giant space station to dock at, and just like the commercial payloads never materialized, the freight version of the A380 now has zero takers, now that FedEx, UPS, ILFC, and Emirates have all canceled their orders, and nobody knows why Emirates is stocking up so heavily on the passenger version. The last time somebody launched a jumbo jet, the only thing that kept Boeing from going out of business was that the 747 had an unparalleled range for its day, even if you couldn't fill it, and they seemed to learn their lesson since the longest range planes on the market in the next few years will be much smaller 777's and 787's. On the topic of bankruptcy, it has been commented that despite doing a wealth of productive work, if NASA were a private company that didn't have Uncle Sam forgiving their strange wanderings, they'd have gone out of business a long time ago... it remains to be seen if Airbus can right itself without a little help from a funny uncle in Brussels.

Of Green Goats and Blackberry Bankers, a travelogue in seven chapters

Prologue

Every once in a while, I need to get really drunk, stock up on French magazines which I will read very, very slowly, and enjoy some of the juxtapositions of urban life, like a bistro serving quality moules au vin blanc next to a sex shop with glory holes in the peepshow booths. And so I my thoughts eastward to Chicago.

Chapter One: And So it Begins

When I first pondered spending St. Patrick's Day in Chicago, I immediately discovered that my first choice of transportation, the Megabus, once famously described as a “rolling prison”, was nearly fully booked with fellow drunks heading to check out the big green river. Looking at my scant options, I began to question how much fun I'd have on an overnight run from Chicago to Minneapolis on a bus full of hung-over students who'd been wearing the same vomit-covered clothing all weekend. Greyhound takes several scenic detours through the wilds of Wisconsin before meandering it's way into Chicago, and Ice Cube & Dr. Dre and the rest of the good people at Northwest Airlines wanted entirely too much money. Don't even get me started on Amtrak's hideously expensive service from some inaccessible spot in Saint Paul that leaves at bizarre hours to better service potential passengers traveling from Milwaukee to Spokane. So I drove the whole way, amidst surprisingly heavy but eager traffic, with large alpha packs of cars topping 80 mph the whole way, conveniently clearing the speedtraps ahead of me. I made great time... until I hit 290, and everything stopped dead.

Traffic waves rippled through the stalled cars with enough frequency to allow us to dribble forward into the city, bit by bit, but it reminded me of one of the two reasons I hate driving. Virtually every accident I've been in has involved either drunk driver, or more often in heavy, stop-and-go traffic, some guy will be following me too close for a half mile, then when I eventually have to stop quickly I have a full second or two to look in the rear view mirror and think, “He's going to hit me this time.” Seriously, the only person who's hit me without making the same scrunched up “Oh shit!” face was so drunk he drove off without realizing he'd practically ripped a wheel off my car. After a couple minor accidents, and a period of weeks waiting for a tailgater's insurance to figure out that I wasn't going to give up, bang out the dents, drive without tail-lights, and accept the trunk flying up everytime I hit a bump, and leave them alone, I'm sick to fucking death of idiot tailgaters, and it completely stresses me out anticipating another tailgating accident. (You ever notice how people with smashed up front ends are always tailgating somebody? Isn't Darwinism supposed to solve that problem?) So then on the Kennedy, the car full of kids in front of me actually collides with the car in front of them, with a nice audible clunk, which did a lot to enhance my calm as I pictured two guys getting out of their cars to inspect the damage and possibly fight it out, with no way for me to get out of the lane. Next time I'm parking in Elgin and just taking the Metra, FFS.

I also like the Illinois plan to get people to use open road tolling and I-pass: get rid of all the automated coin baskets at the remaining one cash line and make everyone deal with the oldest, slowest cashiers they had on the payroll, so you get stuck behind some guy in a Tesla roadster trying to break a $100 bill with a cashier who dates to when the tolls were 5c and still only keeps nickels in her cash drawer. “$99.05, $99.10, $99.15, $99.20. Have a nice day sir, and enjoy your stay in the Land of Lincoln. That's right, we're #1, sir.” Next time I'm paying in pennies, and fuck you. That's what you get for trying to bully me into paying $50 for an I-pass for my one trip a year down I-90.

Chapter Two: Tale of the Goat, pt I

I had a particularly goat-laden St. Patrick's Day, for better or for worse. You could tell it was going to be a wild day when it was only noon, and a trolley full of already heavily intoxicated people started throwing green beads at our all-male group. (Although we are a devastatingly sexy bunch.) After skipping across the green river (apologies to CCR) we stopped for a bite in Billy Goat's. Personally, I had no idea that the “cheeseborger cheeseborger cheeseborger” place from SNL was a real place, but apparently it is, and it's conveniently located on Michigan Ave by the Tribune building. Well, not so much on Michigan Ave as under it on the lower level of the street. You've got to love a place that's so much of a dive that it's not only located on a subterranean street, but it's below street level on that street as well... walking down the stairs I was expecting to see the King of the Mole People behind the grill. It's easy enough to know you're in the right place, because the whole cave it's located in smells like their greasy cheeseborgers. I also have to compliment any restaurant with the balls to name itself for an animal that wandered in the door, just to taunt the health inspector. Although the same goat did lay a hex on the Chicago Cubs, so I guess they were smart not to wonder what a goat was doing loose in the city and throw him out. It does make me wonder how many of the Mexican places named Cucaracha applied a similar principle. When I open a restaurant, I think I'll call it the Ravenous Escaped Circus Lion, that should keep the dine-and-ditch crowd on their toes.

Our merry band spent the rest of the afternoon at a place whose name escapes me, probably because I only heard it referred to as “The Creepy Gay Bar”, which certainly turned out to be on the nose. I don't recall ever being that hammered that early in the day (but I do remember trying to justify it by figuring it was five o'clock in Iceland) and that may have colored my perceptions of the rest of the afternoon. It was at TCGB that we met the Sultry Sisters, two fine, upstanding yet hard-drinking women of Reubensian proportions, one of whom was wearing a “Shake your Shamrocks” t-shirt and a brown thong so small it was poised to snap off and go flying across the room every time she shook her shamrocks, which was often. After downing a lot of Irish car bombs and stirring green dye into everybody's drinks with their stinky pinkies, they seemed to set their sights on the two people least likely to go home with them, got ditched by their group, and left in tears, but fortunately it was only 5 o'clock, so I guess they had time to regroup. I knew it would end badly when they started taking pictures and demanding more sultry poses (hence the name), so I slipped into a couple of their group photos with a big grin so that a week from now they'll look at them and wonder “Who the fuck is that?” Also noteworthy, the guy in that group who knew PJ for an hour before confiding to me, “That guy's so bi-curious I can't stand it.” A strange place... hand towels located over the bathroom door like some dirty secret, and a long wait for a drink because they run out of glassware and you have to wait for somebody to finish theirs. Seriously, I spent so much time waiting for my frisky witch (that's a drink, not a Sultry Sister) I could have gone to Crate & Barrel and bought them another set of shot glasses to complement the eight dirty ones they had floating around the room.

Chapter Three: Don't you wish your girlfriend was an actuary like me?

