Absolut Rufus

Top 10 Reasons I've Been Out of Work For 3 Months

2012-01-15T22:16:00.001-06:00

10. Back in October I ate a Grumpy's meatloaf sandwich, and I only recently came out of the coma.

9. With the snow and ice making it hard for me to take my bike out, I tried taking an MTC bus somewhere. Just a few more blocks to my destination and about 1800 stops where people need to negotiate the route with the driver like it's a damn tuk-tuk.

8. I decided to shave my beard off and I couldn't remember how, so it's been taking a while.

7. Too busy writing Collateralized Debt Obligation: the Rock Opera.

6. I drank a potion that unleashed my dreadful alter ego, Edward Hyde, resulting in a maelstrom of mischief and a lot of missed days at work, because that guy never clocks in. (Actually I should use this excuse to explain my behavior more often.)

5. I wanted to feel what it was like to be an aging suburban hipster, so I thought I'd start with breakfast at Hell's Kitchen. I didn't want to leave because I'm sure any day now my table will be ready.

4. An Impinged nerve in my back prevented me from sitting and standing, and the theater has a tragic shortage of hammocks. This one's actually true.

3. I was tragically paralyzed by obsession with Japanese number puzzles. Actually this one's kind of true too, if anybody wants to stage an intervention and delete the KenKen app off my phone.

2. I can't focus on anything until I finish work on my Batcave style lair, so I can once again return to prowling the streets as the masked crime fighter Quirinus. If Phoenix Jones can run around pepper-spraying people until they're bright orange and choking, why can't I?

1. Way too busy trying to think of a 10th joke for this stupid list.

Zebras 103, Wolves 101

2011-12-31T20:44:00.002-06:00

My experience with the Wolves the last few years did prepare me for one thing: I went in knowing the Wolves would lose. And with two minutes to go I knew Dwayne Wade was going to come up with a clutch shot to kill us and nobody on the Wolves was going to stop him. So my Timberwolves negativity wasn't entirely unwarranted. But despite that little my reward to my pessimism, the Wolves did also provide evidence that things may have changed.

Pessimism does come easily to me right now after the increasing frustrations of the last few months, so I expected a few things besides a Wolves loss. For one, I thought they'd get massacred by Dwayne Wade and his two friends, and where the '08 Wolves are fondly remembered because they'd put up an entertaining fight until opponents turned up the intensity in the 4th quarter, I figured this game would see the Heat up by 30 and clearing the end of the bench by the half. Imagine my surprise when the Wolves were actually leading the game at halftime, and forced a complete game effort by Miami's superstars. I also thought Lebron James would beat Michael Beasley like a rented mule and then chew his way through the rest of the Wolves collection of tweener forwards like the cast of Alien. I wasn't totally wrong on that one since Beasley doesn't have the quickness to stay in front of Lebron (who finished with 34 points and two rebounds short of a triple double) but it wasn't nearly the sad spectacle I was expecting. And to be fair, stopping Lebron is harder than dubbing a Nicholas Cage movie into Cantonese: if the guy had any heart he'd be the best player in the league.

Fortunately there were some more things to grumble about for beleaguered Minnesota sports fans who've long since learned that the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. After a good start Beasley did still look a bit lost and prone to doing stupid things, like he's mentally checked out, and Wes Johnson continues to mystify me as a #4 overall pick. In their own way, both of those guys look like their goal is just to hang out on the court, and would prefer if there wasn't so much pressure to hustle, execute plays or win games. Sometimes I think Beasley's mostly there to fool around for a while and Johnson is just running around hoping the ball doesn't come his way. Despite being our starters, neither appeared in the 4th quarter of a very close game. I know they're both young and Johnson is only starting his second year, but guys like this tying up $10m in salary is why the league had to lock the players out. Also I still think Luke Ridnour looks like an obnoxious punk who hasn't figured out he's not on the verge of a break-out year at 30, but I'm probably just reading too much into his (obnoxious) body language. I feel I should point out that three out of five starters being nigh-unwatchable is why the Wolves were such a painful mess last year.

Now that I've found something to complain about, I should acknowledge there were definitely some pleasant surprises. First off, it was great to see an energized Wolves team come out onto the floor actually thinking they could beat Miami, and obviously executing some sort of game-plan. Amazingly there were substitutions that made sense and put the guys that were performing well on the floor, and most amazingly, against a Heat squad that are tremendous at scoring quick points in transition, an athletic and alert Wolves squad actually tried to contain them. I know I shouldn't be so excited about this, but I couldn't figure out what in the hell Kiriakos Rambidis' gameplan was last year, and it seemed pretty obvious the players couldn't either.

I love it when the role players step up and I still have hope for the much-maligned Darko especially as the only healthy center on a seriously short team, so when he started out the game with a lot of defensive energy, blocking shots and generally looking awake (sometimes he struggles), I had a good feeling about the whole game. The bench was ready to play, as the two Anthonys (Randolph and Tolliver) were solid contributors on offense and defense, and Wayne Ellington had what might be his best game I've seen so far. At the end of a close game, for the Duke to even be on the court at all much less take the last shot (even if he missed) is a huge change from what he accomplished in his first two years... on a team that's really thin at shooting guard having the Duke step up could be huge. But the real excitement this year so far is the rookies.

Ricky Rubio is living up to the Wolves desperate attempts to generate marketing hype and justify drafting a player who may have based career decisions on a childhood phobia of snow (I just made that up). Much as I rolled my eyes at his fan section with the Spanish flags, they were right: it is actually exciting when Rubio comes into a game, heightened by the contrast to the cold beige of Ridnour. He cracked up the entire crowd last night after shaking off a Heat player twice while still taking care of the ball, and then irritably shooing him away with a flick of his hand. Watching Rubio whipping the ball around and using the athleticism of Williams to connect on alley-oops is fantastic, and it's only going to get better once the Wolves trust Reeecky to start games, and figure out what to do with Williams.

One game doesn't make a team or a season (we're still 0-3) but it's been years since I could even imagine a Wolves team putting their foot on the throat of a title contender like they did last night, and if they hadn't frozen up a bit in the last couple of minutes, missing free throws, making dumb fouls and failing to make baskets they could have pulled off a monster upset. Even so the Heat needed a lot of help tonight from the refs who called more offensive fouls in this game than I've ever seen in my life. Without #33 Zach Zebra as the Heat's player of the game, this would not have been close enough for Wade to steal it at the end. I know this is how the Heat win titles (see 2006) but if they need this much help against the Wolves, I don't know what they're going to do in the play-offs against another team with marketable stars.

The A-Team meets Leverage

2011-12-15T21:26:00.001-06:00

The A-Team is gone...

The A-Team loomed large in my childhood. They were larger than life characters, living these impossible lives and somehow juggling an impossible number of projects, personal and charitable. And given the Boomer mania for remaking old properties, it seemed inevitable that at least some production company would think if they could find them, maybe they could hire... the A-Team.

It was hard to imagine anybody making that work since those characters are so firmly bound in a particular time and place, and a much broader, comic-book kind of storytelling than you would get away with today. Silliness certainly still abounds on television (rolling my eyes at NCIS Los Angeles is a guilty pleasure) but these shows all take themselves deathly seriously, try to ground every detail and populate themselves entirely with world-weary veterans and doe-eyed trainees with harsh lessons ahead of them. There are certainly echoes out there of George Peppard's cigar-chomping grin and his enigmatic confidence, but Dirk Benedict wrote a scathing commentary on the timidity of producers and certain flavors of feminism meaning his signature characters were gone forever (Katee Sackhoff says he was less of a dick about it in person), and it seems clear: Mr. T is the only actor alive who could wear 50 lbs of gold jewelry and still be so intimidating as to frighten away even the barest trace of a smirk.

The A-Team did return for last year's film, proving somebody out there besides me still loved those characters. Interestingly Liam Neeson was the weakest of that core cast with his deathly earnest portrayal of Hannibal, while the other characters were born out of a spirit of fun. And it was fun, if not particularly memorable. The film and the re-runs of the series that came up around it were a nice bit of nostalgia, but I really didn't need to see a whole lot more.

...but Leverage continues

I don't know what made me first watch an episode of Leverage, but I'm sure boredom and the whim of my tivo both had to be involved somehow. There's a crooks-gone-good formula that seems to keep showing up recently (at least this is what I've gleaned from promos) and Leverage seemed like late to the game, more of the same. And I was sort of right, because I had seen all this before: it turns out somebody out there shared my childhood affection for all four members of the A-Team (the chick reporters and the sleazy FX guy don't really count). And I eventually found Leverage to be as much fun as I found The A-Team to be back in grade school.

What really got me thinking about the A-Team again was Christian Kane's character, Eliot. I always liked Christian Kane from his days on Angel, and he's probably why I gave this show a chance. Everybody has a defined role, and Eliot's, The Hitter, is the most clearly defined and has the best analogue to the A-Team: B.A Baracus. Both men are primal forces of nature who can be counted on to destroy anybody in their path, to an absolutely ridiculous extreme. Nameless guards always go down in one punch, and occasionally a henchman with a line lasts a few minutes, but every week there's a con that depends on the inevitability of Eliot winning every confrontation. Nobody has made me suspend my disbelief in such a character since Mr. T (notably, the only guy to ever beat Rocky Balboa by knock-out). Both are also surprisingly good with children, showing a tender but firm side. And notably, they both enforced ethical discipline within the group... with a giant fist.

So that got me noticing a few things, like the constant bickering and sniping between Eliot (The Hitter) and Hardison (The Hacker). There wasn't a hacker on The A-Team (it was 1983) so the closest analogue is Murdock, the crazy man who had an essential skill nobody else could duplicate: piloting aircraft. Coincidentally, both are always winding up the team's muscle. The missing essential element of Howling Mad Murdock was his synonymous insanity, but it is reflected in the quirky behavior of the other Leverage team member with unique skills: Parker (The Thief). It seems unlikely we'll see Parker talking to sock puppets and making herself a cape and cowl out of a table cloth, although anthropomorphizing objects and considering them friends does sound just about right.

Seeing Face, the con man, in Sophie (The Grifter) isn't a huge stretch. They both fill the same role, using sex and charm and adopting a host of personae at will. They both have the most independent outside life, and are constantly running into people who know them under other identities or using elements of another long con. That just leaves the leader with a smug smile who conveys a strong sense of authority: on Leverage this is Nate, the only one who isn't a crook, with whiskey and coffee replacing Hannibal's cigar. And then of course there's the van. On both shows, the black guy is ridiculously attached to his black van, which garners most of their love and affection. To me that clinches it.

Obviously stories have been recycled for millennia so finding something that didn't share material with something else would be harder than dubbing a Nicholas Cage movie into Cantonese, but it's still funny to me when I see the 80's revisited like this. (The last time was when I realized how much inspiration Alias owed to Miami Vice.) So every once in a while in this remake happy era, I'm gratified to see somebody actually do it right and carry forward the spirit of an old property rather than just the names, even though obviously the modern version has a long more angst and serialized, interpersonal drama. Plus more women, less poofy 80's hair, and a lot more sex. So yeah, I'm a fan.

On Moneyball

2011-09-11T22:52:00.001-05:00

To answer the question I keep being asked, no, I'm not excited about a movie coming out named Moneyball, despite the two giant moneyballs sitting in my living room (crappy State Fair prizes). Because I know what it's about.

Back when I first read Moneyball, I was in the middle of some kind of binge of books on sports and serial killers, two subjects which actually have a frightening amount of overlap. Both turned out to be largely about men so fixated on one idea they would go to any extreme to appease their demons, and I don't know if I'd prefer being locked in a room with a serial killer or with Mike Agassi and Peter Graf. However in this sea of vivid characters, Moneyball left me cold, for several reasons.

The first problem is it very quickly became dated. Some of the ideas about baseball statistics are interesting, and they were no doubt revolutionary and controversial back in the 2002 season when Michael Lewis was researching this book, but to a large degree the new stats have already entered the conversation especially when it comes to hitters, so it's hard to join in Lewis' smugness as he proclaims Billy Beane a genius for discovering on-base percentage. Lewis tracks the meteoric rise of minor league players who we now know never made it or flamed out, and almost ten years later Beanes legacy is a lot more questionable after he backed out of a big-market job with the Red Sox and led the A's back into obscurity.

Knowing a bit more about how things turned out, Lewis' almost masturbatory tone when describing Beane and his pet prospects becomes insufferable at times. Lewis is so caught up in the magical moments of "catcher with a bad body" Jeremy Brown's historic journey to the majors it's like he hasn't read his own book: early chapters describing Billy Beane's career as a player describe how a "can't miss" prospect never made it as a pro and offers this as proof of the incompetence of the baseball scouting establishment. At the same time, Lewis illustrates Beane's genius by telling the story of how he found the catcher with a bad body and snagged the undervalued player the establishment didn't want (but mysteriously doesn't explain why Beane used a high draft pick on a player nobody wanted). Several chapters raving about Brown and Nick Swisher and the future of the A's seemed a little anti-climactic when Brown is retired and Swisher was riding the bench in another city. Ironically, Beane's six years in the majors look pretty good compared to Brown's ten career at-bats with the A's.

Moneyball is not without merit, and there's certainly some interest in some of the stories of the inner workings of the A's office and how Beane worked trades with other GM's, but the love affair Lewis has seemingly entered with his muse undermines his credibility. Anyone who dares to disagree with Beane is maligned and dismissed, as Lewis tells us statistical analysis shows that A's manager Art Howe's single contribution to the team's success was to inspire the players by standing on the top step of the dug-out with his chin stuck out. Otherwise the manager is just sort of there, getting in Beane's way. Lewis acknowledges that the GM is not allowed into a major league clubhouse, so it's hard not to wonder if his brief dismissal of Howe stems from the manager's disagreements with Beane over the relevance of game situations vs. broad statistics.

And statistics is ironically where Moneyball seems to get lost. Once again it seems like Lewis hasn't read the first half of his own book where Billy Beane's philosophy is initially presented as seeking value, finding the aspects of the game and the players that are undervalued and therefore easier to acquire with a small market team's resources. The key stat Beane found was on-base percentage, and with it the ability to build a team that didn't have power or speed but could string hits together and keep an inning going. Lewis tells us the A's were going to ignore defense and baserunning, not waste money chasing power hitters and pitchers and just keep runners moving and count on maximizing the number of runs they scored over 162 games. Over time every else caught up to what Beane was doing, so presumably he would change his strategy to find another undervalued aspect of the game. But like all statheads, Lewis gets married to one idea and extends it way, way past the boundaries of the model, and comes to the conclusion that maximizing on-base percentage is the only way to win a baseball game.

That strategy did score a lot of runs and win a lot of games for the A's in 2002 and put them in the play-offs where they lost the division series. Art Howe warned Beane that in the play-offs games get closer and the stakes get higher, and when you're trying to win a single game it's necessary to get outs and manufacture runs when you need them, where Beane dismissed this tinkering as gambling on the wrong odds. I'm not enough of a baseball expert to judge, but Lewis dismissively points out that none of the A's 2002 play-off games were the kind of low-scoring nail-biters that Howe was predicting. According to Lewis, the A's just had some unlucky bounces of the ball, and had they played a 162-game playoff series Beane's team would have surely emerged victorious. His analysis completely ignores one fascinating element of that play-off series: their opponent.

It's interesting that Lewis spent so much time in Billy Beane's office that he didn't look around at anything else going on in baseball and make any kind of comparison to other teams. The White Sox in those years were trying to assemble a team of all power hitters who played no defense who would win every game 9-0 with nine home runs. They were mercurial, living and dying on their ability to pound in extra base hits, but they kept losing to a small-market team with little revenue that, like the A's, punched above their weight: the Minnesota Twins. The strategy that the Twins were employing was the exact opposite of the A's, valuing pitching and defense to keep games close and manufacturing enough runs to be one run ahead at the end of the 9th. There is a very strong correlation between runs scored and allowed and winning percentage, yet somehow the 2002 Twins kept defying that statistical logic that says nobody a team that's in a lot of close games has to finish at .500. And they beat the A's, with a utility infielder chasing down the last out.

It boggles the mind that Lewis watched a five game series between the A's and a team pursuing the exact opposite strategy and didn't find it worth considering, however it's not the only glaring omission. Despite their disdain for pitching, the 2002 A's were blessed to have three young pitchers having great years. Having young players break out at the same time is an incredible windfall for a small-market team, and those three won a lot more games for the A's than a catcher with a bad body in their farm system.

Something can be wrong and insightful all at the same time, and parts of Moneyball explain very well the logic of the ongoing statistical revolt in baseball over the last ten years against the dominant 19th century paradigm of the game. And Beane's story is an interesting one, but what makes me unable to ever recommend this book to anyone is when I consider the poor surgeon who no doubt had to be called in to remove Michael Lewis' tongue from Billy Beane's anus. One part of this meandering love poem to Beane is illustrative of how Lewis lost any journalistic perspective and became an sycophant: when he defends Beane's 11th hour antics with the Red Sox. Back in Boston Theo Epstein had famously left he office in a gorilla suit to avoid the press, and Beane had plane tickets in his pocket to Boston when he decided to back out of the job without explanation. With the Red Sox he would have been subject to constant media scrutiny and had no excuses about payroll, and he would either prove his model of baseball by building a world series winner, or he would fail. Most people think he choked and went back to hide in the corner, however Michael Lewis tells us he didn't want the job in the first place, and he just took it to prove to everyone he could be GM of the Red Sox if he wanted to. It's such a childish attitude, like a kid who won't play a game but assures everyone, "I could beat you all, if I wanted to." And yet his loyal sidekick, Lewis, seems to think we should all stand in awe of Beane for pissing away the second or third most powerful job in baseball.

So no, I like Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Brad Pitt, but I'm not excited about the movie Moneyball, which I assume will be more revisionist history.

Can I talk myself into Wolves tickets again?

2011-07-03T12:19:00.001-05:00

Once again I’ve reached that part of the year where I try to talk myself into the idea that the Timberwolves might be watchable again, after the muddled, unmotivated mess they’ve been for the past couple years, and I've decided to write it all down this year. The Wolves went into the off-season with five ways to improve: Europe, our draft picks, the David Kahn trade blender, seasoning players, and maybe looking like they have a plan.

Europe
Especially since the end of the McHale era, the Wolves have finally started to clue in to the idea that basketball is played on more than one continent, and that second round scouting doesn’t have to be limited to watching a few Big 10 games. Consequently the Wolves have a couple players under contract in Europe, although I can’t say their first big European import (Pekovic) has been all that impressive. But now they have Ricky Rubio, the young Spanish point guard with a silly haircut, coming over to play. Two years ago he was a future phenom who refused to play in a backwater like Minnesota, but growing up a bit and having a bad World Championships seems to have tempered his attitude. Adding a potential future all-star could certainly help make the Wolves watchable again.
Plus: Ricky Rubio

The Draft
The Wolves came in with the #2 and #20 picks, and didn’t completely blow it. After failing to make a trade, the Wolves took Derrick Williams at #2 and may have gotten the best player in the draft. Unfortunately he’s our fourth undersized power forward, joining all-star and stupendous rebounder Kevin Love, oddball tweener Michael Beasley, and stick-thin Anthony Randolph. Williams might be better than all of them except Love, but I still don’t know how they plan on playing these guys together.

The #20 pick the Wolves threw into David Kahn’s giant draft blender, in which he makes 15 separate deals like a hustler at a swap meet, and may or may not have actually come away with any more than he started with. But more on the blender later. So adding Derrick Williams… can’t call that a bad thing, but if he becomes a lost rookie with no playing time that really isn’t terribly exciting.
Plus: Derrick Williams

Seasoning Players and Healing Injuries
Kahn keeps reminding us what a young team this is, so theoretically some of them might get better. I don’t know who, though… Love is pretty good already, the veteran role-players have topped out, and none of the guys Kahn rolled the dice on (Beasley, Randolph, Darko) or the young players (Johnson, Hayward, Tolliver) look poised for a giant breakthrough. I suppose the argument could be made that if Wesley Johnson finds a position in his second year and Martell Webster finally recovers from his injuries the Wolves could improve at small forward (and possibly shooting guard). Between Webster, Johnson, and Hayward, one of them has to do something this year, right? And maybe Pekovic will get it together and remember he can dunk on people, who knows.
Plus: improved small forwards, maybe some better play at center.

The Blender
Figuring out the net cost-benefit of a flurry of David Kahn trades is harder than dubbing a Nicholas Cage movie into Cantonese, but I'll try anyways. Here are the assets David Kahn threw into trades: the #20 pick, disappointing PG Jonny Flynn, a future 2nd round pick, and some money. And here’s what he got back:

Brad Miller – once a good center, now aging and injured but hopefully still serviceable. Some veteran depth at center can’t be bad.

Malcolm Lee – a rookie combo guard who’s potentially a great defender. He should get playing time on a team that has only one real shooting guard.

Tanguy Ngombo – I suppose if he can play shooting guard and he doesn’t actually turn out to secretly be 39 years old (African birth certificates are a bit fanciful) he might actually make the team.

Money – the “cash considerations” should come to a net positive for the Wolves. Good news for Glen Taylor, anyways.

Draft picks – a future 1st round pick and two future 2nd round picks.

So really a couple of the draft picks cancel out, and we traded Flynn for Malcolm Lee, the last dregs of Brad Miller’s career, Tanguy Ngombo, a future 2nd round pick, and a net positive on cash. Not exactly overwhelming, but on the other hand Flynn generated mostly turnovers and boos for the Wolves last year.
Plus: Malcolm Lee, possible depth at center, fewer boos.

Planning
It’s possible the Wolves will still fire Kiriakos Rambidis and bring in somebody who doesn’t use a 15-man rotation and look like he’s throwing crap against the wall every night and not even paying any attention to what sticks… just basically throwing crap at the team and the fans until everybody quit on him. Or maybe Rambis will come in with a new plan, who knows. Unfortunately Kahn is in love with the idea of a team of all-versatile players that plays a different roster for every match-up, probably because that works on Xbox.

Conclusion
So overall, here’s how the Wolves might be better or at least more watchable this year:

1. Their starting point guard will be Ricky Rubio instead of Jonny Flynn.
2. Webster might be healthy.
3. Johnson and Pekovic might do something in their second years.
4. They might have more depth at center and shooting guard.
5. Rambis might give up the triangle and make some sort of a game plan.

The Future
The Wolves do have couple of assets for future trades, like the future #1 pick they got in one of these deals, and they could trade one or more of their 4 undersized power forwards if one of them has a decent showing next year. The Wolves will also come out of the lock-out with 13 players under contract with just this year’s rookies to sign so they might be able to take advantage of the ensuing chaos, but they won’t have cap room or roster spots and nobody knows what the CBA will look like, so I doubt that’s too likely. And of course when the Wolves stink next year and get a lottery pick that won’t help, because McHale already traded it away to the Clippers for the epic basketball force that was Marko Jaric.

Basically it comes down to whether Rubio is enticing enough to buy tickets... so yeah, I think I’m going to pass, especially for a season in which nobody has any clue what the schedule is going to be or how many games they’ll get in after the lockout. Nicely done, guys.

On Singapore Cabs

2011-05-15T20:18:00.002-05:00

A quick note about cabs in Singapore: they're cheap but they're weird. I've never met people so averse to earning a fare or keeping a tip as Singapore cabbies, who will quickly dig out and insistently thrust a 10 cent coin at you if you pay your S$9.90 fair with a tenner. The no-tipping policy is culture shock, but the thing that kills me is the unintended consequence of regulation that makes it impossible to find a cab: if you call for a cab in this country they slap an extra S$2 on the fare, so they all lurk around the corner of major destinations waiting for a call. Last night this provided the second of two Singapore cab absurdities as Amstelbooij and I stood outside a restaurant looking at two cabs parked across the street, unwilling to come over and pick us up until they were dispatched... I still can't figure out how these people make money when they spend so much time ducking fares hoping for a dispatch, trying to make sure they get back to the garage just as their shift ends, or my favorite: pulling over for half an hour before sundown and refusing fares because they can charge an extra 50 cents at night. So basically hailing a cab here is harder than dubbing a Nicholas Cage movie into Cantonese, and half of the guys with their lights on are carrying passengers off the books anyways, so it's a mystery how the cab companies stay in business at all.

My two favorite Singapore cabbies in short order last night: first we had a cabbie pull over, then tells us when we got in that her shift was over in half an hour so she couldn't take us anywhere. I'm still not sure why she pulled over in the first place, or why a 10-15 minute trip for you know, cash money was such an onerous burden (it's kind of your job), but we had to pop out and try and flag down even more cabs who wouldn't pull over: either they had passengers and hadn't dropped the flag or were waiting to be dispatched. This was a bit annoying as we were in a mad race to get to an Indian restaurant before the kitchen closed, but it looked like somebody was going to come to our rescue... and then he cautiously drove about 1km below the speed limit at all times while getting directions off of Amstelbooij's iPhone. He mentioned that driving a cab was a weekend job for him; he was a driving instructor for the army. The guy usually drove a tank, so I guess that explains why he was a bit skittish in traffic. We did make dinner with a gentle instruction from our waiter, “If you want anything, order it NOW.”

For some reason in a country where rapid growth and the need to import consumer goods has driven rampant inflation, a few things like cabs are still ridiculously cheap. Singapore does enjoy a supply of cheap labor from Indonesia, Malaysia and southern India with very little oversight, which means housing and living costs can skyrocket while at the same time a live-in maid and nanny or a driver are surprisingly affordable. This is sort of awkward as I'm not used to being waited on without forking over a huge tip, and it's even more awkward when there's a clear race and class difference... guess I'm not European enough, or at least most of my European ancestry and tradition comes from Europe's former colonies not its colonizers. On the other hand while I feel a little weird about an Indonesian maid doing my laundry, I was sort of fine with my friend's Chinese wife washing stuff for me in Chicago while I made jokes about the Chinese laundry being open. My white guilt is apparently quite intermittent.

Rufus, from Singapore

Singapore Diary - Into Orchard Road, or Who's Afraid of Rice?

2011-05-13T17:20:00.000-05:00

I thought it was worth taking a day to just chill with friends I haven't seen since last summer, and to see a day in the life of a people who live here, dropping the kid off at his Chinese speaking preschool and hitting Orchard Road for a bit of shopping, which turns out to be the primary purpose of this city. Every building in this cluster of urban malls boasts a designer name over its entrances and promises a hyperactive food court, and Singapore seems to be jam-packed with every conceivable dining option.

I'm told it's entirely possible to live here permanently without ever sampling any Asian food, but after five minutes in the Lucky Plaza food court I cannot conceive of why you would want to live like that... and this is coming from my Irish-Scandinavian palate that finds mashed potatoes on the spicy side. On top of that, the sticker shock on western food definitely made me gasp as I discovered buying a bit of yogurt that I usually buy for 60 cents in Minnesota: 5.15 in Sing dollars, or over $4 US. My friends tell me everything is that expensive, but the Thai food (with watermelon juice) Lian bought me for lunch was about $6 US and lick-the-plate delicious, so I can't help but wonder if there's just a hardcore Ang Mo upcharge biting everyone who won't go native, demands their imported European cheeses and won't try the Chinese equivalent of Cheerios (on clearance at $10 a box).

Best thing so far I can't find in America: these weird little rice pucks my friend Lian offered me for breakfast, covered with some sort of fried onion like vegetable we haven't identified in English. It's just rice cooked together into a cohesive mass with a texture somewhere between a fried egg white and mashed potatoes, just an unintrusive little bit of starch ready to accept any flavor on top of it... and yet I know people who still won't eat it. I mean honestly, who's afraid of rice?

Tomorrow: A Walk Through Chinatown (and possibly a sliver of Belgium)?

Singapore Diary - The Day I Spent in the Air

2011-05-13T16:26:00.000-05:00

Door to door in just over 24 hours: not that bad for going to the exact opposite side of the planet. (Suck on that, Magellan.) Our shuttered and darkened 747 chased the sun all the way across the pacific, finally letting it escape over the horizon when my Minnesota watch told me it was past midnight. This wasn't an overnight flight and it was barely approaching dusk in Tokyo so nobody really needed to sleep, and the whole purpose of darkening the plane was just to let people squint through the static of our ancient projection TV at the least appealing line-up of movies I've ever seen on a plane... is it bad when one movie doesn't even have a description in the in-flight magazine, like Delta knows the passengers would just panic and flee down the big yellow slide if they knew what entertainment hell awaited them?

I did try to pack reading material with some weight to it, but as always the more ambitious titles in my reading list served as inspiration to read something a bit more skimmable: I let Tristan Egolf's Faulkneresque first novel Lord of the Barnyard and Yasmin Reza's God of Carnage script sink to the bottom of my bag so I could for Rick Castle's Naked Heat... yes, I read a book by a fictional TV author and still felt intellectually superior for not giggling along to Little Fockers with the rest of the plebians in my cattle car. And I just recently discovered reading books fictional authors is not an entirely new thing for me, having read Kilgore Trout's Venus on the Half Shell back in high school without being able to place the author as a creation of the mind of Kurt Vonnegut. (Bizarrely it appears Trout's one published novel was actually written by Philip Jose Farmer and not by Vonnegut. There's got to be a story there somewhere.)

I feel like I did accomplish one more bit of business and didn't let a whole day go to waste by scrambling to find the single, solitary sushi place in Narita airport (I know like 4 downtown Minneapolis: catch up, Japan) Figuring I had no time to waste on translation and pointing I mumbled out the Japanese names of fish I could remember only to have the spritely Japanese girl at the takeaway window ask me in perfect English if I wanted my octopus boiled or fresh. Fresh is generally a good word when you're talking fish, so I went with that only belatedly realizing the way I usually get tako in the states was cold but obviously precooked... fortunately the mouthful I swallowed down before running onto my plane was delicious; I'm sorry I doubted you slimy airport cuisine, Japan. Now I've got to convince somebody in Minnesota to serve it to me that way.

I did earn my nickname of AMG (Angriest Man at the Guthrie) by getting wound up over the smallest grievances, so naturally I assumed riding for 24 hours in 40 year old airplanes with tiny rock-hard little Asian-friendly seats featuring the original upholstery from 1972 would have kicked my ass. Surprisingly it wasn't so bad; my least favorite thing about flying is turbulence, and our pilots kept warning us about storms and turbulence and preparing for difficult descents... but approaching Narita I started grumbling to myself , “Alright, let's start our descent already and get it over with,” only to feel the wheels gently hit the ground a second later. I really couldn't ask for it to go any easier, unless I got one of those weird pod seats they had for first class on the 777 I took from Narita. Seriously, they're these retro-modern bathtub like enclosures all set at a 45-degree angle to the aisles, straight out of 60's sci-fi... even the first class passengers all looked vaguely embarrassed to be sitting in them.

With only a couple hours of sleep crossing an ocean of restless discomfort I had to wonder why I was so mellow, and sort of almost enjoying the myriad little challenges of alternately racing through airports and trying keeping my butt from going to sleep, and somewhere over the South China Sea it finally hit me. Everything I care about is on the other side of thousands of miles of rock and molten nickel-iron, looking at different stars. The job, the theater, the people I love and the women I can't figure out (often one and the same) are two days away. All I've got are a whole new world to explore and a couple friends who for some reason always let me into their home. Everybody else can worry about themselves for a while, I'll be lost in Chinatown.

