Wednesday, August 29, 2007

From Chicago to Chisago and Back Again, a travelogue in eight glorious chapters

At long last, here is the complete text of my travelogue "From Chicago to Chisago and Back Again", including chapters 4-8 in which I present my opinions on the present whereabouts of Axl Rose, several Chicago attractions, and kickball. (Blessedly I ran out of Guns & Roses lyrics to reference sometime in Chapter 3.)

1. You know where you are? You're in the Jungle, baby...

I've recently had a breakthrough when it comes to my navigational skills, passing through denial, anger, bargaining, anger, depression, and into acceptance of the fact that I don't have any. It shouldn't have taken this long, since an ex-girlfriend used to constantly remind me that I couldn't walk across a large room in a straight line, and during the bargaining phase I got a GPS to give me audible directions, so now I still miss all the turns, so it spends most of its time telling me “Please make a legal U-turn” in a pleasant female voice.

Unfortunately the most direct paths to Galena all involve plunging into the woods with a lantern and a bloodhound and hoping you come out the other side without being eaten by trolls, and the only way I've ever gotten there without getting lost was by insisting that any road I used had to be illustrated on the map with a red line as thick as Peter North, and as a result took a decidedly unscenic trip through several hours of Iowa cornfields. Wanting to cut a couple hours off the trip but not wanting to ask directions from a Wisconsin survivalist selling fireworks out of a camouflaged schoolbus (at least not again), I thought I'd try the wisdom of my Great Uncle Burr, who forsook the use of maps and street names and instead navigated entirely by the use of the stars and a photographic recollection of the terrain, yet knew the best route to get anywhere... a true Magellan of the Maid-rite. Since Burr's wisdom was accumulated and distilled through my father's recollections and tendency to include detours through every state park he could reach before anybody asked where he was going, and I was concerned that the inevitable “clump of trees” that forms a critical signpost in all of Burr's sui generis routes might have been cut down and made into somebody's deck, I thought I'd check this against a map and make my own decision, which turned out to be unwise.

The best route through the back roads of Iowa involves finding a way south to US-20, which is a nice wide, level road designed for high speeds with proper passing lanes, but it takes forever going straight south down I-35, plus there's always that risk I'd space out and end up asking directions at the Alamo. So you have to figure out a way to get east to US-218, which at least in Iowa, has been rebuilt into another modern 4-lane highway. I got really clever and decided to pick up 218 as early as possible back where it hits I-35 in Owatonna, home of the fighting Magic Pumpkins, and pass into Iowa through Austin, MN, which served as nursery to both spam and the Gear Daddies, given my extensive collection of Gear Daddies, Martin Zellar and the Hardaways, and Billy Dankert and the Real Austinaires albums. The classic route to Galena goes down highway 61 and has that whole Bob Dylan, God said to Abraham kill me a son, how many roads must be blocked with tipped over bales of hay sort of thing going, so I thought I might have better luck with 218 and the more upbeat tunes of the Gear Daddies, mainstay of the Mower County Fair. As it happens, parts of highway 218 are about a step above a dirt road, with years of patches of blacktop cobbled together into a narrow road swarming with junebugs, rhythmically pattering into my windshield, and then I remembered that track off of
Can't Have Nothin' Nice that goes “218 is a lonely road for me”, and it certainly was. It is kind of nice to get out there into the countryside of scenic Mower County, teeth chattering as you you speed down the cratered road, up and down hills, until you slam on the brakes to avoid plowing into a dump truck going 25mph with no way to pass him for a half hour.

I figured it would open up past Austin, but then I discovered something that should have been obvious, when you consider the music of Billy Dankert, Austin resident and former Gear Daddies drummer, a generally talented guy who manages to combine this pleasant sound with a slightly disturbed romantic wit. He captured really beautifully this sense of growing up in a small town and feeling the steel jaws of a trap close over him as he got older in “Open Wide”, and especially “One Voice”, a pleasant yet haunting ditty that later turned into a cautionary tale about killer bees (seriously, don't let your children play around that apiary). What Billy Dankert was trying to warn me about is that as happens all too often on the back roads of the US highway system, once you get to Austin, the road signs all disappear, and US 218 seems to plunge into a residential neighborhood and disappear, with no hint of coming back out. Lost in the birthplace of spam, I feared I had wandered into some sort of Upton Sinclair inspired nightmare in which sausages rose up out of the asphalt to ensnare my tires, and I'd spend the rest of my life feeding pig snouts into a meat grinder while getting terrorized by a supervisor in an ugly striped sweater with knives on his fingers. And it's not like I wasn't warned: like the creepy gas station attendant in the first reel of every horror movie who warns our heroes to get out of town before sundown, my GPS spent all the time after I passed Owatonna telling me to turn around and periodically suggested an updated route back to the interstate.

I headed east on the last cross street, figuring it was at least the right direction, and hoping to find a southbound road that didn't have a stop sign every two blocks, and of course, that road came to an abrupt end at the beginning of a large wooded area, where a wolf in a dress and bifocals wiping his mouth with a red hood beckoned from behind a tree. Fortunately, figuring I was good and screwed, my GPS relented and smugly gave me the way out of Austin heading south into Iowa. To any tempted to take this route, around Osage or Charles City or somewhere 218 does turn into a decent highway all the way to US 20, and from there it's open freeway and smooth sailing all the way to Dubuque, but for god's sake just don't stop at the gingerbread house. Okay, I made that part up, but I did stop off for something sweet at a DQ in Cedar Falls, only to have the girl at the counter go back and fetch this old hag out of the back who insisted on feeling my arm before making my Misty Freeze. Make of that what you will, and pack plenty of breadcrumbs. I eventually did make it to Galena, and due to the hospitality of dear friends, spent a couple of enjoyable days in idyllic surroundings in a hotel on a hill overlooking rolling green countryside, enjoying the fresh air and sounds of nature, and sleeping on the nastiest urine stained hide-a-bed I've ever seen.

2. Bitch slap rapping but nothing done (and no cocaine tongue)

I was in Galena for a triathlon, or more accurately to watch a triathlon, since I wouldn't run five miles if Big Foot was chasing me (a situation I occasionally thought I might encounter driving to Galena through the morass of unmarked trails that is southwestern Wisconsin). The Galena triathlon is a tough one, starting in a chilly lake and winding over rolling hills into a town clinging to the side of the Mississippi River valley, but it's through verdant, fresh countryside, which may or may not be better appreciated with tears in your eyes from the pain and adrenaline high. For my part, I quickly discovered that the triathlon is really not a great spectator sport, since 1400 people on a beach in matching black wetsuits all kind of look the same so I had no idea where my friends were, and a couple hours of watching heats of people dive into an icy lake seemed like a pretty stupid way to spend the morning. Eager to avoid getting trapped when the roads were closed for the bikers, I started the trek back to the field where my car was parked, with the help of a kindly man on a golf cart with a thick German accent. He drove me part of the way, but then I don't know if he was Adolf Eichmann or something, but when I asked what part of Germany he was from and how he came to be in Galena he threw me out of the cart and drove away. I did get out scant minutes before they closed the lot and the entrance to the road, and I tried to race back to town before the entire road was closed, passing what I figured had to be most of the local law enforcement establishment at road blocks, including one guy, I swear to god, in a leather vest with a cowboy hat and a tin star like he thought he was Wyatt Earp. Since I thought Marshall Earp couldn't catch me on horseback and I had a wide-open Stagecoach Trail in front of me I figured I'd open it up as much as I could to get back before spectators gathered at the finish line only to have me come crashing through, horn honking. It's a nice drive, up and down those hills at 80 mph, when you know you won't come over a hill blind and crash right into a combine going 20mph down the road (or at least I hoped not).

Unfortunately the Jo Davies Sheriff's Department had other ideas, and I was diverted down a series of gravel roads back to town, where I hit on an idea to entertain myself while waiting for my friends to finish the race. Since the entire Sheriff's Dept. seemed to be out on Stagecoach directing traffic, I figured Galena would be wide open for an epic crime spree, like a full-on Batman villain, purple suit and white clown make-up orgy of mayhem leaving a smoke and graffiti scar down main street. Any supervillain will tell you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so I sat down for a waffle first, and discovered the fatal flaw in my plan when the Sheriff sat down opposite me at the counter. Talk about intelligence-led policing, that guy was on me like white on rice before I even designed a supervillain costume. So instead I hit a couple art galleries and a frame shop, and broke something which I then had to purchase and hang on my wall. Bumbling around I managed to miss the whole race except for the big barbecue at the end, where the stragglers were tossed on the fire to feed the winners, who then received their “I am a Triathlete – Biker – Swimmer – Cannibal” tattoos. Seriously, when they say the Galena triathlon is tough, they aren't just talking about the rolling hills. Okay, that didn't happen, but nobody's reading this anyways so I can tell it any way I want. And this part is true, Amstelboy got spanked by his woman in that race, and he wasn't happy about it... like the poet says, sometimes he gets so tense but he can't speed up the time.