I remember a very blurry, spinny Mexican restaurant with some decent crab cakes, but seriously, after drinking vodka and sambuca all afternoon at the Creepy Gay Bar, dinner is really just a big swirling blur. My inebration was to come to a sudden halt, as on a lark, we hit the most depressing strip club experience, and that includes the dirty, sticky East Dubuque scene with pimply, pot-bellied trailer trash shuffling around in their worn underwear. I understand keeping things clean to keep your liquor license, but these girls went a bit too far. Much as I love the fine products of the 3M corporation, the giant swath of scotch tape over their nipples was a little more creepy than erotic, like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs was back in the dressing room shouting “It puts the tape on it's skin!” It's also been a while since I saw a woman in big ol' granny drawers pout sexily... actually I've never seen that. The real attraction was the girls on the other side of the stage, who fully clothed were more interesting, flopping out on the stage with dollar bills. Until they came over and spoke to us. One was a little too interested in the professional details of one of our group (a distant coworker), and trying to look him up on her blackberry so she could send emails through the corporate network with the subject “Hey, I'm the girl from the strip club!” With those networking skills, this is definitely a person who's going to climb far up the corporate ladder. When she asked repeatedly, “Who's your boss?” I think the answer I was waiting to hear was “Tony Danza, now fuck off.” Christ, was she going to call our mothers next?

The real buzzkill was French-Canadian actuary. Do you know what that is? Because she's convinced that it's a great mystery which drunk men at a strip club would like it explained to them in detail. She single-handedly took me from happily smashed to hung-over, and that was just watching her bore other people, since she could tell from one look I was obviously beneath the mystery of the actuarial sciences. I tried hinting to her that her friend should put her crackberry away and drop the subject of work since the two of them didn't quite pick up on the obvious awkwardness, but apparently I didn't phrase it in the form of a risk-management equation so she didn't quite get where I was heading with that. The only one who was interesting was their pimp, who came over to make sure they were keeping in line, and confessed to losing control of them from time to time, like when crackberry was flopped on her back on stage waving singles. Pimp-girl was alright, and the only mathematical science and humanities cross-over I've ever met besides myself, and actually had real shit to talk about besides “Who's your boss and how do I contact your office, dirty boy?” By the way, pimp was her choice of words, not mine. Well, okay I was the one who called her pimp-girl, but I said it to her face when I noted that she was their pimp and she cheerfully agreed. When my associates made a dash from the creeping claws of the Canadian actuary, pimp-girl apologized to me for the fact that her friends had apparently bored mine so much that I had to leave. I miss pimp-girl, she was like the only normal person I met all day. Okay, so I met her pimping financial sector workers in a granny-drawer strip club, not too normal, but she's about the only person I met all day who didn't say something so stupid as to have me wondering what the fuck spaceship she climbed out of to get there, like casting Stockton, California (pop 300K) as a grand metropolis and world city.

Chapter Four: Tale of the Goat, pt. II

With visions of actuaries and sugar-pimp fairies dancing in our heads, I followed my confederates as they exited the club and bolted down the sidewalk, presumably to make sure we weren't followed, for instance by an trench-coat clad actuary holding a boom-box over her head blasting Celine Dion. From the club we hit a party with an african theme, serving west african food, and some sort of fiery wine that instantly restored my alcohol buzz from the French-Canadian snow drift that actuary buried it under. Seriously that stuff was still burning my throat ten minutes after I drank it. As an uninvited tag-along guest, I figured I'd break the ice and show some respect to the nice people whose party I was crashing by enthusiastically exploring their exotic spread of food. One largely undisturbed dish was full of goat meat, so I dug in figuring that getting myself a heaping pile of goat would show sufficient polite interest in their culinary theme for the whole posse, and apparently the goat wasn't circulating too fast amongst the other party-goers either. It wasn't bad, although the spongy and tasteless yams could have used some sauce or something. Oddly, our hosts said they suspected their Nigerian grocer substituted potatoes for their yams, which was appropriate for St. Patrick's Day, but speaking as a proud Irish-American and de facto potato expert, if those weren't yams I don't know what the fuck those Nigerians did to those potatoes. I polished off my rice and goat, but that giant yam was a beast. This is the party where I learned Stockton (California's 13^th largest city) is a major metropolis on the order of San Francisco. Nice view of the city from the balcony, a fine preparation of goat meat, and people who say weird things when they're drunk, definitely a recipe for a great party.

The only problem with getting hammered at noon is you want to go home and crawl into bed way too early, so it ended up being an early night, strolling back to the welcoming environs of the Marshall Field Homes. Okay, they aren't so welcoming, and it's more of a good block, bad block situation, but there's a lot of good blocks. Not so good, the guy who leaves a cut-out of John Cusack in his van window to startle passers-by. That had me treading suspiciously towards every corner expecting John Cusack to leap out with a boombox over his head... I know that movie wasn't even set in Chicago, but after his adaptation of High Fidelity, I keep picturing John Cusack wandering around Chicago voicing his inner monologue to vacant point in space. Although that may have been the goat talking, since I was up half that night sweating and disoriented... that fucking goat was kicking, man, it was kicking. Now I know why my vegetarian ex-girlfriend was so smug about it: no Billy Goat, and no dealing with shady Nigerian goat meat merchants. Not me, though... I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more goat.

Chapter Five: These are a few of my favorite things

Fortunately my entire trip wasn't taken up by sambuca and goat fever dreams, and I did manage to hit some slightly more intellectually stimulating places besides the sociological experiment that was the Creepy Gay Bar. Saturday morning, PJ and I took a trip down to the south side, to check out the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. I discovered a couple interesting facts that morning, such as the fact that if you're going to head through a rougher part of town like pretty much everything that surrounds Hyde Park, do it in the morning, because as it turns out, the crackies, the bangers, and snap, crackle, and pop and whoever the rest of the shitheads are who bring the sketchy neighborhoods to life don't get up that early. I also learned something when I ordered some eggs sunny side up at a diner, and got a box labeled “Sunni”, specifically I wouldn't have expected Sunni style eggs to be served with bacon, but apparently in Hyde Park they aren't that observant.

On the more intellectual side, the Museum of Science and Industry turned out to be one of those places that I would have thought was the greatest place on earth when I was eight years old. It's not so bad now, and there's a pretty impressive collection of history and science on display. The captured U-Boat on display I'm sure would have been fascinating had they let me go into it, unfortunately I wasn't too into waiting four hours for a tour. Also on display was Bodyworks, which is fascinating yet also astoundingly creepy. I could have done without the high school tour groups snickering at the penises and blushing and fidgeting at the sight of the splayed vulvae, but it does work as a basic test of maturity and intelligence, judging by the dolt repeatedly asking his girlfriend if various things were “Like, you know, real”, since he apparently missed the entire premise of the exhibit.

I also discovered a fine Chicago museum that I've never been to before, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, tucked into Columbia College. The main exhibit in the first floor gallery was titled “Sex and Food”, both of which (along with football and film) near the top my list of my favorite things. That was a memorial to Robert Heinecken, who did some pretty fascinating stuff, piecing together images from magazines and other media to create new images. One whole wall was an actual professional guide to posing and shooting models, with illustrative polaroids, which in that context, became quite unnerving in its lack of human empathy and strict, cold rules of presentation in creating a single, consistent image of women, all in pursuit of the one true way to sell underwear. When shooting a woman in a sexy french maid outfit, there are apparently strict rules as to where she can put her hands to be sufficiently naughty but not sexual, and she has to stand in front of a mirror. Period.