And lost is the right word: I know I'm not the best traveler in the world, for instance it didn't occur to me until I was trying to fill out immigration forms that I had no idea of the address where I was staying. This of course was not at all awkward entering a country where customs has the death penalty... I don't do drugs much less smuggle them over international borders, but every once in a while I do take this potion that makes me black out and turn into a completely different person, free of moral responsibility and social accountability, and to my shame it appears Mr. Hyde did slip something intolerable to Singapore's clean society into my luggage and made me smuggle it into the country. And man, when I step on this chewing gum and sell it on the Singapore Mafia's turf, there's going to be hell to pay (the S.M. are the baddest motherfuckers who always still remember to say please and thank you). So wish me luck.

Timberwolves acquire Eddy Curry's penis

2011-02-23T23:47:00.001-06:00

The Timberwolves basically got involved as a middle-man in the long-rumored Carmelo to New York trade, notably giving up Corey Brewer to acquire Anthony Randolph and possibly include Eddy Curry’s penis as part of the worst half-time promotion ever. The Wolves involvement does have me asking myself a few questions about the team and its strategy so this goes on for a bit, but feel free to skip to the end if you just want to know why I keep bringing up Eddy Curry’s penis.

Question #1: Is David Khan an idiot, or does he have a plan?

I don’t think David Khan has a vision for what this team is going to be, but I do think he has a plan. And that plan is to basically get his owner through the impending lock-out. Immediately before the last lock-out the Wolves handed Kevin Garnett the biggest contract in the history of team sports and when the new collective bargaining agreement introduced a maximum figure for contracts it made the Wolves one of only four teams stuck with a crippling mega-contract. That contract, along with the need to at least try and negotiate contract extensions or trades for both Marbury and Gugliotta before they could turn to any other business, absolutely killed the Wolves, and the ensuing years of paralysis all go back to that contract and the fall-out of decisions made in that shortened post-lockout off- season.

This time will be different: except for rookie Lazar Hayward everybody worth keeping is signed through next season so after the lock-out Khan won’t spend a shortened off-season negotiating with his own free agents. He’ll have significant cap room, final year contracts, and plenty of free time to use chasing players if the NBA landscape shakes up again. Looking ahead to the summer of 2012, the first full off-season after the lock-out, the Wolves will have only three mid-level free agents under contract, three restricted free agents and four team options, plus a couple players stashed in Europe. At this point the only potential unrestricted free agents that summer are two versatile forwards who might provide depth (Hayward and Tolliver).

In his bizarre flurry of trades Khan has put a premium on versatility and potential, putting together a swiss-army knife that sadly has no structure, but it’s also a team with no superstar in a star-driven league, waiting for someone to emerge who would set the team’s identity. When they do find an alpha dog (and maybe they have in Kevin Love) I can only hope Khan has actually been preparing for it by acquiring players who will mold their games around a future superstar rather than clash with him.

The quest for versatility and front-office freedom after the lock-out sort of explain trading away Al Jefferson, the only long-term contract signed by the rebuilding Wolves, and a player who required a system built around him. The only long-term contracts are mid-level deals given to a point-guard (Ridnour) and the two centers, but those are the most specialized positions in basketball and it’s essential to have a veteran ball-handler and a couple big guys on the bench. And if Khan is sitting tight until there’s a new CBA, it explains sitting on a trade exemption (from the Jefferson trade) and just letting Curry’s contract expire rather than trying to do a deal with a cap-tied team.

So maybe Khan’s not a total idiot, or at least we won’t know until we see his post-lockout strategy. On the other hand he hasn’t shown any improvement in the Wolves 20-year legacy of blowing draft picks on players not named Kevin. But one interesting thing in all Khan’s flurry of trades is the few times he’s gotten a potential something for basically nothing, like rolling the dice on Beasley for a couple 2^nd-rounders or getting Anthony Randolph for Corey Brewer. Plus the Mayo-Love trade was looking pretty good recently after Mayo got suspended for using steroids and Love got into the All-Star Game. It doesn’t always work, like I still don’t know where that Aboriginal guy disappeared to.

Question #2: So what’s the net result of the trades?

The Wolves get to roll the dice on Anthony Randolph who is young enough to have potential, and versatile enough to keep from stifling anybody else’s development. He also could continue to underwhelm and never put on the weight to be an NBA big man. But we add him to a front-court that includes oddball forwards Kevin Love and Michael Beasley and just hope a couple of them can do something special together.

We swap the mountainous Eddy Curry for the young and raw Kosta Koufos as our 3^rd center. Not really a big change, but having Curry’s expiring contract (and his penis) on the end of the bench may open up a bit more playing time for other big men, and a change of scenery did wonders for Darko so maybe Curry will lose that nagging 30 extra pounds and rediscover his love of basketball. And the mid-2^nd round draft pick we got for Koufos may liven up the end of the bench next year.

The Wolves lose the services of Corey Brewer, a mediocre player with basically no offensive skills whose rail-thin physique seriously limited his match-ups. On the other hand, he was a tenacious defender who came up with a lot of steals on a team that desperately needs some perimeter defense. Ultimately, any void left by Brewer’s departure is something Webster and Johnson really should step up and fill. I like Corey, but only his smile will be missed.

Question #3: So they still suck, but can they really improve?

Love is having a break-out season, and the Wolves are essentially a collection of young players with potential, so they could definitely improve from within. They’re headed to the draft lottery, and the ping-pong balls can’t screw us every time (right?) so the Wolves should have a high draft pick to shake things up and at least one mid-round pick to keep adding depth (if Memphis or Denver make the play-offs we get their picks). Unfortunately those players will be chosen by the Timberwolves front office. And down the road, the Wolves do still have Ricky Rubio and a couple other European prospects to check up on in a couple years when their contract buy-outs come up. But really, I think it’s going to be at least another year before there’s anything new and exciting about the Wolves besides Eddy Curry’s penis.

Question #4: What’s the deal with Eddy Curry’s penis?

I keep mentioning Eddy Curry’s penis because he (allegedly) made it a matter of public record when his driver sued him for (allegedly) making it the center-piece of a really clumsy appeal for gay sex (allegedly)*. He claimed Curry would approach him naked, pleading with him “Look at it… just look at it. Come on, touch it!” This has me thinking perhaps I know why Curry put on weight and stopped trying for the Knicks, because if I know New York sports fans once this story broke there had to be at least one person at every game shouting “Look at it! Touch it!” whenever Curry displayed his manly prowess by fighting somebody off for a rebound or dunking over somebody, and I think that would really kill the joy of the game for anyone. Fortunately that’s unlikely to happen in Minnesota (only because I can’t afford tickets close enough to the court for that).

Considering his driver’s other complaint, that Curry would masturbate into towels and then leave his cum-rags around for his driver to collect, I may be a bit glad not to sit too close to Curry’s seat on the end of the bench, because every time he threw a towel up around his shoulders I’d be whipping my hand up to shield my eyes from whatever came flying off it. And I’m definitely getting up to go to the bathroom when the cheerleaders start throwing t-shirts into the crowd, because if those white shirts have been sitting in the tunnel next to the bench while a bored Eddy Curry tries to figure out how to pass the first 47 minutes of the game I definitely do not want one. I hope somebody tells him getting to play in “garbage time” doesn’t mean he should pull out his “junk”.

*-I’m not worried Curry will sue me (nobody’s reading this) but at 300+ pounds I’m worried he might eat me (allegedly).

How I survived the Great Blizzard of 2010

2010-12-12T02:01:00.001-06:00

When they canceled the buses and it appeared there was no way out of Uptown, I wish I could say I was not afraid. It is only in facing the indifferent challenge of the wild places of this world that a man finds his character, and I decided in that moment, "No. I will not die here, today, on Lyndale Ave."

My first task was to use the only resource at hand, the drifting, blowing snow that stung my eyes and soaked my clothes, and turn my direst enemy into my dearest friend. I knew the blustering north wind would allow me little time to find shelter, so working as quickly as I could I was able to fashion snow into crude bricks and build a wall against the wind, and brick by brick, curve that makeshift wall into an igloo. The dire nature of my situation allowed only a brief rest for my aching muscles and a well-deserved hot chocolate from Bob's, before I once again returned to carving out the tiniest niche of survival from the cruel winter sky.

It would have been too easy to succumb to the temptation to sink into that wet, white embrace of the snowbank upon which I'd built the igloo that was to be my new home but I simply had to waterproof it, and there was only way to do it. I simply had to find a seal. I don't know how long I waited behind the shrubs of that deserted lawn, hoping the white snow drifting over my shoulders would help me blend into the landscape, and cursing the passing cars that were almost certainly spooking the wildlife, until I finally saw it.

It hustled into a waddling turn, hearing the crunch of snow crunching under my feet, knowing it was too late to run for the safety of the ocean, and for a moment as I stared into its sad, brown eyes I could see it knew I was death. For a split second I didn't know what to do, but then it happened. The instinct that led man to conquer the beasts and tame the rivers of this world, and I lowered my hand with cold precision, and watched with an astonished pride as the broken body of the seal fell to the snow. It was the two of us, hunter and prey, until a passing woman shouted "Oh my god, what the fuck did you just do to that... wait, is that a seal?"

Thanks to the sacrifice of my poor brown friend, I finally had a dry place to sit, and by borrowing a few copies of The Onion from a coffee shop and rubbing a boy scout's hind legs together I was able to fashion a small fire and convert my igloo from a pile of snowy bricks into a proper home, albeit one that stank of seal blubber. I had carved out a grim yet comfortable existence for myself, but this was not to last.

Returning from Leaning Tower of Pizza (man cannot live on seal meat alone) I discovered my igloo was no longer my own. I eyed the huddled wet ball lurking in the corner as it slowly thawed back into a man, and he eyed the seal blood staining my coat, and he knew he had entered the lair of a predator. He begged in his way for shelter from the storm, and echoes of concepts of "society" and "hospitality" stirred again in the brain of the wild man I had become.

We sat with the small fire between us, longing for and resenting the warmth and vitality contained in each other's frail bodies, knowing that soon survival might require us to draw closer and share that warmth, awakening the ancient ache for companionship that lives in every warm-blooded beast... and on the lonely edge of the world in the heart of that terrible storm we came together without thought, without shame, striving for the warm release that makes the whole world fall away, until the bite of cold sweat on our bare skin pulled us apart and back into the protective sheath of the sealskin leggings I'd made for him to wear. He left quickly, I think maybe his cab was honking or something.

As the snow eased I tentatively emerged from what felt like the only home I'd ever known, like summer and my sunlit apartment had been a fever dream, brought on by eating too much uncooked seal meat. A blizzard can spin a man around and obscure the most familiar landscape, and even the stars and the snow-covered street signs can play tricks on you... I didn't realize my whole adventure had taken place less than three miles from home, but it might as well have been a continent away.

Back in the world, at fancy cocktail parties, the self-appointed great minds will ask their questions: "It's not that far to downtown, why didn't you just walk or take a cab, genius?" or "Why won't you just admit you made up the part about the seal?", and in their fear they will shun me claiming my beard and my refusal to eat anything but seal meat are not welcome at their linen-covered dinner table, but will pay them no mind, for I know my home is the unforgiving but mostly paved wild places of Minneapolis with no friends but the wolves, the caribou, and of course my hot, faithful lovers the penguins who will sing me to sleep.

Sincerely,
The Bear Man of Lyndale Ave

PS Okay next time I head out to meet that woman with the antlers and glowing eyes for coffee in the middle of a blizzard, I'm not letting her talk me into sharing the space cake.

Pacers 128-124 Timberwolves

2010-10-21T00:02:00.004-05:00

I felt Target Center's security guard was disconcertingly thorough in searching my pants last night. She didn't find anything, because the only thing I carry that causes pain and sorrow isn't in my pockets. When I got inside I really wondered why she even bothered checking me for weapons, since I would have had to cross over two sections to find anybody to fight with. If all three stages are going, I honestly think the Guthrie could draw bigger crowds this winter.

The Timberwolves players also greeted me with the same disturbing sort of misdirected enthusiasm. Apparently the gameplan for the evening was to beat the Pacers by creating opportunities for 20 foot jump shots and playing defense by fouling. With all these career 30% 3-point shooters eager to prove their (lack of) range I kept wondering why Pekovic wasn't more involved, since he's been billed as the first banger the Wolves have ever had at center... when I checked the box score I understood. Due to a mixture of work, apathy, and friendly waitresses I came a bit late, and I missed out on seeing Pekovic foul out in 10 minutes. Sadly he doesn't play defense either. And incomprehensibly the Pacers couldn't take advantage... this mess went to overtime!

I don't even know where to rest my eyes on this team. The only consistent thing is journeyman back-up point guard Luke Ridnour. In a star-driven league, nobody can put their mark on this team, not even Kevin Love. None of the rookies are interesting, and really other than Love all the draft picks of the last few years were busts and bench players. I guess now I know what it's like to be a Clippers season ticket holder: showing up to watch the other team. Sadly the NBA is in such a slump half the teams have nobody to sell tickets. If it's going to be this sad every night, I just hope I can get something for my Lakers, Heat, and Celtics tickets.

Addendum: Did they actually get any better?
As I occasionally like to do, I went back and put all of David Kahn's off-season trades into one giant ball to see what went in and went out. The Wolves traded away two first round picks but got two back next year, so I'll cancel those out, and ignore Delonte West since he was quickly waived. That means they traded away Al Jefferson (franchise power forward), Ramon Sessions (solid back-up point guard), Ryan Hollins (mediocre center), and Ryan Gomes (great role player), and four second-round draft picks. We got back: Kosta Koufos (crappy center), Michael Beasley (underperforming power forward), Sebastian Telfair (back-up point guard), Martell Webster (scoring swing man), rookie forward Lazar Hayward, and the rights to forward Nemanja Bjelica, who's stashed in Europe. Hollins and Koufos cancel out, Webster for Gomes is upside for the Wolves, and Bjelica was a 2nd rounder so he cancels out one of those, meaning the Wolves gain in the mega-trade is the Webster/Gomes switch, and Lazar Hayward. To get this benefit they downgraded Al Jefferson to Michael Beasley, Ramon Sessions to Sebastian Telfair, and threw in three 2nd round draft picks. If Webster turns out to be all that and a bag of chips, the Jefferson to Beasley/Hayward downgrade could be canceled out by the Webster/Gomes upgrade, with some 2nd rounders as gravy... sadly my pessimism won't allow me to see it that way.

The only free agent moves were adding free agents Luke Ridnour to hopefully show Jonny Flynn how to play point guard, and adding Anthony Tolliver and Maurice Ager (if he doesn't get cut) to the end of the bench. The Wolves did also add Bjelica and Brazilian center Paulo Prestes to their European larder which now holds two skinny forwards and Ricky Rubio, and pulled Nikola Pekovic out of it so they'd finally have a center with some low-post moves. They do still have a pile of mid to late round draft picks, Rubio, a few unremarkable players in Europe, and cap room (which is useless when nobody wants to sign here). Still not a lot to get excited about.

Three Words That Should Exist

2010-10-01T22:32:00.002-05:00

Just spreading the health, man

This Monday after declining to shake hands with an actor I was jokingly accused of having hypochondria, which I thought was doubly unfair. For one thing I was obviously sick and not just fretting over the possibility, but more importantly the reason I don't touch actors when I'm sick is for their health, not mine... these are people who can't muddle through work with sore throats and a ghastly post-nasal drip. So is it still hypochondria when it's confined to an irrational concern for the health of other people? And a really particular group of people at that. I can't possibly start telling people I have a crippling case of xenohypothespichondria and then explain the whole thing, but it seems like there has to be some succinct way of putting it.

And situations do arise where a brief, natural explanation is necessary, like when I was working the stage door while sick a couple years ago, and I greeted a black actor I'd met previously at a reading. He extended his hand warmly in friendship, and my white guilt made me really afraid of a clumsy excuse to not shake his hand. If I could just spit out "I have xenohespichonthi..." well whatever my condition is called, it'd be much easier and I'd worry less that people thought I didn't want to touch their dirty hands. What me, paranoid?
Startle Without Surprise

There's another word that I've felt needed to exist for a long time, even though I have to give partial credit to The West Wing for stating it first. Every once in a while something unanticipated happens and it's completely startling, but on reflection it's not surprising at all. Like all the seeds were there and maybe if we'd been paying closer attention we would have spotted the signs. It's like (ahem, hypothetical example) finding out somebody with a number of ethical challenges and a sense of entitlement is stealing at work... I might experience a moment the surprise because I hadn't even been thinking about the possibility of anybody stealing. However the surprise is at the general case that anybody's got their hands in the till, and the specific case just seems like a logical conclusion. There has to be a word that captures that feeling, like when a slasher movie killer jumps out from behind a tree... I wasn't expecting him but I suppose I kind of knew he had to be there: startling but not actually surprising.

Synecdoche for Dummies

Maybe I've just known too many alarmingly literal people... well actually that's definitely true. But I get tired of explaining figurative language sometimes. Particularly when I've left out all the precise detail of a mundane job. When I take out the trash, do I really have to explain that I sorted out all the recyclable materials and disposed of them in the proper receptacles, or every once in a while can I just let that be implied? What kills me is having to specify I recycled a worthless piece of cardboard rather than being able to say I threw it away. I'd call it synecdoche, except I always took that term to mean a part standing for the whole, while in this case it's a generalization... the simplest part of the whole category standing in for a more specific one. There ought to be a simple term I can use when rolling my eyes at stupid people besides "Clearly I was speaking synecdochicamally" or whatever the adverb form of synecdoche is.

Am I really asking too much?

What's with all the jumping between buildings?

2010-09-12T14:11:00.002-05:00

I will try to avoid spoilers for Inception, Kick-Ass, and A Standing Long Jump... or at least keep them cryptic.

I've been kind of down recently. This is I'm sure a great surprise since normally I'm like a hooker in a bathtub: I have hope in my soul-- or however that goes. But it's true, I've been down. And I'm not usually a superstitious person unless I think it's funny for some reason, but I do sometimes get suspicious about the messages the universe is sending me... like when I keep seeing people jumping between buildings. Not really, thankfully, (because that would really depress the hell out of me, but it's been a surprisingly specific theme in the last month or so.

First there was A Standing Long Jump at this year's Fringe, starring a couple people I swear God put on earth to be watched in James Craven and Ali Dachis, and the magical Namir Smallwood. The standing long jump is a metaphor for those moments in life where one has to take the leap with someone, or see them pass out of our world forever. But the metaphor plays out in a couple of literal leaps from the roof of one building to another, knowing that at least somebody's going to fall short and plummet four stories to the alley below.

And then I saw Inception, which features its own leap of faith across an alley. Again, this is a leap that two people must take together, where somebody has chosen the moment and will not relinquish the agenda. This mirrors one of the leaps in A Standing Long Jump, two leapers who believe that something is possible but only once they step off the ledge... over a lover's agonized protests. There's a dream-like quality to the play and obviously to the film, a supernatural state where the impossible may be more real than the physical world... and in both to fall is to drop out of the dream and back into reality.

And then there's Kick-Ass, a mediocre film with a few memorable images. When Kick-Ass is afraid to follow Hit Girl in a leap across roof tops, it confirms what he already knew: he's failed as a superhero. Beyond the obvious, the literal leap of faith, I was struck by one other recurring theme: stepping up wasn't enough. Kick-Ass spends most of the movie posturing as a superhero and while this changes his outlook on himself and probably his life, he's hit the wall hard when he first encounters Hit Girl. I thought back to Ali and Namir in the coffee shop in A Standing Long Jump, when they step up onto the table... but later can't make the leap together.

So all that morbid failure and desire got me thinking back to the leaps I've failed to make. And occasionally those that others failed to make with me. And looking at how far it is to my neighbor's balcony. But really I'm thinking about how odd it is to look back on one's life and be aware of the things that have changed inside. And I'll tell you my love, you won't lose me again, even with a leap across the roof. Of course, you'll have to find me first.

17 Things I Learned in 17 Shows at This Year's Fringe

2010-08-26T13:02:00.002-05:00

1. Teachers do a lot more than run through the pages of a textbook. (Pardon My French!)

2. Joe Mauer is very forgiving. (Two Truths and a Lie)

3. Making a deal with the Devil will leave you smelling of rotten eggs. (The Damned Audition)

4. Ghosts are cool. (Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts)

5. Jack Chick is an underrated comic genius, even if he probably doesn't realize it. (The Jack Chick Plays)

6. Native Americans really are portrayed exactly like the mentally challenged. (Sad Carousel)

7. See You Next Tuesday is not a good last thing to say to somebody. (See You Next Tuesday)

8. Dancers are cool. (O(h))

9. Ikea is the new cruising spot. (Naked Yoga and Other Gay Love Stories)

10. Henry IV is the first Star Wars prequel. (Kill Will)

11. Taking your clothes off can be good for you. (Kathy Jensen is Pretty)

12. Cell phones are annoying. (That Sara Aziz!)

13. Whether you realize it or not, the world will keep moving forward in your absence, and you will never return to a place and time you've left behind. Also, chicken cacciatore is not always easy to come by. (Amaretti Angels)

14. Shel Silverstein is a dirty motherfucker. (An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein)

15. Bowties are cool. Actually this one was from Doctor Who, but one of the 17 shows I saw had nothing to say about anything and I had to come up with something.

16. You may only get one chance to make the leap... don't miss it. (Standing Long Jump)

17. The glam rock, heavy mascara shredded everything look is coming back, or at least it should. (Garage Band)

Rufus Gets His Hair Cut (one show only)*

2010-08-09T22:58:00.003-05:00

After letting my frighteningly agitated and sometimes violent friend Dewdrop cut my hair, I thought there should be a way to capture that drama, and there are certainly worse things being performed out there. So before next year I'll have to grow my hair back and my mountain man beard, and then at show time we'll put a few things in place: me, Dewdrop, a pair of scissors, a pair of clippers, a chair, a hand mirror, a roll of gauze, and a giant drop cloth.

Through the process of ever sillier haircuts and abstract chunks shaved out of my beard, and her attempts to sell me on her artistic vision mixed with threats to stab me with a pair of scissors, and my attempts to escape before things get worse will test our friendship and our will, as we each struggle to define our role and decide with what standard of grooming we will live or die. One performance only, since I will obviously have to grow my hair and beard back, and allow the probably quite painful scars to fade.

It might be terrible, but I guarantee a few good reviews for offering the audience a something real, which can't be reset and replicated for the evening show, which is one of the promises of live theater: the anxiety and the haircut will both be real. Now I just need a $50,000 grant to develop my script, and to finance all the shampoo and conditioner I'll need to use all year to prepare my mane.

(*-Kathy Jensen is Pretty and Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts have definitely sold me on the marketing value of putting my name up front. Also on the value of offering weird southern groceries as a promotion, but that's another story.)

"it’s strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you", Rosy Simas Danse at Bedlam

2010-07-25T14:02:00.000-05:00

I’m generally a major skeptic of dance as an art form. I freely admit, I’ve seen some groups use movement as a critical part of a larger work but when it’s all about the dance I usually find myself wishing I’d sat closer to the door. (No joke, the last time I saw a dance show I seriously considered climbing down the back of the risers and sneaking out the fire escape.) I believe it’s an inherent flaw to the art form, that there’s just something about dance and musical theater that it way too easily turns into heavy handed pretention and repetition, high-strung divas so busy sniffing their own farts they miss that the restlessly bored audience got the whole point in the first three minutes... in short, keeping my attention with dance theater is harder than dubbing a Nicholas Cage movie into Cantonese*.

With that in mind, I have no idea what possessed me to hike down to Bedlam on Friday night for "it’s strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you", a new dance work presented by Rosy Simas Danse. Realistically even the dancers don’t want me there, scowling and jaded and about the worst audience member a dance company could ask for, grabbing a chair up front scowling and rolling my eyes. And after work I really wanted nothing more than to sink into my couch for the night, not shower, change clothes, and head back out into the damp washcloth of humidity this city has been all summer, but some instinct whispered “Go see something. Anything. Find some life somewhere tonight."

To my surprise, I loved it, and I couldn't take my eyes away (even for the cute baby dykes in matching knee-high ring socks sitting next to me). And here I really thought getting stuck with a front row seat was going to be a brutal exercise in forcing a smile and taping my eyelids open. As often seems to happen when people like me who are decidedly not dance aficionados see something we love, I can’t really find the words to explain what I saw in it or why it moved me about all three pieces of the show. I can say that the wet, naked finale in which several dancers gathered in a gentle downpour of water and then slid and spun around the slick stage was beautiful, and oddly reminded me every time I’ve tried to explain sports to art folks: sometimes in that sweaty, emotional celebration of the body you see something brilliant happen. So I may have been selling you short, dancers.

When I got out of the show it was that perfect moment as the heat of the day started to break, and I borrowed a free city bike and rode home with the buzz of that show still in my legs. Everything in the world seemed fresh and fragrant and calm, and I became aware of that paradoxically energized, lavender tranquility that I have spent fifteen fevered years searching for and found in only a few disconnected places, like watching the waves crash into the taiga on Selwyn lake, sweated into the sheets of a certain blonde, or the Baha’i temple in Evanston that seems suffused with it it’s left a purple vein flowing all the way back into the heart of the city… but as usual, I digress.

In short, I simply felt good walking out of the theater that night. And that’s why for all my endless whining, I keep crawling back to the big G, keep dragging myself kicking and screaming to shows when my eyelids and my legs are ready to come tumbling down… because sometimes you see something beautiful and it washes away the rest of the day.

Keep spinning, dancers... I hope we can see this work presented again.

*-He never opens his mouth!

Career Advice for Amstelbooij

2010-07-19T19:30:00.001-05:00

The way I see it, you have three choices:

Singapore autumn
warm rain and money splashes
ladyboys blossom

Neon streetlights blinking
At night the city screams
a thousand diamond dreams
Christopher Street winking

There once was a banker from Gold Street
Who moved to Brooklyn but got cold feet
Fifteen dollars for the zoo!
I Can't believe it can you?
Now back in Chi walking his old beat

I think that pretty much sums it all up, don't you?

On Bikes and Pedicabs

2010-07-10T17:26:00.001-05:00

I like the initiative behind providing free (sort of) bikes in Minneapolis, to try and make the place that much more liveable and get a few more cars off the roads. I can't say whether it will work and be sustainable, but after examining the pros and cons, I'm definitely a huge fan. And considering that the majority of the installation costs are paid and the machines seem to be solar powered, I would think it wouldn't take too much in fees to justify maintaining the system, although I wonder where they'll store all those bikes.But here's what I like about them:

The Last Mile
I don't know how many of the target market of downtown commuters will jump on these bikes, but it is great as an easy option to make a couple stops without having to walk miles in between or the achingly slow and disconnected mess that is our public transit system. Plus you don't have to sit next to that guy on the #14 line who just bought a new machete to cut people's hands off with (of all the people to accidentally make eye contact with, I just had to pick him). The frustration of transit does make me wish the system was expanded just a bit more, with a bike rental stand at each LRT station so you could hop the train to the right neighborhood and then take a bike to the Seward Co-op, the Smitten Kitten, Chris and Rob's or your favorite not quite on the transit map destination. It's much cheaper to add a bike kiosk to an under-served intersection than to re-route a bus line, and that's why I think it's a cool last mile solution. (Technically there's actually nothing stopping me from using my own bike for this purpose, but read on.)

It's much harder for me to lose one
This is probably the biggest reason why this system works so well for me, a person who constantly forgets where I left things. For instance, I'll run down to my garage to head to the store and find it's missing... because I parked it at the Guthrie two days ago, forgot it was in the lot and then walked home. Or the time(s) the garage door wouldn't open so I left it in guest parking and had to essentially buy it back from the impound lot (cash only and so expensive I thought about just letting them keep the car). Keep in mind, that's a licensed, insured vehicle weighing several thousand pounds with an alarm system that's valuable enough that I never totally forget where I left it. If I left my cheap bike anywhere that long it'd be much more likely to be stolen and the worst part is I'd never be entirely sure it was really gone because I'd never remember which bike rack I chained it to. I'd have to wander the earth looking for it like Oedipus, symbolically castrated by the removal of the giant spinning contraption between my legs. I also get tired of theft-proofing my car every time I drive anywhere, having to try and hide every bag or power cord lest some idiot think I must have left something worth stealing and smash my windows. Once I return the bike, it's not even mine.

Like a hooker, you don't have to take it home afterwards*
Or so I'm told. A friend of mine (if you knew him you probably know who I'm talking about) had some stories about the awkwardness of getting a streetwalker back out of your car. One of the things I hate about driving is having to drag my car behind me everywhere, and find a new parking spot at every destination or finish my trip by tracking back to the beginning where I left it. I like being able to change my plans, and if it's pouring down rain, I like that I can take the train or cut through the skyways and avoid hauling my own bike home through puddles. Or just get really drunk without worrying about accidentally swerving down a ravine and into the Mississippi River, because I think going through the falls would really mess up my bike.

It's cheap
The first time I used one I was planning to take my bike to work, but then discovered the handlebars were facing the wrong way and the whole thing was filthy. I didn't really have time to run upstairs for my tools and fix it (one of the reasons I bike is it's about as fast as driving when I'm running late) and in any case I'm not so wild about the old, crusty rubber brake pads that moan and stutter when I try to slow down, plus I also have no lights on my bike and head home from work at midnight in all black (either that or my Intelligent Homosexual shirt which is still the best uniform ever). So I had to admit, $60 for a 365 day subscription was probably cheaper than tuning up my old, long-disused bike and let me avoid the risk of snotty bike shop employees.
I should apologize, that is a bit paranoid. I've met great people in bike shops from here to Massachusetts and gotten great service, but those businesses do seem to cyclically attract clusters of people who resent dealing with the common folk to support their passion, especially when whatever they love has gotten trendy amongst yuppies with money and attitude. I still remember the icy stare and eye roll I got for questioning the fit of a pair of boots at Midwest Mountaineering back in the early 90's, but fortunately even they seem to have embraced customer service now that the wilderness craze is over and everybody's into taking spin classes... see why I don't want to go into a bike shop?

It really is a nice ride
It's a pretty basic bike with three gears, and unless you're like me and always forget to adjust the seat until you start riding and have to fiddle with it at the next stoplight, it's a fairly comfortable ride. This is more than I can say for my old bike's seat, which applied this strong genital nerve pinch that it left my penis numb for about 5-10 minutes after riding it. (Probably more information than anybody required.) But perhaps my favorite thing about these bikes is the clean and tamper-proof design that hides the brake lines and the gears, and it's particularly delightful to not have an uncovered front gear snatching and tearing at the bottom of my pants (one other reason I didn't previously bike to work). Plus the low bars make it convenient for those occasions when I wear a dress (not many, but it happens).

The Big, Long Key
With a subscription, they give you a giant key which you slide all the way home into the slot before going for a ride. Chicks dig keys... it's a phallus/power thing. You may roll your eyes, but the other day when I ran into a man checking out bikes for him and his girlfriend and explaining to her how the system works, as soon as I wiggled my key in to the slot she turned her back on her boyfriend's plaintive explanations and bombarded me with questions about how I secured a bike so quickly, her eyes fixed on the long implement in my hand, and my other keys jangling below it. I'm not big on Freud (which ironically seems to be a girl thing) but consider every woman you've met with a giant keyring in her purse or a whole set jangling on a lanyard around her neck: clearly penis envy.