Chapter Three: Where the grass is green and the girls are pretty

We celebrated the race in style, gathering for what strikes me as the antithesis of the Independence Day bash with Toby Keith and exploding bombshells, as the more progressive end of town gathered for dinner on a sheltered porch watching woodland creatures rummaging through the creek bed, and discussing the usual liberal topics: the way our hands our tied while the billions shift from side to side and the wars go on with brainwashed pride for the love of God and our human rights are swept aside, things of this nature. After heading into town for a knees-up with some local bands and a 12 year old kid doing the time warp, our footsteps were drawn as they always are to the Paradise, which I always remember fondly for being there in years past watching the 4th of July parade with Butch, the Earl of Jo Davies County... I can't help a little smile stepping into the Paradise. It was in full swing on a Saturday night, with cash trading hands around the pool table and batting eyelashes everywhere asking oh won't you please take me home. Some of my friends got snookered into a high stakes pool game with the local gentry, and upon losing were sent scurrying to the bar to refresh the victors' throats with the most expensive sipping whiskey in the house ($5), while I had a fascinating time with a Gaelic scholar and a sapphist and sometime cougar (she insists it's just a phase), until a Guns & Roses song came on. Then I got the first clue to a mystery that has plagued me since 1993... is Axl Rose is still out there somewhere? Because I tell you, I met somebody in the Paradise whose intimate familiarity with all things Axl went beyond what a fan gleans from wikipedia and years of Rolling Stone interviews, going back to Axl's childhood, and I think she was trying to tell me something. I didn't assign much significance to it until I mentioned his dancing style and she insisted she could recreate it, to my amusement, since I love impressions. Then as I was preparing to leave, “Sweet Child of Mine” came on, and out of the corner of my eye I saw her start to dance... I turned to say goodnight to the dancing girl but she was gone and in her place the specter of Axl Rose, wistfully swaying to his own twenty year old tune, in that eclectic, willowy dancing style, and the way she captured that vision of Axl was beyond eerie and into something else. Stepping back out into the night, I planted a kiss on the window in one of those “I hope that was funny and not creepy” sort of gestures to get a laugh out of Axl and the Cougar, and wandered back down Main Street.

I've seen some of the world's greatest works of art, creations that have stood the test of time for hundreds and thousands of years, and many more beautiful things that have not, and as a certain Redwood Rapunzel used to point out to me, the ones that bring me to tears more likely than not capture a moment in time that ties together long threads into an inseparable knot on which for that instant the entire world turns. That gigantic statue of Laoc
öon being tormented by the serpents, or Canova's statue of Cupid and Psyche at the moment of embrace, or the last touch of the blood-stained shirt at the end of Brokeback Mountain, when the tragic enormity of a lifetime's worth of decisions is contained in that gesture and a deeply stifled sob (make fun of me all you want, Amstelboy, it's still a good movie). And in that moment, it was if Axl had stepped into the smoky shadows of the 1980's LA clubs (where he rose to prominence and will live on in perpetual youth in the memories of aging clubbers) and emerged into the Paradise to enjoy his legacy in permanent rotation on the jukebox. And Axl was looking good that night.

Chapter Four: As years all went by, with all the voices I've heard, something has died

After that night in the Paradise I started reviewing what I knew about the disappearance from the world of the wit and majesty of Axl Rose. It's been twenty years since Appetite for Destruction, and it's been over a decade since The Spaghetti Incident? with Axl gone quiet all that time. The claim is that he's been holed up in a recording studio working on an album called Chinese Democracy, but consider that Fleetwood Mac's one-time eight-month recording session is commonly cited by musicians as maddeningly excessive... perhaps literally since one of them took a shot at the mailman bringing him his royalty checks. Axl was pretty nuts before he started Chinese Democracy, occasionally checking in to hospitals and being discharged two days later without shoelaces, and apparently scheduling shows on his own secret inner clock, while the band showed up at 7pm but hedged their bets and printed “Around 7pm” as the start time on the tickets. He also famously threw his mike down and stormed off stage when the teleprompters didn't work, claiming he knew his songs but got so lost in the incessant, insistent running dialogue in his head that he needed an occasional reminder of where he was supposed to be.

So maybe his reported bipolar disorder is what keeps him persistently motivated to keep working on his new album yet unable to complete it.
However, no songs have been released in any form, theoretically because Axl is endlessly reworking and rerecording all the songs, and he has also replaced all the people around him in the band numerous times, so nobody knows exactly what has been recorded and how much progress Axl is making on the album every time he makes a fresh start and re-starts the recording process. Here's the curious thing: several album covers have been leaked and the name of the album, “Chinese Democracy”, is something the mercurial Axl has never changed, and the overall style remains the same. The name of the band has remained “Guns & Roses”, despite a conflict with the former members of L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose who formed GNR in it's heyday and resent Axl using the name. Now assume for a moment though that there is no new album, but Axl wanted to convince the world there was. His phantom project attains a certain permanence in the minds of the public through years of murmurs and promises about a release date, and keeping the Guns name on it insures there will be animated discussion of the upcoming album for years from anyone with an interest in or Guns or Rose. There are witnesses to his work on the project from the steady churn of the band and other staff, but if he only worked on the same song with each new group, recording it several times to “get it just right” and then fired them all in a manic episode, Axl would only have to appear back in L.A. Periodically to keep this going for years. Keeping the same name for his album makes it easier to keep his story straight, and shuffling the people around him means nobody digs too deep. Everybody who would speculate on Axl's whereabouts thinks they know exactly where he is: in a studio re-recording tracks for “Chinese Democracy”, but it's possible for him to be leading a completely different life for most of the year.

Even if you accept my theory as possible, I admit so far it's highly implausible because I have yet to offer any explanation of the flip side of Mr. Rose's double life. My claim as to his how he could disappear so fully from the world while still occasionally popping back to L.A. to stoke rumors about “Chinese Democracy” is this: after living the wild life as a stadium attraction, he's hiding out as a female graduate student, immersing himself in the quiet world of academia and studying Welsh. And I know this because I've met him (back in chapter three). The flexible scheduling of academia allows an assistant professor or student who can live off his (or her) GNR royalties plenty of opportunities for an annual trip back to SoCal to work on “Chinese Democracy” and storm out in protest after leaking a new sketch for the album cover. In addition, people who liked GRN back in the 80's and early 90's never socialized with the people who make up the more esoteric disciplines of academia, like any language not used as a langue vehiculaire somewhere (English, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, etc) leaving Axl free to speak Welsh in anonymous bliss in some tiny office full of wild-eyed arm-chair revolutionaries. And he had to create a new persona, MTV wouldn't have just let him go: Izzy Stradlin left the band and released an album and they wouldn't shut up about it for months before the market ruled that “former GNR rythym guitarist” doesn't guarantee a platinum album and a prominent place in pop culture.

I have to consider the clues Axl left us before he left: he was always strutting up and down the stage in a kilt and a catcher's mask, which gave him great practice walking and sitting in a skirt, a skill that I learned (under the sharp mockery of a couple of women) does not come naturally. It's a long story involving a crazy camp counselor who lives in Antarctica because he says ice can really add a lot to a drink, convincing a buxom lady to run naked in the snow with me through the grounds of the archdiocese, and trying to prove something to incredulous, buttoned-down New England Catholics, but really I'm sure it would just bore you all. Anyways, for a grown man it does involve un-learning a lot about movement and posture to move through society in something frilly and pleated that blows in the wind, and given Axl's obvious affection for Gaelic culture, I'm sure he followed tradition and went with an unfurnished basement. I'm sure a stadium full of groupies and the paparazzi lurking around every corner gave Axl the crucible he needed for a crash course in keeping the package in the mailbox, so to speak. As far as my claims to his love of Gaelic culture, he does speak Welsh, and if you'll recall, the big concert performance from which GNR drew a lot of their later videos was at Wembley Stadium, where the proximity to his beloved Cymru brought out the best in the mercurial Rose. And there was that time he played November Rain on dueling pianos with Sir Elton John, UK resident and friend to alternative lifestyles.

In a world where everybody wonders what ever became of Axl Rose, nobody suspects him in his current female guise, and that's the real genius. In the film
The Prestige Christian Bale's character makes the observation that the real magic trick is in making an illusion of your whole life, so that nobody can ever detect the misdirection and transformation... consider some of Mr. Rose's iconic behavior: his screeching, wavering singing voice was so obviously mannered as to be unmistakably identifiable as Axl Rose and no one else. He lived his public life as a bipolar dynamo doing crazy stunts, with a mannered dancing style some say he borrowed from Davey Jones, with long hair streaming out from under gypsy bandannas (which indicates it may not have been real either) and especially crazy outfits that drew attention to his wardrobe, and away from his face, making me wonder if anybody really ever looked him in the eye before he scuttled away frantically. If he were to stop (as Axl might say) “using his illusion”, move and speak normally and put on a tasteful wool skirt and sweater, would he really look anything like his stage persona? Let me put it this way, for a new persona, he didn't need to invent Alice, he just had to stop playing Axl.

Some might say it's still a stretch to think he's reinvented himself as a woman, but I say he had to be trying to tell us something with that catcher's mask he used to wear. And given all this circumstancial evidence, Axl Rose of Indiana disappears, and I meet Alice Rose of Indiana (not her real name... or his) who shares all his interests in Gaelic culture and whose childhood in the Hoosier state tracks Axl's up until his rise to stardom? I don't believe in that kind of coincidence, and as I said, Alice just had to choose to stop being Axl. But in the dark corners of the Paradise to the nostalgic tones of “Sweet Child of Mine”, Axl/Alice dared for a few moments to drift back into character, and the game was up. Confirming my suspicions, the always on-the-run Rose kept me from asking questions about her current life and whereabouts by claiming to be uprooting and leaving the country soon... for England, where presumably Sir Elton's old futon is available for her to crash. Oh, and for any groupies and curious boys who missed their shot at pre-
Spaghetti Incident Axl and want to try again, unfortunately Axl/Alice is married, but my good friend Screwdriver assures me she's waiting for something better to come along, so hope springs eternal.