Other works that I found really engaging were this landscape composed of blown up film frames of the profile of a reclining woman's body, mixing and matching and repeating parts of her body as necessary to create a continuous landscape. And also a whole wall of Heinecken's magazine excerpts in which he creates shots of women in lingerie, only the lingerie is cut outs of other images of naked women. So a woman is doing a very coy, catalog pose wearing a tastefully cut negligee, only it appears to have a print on it of another woman's breasts and vagina, with wandering hands visible on the negligee-woman's body. One was striking in that the implied print of her nightgown was a man's body, with a woman's arms around his waist and her head firmly held to his groin in a very dominant act of fellatio. That's what keeps these models modestly covered, these provocative shots of other women's bodies... when you're looking at breasts that aren't hers, that poses questions about the whole eroticism of the experience and who I'm really looking at. But that may have just been me. There's also a twinge of Silence of the Lambs to these shots of women symbolically wearing other women's bodies... there are a lot of provocative subcurrents in these photographs.

The second floor featured these large, beautiful prints of rooms from Japanese love hotels, rooms constructed around creating a space to explore or indulge a particular sexual fetish. Each one was photographed without any human presence, just an empty space with strange fixtures fitting the theme, like tiled walls and a sterile examination table, a carousel with pictures of smiling children painted on the wall, or even creepier the Hello Kitty room, with the ubiquitous restraints. The final gallery had a similar focus on erotically charged empty space, showing huge blown-up shots from Larry Sultan's Valley collection, a series of photographs of houses in the San Fernando Valley that were being used to film porn movies, but focusing on the space around the actual production. A few images have wild, fantastic, pornographic sex going on, just barely caught in the frame of an architectural study of a fireplace with a rough stone chimney climbing up the wall. Other shots capture some of the performers just in this lavish house, naked and waiting, half asleep, curlers on their hair. All of them were just beautiful exposures of these homes, and removing the normal residents to replace them with the manufactured sexual energy of porn stars, gives each home an eerie alien sharpness, like an archaeological dig of the ancient home of the porn stars. Very strange, but exquisitely beautiful photography.

I also found later that afternoon how bored to tears I am with the Chicago Art Institute. I didn't really dig too deep, popping in on a lark, so it's a bit unfair, but I can only look at so much Chinese pottery. There are fifty rooms of European paintings, but there's that problem with American museums and European art where they only get the stuff that somebody managed to smuggle out in a balloon, or in the case of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, a shitload of Courbet that they must have come by when during the many years the frogs were still pissing on him, before they gave him his due. The rooms full of various assorted paintings all strike me a bit like in Futurama when Dr. Zoidberg goes to a gallery, plunks down some cash, and says “One art, please!” There is some great stuff in the Art Institute, like some Magritte and Delvaux they hide away in a corner, although some of it seems to have been removed since I was last there. It's probably just me, but I wish for instance some of the stuff tucked away in corners and hallways got a little better presentation, like put the art deco building exteriors into a room where you can linger over them, not in a hallway, because that's something that the museum could really do better than anybody else. There's art everywhere, but it's all just kind of there, like “Here's your art, now fuck off.” On the other hand, I may have just been in a bad mood when I got there, and there was a special exhibition featuring Cezanne and Picasso, and I wasn't paying more money for #&%$'ing Picasso.

The Museum of Contemporary Art may be the most uneven museum I've ever seen, because in the two times I've been there, they've had something really cool and then some godawful installation on the whole first floor. The last time there was this dominating, dinosaur-sized skeleton in the atrium, towering over me, but of this completely alien animal, looking nothing like the bones of any dinosaur I was familiar with. It turned out to be the skeleton of a housecat, reproduced on a massive, terrifying scale. That was pretty fascinating to look at that, but then the whole first floor had these dark rooms with dark, charcoal drawing animated films of houses turning into coffins or something like that, just bizarre. This time the first floor had all these giant, wall-sized pieces of styrofoam with foot sized holes gouged in them, and this carpeted wall with scratches in the carpet. I have no idea what that was about, but there was an exhibition on the top floor of the history of photography with examples of a few different people's work, and a fair bit of that was pretty striking. I'm glad I found out there was a top floor this time.

Chapter Six: "One day you'll realize there's more to life than culture... there's dirt and smoke and good honest sweat!!"

Museums aside, I discovered a couple other things about Chicago on Tuesday, like that it is definitely one motherfucking windy-ass city. That day the sun was shining and it was warm out on the sunny side of the street, too hot to bundle up for the usual midwestern March weather. This was great until I hit Wells on my way to Noogie's and this icy draft was careening down the street turning me into a frostbitten Marcel Marceau. The weird thing it was just on Wells, not on any other north-south street. There was another weird icy wind blowing off the lake down Chicago Ave, again, just on Chicago, not on any other street. I also thought I should check out Argyle St., which a guidebook assured me was good for about half an hour of window shopping or sitting down for some noodles. I think they may even be overselling it at half an hour, on a neighborhood that extends for about a block each side of the pagoda that sits atop of the Argyle el station. Argyle does have this odd character of being the shadowy reflection of Chinatown on the other end of the red line, composed of several Asian subcultures (Vietnamese, Thai, et al) united all being sick to death of explaining that they're not Chinese. And thanks to Argyle, at least somewhere in Chicago there's doctor's office, pharmacy, and video rentals, and a florist all located in the same storefront. All they're missing is tanning booths and a dermatological oncologist. I like how that street also has the “gunshots fired, shit going down” blue lights flashing in the middle of the day, always a sign of high class.

I have to give some props to a couple fine Chicago eateries, first off Noogies-*, which makes a fine swiss and mushroom omelette, with some really great fresh fruit and fresh squeezed, pulpy orange juice. However they only take cash, so those who only ever carry the currency of countries they're not in will go hungry. (They did think to put an ATM in the doorway, for anyone who uses modern electronic banking and doesn't keep their money in the form of Nazi gold hidden under their mattress.) Then there's Ping Pong, a good Thai restaurant with some nice dishes to share, and some nice ginger beef that I planned on sharing with nobody. Screw the people I'm eating with, that's why I ordered soup as an appetizer: nobody else can swipe some with their chopsticks and deny me my gluttony. To get quicker service from the ladyboys who serve as waitstaff (seriously, our waiter was pre-op and proud of it) I recommend wearing a flamboyant orange scarf of some sort. It was worth the wait, especially when they started projecting Kung Fu Hustle on the wall. A curious advantage of foreign films in a noisy restaurant: I can't understand the Cantonese dialogue anyways, and the subtitles don't make me strain to hear the soundtrack and feel like I've gone deaf the way closed captioning does.

Chapter Seven: John Carpenter's Escape from Oldtown

After a few days of sweating out goat meat and generally stinking up my friends' guest bedroom, they finally managed to shuffle me out the door, muttering under their breath “Did you lock the back door so he can't sneak back in?” It was then that my troubles really began. After dropping my hosts of at their respective banks (“Seriously, before I get out, did you leave anything behind? Because we'll mail it to you, just for god's sake please don't eat another plate of goat and show up at our apartment.”) and bidding adieu to the Pecuniary Pair (as they will now be known unless I think of an even dumber alliterative nickname) I set sail for home.