The Bell
I don't know if this is a pro or a con, honestly. On the one hand I'm incredibly embarrassed when I accidentally brush the hair trigger on this bell. I feel like a massive tool riding down the street ringing a bell on my bike. It makes me want to paint the thing pink and glittery, put a basket on the front and ride around in a sunflower dress***. And on the other hand, I'm even more embarrassed when I ring the bell intentionally (after checking to make sure no one's looking). Because having a bell on your bike is awesome, but still makes me feel like a tool.

So I'm completely sold on these bikes. And looking at the rack near my house, I'm clearly not the only one: on nice days in the morning there are almost no bikes left, but they all return by evening, as my neighbors are apparently all enjoying the virtue of commuter bikes. I can only hope this will prompt the city to add more bikes, and to add more racks at big destinations, but the pessimist in me thinks they'll shut down the system for being too popular to maintain.

On Pedicabs
After taking one home from Pride, I officially love the new pedicabs that have sprung up in Minneapolis. It's a nice way to travel, getting a smooth ride with fresh air around you and a toned young bicyclist rising up to meet the road in front of you, and I felt like the Emperor of Rome with people eying me in amusement being carted around by somebody else's sweat and tears. And it's nice to throw a few bucks to an entrepreneurial kid and save the earth at the same time for those occasions when my feet have had it or I don't want to walk 20 blocks in a suit.

There are a couple down-sides, like having to negotiate your own fee is a bit weird for me (others I know live to haggle) and I honestly can't figure out if you tip on top of that. Plus for that ride I could have gotten a real cab cheaper and they're a bit easier to call, although I'm not such a big fan of clueless Minnesota cabbies (“Oh yeah, lived here my whole life. No idea we had an airport.”) The most amusing disadvantage I discovered was my guilt-ridden travel companion who apologized every couple blocks for making our driver haul two huge, heavy people around town on a hot day. I did enjoy the kid hauling us for pointing out with a smile that a) he volunteered for the job and b) he'd charged us enough to make up for it.

So it comes down to this: if you're like me and you value the little things, like a nice ride through the city and the sense of Caligulan Decadence that comes from making another human being ferry you from place to place, it's a great way to travel. I only wish I knew how to catch one other than hoping they pass by, but if this continues to grow, I have to hope some entrepreneurial bike messenger company will branch out into dispatching pedicabs.

A couple brief notes:
*-Not that I would know, but I have a friend with amusing stories about trying to get hookers back out of his car. And if you know him, you probably know who I'm talking about. All I'm saying.
**-All I know is after he brought that tranny to a cocaine party in Singapore, he threw away the bicycle pump. You'd have to get the rest of the story from him.
***-Which I sometimes find necessary. Nothing cheered up a sick friend of mine more than the time I brought her food in my girlfriend's dress... I don't think she appreciated the food half as much as watching me try to figure out how to sit down gracefully. Also that time we went running around the Archdiocese naked singing “Help Me Rhonda” but that's a whole other story.

Traveling Light, or the second most fun I've had in a cemetery

2010-07-10T13:32:00.010-05:00

I really enjoyed this show, in which Theatre Pro Rata borrowed the Layman's Cemetery to stage a late night meeting between playwright Joe Orton and Beatles manager Brian Epstein in 1967 London, a few weeks before their ghastly deaths. For this one night, Epstein and Orton get to discuss art, sex, identity and clothes, and a taste of a world in flux as they argue, exchange clothes, and tangle with the police. It ties the deafening scream following the Beatles to beginning the decriminalization of homosexuality, and the larger and brighter world we find ourselves in when the violence of control is banished by the light. It achieved this best through WPC Foster laying bare the tragedy of Orton and Epstein's deaths, making me ache to see them finish what they'd started, plundering a sweet grave and birthing something beautiful with Orton's edge and Epstein's finesse, driven by the romantic power of the Beatles, and maybe also through the grotesque metaphor of the title.

But actually never mind about all that, that's not really the reason to go see it. Go see it because it's fun. Go see it because it's moving. Go see it because it's funny. Go see it because it just works.. putting so much dated counter-culture kitsch into one play, from the Beatles to swinging 60's London to nasty bathhouse humor to a gimmicky setting and the safe culture wars of a half century ago under the banner of the Sgt. Pepper's cover in most hands would make for a deathly tiresome masturbatory fantasy, but in this case playwright Lindsay Harris Friel and Theatre Pro Rata find the heart in all of it that drives the pulse of a bloody, sweaty breathing play. The kind of play that delights as it gently tugs on the creases of the brain, adding like a dream to our memories. It's the kind of show that makes me want to go home and write, until I remember I burned out long ago and I have nothing left to say.

So yeah, I liked it. Maybe it's just that the button-down chick with handcuffs in the graveyard was a deep scoop through the memories of another time in my life when I stood closest to love and art and death, so I hope others will try it and decide for themselves. I do recommend a bit of bug spray, and perhaps not drinking a liter of water then forgetting to scout out a bathroom beforehand... when I got out everything was closed, and by the time I caught my train home my back teeth were floating. (That may have been more information than anybody required.) And if you do take a chance, consider the worst case scenario is you have a cool hipster story about attending a show in the graveyard, right?*

More details and a study guide are available on Pro Rata's website:
http://www.theatreprorata.org/home.htm

*-Actually the worst case scenario would be my friend who may have gotten bit by a bat and may also be hallucinating the presence of a giant clown in her backseat, but I think it's still worth it.

The 2010 NBA Draft, or Why Can't I Stop Crying?

2010-06-25T15:12:00.004-05:00

The short version: the Wolves went into this draft with five picks, cap room to make trades, a crown jewel to trade (Jefferson) and a few morsels (Gomes and a couple point guards) and came out of it adding Wesley Johnson and Martell Webster, and losing Ryan Gomes. None of the other picks will make a difference next year.

About the only thing I like about this draft is the Wolves used their second rounders to stash a couple centers away in development. Paulao Prestes sounds interesting if a bit raw, but he's young and can be stashed in Spain for a bit longer. it's got to be good for a team that's been weak in the middle for 20 years to have a center nicknamed King Kong. With a really late pick they grabbed another center, Hamady Ndiaye. He's 7 feet tall, a good defender and has a decent jump hook, all things that would be a delightful surprise to see combined into a Timberwolves player... I think for the first time. He'll hopefully be stashed on the Sioux Falls Skyforce for a year or two and then make the end of the bench someday.

I really shouldn't be this excited about prospective future bench players, but for many years under Kevin McHale the Wolves didn't take the draft seriously, throwing in a draft pick on every trade, and they conspicuously ignored Europe and never got anything in the second round. They still can't figure out what to do with first round picks, but at least we've started to use Europe and the D-league to bring more talent to the franchise. Where it's completely wasted, since the young players on this team all end up being cut or traded for proven stiffs who have the dubious distinction of being a “veteran” presence, or put another way, guys who know how to lose.

The Wolves had two picks in the bottom half of the first round, which they amazingly used to make the team worse. After drafting lights-out shooter Luke Babbitt with the 16^th pick and a complete cipher in forward Trevor Booker with the 23^rd, the Wolves traded both. For Booker they got two forwards with quirky bodies: an undersized power forward who compensates with quick feet and a decent outside shot named Lazar Hayward, and Nemanja Bjelica, a string bean with a nice offensive touch who we can leave in Europe for a couple years. Hayward kind of reminds me of Craig Smith, who the Wolves traded away for a player they valued so highly they traded him away for nothing. But in any case, the #23 pick isn't going to help the Wolves next year. But that's not making the team worse... which is where the other pick comes in.

Babbity Rabbity could have been really useful to a team that has virtually no perimeter shooters besides intermittent bursts of Sasha Pavlovic, but instead we traded him to the Trailblazers for Martell Webster. This seems to be something we do, just ask the Blazers who they want, like when they wanted Brandon Roy so we made do with Randy Foye and spare change (okay $1m). Looks like a great deal: the Blazers get a the kind of player they need, ditch an unproductive asset, and Webster gets a fresh start... but unfortunately the Wolves weren't getting screwed enough to make it work, so we threw in Ryan Gomes. An all-around athlete, Gomes is the kind of player who's best on a good team, because he's a guy who does all the little things: rebound, intercept passes and chase down loose balls, and has a knack for getting out of the way on offense, either making the extra pass or setting up for an open three, something we desperately needed. Honestly, from the little I know about Webster I wouldn't trade EITHER Gomes or Babbitt for him, much less both. He's a small forward who after several years in the league has yet to show more than a glimmer of the potential the Blazers saw in him, and isn't likely to even get playing time once you consider who the Wolves took with the #4 overall pick.

I really wasn't excited about anybody the Wolves could get at #4, and I really hoped they'd pull off the trade with Philly to move up and get Evan Turner. But I really hoped they wouldn't take Wesley Johnson, who just doesn't sound like a game changer or a guy with a very ceiling on his future development. So of course they took Wesley Johnson, who in his defense was rated as the top small forward coming out of college this year. This just makes it all the more inexplicable that the Wolves gave up so much for Martell Webster and had such a hard-on for small forwards and undersized power forwards this year, the way they went crazy for point guards last year. Well, at least hopefully Johnson can score?

They still have cap room to sign free agents as a way to improve next year, but with everybody clearing cap space this year for the Lebron sweepstakes too many big market teams can make sweeter offers to players. They still have a couple players they can trade, but given the general cluelessness of this team, I just don't see them doing it. They still haven't solved the problem of the Bermuda Triangle offense and how poorly suited their players are to it, gotten anyone to protect the rim, or how to get their best player from last year (Kevin Love) onto the court for more than 15-20 minutes a game. And they still haven't done anything to put butts in seats, which I hope means I can move up 50 rows without disturbing anyone. Honestly it's like after tanking through the regular season for draft position they've decided to tank the draft as well... maybe Taylor's positioning the team for a sale.

The Wolves have to do some things top get my attention next year:

Fire David Kahn. He's completely out of his depth and a national joke. The number of players he's traded for only to cut them a week later is damning enough.
Fire Kurt Rambis and bring in somebody who's able to create an offensive system that uses the existing personnel rather than trying to bang a square peg into a round hole. If he really got the most out of this team, then they all need to go. Maybe give Laimbeer the job just to piss off McHale.
Trade Al Jefferson and get something for him. Or if they're going to keep him, actually use him properly as a power forward and get a center behind him who plays defense, and figure out a way to get something for Kevin Love. Just do something other than have him in there like a boot on the front left tire.
Sign Darko. I don't care what it takes, and the Joe Smith fiasco showed our owner is willing to go above and beyond to get a player he really wants. Honestly that was the one glimmer of hope in the second half of the season, having the first legitimate center in ages who didn't look like he was bored and itching for a drink by the end of the first quarter.
Quit signing stiffs. The Wolves are years away from contention and I don't want to watch journeymen like Damien Wilkins play for a losing team. I'd rather play rookies and lose by 50 than watch 30 year old guys with no upside puff their chests out like superstars every time they make a lay-up against the second unit. The number of these guys brought in for their “veteran presence” who were cut without playing a game or centers who slept through games is staggering (we paid Daniels, Blount, Pecherov, Pavlovic, Tucker, and Atkins close to $18m last season), and if Martell Webster wasn't signed for 3 more years I'd expect Kahn to cut him in the preseason too.

I'm actually so disgusted I'm going to call and see if I can cancel my tickets for next year. I know there's really no way, but I feel like I have to try. Or maybe sell them at a steep discount and at least get something back for my folly. I'm actually not that negative, and I want to be excited about Johnson as a second scorer and Darko or some of the European players coming over. But most likely I will go into next season sick to my stomach about having to watch last year's team + an ordinary Wesley Johnson, and they will completely fail to surprise me. And I don't know how much more disappointment I can take in my life right now.

A Declaration of Independence, or Suck it England

2010-06-11T14:37:00.002-05:00

This past year my sister married a wonderful Englishman, and while it has been a great joy to have him join my family, I find there is no room in my heart for his football team and it's delusionally arrogant fans. Accordingly, I submit the following:

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the sporting bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all fans are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of sporting glory. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that associations long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future entertainment. --Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former friendship. The history of the present Queen of England is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the beautiful game. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

She has conspired with her subjects to create an endless series of excuses for failure... cited most often is the dreaded misfortune of being scored on by the best player in the world. (Maybe they've got something here... what reasonable person could predict that Ronaldinho would turn up in Shizuoka in 2002 and snatch an easy victory away from the clear world favorites? Or that a referee would mistakenly allow a goal in 1966, sorry I mean '86? Bad luck, Germ- I mean England.)

She has joined the European conceit that all tournaments must be reachable by train from St Pancras Station; the presence of footballers from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and these United States has apparently not served to make her majesty or her subjects aware that football is played in places not listed in her trusty 1966 Michelin Guide to Western Europe.

She has sent Wayne Rooney out in the world with spiked boots and in so doing, has fomented his homicidal rage and total disregard for the sanctity other people's testicles.

She has allowed her subjects to claim that beating a tiny nation 45 times in 110 matches (and losing 41 times) constitutes “total dominance”, in violation of all the laws of mathematics.

She has repeatedly laid claim to inventing the game of football, before inviting in a succession of Scots, Frenchmen, Swedes and Italians in a futile attempt to teach her subjects how to actually play it.

Her predecessor George VI endeavored through her newspapers to obliterate the achievements of the United States and her sportsmen, by binding all into a conspiracy to alter the news from Belo Horizonte on June 29^th 1950 and proudly present England as 10-1 winners in the next day's paper. (If you only have access to English newspapers, you may not realize that the actual score was 1-0 in favor of the United States.)

She has given us only one successful national team coach in the last 20 years: Glenn Hoddle, a man who did his part to promote physical fitness by claiming that disabled people were paying for the sins of a previous life.

She has, through her instruments the Football League and its several clubs, conspired to overprice every man of that nation with an English accent and a pair of boots, then whined endlessly about how nobody with any financial sense (like the rest of Europe) wants to pay £50m for the right back from MiddleofNowhere United.

She has sent her subjects out in the world armed with the cutting edge tactics of the 1950's, meaning every international company has a club team that tries to avoid passing to the English guys, knowing they'll just close their eyes and boot it upfield.

She has endeavored to turn the most innocent among us away from the game of football, by only allowing the ugliest, most terrifying members of her society to take the field, chief amongst them the monstrous creature whose unnatural, mechanical movements make a mockery of the grace and form of man... put another way, one look at Peter Crouch doing the robot and the world's children will be so paralyzed with horror, they'll never kick a football again.

She has through her instrument the Football League confined our players to the bench, no great sin until they were needed by their mother country, in which case they suddenly became indispensable to their club and unavailable to play for their country.

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses... oh no, my mistake, that one was King George. (Sorry.)

She is at this time transporting large armies of savage mercenaries in England tops and Burberry caps to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. (Except for the Burberry caps, we actually submitted this complaint to King George too.)

She is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. That's not a repeat, this time I'm talking about the WAGS.

She has conspired to impose upon us her servant David Beckham, his irritating wife, their incomprehensible whining accents and his collection of stupid haircuts. Sentencing disgraced members of the Empire to transportation was bad enough, sending them here is unforgivable.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions, including a friendly invitation to play in a tournament we held in the summer of 1994 have been answered only by repeated injury. A Queen, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to call herself a sports fan.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our English brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their clubs to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over our players. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States Soccer Federation, in General Congress, assembled for the 50^th anniversary of Joe Gaetjens' famous goal, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all friendly rivalry between them and the state of England, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent states, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and put a serious smackdown on the Three Lions come Saturday. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Bob Bradley

Arizona: Robbie Findley

California: Carlos Bocanegra, Jonathan Bornstein

Maurice Edu, Landon Donovan, Hercules Gomez

District of Columbia: Oguchi Onyewu

Georgia: Ricardo Clark

Illinois: Brad Guzan, Steve Cherundolo, Jonathan Spector

Indiana: DaMarcus Beasley

New Jersey: Tim Howard, Michael Bradley, Jozy Altidore

New York: Edson Buddle, Benny Feilhaber

Texas: Clint Dempsey, José Torres, Stuart Holden

Virginia: Clarence Goodson

Washington: Marcus Hahnemann

Wisconsin: Jay DeMerit

P.S. After all your years of bragging and telling us we don't know anything about football you really can't win by anything less than five goals without hanging your heads in shame... so even if you win, you can still suck it, England.

This calls for drug-addled poetry

2010-05-21T21:05:00.001-05:00

After several days of ever-growing pain, the combination of sleep deprivation and prescription drugs has made me a bit goofy. Desperately needing something else to take the edge off, I came to the only logical conclusion: Drug Addled Poetry... and it's working. (By the way, in my head this introduction TOTALLY sounds like the opening to the A-Team.)

Can't believe the pain I'm in
Swelling void of missing tooth
Wow, I need more vicodin

For each hurt and in each sin
Acts of men but hid in youth
Can't believe the pain I'm in

Rue and guilt come with hurtin'
Part ego, but mostly truth
Wow, I need more vicodin

Poppy or scars, who will win?
Can the priest-king say the sooth?
Can't believe the pain I'm in

Will Ramsey let him slide it in?
PJ asks from in the booth
Wow, I need more vicodin

How did that gay porn creep in?
And what the fuck is a sooth?
Can't believe the pain I'm in
Wow, I need more vicodin.

To persistent pokers

2010-05-12T21:58:00.000-05:00

Poke.

Pokemon.

Poke.

~~Poke.~~

Poke.

Pokerface.

Poke.

Just saying, keep poking me like that and somebody might poke you back.

Twins 5-2 Red Sox, or Opening Day

2010-04-21T21:33:00.000-05:00

I still remember my first Twins game a quarter of a century ago, in the blue embrace of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. I learned two truths that day: that Kent Hrbek was the greatest man alive, and that the New York Yankees were the pure distillation of evil. (I still tend to be a bit manichean in my sporting outlook.) I also learned that ice cream is somehow better when served in a baseball helmet. But even after a lot of years of fond memories of the Humptydome I was really looking forward to outdoor baseball, seats that faced home plate with unobstructed views and just in general not watching baseball in the air-conditioned corner of a football stadium. I'd been dying for a year to get a look inside the limestone walls of the new place, our first real baseball stadium in my lifetime (besides Midway Stadium). Still, thinking back to that first game I probably should have expected it, but I was surprised on opening day by how much I missed the old place.

After the yawning expanse of the Humptydome where on a clear day you could sort of make out Torri Hunter under the giant wall of folded up seats in the outfield, Target Field just feels really small. I used to wonder how in the hell Jim Thome and Justin Morneau could hit the upper deck in right field, but Jason Kubel's homer on opening day just seemed like it had no trouble clearing the wall. It will take a while to grow on me, this cozy little field with its beautiful facade and Minnesota fir trees in the outfield, but it's already seducing me with the promise of fresh air and ample bathrooms. It's a new experience going to a sporting event in Minnesota where nobody shouts "Shoulder to shoulder, squeeze in!" while I'm urinating (and nobody giving me odd looks for standing shoulder to shoulder when it's not crowded).

There are still some teething troubles to opening a place like Target Field, like the complete and total lack of signs at the perimeter telling you which way the various gates are, and it took me a few innings for the food court to get their act together and get the lines moving, but it's too early to whine about that, even for me. And it is nice to have a properly designed building where getting in and out of a seat doesn't include pushing through a crowd and climbing 300 steps, getting out doesn't involve a crash course in claustrophobia and hoping the 9-year old I've brought doesn't get swept out to 5th street by the mob.

I've started to think that after the envious trips I've taken to Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park and Fenway to see the Twins, wishing we had real baseball in Minnesota not played on carpet, this game may have just felt too much like a road game and not quite like home. But it was a beautiful day and a nice win, and every time I looked at the Twins pennants flapping in left field, I was reminded of how much I loved watching the teams that won those division titles and the World Series teams (I missed the 1965 American League champs). Watching those real pennants get hoisted for the first time in Minnesota, it was a bit like winning them all over again, and it brought Hrbek's unlikely gracefulness, Kirby's crazy energy, Johan's killer change-up, Bert's wise-ass friendly rivalry with Frankie V and everything that made those teams into the new building.

The only thing I'd change is while it was nice to see the five retired numbers all come out together to the mound (with Kirby jr. taking his dad's place), I think they should have come out wearing their red Twins Sages robes with their numbers on the back, because that commercial still cracks me up.

So welcome home, Twins.

Do Not Disturb the Kraken, and other mediocre re-imaginings

2010-04-21T13:27:00.001-05:00

Seriously, keep the Kraken where it is. I know that sounds like something I'd say in the Captain's hot tub (possibly about that floating lobster) but it's still good advice: nobody needed to dislodge the Kraken this movie season. The Kraken looked like it was on a nice career swing in the last ten years after turning a cameo in Fellowship of the Ring into a feature role in the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, and I know the Kraken's gotta eat, but it's still sad to to see so many talented people (Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Mads Mikkelsen and Polly Walker, amongst others) slumming it in a movie that's sold by one of the worst A-list actors working today... I think Sam Worthington is the new Keanu Reeves, doing for facial expressions what Keanu did for awkward line readings. On the other hand, bad as she is in this movie Gemma Arterton is still a delight to the eyes as a brunette (Strawberry Fields the oil-covered red-head secret agent was one of the highlights of Quantum of Solace). Honestly Hades was so bad in this movie I was sure he was played by William Hurt, like my brain wouldn't accept the idea of somebody as professional as Ralph Fiennes going that far over the top.

Sadly this capped off a run of a few mediocre re-imaginings and attempts to milk franchises I've seen recently, including a dreadful showing of The Wolfman. I went to see it at one of the last ripped-screen, clock-radio sound system dollar theaters operating in the Twin Cities, but really the script had enough to apologize for on its own. There seemed to be a couple plot elements cut from the film hinting first that water could reverse the curse, foreshadowed by the revelation that as children Benicio del Toro and his brother used to use a waterfall as sanctuary from their father, and his gasp of recognition and meaningful glance at the dripping water in the sewer. So when at the climax when Emily Blunt, who has secret off-screen gypsy confidential information about how to save him, finds herself with wolf-Benicio at those same falls over looking the raging water, and nothing comes from either one of these themes, it screamed "focus group re-write".

Really though I have to admit I'm most irritated by Lego Indiana Jones 2. I don't know what's so strangely addictive about these little Lego film characters, but I started realizing I had a problem with Lego Star Wars and Lego Batman when I started dreaming in Lego. The well-documented, unplayable glitches in Lego Indiana Jones helped me wean myself off those games a bit, but then they had to come out with a sequel that included The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and some more levels inspired by the earlier films. This made me realize that while I remember enjoying KotCS and didn't drink the Hateorade on the last movie like some people, I actually didn't remember a lot of the plot or the characters. I also have no interest in playing a video game as Mutt, since I hated that character the moment Shia LaBeouf came riding out of the fog in his village people biker outfit. (The only thing I've liked him in is that SNL digital short where Andy Samberg and Bill Heder shoot him six times as soon as he walks into the room and starts talking.)

But really, what annoys me the most is the seemingly unavoidable influence of Super Mario Bros. on all games, especially sequels. For some reason, these Lego games have to keep inserting more and more moving platforms and jumping puzzles, until every location turned out to be the side of a giant cliff or a pit of lava. until in this game there are entire levels that are unrelated to the source material and just consist of cartoon bricks and lava pits straight out of every nintendo platformer ever. This happens everywhere: the gameplay of Doom was so good that it's still playable 20 years later, but every new first person shooter will inevitably come to a screeching halt when I hit an impossible jumping puzzle. I've seen every Bond film, and I honestly don't remember so many tense "Can Bond climb this ladder in three seconds???" sequences... and I really have to groan when a hunting game of all things requires clunky tight-rope walking across a fallen tree sequences to get to new areas. Just let me shoot terrorists/animals like your cover art promised. It always seems to get worse for sequels, like the truck racing game that was fun but didn't include picking up hammers and throwing darts and spinning from bars or having your truck get up and walk, so all these things made it into the bug robot racing follow-up. Ridiculous... now get off my lawn, you damn kids.

Timberwolves 108-99 Kings, or how I learned to love Darko

2010-04-11T23:52:00.001-05:00

(Forgot to actually post this two weeks ago, whoops. Fortunately nobody will read it anyways, so no harm done.) When I saw the Wolves beat the Kings, had certainly been a while since I saw them fail to execute a fourth quarter meltdown. I have to admit, I was a bit surprised. With a handful of games left in the season the Wolves have locked up the second biggest batch of ping-pong balls in the lottery. The Nyets won the head-to-head and clinch the worst overall record by virtue of having blown 20+ point leads in both games against the Wolves... basically the worst tank job I've ever seen outside of pro wrestling. I have two concerns over the eventual flop of the ping-pong balls: whatever kind of talent the Wolves might be able to add next year, and a rather low stakes gamble I made on a season ticket.

Sadly in a 2-player draft it's hard to imagine the league allowing the Timberwolves a crack at one of the top two players (there's a reason they hold the draft behind closed doors). They can't make it too obvious they're getting screwed, so I'd guess they're looking at the #3 overall pick which means my crappy "Pay the Pick" season ticket will cost $3 a game and I can only hope the Wolves do their homework and use a top 5 pick to find a player that has some impact. With six draft picks and 3-6 spots opening up on the roster next year, somebody's got to change up the dynamic of this team so by mid-December I'm not already thinking about rebuilding for next season.

Trying to make sense of what they put on the floor now I took a look at the +/- for this game. If you don't know, that's the total shift in the scoreline during all the time a particular player was on the floor... a stat with a lot of biases, but still interesting. In this game the Wolves won by 9, and the guys who split time at point guard combined for a +/- of 9, which is kind of mathematically necessary. The other positions are a bit muddier, but most everybody else was about +8 or +9. The exceptions are interesting... Wayne Ellington was at -9, meaning the game went horribly against the team while he was in, and Corey Brewer who seemed to be having a good night was +11. The big men (Milicic, Jefferson, and Love) combined for +18 (which is about right for guys who got most of the minutes at 2 positions) but almost all of that was Milicic and Love.

This is one of the confusing things about the Timberwolves: much as I love Jefferson who quietly builds a 20 point, 12 rebound game every night, Love looks like our best player but nibbles for minutes of the bench. They've got to find a way to play those guys together or make a change. Our starting point guard isn't much better than his back-up, but to be fair he's a rookie and I'd like to see his sophomore year. Nobody really stands out at shooting guard or small forward, just a couple good but not great squad players in Gomes and Brewer. And the weird thing is after three different centers didn't really work out, somebody's gotten Darko's motor running for the first time in years and he's putting up double-doubles and blocking shots, making him the first Wolves center in years to do anything but stand around and look sleepy.

It's just sad that three years after freeing KG and blowing up the team, they still have no identity and are contending for worst in the league (in any other year they'd have gotten it). If they don't do something this off-season with a top 5 pick, cap space, six overall draft picks, and the inside track on Darko, Ricky Rubio, and Pekovic, I have to wonder what's the point?

What the hell is going on in Vancouver?

2010-02-19T15:44:00.002-06:00

I don't know if they just got confused and thought they had until 2012 to prepare, but everything about the Vancouver Olympics is so slap-dash and even dangerous, if I were Canadian I'd honestly be ashamed of this.

Every time I turn on the TV somebody's getting hurt. NBC's decision to show that endless loop of Nodar Kumaritashvili flying into the support post at 90 mph was certainly grotesque, but it's amazing to me that it happened in the first place, that after trying to add inches to Canada's penis by having the fastest track ever there was just zero consideration for the possibility of an athlete losing control at the bottom, where the speeds are highest. Part of the fun things about the Olympics is that it gets athletes from smaller countries and smaller sporting programs involved in a global event, but that does mean there will be a wider range of skill and experience amongst the athletes... to be completely unprepared for the possibility of a crash after repeated warnings is just criminal.

It's not like it's an isolated incident, given the number of horrific crashes I saw in a single women's ski event, including Paerson's now infamous 190 foot flight. Apparently that was due to the horrible conditions in Vancouver which prevented any of the women from getting a full training run on a difficult course. The one nice thing about those crashes was watching so many of these shaken up and bruised women get up and walk off the course under their own power, proving to another generation that women are not really so fragile after all. The cross country course was another curiosity, as somebody thought it would be logical to build up a platform of snow right next to a ravine... on a turn! After Petra Majdic fell into it, watching her snowplow her way through that turn in an Olympic race (spaghetti, pizza, spaghetti... bronze medal) was just sort of sad. Outside of crashes, the poor quality of the course and the weather has forced the reorganization of events with skiers going out of order to try and rig the event for the top seeds, and it's really just pathetic. Snow is being brought in by helicopter to try and fluff up the venues... just insane. As my friend Amstelbooij says, just have it indoors on fake snow in Dubai next time.

Not everything can be blamed on the weather, since incredibly Canada was also unable to come up with a either a zamboni or a clock that works. Skiers have been sent early in pursuit races, the whole point of which is that whoever crosses the line first is supposed to win, and you can pace yourself by other racers. Now those races have to be reviewed to adjust times and determine a winner in a smoke-filled room somewhere, the same smoke-filled room where they determined Petra Majdic could get a do-over after falling into the ravine. The zamboni problems being so bad that the skating coaches had to intervene and collectively refuse to send their athletes out... that I simply cannot comprehend. Everything has just been so half-assed, from the sloppy opening ceremony with Native Americans as mascots and broken equipment at the torch-lighting ceremony to erecting a big chain-link fence around the Olympic flame and draping it with advertising posters. Just sad.

I knew my aggravation level would be high having to watch the Olympics on NBC with their fireside chats in front of a fake fireplace (I love Colbert for climbing in and warming himself in front of the monitor), and the way they play favorites and are still trying to make Lindsey Jacobellis into a folk hero for showboating her way out of a gold medal, and having a luge snuff film to show certainly sent them into overdrive. What I really didn't understand is after all these years of jocking even the most insignificant American athletes, for this Olympics they cannot stop highlighting Canadian athletes, carrying on about Canada's medal count, and that ridiculous coverage of Canada's 3-day gold medal drought like they were guaranteed medals and a wheaties box on day one. But eventually I saw an event that clued me in, as a Canadian crossed the finish line in snowboard cross and the camera at the bottom of the course followed her over the line, over to the boards, and stayed on her while she took her board off and celebrated with her coach... they completely cut away from the neck and neck race for 2nd place to show a Canadian jump up and down. Then I remembered that in previous Olympics the TV coverage was done by local stations who in the past have tried to come up with footage for everybody to be able to show local coverage of their nation's Olympic athletes... not this time, when apparently the camera just stays on the Canadians and that's that. So I guess NBC has to rave about Canadians, because that's the field the world is getting. And for that, the Canadians shouldn't even be invited to London or Sochi.