The alternate explanation for Axl Rose's disappearance and Alice Rose's re-appearance include several factors. GNR rode the wave of 80's music culture and MTV, and the rise of alternative music as a response to the excess of the 80's pushed them aside, as it did Def Leppard and numerous imitators, much like reactionary rise of punk to kill off the 70's. At the precipice, GNR released their worst album ever (according to people who actually listened to it) and Kurt Cobain committed suicide, devastating legions of teenagers and further making Axl Rose, Eddie Vedder, Morissey, and all the other suicidal lead singers no damned fun anymore. Add to that Axl's famously difficult temperament and Slash's inability to see out from under that top hat, and it's possible the two could just never get together to work on a new album for a few years. Personally I think the vanished pop icon + woman I met for like four hours = mystery I should investigate theory is much more fun, but probably also explains why so many people I talk to smile nervously and back away slowly. And it may have taken a couple months to get around to publishing my theory, but I still got it out ahead of
Chinese Democracy.

Chapter 5: Oh my god it's full of stars

In 1999 Liam Neeson apparently considered quitting film acting to be exclusively a stage actor, and credited that decision in large part to his experience playing Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace. He refused to reprise that role in any part, otherwise he would have plugged a couple holes appearing briefly in episodes II and III and VI. Since Neeson took over Alec Guiness's “I'm an artist, damnit” rejection of Star Wars fandom, the true heir to the bitter legacy of Obi Wan Kenobi, Ewan MacGregor, confined himself to appearing on a magazine cover in a shirt reading “I did Star Wars and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”.

Given all that, I was a bit surprised to hear Liam Neeson narrating a film about black holes at the planetarium. The whole experience, an omnitheater with psychedelic images of spinning galaxies and the unraveling tendrils of gas giants spiraling into the turbulent vortex of a black hole, with Mr. Qui-Gon Jinn himself narrating the throbbing rainbow plunge into the maw of the singularity was certainly trippy, and exactly the sort of hipster nonsense I'd expect the man who didn't want to be a Jedi to turn up his nose at. And yet it was a lot of fun, and it's great Liam Neeson leveraged his lightsabre skills to do something educational.

The Adler Planetarium is a decent addition to Chicago's museum campus, and I love planetariums (planetaria to you Anglophiles who use Latin plurals) and omnitheaters, and I was saddened by the demise of the Minneapolis Planetarium, so when I went in I was an easy mark for a student membership. Now I have to go back at least once this year to justify my membership, and use my 10% discount at Galileo's Cafe. The solarium that houses the cafe has this United Federation of Planets vibe and a great panoramic view of waves breaking out on Lake Michigan that I'm sure is a nice way to ward off stress and sunlight deficiency in the winter for Chicagoans who aren't afraid of science or the #12 bus, but on a hot, still July day, I had to exit quickly because the last thing I wanted was more warm sunbeams. I'll return to the solarium for a drink this winter, just as soon as the Witte Maus and the Dragon Lady are shipped off to the Orient and I break into their vacant apartment for the winter.

Chapter 6: Episode #71: The Enemy Within, or The Diet Coke of Art (just one calorie)*

I've discovered that there are only so many times I can go to the Art Institute or the Field Museum before the spectacle of seeing the same broken jade hairbrush behind three inches of armored glass loses its sense of wonder, as does the collection of “Paintings the Europeans Didn't Want” in every American museum that has to be stacked floor to ceiling with the remnants of Gustave Courbet's work that wasn't urinated on by 19th century French art critics, and mile after mile of boring haystacks and water lilies. The obvious alternative is the Museum of Contemporary Art which in my experience always has some gigantic set of installations that make for a brief, puzzling trek through the first floor galleries looking at a wall of carpet with scratches in it facing a wall of styrofoam with gouges in it, both labeled something like “The Despondence of Joy in the Hindu Morning #19”, or room after room of video screens of charcoal drawings of burning buildings. The upper gallery of the MCA has had an interesting photography exhibit, but after a few months I've seen enough of it... other than the cartoon mural with the Medusa vomiting music and the Chinese food delivery girl upended on her bicycle with a bowl of noodles on her head, that was worth another trip. The room with a video of a girl swimming split by a mirror while Chris Isaak's “Wicked Game” plays over the PA with a kid hoarsely screaming the vocal track, now that I only needed to see once.

The International Museum of Surgical Science

In my search for something new I found a couple museums in Chicago that are always good for a reaction of “You went where?” when I describe them to friends and acquaintances, and occasionally a follow-up of “For god's sake why?” The International Museum of Surgical Science definitely elicits the latter question, but when I went there on a lark (it was Tuesday and I'm a complete whore for free museum admission) it was more memorable than I expected. The museum is located in an old lake front mansion on North Lake Shore Drive modeled after Marie Antoinette's “cottage” at Versailles, with tiled staircases and fireplaces in every room, donated by its owner on her death to a surgical college in order to continue her work promoting the advancement of medical science. The walls feature murals of doctors throughout history performing radical medical procedures, with busts and portraits in the stairwells of the noteworthy contributors to medicine from outside Europe and America. There's a drawing room with huge grand windows lined with huge imposing statues of doctors and scientists from Hippocrates to Marie Curie, and the overwhelming sense of obeisance to those insightful and sometimes daring enough to create new techniques for the practice of medicine was surprisingly moving. There's a certain whimsy to the art gallery on the top floor that offers artwork based on anatomy, like blood vessels in petri dishes and the gift shop has a nice range of plush microbes and red blood cells with cute googly eyes for sale. Granted I felt like the biggest dork in the world entering the museum since everybody else there was part of a college class filling out work sheets, but I resisted the urge to join in on a tour with an instructor giving me quizzical “Where did you come from?” looks. I'm certainly not going to steer anybody there, but that was certainly an interesting diversion.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography

My favorite spot I've discovered in my recent trips to Chicago is the MoCP, described by a guide book as “a light snack for your brain”, given that it's only about two rooms, a classroom with art on the walls, an entryway to somebody's office, and a hallway in a stairwell, but it's a tasty snack. Generally the museum is divided into three galleries with the work of 3-4 artists between them, and every time I've been, there has been at least one captivating, often provocative collection adorning some wall. Some of the work I've seen there has occasionally been provocative enough to require being very secure in one's appreciation of art to linger in front of it without feeling the eyes of strangers boring a hole into one's back. Here's some of what I can recall that I found stimulating, with only the dimmest recollection of the artist's names, and as I said, the aim of a lot of it is provocative:

A frothy exhibition of Robert Heinecken's work using a lot of existing images of women from magazines and other media. A whole wall was dedicated to the art of catalog photography with instructions and illustrative polaroids on how to achieve the “natural” pose that best showcases the product without making anyone uncomfortable, and facing it was a collection of what looked like catalog pictures of women in lingerie, with the nude bodies of other women drawn from erotica superimposed over their lingerie replacing what was covered, so in effect, the model in a photo would be covering her own breasts with somebody else's chosen to match hers. It's a disconcerting effect, separating some of the layers of exposure and stimulus that surround the eroticism and exposure of these women, who are in coy, sexy poses, and displaying all manner of breasts and vaginas with roaming hands, but not actually exposing themselves.

The last time I went a couple of large landscapes turned out to be fake, composed of elements from disparate landscapes to create new locations. A Saudi Arabian desert combined with an American suburb, unclear which is encroaching on the other, or a bright, red-roofed town and marina added to a barren industrial lake shore full of debris. There was another enormous composite landscape there the first time I went, composed different exposures of the reclining profile of a woman's body, hips flowing into the curve of her neck and onto her calf, all under a rising full moon to make it seem like some undiscovered country.

In the stairwell I've seen an exhibition of beautiful images taken in Japanese love hotels, themed rooms for couples looking for a romantic getaway. In true Japanese style, every variety was on display from the jail cell with the naughty warden to the circus to the doctor's office, and finally to a Hello Kitty themed room with a giant mural of the eponymous feline mutely peering down at her amorous guests like Big Brother (having sex under that thing would haunt my dreams). The empty rooms are so charged with naughtiness but so devoid of life in their clinical condition, they imply the acts that will take place there but not the people, and that's what makes it so unsettling.

The current exhibition in that hallway is of places in America where injustice has occurred, again charged spaces like a scar devoid of the people who gave them their significance, like the stretch of highway where Karen Silkwood was (allegedly) run off the road, or the toxic residences of Love Canal. On the top floor is an exhibition of photographs of divided communities, featuring Northern Ireland and the West Bank, two areas philosophically linked in Northern Ireland's murals that share the same walls and atmosphere of violence.