This should have been easy enough, except I'm a total idiot with no sense of direction who frequently spaces out while walking and driving and then wonders where the hell I am. The top of my list of electronics should definitely be a GPS unit with an increasingly aggressive voice telling me “Turn around, you... stupid... moron.” So instead of getting right on I-90 in downtown Chicago, I took a scenic detour to the west side. After I passed the United Center, it was several minutes before a nagging voice in the back of my head was able to interrupt my reminiscence of the Chicago Bulls of the late 1990's... seriously, what happened to all their role-players after Jordan retired? I know Bison Dele got murdered, Steve Kerr went to San Antonio, Luc Longley made the clever decision to sign with a team running a full-court offense he couldn't keep up with, but guys like Jason Caffey were never heard from again. Seriously, that was a big stable of guys from this dominant organization with championship experience, and then not even Rodman or Pippen could carve out another niche anywhere. So you see how I could get a ways past the United Center before it occurred to me that I was way, way, way out on the west side and the highway I was looking for was pretty obviously way, way back downtown, and I'd driven right over an interstate without noticing it. Actually that was probably good, because it gave the rush hour traffic another hour to clear, so it only took another 40 minutes to get past O'Hare. The blue line with its frequent stops, 15mph and 6mph (?!) zones still blows by traffic, incredibly.

The trip down featured bright sunshine, dry pavement, and a lot of speeders anxious to get down to the big city and get their drink on, the trip back a growing downpour and enough rain and gloom to make me miss at least one toll. Another benefit of open road tolling and putting the signs 30 feet before the toll, it's easy to accidentally blow past a toll and not see you have to get over to pay until it's too late to do it without risking a catastrophic pile-up, all so Chief Illiniwek can collect his 80 cents. (I know the Chief doesn't exist anymore, but it's easier to spell than Governor Blagojevich.) I wondered if they'd really ever get me unless I got pulled over in Illinois for some other violation while driving the same car, not likely given the fact that I'm actively looking to avoid driving the whole way in again. But I'd like to think of myself as an honest soul, and I don't want guilt and apprehension looming over me because of an eighty cent debt. So I tried to pay it online, which requires that I tell them exactly which toll it was... short of driving 400 miles back and taking a picture, I have no clue what the toll plaza was, and helpfully, the toll website itself notes that due to open road tolling construction, their own maps are out of date and do not necessarily show the actual existing toll plazas. I decided to take a guess and hope they have the requisite imagination to put together that a car with MN license plate GOA-TSE (not my actual license plate) skipped the Heavenly Hills toll plaza and somebody with the license plate GOA-TSE paid a toll online for the Melifluous Meadows toll plaza, and don't send John Cusack to my door with a badge and a boombox over his head playing “Fulsom Prison Blues”. Seriously, if I went to the trouble of paying 80 fucking cents online and Illinois still somehow got after me over that missed toll, I'd go on such a furious rampage they'd have to wheel me into Joliet wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask.

Deep into Wisconsin comes that point for a Minnesotan where you know you're getting close to home sweet home, because everybody forgets how to fucking drive. People switch off the cruise control and start creeping into your blind spots, accelerating and decelerating at random, camping out in the left lane and making everyone duck between semis in the right lane to get around them, and you think, “God I haven't missed these idiots at all.” I love Minnesota, but my god we're shitty drivers (I include yours truly Mr. Scenic Detour Past the United Center in that statement as well). But then, in the rain, the fog on the St. Croix river rose high enough to cover the bridge as I came over the hill into the St. Croix valley, which was a pretty cool sight, and it didn't seem so bad. Until some idiot tailgating me in the middle lane tried to pass me on the right, and nearly plowed into a semi trying to squirt through the rapidly closing gap between us, before zagging back behind me into the far left lane that was MOVING FASTER THE WHOLE TIME. Any moments of serenity I seem to enjoy are tragically shortlived.

Epilogue

All in all, I had a great weekend in Chicago, relaxing and revitalizing, and I am deeply indebted to my gracious hosts, who were actually still far too polite to irritably shove me out the door after a few days. I sampled goat meat, and will continue to tend towards lamb when dining on caprinae. The Museum of Contemporary Photography I think should join Europa Books as a requisite stop on every future Chicago trip, just like how you can't use Phil's hot tub without streaking the Muffaletta. But I will not buy a #$@&'ing I-Pass!!

To an Oldtown condo

Garbage in the street
slums face off against high class
dog poop at my feet

strange hoodlums I meet
lurking bandits kick my ass
garbage in the street

tea drinking elite
behind sunlit panes of glass
dog poop at my feet

travellers find seats
as skyward trains rattling pass
garbage in the street

midwest summer heat
drifting bursts of sewer gas
dog poop at my feet

airy, light and neat
interior you can't surpass
garbage in the street
dog poop at my feet

New Mexico and the Poor Man's Galileo

The New Mexico state legislature is voting on a resolution to officially recognize Pluto a planet. I really don't get why there needs to be an official state policy regarding the nomenclature trans-Neptunian objects, even if the underlying aim is more or less harmless fluff: the astronomer who discovered Pluto was from New Mexico, and they don't want to see his achievement diminished. The only reason it annoys me is the government found scientific consensus inconvenient, so they changed it. When scientists are thumbing through thesauruses to avoid using the word "evolve" in any context for fear of losing federal grants, having a state-by-state astronomy policy really doesn't feel right. Though it has long-since been supplanted by biology in this regard, astronomy was the original test case in the West for whether science was allowed to disrupt our world-view, and furthermore, this just plays into the mentality that says we have to hold back information in schools lest kids contradict their parents with new information.

But really, I just want to know what the Galileo of Michigan Avenue has to say about all this. The GoMA was a woman I saw taking an ungodly amount of time in the rarely open Verizon store on Michigan Ave, because she needed a lot of help choosing a phone. Which would be fine, except she only had a choice between two virtually identical phones: one was smaller, but the other one while larger was somewhat more durable. To understand this crucial difference, Galileo jr. posed the sales staff with a hypothetical experiment in which she would simultaneously drop both phones from the same height, and wanted their speculation on the results of said experiment. This is about when the sales staff scolded me for impatiently rolling my eyes and chuckling. I found that unfair because I was only impatiently eavesdropping on this meeting of the Royal Society due to the only other staff member being occupied transferring somebody's contacts to a new phone, a process that took a long time because he was trying to slip his own number in and hopefully get some, and obviously trying to memorize all the numbers attached to girl's names as a back-up plan.

Personally, I don't know why they didn't just send Galileo across the street to the Wrigley building with both phones. And run her a hot bath from which to announce her discovery... okay, that would actually be the Archimedes of Michigan Ave, and probably more of a fond remembrance of the days back in Boston when I used to regularly bathe with a lithe scientist. You know, maybe Archimedes is why religious conservatives hate science and I love smart women, we're both haunted by the image of a hysterical, soapy scientist running through the streets of Santa Fe slippery and nude with nothing to cover themselves but a vacuum cleaner. (Does that sound right? I know there's a vacuum cleaner somewhere in that story.)