Fare thee well, your Eminence

2010-02-17T19:23:00.002-06:00

His Eminence Brian Cardinal and his expiring $6.75m contract is expected to officially be traded to the New York Knicks tomorrow morning, bringing the Cardinal era of Minnesota basketball to a close. It's hard to believe I'll never again see his Eminence come in for three minutes to give somebody else a breather, something he did every fifth game or so. Honestly, Cardinal was a nice player for the end of the bench who had a great attitude, came in and worked hard, and had very nice three point range especially for a forward. On the other hand he made $6.75m, and that's just insane. The funny thing is New York is just clearing roster space and shaving a little off their payroll in preparation for another trade, so the Wolves could theoretically take Cardinal right back when the Knicks cut him. This would clearly be worth it, just so they could still keep Cardinal's main contributions to games: the self-consciously creepy "This is ladies night!" promo he used to do on the big screen.

In exchange for Cardinal's expiring contract, the only thing the Wolves get for sure is Darko Milicic's slightly more expensive expiring contract. Darko was insanely drafted #2 overall just behind King James but ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, and many other people who've had more memorable careers. (That was the year the Wolves drafted Ndudi Ebi and Rick Rickert so I feel your pain, Detroit.) The fact that he was a consensus top three guy with Carmelo Anthony and Carmelo Anthony does speak to his heretofore unrealized potential and 7-foot true centers don't grow on trees, so I'm glad to see the Wolves take a chance on him even if he does plan to go back to Europe at the end of the year. The Wolves desperately need a presence in the paint, and currently their options at center are stick-thin Ryan Hollins and Oleksiy Pecherov who's been buried on the bench for months. If Darko sulks until April and never gives the Wolves a chance we haven't lost anything besides a bit of Glen Taylor's money, but given the lack of progress three years after McHale blew up the team and started over, I would have liked to see a more substantial shake-up before the trade deadline.

Tiger Woods is a Weird Guy

2010-02-14T00:23:00.002-06:00

I have to admit, I don't watch a lot of golf and I'm not that familiar with Tiger Woods oeuvre. It also always seemed to me that especially in his younger days Tiger conducted himself with a lot of poise amidst the discomfort a lot of people clearly experienced when he joined the tour, by which I mean the closet racism of people who saw him put on his first green jacket and couldn't quite put their finger on what just didn't seem right to them about that picture. As a public figure I believe Tiger Woods may have done more in the last twenty years to undermine unconscious racial barriers than anyone except President Obama (and maybe Oprah until she shut down her book club because there were no more books worth reading). So for that reason I've never really wanted to speak ill of Tiger but now I've started to explore Tiger's world through his video game, and from that and the glimpse into his personal life we're getting from the furious media storm surrounding his extramarital affairs and intramarital being chased by a blonde with a big stick affairs, I'm starting to think there's just something a bit off about this guy.

First off, I never realized until I fired up the first hole of Tiger Woods 2010 and watched him head to the first tee box at Banff, Tiger has the cold dead eyes of a killer. Some may interject that this is just the zombie-like state of animated characters on the Wii, a plateau in animation that helped make The Polar Express into the creepiest children's film ever, but I beg to differ. I mean just look at the Vanity Fair cover that he did while trying to hastily remake his image in the wake of losing half of his sponsorships... or as I call it the "Tiger Woods will rape you in the shower" cover. A black man who's just had a run in with the police and admitted to being a sex addict, he does this predatory prison weight room picture that looks like it should be subtitled "Fresh meat in the yard!". For agreeing to that picture, his agent's got to be worse than post-Jordan David Falk ("Don't worry, playing in front of 4,000 people in the Meadowlands will feel just like playing at the Garden, Steph").

Actually it's completely wrong of me to describe that picture that way, since this game has also taught me Tiger Woods could never attack anybody in the shower. Just like Dracula, Tiger's secret weakness is an inability to cross water. Kind of ironic for a guy named after a cat, even though real tigers are much more comfortable in the water. Weird things happen when you get near water in Tiger's game, and water hazards will exert a sort of magical suction that will draw your ball down into them. That may sound like sour grapes, but there are times when you have the wind behind you, you're hitting downhill, the max range of your club way, way past the waterline, and the ball comes off your club at full force going straight (according to Tiger's own swing meter) and your ball will fall short for no discernible reason. You're just supposed to know about the evil gravitic properties of dihydrogen monoxide, I guess. What's really weird is at Pebble Beach the wind can be blowing in from the ocean and it will still suck balls off the course and over the cliffs down to the beach, and this is how I know it's just hydrophobic Tiger messing with everyone: this happens to the other players in match play. When you watch a pro golfer mystifyingly hit three balls out of bounds because they can't compensate for the sudden spike in super-secret seaside suction, it's safe to say we've found a place where the laws of real world physics are subordinate to some secret fear from Tiger's psyche.

One factor working against my "Cats fear water and so does Tiger" theory is the fact that it seems to be constantly raining in this game. It's not just overcast conditions or light drizzle on a few courses, but seriously half the courses have to be played in the pouring rain, with puddles splashing on the greens. It's as though Tiger has never seen Caddy Shack and particularly what happened to the old minister. I always thought of Tiger as this genial guy, but maybe he really does delight in making everyone slog through the rain in soaking wet shoes trying to push putts through an inch of standing water, so nobody will beat any of his records (even just in a video game). This factor of the game does also make sense in light of Tiger's public disagreement with Phil Mickelson about Sawgrass, where Tiger wanted the course rearranged and hole 8 and 17 swapped so as to not have to end the day facing his nemesis: an island green. And you'll notice, when his future ex-wife started getting suspicious she bought herself an island to run away to with the kids.

I suppose I'd have to admit my image of a genial, all for the love of the game Tiger Woods was already shattered by watching how all the players conduct themselves on the course in his game. These people have zero sense of etiquette, doing an elaborate victory dance after every successful hole and even more irritatingly after a poor hole will stomp their feet, swing their clubs around and generally refuse to clear off the green so their opponent (that would be me) can finish the hole. It's really sad that Tiger encourages this behavior in a game that will be played by children just starting out in the game of golf. I wondered why during a tournament I could check the leaderboard, play three holes and then find the guys ahead of me would be stuck on the same hole, but now I realize it just takes them longer because they have to dance and cry and just generally ruin the round for everyone playing with them, and that takes time. Or maybe like Tiger they're so horny they have to sneak off and get some in the tall grass between strokes.

What's really aggravating though is when your 300 lb opponent misses his birdie putt and does a complete body slam onto the surface of the green that makes the entire screen shake... when I'm waiting to putt for the win, how does he not get a penalty for a maneuver that has to have displaced my ball? I imagine in Tiger Woods 2011 a bogey putt will result in my opponent furiously thumping down their club and ripping a divot out of the green right in my lie. I'd turn a blind eye to this foolishness, but the weirdest thing about this game is I can fast-forward through my opponent's shot (the actual game of golf), but I can't skip what happens before and after. This means the first time you're required to enter match play you have to watch in excruciating detail a severely obese man whose sweat-soaked rolls of fat are draping over his shorts take forever to dig in and take an ugly dipping shot, then slam his putter and often his whole body down every time you win a hole. Take it from an overweight guy who plays bad golf, nobody's enjoying watching you sweat and jiggle our way through ten strokes, just get the hell off the green.

Especially because Tiger seemed so determined to make me play with greasy Italians in track suits and sweaty out of breath sumo wrestlers, I decided I needed some eye candy to make this game palatable. In general I feel there are three methodologies for creating video game avatars:

1) your character represents you and should be patterned after you
2) your character represents how you present yourself in the game, so you should create a character that envisions how you intend to play the game
3) you will spend hours staring at your character's ass, so the important thing is your character should be easy on the eyes

For me, option #3 tends to trump the other two in about every game situation, so I play a lot of female characters and get a lot of weird looks for it. In this game, I feel like creating a character or choosing which of the several pro golfers I could play taught me even more about the psyche of Tiger Woods. For one thing, he seems to think the undersides of women's breasts are sticky, and any type of clothing (spandex, windbreaker, untucked polo shirt, anything) will adhere to their bodies like paint. Admittedly I haven't checked in a while, so putting tape on their breasts may just be another thing that women have borrowed from strippers along with shaving their privates (I think the last time I investigated the issue, somebody assured me that was now de rigeur). The other weird thing is finding it's really difficult to scale those down at all and have the upper body and torso line up in any way, or really to match up any combo besides big booty, wasp waist, and a humongous rack. So you kind of have to play a woman with breast implants and these lifeless doll's eyes, and it's kind of creepy, until you realize this is the vision of a guy who had a stable of identical mistresses who all looked like he picked them off an assembly line. And suddenly it all makes sense.

So my character on the PGA tour is a rather... overdesigned woman with cowboy boots, a nose ring, and hair color that changes to match her latest sponsor's gear. And I'm totally hoping the prize for winning the whole game is I get to see her chase Tiger down his driveway brandishing a golf club. Because that guy is weird, man.

Vikings 34-3 Cowboys, and other random bits about football

2010-01-23T22:52:00.003-06:00

I know I'm late in commenting, with the impending big game, but after six days I still remain giddy over the epic beat-down the Vikings gave the Cowboys. It's always funny when the national media picks a losing horse to ride, and they had all but guaranteed victory for the Cowboys... to show the depth of their disrespect, the crew calling the game was former Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman (logical) and to balance that out... Joe Buck, who wouldn't stop wailing in horror when Randy Moss pretended to drop his pants and moon the Green Bay crowd in the '04 play-offs, and pouted when the Eagles referenced that in a TD celebration the following week. Being in the stadium one of the best moments was after the first turnover when it got so loud I thought my ears were going to bleed; I guess watching the game on TV had its own special moment when a speechless Aikman and Buck pouted and refused to call Sidney Rice's first touchdown. The bizarre contention that the Cowboys woes were due to the missed field goals and the Vikings putting an exclamation point on it with the final touchdown... that's just pathetic, to offer any excuse for a team that loses by five scores besides simple incompetence.

This game really illustrated one of the key elements of Vikings success: Ray Edwards. He's the only guy on the D-line not going to the pro bowl, but the Vikings defense very much wanes and waxes with Edwards' penetration into the backfield. He was intended to be a run-stuffer to complement a dominant pass-rusher on the other side of the line, but if he gets loose from the right tackle Edwards causes gameplans to come completely unglued, even when he doesn't get to the QB. One of the numerous sacks on Romo stood out because of the way it started with Ray-Ray getting upfield and starting to find a way around a desperately scrambling right tackle. As he neared Romo, the tackle shoved the lunging Edwards down as a flustered Romo jumped forward out of his way, only to immediately jump back out of the way of a diving Jared Allen. Now completely on the run Romo scrambled left into the void left by Allen, but his inability to get his feet planted and make a play before Edwards and Allen slashed into the pocket meant linebacker Ben Leber had time to come around the corner and meet Romo head on in the open field. And a whole stadium was reminded that Romo is Italian for "happy feet".

Watch and you'll see this is how it happens: finding nobody open in the first three seconds, a QB sees his right tackle losing ground to Edwards and tries to step up in the pocket. Sadly by this point the Williams Wall is chewing up guards and collapsing that pocket on him and he quickly starts moving backwards away from the threat he can see: Edwards. The problem is this means running towards monster sack artist Jared Allen, which quickly turns out to be a bad idea. So the QB either tries to go upfield, in which case a startling number of them get tripped up from behind by Allen and Kevin Williams and then finished off by the linebackers, or he runs right back into the arms of the suddenly free Edwards.

When you have to double-team Allen, you have to double-team Pat Williams, and the linebackers and physical corners stay back in coverage and shut down any quick passing outlet... and that means Edwards has a few seconds against a big slow run-blocking tackle who's got no help if he gets in trouble. If Edwards wins that battle, it's all over. If he's not winning that match-up, the linebackers have to blitz and leave holes open for runners and for short passes, and the QB may have time to let his receivers work. So when Edwards left the game limping last week, everybody held their breath and prayed for his knee.

A week later the other things still running through my mind from that game are Sidney Rice ripping snatching three touchdowns out of the mouth of the Iron Wolf, dragging a Dallas defender on at least two of them and still managing to pull the ball in and achieve separation. (If you're going to tackle a receiver, at least make sure they don't catch the ball and beat you to the end zone, idiots.) Watching a Cowboys safety just give up and watch Rice stroll into the end zone was an amazing sign that we've castrated our former nemesis. Dallas had the better of our first forty years together in the league, but now it's over. I also wonder what was going on with Shiancoe... I was really worried to see our catching tight end miss the whole game due to nagging injuries, but when he came in and still scored on the hapless Cowboys... man that's just cold.

I have no fear of the New Orleans Saints. They're too cocky. Their fans are ripe for punishment from the Gods of Ragnarok for their hubris, having not only rescheduled Mardi Gras months ago to make sure it wouldn't interfere with the apparently inevitable Superbowl victory parade, and now they're selling their tickets to Vikings fans to finance their again inevitable Superbowl trips. I think they might want to have a word with Cris Carter, Robert Smith, and above all Gary Anderson about the fickle nature of destiny. I'm not saying they're not a great team, and that the Vikings are rightly underdogs... but they're ripe for a fall, and if we don't take them down and they go to Miami thinking just to put a cherry on top of the sundae, Peyton Manning will eat them alive.

I say Manning even though I'm rooting for the Jets... about the same time I fell in love with the Vikings I fell in love with a Jets fan about as hard, and it's a toss-up as to which relationship caused me more pain*. But I still have a soft spot for the J-E-T-S, silly New Yawk accent and all. And they have the makings of a team of destiny, oblivious to the reality that they're the worst team on paper, and tweaking the noses of the experts and frontrunners who've all picked their rivals at every turn. Plus I like Bill Simmons notion that the Mount Rushmore of beaten down fan bases is the Vikings, Bills, Browns, and Jets, and that makes a Vikings-Jets Superbowl a beautiful thing. Or alternately a Saints-Jets Superbowl would make a wonderful side show as TV pundits wrung their hands about whether they felt worse about 9/11 or Katrina, and who deserved to win more: New York firefighters or Superdome refugees.

In conclusion, I'll say again that the financial world needs to quit commenting on sports. Between Simon Kuper's consistently idiotic sports column in the Financial Times (it's sad when a frontrunner tries to justify following the in-crowd) and the Wall Street Journal's article on the Vikings that's worse researched than my twitter updates... seriously just sit in your luxury box, sip your champagne, and shut up. We'll even put American Idol on the monitors so you don't get bored by the game. If you're not familiar with the WSJ article, it's kind of a whiny piece on how the Vikings have built their team on free agency, and how could such a thing happen(?!). Their first example: Jared Allen. Who the Vikings acquired in a f***ing TRADE, after his value was reduced significantly by his struggles with alchoholism and a stint in rehab. Their legitimate examples were guard Steve Hutchinson, an established player whose signing did involve a fair bit of silliness between the Seahawks and Vikings over contracts, and tight end Visanthe Shiancoe who was not a superstar, and the unique situation of being the one team in a position to make Favre an offer, but like Allen, Favre was a huge risk.

Some things not mentioned by the article were any explanation of how a small market team could so unfairly steal away the big boys' toys, much less how they did this in a league with a hard salary cap and revenue sharing, where everybody has the same budget for player personnel based on league revenue. Here's some hints for the WSJ: in the final years of Red McCombs tenure as owner, the team positioned itself for a sale by paying way below market for coaching staff and by not signing any long-term contracts that might tie a new owner's hands. They preserved future cap room by guaranteeing salaries rather than giving out signing bonuses, and could cut players with little financial pain. On top of that, some risks paid off (Favre, Allen) and some prospects finally peaked like Sidney Rice and E.J. Henderson (who used to drive me nuts as a young middle linebacker). It's a flash of glory and they may not be able to keep it together, but it sure is fun, even if the Vikings bar in Alphabet City isn't in a posh enough end of town for the WSJ to join in on the party.

In conclusion, SKOL. Thank you.

*-Falling in love with me is reportedly worse than the ebola virus, so I guess I still got the better end of that deal.

What does this weekend mean for the Vikings?

2010-01-01T21:47:00.001-06:00

I suppose I could just wait two days and see what happens, but I've been trying to figure out all the play-off implications of this week's games. One thing is settled about the NFC play-offs: New Orleans has backed into home field advantage throughout the play-offs. Green Bay will probably be the top wild-card team, but it's down to the Vikings, Cardinals, and the winner of the Eagles vs Cowboys game to decide who finishes 2nd, 3rd, and 4th in the play-off seeding, and to figure out how Packers and Eagles or Cowboys will fill out the wild cards. Here's how it works from the Vikings perspective:

Vikings beat Giants - if the Vikings win, they immediately check the score of the Eagles-Cowboys game.

If the Cowboys win, the Vikings have a bye week and home field against everybody but New Orleans, and would likely play the Cardinals in the divisional round (or potentially the Cowboys, Packers or Eagles).
If the Eagles win, the Vikings do not get a bye week and would host the Cowboys in the first round, then hypothetically travel to Philadelphia. They would only return to the Dome after a win over the Eagles if the Packers or Cardinals were to bump off the Saints.
Other amusing consequences: The Packers and Cardinals likely play a repeat game the following week (unless the Cowboys beat the Eagles).

Giants beat Vikings - the Vikings lose the bye week and check the score of the Packers-Cardinals game

If the Cardinals win, the Vikings have the 4th seed and host the Packers in the first round.
If the Packers win, the Vikings have the 3rd seed and host the loser of the Eagles-Cowboys game in the wild card round.

Pete and Repeat?

It's quite possible one or both of two big games will be repeated the following week. Really if the home teams win this week (Vikings beat the Giants, Cowboys beat the Eagles, Cardinals beat the Packers) both games will be repeated the following week as elimination games.

Eagles at Cowboys

If the Cowboys win (thereby winning the division) and the Packers also win, this game is repeated. Otherwise either Philly wins and takes a week off, or they flip opponents with the other game (Eagles to Arizona, Packers to Dallas).

Packers at Cardinals

This game is hard not to repeat. The Packers stay in Arizona unless they win and the Cowboys win (in which case the Packers go to Dallas, and the Eagles to Arizona), or the Packers and Vikings both lose, in which case they meet each other! For Green Bay it's like this: beat the Cardinals and they either stay in Arizona or go to Dallas. Lose and they either stay in Arizona or go to Minnesota. Honestly given the deranged cockiness of Packers fans, they'll probably claim they threw the game to "try and get another shot at Favre".

In any case, if the Vikings beat the Giants, the Packers and Cardinals will kick off knowing the only way they aren't playing each other again the next week is a Cowboys win. Kind of funny.

KGB Pizza

2009-12-22T15:59:00.003-06:00

Ever go into one of those businesses that looks fine on the outside but on closer inspection, you maybe start to notice some things? There's a new pizza place near where I work, and I was really happy given the odd schedule I keep to find that there might be more food available in the area (I can only eat so much tom yum goong soup). It looks non-descript enough, with a sort of Italian color scheme in homage to the motherland of pizza (mama mia!) and there are pizza boxes stacked everywhere and employees standing at attention, there's just one thing missing. When I run in out of the cold trying to grab a quick meal in between shifts, they never, ever have any f***ing pizza. Usually there's a long line of grumpy looking customers waiting with ever decreasing patience and an empty rack where they tell me they sell pizza by the slice, and some cheerful employee telling me if I just wait a bit they'll cook more pizza, but I can't help but wonder how long that's going to take with 20 people in line ahead of me.

But then as I'm ready to turn on my heel in frustration and look for another restaurant, I start noticing some things. Like despite being so busy they're completely sold out of pizza, the glass and aluminum rack for the slice line is so clean it's gleaming in the sunlight, not a drop of pizza grease or a crumb to be seen. It's possible they've got sucha JIT supply chain of pizza that every slice is cut and served within seconds of the pizza coming out of the oven, or maybe that they're just so far behind that their hungry walk-in customers devour whatever comes out of the oven, snapping like jackals. I could see that at lunchtime, but day after day business in the slice line has never slowed down enough to put a single pizza in the rack?

And consider the stacks and stacks of pizza boxes, which are all assembled, ready and aching for piping hot pepperoni and mozzarella to be slid into them, peeping around every corner. If they're so busy, I'd wonder how it is they haven't depleted their pile of boxes. They could be so overstaffed that during slow times they can do an excessive amount of cleaning and fold hundreds of boxes, and there are always about six guys just milling around. But again, it's a bit suspsicious to find a brand new business trying to carve out a niche in a bad economy that's so ridiculously overstaffed. I know what you're thinking, they're all delivery guys, but this brings me to my next point: who delivers pizza in a BMW? I'm not kidding, one of my co-workers has seen a BMW cruising around with their delivery sign on it, ~~making collections~~ delivering pizza.

Since they're clearly not employing all these people by cooking pizza, I'm starting to think that if you were to go into the back of that place you'd find Teddy KGB and Viktor Yanukovich dealing an illegal card game while a whole production line of Russian immigrants bags meth and heroin in pizza box sized quantities. In fact, I'm guessing the #1 selling item on their dessert menu is yellow cake... the kind from Niger that glows in the dark. They've got money out on the street at 2% a week, just pay your driver. If you can't come up with the money on-time you get buried in a hole by the railroad tracks, but for payments of more than $1000 you get a 16" pizza with up to three toppings. And while you can't get any pizza, I bet they can give you a great deal on an ipod that is in perfect working order but was accidentally dropped on its serial number (which explains that big scratch through the number). If this sounds like paranoid stereotyping, I again refer you to the guy "just delivering pizza" in a f***ing beamer.

Now I'm mainly worried about a turf war between them and the Gustavus Adolphus tennis team, who are clearly cooking meth in that big bubble. (Hey, meth did lead Andre Agassi to the first career grand slam in decades after the introduction of hard-courts and the open era.)

Amstelbooij's New York to-do list

2009-12-18T16:57:00.000-06:00

Pop over to the Meadowlands to pick up tickets to see the New York Jets.
Head out to Shea to get my tickets for the New York Mets
Cruise by Atlantic Yards and think about getting tickets for the New York Nets
Slip down to the OTB and place some New York bets
Spend my winnings at a tapas restaurant ordering some New York croqettes
Remember to pass by BofA and pay my New York debts
Stop by Arthur Ashe on the way to play some New York sets (better loosen the nets so I'll get some New York lets)
Find a French-Canadian bar and watch the CFL with my New York Alouettes
Walk the beach and see some New York egrets (bring my speedos and get some New York wets)
Stop by the pet store and get some New York pets (and get them checked out by New York vets)
Reserve a venue and hire a caterer for my New York fetes
Got a sore throat, better find a bodega and pick up some New York sucrets
Head out to Sunset Park with my Vietnamese buddies and celebrate some New York Tet
Visit the Bronx Zoo and feed some New York marmosets
Because whatever Amstelbooij wants... New York gets.

Clippers 120-95 Timberwolves

2009-12-17T16:35:00.002-06:00

Last night as I was watching the surprisingly listless Wolves get pummeled by the LA Clippers (I know, really?) it was kind of sad to watch the current Wolves be outplayed by a team stocked with former Wolves. I loved watching Sebastian Telfair coming off the bench, undersized but scary quick, but I did remember last night why I loved him, and why we traded him: after faking out a Wolves guard last night so badly he fell down (wow) Telfair couldn't come up with a way to take advantage of that besides an entry pass into the high post (er, wow?). But it got me thinking about this summer's Wolves-Clippers trade, where they traded Sebastian Telfair, Craig Smith, and Mark Madsen to the Clippers for Quentin Richardson, who the Wolves promptly to Miami for Mark Blount.

Trying to see how that trade worked out in the end, I started searching for who the Wolves had moved Blount for or when they'd cut him, and I was shocked to realize he was actually still on the roster. I hadn't noticed him down there through a third of the season, honestly. So they traded Telfair, a quick change of pace point guard; Smith, an undersized yet tough power forward who used quicker feet and crafty moves to create match-up problems; and Madsen, who had really suffered career ending injuries. Blount was theoretically at one time a center with a nice jump shot who could draw out opposing big men and open up room for a dominant low-post player, but really they just traded those guys away for a fresh start and cap room at best.

Are they getting anything back in trades?

That got me wondering what all the big Wolves trades of the last couple of years have netted them. I figured I'd start with the draft day decision last year to trade OJ Mayo, and combine any trade involving pieces that got later re-traded into one gigantic deal. Since this is about figuring out if they made the team better, I'm sort of ignoring anybody who got cut without making a splash.

So in the hypothetical mega-deal, the Wolves traded away: OJ Mayo, Randy Foye, Antoine Walker, Marko Jaric, Greg Buckner, and Bobby Brown, plus two 2nd round draft picks. That seems like quite a haul, except that Walker would have left as a free agent, and Buckner and Brown are cheaper role-players, so it's really Mayo (potential superstar), quirky combo guards Foye and Jaric, and bodies + contracts. Foye is playing limited minutes off the bench this year for the Bullets and Jaric was told by the Grizzlies to shop himself around the league and stay away from their practices (ouch). So really we didn't miss much in that deal... I'd honestly take Buckner back first (defense and three-point shooting off the bench would be nice). So it's OJ Mayo, two 2nd round draft picks, Foye and Jaric?

In return, the Wolves essentially got Kevin Love, Ricky Rubio, Brian Cardinal, Oleksiy Pecherov (wait, we traded OJ Mayo for four white guys?), Damien Wilkins, and a 2nd round pick. Mayo could be a superstar, and he was widely projected as a higher pick and better player than K-Love, and while time will tell, there certainly should be compensation for trading down. Just because it's easier to evaluate, I'd like to split the deal in two into the known and unknown quantities, and call that 2nd round pick Nathan Jawai since they traded one to Dallas for him. Part of what the Wolves got back was cap room a year earlier as Cardinal's inexplicably giant contract winds down, and I'd like to just put that together with role players Wilkins, Jawai and Pecherov, and balance that against Foye and Jaric. A couple of crappy centers and a mediocre shooting guard who can score (a bit) plus cap room for Foye and Jaric, the versatile yet inconsistent point guards who couldn't actually play point guard? I could honestly see calling that a wash.

So if you figure the known quantities cancel out, or are at least within the margin of error of a lottery pick's future potential all that leaves is the traded draft picks to sort out. That's OJ Mayo plus two future 2nd rounders for Kevin Love plus the draft rights to Spanish superstar in the making Ricky Rubio. A talented guard and future training camp fodder for a really talented guard plus a nearly as talented big man. That's a great deal, except for one thing: Ricky Rubio will probably never be a Timberwolf (under contract, making too many euros, afraid of snow, wants to play in NYC, etc.) So really it's OJ Mayo for Kevin Love plus down the road we get to trade Rubio to the Knicks for a little something. Honestly that still sounds okay to me. I kind of like that the Wolves are accumulating talent in Europe like hiding assets in a Swiss bank while tanking for a lottery pick.

So are they actually getting better?

Through trades the Wolves did stock up a bit for the future by getting future cap relief, by adding trade-bait in Rubio and Pekovic (sought-after Europeans who have no interest in playing for Minnesota) and by trading Ty Lawson for a pick in next year's draft and by drafting Henk Norel they have a 2nd round pick stashed away in Europe. The draft added Kevin Love last year, and Jonny Flynn who is fun to watch, and Wayne Ellington. Corey Brewer is back and he, Ellington, and Flynn all look capable of taking big steps forward. But that's kind of hard to get excited about when you're watching a 4-22 team (tanking for a lottery pick is theoretically good for the future, if you have a TV market big enough to attract ping-pong balls).

In the present, the Wolves did add one decent free agent in Ramon Sessions and he and Flynn apparently seemed good enough to merit ditching their attempt at adding a veteran point guard (C3PO or Chucky Atkins), and hopefully their third PG Jason Hart is learning something down there on the end of the bench. Another FA was Aleksandr Pavlovic, who was supposed to bring in much needed three point range, but really I feel like he and Wilkins are warm bodies at shooting guard, and again I just hope Ellington or Brewer will take a step up. Adding Ryan Hollins as a legitimate center is good, but really there's no big free agent addition to be boning about.

So they aren't really any better this year, but if they go into next year with the #1 overall pick and two mid-round picks from Utah and Charlotte (via Denver) and use that to add talent to a core of Flynn, Love, and Big Al, have Pekovic and Rubio on the shelf, and still have cap room (!) I think they should go after a superstar who's been elevating crappy players for too long. Seriously, I say go after Lebron James... I'm sure Nike would nix that deal, but just imagine David Stern's head exploding.

Cardinals 30-17 Vikings, or the Secret Scandinavian Sense of Doom

2009-12-07T00:21:00.001-06:00

Since I got home from work after midnight last night, I got up this morning and watched the end of last night's Timberwolves-Jazz game and to my great shock they rebounded, didn't break down on defense under pressure, weathered their usual third quarter reversal of fortune and hung on for a win. I couldn't help but feel this creeping sense of dread as the Scandinavian blood in my veins insisted that it would be too much to ask to see two Minnesota wins in one day, especially after seeing the suddenly lucky Wolves tied their longest winning streak of the season (that would be one game).

The funny thing is my tivo tried to warn me, crashing during the first half and taking forever to reboot, like it secretly hoped I'd look for another distraction and get lost in Lego Indiana Jones 2. But like Tyr with his hand in the Iron Wolf's mouth, even knowing that the agony to come will rob you of a part of yourself that you'll never get back, you just have to smile and embrace the pain. I hope that crumpling at the first division leader they've met this season isn't a sign of things to come, and I hope the Vikings are better prepared for a potential rematch in the Metrodome (at this point I'd expect the Cowboys or Cardinals to come calling, followed by a trip to New Orleans). So what was so painful?

1. No pass rush. It takes a while for the Vikings D-line to make their presence felt, but once they do it's like opening a floodgate, as sack leads to sack leads to panic. Tonight it took until the fourth quarter, and after three quarters of weird zone blitzes and a calm, undisturbed Warner able to pinpoint the timing of his passes it was too late.

2. No outside linebackers. Seriously, I think they played nine guys out there tonight. Maybe it was the weird yet completely ineffective blitzing scheme, but other than Henderson's tackles in the backfield (nice) and his exit from the game on a golf cart (ouch) there were too many tackles in the secondary and the line was chasing down too many guys from behind.

3. Everybody got hurt at once. Our middle linebacker left the field on a cart, our starting corners are both out, it's just bad. The D-line better go ugly early and make something happen or the play-offs will be short and brutal. On offense our catching tight end went out clutching his ribs, and half-man, half-tractor Phil Loadholt went out early, which really didn't help the running game.

4. No running game. I can't even begin to fathom how the Vikings couldn't run on a team that seemed to camp out 5-6 guys in the passing lanes and keep a linebacker deep, and ran complicated blitz packages that had guys running all the way across the field. Just baffling.

5. Favre crazied out on us. The way the Vikings used to beat Favre was to take advantage when he got over-excited and started throwing everything as hard as he could, bouncing balls off of his receivers, trying to thread the needle and whip something through two linebackers and a safety, or just throwing the ball into the stands. So he started throwing picks tonight including one that I swear was intended for a Cardinals defender. Intentionally making mistakes is nothing new for Favre... he spent a whole game running naked bootlegs in front of Michael Strahan and holding the ball to help his buddy set the sack record. (Admittedly, I have no theory as to why he would throw a game to the Cardinals.)

During all of this as my chest tightened and the sense of doom crept over me, I couldn't help but think back to first aid training and the fact that both are warning signs of a heart attack. If the Vikings don't come back to town pissed off and try to play like this against Cincy, I may be chewing aspirin in the stands by half-time.