One of the most beautiful exhibitions I've seen there came from something mired in such a languid, mucous vulgarity that I would never have thought to see anything like this come out of it. Larry Sultan collection “The Valley” took him into the mansions that bizarrely serve as backdrop for much the porn mill that permeates the San Fernando Valley, where an endless stream of plastic women and servile girls submit to grimacing parolees on the same ugly red couch. Sultan's pictures focus on the surroundings, capturing the houses and furnishings, a stone fireplace chimney climbing to the ceiling while a tangle of legs peers over a couch out of frame, or the artifacts of the ordinary daily presence of the tenants: the tipped over box of cornflakes in the kitchen, or a girl's bedroom full of dolls, with a woman's clothes neatly piled on the bed next to her bag of vibrators and lube. Other shots detail the activity surrounding the shoots, capturing the same matter of fact nudity and casual sexuality as Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' “XXX: 30 Porn Star Portraits”, the odd quality that lingers over porn stars when they act like real people, only with a frank nakedness... one description of Sultan's work is that it's as if a dozen naked and horny people just invaded a suburban home for a couple hours. Both projects sound like a horrible idea, but they both produced beautiful photographs.

One of my other favorite projects was collection that featured sets of images blown up to all different sizes taken from different cameras, but all taken of the same person at the same instant, from different angles. What can be seen is different in each image, sometimes because we don't know what we're really looking at until we see it from the right angle, and sometimes just because the aspect that is captured from different views can be so different.

Some of these projects could be observed for hours, while sometimes a lot of the museum can be absorbed in just a few minutes, like a visit I made earlier this year where most of the exhibitions seemed to be stills of early 20th century barn door hinges and the like, and yet a collection of one artist's work, about ten images on a lonely wall, sharp as broken glass. The exhibition was a series of twelve year old girls acting like adults, the most striking being this girl posed in a cocktail dress looking back towards the camera in the classic 20-something club kitten pose, arms crossed with an ashen cigarette as accessory, lips slightly parted in that bored expression that is used to imply sophistication without the threat of intelligence. It's so iconic, and so wrong when this girl hits it so squarely that she illustrates what an adult woman looks like by contrasting her own childish body against it.

It's worth a trip if I ever get anywhere near Michigan Ave is all I'm saying. Southwest corner of Michigan & Harrison, take the red line to Harrison and head towards the lake, or Loop trains to Adams or the Library, pop over to Michigan and head south. Or just follow the crowd of people of unusual intelligence and sophistication who will eventually lead you to the MoCP, presumably on their way to the theatah...Rule Britannia, and all that, I say.

*-I only find this funny because of a particular set of circumstances involving Austin Powers, a seminar on genocide and fascism, an anatidaean brunette, and the plot of every Star Trek episode ever.

Chapter 7: Of Hipster Hideaways and Sinister Stockings

While in CHI after the triathlon (not even with Big Foot chasing me) Amstelboy and I took in one of Chicago's more obscure bars, tucked away behind a warehouse next to the municipal fleet's garage and gas pumps, where somebody threw up some Christmas lights and neon signs informing passers-by it was “Miller Time” in the windows of his house and started serving beer on the patio. Not a bad spot for a drink on a Tuesday night, with a cop rolling by the neighborhood every sixty seconds for a fill-up and a screwdriver. Like the bird watcher that he is, Amstelboy noted the plumage of the clientèle, the “hipster uniform” as he calls it that requires a certain amount of silver chain on one's pants or skirt, denim or plaid with pleats, and some circa 1980's video game t-shirt. The reference to the 1980's is important, because it's what marks the wearer as being under 25: for the Children of the 80's (this was apparently our attempt at re-branding ourselves when “Generation X” became such a pedestrian sneer) Pac-Man, The Thundercats, Sesame Street and the Muppet Show in their glory days, the Dukes of Hazzard, and the other things printed on these shirts are childhood icons. For the Millennials (their attempt at re-branding themselves when “Generation Y” became such a pedestrian sneer) they're “retro” and actually move in the opposite direction through time, older vs younger. And this is why I have that Sesame Street t-shirt: you may not be a hipster, but you can embarrass them (and yourself) by wearing their uniform, which is so commercialized it's sold by Target... are off the rack “pre-ripped” pants any dumber than acid wash jeans? (At least with Carhartt's, the Widji camper hipster uniform, you had to get that worn look by wearing them.)

So it was in a silly Sesame Street gangsta t-shirt that I took the red line down to Comiskey the next day. This is a mixed experience for a Twins fan, because on the one hand, outdoor baseball in a proper stadium is a rare treat, plus there's the legendary Comiskey Park food court, but on the other hand, I was nervous I'd accidentally say “Black Sox” in the bleachers, and eight guys would throw down their churros (bought at the best food court in the majors) and beat the crap out of me. Chicago baseball is curious in that it's the market least concerned with baseball: you go to Wrigley for the beer and Comiskey for the food. The atmosphere at Wrigley keeps it full, but in a city that loves the Cubs Comiskey famously needs a winner to keep the turnstiles going. I have to say I enjoyed seeing a game out in the fresh air, and nibbling on a kosher hot dog, while the A's thumped the stuffing out the Black Sox. I still don't know what made them collapse so quickly... for a few years the Sox were all about power hitters, and their porous defense and the mercurial nature of power hitters meant they kept losing to the small ball Twins, so they put together a much better roster with table-setters and better defenders, and they won the whole thing. It really surprises me Jerry Reinsdorf couldn't scare up enough to keep some of their players, but then again he and Jerry Krause kept raving about how they were making moves to insure the post-Jordan Bulls didn't collapse like the post-Bird Celtics, and that sure worked out great.

Based on that experience though, I have to offer a few words of advice to the financial professionals of the world. Learn the words to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” because people really do sing it and for mercy's sake at least get up out of your seat, when your team is losing in late innings your cap goes on upside down, don't get up for churros during an at-bat, throw the other team's home run ball back, and don't ever reach over the fence for a ball when your team is fielding... the last guy to do that in Chicago had to be taken out in a police riot van to protect him from the angry crowd. At least one of the bankers I was with that night understood these critical concepts: I honestly just told him to put his cap on upside down as a joke, I had to admit I underestimated the stuffy world of finance when he faithfully his hat in the “rally cap” position.

Chapter 8: I play kickball with my cousins and discover I am a bad, bad man

After one of my trips to Chicago I went directly to Chisago City to spend some time with my cousins at their cabin. This is a very competitive branch of the family, who can make any game into the Superbowl, and it's very easy to get drawn in just even watching them as the tension mounts and the psychological games begin. However I figured I was safe when I joined a three person team composed of myself, my seven year old cousin, and her uncle the gentle giant who safeguards our prisons like that guy from The Green Mile (I never saw that movie so I may be confused) against his wife and a couple of enthusiastic kids in their early teens who implored us to come play kickball in the backyard at their cabin. Usually it's their uncle who crushes aluminum beer cans in his haste to vacuum the beer out of them, his big brother who sublimated his desire to throw a beating to one of his in-laws into some very passionate games of bocce ball, and a couple of their more boisterous sisters who get the trouble started, but this game got out of hand quickly, and I hate to say it was my team doing most of the trash talking... okay all of it.

In my reluctance to let children half my age win, I found myself hitting bunt singles, aggressively running the bases and making headfirst slides to avoid being picked off at first. One of my teammates kicked the ball into a tree which should have ended or at least paused the game, but instead he announced he'd hit a home run, and then did a slow trot around the bases to taunt his wife, niece, and nephew. That's right, the 8 year old girl was the mature one on our team who was just there to have fun. When her grandmother came out to act as umpire and keep things under control, she was told "If you had one more eye you'd be a cyclops, ump." I also recently discovered this isn't a woman you talk back to, because she might throw a meat fork at you. (If I'd known that at the time, when somebody started singing "Three blind mice" after all her decisions, I might have asked her to step away from the grill full of barbecue tools and hot coals.)

Sadly this isn't the only kickball game my cousins have drawn me into where I've walked away slightly ashamed of myself. There was a time where after a cousin made his confirmation all the little kids got together after the church service to play kickball. In a game full of children ranging from ages 5-15, I wasted no time getting to taunting my teenage cousin K___ by calling the infield in during all his at-bats because of his weak leg. And then I kept the taunting going every time he made it to first base. He's a pretty charitable kid and I'm a bad, bad man because he let this go on for hours without objecting, however I noticed when we played Mortal Kombat later he took particular relish in killing my characters before I could figure out how to use the controls. (They changed all of Scorpion's moves around, wtf!) When we really started falling behind, one of my younger cousins, A____, who shares a frighteningly similar temperament to mine tried to advance from first to second, circled the area a couple of times, and finally looked up to see me in shallow center field dragging second base away with my foot. I hate to report that the example of sportsmanship was set by my cousin D____, a tremendous athlete and competitor in his early teens who took over pitching duties and rolled soft balls to the other team out of a sense of competitive fair play (arguing over pitches and whether your eight year old niece got the ball over the plate is a hot topic in these games) and also answered all questions about who was winning by giving a tied score and adding a couple runs for each team as time went on. I should have learned something from his example, but instead after losing terribly at Mortal Kombat, I went right back to taunting my cousin (who I have to admit is way better at MKIII than Amstelboy was at MKII on his best day).

Epilogue: Of Chow Mein and Chopping Men

One other thing came up in my travels I thought I'd share, what with the Big Damn Wedding coming up. Up in Chisago, the party continues until dawn, and I learned from many a sleepless night in Boston life gets awfully silly around 4am. After traveling all day from Chicago and finding a cool, empty bunkhouse (usually packed to the rafters and hot as an oven) waiting for me in Chisago I elected to turn in early and get a good night's sleep, but it came as no surprise to find that my silliest cousin (ironically for this story, her name is Lee Ann) got into a raging argument with her husband around 4am as to whether or not he liked chow mein. He insisted he did not in fact care for chow mein, and she was infuriated because she thought he was lying. After a few hours of sleep, it was kind of hilarious to her that she was so emotionally invested in chow mein, and that she would actually believe her husband would invent antipathy towards the dish. However, I mentioned this story to my parents, and within moments, my mother was angrily shouting at my father for making false claims that he liked chow mein, when she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not. I had no idea chow mein was such a difficult subject for couples both young and old, but I did find that I preferred it when I slept right through the inevitable chow mein argument.