Bayern Munich 2 - 1 Real Madrid

I have to say, it's always fun to watch big marketing creations like Real Madrid crumble. The Galacticos have all moved on except the tiresome and over-rated Raul and Roberto Carlos, and in the absense of Fabio Cannavaro, I had to wonder if anybody knew how to play defense on this team today. On countless counter-attacks, Bayern strikers kept catching Madrid defenders napping, way too far upfield and not picking up anybody. With miles of space and the speed to exploit it, Bayern was getting some nasty chances. The Madrid defenders kept lamely asserting that anybody who got past them was offside, but when you play up at the halfway line, you're not getting the offside trap called. Iker Casillas had a nice game in goal, otherwise Madrid would have been even more boned.

Bayern's first goal was classic. Raul received the opening kick and passed it to Roberto Carlos who got a bad touch and had the ball dribble over his foot and past him. Roberto Carlos turned around just in time to see Hasan Salihamidžić scoop the ball up as he blew past him. Roberto Carlos couldn't catch him, nobody was awake for Madrid to close him down, and Salihamidžić got off a cross into the box for Roy Makaay, who was also out ahead of huffing and puffing Madrid defenders. Makaay scored with 11 seconds on the clock, a Champions League record.

Munich increased their lead in the second half when Willie Sagnol found Lucio on a corner kick, to make it 2-0. Munich really continued to look dominant, until the last ten minutes, when Cassano and Robinho came up with the idea of flopping their way to the quarterfinals. Robinho did a Superman dive over an outstretched leg to win a penalty, which Ruud van Kneestillsore converted perfectly, putting it safely inside the right post with enough power and enough of a curve on it that Oliver Kahn had no chance to get to it.

Madrid almost tied it up again with more cheating, as Guti put a long pass to the edge of the Munich box, and a heavily marked Sergio Ramos headed it over to Raul, who used his prehensile stomach to trap it and bring it down for a beautiful finish rocketed into the corner of the net. Well, that's what he wanted us to think, actually he trapped it with his arm, not his stomach, so no goal. In the final scuffles to try and get something going for Madrid, Van Bommel and Diarra got sent off, so the game finished 10 on 10, however ESPN ran long and my tivo cut off the end of the game. Which is odd, because it was tape-delayed, so I don't know how they could have unexpectedly run long, especially with a 15 minute introduction that could have easily been cut down.

The 2-1 victory is added to the previous result from the Bernabeu, 3-2 in Madrid's favor, so the two teams tied on aggregate 4-4, but Bayern wins 2-1 on away goals, and go on to face Milan in the quarterfinals. The last minute goal by Van Bommel in Madrid did prove critical, and if Madrid had held their 3-1 lead, they'd be in the quarterfinals.

Also not in the the quarterfinals are Arsenal, who lost to PSV. For the first in a decade Arsenal won't be competing for a trophy in the spring. PSV go on to face Liverpool, who upset cup holders Barcelona. Manchester United faces Roma, and Chelsea will play Valencia. I will keep my loyal yet totally uninterested readership apprised of any further developments.

Of Bats and Kats

Filming is due to begin on the next Batman film, and everybody from Batman Begins is returning, Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, Michael Caine as Alfred, Gary Oldman as Ben Gordon, everybody but Katie Holmes. They're not just writing her character out, which would have been easy enough, instead they're recasting the part with Maggie Gyllenhaal, cutting Katie Holmes out of ever appearing again in a billion dollar franchise.

This is interesting, given the rumors that TomKat was a marketing creation, where Tom Cruise would squash rumors he was gay and appear more wholesome and less like he'd stepped out of an X-Files episode with a pitcher of kool-aid. Of course, they never quite pulled it off, and Katie talking about her marriage like a celebrity prom date ("Wow, I like totally had a crush on him back when Top Gun came out... then I turned 8 that winter. So being married to Tom Cruise is like, so cool... er, isn't it?"), coupled with her parents growing and public horror, kind of made it backfire, and gave way too much material to anybody with a sarcasm bone (Free Katie!). Not leaving the house for months or being seen by anyone after her baby was born got really creepy as well, especially when her husband was out railing against the medical establishment and post-partem depression in particular. If she doesn't make another movie, I'd check the flower beds for fresh dirt.

Tom Cruise manage to blow whatever positive publicity Katie was supposed to get out of the deal, and is allegedly the reason she's been replaced in The Dark Knight. One reason is indirect, since the producers of Batman Begins apparently didn't appreciate having their advertising campaign overshadowed by her moonbat wedding. But the other reason is Tom has supposedly nixed Katie appearing in any love scenes with Christian Bale, and I certainly can't blame him feeling threatened. One thing about Christian Bale, his creepiest role was in American Psycho playing a 1980's serial killer who can barely hold it together and keep from killing people in public places, and the flustered and insane smile his 80's pop obsessed homicidal maniac character gets at those moments is basically 80's icon Tom Cruise's default public expression. When people cross him (like the guys who squirted him with water from a fake microphone) the wild-eyed grin becomes even larger. I would seriously worry that after spending so much time with the charming Christian Bale-* Katie would watch some of his movies, and wonder why that character seemed so familiar. Then she'd go home and find Tom had painted all the walls white and was listening to Huey Lewis & the News. Given Katie's decline, it looks like Michelle Williams will remain the only cast member to survive Dawson's Creek... perhaps literally.

*-Multiple ex-girlfriends have noted their opinion that I'm entirely too enamored with Christian Bale, generally in a jealous, catty sort of way. I myself must note that while they've all gone, I still have Batman Begins, Equilibrium, and Metroland to enjoy, and that scene of a young Ewan McGregor and Christian Bale frolicking naked in a fountain in Velvet Goldmine will remain preserved for eternity on film. That is quite a film for images of male actors... even after Bend it Like Beckham, Mission Impossible 3, and Match Point, every time I see Jonathan Rhys Meyers I still picture him in Velvet Goldmine snorting cocaine off a naked woman's back while making bitter philosophical pronouncements on gender to his estranged wife.

Studying Geography, sort of

Recently, I decided to further my education by expanding my knowledge of geography and climatology. I figured I'd pick up where I left off back in school, and start by playing Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?, which jogged my memory on a few things. One is that putting punctuation in a title is just stupid. I was also reminded of how well the early games that are only a few kilobytes still hold up in terms of actual game play, like they perfected the maze game in Pac-Man, and any improvement was just distracting from the purity of the original. But it was also good to learn a few things from Carmen San Diego about the geography of the Soviet Union, the importance of hitting the bank to change your currency before traveling from say Paris to Rome, and to learn a ridiculous amount about Comoros, which is a destination in about every god damned game. I was also interested to find that Carmen San Diego's organization V.I.L.E. has a significant presence in Iraq, and her henchmen always seem to pass through Baghdad after a heist. That got me anticipating News Corp releasing Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, where kids can learn about geography by deciphering clues about Osama bin Laden's travels they glean from interviewing people in various cities he's been to. Something like this:

Bank Teller:
He said something about visiting a stable democracy to congratulate the liberators. (Go to Baghdad)

Imam:
He left in a plane with a hammer and sickle flag on the wing. (Go to Nantucket Island)

People's Commissar Ted Kennedy:
All I know is he was looking forward to a free and fair election with no voting irregularities. (Go to Miami)

Then I thought I'd watch An Inconvenient Truth, and see what Al Gore's been up to for the last few years. Al Gore is surprisingly engaging, in a way he hasn't been since the night he took Ross Perot to school over NAFTA. He couldn't have done more to finish Ross Perot if he'd shoved his head in a bucket. It's also interesting to find that Al Gore, like President Bush, has an orthographical blind spot, and can't quite figure out how the word “arctic” is pronounced. Where President Bush adds extra vowels to nuclear, Gore will not suffer an inconvenient consonant, and has to just say “ardic” and hope nobody notices. Personally I think that warming up the oceans enough to cause a hurricane in the South Atlantic a good thing. A system of ocean currents that made it impossible for a hurricane to hit Florida but not Angola or Argentina was not equitable, and I think climate change should be Fair and Balanced. Glaciers melting in South America? Take your ski vacation in Colorado and quit whining about drinking water.