Amstelbooij's To-Do List for moving to Jersey City

2009-12-03T23:05:00.000-06:00

Find new anthem to replace “Sweet Home Chicago”. Slim pickings for music fans under 60... perhaps Don Henley's “New York Minute”?
Say goodbye to all the guys at Steamworks... I'll miss you most of all, Scarecrow!
Get ready to ride The Fairy from Jersey City. Oh yeah, baby... wait, what do you mean that's a boat?
Buy new flippers. Boy, the complete lack of aquatic life in the river will be much less distracting when scuba diving!
Get a cheaper bicycle with fewer gears, because there's no hills to climb in Jersey unless you hit a landfill.
Pick new football team, either the Giants or the Jets, or ummm... the Eagles or something. Fuck it, who's winning this year?
Learn the rules of baseball. (All I remember from Chicago baseball is Old Style beer and churros.)
Buy tickets on the Chinatown bus to New York... 800 miles for $4. (Or maybe just catch the Ang-Mo Town bus from Singapore.)
Get a map of the Pine Barrens so I can find the Jersey Devil and blow him. (Again with the gay jokes? Seriously?)
Get ready to live in a well-governed state where the last Governor isn't a punchline. Okay wait, maybe we should live in the City... no that won't help either. Damnit.

It's a stripper, it's a call girl, it's a... naked clothing model?

2009-12-03T18:45:00.003-06:00

This is seriously the best ad ever. An escort service offering you the opportunity to take this girl's pants off (for a negotiable fee) would almost certainly get the phone ringing. Or if it's for some sort of nude panty hose or an invisible thong which conveys some benefit oddly unrelated to hiding your privates, I guess they've made their point. But really the reason it's so spectacular is the ad is promoting the f***ing bag.

It's like they're trying to tell us "This bag is so expensive I couldn't afford pants... but it's so groovy I just don't care!" I suppose if the ad was for that hat that might make sense, like it's the hat that keeps you so warm you'll find the rest of your clothes to be overkill. Or maybe it's the bag only used by people with a body so good they want to share it with the world... she's just smirking at you to say "Oh you have a body so good people can't stop staring? Well then where's your stripey bag?"

Sadly somebody already succinctly captured the lunacy of American Apparel advertising much better than I ever could, take a look.

Of Bears and Grizzlies, or "Hey look! My magic rock is working."

2009-12-03T18:04:00.002-06:00

I was really glad to see the Vikings deliver such a crushing blow that they were able to once again let the Tardis finish the game. I don't know why there was such a requirement for the Vikings to only have quarterbacks with silly names... Tavaris, Sage, Rosemary, and Favre... perhaps the Superbowl is at Scarborough Fair? Tenuous attempts at humor aside, Vikings-Bears games are always head-scratchers, and after dealing with the crowd at the theater I scrambled over to the Dome just in time to watch the Vikings and Bears exchange turnovers, and the frustration and exaltation and general confusion of the crowd was like a warm, familiar blanket. Plus the company was delightful, but that's another story.

My favorite play of the game has to be the highlight sack in the red zone, although Allen grabbing the interception and forgetting which way to run is a close second. But watching the Williams Wall calmly pushing forward to efficiently collapse the pocket, forcing an alert Cutler to attempt to roll out to the right, only to bump into his own tackle who was giving up ground to Ray Edwards faster than Neville Chamberlain. Cutler scrambled left just as Jared Allen, who recently gave up drinking and immediately developed an addiction to quarterback flesh, broke free and came looking to kill him, and desperately seeking a port in a storm drowned in a sea of purple. While it was Kevin Williams who got his arms around Cutler, it was a sack that belonged to all of them, as they mercilessly closed in from all sides.

In a way this is the best Vikings team I've ever seen, though they are mere mortals, and lack the Olympian skills of Cris Carter and Randy Moss who made first downs on uncatchable balls multiple times a game, and the general sense of invincibility those receivers and that impassable line gave to the Vikings, running out of a three wide out set, making double-teams invisible, and excruciatingly drawing out the epic killing stroke with a showman's timing... watching a flea flicker patiently develop, or watching the huge right side of the line roll out like the Blob taking over a town, clearing trail for track star Robert Smith to sprint the 60 yards to the end zone unimpeded.

The current Vikings have managed to build up the same record at the same point in the season without appearing to wear the skin of the Nemean Lion (just the mangy pelts of the underfed Detroit Lions), with their biggest vulnerability, Favre's weathered arm, never far from everybody's minds. On second thought, Adrian Peterson was clearly an Argonaut in another life... actually he's more like Dracula, you think he's down but he always cuts back and blows his way through a hole that nobody saw: the only way to tackle him is to drive a wooden stake through his heart. But they do make huge plays by the skin of their teeth, snatching victory in the blink of an eye, with somebody new keeping drives alive every time, making me wonder if they can keep it up all the way to Scarborough Fair.

The spectre of that '98 team hangs heavy on my heart making it hard to believe that this is the real deal; that and the other poisonous heartaches of the years since put the fire out in that battered organ a long time ago. It wasn't the Vikings that turned my beating heart to the cold, cutting weight of peridotite in my chest, but only the Vikings might tempt me to lose myself again in fire and lava. But self-indulgent lovesick metaphors aside, the one place I start to trust the Vikings is on defense. I always knew if they didn't come up with a nasty reversal of fortune (like the turnovers they feasted on) eventually they'd wear down and like the Titanic, the bow would start to slide into the water. This year I feel like it's only a matter of time before the front line starts to claw down the offense and get that last step closer to an increasingly skittish quarterback and drives will falter, and with pressure coming from the front four the linebackers and secondary can stay loose, finish off plays with swarming tackles and make the offense work for every yard. The chains may move, but the decisive moment will eventually come to rip out their throats and make sure the Vikings have a chance to win. There really is something about watching a man in purple push people around.

With a balance the spectacular '98 Vikings and without the ego trip of having the highest scoring offense in history, and the media still (rightly) tumescent over the undefeated Colts and Saints, I hope they continue to quietly go about the business of winning footbal games, and a Superbowl would probably keep them out of LA. However, I still remember once before when the only thing between us and a trip to Miami was a long-unfashionable dome team from the South having a superb year. Two preachers played in that game, one missed his best shot at the Hall of Fame (although he still deserves it), and the other nearly missed the Superbowl for trying to get his helmet polished the night before (and no, I'm not referring to his Falcons helmet).

So how is it that what should have been a tough division opponent imploded like that? I like to think it's because I have a magic rock in my pocket that keeps away Bears. Or at least makes them run away when Jared Allen and Al Jefferson put their arms up and try to look big. So rest assured, I will bring my Magic Bear-Castrating Rock to Chicago on the 28th. SKOL!

An addendum both tedious and brief:

When I started writing this last night, the Wolves were building a lead against the Memphis and looked ready to expand on their longest winning streak of the season (that'd be one game) and I thought the Magic Rock theory was foolproof. Kiriakos Rambidis did say after they beat the Nuggets that the Wolves had collectively decided to do their best from now on and not to all quit after the first quarter, which I thought was a very thoughtful gift for the fans with Hanukkah almost upon us, to actually show some effort at your multi-million dollar dream job at least through New Year's. There were some bright spots, like Ryan Gomes reminding me what a fantastic all-around complementary player he can be (like Scottie Pippen only without the dominance, the arrogance, or the ugliness), Jonny Flynn being aggressive and finding good things happen, and they even let Wayne Ellington play for once. But they still couldn't put away the Grizzlies, Big Al disappeared at crunch time, and they came up short in the final seconds. Given what a marked improvement that still is for a team whose games were over by halftime last year, I have to give all credit to the magic rock.

I ain't saying nothing, I'm just saying

2009-12-03T17:44:00.000-06:00

Dear You Know Who You Are:

You know people are talking, I know you know that. And you have to know I know you know that. And they may not be saying all that, but they are saying things. And they know we're hearing what they're saying, even though they're not saying it to me, they know I'm hearing it all, here and there. It's a classic I know you know they know we know they know it situation, you know? I'm not saying anything about anything to anybody or everybody, and nobody's saying what they're saying to me but it's not like it's not being said... say no more. So like I said, I ain't saying nothing... I'm just saying. You hearing me?

Sincerely,
You Know Who

Of Sheep and Wolves (and possibly even Big Foot)

2009-11-25T20:39:00.001-06:00

I think someday Wolves head coach Κυριάκος Ραμπίδης will figure out a starting line-up and a regular rotation, and I won't go to Wolves games wondering which players will be inexplicably buried at the end of the bench tonight. When the Wolves lose to a Rockets team without Yao Ming or Tracy McGrady on a Wednesday night in front of a few thousand people (and that one guy who totally looks like Szczerbiak has to actually apologize to the sparse crowd for the poor quality of the opposition) it's hard for me to watch a couple journeyman players get heavy minutes while rookies sit. After coming from behind to win their opener, the Wolves have lost 13 straight, with a high degree of correlation between the score and whether or not they remember to rebound. They really desperately need K-Love back, unless this is some really elaborate ploy to get the a #4 overall pick (not a big enough market for a lottery pick) and keep racking up the rights to European players with no apparent ambition to play in the best league in the world.

The highlight of a night out to a Wolves game was ironically finally hitting Black Sheep Pizza for a gigantic calzone nearly a year after my cousins game me a gift certificate to a restaurant three blocks from my house (I was busy, alright?) even though the like, six pounds of ricotta they squeezed in was a little more than the human body was designed to handle. Another highlight (and probably also more than I could handle) is the new cheerleaders they've got, especially the middle eastern looking one... or maybe she's Greek and came up the Mississippi on a barge with coach Kiriakos Rambidis. The creepy burned in tans and general arrhythmia of the Timberwoles dancers in recent years really had me scrutinizing the other team during time-outs, and a bald man squatting with a dry erase board in a forest of sweaty guys tying and retying their shorts really shouldn't be competing on an equal footing with fit women in boots and loincloths.

Since I started writing this (I'm so tired lately get three sentences into everything and then space out) I saw another confrontation of Wolves and Sheep, when the Vikings eviscerated the Seahawks. I would have enjoyed that more a few years ago, but then the only Seahawks fan I knew got a lot less fun to taunt. There certainly was plenty of material in a game where the Vikings had the game so far in the bag they pulled Brett Favre in the 3rd quarter to rest his arm, and the Tardis continued the pummeling of the Seahawks. I'd guess the only person not nursing a giant erection on the Vikings sideline (come on, we all heard about the boat trip, we know how they celebrate) was Sage Rosenfels, who had to be thinking if a quarterback with a dumb name was going to take over for Favre, it should probably be the guy the Vikings lured up here to be their starter before Favre set his mind on chasing Michael Jordan and Sugar Ray Leonard on the list of most pro-sports retirements.

I think the most remarkable thing I've seen in sports in recent weeks was the mascot game at halftime of the Vikings game, featuring the usual line-up of local sports and business characters in suits that allow limited mobility, poor peripheral vision, and really no ability to grip a ball of any kind. At Wolves games this is usually such an epic disaster nobody can look away until its over, which is shortly after it devolves into a cruel game of messing with the least beloved costumed figure: the first one I saw ended in a hogpile on Barney the Lovable Dinosaur, the last one with Captain Morgan repeatedly throwing chest passes at some poor guy in a dolphin suit who couldn't get his flippers up to catch it. At the Vikings game I was just expecting them all to beat the living hell out of Herkey the Hawk as payback for the Hawkeyes win over the Gophers, but they actually played real football against a bunch of 7th graders, and when Sasquatch bolted for the end zone throwing a straight arm into every kids face who dared get in his way (never get between Big Foot and the end zone) I knew I was seeing something I'd never see again.

The weirdest part though was nobody knew what the hell team or business Sasquatch was supposed to be promoting... I think Big Foot just came into town for a rave*, wandered into the Dome after eating the first security guard who tried to frisk him, they gave him a jersey and lined him up between a wolf and a bee and he felt right at home. The proof would be if anybody has any blurry pictures of the event, because as Mitch Hedberg tells us, Big Foot is blurry.

*-Have you booked DJ Big Foot for your next Wedding or Bar Mitzvah? He's got an office above a hookah bar in Queens, I got the phone number around here somewhere...

Dear Old Man Talking Loudly on his iPhone,

2009-11-07T21:36:00.001-06:00

When you approach me talking on your surprisingly discreet iPhone microphone and earpiece, it's a bit confusing when you LOOK ME RIGHT IN THE EYE and tell me all about how you just wanted to check in with me and admit that you were overthinking things. With the glassy-eyed look and nearly empty cup of wine in your hand, talking nonsense directly at total strangers and meandering aimlessly, it really looks like the kids took Grampa out for a night at the theater, but you snuck away at intermission for a glass of wine and couldn't find your way back. I feel that I could also reasonably note that the fact that you won't pause to draw breath for fear of letting the person on the other end of the phone interrupt your monologging about the strange salespeople at the Apple Store (believe me I understand) does also contribute to the whole crazy man who's decided the lobby is a good place to talk to his imaginary friend or rehearse his one man show "Get Off My Lawn!" . So please, don't do that. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Rufus

Vikings 33 - 31 Baltimora, or Monkey Business on a Sunday Afternoon

2009-10-18T23:55:00.001-05:00

This game certainly had an enormous swing of momentum from beginning to end, and over the course of four quarters the pendulum swung from the Vikings to the Ravens... ending up far away from nowhere, on its own like Tarzan Boy. In the first act of this rather tense drama, the Vikings struck quickly on the opening kick-off when Favre found tight end Visanthe Shiancoe slipping away from Ravens defenders, living in the open all alone like Tarzan boy. I always love the moment when the Vikings first score: a native beat that carries on, burning bright, a fire blows a signal to the sky as the crowd roars beneath the glow of fireworks shooting up the goalposts. After the defense stopped the Ravens cold, Favre connected with Sidney Rice emerging briefly from heavy coverage, a game of hide and seek while rushing across the forest, to put the Vikings up 14-0 just a few minutes into the game... monkey business on a sunny afternoon. Since Favre brought his leadership and gunslinger confidence to the Vikings, asking his teammates to "Take a chance, leave everything behind you, come and join me, won't be sorry, it's easy to survive," the difference in the offense is remarkable.

As the game went on, the second and third quarters turned into much more of a stalemate as neither offense could put together a scoring drive, and the Vikings defense would make good plays but seemingly inevitably follow them up with a breakdown that led to an easy Ravens first down. It went back and forth like this for a long time, both teams trading the ball back and forth night to night, gimme the other gimme the other, from one end of the field to the other, far from the end zone but also far away from nothing (don't worry, you won't miss home) each notching a couple of scores without changing the direction of the game.

Eventually the inevitable happened. After being exposed for too long, the defense started to crumble a bit and the Ravens began to break open the game in the 4th quarter. And also inevitably I had to admit that Tarzan Boy is far too meaningless and repetitive a song for any kind of borrowed wordplay. Even more tragically as the Vikings offense blew what looked like their last shot to kill the clock and put away the Ravens, Chris Kluwe shanked a punt deep in Vikings territory leading to a quick Ravens TD that gave them their first lead of the day. All was not lost, as the Vikings had plenty of time for another drive that if it ended in a touchdown could drain the last few minutes from the clock and leave the Ravens in a desperate situation. Sadly, it sputtered into a field goal that allowed the Vikings to regain a scant 2-point lead, and poor coverage on the squib kick that followed left the Ravens with a short field and close to two minutes to get into field goal range against a battered Vikings defense that was completely failing to cover the pass. The Ravens inched closer and closer, until with two seconds remaining Flacco spiked the ball well inside the Vikings 30 yard line. A 43-yard field goal isn't automatic, but inside the 30 an NFL team has to be counting the 3 points. And yet somehow guided by the spirits of Gary Anderson, Darrin Nelson, Nate Wright and Viking Superbowl dreams past (and probably a lineman's hand)... IT MISSED.

I wasn't sure what to make of this game, whether they choked away a dominating performance until dumb luck snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, or if they had a couple fluke plays at the beginning mask an inability to move the ball consistently or more frighteningly, run the ball and move the chains at crunch time. Looking at the stats, the 3-3 Ravens initially didn't appear to be a powerful defensive team, but if you remove today's game, the Ravens suddenly become the league's 4th rated rushing defense (and 7th rated pass defense). The Vikings really did put up a lot of offense and hold the Ravens through three quarters, never letting the game get out of reach of Favre's famous last-minute heroics that I came to know all too well when he played for the Packers. And nobody gets lucky six times, not even the 6-0 Vikings, even though this loss almost certainly leaves the Baltimore Ravens a bad taste in their mouths... and I'm betting it's the taste of cool mint Listerine.

On Getting "Warm", an open letter to my friend with a broken furnace

2009-10-05T13:00:00.005-05:00

The first hit is always free. Pretty soon they'll start talking about getting your stove working "just a bit better", and maybe cleaning your ducts, maybe a gas fireplace... you end up hauling a space heater and an extension cord with you everywhere, but at that point you're beyond caring what people think... your family give you these sad looks as you explain away your burned lips and hands that you're just trying to stay warm. At that point you might start getting secretive about it and start "hitting the pipe"... the water pipe that is, cranking up the hot water heater to scalding and just lingering in the steam with a bunch of horny bears (wait sorry that's a different story).

Eventually you know you've hit rock bottom when you're stealing people's catalytic converters and tapping your foot in the bathroom at the airport to buy just a few more cans of sterno. I quit cold turkey and had the whole furnace ripped out and I used the money to pay for a whole pile of blankets. Sometimes the old ways are best. Don't buy the hype about "getting warm", just because Hollywood portrays it as glamorous and normal. There's a reason our ancestors came to Minnesota, to stay free of the warm weather that has ruined every great civilization. I mean look at the whole Mediterranean, the Spanish Empire crumbled when they discovered the Caribbean and everybody just hit the beach, Carthage couldn't survive a single ski vacation in the Alps, Alexander's whole empire dissolved once the Greeks started lighting their cheese on fire (just to get it that little bit warmer), Rome was sacked by a bunch of proto-Vikings who were less concerned with keeping warm than keeping it real, Visigoth style. The Egyptians got it: when they were trying to stay cool wearing just a couple strips of white cotton that breathes and looks effortlessly sexy, they built the pyramids.

Shivering (and loving it),
Rufus

King of Shadows

2009-10-04T23:57:00.005-05:00

King of Shadows is a good show. Spooky and poignant, this play about a grad student collecting stories from street kids until she meets one with a story she can't handle is full of supernaturalism and mystery, but subtly uses them to tell a much smaller and yet more powerful tale about the failure of its protagonist to make real connections to other people, no matter how many ways she thinks she's reaching out. I hesitate to even tell more of the story, because I walked in the door cold knowing nothing about the play and loved that experience, because really the only reason I went is that its director is such an amiable guy I wanted to support his work. Also Pillsbury House Theatre offering free tickets to arts organizations really helped, so I hope I can pay them back a bit by spreading the word about this show.

I've seen Randy Reyes put in great performances on stage, and while I am in no way qualified to judge his work as a director it felt to me like he got everything there was to be had out of this script. In my mind the script falls short of greatness but still lands somewhere very good and very interesting, and this production does a very nice job artistically and technically of bringing everything good about it to life. I must admit I've found it curiously difficult to judge some works when they're fresh in my mind, needing instead to find what still resonates in my head and my heart weeks and months later, like Marco picking up the chair or the journey to the City of Bones. I really liked Catherine Johnson Justice in what I would think has to be a difficult part, anchoring a play with a central character long on cold, abrasive edges and short on charm besides what the actress brings to the role. It is also somewhat gratifying to see new plays with a very different gender balance than a lot of older work.

I definitely recommend King of Shadows (or I would be if anybody was actually reading this) and in this case I'm not just shilling, because I really don't know anybody involved in this production beyond the occasional awkward wave in the hallway... I think if you offered Randy $10,000 for his next show if he could come up with my name within 3 tries his guesses would be "Gaius", "Rumplestiltskin" and "Mmmwhahamarumph... you heard me! Now where's my money?" Anyways, it's hard to beat getting a nice dose of culture and rich conversational material in such an intimate setting as Pillsbury House for $20 or less, and PHT seems to have quite a lot of options for getting into their show even cheaper like Wednesday pay what you can performances, and today I even got a parking place right in front of the theater, so really what excuse do you have? Seriously, even the cookies on sale at intermission were good.

King of Shadows

Oct 2 - Nov 1

Pillsbury House Theatre

3501 Chicago Ave S

www.pillsburyhousetheatre.org

As a post-script, it is funny how art ties together and the same themes come up in different works by different artists... as I sat in the theater waiting for the show to start I read the end of Dan Simmons' novella “Looking for Kelly Dahl” about the violent end to a teacher's failure to for all his good intentions to make a difference to the student who needed him the most, and the last show I saw was Jon Ferguson's new play Supermonkey, about a doorman's string of brief interactions with his tenants and his attempts to nurture them into something more meaningful (“Fruit plate!”) I wonder how much these other works affected the way I took in King of Shadows... fortunately I think I managed to tune out entirely the resemblance of one of the characters to the gay hustler with full-body tourette's from Crank 2: High Voltage (the least artistically redeeming work I've seen this year... seriously “Streethawk” was better).

My Morning, as told to Mr Earnest Hemingway

2009-09-30T12:34:00.007-05:00

The sun was in the windows and on the floor. I got up to finish the film while I had my breakfast. The black girl was dancing and singing, the cereal too sweet and soggy, gaggable stuff. The phone rang, Zurich calling, like always.

"I'm on the tram. I have a meeting to get back to. This train is too slow."

"What are you doing out? It's 5 o'clock."

"I wanted to try going out in the sunshine. I wanted to try it."

"Were you at the Mariott? Did you stay watching the racy films too long? That's why you're late now."

"No. Why is everything about that with you?"

It was an old joke. We always made it. He moved on.

"Kevin Garnett. That man is amazing."

"He is the MVP. He will be. Did you see that Grasshopper lost? Lost in the cup? Their opponent, FC Wil or somesuch, has not won it for one hundred and four years."

"No. Did you speak to the Captain?"

I had known he would say it, before he did. The stupid joke came from the Captain. He who had not been seen by us since Christmas. Or before, maybe summer, in the Tuscan hills with the wine grapes we had fought. With my forehead still stinging from where I had been hit with the rock, I had gone to the train station. I hadn't known where I was going. It turned out to be Rome. Then La Spezia, and Riomaggiore, and Camogli. And then the hours back to Zurich on another train. We had fought again there. The call ended. I pushed the button again for the film.

The water was running now, hot on the dirty tile. I had a friend somewhere in Africa, under a cold, brown waterfall beating his clothes on the rocks. He liked doing that sort of thing. It took millions of dollars in the bank for him to be able to go do his laundry under a waterfall. And surely he would be playing his guitar while they dried.

I turned around to the mirror, and I saw her under the hot water, tucked up like a child in the protection of her mother's stomach. She was slick with soap and soaked to the bone, stillborn but for her eyes blinking. She stayed until the water turned cold. Her tears were hot but she still shivered.

I wiped the steam from the mirror. My towel would be wet now. The razor was dull, and I had no more shaving cream. I cut myself, but I was tired. I closed my eyes. It was time to go.

*-Sorting through my desk looking for bills I found a copy of this thing I turned into a lit class a number of years ago (apparently during the heady days of the Timberwolves only championship run) as my brief response to The Snows of Kilimanjaro. It amused me all over again (ça plus change, ça plus même) and made me think about starting a Hemingway kick for a while, in my often derailed quest to use literature as a form of mental rehabilitation although always leaving room for Rob Zombie, slasher movie auteur du jour. Anyways, the names have been changed to protect against implications due to my artistic license and missing detail in recalling certain events... basically what I'm saying is don't read this and take the implication that the Captain really threw a rock at my head, because he didn't (that was somebody else, and there were witnesses). As always, apologies in equal proportions to Papa Hemingway and to my faithful readership.

On Watching Too Many Horror Movies

2009-09-26T12:07:00.002-05:00

I discovered the other night it's a bit difficult getting to sleep with John Carpenter's Halloween theme quietly running through your head. I decided this after a double feature of G.I. Joe the Rise of Cobra, and Halloween 2 or II... well whatever it is officially, the 9th Halloween movie, which to some would sort of make it Halloween Nein. That combination is enough to give anybody nightmares of being pursued through some deserted lonly place by a spectrish, barechested, drooling Marlon Wayans... you'd think the most upsetting thing from that double header it would be the long series of brutal murders, or maybe a redhead named Rachel (merging a few images from my dark past), but mostly it's just Marlon wayans as a male love interest that made me squirm in my seat.

I wish I could follow Rob Zombie's vision of how he wanted to improve on one of the modern horror icons, but in so many remakes a director must always blow your mind by taking whatever was iconic about the original and turning it upside down and inside out, and then deny that he just sort of missed the point. And then I think drop half his own story to get the project completed on time, which in this case was a couple months early, so the DVD would be out by Halloween... somehow that fills me with sadness to think of actual movie theaters as an increasingly pointless marketing exercise. I hesitate to analyze further, because I still have this vivid memory of over-analyzing certain vaginal images in the original remake (???) and being accused of mockery by the girl who'd invited me over to watch it. (Oddly when I tell that story nobody has a problem imagining that I would find esoteric sexual detail in that film worth over-analyzing, but they don't believe a girl would invite me over to watch it.)

A couple days ago the power went out in my apartment, and with John Carpenter's pesky electronic melody playing in my head yet again, I tried to find a flashlight with sufficient batteries to allow me to take a slightly less creepy shower (I really miss having a bathroom with a window sometimes) and headed down for the garage. In between dim pools of light, I found several strangers huddled around the lowered garage door, faced with a lock and key they couldn't reach. As we discussed the problem, the general irritation of living in a construction site for several months and the lack of help from our mysteriously buttoned down management office, we started to discover hidden connections between ourselves, like maybe we'd met somewhere before. All perfectly normal, until I managed to get the key down and it didn't fit the lock on the automatic door release.

So there we were, several strangers who weren't really strangers, huddled in the lonely dark facing a lock and key that didn't match when I realized I'd seen this all before, and I quickly turned around looking for a puppet on a tricycle announcing he'd like to play a game. Could this all be some perverse marketing stunt to promote Saw VI, a movie that looks like such a bad idea even I won't see it? Eventually we were able to find a lock that the key fit and get a door open, but it required that one person remain under the door holding it open so others could drive through, which was about as lame a puzzle as I'd expect from Jigsaw at this point in the exhausted franchise... although I do have to wonder why a guy who's been dead for the past two movies is still popping up in this one (and he's not the only one with a dead character and a dead career that's inexplicably back in action).

In true Saw fashion though, everybody abandoned me when I went to replace the key and get my car, even the guy I found alone in the dark on the way back and directed towards freedom (thanks a lot, jackass...) so I remained trapped in the garage. With Puddleglum and the CHUDs. As to how I escaped that is a tale for another day, but don't worry, I'll make up something terrifying and sensational, crammed with sizzling gypsies. Maybe Nicholas Cage can put on 30 pounds and play me in the movie, although that will sadly ensure it is never distributed in Hong Kong (too hard to dub into Cantonese).

Tigers 6-2 Twins, Vikings 27-13 Lions

2009-09-21T22:58:00.002-05:00

I don't think I would have been able to take two losses to Detroit in one day, so I'm so grateful for the Lions tackles forgetting how to block in the second half, especially with Favre looking like the old man he is. Although still not so bad as Delmon Young nodding off in left field and needing to take a moment to rub the sleep out of his eyes before he could get the ball back into the infield. It's like he was having this beautiful dream where blondes in bikinis were tossing their beachballs at him (which he still couldn't hit) and then he was jarred awake by the crack of a bat and a ball hitting his glove. I still can't believe we gave up Garza, Bartlett and a bullpen prospect for this guy (given the Twins excess of outfielders and utility infielders with soft bats, the other players in that trade don't really matter).

I may have seen my last baseball game in the Metrodome today; with only one more series left at home and the Twins down three games to the Tigers in the division race as they embark on a 10-game road trip I don't know if I'll get tickets again before Target Field opens next spring. I thought I'd feel a bit more sadness at that, since I really do have so many fond memories of those blue seats. On the other hand it was a dump with like six bathrooms and I'll be back next week for the Vikings home opener. Kind of a pathetic farewell though: usually it's the Lions that put people to sleep on Thanksgiving (if they played after the turkey was served coma wards would have to be expanded) but today it wa the 87 lame pick-off attempts and generally sleepy pace of the game actually killed all my drive to pop back into work for a few hours.

This is the first football season in a few years where I've had a fantasy football team that I actually care about, and I forgot how much it distorts the way I watch football. This week I really need Favre to throw underneath to his tight end, because if he goes deep to Berrian my exultation at the Vikings touchdown is muted by the knowledge that the Rode Duivels have been scored on too. I also still can't believe anybody drafted Calvin Johnson, a player I still associate most with the phrase "Wake up motherfucker, it's our ball!" But the important part is the Vikings are up 2-0, and my undefeated fantasy team is coming off a week two blow-out. I'm feeling luckier than that time I fucked a leprechaun.

There's only one R in Kushner

2009-09-04T19:31:00.005-05:00

For the last time... if you're talking The Empire Strikes Back, Robocop 2, Eyes of Laura Mars, Never Say Never Again... that's Kershner. If you're talking Exotica, The Black Dahlia, The L Word, Not Another Teen Movie, The Crow 2, that's Kirshner. If you're talking abuse of executive power and defaulting on IMF loans, that's Kirchner.

If you're talking A Bright Room Called Day, Angels in America, Slavs!, Caroline or Change, Munich, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, East Code Ode to Howard Jarvis, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, Geraldine of Albania Meets Lucia Pamela on the Moon... for the last time his name is Tony KUSHNER.

Why must people who add an extra R to his name always do it with such smug authority? "I know all about him, except how to say his name." I mean really.

Annoying Timberwolves Update: Uh, who plays for them again?

2009-07-28T15:59:00.004-05:00

Since the Wolves hit the Big Reset Button two years ago and traded Kevin Garnett to Boston, fans have been not so patiently waiting for young talent to mature, and for the team to dig its way back out of salary cap hell, and assemble something resembling an actual NBA team rather than Big Al and the seven dwarfs. Two years and a lot of trades later the Wolves haven't really improved, and are still buried under a mound of McHale-era contracts, but with every trade they did accumulate more and more draft picks this year and next. In order to sort it all out I felt like I had to write it all down, and at that point why not share it with my loyal readership-*?

Part I: What's changed since the end of the season?

The draft brought about another flurry of activity that had a few players join the Wolves and be traded away before they had a chance to be issued a number, or start to brush up on the local dialect and try some hot dish. And the Wolves had so many draft picks and potentially so many rookies coming in that they had to trade some of them straight up for picks in next year's draft. So now I'm trying to sort out for myself what they ended up with, and what this means for next year.

As far as last year's Wolves go, a few are gone. The Wolves dispensed with the services of Randy Foye, Craig Smith, Sebastian Telfair, Mark Madsen, and Mike Miller. (No, not that Mike Miller.) Because of his 3-point range, hustle, and basketball intelligence Miller is the kind of guy who's a great role player on a team with an established core, but on a team as incomplete as the Wolves his talents were wasted. Foye and Telfair were point guards who brought unusual size and quickness, but not the ability to run an offense or match up with elite point guards. Mark Madsen was a fireplug, a really tough role-player who could rebound and play defense against much bigger players but had no offensive skills whatsoever... like Miller a complementary player on a team that needs to find a core before it can add supporting pieces. Craig Smith was an undersized power forward whose tenacity allowed him to compete with bigger players and created constant match-up problems by using his quicker feet and a nice floater, but like Telfair and Foye, he struck me as a 2nd unit change of pace kind of player on a team that had no established first team. Honestly none of these guys looked likely to get better, and none of them brought anything consistently to the team that will be missed next year.