The other thing I discovered is when I'm at a cabin I know is frequented by hockey players of all ages and genders, but I unwisely choose to sleep alone in the bunkhouse, it's that much harder to shake that image of Jason looming over my bunk in a hockey mask as I drift off to sleep. If any of the girls ever becomes goalie, I swear to god I'm outta there before she scares the hell out of me popping out from behind a tree in that mask as I'm tiptoeing to the outhouse at 3am.

(By the way, all my cousins' names are blanked out because they're minors and god help them if their social circle googles them and come across my observations about subprime lending, porn, and their kickball skills. Although googling them was in cases amusing... one of them has a friend who apparently has very strong feelings about the quantity of moaning in porn movies, and also probably should have made his Myspace page private before Google's spider crawled it and added it to their cache.)

Sunday, August 26, 2007

Wedding toasts take two

Rufus:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of Orange;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set the dragon lady and the groom
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if Amstelboy be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Lian closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'L'
Of Singapore the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Lian comes.

And now let's hear from the third member of this partnership, the Acura DMX in the garage:

Acura DMX:
Whooo!
Y'all gon' make me lose my mind, up in here, up in here
Y'all gon' make me lose control, up in here, up in here
Y'all goin' buy some premium gas, up in here, up in here
Y'all can't find no parking spot, up in here, up in here
Y'all won't let Lian drive, up in here, up in here
Y'all gon' drive me up to Steamworks, up in here, up in here
Y'all goin' there on the down low, up in here, up in here
Y'all gon' drive a yellow float, up in here, up in here
Y'all gon' drive into a bridge, up in here, up--

Rufus: Okay, thank you... that certainly got annoying quickly. Captain, if there's anything you'd like to add, I can pass the mike down to you.

Captain: Make it so. Marriage... the final frontier. These are the nuptials of Amstelboy and the Dragon Lady... their lifelong mission, to seek out new life for their children, and new happiness for themselves. To boldly go where Amstelboy has never gone before, into a committed relationship, hands together with their rings twinkling together like four lights in a tranquil nighttime sky full of possibilities. Live long and prosper, and Q'aplah!

Rufus: Dude, even for you that was a new low in dorkiness. And shouldn't it be two lights in the sky for the two rings?

Captain: THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!* And why don't you shut up, Mr. "I'm all cool because I can cut and paste Shakespeare". By the way, you can call me a dork all you want, but last time I checked, I'm the one who brought a date, you loser.

Rufus: I resemble that remark. Bridesmaids, anything to add? Do you understand the words coming out of my mouth?

Random Asian Bridesmaid: Confucius say happy marriage like CDO: take hard work to put together, but value inestimable by market. (aside to Rufus: There, I said in that stupid accent, will you bother someone else now?)

Rufus: Okay, all kidding aside, I think the person we've all been waiting to hear from is the best man, and here he is.

H.P.: Als Lian op een woestijneiland, werd opgesloten en zij moest tussen Paul en een emmer van hamburgers kiezen, en ik bedoel werkelijk goede hamburgers, met verse sla, en tomaten--

Rufus: What the hell? This isn't the U.N. pal, even fortune cookie over here did her toast in Engrish-- oww! Jesus, somebody take that fork away and get this girl some blunt chop sticks, that hurt. Okay, that pistol Amstelboy's mom just took out of her purse tells me it's time to wrap things up, let me just conclude by reminding the bridesmaids that even if you're unlucky at wedding bingo, you can always come up to the real party in my hotel room, where I have enough booze to make everybody my lucky lady--


(At this point I imagine I will be interrupted by a loud bang and a smattering of applause.)

*-see ST:TNG episode #137, "Chain of Command pt 2", stardate 46360.8, or alternately, don't.

Wedding Bingo















































B



I



N




G



O



Someone appears in an orange windmill tie



Anyone does the robot




Rufus is kicked in the balls by a bridesmaid after
saying, “Nice legs, what time do they open?”



The DJ plays any song by Men Without Hats



Fireworks!!!




The groom's family comments on the food



Any appearance of a Chinese festival dragon




Rijkman Groenik informs the bride she is
overvaluing the groom and suggests other suitor



A wedding toast references a desert island and a
bucket of hamburgers




The groom goes AWOL and is found hiding in a booth
at Frenchy's



Someone tells the Professor a long story about a
trip to the bathroom




The Captain drops a $100 bill on the dollar dance
with the bride, won't let go



“I do”



The Captain drops a $100 bill on the dollar dance
with the groom, won't let go




Brian puts on his Muammar Quadaffi sunglasses



Rudolf lights a road flare




Somebody's employer rushes in to cancel the
service at the last minute



Bryan calls anyone _____BOYEE!!!




Rufus is karate chopped by one of the bride's
relatives after asking if they like the flied lice



Benjamin Graham goes to bed




Neighbor's dogs shit in the aisle



Anyone breakdances



Anyone shows up in clogs or a pointy Chinese hat




Rufus puts Gatorade in a champagne flute



Anneke gives anyone the “I'm watching you,
Frenchy!” gesture



Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Eddie Griffin, 1982-2007

I saw on the news today that former Timberwolf Eddie Griffin was killed last night when he drove his SUV into the side of a train. He was an extremely talented young man, possessed of both a remarkable shot-blocking sense with the 7 foot frame to use it, and a three point shot of unlikely grace for a man his size. (And no, he wasn't the guy from Undercover Brother.) He bounced his way out of the NBA due to drugs and some serious mental issues that prevented him from reaching his potential, after a drunk driving incident which he blamed on watching porn while driving. I'm quite serious, he really got out of the car and told people that, and he had a monitor in the dashboard to watch porn. Because of all of his obvious personal issues and his history with drug abuse and drunk driving, nobody knows if it was an accident or if he meant to drive into the path of that train in Houston, but as somebody who watched him play and hoped he'd get his life together, this very sad.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

The sub-prime lending crisis part two: Of Lemons and Lamentation

If after hearing about the various lunacies of the sub-prime crisis, like NINJA loans ("You have no income, no job, no assets, and you won't tell me your real name... here's $50K.  No you don't have to sign anywhere, a handshake is good enough"), your first thought was, "How can I get in on this?", I think you should print out the following quiz:

A child who operates a lemonade stand sees a steep cut in the price of sugar.  Should she: 

a)  stretch her capital to produce more hourly inventory to handle the busy periods (increasing overall revenue but increasing labor inputs)
b)  implement variable pricing during slow periods now that her price floor has dropped to draw in new price-sensitive customers
c)  explore expanding the business through franchising now that increased margins allow her to tolerate more inefficiency in her core business
d) offer an extra sweetener upcharge, since she can now price it low enough to tempt customers
e)  protect the monopoly:  cut overall price immediately to avoid competition from start-ups
f) scale back her hours maintaining stable profits on higher margins, so she can spend more time with her parents (they grow up so fast)
g)  pocket the extra profit and start a charitable trust to endow her own teddy bear hospital, receive humanitarian awards
h)  put out an advertising blitz or loosen up and drink some of her own product now that her budget isn't stretched so thin
i)  diversify:  get a paper plate with some cookies out there and see how it goes
j)  just put more sugar in each cup for no reason

If you took a magic marker in your fist and scrawled about 50 ragged circles around j) while frantically muttering "More, more!  More sugar!" you may have a future in the American mortgage backed securities industry, where our motto is when margins go down, it's definitely time to sink in more money, and mass hysteria mows down prudent research like the Sea Dog runs over swimmers in Lake Michigan.  If you figured out how my presentation of option j) is actually intellectually dishonest and can point to which option it's the converse of, you are more intellectually honest than I am, and your integrity may win you a cookie.

Saturday, August 11, 2007

The sub-prime lending crisis part one: Can a sub-primer get a table dance?*

Sorting out the current crisis plaguing the financial world is going to be harder than dubbing a Nicholas Cage movie into Cantonese (the guy never opens his mouth!), so I've tried to split it into three separate questions: how did it happen, how do we fix it, and how can Amstelboy profit off of it? (That's not just me being jealous and cynical, he actually called me to specifically ask my advice on squeezing the last bit of cash out of the people and institutions falling into ruin.) I will address each issue in a separate section, which will get shorter as I get bored and use up all my asset valuation humor. By the way, I know basically nothing about this topic, I just like to rant and find excuses to mention Nick Leeson, because I think it's funny he still acts like it's a tiresome imposition that people still think of him as The Boy Who Broke the Bank of England when he's moved on with his life, other than the odd movie deal where Ewan MacGregor can rehabilitate his image and leave out certain sordid details. (Was I the only one who wondered why his ex-wife was a flight attendant at the end of the movie? But I digress.)