You can cut that man's brain out, but don't you dare feed that baby, lady!

Here's something I really can't understand. A few years ago there was a remake of 13 Ghosts, cleverly titled Thir13en Ghosts in some sort of homage to 1337 5p34k, starring Tony Shalhoub, Matthew Lillard, and Antonio Salieri. Since nobody I know will have seen it (nor should they) I'll give a brief synopsis: Tony Shalhoub loses his wife, their home, and all his worldly possessions in a fire, and is barely holding his family together when his rich eccentric uncle (Antonio Salieri) dies and leaves him a weird glass house to live in. Unfortunately, his uncle and drooling psychic Matthew Lillard trapped 12 pissed off ghosts in the house, who by both the nature of their lives and their violent deaths, form the Black Zodiac, and there's a nefarious purpose to gathering all these people, living and dead, in the house. There are twelve poetic names for each of the roles these ghosts fill, and each one has a horrifying appearance and funky back story, but my confusion centers around one, The Angry Princess.

The ghost is that of a beautiful young woman who was obsessed with fixing imaginary physical flaws, and addicted to cosmetic surgery. After disfiguring herself in one of her surgeries, she commits suicide in a bathtub by repeatedly slashing herself with a butcher knife. It's pretty horrific, and her ghost is that same disfigured corpse straight out of the tub, completely naked and covered in open slash wounds, carrying a huge knife. She has a long scene in a bathroom with Shannon Elizabeth (who is unable to see her) in which the Angry Princess keeps lurking naked and bloody around a blood-spattered bathroom, eventually reclining in a bathtub full of bloody water, with a message written on the floor in her own blood.

More graphic is one of her first appearances in the film is when she is first released and stalks this suit down a hallway to kill him. He backs away from this buck naked, slowly advancing woman with a knife until he walks into a doorway and a pair of sliding glass doors close on him, cutting him in half, and then she watches as the front half of his body slides down the glass, leaving a bloody exposed cross-section of his brain and eye sockets stuck to the other side of the glass. It's okay, because we knew he was evil when he showed up in a suit, and he did release the ghosts and tauntingly say “Nice tits” to the naked ghost. Never comment on a ghost's breasts, you know that's not going anywhere good.

My confusion is this: when I recently caught the film again on television, I assumed some things surrounding the Angry Princess would be cut down a bit, but as far as I could tell, there were only two. In the edited for television version, the Angry Princess has no nipples. Particularly, the guy getting cut in half is there in all its glory, quivering gray brain and all, just the nipples are gone. They weren't blurred, the shots weren't carefully cropped to avoid showing anything, and her naked breasts were still on full display, this woman just didn't have any nipples. It was possible because the actress is wearing a latex suit to simulate her character's cut-up body, and so they shot one with and one without nipples. This is very confusing because basically everybody I've ever seen naked has actually had nipples. Even I have nipples, I'm not ashamed to admit it. And she's seriously still naked, so this implies that some exec believes there is an audience out there who would have a serious problem with a naked woman appearing in the film, but wouldn't notice she was naked if they didn't actually see her nipples. Has nudity become that specialized?

Her character is already highly sexual and shown clearly naked, so there's still the same amount of sexualized violence, which is the only logical reason to allow violence but shy away from nudity. The only real change is that now the audience is reassured that white she may be naked and bloody, we can all relax because she will not be nursing any infants during the course of the film. Which is good, because that would actually be pretty disturbing. But seriously, if you're too young or sensitive for nipples, the rest of this film should have been too much for you as well. I think it was Roger Ebert who said that with an R rating you can show a breast, but the only thing you're allowed to touch it with is a chainsaw. It's really disturbing how that puritanical instinct is so increasingly divorced from reflection, and born out of the momentary emotional, visual stimulus, where the context isn't seen, even the woman isn't seen, only the nipple is seen, and oh god why is there a nipple on TV??? Morality through emotional response has always been with us, justifying lynchings because it certainly feels like there's a rapist on the loose when you light up the torches, the fascist motto of thinking with one's blood, or diagnosing a coma patient from a videotape and doing what feels right, but this is just bizarre. Within the context of the film, the logical implication is that this woman has removed her own nipples as part of her beautification, and good lord is that more disturbing than leaving them on would have been. Seriously, if you take away the nipples this becomes family entertainment for a family not named Borgia?

You may wonder whether this really does any harm and why I'm so irritated by two missing nipples that I've already seen in the unedited version, but I have to wonder what this does to the target audience's sense of what a woman's body is, because of some of the particulars of this character. She's supposed to be somebody whose unhealthy self-image drove her to disfigure her own body, so she has these exaggerated features like giant duck bill lips and fake breasts, and now no nipples, but that's the only naked woman being shown on basic cable. I still can never quite get my head around the fact that all the women I've been with were so distinct from each other, that even years later I'd have no trouble identifying them all from the neck down in a line-up, yet whenever there's more marketing than art involved, the women all look the same, whether it's selling lap dances or women's running shoes, which are theoretically different markets.

It's also irritating because it happens in more serious films than this. Thir13en Ghosts is already silly before the nipples come off, but the last time I caught The Shining on television, it just reinforced how much the audience needed to grow up. When Jack enters Room 237, a naked woman gets out of the bathtub and embraces him. While kissing her he sees in the mirror that her body has turned into an old rotting corpse, his arousal turns to revulsion, and he flees the scene in horror. It's a disturbing scene, manipulating sexual arousal and fear, and there's no way anybody who's uncomfortable with a naked woman should be comfortable with anything in that scene or a lot of the rest of that film. The pixelated bars across her body do puncture the directness of it sexuality, and the growing dread that permeates the scene and the film, like a paternalistic hand on the shoulder trying to remind you that you aren't supposed to want to look, even when Kubrick actually went out and shot that scene for a reason. One of my other favorites I've seen on TV is not a horror film, but is definitely a film nobody without an adult sense of their own sexuality should see, because it's got such very challenging and unhealthy images of sex in it. I saw Breaking the Waves was on Lifetime or Oxygen or one of the estrogen-supplement networks, but blurred out big swaths of Emily Watson. She spends half of that movie looking for strangers to have sex with so she can describe it to her immobilized husband, and is severely beaten and raped a couple times as a result. The early scene of her getting blood on her wedding dress having sex with her husband in the bathroom at the reception is already too much for most movies, and requires no blurring. I really was stunned though that “television for women” is afraid to show women to other women. Do their viewers have to close their eyes doing a self-examination for breast cancer or inserting tampons? They can say, “Yeah but some kid flipping through channels might come across it,” meaning a boy, but no kid of any gender should be watching a Lars von Trier movie until they grow up, even if the women were wearing full veils.