So what did losing these guys gain? First, the Wolves got Quentin Richardson, a swingman who I hope can actually score and has 3-point range, and if not a superstar might actually offer some consistent option away from the lane where Big Al is supposed to be lurking. And if he stinks, he has a $9m contract that expires after this season. The Wolves also picked up some less than inspiring players in guards Chucky Atkins and Damien Wilkins, and forwards Darius Songaila and Oleksiy Pecherov. Atkins is potentially able to mentor young Wolves point guards picked up in the draft, and it's possible Pecherov might have some upside now that he's out of the abyss of despair otherwise known as Madison Square Garden, but they also don't tie up a lot of money. Slim pickings, but the Wolves also added a #5 overall draft pick to their haul.

Which brings me to the draft. Six picks with four in the first round was a little excessive so the Wolves traded away the rights to a first and second rounder (for picks in the same rounds next year) and drafted a couple European players who are unlikely to join the team this year (more on that in a moment). The two players they've signed from draft night were lottery pick Jonny Flynn, hopefully one of the more NBA ready point guards coming out of college, and in the late first round they picked up shooting guard Wayne Ellington from UNC.

In free agency the Wolves still have no real cap room to make a surprise free agent signing, so practically speaking just have their own unsigned free agents to negotiate with: two centers I almost forgot were still on the roster in Shelden Williams and Jason Collins, and shooting guard Rodney Carney, who was actually pretty good last year.

Part II: What does this mean for next year?

Sadly not much besides hope. A few players could continue to improve, and I'm hoping a couple pieces could add new wrinkles to a team that will now at least have fewer oddball "solution looking for a problem" types of players (Hi I'm 8' tall and my specialty is shooting from half court) kind of players to bang and weld together into a crude line-up.

In the front court the Wolves are building around an outstanding power forward in Al Jefferson who will probably find himself matched up against bigger centers all year, and the versatile and energetic Kevin Love who will hopefully continue to develop as a natural complement to Big Al. For depth Ryan Gomes is still a solid squad player who can play either forward position who works hard and plays well with others, and Bryan Cardinal is like a poor man's Mike Miller adding 3-point range from a forward position for a different look. Adding Oleksiy Pecherov to that mix could be great if Pecherov is a true center and can give the Wolves the ability to start Big Al at power forward and Love at small forward for a genuine big front court. For depth the Wolves also have forward Darius Songaila (no idea what he brings) and could sign one of their FA centers for another warm body in the paint.

For shooting guards and swing men Quentin Richardson can maybe a consistent scoring threat from the 2-3 (I really hope) and a healthy Corey Brewer could be nasty defensive stopper and continue to gain confidence as an NBA player. Rodney Carney was a solid squad player last year who had the best season of his young career and is at least fun to watch, plus the Wolves just added rookie Wayne Ellington so there's hope for modest improvement in that part of the court. Or at least something to watch for the first few months, seeing who wins the starting jobs and who improves.

At point guard, the Wolves really cleaned house from the last few years, and right now it looks like they're starting fresh with rookie Jonny Flynn with Chucky Atkins as the wise, veteran back-up, and it remains to be seen who they'll choose to fill the crucial "Sit over there and don't drink too much gatorade, we'll call you if somebody gets hurt" 3rd point guard spot. So watching Jonny Flynn's rookie year could offer some entertainment. (Plus remember the international players I said I'd mention later?)

The final verdict on next year is that they might be a bit better or at least a little smoother and less awkwardly disjointed in their line-up, but probably not a lot better. No obvious superstars in the making have joined the team, but there are still a few young players I'd like to watch, and hope springs eternal.

Part III: Uh, that's grim... what about the future?

It seems like that's what I end up talking about constantly with the Wolves, who are always one more year away from digging their way out of the snowbank. However they do have a few assets that could improve the team directly or be used as trade bait within the next year including some players who could get better (Al Jefferson, Kevin Love, Corey Brewer, Jonny Flynn), five picks in next year's draft (including three first rounders), and the draft rights to a three international players who could have a future in the NBA. Even if they push the draft picks back again and their European players stay in Europe, next summer the Wolves could still have up to $20m in cap room to lure free agents who hate sunshine and media exposure but love ice fishing and theater.

Part IV: If you're French in the kitchen and Italian in the bedroom, what are you in the bathroom?

The biggest unknowns for the Wolves future are those European players they drafted. The one most likely to appear in a Wolves uniform is this year's second round pick and former Amsterdam Demon Astronaut Henk Norel (whose picture makes him look so Euro it's scary). Norel has proven playing as a forward in Spain that he's got a nice outside shooting touch for a big man, which makes it obvious that the Wolves picked him thinking that like Kevin Love, his skills would complement Jefferson's. Whether he ever makes it to the NBA is anybody's guess, but in the mean time he's playing in the Barcelona suburbs for Spanish club Jovenhut Badalona. I wonder if that detail could be important...

Last year the Wolves drafted Nikola Pekovic, a Montenegrin center who could make a huge impact on the Wolves roster if he ever came over. The problem is he's making so much money tax-free from Partizan Belgrade that convincing him to buy out his contract at huge expense to himself so he can come over and be an NBA rookie will be harder than dubbing a Nicholas Cage film into Cantonese. He's only 22, so if his contract ever runs out and he decides he wants to try his hand against the best he would be a huge asset to the Wolves roster, and even as a gleam in a GM's eye he's a valuable trade asset.

The biggest European question for the Wolves though is their top pick from this year's draft, and the player they traded Miller and Foye to get. Spanish point guard Ricky Rubio at 19 already looks like he's going to be a demon, with incredible ball-handling skills and great court vision as a playmaker and distributor. Rubio currently plays 10 minutes from his hometown but says he wants to someday play for a big-time NBA team, but has pretty much indicated that he's only considering cities like New York and other places Europeans have heard of. He might mature a bit in the next couple of years and decide he doesn't need to dictate terms (or notice that the Knicks are one of the worst-managed teams in the league and headcases get sent there until the booing crushes their egos), or the Wolves might be able to use him in a blockbuster trade... although the way things are going we'd probably just get more draft picks.

But meanwhile, Pekovic is in Greece and Rubio will continue to play for Jovenhut Badalona, alongside Wolves draft pick Henk Norel... which makes me wonder if the Wolves aren't trying Arsene Wenger's professed "Bring two at once, they'll settle easier if they have somebody to talk to" strategy for foreign players, although Wenger meant grab players from the same country who speak the same language... maybe we should just start teaching the Timberwolves dancers Catalan and Serbo-Croat.

Part V: So that's it, then?

So that's the story on the Wolves. Not a lot to entice season tickets sales but while I can't quite yet say the future is bright, it is at least wide open. Their oldest star is 24 and under a long-term contract so the clock isn't ticking on an aging superstar like it was for KG (who certainly earned his release with his dedication to this community), they have copious potential assets and have finally cleared all their onerous contracts. And who knows, a productive season followed by a blockbuster off-season next year might produce a team where Rubio and Pekovic would consider starting their NBA careers. (My giddy optimism about Minnesotan and Belgian sports teams is a necessary balance out the general horror and pessimism of the rest of my life.)

*-By loyal readership I am of course referring to the two or three people who might skim through a couple paragraphs, and the weird angry strangers who always leave comments about my sports musings.

A Modest Addendum: 8/23/09

I suppose I had three remaining questions about the Wolves this off-season. One was the lingering weakness at center exposed so well by the undersized Wolves line-ups of the last couple years. Another was whether Quentin Richardson was going to be a scoring threat or salary cap relief, and finally I wondered if they'd ever sign Rodney Carney. I still have no clue what the problem is with Carney's contract, but they at least bulked up in the paint.

The Wolves traded Quentin Richardson to Miami to bring back Mark Blount. It's possible that Blount is perfect for the Wolves, as a center with a mid-range jump shot who can get out of Al Jefferson's way on offense and pull an opposing big man out of the paint. On the other hand, he'd have to play defense and rebound, which was not really his forte. The Wolves also signed Ryan Hollins from Dallas for a true center who hopefully has a little more life in him than Jason Collins and Calvin Booth did last year. Hollins is a bench player with little experience, but it's a start.

So now hopefully the Wolves have more playing time at the 2-3 spots for younger players, and with Mark Blount, Oleksiy Pecherov, and Ryan Hollins as options in the middle and Al Jefferson, Kevin Love, Ryan Gomes, and Darius Songaila as forwards they'll look a bit less tragically undersized. But still, it's not like they got a whole lot better since last year.

Pride

2009-06-28T20:55:00.000-05:00

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On Smokers

2009-06-10T20:18:00.004-05:00

I hate cigarettes. Really, I do. I hate the smell of them, I hate the burning ashy sensation in my throat and nose whenever they're waved around nearby, and I hate that smokers are magically always able to stay upwind. I hate that smoking culture is so into littering, stamping out butts every place people gather, all over doorways and bus stops. (The one time in my life I got pulled into smoking was up in the tundra, where we stamped our butts out on our boots and packed them out so we could throw them away in Baker Lake six weeks and several hundred miles later). I hate watching people destroy their lungs, and it's really hard for me to watch some of my relatives risk having strokes or losing their eyesight for a puff. But the funny thing I've been realizing is that I really like smokers. And so I find when I need to wolf down garlic stir fry in between jobs that I do it out with the smokers, acrid tobacco swirling around and settling on my fresh ham and provolone sandwich.

So why are smokers such desirable companionship, despite their filthy habits? I think it's because in the sheltered doorways of the non-smoking buildings in this frosty state (the weather and the people) there's a thawing effect to the glowing red butts amongst those huddled outside sucking smoke into their chapped red cheeks. I think it's because you're there with something habitual to do, leaving so much social and intellectual capacity idle, that smokers can't help but talk to each other to alleviate boredom. And since you never know who'll be there depending on how your nic-fits coincide, maybe smoking just helps develop social skills. Or maybe they all just pretend to like me because they think someday I might be the only one with a lighter or a spare fag.

The funny thing is while I hate cigarettes, I do like cigars... perhaps I should take up smoking those, where you can get away with not inhaling. Because damnit, I really need a ridiculous affectation of one kind or another.

Singlish

2009-06-06T12:02:00.003-05:00

What's really funny is how many ang mo (you know, round eyed devils) I know who've picked this dialect up from even limited exposure, and keep using it in North America. And yes, I know this means I'm in for cock jokes every time I order a soda.

I knew there was a reason I never trusted this guy...

2009-05-30T22:59:00.000-05:00

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On Jeffrey Wright

2009-05-19T20:32:00.010-05:00

Why is it about Jeffrey Wright that makes him so captivating? I honestly haven't even seen him in that many films, but through these characters and the many changes he makes in his voice and his appearance, each of them carries somewhere deep in their voice the same lyrical murmur of Jeffrey Wright... and I can't look away. The dreamlike quality of that voice sounding like it comes from somewhere beyond the world made him perfect in Angels in America as the phantasmal travel agent Mr. Lies, navigating Harper on her drug-induced escape to Antarctica (through the refridgerator), sitting on a snowbank in a fabulous parka and playing awistful oboe. I hear it too in some of the smaller and less mystical roles, using a handful of lines to turn Felix Leiter into this larger than life American able to arrest a charging James Bond with nothing but a firm hand on his arm and that voice, a character that implies that his mind is somewhere else, located above the petty evils and trivialities of those around him, in Casino Royale with an engaged bemusement and in Quantum of Solace with a disgusted detachment, unmoved by either $5m or a hail of bullets. And really the most memorable supporting characters in QoS are him and Gemma Arterton, who have like eight lines between them. (I have a thing for redheads with funny names covered in oil.)

What has me realizing this about Jeffrey Wright is one particular performance in Mike Nichols' film adaptation of Angels in America. I saw the second part of that play (Perestroika) on stage at the Kennedy Center over a decade ago, and while that play is a lot to take in, it's also the kind of work that will burn into your brain with absolute vivid detail. The biggest change by far was not Justin Kirk's bringing a strength and prophetic fire I didn't remember to his portrayal of Prior, or Al Pacino's less sarcastic and more deranged Roy Cohn, it was Jeffrey Wright whenever he appeared as Belize, glittery gay nurse and completely, totally unrecognizable as Jeffrey Wright except in rare moments where in silence he adopts the familiar pose, face turned down and eyes looking up with a mix of sadness and patience, looking like he dropped about ten years, fifty pounds, and a huge helping of masculinity to create Belize. And it's so unbelievably good.

So in short, I defy anyone to watch Angels and even take their eyes off of Wright whenever Belize is speaking.

Vikings Draft

2009-04-26T21:19:00.000-05:00

Another glorious Vikings draft is come and gone, and once again not without controversy. The Vikings had some obvious needs in this off-season, like the basic tools of a consistent passing game. Really if they didn't come away with a wide receiver, a quarterback, and an offensive tackle to protect him the passing game was going to continue to suck.

So the Vikings addressed part of that by trading for Sage Rosenfels, a back-up quarterback from Houston who may or may not be a more reliable passer than the Tardis. And their second round pick, Phil Loadholt from Oklahoma where he established a name for himself as a monstrously huge man who likes getting up and pushing people around despite having a name like a 70's pornstar. So he'll hopefully add some menace to the right side of the line and make our running game even scarier than it already is. And of course, they did not fail to add some much-needed talent to the wide receiver position by drafting Percy Harvin out of Florida in the first round.

Harvin is undeniably talented, small but tough and capable of running about any kind of play in college, fearlessly coming out of the backfield or crossing over the middle, and on the basis of his football ability, he's a steal at #22 overall. One cannot help but be reminded of another talented wide receiver who fell to the Vikings at #18 in the '98 draft, who was so freakishly talented that he could change the course of a game with only a couple touches on the ball. Of course, Moss also had a bit of a problem referees, and with driving over traffic cops, and with marijuana. And Moss wasn't alone in making headlines for the wrong reasons, since the the Vikings have had some recent issues with players having floating orgies, parking in the middle of Fourth Street to toke up, getting it on in public places, and the like. So they draft a guy who has such poor impulse control that he partakes of the good herb right before going to the NFL combine where he will be weighed and measured, drilled vigorously, and of course, drug-tested. So now he comes into the league already subject to random drug tests by the NFL. If he gets he's in an ideal situation to stand out on a play-off team that desperately needs a receiver, and how easy it would be to blow it... he could be an outstanding weapon with Bernard Berrian stretching the field and Adrian Peterson keeping defenses honest.

The other glaring needs were mostly on the other side of the ball, since despite the strength of the Vikings defense, they really lack for depth in certain spots. Darren Sharper's departure leaves us with some weakness in the secondary and a wide-open battle for nickelback. There's not a lot of depth at linebacker, and it's possible the interior of the defensive line will start the season working off a suspension from last year. In any case, the special teams units were so horrible on coverage last year, I think anybody who knows how to tackle in the open field would be welcome. Addressing that the Vikings kicked off the second day by picking up Asher Allen, a physical cornerback from Georgia whose relative lack of speed will hopefully not be exposed playing in the Vikings system where he'll have a safety backing him up. Looking at the depth chart, I imagine he'll get playing time early at nickelback and we'll see if he's any good.

Still needing depth on defense and a kick returner, the Vikings just had a couple late round picks left, so they hopefully got some help by taking Jasper Brinkley, a linebacker from South Carolina, and Jamarca Sanford a safety from Mississippi. While Sanford may be an unspectacular benchwarmer as a free safety, Brinkley can provide some depth at middle linebacker and I hope both are the nasty kind of tacklers the Vikings need on special teams.

So what remains to be seen?

1. Can either Sage or the Tardis actually step up and play consistently at QB, or do we have to hope #3 QB John David Booty brings something to the team other than a few reps in practice and a funny name?

2. Do we have a kick returner, or is Childress nuts enough to let Harvin get his ass pounded running back kick-offs?

3. Will the secondary hold up without Darren Sharper, and can the defense survive four games without the Williams Wall up front?

4. Will adding Harvin's hands, Loadholt's blocks, and Rosenfels' arm to the Vikings offense open things up enough to make holes for Peterson and open field for Berrian?

5. Does the miracle of a Bears team with a QB (something we haven't seen in 20 years) make it all moot and put the division out of reach?

Fortunately the Vikings have an easy schedule, so this should be a lot more fun and less torturous to watch than a lot of last season. And if the answer to these questions turns out to be no, no, no, no and yes, Joe Dowling will be directing The Importance of Being Earnest, a spectacular comedy, a couple blocks away. Maybe that will take the edge off if the Bears record another album.

Pleasant Surprises, or allons-y a la creperie

2009-02-28T17:53:00.010-06:00

In recent weeks I've been bumbling around with my filthy, scratched up glasses barely able to stay on my face and a devastating case of hat-head from bundling up to wade through snow banks (but at least I think I have a fairly cool hat). So I decided to do something about a couple of those problems and get a haircut and maybe replace my rather $@*%'ed up glasses, which involved a bit of stomping around downtown on a bitterly cold morning trying to figure out where the hell Moss Optical got off to since my last visit. Eventually I had to conclude it was too cold to search for anything without the use of a St. Bernard and I started the long, icy trek to the theater. But as I pushed forward, blinking away the blowing snow and burrowing my face further into my woolen scarf, like Lucy Pevensie plowing her way through mothballed furs in a wintery wardrobe I made a rather fantastic discovery.

Just as I was trying to think of an excuse to duck into a warm shop for a moment and desperately hoping there might be a warm shop where I could make some pretense of browsing and not the barrette and Christian bookstores that seem to crop up in every forlorn retail space during an economic downturn, like a clown wig at a funeral. But as luck would have it I noticed a doorway nestled next to the entrance of a large building, a doorway marked simply "La Belle Crepe". For a moment I doubted my senses to have stumbled on something so unlikely and so timely that it could only have been conjured by the Hogwarts Castle Room of Requirement, but I rushed through the door to find a jovial and engaging Frenchman whose persona I can perhaps best describe by asking you to picture him tugging fine, blonde hair off his chef's coat from last night's (or this morning's) lastest tryst, offering delicious crepes stuffed with ham and gruyere and countless other delights in little more than an entryway. It was a perfect little nook, just big enough to tease and please but not large enough to lose its focus, become infatuated with deep chairs and fireplaces and succumb to becoming a Starbucks.

I watched wide-eyed in wonder as like turkish delight emerging from a snowbank my fresh crepes took shape on the grill in the icy window looking out on the windblown snow, and as we discussed the surreal quality of such a place in the windswept plazas of Nicollet Ave and how it came to be, the proprieter cheekily confessed to me the secret ingredient to making fine French treats was cheap Canadian beer. A slight chill from the outdoors crept into me at this moment in a manner no doubt reminiscent of something from one of the children's series I just re-read, but as fear's raspy fingers danced up my spine like the Little Prince's rake across the starlit baobab roots of his lonely cold asteroid I found my mouth and my instinct to annoy people with running jokes had both gone dry.

I have always refused cheap beer, not out of snobbery towards the delights of the lower classes, but because it just so happens there are certain plants of the earth that cause so much alarm and confusion to my immune system that brother turns against brother, blue cell against grey cell, and the worst of these is the sinister climbing cones of the humulus lupulus plant. The last time I tried a deodorant that cheerfully advised me it was "Now fortified with extra hops!" it descended on my skin with the same terrible wrath of Mr. Fitzgibbon's plow on the rats of NIMH's rosebush and I vowed to never let that terrible plant near me again. At the very memory my skin began to crawl as if threatening to make an escape down the road with the dish and the spoon calling back over it's broad yet floppy shoulders "Count me out pal... and a little vitamin B once in a while would've *%&#'ing killed you?" (My skin is surprisingly less eloquent than my literary left brain but generally on a par with the furiously twirling stumbles of my right brain... which is unfortunately the part I seem to talk with.)

But just as you can't put fucking onions in my fucking omelette (like they do every time I eat at Key's) without breaking a few eggs, you can't make really delicious crepes without the particular yeast that brewers use to make their foamy golden poison, and once I've caught the smell of certain pleasures I'm lost... I had to have it. I took my crepe back to the theater where I reminded the stage door attendant of my extension and to please, please send help immediately should I call 911 from that phone because it would mean my throat was closing. And while my gamble paid off and I did survive the experience with only an almost certainly psychosomatic tension in my neck, I still think I still would have been licking the berries and cream off my lips as the paramedics burst in to jab me with epinephrine.

So La Belle Crepe is highly recommended, for both the fresh-made crepes and the rush of cheating death, and unlike Narnia you can return more than three times. Le Patron assures me that in the summer he will be offering outdoor seating and adding a fresh delight for pedestrians on an avenue that really needs a lift, and expanding to Uptown as well. But for me I'll always treasure the memory of that day when in the middle of winter I discovered there lay within Nicollet Mall an invincible summer.

La Belle Crepe

825 Nicollet Mall #100
www.labellecrepe.com

P.S. Of all the authors from whom I have stolen shamelessly to elicit groans from my loyal readershop, I apologize only to M. Albert Camus for nicking "Au milieu d'hiver j'ai enfin decouvert qu'il y a en moi un etait invincible" from Retour a Tipasa.

10 ways to spend my stimulus check

2009-01-27T11:54:00.010-06:00

With my tax rebate burning a hole in my pocket, I'm really stumped as to where to spend it. Please look into your hearts and help me figure out what to do by voting for one of the following options on the poll in the right hand margin.

10. Maybe I can make a down payment on a round-trip ticket from MSP to Midway. (It's nice when your competitors go belly-up and you can raise prices 900%.)

9. I could buy this couch.

8. I could quit my job(s) and pursue my dream of being a full-time Acting Company groupie, following them on tour as they cruise around the country doing Shakespeare in those cool-ass multi-zippered leather coats straight that are half Project Runway and half Blade Runner. (And I still say Nym looks like Bryan.)

7. Convertible bond arbitrage, baby. With how badly that market's been devalued, I figure I can corner the market and have enough left over for pizza.

6. I could buy Dick Durbin's senate seat ("Oh no, it's not for sale", yeah yeah... that's what you said about the other one.)

5. I could do the responsible thing and put together a care package for the Blackjack Bandit on his tour of West Africa: clean syringes, fresh beans for his espresso maker, a book on Shiatsu massage translated into Tswana, some wood polish for his grandfather clock, and clean syringes.

4. Put it all on black 20 and let it ride until I have the 100,000 deutschemarks I need. (Euros are for suckers, baby.)

3. There's always the old standby of buying Merrill-Lynch shares at a 70% premium. (After all that is where all the rest of the government's stimulus money went.)

2. Spend it all on a 3-day binge of hookers and blow, only to emerge bleary-eyed from my hotel room and find I've accidentally become governor of New York. (Oh no, not again.)

1. I could buy anything really, as long as it's made in China and boiled in lead. (Again... that's where Walmart shoppers are spending the rest of the stimulus checks anyways.)

Eagles 26 - 14 Vikings

2009-01-05T10:26:00.003-06:00

What happened to the O-line? They couldn't get a push in the running game, and eventually on every passing play the Eagles pinned their ears back and blitzed the whole house. With Peterson unable to get anything consistent going in the ground game and the Tardis unable to ever connect find a dump-off receiver over the middle, there was nothing to slow that blitz down, and it got ugly.

Not as ugly as the Eagles fans, many of whom had to be removed by the Minneapolis Police Department. No you can't throw your beer at a woman and stay to watch the second half. And I had to love the guy who got arrested but wanted to finish his beer before being cuffed. When the cop arresting him snatched the bottle out of his hand before marching him out with beer all over his face, she got the most applause of anyone in uniform that day. Classy bunch, especially the guy in the bathroom wearing a Harold Carmichael jersey yelling at the kid in front of him for taking too long at the urinal. Not just classy but also a real smart move in a bathroom packed shoulder to shoulder full of Vikings fans, to start hassling at a teenager who hasn't done anything to you.

The better team won, and really it couldn't have happened to a worse group of fans... even more mean drunks than the Brewers. I hope you all get pounded in the ass by the Giants next week (and not the good way).

Lions achieve historic perfect season

2008-12-29T10:30:00.002-06:00

Many years ago some of the wiser heads of the National Football League including commissioner Paul Tagliabue and New York Football Giants owner Wellington Mara (whose granddaughter was that hot redhead at the end of Brokeback Mountain) started moving towards a more balanced league in which all 32 teams, from any size media market, had the possibility of putting together a Superbowl contender. Keeping football interesting across the country would get everybody a slice of a bigger pie and insure the NFL dominated the American sports scene every fall. Since then, many dominant franchises have crumbled, and nobody has stayed at the top for long, as even the Patriots can be beaten.

However, this year the Detroit Lions have finally done what was previously considered unpossible, and put together a season so inept that they couldn't find a single team to rise to the challenge of playing worse football than the Lions. Sixteen straight losses, something no NFL team has ever achieved in a single season. If the Lions can build on their ineptness through the draft and use the #1 pick on a disruptive headcase who will hold out on signing a contract until November and prevent them from signing any of their other rookies or free agents, they could get the 9 straight losses they'd need next season to tie the '76-'77 Buccaneers record 26 game losing streak and be assured of their place in history.

All kidding aside, why leagues continues to tolerate franchises that contribute so little to the quality of their product is baffling. And to be fair and not pick on Detroit, I said the same about the Twins teams of the mid to late 90's that wanted public money for a new stadium to showcase a glorified AAA team. But yikes, 0-16 and you haven't burned the stadium down yet?

Top 10 reasons I haven't updated my blog in 2 months

2008-12-20T20:10:00.003-06:00

10. I've been sitting in the back seat of my car filling out ballots for Al Franken since October.

9. Blowing Rod Blagojevich's entire staff to lay groundwork for Senator Rufus (D-IL) took longer than I thought it would. Turns out all I got for it was gratitude... GRATITUDE?! Fuck gratitude!

8. I saw Shadowlands at the Guthrie, and then sobbed uncontrollably in my closet for several weeks over the death of Joy Gresham... bring her the magic apple, Douglas!

7. I've been working hard and contributing to the Gross National Product of this great country, which is more than I can say for certain CDO-squared selling motherf*****s I know who think it's funny to kick yuppies out of their starter castles at Christmas.

6. I spent a few weeks learn how to pronounce Amstelbooij's new Collateralized Diaper Obligation's name, eventually I just gave up and decided to call him Chocomelbooij.

5. I had a craving for a Misty Freeze, and I had to go all the way down Highway 61 to Baton Rouge to find a DQ that was open. Although speaking of DQ, who else suspects we may know the owner of this one?

4. Last October I accidentally said Macbeth in a theater and was beaten into coma by superstitious actors.

3. I just couldn't remember which of my half-dozen different jobs I was going to so I went to the scene shop and pretended to be a lamp-post for a couple weeks before they tried to bolt me to a stage.

2. I've been trying to fight the war on Hanukkah by saying "Happy Hanukkah" to as many people as I can. This "Happy Holidays" nonsense WILL NOT STAND.

1. And the real reason I haven't written anything on my blog in ages is Lego Star Wars, the most addictive game I've played since Tie Fighter. When I had a dream about Lego Star Wars, I decided maybe I'd had enough. So then I went and bought Lego Batman and Lego Indiana Jones.

Macbeth at the Garage

2008-10-24T20:32:00.002-05:00

I went to the Theatre Garage with a surprisingly heavy heart, owing partly to how tired I was and partly to revisting the neighborhood of a star-crossed romance I had with a certain long-haired theatrical type (you know, one of those) who lived across the street. So a blood drenched show about intrigue, betrayal and evil women sounded like just the thing to pick up my spirits.

If the Guthrie is distinguished by its grandeur, and Pro Rata by being so provocative and raw, then the production company behind this show, Torch Theater, differentiate themselves by their dedication to accessibility in all forms. The obvious reflection of this is making every show accessible to blind and deaf patrons, but there's also such an apparent effort to shoo away the snooty veneer of... the thee-a-tah... and bring audiences into closer contact with the performance. When I called to make ticket reservations I was surprised to find that Lady Macbeth herself (Stacia Rice, Miss Jane Eyre herself for all you Charlotte Brontë junkies out there) recorded their daily automated message, but she is in fact a founder of that theater,
and her decidedly un-diva-like involvement in the daily operation of the theater really demonstrates their mission to fight snootiness and exclusion in all its forms. Plus I imagine her sexy voice is part of the reason people come to see her strut and fret her hour upon the stage.

And Stacia is great as Lady Macbeth, in a very Detroit minimalist techno sort of presentation with a stylish yet versatile black set and fabulous costumes. After Jane Eyre I had wanted to see Stacia in something different that maybe gave her a little more room to come out and play, so it was a treat to see her in a very focused, very modern show like After a Hundred Years last spring. Macbeth splits the difference between elegant period piece and stylish modern psychological drama represented by those two shows, but the immediacy of that tiny theater and the minimalist made this an actors show, it was really fun to see Stacia and Sean Haberle's presentation of the ruthless couple.

In the past, I've never really followed that transtition from level-headed schemer to raving lunatic in Lady Macbeth and the descent from noble soldier to paranoid preacher in Macbeth, either reading it or in Roman Polanski's film. (Out of Joint's west african production at the old Guthrie Lab had its own cohesive take on the story, but I've been told to stop annoying people by raving about that production.) In this production, Sean Haberle's Macbeth slips into almost rodent-like mannerisms whenever challenged make him a furious warrior pressed on by his gnawing insecurities, which makes it easier to believe his descent into tyranny. And Lady Macbeth's ineffectual attempt at an angelic intervention in Fife, helplessly watching the slaughter behind a white silk hood, bridges the gap between the childless woman who can talk casually about dashing her own baby's brains out to the gaunt, sleepwalking figure who aimlessly shuffles off the stage in Act V.

It's a good show, and I couldn't help but think as I was watching it I wish I could get more kids there. Back in our days at the Academy the Scottish Play was our first introduction to Shakespeare, and I wish I could slip a few kids into a show like this that's trying so hard to engage rather than to elevate. A theater that invites you to take your drinks back in with you and offers non-crinkly bags for you to put your noisier snacks in just seems made for people who are thirsty for a first taste of culture but maybe not aware of it. And it really has been great the last couple of nights I went to the theater to be in a crowd that was clearly having a fun night out, with much to discuss afterwards. So yeah, I'm sold on Torch and Pro Rata, at the Garage or the Gremlin or anywhere else, and I hope my vast readership gives Macbeth a chance. And really if your choice of Halloween entertainment is seeing Macbeth for $20-$30 or Saw V for $8.50, it's well-worth the extra money (and the snacks are more reasonably priced).

The Lost Boys: a case against GPS

2008-10-19T13:50:00.007-05:00

Don't get me wrong, it was nice to see Corey Feldman was able to tap back into his scowling, growling persona of Edgar Frog 20 years after last performing the role. Actually I suppose all he had to do was put on that stupid headband. It's also funny to see Corey Haim's cameo, where the meth-face makes him look about twice Feldman's age. But wow, what a shitty movie. I accept that trashy cinema is going to be derivative, but the foundations of this movie were laid pretty bare, trying to update Point Break... only with vampires this time.