As to how it happened, the short version is new tools for new fools playing a very old game. What's amazing is five years after Enron it still took so long for the mainstream financial media to start whispering the F word (psst, it's fraud). Please give the Street and the City credit, they knew a cash loan to a guy who lives under a bridge was a loser, they just didn't care. At the heights reached by the real estate market in the last few years, there really isn't enough oxygen for people to be making sensible decisions, and asset valuations could be based entirely on stupidity, as in "Is there somebody stupid enough to pay $1m for this? If not, is there somebody stupid enough to pay $950K?" Repeat ad nauseam, or ad venditio. The proof of this by the way is now that the cat's out of the bag about making boat loans to homeless people, nobody can figure out how to value those loans (except me, because I don't get fired if the answer is $0). Like a communion wafer is just bread until blessed by a priest, the value of those loans is drawn out of the ether by the presence of a stupid buyer. (Actually that example only works if you're Catholic, in Protestant churches the wafer is still bread.) That's why it's fraud, even for the people who were aware of it, they figured there would always be another rung of the pyramid to pass these things off to.

As to how anybody can possibly be that dumb in this day and age while still possessing the capital to sink into sub-prime lending, it's because every time we get a new tool, we magically figure it's all different now. Remember when P/E ratios didn't matter on the internet? This time there are collateralized debt obligations and many other tools I don't understand but feel qualified to speak about (if P/E ratios don't matter, neither does my lack of financial education), which make new things possible and old things easier. These are great tools that make it easier to diversify risk, increase liquidity, and raise capital, all of which are good things for the financial system... and annoyingly, all things that reduce returns. If you loan money to one person you have to limit your stake to what you can lose if they don't pay you back, and charge them enough to make it worth the risk of walking away with nothing. If you can 1000 people 0.1% of your capital and have 999 other investors pony up the other 99.9% of each loan, everything reverts to the mean and you can budget for the expected payback rate, with very little risk of walking away with nothing, so it's safer to put more money in. It's more liquid, since it's easier to sell a diverse package of loans than singing the praises of your particular debtors... while you're trying to dump their debts off on somebody else. The liquidity makes it easier to find institutions that want in, since it's easier for them to understand the fundamentals behind a slice of a big market than a small volatile pool of individual assets. More money was competing for suddenly safer assets, and this meant suddenly loaning money to people who pay their credit cards every month wasn't very lucrative.

Getting some higher return assets back into the portfolio required finding some new places to park money, and this could have meant opening new frontiers, but that was unlikely since there's a reason London, Ingulland is once again the world financial capital... London is throwing money into new markets while in the US companies only grow by mergers & acquisitions and the NYSE costs the US economy 10 billion annually by making it harder to raise capital and value assets through their archaic system of hysterically screaming men in ugly jackets who sweat too much throwing paper airplanes at each other to transfer billions of dollars. So instead they did what they did best, just more of it, in sillier and sillier ways. A little bit was logical, as new tools made it possible to make loans that would have been marginal before, moving the rates into reasonable territory, and this should have been another positive, for one thing expanding the class of low-income homeowners, with significant benefit to society.

But it wasn't enough, and all that extra cash had to go farther and farther out on a limb to find somebody to loan money to, into riskier and riskier loans. But they were safer than they would have been previously, right? Well, here's the thing about diversification as a risk management strategy: the Law of Large Numbers (the second most obvious thing I learned in economics**) brings returns closer to the mean, and sometimes that's not so good for high risks... ever been to a casino? Their entire return revolves around the diversification strategy, while the gamblers depend on volatility: the casino makes %2, and the more bets you make, the more likely you lose exactly 2%... actually given the finite resources of gamblers, the return on large numbers of bets is even less than -2%. If you loan money to a heroin addict, there's a 1 in a 1000 chance he might pay you back with interest, but if you loan money to 1,000 heroin addicts, you're statistically guaranteed to lose so much of your money it's probably not even worth bothering to track down the one who might pay you (I'm assuming collections from heroin addicts incur high transaction costs like getting stuck with an HIV infected needle). There are people who pursue only high risks and are protected by diversifying their high risks, such as venture capitalists, but here's a critical difference: there's no upper limit to what a VC project can return, so with enough fingers in enough pies, they find a single project that pays for all the failures. Somebody could pay you %30 interest on their mortgage forever and never pay off their loan or ever default, but I seriously $%#&'ing doubt it.

Nobody could be so starry-eyed as to not realize that, but that's the liquidity aspect of CDO's comes in. It's a lot easier to hide the quality of your underlying assets when every problem is only a tiny fraction of the whole. "Sure, one of these guys who applied for a home equity loan lived in a cardboard box, but your exposure to his default is low. Oh, um, yeah, the guy who scrawled I WILL KILL YOU when we asked for a signature is also a high risk, but that's only two guys, and Mr. I WILL KILL YOU also qualified for a boat loan and a car loan, so that's better. It just is. Quit asking so many questions." This gets even sillier in the case of unique securitized operating assets that can't be valued until they're sold... how much is the name Dunkin' Donuts worth, or the royalties on the Kinks song HP is using for printer commercials? How much are FedEx's assets at the Memphis airport worth, when owned by somebody else? With the expectation of flipping these assets to somebody else, volume became the primary measure of performance, as the banks with the ability to directly make loans flipped the loans of the people trying to flip the real estate, all dipping their beaks in the endless stream of flipping revenue. The underlying mechanism shouldn't be that shocking, since this is what the S&L barons did in the 80's: buy worthless stuff (like your wife's paintings), tell everybody it's valuable, and then when something happens, the company needs money and you can't sell your wife's paintings, run for the border with the money your wife earned as an artist, while your accountant is hospitalized for shitting out his pancreas.

I mentioned Nick Leeson earlier, because one day he sent a fax in to his bosses to tell them they illegally held positions on the Nikkei leaving them with obligations of nearly 300 million pounds as he beat a path out of town. Supposedly it ballooned to 700 million because the directors didn't know what the hell he was talking about and the market figured it out before they did, until ING stepped in and bought the whole bank for a pound and hopefully gave them all a one way ticket to Cornwall. It's hard to believe that grown men could sit in a room with Nick Leeson and believe he had a secret client who in the wake of an earthquake was still so exuberant about the Nikkei he bet over a billion US taking long positions against the rest of the world. And it's hard to believe that bankers across the world all collectively forgot that broke-ass people with no income and not a cent to their name probably got that way for a reason, and are also conveniently judgment proof... nobody forgot, they just ran out of suckers. What do you do if a homeless guy doesn't pay back his boat loan, take his cardboard box away and securitize that?

*-Larry Wilmore's sub-prime lending analysis on The Daily Show was hilarious, and I'll shamelessly steal lines from it if necessary

**-The single most obvious thing an economics professor ever told me with a straight face was the First Law of Financial Economics: more money is better than less money. That and the French PhD candidate who humored me by adding more and more extraneous data to problems at my request figuring once I actually solved the problem I'd realize how pointless all the extra information I'd asked for really was. "'Ere is zee extra rhope, avez vous 'ung yourself weeth it yet?"

The Agony of Defeat (with a side of cous cous)

Rams 13
Vikings 10

After a couple of high scoring significant games against the Rams in the late 90s including the ridiculous blow-out loss to the Greatest Show on Turf in '99 and some dreary games since, I eventually concluded the only way to enjoy the Rams was with green beans and mint jelly. I thought tonight's game was a frustrating debacle that would never end, mainly because I forgot how many TV time-outs there are in football and how rough it is to sit in a seat designed for a Chinese contortionist (thank you so much 1979 legislature for packing three tenants into the most cramped fire trap you could slap together on the cheap). By the third quarter my back and knees are so sore I can't stand up to let them by without grabbing the seat behind me for support and grimacing, although for the first time I actually got some guilty looks from the be-seens who go on walkabout every ten minutes for more lite beer and prawn sandwiches. By the way, if you're one of those people who gets up on 3rd and 4 in the red zone, or on a 3-2 pitch with 2 outs and two runners on, everybody notices and comments on it loudly to their neighbor as soon as you leave. Don't be that guy, or his high maintenance girlfriend.

Anyways, there were some positives early, which is all that counts in the first preseason game. Troy Williamson was a midget with small hands, bad eyesight, and amazing but useless speed that made him stand out as some sort of cruel joke as the replacement for Randy Moss, but a trip to the ophthalmologist seems to have paid off, and he came up with a couple of very nice catches in traffic for first downs. The receivers and the passing game in general looked like a huge improvement on last year, as the Tardis actually completed some passes in addition to showing off his mobility on a nice scamper for a first down. The linebackers seemed much better positioned to make use of their athleticism, notably Donterrious Thomas returning an interception well over 60 yards for a touchdown. The receivers and linebackers were major concerns, so this was quite welcome. Top draft pick Adrian Peterson looked good catching balls out of the backfield, and showed a lot of spirit hitting the hole quick and dragging defenders with him over the first down marker. The problem is the running game still looked pretty dire: Peterson was sent right up the middle into a brick wall when the line couldn't open holes for him, and the Vikings ran a lot last year for little gain in a losing season. The linebackers and the secondary may be ball-hawks, but the pass rush was weak, and a critical element of the Tampa-2 defense the Vikings are so enamored with is pressure from the front four. Ryan Longwell can't kick off, and he couldn't hit a 41-yard field goal either, which makes me wonder if by the time the team is straightened out he'll be washed up. The team's total offensive output was 3 points, and only Thomas' touchdown gave them a shot at winning at home. I'm remaining positive, mainly because after a long absence the ice cream stands at the Dome are serving walk-away sundaes again.