So in essence this is American television: a guy manipulating his wife into prostitution is okay, exposed brains never hurt anyone, but for god's sake put away those boobies, it's bad enough that girls can look at their own at home! Actually, the half of our society that can be prevented from the soothing, maternal sight of a naked breast is also the half that commits most of the violent crimes. Coincidence? Okay yeah, probably, but I still think “Show Breasts not Brains” should be my new bumper sticker slogan.

This is how I imagine my wedding toast will go...

Ladies and gentlemen, since I'm here tonight in a tuxedo, and because I started drinking at 9am, I'd like to sway to my feet and say a few words about the wonderful thing we've just witnessed. Some of you may not know this, but PJ spent a lot of time looking for the right person to spend his life with. He went to Singapore, he went to Hong Kong, and he went to Hydrate. He went to Bangkok, up and down the Reguliersdwarsstraat, up to the Gold Coast Cafe, over to Tokyo, down to the Bijou with a fist full of poppers, to Kuala Lumpur, to Bangcock (the other one), and of course he took the red line down to Chinatown. All that time he was just looking for the perfect match, waiting to hear what the Dutch call the Witte Muis Gepiep, or “white mouse squeak”. It's like the black snake moan, only more, um, disconcerted and disappointed. But of course, the person PJ was looking for the whole time wasn't in any of those places... he was in St. Anthony Park, but he was already married, so all those homoerotic wrestling matches they used to get into on my couch were for naught. I know you were all expecting a storybook ending to that story... actually so was I, but I totally forgot where I was going with it. Something about if Drew Barrymore were Chinese...

Okay, forget that, and let me tell you how I knew these two people were ready to be joined in holy matrimony. Consider, if Lian were stuck on a desert island, and she had to choose between Paul and say, like a bucket of hamburgers, and I mean really good hamburgers, with crisp lettuce, some fresh tomatoes... oh and the buns would stay good too, which is difficult to do if you're around all that wet salt air all the time. You could take your bucket up to the top of a hill or something, like if it was that island Tom Hanks was stuck on with Wilson, but they'd still dry out, if it was a big bucket and it took a while to eat them all. But that's love, ladies and gentlemen. That's love.

And now for a few words from a man so opposed to interracial marriage he won't eat oreos, ladies and gentlemen, Captain P.

The Captain: Wow, those jokes about me being a racist really take me back to 1995, because that's about when they started getting stale. But really I do have a few words to say: It's been a long road for PJ, getting from there to here. It's been a long time, but his time is finally here. And he will see his dream come alive at last, he will touch the SKY, people. And his fears are not going to hold him down no more, no they're not gonna hold him now, because he's got faith... of the heart. He's going where his heart can take him, he's got faith to BELIEVE he can do anything. He's got strength of the soul, and no one's going to bend or break him. You can reach any star... because you've got faith. Faith of the HEART. And now you'll boldly go where no man has gone before... well, actually I've gone there. Oh fuck that came out wrong, I just mean I've gotten married, not that I had your wife... you know, I'm just going to sit down now.

Wow, he tapped that ass and brought it up at her wedding, ladies and gentlemen, this man is my hero. Mary's definitely going to be cracking out the Klingon pain sticks back in your room tonight. (Captain: He's just kidding, honey! Lian, I am so sorry, I never should have put him on my bar tab.) Bryan, anything you'd like to add?

Bryan: Just that I can't believe anybody would invite you to their wedding, much less give you a microphone. To anybody blaming this on the Illinois champagne we've been drinking going to his head: he's even worse when he's sober. Lian, stop crying, have some more of this bubbling Night Train your husband sprang for, you'll be feeling no pain.

Hey that reminds me, let's give a hand to Panda Express for all this great food, I'm glad to see you guys spared no expense on your special day. I knew there'd be a cash bar, but the groom bringing a check to the table after dinner was a new one... and where do you of all people get off adding a 15% gratuity? Hell, if he was at the Last Supper there's no way PJ would have left more than one of his 30 pieces of silver as a tip. Hey, table one isn't looking so happy, let's get the happy couple's parents another box of chardonnay so they'll quit glaring at me. Uh-oh, do we need to coax a few words from the man who can put a smile on anybody's face? That's right, I bet you didn't think he'd be here, but the jolliest man in Zurich wasn't about to miss this occasion. Come on, stand up and toast the happy couple, Dr. Euler!

Dr. Euler: Ja, mein fuhrer. I vas so pleased to be invited to such a happy occasion, and to see the new home of Der salat-werfen Mann. That is the name we used to call him on Freudenbergstrasse, Lian, in English das is like der man who throws the salad, maybe you don't have that word here, but of course, it is der idiomatische Deutsche, so it has nothing to do with der Salat. But he vas so good, you see, everyone in Zurich knew if you needed your Salat geworfen he vas the man to see, ja? Every day when PJ would go to verk, everybody in their garden would wave and say, “Gruzei, der salat-werfen Mann!” And now even though we are no longer neighbors, I hope Lian and der salat-werfen Mann are very happy in their new home. Although I must say that I am not happy about the satellite dish on the roof. I cannot see it from my flat in Zurich and it does not concern me in any way, but I do feel such things should be verboten and I have decided to climb up to your roof and take it down while you are on your honeymoon. Everyone will be much happier, ja? So congratulations, and Sieg Heil!

Okay, well that was... sit down, Captain, one Nazi salute is bad enough without you joining in. You know folks, I'm also reminded of another happy occasion we all gathered together for, when The Captain tied the knot with his first officer... because there was this woman there in a thong, at least that's what the bridesmaids told me. And twins, who were possibly underage. And possibly not twins. But I'm sure the Captain will back me up on this, it's at his wedding that a man first sees the most beautiful sight he'll see, because beauty is something we only see as a pale reflection, a shadow. Until a man sees his lover for the first time in the fullness of what it is to be a woman, something I don't think he can ever fathom until he sees her in that white dress, because that's when he knows he's ready to give himself over and realize he'd lie forever in that white silk embrace.

And for me, it's not so much at the wedding, but the night before and many times after, when I watch Japanese strippers whipping people with their own belts, that I catch that glimpse of something I could fall into, and never ever climb my way back out of it's moist velvet walls, and for one transcendent moment, I drift away with Trixx and Brittany into the the smoky ether of the club, and all the insistent noise and chaos of this world fades to the background leaving nothing but the flapping of dollar bills in a g-string. In that haze of perfume and baby oil it's as if Precious turns back the clock to when God and her were born, where Eve was whole woman and yet still innocent babe. In the breeze from the flapping bacon strips of her post-partem vagina, sometimes I think that's when I get all this, the flowers, the layer cake, friends and family all gathered together for that beautiful moment when she'd look into my eyes and slide her finger into that ring, working that big rock at the top and with a ragged breath shyly offering me her ring as my finger rises to meet it... but while my dream is all over in a click of her clear heels, today we're here to celebrate something eternal. As long as this man is able to continue to deny his homosexuality and sublimate his craving for the male sex organ into a relentless fever for shooting off giant rockets, they'll be together.