Bad things come in threes, so I thought I'd wash down that piece of crap with two more bad movies: the listless Prom Night, and the vapid remake of Prom Night. I did recently see a movie about a sleazy maniac who kills people for no apparent reason and the closeted lesbian who fights back that took a very old formula and did it right, so it's possible High Tension just spoiled my appetite for crappy slasher movies. But there's still no excuse for either version of this film ever being released.

I thought a comparison of the remakes to the originals, separated by decades, would be at least amusing and worth a decent rant. But it wasn't... just boring, sadly. There's not even a decent joke about dubbing Nicholas Cage into Cantonese to be had here.

"Wake up motherf***er, it's our ball!", or Vikings 12-10 Lions

2008-10-12T19:11:00.003-05:00

Well that was certainly bizarre. Really, really bizarre. The Vikings beat the Lions in a game that at one point had most people around me thinking the Vikings might hold onto their 2-0 lead to win the game, unless a second half field goal by Detroit allowed them to squeak out with a 3-2 road win. When the Vikings entire scoring output consisted of Dan Orlovsky running a bootleg out the back of his own end zone (and still looking for an open receiver when he realized the Vikings pass rushers were already celebrating) I must admit I began to lose hope.

Both times the Vikings got a first down in field goal range after a big play, my dad sardonically suggested kicking a field goal then rather than trying to score a TD, and it was really sad that he was proved right when Adrian Peterson's fumble ended their first real scoring drive, and they later penalized themselves back out of field goal range (leading to a blocked kick). The Vikings only TD came when Bernard Berrian broke one open and didn't give the OC a chance to overthink things and choke. Facing 3rd and 20 in your opponent's half of the field, it's kind of clever to call in a running play to try and set up a field goal rather than go for a difficult first down. It's less clever when you telegraph it by putting in 2 tight ends and a fullback to block for him, and don't even send the receiver deep to pull off the safeties or anything.

I have no idea how the Vikings won this game committing so many offensive penalties and turnign the ball over three times, but somehow they did, partly because our defense was driving their skill position players into the ground like they were using them to build a fence. I would occasionally wonder why our d-backs could give a receiver so much room to catch a pass and get up to full speed in open space, until I'd see a linebacker and safety converge to high-low the guy and basically rip him in half. Somebody behind me set the tone for the game when a Calvin Johnson made a big catch, took two steps before disappearing into a purple Charybdis (thank you Oddysseus now go to Ithica) while Ben Leber picked up the live ball that came squirting out. As the trainers attended to limp, motionless heap that Ray Edwards and Ben Leber left on the field where Johnson had been standing, one of the drunks behind me shouted, "Wake up motherfucker, it's our ball!!"

Up next: Da Bearss, in that giant toilet bowl somebody left on Museum Campus Drive

Killer Joe at the Gremlin

2008-10-12T17:07:00.004-05:00

Not knowing recently if my Guthrie adventure was coming to an end or just turning a page (or more likely entering a long murky denouement) I had decided to start sampling more of the local theater scene to see what I was missing with my usual obsessive tendency to over focus, drawing the universal from the particular, rather than distilling it from the mass of experience like everyone else (that may make no sense to anyone but me, but hey it's not like anybody's reading this). On my first sample of one of our smaller theater companies, I got everything I asked for and rather more than I bargained for.

Really it's not my first taste of what the rest of the local scene was doing, since Theatre Latte Da had just done such a wonderful production at the Guthrie of Old Wicked Songs and I saw Penumbra's operatic production of Gem of the Ocean here on August Wilson's birthday. So on Thursday when I mentally flipped a coin to decide between Torch Theatre's production of MacBeth at the Garage and Theatre Pro Rata's production of Killer Joe at the Gremlin, I figured it should be interesting either way (and boy was it ever). Ultimately my decision came down to needing to eat first, and when I couldn't find a parking spot on 4th to run into Pizza Luce for a slice or to dash into Koy to ask Kirby how quick he could get me a bank roll and a cuppa green tea, I decided to go to the theater I knew was across the street from a Mickey D's and wouldn't be full enough for anyone to notice my post-Big Mac gas attack. The winner was Killer Joe at the Gremlin.

The Gremlin Theatre is in St. Paul on University near Raymond Ave, home of Key's where they always put onions in my motherf***ing omelette no matter what I order. Seriously, if they would just knock that off and quit telling me "Oh, those are just white tomatoes" I might pop in there again... I've seen it happen to other people too, so I don't know why their kitchen is so fixated on making sure everyone is getting their daily dose of sulfites. At least the guy throwing up in a garbage can six feet from my table was a one-time thing, even if it did last 20 minutes. But don't let his review fool you, if they'd bring back the regular waffles ($3.95 with a second one for $1.00) I would totally hop on the #16 bus and go back.

And now that I've cleared that up, the Gremlin shares its building (and its bathrooms) with the aikido school next door, which meant that when I arrived at this University Ave storefront with empty display windows and a door that just directed me down a creepy hallway to a back room draped with black curtains, I was expecting to find a naked FBI agent sliding around silk sheets and Laura Palmer talking backwards to a dancing dwarf... and where the hell was Annie anyways? Oh dear, I may have wandered off on another tangent. The rough look of the theater was in perfect keeping with the set, which was a garbage strewn trailer in some Texas hell-hole. It looked like a tornado had just hit the theater and deposited all this crap on stage. As I settled into my creaky, threadbare seat (nicked from the ruins of the Loading Dock Theater) I thought these were dire beginings to an evening at... "the Thee-a-tah!"

But I was wrong. Killer Joe is the story of Texas trailer trash who concoct a half-baked scheme to bump off their mother for the insurance and live like minimum-wage kings, and that horrible looking collection of trash was exactly how those people lived, with biting ants on the floor and the constant flicker of NASCAR in the living room. It was a really great show, full of characters I couldn't look away from, sometimes because I was desperate to know what would happen next, and sometimes because they were like a sore I couldn't stop scratching. If Quentin Tarantino nd Robert Rodriguez owned a theater, this is the show they would open with (well, either Killer Joe or Titus Andronicus) because never have I seen anything crammed with so much nudity and raw sexual violence that wasn't direct-to-video. Apparently the playwright Tracy Letts also penned August: Osage County which won him a Tony Award earlier this year, and I hear those aren't easy to come by.

I was looking for something I wouldn't see at the Guthrie, so I was certainly intrigued when the first actor to cross the stage came out completely bottomless. As she and her son-in-law bickered about the appropriateness of her exposed bush in graphic detail, I had to admit Pro Rata had certainly delivered. The honest, uncomfortable nature of that presentation, the imperfect, quivering exposed bodies that sent a tingle up my spine and and the brutal violence that twisted me in my seat was so raw that by intermission I was chatting up the lobby staff about my vast expertise as a theater volunteer and offering my services. And it was only partly because she was cute and had a genuine, guileless quality that said, "I'm groovy-relaxed enough to be delighted by my haiku shirt and to possibly give you a chance" that I was talking to her, and mostly because of the art on display. (And given all the pain, confusion, and growing sense of horror that everyone who dates me seems to experience, I'm going to leave it to the cute of the world to amuse themselves.)

Killer Joe runs at the Gremlin (2400 University Ave in St. Paul) until Oct 19 with tickets on a sliding scale ($14-28), and I encourage anyone looking for a visceral theater experience to give it a try, especially since October movies are so dire (and there's only so many times you can see An American Carol, Captain.

http://www.theatreprorata.org/
Box Office: 612.874.9321

More On Vice Presidents (pun intentional?)

2008-10-12T16:44:00.002-05:00

I havne't watched any of the Presidential debates this election season, mainly because I'm so bored with all of it. I feel like I made up my mind on Super Tuesday when I had to decide whether I was going to caucus for McCain or Obama, and I have yet to regret my decision. I did watch the Vice Presidential debate last week, because Sarah Palin's candidacy may have been questionable politically, but it did make for damned good television.

As I watched her face Joe Biden in the debate with all the questions swirling and most of America with one mind salivating for it to turn into a train wreck of one kind or another, there was just one recurring thought I couldn't keep out of my mind: Sarah Palin really didn't look so good in HD. I previously described her as the one part of Alaska's natural beauty that I'd like to drill, mostly for a chance to pull out that corny line (and because Jewel is too annoying) but the Maverick Mom did what most women do when they sense they're thought of as attractive: she pulled her hair back and slathered on make-up, covering over and buttoning down anything that made her look good.

Since her whole candidacy is based on being a Maverick Mom, the fact that she's ultimately an old-style corrupt politician who circumvents the rules to get her way, values her own lifestyle above anybody else's (like Nancy Pelosi, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Harry Reid, and the entire establishment she's bucking) doesn't make her much of a maverick. The rest of her claim is that she's raised a kid and that makes her a "real person", but most people don't shoot wolves from helicopters, and all the real people I know who had an opportunity to get an education also have a passport and used it before turning 40.

So now I'm back to being bored with all of it.

Black Sox 1-0 Twins

2008-10-01T09:47:00.003-05:00

At the end of a tight division race, the Twins needed to take two out of three at home against the Royals to clinch the division title over the floundering Sox. This would have put them in the play-offs when the team that usually knocks them out, the Yankees, are finally missing a series for the first time in over a decade. (Apparently Joe Torre wasn't the problem.) So of course... they lose the series to the Royals 2-1, and go into a play-off against Chicago. In a nasty tight pitcher's duel, Jim Thome caught one pitch left up by Nick Blackburn and scored the game's only run on a solo homer. The closest the Twins came to scoring was Michael Cuddyer testing Griffey's arm coming home from third on a shallow fly ball and then tackling A.J. Pierzynski at the plate. It took a perfect throw to beat Cuddyer to the plate, but it was fun to watch him try it, and even more fun to see him take out Pierzynski.

The '08 Twins took a long time to sort out fielding positions and give the kids a chance over the tired veterans Smith brought in last winter, and Gomez's inability to get on base combined with the disappearance of Cuddyer and Morneau's power really killed them, but they were still in it until game 163, and a pleasure to watch in the second half of this season. Unlike the Black Sox, who play ugly, look ugly, won ugly, and have an ugly-ass stadium.

On Nazis, Skinheads, and the Dichterliebe

2008-09-28T20:48:00.008-05:00

Q. What's green and flies over Germany?

A. Snotzis

I have to admit a lot of Nazis and skinheads kept popping up in my recent art and entertainment choices, and it's really left me in the mood for some light, happy escapist fare, but I couldn't help but be a little shaken tonight by some of the other recurrent threads in three films and plays about skinheads, Nazis and classical music, and the sensation of being numbly set adrift in icy cold water that is pervasive to all films about skinheads.

I've seen four that are worth a mention: Romper Stomper, American History X, The Believer and This is England, and without a doubt the strangest is The Believer. Ryan Gosling has this uncanny knack for rising way above the material, and there are some serious flaws to this film's aimless plot, its "incest andS&M sex kitten who wants to learn Hebrew" subplot, and above all its cop-out ending, but Goslingdoes a lot with the film's bizarre premise: a Jewish skinhead. The bitterness in Gosling's Danny Balint and the furious preoccupation with Jewish history and theology that twists into a strangely reverent loathing is absolutely fascinating, and the fact that Gosling is able to express all that internal conflict while retaining a cohesive performance is amazing.

I've raved at length elsewhere about the last Shane Meadows film I saw (Dead Man's Shoes) but I couldn't help but feel that there was something missing from last year's This is England. The performances of both films have this stark, genuine quality like Meadows went back to 1983 and followed some kids around with a camera and filmed them from the bushes without them noticing, making it a subtly powerful film. I couldn't shake a certain feeling of inevitability, as the film had to follow the same well-worn arc of every other skinhead film I've ever seen, and that left This is England somewhere just short of brilliant, but very much worth watching.

It did leave me pondering the lost children who become the monsters of these films, and the degree to which I find myself sinking into that same feeling of alienation recently, since I don't know what I'll be doing with my days in a few weeks. For that reason the way that feeling drifts like a fog out of every scene in This is England shook me so much, I took a walk down ironically deserted street where all the restaurants pull in their sidewalks on Sunday night, the pleasant chill of October mixing with a craving for pizza and deep melancholy.

It was an odd confluence of films, randomly popping up in my Netflix queue, when there's an amazing show playing at the Guthrie set in 1986 Vienna about a young American pianist who's lost his touch studying with an eccentric Austrian professor. Old Wicked Songs explores the same idea of putting on a costume to declare to the world who you are, with the hope that you can find that identity within yourself and fill out the costume. The play is set on the eve of Kurt Waldheim's election and so stirs up the legacy of Nazism in Ostereich, while most of the populace continues to bury their heads in the sand. I hate to describe too much of this play given the innocent seduction of the audience in the early scenes, but it's about wearing the clothes of a pianist, of a Jew, or of a Nazi, and finding that this may only magnfies the emptiness within. It follows the opposite trajectory of the skinhead films, wherein a character finds themselves by building their skinhead identity and then rejecting it.

I really wish more people could have seen Latte Da's production of Old Wicked Songs, but I get the same feeling about virtually every show I've seen in the Dowling Studio. I don't know how much longer my time at the Guthrie is going to last, but I see a Dowling Studio Package ($80 for four tickets usable at any show) in my future. I feel like I had so much more to say about all of this, but I'm just so damned tired with the emotional back and forth and the grind of being here every morning that has characterized my time at the theater recently. Here's hoping I can figure out what I'm doing past Halloween.

Don't Tell Me the Score!

2008-09-07T09:57:00.006-05:00

Tomorrow night I will be at work until at least 9pm, meaning I'm going to tivo the Vikings season opener against Green Bay on Monday Night Football. I'm turning off my phone and not checking my email (or talking to any patron in purple) but I still know Amstelbooij's going to find a way to tell me the score this week and every week during the Vikings season when I have to work during away games (I love the theater, but not enough to miss a home game). Here are the top ten ways he'll do it, covering the myriad locations in which I might find myself working:

10. He'll send a singing telegram to my cubicle, that much is obvious.

9. A chinese dragon will parade through the lobby past the concierge desk, with "Vikings 24 Packers 17" written on it.

8. All prairie sky backdrops for Little House now have "Vikings 24-17 Packers" written into the clouds.

7. A mail order will be called into the store: "I need 24 Vikings and 17 Packers, could you verify with Rufus in the stockroom that you have that?"

6. A fax will be sent to the stage door of his newborn's son's birth announcement... informing me his the kid's name is "Vikings 24-Packers 17"

5. An improv class in the Learning Center will begin with a warm-up vocal exercise of yelling "Vikings 24 Packers 17!" loud enough for me to hear it at the desk

4. When Melissa Gilbert comes out to sign autographs after Little House on the Prairie, she'll also blow the Gjallarhorn in the lobby to announce a Vikings victory

3. The big musical number in Little House on the Prairie at the end of act I now concludes "I'll be your eyes... when we watch the Vikings beat the Packers 24-17 with a 4th quarter touchdown on a reverse by Aundrae Allison"

2. Amstelbooij will be poised to pop out from trap door in the thrust stage in a purple and gold mask like the &$*#'ing phantom of the opera screaming out "Vikings 24 Packers 17!"

1. During tomorrow night's concert, announcements over the PA intermission will go like this: "Ladies and Gentlemen, the call is places... the performance will begin on the McGuire Proscenium Stage immediately following the second half kick-off of the Vikings Packers game which the Vikings are leading 14-10"

On Vice Presidents

2008-09-01T15:37:00.003-05:00

At long last, our national nightmare is over... the vice presidential picks are in, and we now know within a margin of error of about 5 Aaron Burrs on the left-right political scale who will hold that unique position in American government, who serves in two branches of government while having almost no influence over either.

On the one side is Senator Joe Biden, a man who had the top of his head surgically removed to give surgeons access to his brain... and then he had the procedure done a second time because the first time they couldn't find his brain (note to the Captain: Joe Biden told that joke himself on "Meet the Press", don't get all worked up). As chairman of the foreign relations, Biden has also famously taken meetings with معمر القذافي to discuss how most democratic countries don't have a President-for-Life, and advocated a Belgian solution to the problem of Iraqi governance, which I assume involves shipping over chocolates and starting a Michael Jackson "touch" football fantasy camp.

If you're from overseas and don't know what the Vice President does, or were educated in an American school and still don't know what the VP does, don't worry, because neither does the other candidate for the job. Every politician asked about the Vice Presidency, including Senator Biden, publicly denies any interest in the job, leading New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson whose name is constantly associated with the job to describe it as "the job nobody wants, but nobody turns down." When she was previously asked about the Vice Presidency, Alaska governor Sarah Palin brushed it off joking that she didn't even know what the VP did, which really was an unfortunate choice of words now that she's trying to follow in the footsteps of Cactus Jack Garner, Elbridge Gerry, and John C. Breckenridge. That's right, to get famous in that job, you either have to invent gerrymandering, have a stupid name, rebel against the government, or shoot somebody who's face is printed on money (a cookie to anybody besides the Captain who knows which bill that is).

As a former beauty queen and current governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin does have a few things going for her, the most significant being that she's not incredibly old and covered in melanomas, and is in fact the one part of Alaska I'd like to drill. She appeases the conservative base of the Republican party, because she is staunchly pro-life and skeptical of science, favoring teaching Intelligent Design alongside the theory of evolution... hey, it's not any dumber than that guy at SPA who used to teach about phlogiston. Governor Palin also brings executive experience, having been Governor of a state mainly populated by caribou for a couple of years, and having also been mayor of a town with fewer people than a Gopher hockey game. Sarcasm aside, she brings youth, executive experience, and a vagina to the Republican ticket, and I do like to think that there's a woman who's part of a credible bid for a federal executive office, and not a sacrificial lamb who won't even carry her own state like in '84. Part of the reason I like this is Hillary Clinton doesn't get to claim synecdochic representation of all women everywhere, and part of it is because Palin has a much better website devoted to her than Biden in www.vpilf.com

The job of the Vice President has generally been to help win an election and then make people less nervous about the President being incapacited. Given the fact that the President is likely to be an old cancer survivor or the biggest target for the ignorant and violent underbelly of our society since JFK went cruising around in an open limo to better grope passing women, the Vice President better be somebody who can take over while the President is recovering from a gunshot wound or has fallen and can't get up. I say that largely without mirth, but I do think somebody's going to do a big hit of meth and take a shot at hypothetical President Obama, and I'm glad he picked somebody with foreign policy experience who's made serious bids for the presidency.

The past two Vice Presidents have had serious policy portfolios rather than being a useless appendage: Al Gore was the public face of the government's work on NAFTA, and in charge of the effort to reform the federal bureaucracy into something more adaptable and just generally less stupid, while Dick Cheney has been secretly running the country from an undisclosed location for eight years while the President clears brush on his ranch. I don't know what sort of agenda we could expect from the two current nominees, if Palin will just drink orange juice and work out twice a day so she stays healthy "just in case" and Biden will be sent to out of the way corners of the world to tell dictators to suck it, or if they'll have something real to do, but I certainly am looking forward to this debate.

And a quick memo to the British press, it's Governor not "Governess", she's not teaching inbred upper class children how to fold their napkins and boning the ghost of their father in some circa 1800 windy shithole of a house in a marsh somewhere.

Olympic rings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or where have I been all summer

2008-08-13T20:10:00.005-05:00

I've realized recently that I really started losing track of the 2008 election and stopped providing updates on it. One reason of course, is that I've decided to vote for General Zod from Superman 2, but also I found a much more interesting and occasionally more frightening clash of superpowers in the Beijing Olympics. And there have been some fascinating developments at the games so far, not least of which was the first complete WTF moment when news broke about the Spanish national basketball team's "slitty-eyed" ad campaign. Facing a serioius credit crisis, that's definitely a great way to court the Asian tourist dollar. Or euro, or yen, or baht or whatever else you got.

After the inevitable nuclear holocaust over oil resources, somebody will have to rule the barren wastelands, and I'm not betting on the mohawked Australians in football pads from The Road Warrior. I think the South Koreans will emerge to fill that role, spreading out from Busan and Koreatown to rebuild a feudalist society based on tofu. The reason I say that is that after decades of living a hop skip and a jump over the minefield from Kim Jong Il's nuclear program they've clearly started preparing the low-tech army that will rule a world without sophisticated manufacturing and electronics, by aggressively teaching the bow and arrow. Have you seen how freakishly good Koreans are at archery? The streak of bullseyes they smugly fired in against the Italians in the gold medal round was crazy, and Korean archers may have taken over from Norwegian biathletes as the scariest people to meet in the woods. (Who am I kidding, I'd love to meet a Norwegian bi-anything in the woods.)

As I was flipping through obscure Olympic events nobody but me watches I found a couple other real surprises, like the medal sweep by the US women's sabre team. It's been a hell of a long time since I lifted a sword in anger, but man is it nice to see that the rare women I used to fence against really succeeded in cracking the door open for women in our weapon. Also the chick who won the bronze is hawt. I can't help it, elite female athletes are already sex bombs but a redhead with a sword really gives me funny feelings in strange places.

It was also interesting watching the group play in women's soccer to see what a difference a year made when the US women played New Zealand. A year ago at the Women's World Cup (note to the Captain: the WWC was also curiously located in nnnnnnn-China!) when I caught the Football Ferns in action against Brazil they looked like a bunch of underdeveloped girls whose schoolbus had dropped them off at the wrong field and they'd been thrown in against full-grown women. But they were still fun to watch, especially their keeper Jenny Bindon crashing after loose balls with her knees up and Ria Percival in her paddington bear yellow boots. In the last year they've grown into their bodies and their game, and even though they got spanked by the US (4-0) they held their own against the Japanese and kept things close against Norway, which can't have been easy. Now that the Matildas are out of their region it's more or less inconceivable that there will be an international tournament without the Ferns, so I look forward to seeing them again in Germany'11.

But really the most surprising thing was the opening ceremonies. When I heard Zhang Yimou had taken over for Steven Spielberg as director, I knew that we'd be treated to an amazing spectacle, just based on his wuxias I've seen (Hero, House of Flying Daggers, and The Curse of the Golden Flower) but I kept waiting for the inevitable third act to such an epic: death and shrieking on an unimaginable scale. Seriously, with all those athletes standing exposed in the middle of the field and Zhang Yimou at the helm I kept waiting for the inevitable hail of arrows or ninjas with hooks rapelling from the rafters, all in smashing outfits. Then again, maybe he's saving it for the closing ceremonies.

Start spreadin' da news...

2008-08-08T17:16:00.002-05:00

I told you all Brett Favre would not stay retired. (Next time pay attention!) After publicly carrying on for years about his imminent retirement and enjoying about five farewell tours while the Packers groomed his replacement for about three years, the Packers finally asked Favre "Are you really retiring this time? Really? So would you say that's like 95 percent sure, or only 75? You're really leaving this time, no backsies?" and he finally retired. Until summer. The Packers were so unexcited about the QB controversy that they offered him $25m to stay retired. Favre showed up to training camp anyways. Packers fans held a candlelight vigil at his home, and one of the most media-savvy players in pro sports turned on the charm, and the Packers finally accepted that Favre was back in the NFL... so they traded him.

Favre will play for the New York Jets next year, which I hear isn't as bad as it sounds since they massively overhauled their previously horrid roster. But even if he has one more superbowl run in him, I doubt it's with the J-E-T-S. Which is too bad, because I used to know a Jets fan inside and out, until she became a Raiders fan and I realized I didn't know her so well. It wasn't just about football, I also really am just about the most horrible person to fall in love with... find somebody who has something nice to say about the whole experience and I'll send you free theater tickets. Someday I hope to be able to separate love and sex from despair and annihilation, and most importantly from football. But I digress.

The Jets get Favre, Green Bay gets a conditional draft pick, probably a 3rd rounder unless Favre falls flat on his face. If New York, New York make the playoffs with Favre at the helm, it improves to a second rounder, and potentially the 31st pick if Favre was to lead them to the Superbowl. As expected, the trade also stipulates that should Favre be traded to a certain purple and gold rival, the Jets must forfeit three first round draft picks to the Packers, which should ensure that Favre will never ever play another game at the Metrodome. Despite the gnashing of teeth in the Chicago and Minnesota sports media, there is no freaking way the Packers were going to risk Favre coming back to their stadium in another uniform, and the trade conditions clinch that. Frankly I'm so sick of all the drama that surrounds him every year, I'm glad that as far as the Vikings are concerned, he might as well be retired. Bring on Aaron Rodgers.

2008 Timberwolves Draft

2008-06-27T23:41:00.001-05:00

I know this is the time when I’m supposed to explain the Timberwolves draft strategy and their future prospects, but it’s been hard for me or anybody else to sort it all out. The Wolves essentially traded down again for money, although not as blatantly as they did two years ago when they swapped picks with the Trailblazers for $1m (less than 2% of the average NBA payroll). But the Wolves had three picks this year (#3, #31, and #34) and this is what they did with them, in my most optimistic analysis.

#3 pick – OJ Mayo (traded to Memphis)

After once again getting the third pick in a two-player draft, the Wolves drafted OJ Mayo, a point guard from USC who probably was the best player available. Issues were immediately raised about how to fit him into a line-up with so many guards, but really it wasn’t hard to see that Mayo had a bit more potential at that position than the passable Randy Foye, tiny Sebastian Telfair, and mercurial Marko Jaric. And I was looking forward to ten years or more of making jokes about eating French fries with OJ Mayo to Amstelbooij (btw, good luck in Brussels!).

Then around midnight, the Wolves traded Mayo for Kevin Love, the #5 overall pick. Love is a power forward whose strength is his versatility and whose weakness is he’s a bit light. The thing is, the one thing the Wolves have locked down is they have a great power forward signed long-term, and about the only other young players anybody’s excited about are the other power forwards who back him up. If Love is able to play off of Al Jefferson the way Kevin Garnett at one time played off of Tom Gugliotta and makes it difficult to quadruple team Big Al, then he could be worthwhile. And while the Wolves really needed a center so Jefferson could move back to power forward, I suppose it’s still an improvement over starting Ryan Gomes out of position.

That being said, they traded down to get Love, so you’d think there must have been something in it for the Wolves… and at least this time it wasn’t straight cash. The trade really breaks down into three parts, the hot prospects, the warm bodies/jackasses, and the role players. I’ve already explained the difference between the hot prospects, meaning the Wolves probably lost on that part, so one has to assume the rest of the trade made up for it. In the warm bodies component of the trade, a couple of big, long contracts got dumped for shorter, smaller ones, meaning the Wolves can look to sign big free agents in the summer of 2010. Basically this brings the whole process of clearing out deadweight forward a year.

For their warm bodies, Wolves threw into the trade the gigantic unhappy contract of Antoine Walker, as well as Greg Buckner, two guys who were unlikely to do anything this year but take up cap room. The Wolves also threw in another unhappy and overpaid guy in Marko Jaric, whose versatility in the back court got him a lot of playing time, but his inconsistency really made him impossible to build around or give him a role on a young team. The Wolves also got back Brian Cardinal as a warm body who ties up money but not as much as the players the Wolves dumped. If Kevin McHale can be believed, he also dumped some seriously bad attitudes when he got rid of Walker and Jaric, so the warm body / jackass part of the trade is a small but significant net positive.

The real positive is the Wolves also got back role players who actually appeared last year as something other than a garbage time novelty. The Wolves got something they needed in Mike Miller, a small forward with a three point shot who theoretically can stretch the floor out and punish teams for piling bodies onto Al Jefferson. They also get a true center in Jason Collins, who is legitimately seven feet tall and while he doesn’t score or rebound, can do some of the work inside. (Arguably Jaric fits in both categories as an overpaid, disruptive role player, but with the number of guards the Wolves have available he’s not that big a loss.)

#31 Nikola Pekovic (under contract with Panathinaikos)

With the first pick of the second round, the Wolves took this big Serbian center who everyone would be drooling over… if he wasn’t under contract for the next three years in Greece. Having the rights to Pekovic is a good thing assuming if they can ever get him to come over to the US when his contract is up, and nobody else would have passed on a chance to draft him in the second round. But he obviously won’t be doing much for the team any time soon.

#34 Mario Chalmers (traded to Miami)

When the Wolves picked Chalmers I thought it had to be a case of bringing in the best available player, because the last thing they needed was another combo guard, but then they traded him to Miami for a couple of 2nd round picks in next year’s draft, plus a pile of cash. I don’t know why they didn’t just keep him and send him to the Developmental League, because the picks they’ll get from Miami next year probably won’t be all that great and there’s only so many 2nd round picks you can get onto the roster.

Summer of 2009

It’s interesting to note that the Wolves may have a ridiculous number of picks in next year’s draft, if several reasonably likely conditions occur. If the Wolves pick is in the top 10 (and it will be, they’re going to stink) they’ll keep that top 10 pick, and if Miami challenges for a playoff spot, they’ll send their pick to the Wolves, and so will the Celtics. The Wolves give up a second round pick to Detroit as part of another trade but gain two from Miami, meaning in the summer of 2009 they’ll have five draft picks and a bunch of fat contracts in their last year, all of which are useful in trades.

But for the time being, there’s a draft pick with a lot to prove, five guys from last year to re-sign or replace and a lot of issues to sort out. Which I'm sure will require a lot of ranting and raving on my part.

Euro2008: Netherlands vs Russia

2008-06-22T16:56:00.008-05:00

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, so here's a brief pictorial tribute to Holland crashing out of the last two major international tournaments in their first elimination game:

Things in Chicago that are free

2008-06-14T13:36:00.003-05:00

In no particular order, here are my ten favorite free things to enjoy in Chicago, which can be visited for the price of an "L" ticket.

The Museum of Contemporary Photography

I've raved about this museum at length elsewhere, many times I'm sure. There's always something worth seeing tucked into a corner of this museum, and given the small size of the gallery, it doesn't take long to find. And it's on Michigan Ave in the South Loop, making it easy to pop in.

The Baha'i House of Worship

While it takes a while to make the trip out past Evanston, the Baha'i temple is a tranquil oasis out at the end of the Purple Line. Go in, sit down, enjoy the way the light enters the building and chill out for a few minutes.

National Museum of Mexican Art

Half the fun is getting there, because of the murals at the 18th St Pink Line Station near the museum, which put to shame any other attempt at public art I've seen in the Chicago transit system. I'm not a huge fan of the museum, but the Chupacabra room was very stimulating, and I have to admit I like their gift shop for all my Doogie Howser weird mask needs. (Don't ask.)

Tuesdays at the MCA

The MCA is a very hit or miss kind of museum, with the risk you'll wander in to an video projection of a child swimming while a hoarse child screams the lyrics to Chris Isaak songs. That one was maybe not worth the price of admission, which is why I try to go on Tuesdays and buy something from the MCA's rather fantastic gift shop if I feel like I should chip in. And I have seen some spectacularly neat stuff at the MCA like the dinosaur-sized cat skeleton they had looming over the lobby for a while like an eerie, alien counterpoint to the Field Museum lobby.

Chinatown

There's something delightful about the insular nature of Chinatown, which really feels like another country has sprung up in the space between the Orange and Red Lines, and it's hard to shake the self-conscious feeling of appearing different and speaking a strange language while walking around Chinatown speaking English. Plus I still say sauteed baby octopus and squid with lemon grass at Penang makes for a nice meal.