Frankly I'm all for the commissioner's proposal to eliminate two of the exhibition games and have an international week in the regular season. Meaningful games on neutral fields all over the world... well, mainly in Germany I suppose. And happy birthday to Dru Berrymore, wherever you are.

Thursday, August 09, 2007

Who brought down the 35W bridge?

Fingers are pointing, rumors are swirling, so let me see if I can't sort out some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the bridge collapse.

Theory #1 - It was the repair crew

The essential tenet of this theory is that the repair crew resurfacing the bridge deck piled all their supplies on one side of the bridge, tipping one section and destabilizing the whole bridge. The NTSB has requested any video evidence of exactly who and what was on the bridge when it collapsed, so pretty soon the damning photo will come out with giant piles of sand and concrete, a semi trailer full of bowling balls, a Carthaginian general marching elephants across the Mississippi, and only three minis and a vespa in the northbound lanes to balance it out. Actually the elephants don't come until the Republican convention next year, when the Captain will be in China waving a little red book at the Olympic badminton tournament.

Theory #2 - Pigeons did it

You know those little fuckers would get us if they could... they ruined all the statues in Milan, now they're after the bridges, too! Unfortunately despite the amusing hysteria, the quantity of pigeon shit required to significantly weaken the concrete on a bridge that size is so staggering that even with another 40 years to do it, the little bastards couldn't come close. The actually sane possibility underlying this particular theory is that the pigeons layered so much of their horrid droppings on the bridge that they obscured cracks in the cement and other structural failures, and none of the inspectors were willing to get in there with a pickaxe and a shovel to dig down through it to check on the underlying structure. (Fucking pigeons.)

Theory #3 - It was LRT advocates

There's a real rush to get the main north-south artery through the Twin Cities rebuilt in a hurry, and it sounds like the new plans include a fourth lane to be reserved for a future light rail project. This appears awfully... convenient... to the varied opponents of mass transit in Minnesota, who are suggesting that the collapse was orchestrated by pro-mass transit environmentalist liberals, whose green outfits provided the perfect camouflage to slip in amongst the green steel supports of the substructure. To those who point out that most demolitions are noisy and somewhat obvious, the conspiracy theorists answer that clearly the green meanies used thermite to melt the supports, and point to the white smoke observed by drivers right before the collapse.

Theory #4 - God did it

This is one that shouldn't be real, but it is. Christian groups who will not be named are actually making a big fuss about this, and trying to get the message out that God was upset with Minnesota, because we're sinfully tolerant of homosexuality. Gone are the days of the burning bush and leaving some commandments behind a rock, or sending light-footed angels and groovy messiahs. Plunging a bridge into a river just had that je ne sais quoi characteristic of the Allmighty when he's doing the work of his more hate-filled disciples: it's vague enough they have to shout a bit louder to make their case.

Theory #5 - There is no theory #5

Seriously, I can't think of one. (At least that's what we want you to think.)

Theory #6 - It was The Captain

I know at first this seems implausible, but consider his long-running (and highly misunderstood) vendetta against the St. Paul Port Authority (which he still says is not a bus depot). I haven't quite figured out the specifics on this one (he's wily) but he's been incognito for a while, and I know he must have been up to something. (Something other than having a life, and a wife, and a fief.)

Theory #7 - It was the iPhone

It's an NES emulator so you can play Mario Bros, it plays pr0n so you can enjoy the golden era of Peter North on the subway, and oh yeah, it's a phone. Seriously, is there anything it can't do? Is there anything it... wouldn't do? She's a nasty girl that iPhone, she's 1337 and she's coming out swinging.

Theory #8 - It was NAFTA

This theory is based on the proposal for a NAFTA Superhighway linking Mexico, Canada, and the United States. It's hard to nail down specifics on this thing, partly because the Trans-Texas Corridor has already been called a NAFTA Superhighway, and has multiple potential routes on its own, and partly because most of the people talking about the NAFTA Superhighway don't know anything either and so they're creating their own fantasy of where it will go and how it will ruin their lives. For instance, Canadian conspiracists have it running to Churchill, Manitoba, like we're going to import their stupid garbage eating polar bears. I flew through Churchill once, your airport is boring and uncomfortable, I never got my peanuts and the girl sitting next to me was a lesbian so no mile high club. But one of the blindingly obvious routes would be the I-35 corridor, which will probably in the end house a lot of the Trans-Texas Corridor, and gets you awfully close enough to Western Canada and perhaps most importantly goes right to major ports on Lake Superior. Why in the holy hell conspiracy theorists think it would run through downtown Minneapolis is anybody's guess, since the whole point of such a highway is to bypass urban density at 85mph, but their theory is the bridge is being rebuilt to accommodate truckloads of Mexican day laborers, I guess.

Grand Unifying Theory

As always, it falls to me to sort this all out, and explain how all these disparate elements are not contradictory... but in fact complimentary. Let's start with something obvious, the mystery of how pigeons were able to generate such volume at high accuracy when they coated over weak spots in the bridge. The Christians have this one solved: God sent the pigeons (see Theory #4 - God did it). He moves in mysterious ways, and he's spoken through representatives on earth before, so let us turn to the surprising involvement of the Captain (whose motives are clearly spelled out in Theories #3 and #6). Most people would tell you he couldn't possibly have climbed out on narrow girders to set precise thermite charges, being more of an idea man and bon vivant than black ops ninja, but remember this: anyone who's played Mercy with the Captain has certainly felt the hand of God reaching through those fingers, bending the unworthy to their knees... I say in Christ all things are possible. Plus see Theory #1, and remember this guy is all for keeping elephants out of town, and as a loyal foot-soldier of the dfL got the unionized labor force off the bridge in time, no doubt by calling them on his iPhone (Theory #7), forcing them to drop what they were doing leaving all the supplies piled up on one side of the bridge before they had a chance to divide them up (a key tenet of Theory #1). So am I really arguing that the Christian activists are right and God hates fags? Of course not, and while they may have felt the presence of God, whatever secrets lurk in their hearts and their loins led them to the wrong answers about his plan. It's very simple: God loves Mexicans, and he wants to build them a shining path to paradise... which is apparently located at the end of the NAFTA Superhighway on the outskirts of Churchill, Manitoba and guarded by polar bears in case the rest of us stumble across it before they get there (Theory #8). And any discrepancies are all explained by Secret Conspiracy Theory #5, which will not be revealed at this time.

Irony and Karma in Kansas City

The Twins are having an odd series with the Royals in KC, part of a whole knot of curiosities. The Twins looked well out of the play-off race at the trade deadline due to horrid offensive output and a rough series with the Tigers, so they traded a consistent second basemen and lead-off hitter in Luis Castillo (who was on his way out next winter anyways) and called up a couple young infielders to start building next year's team. Surprisingly, they got a bit better and a lot more fun to watch as the inept Nick Punto went back to being a utility infielder, Brian Buscher got some hits at third replacing him, and the new second baseman wasn't that much of a drop-off, and another good hitter, Michael Cuddyer, is back in right field. Meanwhile, with a little help from the Black Sox, the Indians and Tigers have been losing games, giving the Twins another opportunity to get back into the race. Finally they had a chance to turn around their anemic output, which led them to play around .500 record with a lot of close games. Unfortunately, the heart of the line-up still didn't produce any runs, and Brian Buscher is out indefinitely with an infection in his leg, so we're back to the 3rd baseman who forgot how to bunt. They really can't catch a break.

Then in the first game in KC, the lights went out in the stadium. Even first baseman Justin Morneau, who has more home runs than anybody in the American League but A-Rod but has been struggling lately, had to admit that a "power outage" was an ironic atmosphere for a Twins game. Then last night, presumably following the example of Pedro Cerrano, Justin pray to Canadian socialized medicine to take fear from bat, and hit a ball off the rail in the outfield. Off the rail, up in the air, and back onto the field... where nobody knew if it was a home run or a live ball. Morneau was smart enough to just run, and easily made it into third base as the throw from the outfield sailed in, but the third base umpire (and two others) signalled home run, so he went home. Then they had a conference to decide if it was a live ball, pointing at second and third, so Justin went back to third base and stood there to symbolically make his case that he thought it was a triple (at least). After much more arguing, a decision was reached that it was a ground rule double, which I don't get since the entire point of that call is that an unplayable ball gives the runner an extra base, and the Royals obviously played Morneau's hit. Then Torii Hunter settled the argument the old fashioned way, might makes right, and hit the next pitch out of the park, sending Morneau home anyways in karmic retribution (3rd, okay, but no way he goes back to 2nd). It was a great hitting game for the Twins: Michael Cuddyer drove in a run in the first so they could play with a lead, they batted around in the 3rd scoring 5 more runs, and won by a final score of 11-4. So I thought things were looking up, and then they get shut out this afternoon in a 1-0 loss to lose the series. If they can't put away KC, then they really aren't going to catch the Indians and Tigers, but then again, last year they looked hopeless and were four games back on the Tigers with four games left to play and won the division, so 5.5 back in August might not be so bad.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Your Blog Request Fulfilled

By Amstelboy's request, I did some due diligence* on the following topics. As always, my judgment is absolute, and final.