Well, I think it's about time for me to turn things over to tonight's entertainment, featuring the dulcet tones of DJ Bigfoot... gosh, this is just like the Oscars where they have the orchestra play you out, as soon as I see that ventriloquist dummy start talking, I know my time is up, don't I? I know the happy couple are anxious to get out onto that cardboard square for their first dance as man and wife, and while they're breaking it I know I'm anxious to find some lonely bridesmaids... seriously, I knew Paul and Lian would be good hosts, but put a whole table of single girls into ugly dresses and serve cheap champagne, I'm going to run out of hotel room keys to give out. Ladies, my minibar and I are here for your pleasure... I'll be cracking fortune cookies until the year of the rat. Come on Lian, don't cry, it's been such a beautiful day, don't spoil it. So how about a toast to two happy couples... PJ and Lian, and I'm thinking me and that girl over there with the thick glasses I see looking for a refill of champagne. Ganbei! Prost! Cheers! Ladies drink free in my hotel room! And that includes the lesbians in attendance, because I think of it as less of a strike-out and more of an intentional walk from a left-handed reliever. Seriously, help me get the lonely straight girls drunk and we'll see who gets more open-minded, everybody wins. So fill up your glasses... come on, fuller than that... and let's toast the newlyweds! Seriously, down those glasses, ladies, you don't want to just sip at this champail and risk actually tasting it.

Bryan (opening cell phone): I can have CPD here in five minutes to haul him out. Just say the word, Lian.

Jazz 109 - 83 Timberwolves

You know you're watching a franchise in trouble when even the backboard refuses to take any part in the game. The hoop closest to the Wolves bench collapsed before the game, and the replacement didn't work either, so the players were sent back to their locker rooms, and the game didn't get under way for 45 minutes while the arena staff ran out into the blizzard outside to find a peach basket and a ladder. There were rumors that the Wolves organization was trying to sell advertising space on the backboards, but I have to wonder where they'd find a major corporation with a midwestern presence that likes to slap their name on stuff that ruins big sporting events by toppling over. Oh, I guess there is at least one, isn't there? Throw in a few slippery decals of their logo in the paint and they're in for $10m a year.

The Wolves continue to suck, and despite showing some glimmers of excitement, they were still down 20 by the second quarter and made no sign of challenging the Jazz. Marko Jaric for a brief period came to life and started showing off some of why the Wolves gave up so much to get him, with a couple nasty steals. By the end of the game all the useless veterans were back on the bench and Craig Smith got to show why he and Mark Madsen are so popular, by playing hard and tearing a couple rebounds away from the Jazz in wrestling matches in the paint. At halftime it took me a minute to figure out why the guy in a suit standing behind the basket while the Wolves warmed up looked so familiar, and then I realized it was Madsen, tracking every shot and shagging stray balls. If we have to lose all the time, I would really like to see more of those guys.

Since the current set-up is going nowhere, Britt Robson wrote a brief summary of the Wolves current roster and their trade value, as an examination of the possibility of upgrading the talent and building a contender around KG. Expanding on what he and other fans have had to say, there are some guys who might be worth something:

Ricky Davis - His contract expires after next year which is useful in the NBA where it's a problem in about every other sport, and he's not a bad player. The Wolves are so well stocked with shooting guards that the one with the best chance of returning equal value will definitely be gone, hopefully for someone above 6'5". My dad will go nuts if we lose an Iowa alumn, especially after Iowa State alumn Fred Hoiberg's heart-surgery forced his retirement, so this will be a tough trade to live with in my family.

Randy Foye - The laws of economics require that each party put up parts of reasonably equal value, and the laws of the NBA require equal salaries, so highly talented underpaid player + crummy overpaid player = appropriately compensated high quality player. Randy Foye is one of the only people the Wolves can partner with their stable of overpaid shitty players to create a trade-bait Frankenstein with the right amounts of salary and talent sewn together. However, when negotiating for Allen Iverson, the Wolves balked at including Foye, and if you trade the only bright light in the team's future, you'd better damn well get something great in return.

There are guys who could potentially be more useful to somebody else than they are to the Wolves. Marko Jaric does occasionally show flashes of brilliance with some of his passes and steals, and he has the versatility to play a few positions depending on match-ups, so somebody could make use of that if they could be convinced he'd live up to his potential. Mark Blount is over 7 feet tall and a true center, and there's always a market for that. He's got an odd mix of skills that make him useful to a good team, with the right mix of players he can supplement. Trenton Hassell was a strong defensive player, I don't know how true that is anymore, but somebody who loses games by less than 3o points and goes to the play-offs might find a defensive stopper useful.

Mark Madsen is a good roleplayer and a hard worker, and that makes him surprisingly popular in Minnesota, and the guy does have a couple championship rings. I can't imagine how the Wolves would get better by trading Madsen, because I can't imagine anybody really giving up a lot for him, and a fearless big man is something in short supply for the Wolves, who seem to have stocked up on 7'1" perimeter players.

There are a couple young players with upside besides Randy Foye, none of whom are particularly attractive in a trade. Bracey Wright looks alright in garbage time but is unlikely to turn into a superstar, and he's competing for a pretty overloaded spot. Craig Smith is about as popular as Madsen for the same thing, being unafraid of the paint, but he's got a size disadvantage, so who knows. Rashad McCants may be the best of them, but he's been injured, so he's also not a lot to pin your hopes on, but he might turn into something. Justin Reed I have no idea what he does, other than make it look like we have more forwards on the roster. These guys should be around next year, unless they get thrown in as filler for a trade partner running short on depth, I suppose... somebody may take a shot on McCants.

Then we have shoot-first point guards who don't really do that terribly well either. Mike James and Troy Hudson just aren't that great, and I think everybody in the league knows it. Some of Hudson's best work in recent years came from playing him with Marko Jaric, but letting Jaric run the offense so Hudson didn't dribble away 18 seconds looking for his own shot... Hudson's contract runs for another 50 years or something. These guys leave in one of two ways: either they go in as salary, and the Wolves insist "You want Foye? You have to take Hudson too," or they go in exchange for another team's disgruntled locker room cancer.

Eddie Griffin I'd really hate to see go. Earlier this year, he apparently got good and drunk, then he started watching a porno and as he got into it, unzipped and started stroking it, just unwinding after a hard day. As it happens, the only reason anybody can be so sure that on March 30 he was having a few cocktails and whacking off to a porn movie was he did it in his car... while he was driving it. Until he crashed into somebody else's car and pants around his ankles had to beg them not to call the police. Since he's had a long history of problems and is so widely expected to be cut by the Timberwolves that I'm sure nobody's offering lottery picks to secure the rights to Eddie Griffin.

So basically it's either build a deal around Foye, trade Garnett and start over, or they can wait until he opts out of his contract and just turn the Target Center into more lofts after they get zero season ticket deposits. Personally I'm hoping they trade Garnett to a decent team, get some draft picks, just focus on clearing cap space and developing a scouting operation for the next couple years, because I'm just so sick of watching them audition to escort Dorothy to the Emerald City... players with no heart, coaches with no gameplan, and an organization without the courage to change anything. But then what do I know, I'm so buzzed from alcohol and unagi by the time I get to the game I don't know half of what's going on.