Signature Lounge

I've never been up to the observation deck on the John Hancock tower, and the all-dancing all-singing all-crapping on your car pigeons that narrate your trip to the top of the Sears Tower really make me hesitant to go back. But the Signature Lounge at the Hancock Tower is a nice place to stop in for a drink with the whole city laid out around you. (Just stay away from the oily focaccia.)

Lincoln Park Zoo

I do like a nice zoo, even on a hot summer day when the animals all get that kind of stoned, weary look that says "You brought me all the way from Africa so I could sit around in the 80% humid, 90 degree Chicago summer? Thanks, it wasn't hot in the Serengetti or anything, this is really great. And don't over-season my gazelle this time."

Garfield Park Conservatory

I like this conservatory for the same reason I like the Baha'i House of Worship, it's very beautiful and calm, and right off the Green Line. The fern room which recreates Chicago in the Cretaceous Period in this lush, moss-covered greenery overgrowing its brick paths with only the waterfalls and fat koi to break the stillness is really an amazing retreat from all the chaos that surrounds the park. And there's a lot else to be said for the Conservatory as well.

Lake Michigan

I do enjoy the shoreline between North Ave and Navy Pier, and the unbroken, open quality of the Chicago shoreline, which will soon be completed by the Calatrava bridge over the river near that sky-scraping dildo he's building in Streeterville. It is a lovely place for a walk, but don't tell anybody I said that or Amstelbooij will be trying to get me to bike to his sailboat in Calumet City (the one his wife doesn't know about).

Kenny Chesney Wake-Up Call

When you least expect it, you too can be roused for a Kenny Chesney pop quiz. Startled and disoriented, you will have no idea what is going on or who you're talking to, only that Kenny Chesney is involved somehow. This is a free service provided to any number in the 312 area code, any time after our operator reaches the office at 2:30am. For those outside the Chicagoland area, also see our 4:52am "What time does Perkins open?" emergency phone call service.

Spiritual Guidance

2008-06-10T22:45:00.000-05:00

The Ugly One

2008-05-31T14:10:00.003-05:00

Never have I been so entertained by the story of an ugly man than I was by the American premiere of Marius von Mayenburg's The Ugly One, other than maybe that red stripe commercial where he tells the guy he can make himself beautiful by standing next to a bottle of red stripe ("You sir, are very ugly!"). I'm sorry it's having such a short run here at the Guthrie, but I'm sure it will reappear many, many other places in America in the next few years. It was really cool to see Kate Eifrig back in the Dowling Studio, playing three different women this time instead of the nine she played in her last show here (9 Parts of Desire), and I still say she should have a website for her stalk-- her fans. Fans, I said fans.

The Ugly One has the virtues of being provocative, funny, and short, presented in a minimalist homage to Detroit techno with no backstage area and props just strewn about the edges of the room, until the actors filed in to the noisy house and began their performance. The whole show is about what happens when the world's ugliest man has dramatic facial surgery that makes him irresistibly beautiful, introducing drastic changes to his lifestyle, until he discovers that this process is infinitely reproducible, and everyone in the world starts to look like him. Through all these changes his identity and the sense of purpose and belonging in his life are lost, making this story as tragic as it is funny.

I was also amused at how German this play is even in translation, especially with the rather Euro-stylin' Nathan Christopher as Karlmann the assistant plug-tester and Karlmann the sexually confused boy who serves as his mother's boy-toy wrangler. The whole cast seems like people who ought to be on stage more often, and worth looking for when they are, despite not being diminutive ingenues and dashing, lithe dancers... well actually I think a couple have put in some time as glam rock magic faeries in scandalous tights in the other show as well. And against the three hour tours of Gem of the Ocean and Midsummer, The Ugly One's 55 minute run time made for a nice antipasto of culture.

Swiss Geography

2008-05-31T13:40:00.002-05:00

"Never liked the Swiss, they make them little clocks, these two cocksuckers come out of 'em with these little hammers, hit each other on the head. What kind of sick mentality is that?"
--Heist, screenplay by David Mamet

The ouroborosian self-consuming xenophobic isolationism of the Swiss certainly has its costs. (A cookie for whoever spotted the redundancy in that sentence.) One obvious casualty seems to be geography, as evidenced by this map of Swissair's American routes. Other evidence includes the total lack of signage in the Zug train station, and the conductor growling in scheissedeutsch over the ratty Trenitalia PA who doesn't think he needs to make any distinction between Zug Hauptbahnhoff and Zurigo Hauptbahnhoff.

Indiana Jones and the Chronic of Narnia

2008-05-23T13:30:00.002-05:00

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The new Indiana Jones film actually did turn out to be a lot of fun. I didn't expect much and the low-key opening wisely didn't overinflate expectations, but after I got over the inevitable wish that I would be magically transported back to my first childhood viewing of Raiders of the Lost Ark, I did settle back and enjoy myself. To be sure, in the early going Indy seems to be trying too hard for a laugh, and he's a softer, gentler Harrison Ford than the Indiana Jones from 1981 who began as nothing but an imposing profile and the crack of a bullwhip, but enjoying this film is very much a case of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

One thing that was back from Raiders was Karen Allen, and she's back in style, a perfect update of Marion Ravenwood after some twenty odd years. The rest of the supporting cast isn't bad either: Shia LaBoeuf is the least annoying I've ever seen him, and even manages to get past his atrocious gay biker intro, and I liked Cate Blanchett as the groovy Russian chick with a sword and a bad haircut. I also really liked the nod (er, literally?) to the late Denholm Elliott as Marcus Brody, and the classic you know it has to be coming what is Indiana Jones afraid of joke is hilarious.

The plot is kind of nutty, and none of the sequels have taken themselves seriously enough to ever reach the grandeur of the first film, the tone of which is exemplified in a single scene: when a bitter and beaten Indy trying to drink away the memory of Marion's Death, is confronted by Belloq over the meaning of digging up the Ark. That scene would have been out of place in any of the comical, bug-eating Indiana Jones sequels, but nevertheless I continue to enjoy all four films.

Prince Caspian

Unfortunately this was just tiresome. I'm not sure what Prince Caspian was doing in the movie other than tossing his wavy black hair in the breeze and telling Susan "This is not a schell phone in my pantsch". The whole film is enmired in banality and cliche from Reepacheep as the plucky comic relief to the armies of faceless soldiers he mows down in the gray-washed CGI battles that substitute for the dazzling spectacle of color of the first film's climax. The only time this film gets any twinge of the sense of wonder of the first film is in the White Witch's brief reappearance when the wolf chanting "I am hunger, I am thirst" started to send a few tingles up my spine, but really it's just too much of a reminder of how sad this film's villains are compared to Tilda Swinton's White Witch.

What's really almost distressing about Prince Caspian though is the casual quality of its violence. Peter can mow through a thousand Telmarines without anything more than a shrug, and Reepacheep's taunting before he stabs people in the face was straight out of an 80's actioner. There's no sense of meaning to any of it, and it's just excruciatingly tedious to wait out all the cliches all the way to the long goodbye ("I'm leaving now.... no wait, I'll turn back for just one more kiss!") that finally starts to wrap things up. Unless there's a serious change in direction the Chronicles of Narnia are poised to join Eragon, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, and any more direct-to-video D&D movies the sci-fi channel wants to put out as just another by the numbers fantasy action franchise, and that's just sad.

Why were the chefs in love again?

2008-05-21T11:48:00.001-05:00

Usually a movie has to be neither romantic nor funny to be a romantic comedy, and No Reservations certainly qualifies for that title. There's nothing funny about it, nor is anyone really all that charming and it fits one of the classic elements of the genre in that there's no indication on screen why these people are destined to be together except for cheesy music. So that was just terrible, and of course as in all film romances, somebody was about to jet off to another city unless they were arrested by some sort of heartfelt confessional. Sadly even the generally smart The Devil Wears Prada couldn't avoid that eyeroll and reconcile its lovers without a plane being involved.

But while mulling over whether I really wanted to trash it in some overwrought rant, I realized it's not the only peculiar romance between chefs with a cute little onlooker I've seen on film recently. In Ratatouille, I never got if there was a reason beyond the necessity of cliche for Colette and Linguini to be involved at the end of the film, with no real groundwork for it. Working together, maybe a spark as she's looking at him in a new light, but "Oh yeah and he's totally banging the French chick" seemed kind of like a silly thing to tack on to a movie about a cooking rat. On the other hand Remy the Rat is adorable, and between him and the transcendent moment of Peter O'Toole's creepy food critic, I found something genuinely likeable about about Ratatouille.

Death Star Canteen

2008-05-19T10:59:00.000-05:00

To answer a question about the Rainforest Cafe

2008-05-11T13:30:00.003-05:00

The answer is no. Hell no. A thousand times no. No no no no no no no. Mother#$*@'ing no I was not trying to eat at the Rainforest cafe in the Loop. I have never eaten at any Rainforest cafe, a decision I made when I was a kid and one opened at the Mall of America, because of their facade: a big exotic jungle full of bright colored animals including, of all the animals in the world, a giraffe and a lion.

Consider if you will the nature of a rain forest, with its heavy canopy and lush vegetation, and ask yourself... what about that situation would bring about an evolutionary adaptation like being bright yellow so you're easy to spot in the dim light, being huge and having long legs so you keep tripping over shit and getting clotheslined by low-hanging branches? A long neck is useful in the savanna, an area defined by the sparseness of it's canopy of trees, in order to reach scarce green vegetation and for greater visibility, less useful with thick trees in every direction. A long neck might help you surprise the fuck out of a jaguar lurking on a tree branch when you pop up your head up next to him like the periscope off the Yellow Submarine, but one swipe of her claws would probably make that a lot less funny from the giraffe's perspective.

Now I know what you're going to say, what about the temperate rain forests, like in the Pacific Northwest? Well, Lafcadio (the lion who shot back) aside, have you ever seen a lion riding the monorail through downtown Seattle, sipping a macchiato and growling at panhandlers? No you haven't, and I assure you this is a perfectly valid counterargument, despite the fact that the monorail doesn't even run anymore (too many lion attacks).

So no, I was not trying to eat at the Rainforest Cafe in the Loop. I would not go there for steak, I would not go there for soup. No, I do not like to go, Nobo.

A Midsummer Afternoon's Feverish Catnap

2008-05-10T17:04:00.006-05:00

I just saw A Midsummer Night's Dream, and wow that was just #@*&'ing crazy. It took me a while to get into the spirit of it, but once I did that was absolutely hilarious. There's glam rock faeries swooping in and doing musical numbers in a variety of styles, the Mechanicals are actually funny, there's hot young people in their underwear and glam rock faeries swooping around in next to nothing, but what really drew me in was when I realized they were going to be able to add in their own flourishes and still actually respect Shakespeare's text and tell the story without the irreverant eyeroll that says "we're too zany sexy cool for this dried out Elizabethan prose... jazz hands on three!" that accompanies an adaptation as unrestrained as this one. And there are crazy painted glam rock faeries with feathers everywhere and glittery codpieces dropping down from the ceiling, it's crazy.

I don't often get to laugh as hard as I did at the Mechanicals' play at the end, and to just enjoy the whole energy coursing off of that bunch. And this is one thing I love about the new Guthrie, that you can have three completely different styles of art going at the same time and everyone just spills back out into the bars at intermission. Lou Bellamy and Penumbra are digging deep into American history and the human soul in Gem of the Ocean on one side, Joe Dowling and the Guthrie are blowing up a confetti factory on the other, and above it all there are French dancers stomping out their cigarettes in 3/4 time upstairs in the Studio. I love this place, I really do.

And now I'm off to the Twins-Red Sox game at the HumptyDome to take in a completely different style of performing art at what I'm now starting to think of as the fourth theater. And Midsummer put me in such a good mood that not even that stupid umpire from the Black Sox series finale who waited so long to call a strike on a 3-1 count that the batter headed to first and both runners moved up as everyone in the building thought it was a ball. Okay, let's be honest... that guy could still ruin my good mood. But if he's the home plate ump tonight I'm totally getting Oberon to come swooping out of the stands to verily smite his ass. Forsooth.

Chicago Destinations

2008-05-04T10:46:00.004-05:00

On my last trip to the City of Children dodging fish with Clive Owen, I hit some of my favorite locations and some new ones, and I've decided some things never get old when I go to Chicago. And some things get old awful fast.

Things That Never Get Old:

The Museum of Contemporary Photography always finds at least one nugget of provocative artsy goodness to make the small detour worthwhile. And even if they ever did put on a crappy exhibition, I could never stay angry at a free museum. This time the large picture of a South American shanty town made it all worth it, because of the amount of time it took me to realize that mixed in to all these corrugated tin and paper shacks that had never seen a level were these gleaming cedar homes designed to be off-axis and edgy, blending right into these scrap metal domiciles.

The solarium at the Adler Planetarium is always nice on a cold windy day in Chicago, sunlit and calm with this panoramic view of Lake Michigan. And I still like a nice planetarium show, so I can point up at the night sky and act smart until Amstelbooij cuts me off saying, "Thank you Galileo, now go to bed." (Eppur si muove!)

The best breakfast in the city is still Noogie's, whether it's the original, Too, or Tree. The strawberry and mascarpone napoleon that requires a steak knife to eat is still to die for, and come summer I'm camping out overnight for the first crack at the three berry brioche. The Breakfast Club is good, but three locations just off the red and brown lines is hard to beat.

I also never get tired of Chinatown, just even to walk around for a while, because it really is like another country nestled into a few blocks on the south side. And it's nice to be able to pop down and pick up a little giant clam and tiger balm (it was a wild weekend) and Chinatown's markets are certainly unique. Chinatowns in other cities have been difficult for gentrification to dislodge because many Asian property owners won't sell their Chinatown holdings and give up the character of the neighborhood, so hopefully Chicago's Chinatown is here to stay as well. And Argyle St, which I still think of as "Not-Chinatown" for its concentration of non-Chinese Asian businesses.

Joining that list may be the Baha'i House of Worship in Wilmette. Out at the end of the purple line, it's this beautiful bastion of tranquility, and I know very few people with too much openness and tranquility in their lives. I may add that to my list of places I keep returning to in Chicago, a place that asks nothing but that you be at peace when you enter, and keeps services blessedly short. Certainly shorter than the trip up there... next time I'll be smart enough to pick up a purple express at rush hour.

Things That Were Worth a Trip Once:

The National Museum of Mexican Art has some interesting elements in its collection, especially the political art in the Chupacabra-themed gallery. There's too much old pottery for my taste, so I probably won't make it a point of going out there too often, but I really can't stay away from a free museum for too long.

The L platform at 18th street is so extravagantly decorated by Latino artists that it adds another highlight to the museum. I wish more Chicago stations had their own style, and you can see bits of this at Chinatown, but it seems like a huge opportunity during the huge renovation that has to be done all over the L. Letting local artists painting the panels on some of the platforms is certainly cheap enough to be viable. Also adding to the style of the pink line, I like the ancient subway cars with batwing doors they have banging along that line.

Chinatown's own Chinese-American Museum is interesting for its reminder of how long there has been a largely independent, sometimes segregated Chinese-American community in Chicago, and I hope they are able to continue to develop their exhibits and keep that history alive. I don't know that I'll be buying a $1000 glass brick, but it's important.

The Leather Archives boasts the best collection of uniforms and hardcore gay S&M porn I think you're likely to see in a midwestern museum, and I enjoyed their big screen presentation of short films showing in the theater as well. I resisted the temptation to buy a t-shirt of a muscular, mustached man sodomizing a bound boytoy, even though I do need something to wear around the office, but I like their gift shop. And really what I like most of all is their attitude: friendly and relaxed, without a touch of either shame or defiance... "Hi, we're here, come on in and stay a while."

Things I May Give Another Shot:

The Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Museum in Chinatown is supposedly a one-room museum of Kuomintang memorabilia, which I wouldn't make a trip to see if it wasn't right on the main drag in Chinatown above a storefront. Dr. Sun Yat-Sen is referred to by some as the father of modern China and he's got a bigger museum somewhere in Hong Kong, so I figure it's worth a look if I'm ever back on a weekend... I can't say no to a free museum.

I'm all annoyed at the torrential rain that was pouring down on my last attempt to take in a Twins-Black Sox game at Comiskey, and then last night's game against the Black Sox had a lengthy rain delay as well. I seriously just want to get in some outdoor baseball before the new Twins stadium opens in 2010... I shall return.

I also didn't think the rain and overcast skies did much to heighten my appreciation for James Turrell's Skyspace installation thingy on the UIC campus at Roosevelt and Halsted. Also the screwed up #12 bus getting delayed and overloaded doesn't do much for anybody's appreciation of art. I would like to see Turrell's piece when there's actual light for it to work with, and the fountain that's supposed to deaden some of the street noise and make the place tranquil, rather than dull, windswept and dusty.

Things That Just Failed:

I'm done eating at any restaurant in the Loop. Or basically anywhere with a wait... you would think that would indicate a good restaurant, what it actually means is the people who eat there don't know anywhere else to go, so they just sit and wait for an hour and a half for an uninspiring dinner and a stomach-acid inspiring bill. It's never a great experience, and half the time the staff don't know what the hell they're doing, leaving a tray of half-eaten food next to the table for you to look at as your empty stomach rumbles, then arbitrarily taking the bread plates and utensils away (but leaving the bread)... there is good food in Chicago, but there isn't any place worth waiting an hour behind a line of ovine yuppies. Except Noogies. It's always worth the wait at Noogies.

Gem of the Ocean

2008-05-03T12:39:00.008-05:00

This past Sunday, Carl Eller and I took in the Guthrie's presentation of Gem of the Ocean, although not together (I'm not in tight with any Purple People Eaters). Carl sat in the good seats while I was chaperoning the Howling Dowlings, who are young and talented and still in search of a better name.

I suppose the most important thing to say about current production of Gem of the Ocean is that while it is presented by the Guthrie, it is Penumbra's show, and from that flows everything good and bad about the show. The Penumbra Theatre Company is one of about three African American theater companies in North America, and that allows them to offer something you'll likely never see anywhere else, a show performed by a black cast aimed only at a black audience, with all others in attendance welcome to come along for the ride. August Wilson was a huge believer in Penumbra, who performed more of his plays than any other theater in the world and had a personal relationship with him, so there was no better company to see perform the beginning of his 20th century cycle on the late playwright's birthday.

It certainly was a tremendous performance, especially James Craven as Solly Two Kings, in a story that was certainly not like anything I'm used to seeing. The play, set in turn of the century Pittsburgh, is about a lot of things but what really struck me was Solly Two Kings, a former slave and conductor on the underground railroad, trying to pass along the legacy of that to another generation in the midst of a racist backlash and great turmoil about what the future of African Americans was going to be at the dawn of the 20th century. They really didn't care if I got what they were doing, and I'm sure I missed a lot of it, but man my eyes were glued to James Craven every time he came on stage. The journey to the City of Bones was truly a departure to something mythical, and the operatic quality of those voices rising through the proscenium theater, it really was something special. And there are certainly a lot more positive things I could say about Penumbra's show, including repeating fifty-seven times how great James Craven was.

I do have reservations about the production, and I wonder if some problems are a result of Penumbra being too close to Wilson and his work. There is a relentless gravity to the play and it holds so many notes far too long for my taste, often taking a very moving moment and crushing it under a second helping of pathos. This makes the play exhausting more than exhilarating, which is actually kind of tragic. On the whole, I was still left with a lot to think about, a desire to see Penumbra on stage again, and a deep gratitude to the Guthrie for putting the weight of their marketing machine and their magnificent venue behind the show, which will hopefully be the first of several collaborations with Penumbra. No word yet from Carl Eller on what he thought of the show, or the Vikings' weakness at offensive tackle.

The last three movies I've seen in the theater

2008-05-03T12:39:00.007-05:00

Rambo

Obviously I wasn't the only one waiting with growing anxiety over the last twenty years to find out whatever happened to John Rambo after he single-handedly chased the Russians out of Afghanistan. No, there was at least one other person in the theater when I saw it, and the movie did make back almost half of its production budget, proving demand is strong for new tales of blowing shit up and wiping your mouth with the American flag.

Actually though it wasn't all that bad. And the Rambo franchise, like the song "Born in the USA", was never quite so rah-rah America anally raping communism pigs as people who never saw the movies probably thought. The original concept for this character is a green beret with severe untreated PTSD from years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam who gets pushed out of town by a good ol' boy sheriff, and the latest sequel returns to that origin. An aging Rambo has returned to Thailand, barely able to cope with human contact and making a living trapping snakes in Thailand. When a group of Christian missionaries ask him for help getting into Myanmar and predictably get themselves captured by warlords, he goes back to the one thing he knows how to do: kill an entire army with homemade weapons. And the movie really delivers on its promise of the old Rambo howling through the bamboo like the angel of death, without ignoring the last twenty years of his continuing breakdown. So I liked it. I'm not thinking Stallone has a SAG award in his future, but really, this was about the best you could hope for resurrecting the Rambo franchise, and a pleasant surprise.

Street Kings

What a difference letting the suits do the casting makes. Street Kings is full of great actors, including comedic actors like Hugh Laurie, award winning actors like Forest Whitaker, annoying but effectively cast actors like Jay Mohr, typecast actors like Noel Gugliemi (everybody's favorite Latino banger), underrated actors like Chris Evans (who really needs a better agent), strangely named actors like Cedric the Entertainer, and non-actors like Common and The Game, and they all do really well. And then there's the lead... Keanu Reeves never provides a single genuine moment in this film, and his usual post-concussive style of acting drowns the whole movie. He's like that horrible child corpse at the end of Friday the 13th that pops out of the water to drag down the canoe; just when you think the movie's really turning into something interesting, there's Keanu giving line readings like he's just been repeatedly punched in the face. Getting a decent performance out of Keanu Reeves is like dubbing Nicholas Cage into Cantonese, with the right material some directors have done it, but apparently David Ayers isn't one of them.

Iron Man

Iron Man was a blast. Iron Man and The Dark Knight have already restored my faith in comic book adaptations after the recent Spider-Man, Superman, and Fantastic Four debacles, and The Dark Knight hasn't even come out yet. But Iron Man was a hell of a lot of fun, and proves the power of decent casting, especially when it comes to female leads in popcorn movies. Robert Downey jr is perfectly cast as peripatetic playboy Tony Stark and Gwyneth Paltrow can be great when she's given something other to do than quiver her lower lip, and Terence Howard is always great no matter what awful movie he's in (seriously, he brought his A game to that 50 Cent biopic) and Downey's mile-a-minute banter against Howard's straight man and Paltrow's deadpan make this a hilarious film to watch. The timing is so good I laughed out loud at every gag, even when I knew it was coming, including Jim Cramer's hyperactive, studio-destroying sell rating against Stark Industries stock, and my favorite Stan Lee cameo ever. Jeff Bridges is delightfully bald and conniving, and while staying light, the film does find enough depth and scale to make a hero out of Tony Stark... it's just a great movie. And stick around for the post-credits teaser.

Vikings Draft Errata

2008-05-02T17:14:00.004-05:00

I would be remiss not to correct a couple errors and just general wishful thinking:

1. The Vikings vanishing 7th round pick

The Vikings traded their 7th round pick to the Packers in order to move up in the 5th round and take QB John David Booty. That's interesting to me, that they had their eye on him enough to be monkeying around with the Packers to be sure they got their guy. I doubt Booty slips away to the practice squad, and despite Childress talking about keeping 4 QB's, I hope they just cut Bollinger loose after training camp so I don't have to watch him getting sacked on the first play of every drive.

2. The Vikings do have a glaring hole besides wide receiver, and that's offensive tackle. Ryan Cook was not too impressive on the right side, and Bryant McKinnie's recent arrest makes it possible they'll be completely without a left tackle. Not having a tackle covering his blind side makes it more likely Tavaris Jackson will convincingly dub a Nicholas Cage movie into Cantonese than successfully get a pass off. Hopefully there's some sort of plan in place, otherwise I want Bollinger to start next year... if we're going to get a QB killed, it should definitely be him.

Anatomy in the Gallery

2008-04-28T11:18:00.003-05:00

In my recent trips to Chicago, I decided to get off the beaten path and try and make it to more places I've never been, which has led to some gems (the Bahá'í temple in Wilmette, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 18th St station) and some misfires. I wasn't sure how to classify the International Museum of Surgical Science, which does feature a beautiful building right on the lake (modeled on Marie Antoinette's summer cottage) to house its reverent artwork depicting great healers of the last 2000 years, and a really great gift shop with plush microbes (the red blood cell with googly eyes is cute as can be, and I'm kind of fond of the soft and squiggly syphilis bacterium as well). Sometimes you can like the idea behind something more than the actual implementation, like I have to love a medical museum with its own medical themed art gallery, no matter how strange that art may turn out to be, like an installation of what looks like pasta dried onto construction paper that's selling for $400.

And speaking of their gallery, the IMSS is hosting a gallery opening this Friday May 2 from 5pm-8pm for their newest exhibitions, ExtraSensory and Two Spaces, One Body, which both look extraordinarily weird and fascinating. For anyone living in the Near North area, this might be an interesting place to stop off on a Friday evening for a free drink. And given the general WTF quality of the place, I definitely recommend seeing the IMSS for free, which is why I went on a Tuesday, but the new exhibitions do look cool. The IMSS is between North and Schiller on Michigan Ave, facing the lake.

2008 Vikings Draft

2008-04-28T09:34:00.004-05:00

This draft was a quiet one for the Vikings, because despite entering with eight picks (four on each day) they traded way most of their early picks. Here's what they got:

Trade - DE Jared Allen

The Vikings traded their first round pick and two third round picks to the Chefs for former Idaho State Bengal and 4 year NFL veteran Jared Allen, who has accumulated 43 sacks and 2 DUIs in his career so far, including 15.5 sacks last season alone (and no DUIs). The nonexistent pass rush really was the Achilles Heel of last year's Vikings defense who found getting to the QB late in games to be more difficult than dubbing Nicholas Cage movies into Cantonese, so Allen could make a huge impact on the right end. If Ray Edwards can slide over to left end the Vikings could remain tough against the run while seriously improving their pass defense.

This trade has been controversial given Allen's alcohol abuse and the high price the Vikings paid, but given the poor development of all the mid-1st round defensive ends the Vikings have taken the last few years, trading up or trading for a veteran was a must. The other glaring position of need for the Vikings has been at receiver where the team hasn't had anybody who could beat single coverage since trading away Randy Moss in 2005. Since no receivers were drafted in the 1st round, the receiving class was obviously too thin to use a first round pick there.

2nd round - FS Tyrell Johnson

With Darren Sharper not getting any younger and Dwight Smith parking his car in the middle of 4th St to partake of the Good Herb, the Vikings secondary certainly needed depth, and a replacement for Smith. Johnson was a strong presence in college who could crash the line of scrimmage, and also set conference records for interception return yardage. He's tough and speedy, and could potentially work out at either safety spot or cornerback. Plus in college he was a Red Wolf, how Minnesota is that? The Vikings swapped a 4th rounder for a 5th rounder to move up in the 2nd round and get Johnson.

Rounds 5, 6, & 7

They say an NFL team is built with 2nd-4th round draft picks, and the Vikings traded away two 3rd rounders and a 4th rounder to secure Allen and Johnson, so this is definitely a light draft. Starting in the 5th round, teams start to gamble, and while a 5th rounder is expected to survive training camp (even if he may never pan out) a 6th round draft pick generally has some glaring shortcomings and may never make the team, although many 6th rounders go on to become superstar players. A 7th rounder is a warm body for drills in training camp. All that being said, John Randle and Robrt Griffith were both undersized defenders who got invites to Vikings training camps after going undrafted and later went to the Pro Bowl, so a smart team that knows where to dig can find some buried pirate treasure in later rounds.

5th Round - DT Letroy Guion & QB John David Booty

So of course with their first 5th round pick the Vikings picked up a QB named Booty ("Hey professor, what's another word for pirate treasure?") who while not exactly eye-popping, could develop into solid back-up. He is an accurate passer suited to the short crossing routes favored in the West Coast Offense that Brad Childress claims he's running (even if he does constantly have receivers stopping and coming back for the ball). On the other hand if he rises above the practice squad or #3 QB in the next couple of years, the Vikings have some serious problems.

Defensive tackle (those are the guys who play in the middle) Letroy Guion didn't start too many games at Florida State, but he was productive in a good program with a tough schedule. Weighing in at over 300 lbs (that's ~138 kilos for those of you who've been living in Europe too long) he's not too quick but reportedly changes direction quickly enough to find routes into the backfield, and given the Vikings need for pass rushers, I'm willing to give a shot to a guy who got 12.5 sacks off the bench for the Seminoles last year. Hopefully he could be depth at under tackle or come in on passing downs.

6th Round - C John Sullivan & WR Jaymar Johnson

I have no idea what Notre Dame center John Sullivan has going for him other than he supposedly has the smarts to play center if not the build. The Vikings current center was a late round pick with a Harvard degree, so maybe smarts are underrated for the guys who have to know the playbook well enough to call out blocking assignments at the line of scrimmage, and every play begins with the O-line forming a wall or opening up a lane. On the other hand Birk an pull out from the middle of the line and come charging around the end to surprise the fuck out of a linebacker on a screen or a sweep. Nevertheless, I'll be interested to know what Sullivan brings to the table other than an intimate familiarity with Touchdown Jesus.

Jaymar Johnson will require a lot of work on the practice field and in the weight room, because in the pros he can't just outrun everybody like he did at Jackson State. The Vikings desperately need receivers, so opportunities will certainly arise as a return man or 4th wide-out on a roster that features such luminaries as Bobby Wade, Bernard Berrian, Sidney Rice, and Aundrae Allison ahead of him. (Actually I have high hopes for Rice and Allison in their second year).

And that's the 2008 Vikings draft, which accomplished the following goals:

1. Developing a pass rush - Jared Allen could be a game changer
2. Keeping the secondary from crumbling - Tyrell Johnson could be a strong addition
3. Depth on the D-line, O-line, at receiver, and QB

The glaring problems that remain:

1. Quarterback
The quarterback situation is still a mess, and Booty isn't going to change that. The Tardis needs to get a lot better and the team needs to get a veteran in the #2 slot who can help him learn. I can only hope Hopefully Gus Frerotte is that guy.

2. Wide Receiver
Somebody's got to step up and give Jackson a target on the sidelines, crossing the middle, or downfield, because as much we all like finding a tight end and going deep, TE Visanthe Shiancoe and the backs shouldn't be the only passing options. Adding Jaymar Johnson won't help that, but hopefully Berrian will have a break-out year, more likely the continued development of Sidney Rice could help a lot and the speed of Aundrae Allison could add another option.

Overall, I'm optimistic. I like the Tardis and I have some hopes that a steadier hand behind him will make a difference as will the presence of some targets to throw to, and everybody will have learned a bit from last year. For the receivers, I'm definitely going long on Rice futures (as soon as anybody from the rice pit at the CME gets back from their six martini lunch and takes my call) and a single reliable option would be 1000% more than the Tardis had last year. Add that to a tremendous running game and a defense without the glaring deficiency against the pass late in games, and the Vikings should be back in the play-offs, hopefully as a division winner.