1. Freddy Adu joins Benfica

Freddy Adu, the overhyped teenage soccer phenom is on his way to Portugal to play for Benfica. This is a good opportunity for him, playing in a second tier European league but for a team that will play in European competition. Actually it's more like tier 2A for Portugal and the Netherlands, with a Tier 1B above them that has the French Ligue Un and everybody in the German Bundesliga besides Bayern Munich in it. Tier 1A is Spain, Italy, and everybody from England except Spurs, who mathematically can't win anything until 2011 (do the math). I'll put Russia, Greece, Scotland, and Belgium in Tier 2B at present, and maybe a 2C with Turkey, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic, regular contributors to the CL who would be upwardly mobile in good years. But anyways, Benfica is a good spot to find out if he's any good, because he'll get playing time, and if he's any good he'll play some European games in the CL or UEFA Cup, and won't get buried on the bench like Landon Donovan and Claudio Reyna did in Germany.

An American player in a comparable situation was DaMarcus Beasley who played in the Champions League semi-finals for PSV Eindhoven, who has since moved on to Rangers, another tiny league superclub like Benfica or PSV. When Rangers got Reyna from Wolfsburg, my impression is he was like they stereotypical American soccer jock, a big fish in a small pond who pictures himself as a playmaker through which the chi of his team flows. Talented, but not aggressive, always in midfield because he has to touch the ball but isn't a finisher. There's a breed of world class midfielder who stamps his mark on a game: a fantasista like Zidane from the middle, a striker like Henry or a mezzapunta like Francesco Totti from up top, or wingers like Beckham with his crosses or a Franck Ribery with his long runs last summer for France... lots of ways to do it, if you're that kind of chi-focal player, and that's how the coddled soccer jock imagines himself. Then there's a different breed of world class midfielder, including linchpin players like Clarence Seedorf and Andrea Pirlo who switch the whole team from defense to attack, and versatile defensive midfielders like Patrick Vieira, Edgar Davids, and Roy Keane who were tough as nails but could roam both ends of the field.

While Reyna was not in the class of the players I've mentioned as archetypal, it seemed that he went to Rangers as a soft soccer jock imagining himself as a Zidane-style fantasista, and they made him into a holding midfielder, a supporting role that required him to be tougher and play off of other people. When he was fit enough to play in the 2002 World Cup, the US team had the middle of the field locked up with Pablo Mastroeni as ballwinner and John O'Brien as distributor, both playing supremely well, so there was some expectation that Reyna as the Captain and darling of US Soccer would screw that up. came in to play on the right side of midfield, and immediately made an impact as an aggressive presence on the wing. My opinion is he became a much better player for getting an opportunity that made him stretch himself at Rangers, as did arguably John O'Brien when he got playing time as a defender at Ajax. The two bad situations are the two Landon Donovan has found himself in: too good to need to push himself in California, and not needed enough to get playing time in Germany.

So hopefully Freddy Adu gets slapped around in Portugal where nobody cares if he's Freddy Adu, but gets an opportunity that challenges him. But all in all, youth phenoms have a poor track record at the top level... if you look at some of the teenage phenoms who've blossomed, like Cristiano Ronaldo, or Cesc Fabregas, or Nicholas Anelka back in the day, they weren't making their bones in U-17 World Cups and playing for youth teams, they were signed with big clubs (Manchester United, Arsenal, and Arsenal, respectively) and playing for their countries' senior national teams (Portugal, Spain, and France, respectively) by the time they warranted so much hype. So let's see what he does outside of second flight football when nobody gives a shit about his marketing deal.

2. Kevin Garnett Trade Rumors

There are no Garnett Trade Rumors, he's gone. Speculation is Kevin McHale still loves the Celtics, because in two trades, he did more to help them rebuild than anybody in the last 15 years. They have a core of veteran all-stars, the Timberwolves now have some young talented players, some expiring contracts, and a couple draft picks back to replace the various ones McHale gave away (including the Celtics giving back the one they got in our last trade). The most important part of the deal for cynics is the Wolves get under the luxury tax threshold and save Taylor some money, and for the optimists, that while we'll suck next year, we get to rebuild a team with a new identity not based around jump shots, and one more good trade could pretty much clear out the rest of the garbage.

3. All Things Cub

Is 99 the Cubs lucky number, is the Hope Train leaving the station for Clark and Addison or are they the ninja loan of Midwestern baseball, due to shinobi their way out of the playoff race in September? They may make the play-offs, provided no naive bankers with too many stamps in their passport don't pay attention to the game, pull a Bartman, and haul in a critical foul-out as a souvenir. However, while they may lead the NL Central (the subprime mortgage market of Major League Baseball) the Brewers just had a rough patch and are 0 games back, and the wild card race is distinctly unfriendly, with the Cubs and like 3 others tied for second. Are they clutch? Are they a team of destiny? Their Pythagorean win total at this point in the season is 61, while their actual win total is 57. For those of you whose statistical training didn't include the Pythagorean theorem (no, not the one with the triangles from 8th grade) that's a sophisticated system somebody drew up on a cocktail napkin to predict a team's record based on their offensive and defensive productivity. Even after the walk-off wild pitch in their last game, the Cubs are under-performing slightly, which means they lose close games... not good for a tight play-off run. Then again, maybe it means they're due to pick up four more wins and pull ahead in the NL Central.

The long-awaited sale of the Cubs by the Tribune did have some interesting fall-out. One of the Cubs suitors is Mark Cuban, and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is expected to oppose his purchase of the team, despite an OBVIOUS conflict of interest. Cuban is the guy most likely to "get" the appeal of the Cubs, which ironically makes him the perfect guy to own the White Sox. Cuban bought the hapless Dallas Mavericks and turned them into a major success as both a contender and a profitable contributor to the NBA, and stated that his philosophy in doing so was that the Maverick's product was not basketball, it was "sore throats". Unable to insure victory, Cuban tried to make sure the experience of a Mavericks game was a good one for paying customers regardless of the outcome of the game, with a competitive team and energetic atmosphere, so everybody left with a sore throat from cheering. This is how the Saint Paul Saints came close to outdrawing the Minnesota Twins in the mid-90s, by making a day at a Class C game more fun than the MLB game at the other end of the #3 bus line. The experience of a day at Wrigley is an American legend, and my Dad still has the scorecard from his first Major League game at Wrigley Field back in the 50's. The Cubs stink because they can... nobody cares and they won't go out of business, because it's still fun to be a Cubs fan. The Black Sox have traditionally only had two real lures: winning teams, and the best food court in the majors (allegedly). My cousin (a Cubs fan) tells me Black Sox fans describe themselves as political, staying away to protest managerial decisions and make their displeasure known, which is kind of a sophisticated way of saying they're fair weather fans who don't really even want to watch their own team half the time. Frankly, the experience of being a Black Sox fan doesn't sound all that much fun, eating churros while the Piranhas from Minnesota nip away bases and having to listen to endless Shoeless Joe jokes (like me continuing to call them the Black Sox after 88 years).

And that addresses your last Cubs question, about rebuilding the stadium. For the Cubs, Wrigley Field is their product. It's the CDO^2 of baseball tickets, all risk has been heavily diversified out of the product. They can renovate a bit, open up new revenue streams with a club and luxury boxes, a discrete new stand, but some places are special. The Knicks survived leaving the Mecca of Basketball (the old Madison Square Garden) but it helped being the crown jewel of the city that has an unbelievable cradle of basketball legends across the East River, but the Celtics never recovered from leaving the Boston Garden. If they did something truly tragic, like moving the Cubs to a soulless, gargantuan new facility in Evanston or Skokie where they had a development deal, they'd quickly become a curiosity, lose mindshare to the Black Sox, and the mystique would continue to surround the field and the history of the club, but the ability to step back in time to a pre-Vietnam, or even a pre-WWII America would be lost, and that's what they're packaging and selling at 1060 W Addison.

4. Skol! Let us drink from the skulls of our enemies!

Ever since the debacles of 1998 and 2000 I've been unable to commit to being wildly optimistic about the Vikings season, because I know my emotional state is too fragile to leave it in Ragnar's hands. They may be better than last season, and they could hardly be less watchable, but the major flaws may still remain: no passing game, and no pass rush, leading to horrors like the Patriots game last year. I'm still irritated with my ex-girlfriend from Connecticut over that game, and we broke up 12 years ago... it produces that level of irrational bitterness, which is why I have to manage it carefully. With our weak implementation of the Tampa-2 defense exposed and not a single reliable receiver to revive our weak implementation of the West Coast Offense, we're screwed, that's your Vikings outlook, so you can go ahead and hop on the Bears bandwagon early, Amstelboy.

5. Triathlons and Tattoos

The Singapurrr triathlon is an experience I can only imagine. What is it, running, running while being caned, and swimming in salt water with sharks circling your raw, bleeding fresh caning wounds? How does it compare with the Chicago triathlon, where take your bike on the red line to 95th street, ride it north until it gets stolen, then run like hell until you get stabbed and thrown into the river, with a finish line in Indiana where your body washes up on the shore? I'll stick to the Minnesota triathlon: 30 miles by dog sled, 5 miles on foot chased by wolves, and eating deep fried candy bars at the state fair until you throw up, and then we all celebrate with a glass of root beer milk from Senator Boschwitz's milk stand. In the relay my team's a dead lock for the gold... I marked every tree in northern Minnesota until I'd established my alpha status amongst the native wolf population, and the Captain is like the Eddie Merckx of eating deep fried candy bars.

*-By due diligence, I mean I thought about each topic for upwards of a minute before forming my opinion, and made occasional trips to wikipedia to verify small details I couldn't bluster over.