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“Do you think you can make an all-star wrestler out of me?” I asked Sheriff and Shifty at Midwest Pro Wrestling in Maple Grove. They looked me over—I’m 5’ 9” and weigh only 155 pounds—and assured me, “Sure, just give us enough time. Size doesn’t matter anymore.” In fact, Terry Klinger (stage name “Sheriff”) is slightly shorter than I am, so I signed up for a trial session.

“The first six months is wrestling training, then the second six months we work on costumes, talking in front of the camera, and riling up the crowd,” Sheriff told me. How did he get his snazzy name? “I can still remember the day! I was channel-surfing and heard the theme song for Cops. I went down to the cop shop on Hennepin for a uniform and even got a badge with my name on it. The fans love it!”

Shifty, aka Dan Schaffner, chimed in. “There are basically two kinds of characters. ‘Heels’ are the bad guys, and ‘faces’—or ‘baby faces’—are the good guys. If you can’t make people hate you, then you’re a face. You can be a heel for six months, then the fans love you and you become a face. It used to be that the heel would come out and insult the crowd. Nowadays, everyone likes the heels because people like the bad guys better.”

I asked if I could still wrestle if I don’t have an alter ego yet. “You probably don’t want people to know your real name, because then you’re in the phone book and then they show up at your work. That’s no good,” Sheriff told me.

I couldn’t wait to get started. Shifty and Sheriff told me I could begin wrestling in front of crowds at their Sunday evening performances in Maple Grove after six months of training. “We get up to 225 people in here for the shows at three dollars each,” Sheriff said. The matches are then aired on channel 20 in the northwest suburbs and on channel 6 everywhere else, starting in May.

First, I needed to meet my adversaries: The Punisher, Kid Krazy, Joey E. (a cruiserweight champion), The Anarchist (“Right now, he’s a heel, but he used to be a face”) and Joessiah (as in Joe-Messiah, who has his own religion with his Joesciples and dreams of Joetopia). Absent tonight were Chaos, Pretty Boy Delgado, and Ice Cream Man (“He comes out in his white pants and hands out ice cream bars to the fans”). I wanted to shoot some photos of these young wrestlers, but Sheriff stopped me. “I don’t want people to see them without their costumes because the fans will start talking on Internet chatrooms about how they’ve seen that these guys are actually friends.”

Before we started training, I asked Shifty if the rumors are true that professional wrestling is fake. He obviously didn’t like the question and surprised me by breaking into a semantic discussion. “Define the word fake,” he challenged. “Fake meaning it doesn’t hurt, then you’re wrong. Fake meaning it’s a show, then you’re right.”

I got suited up in a dressing room that was wallpapered with WWE posters, swimsuit centerfolds, and 93X banners. Hoping to intimidate my rivals, I donned my “Big Ole” T-shirt, which depicts a viking. Sheriff then introduced me to the wrestlers. “This is Eric. He’s a journalist for The Rake and doesn’t think this is real, or that we get hurt. Who wants to get in the ring with him first?” These motley characters snickered as though they could smell fresh blood. Sheriff stopped them. “Before we do anything, you have to learn how to ‘take a bump.’” In other words, how to fall.

“The floor has a car spring in the middle covered by two-by-sixes and a horse-hair mat,” Sheriff said, as he demonstrated correct landing procedure. I mimicked his moves. My legs flew into the air, and I hit the canvas with a painful thud. The mat wasn’t nearly as soft as I expected; my first ‘bump’ almost knocked the wind out of me. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Breathe out before you fall. And tuck your head.”

The next move was “running the ropes,” or taking no more than two steps across the eighteen-foot ring and springing off the garden-hose-covered cables. The goal was to build maximum speed, and thereby reap devastation on my giant opponents. Luckily, they refrained from giving me the “Leaping Neckbreaker Clothesline” as I ran back and forth.

Since neither “taking a bump” nor “running the ropes” seemed to be my strength, the Sheriff suggested I take a “Flying Leg Drop” across my neck. “Lay down in the middle of the mat. And whatever you do, don’t move a muscle or you’ll get hurt.” Joessiah flew off the rope and landed with his enormous right leg across my Adam’s apple. I thought this was surely the end, as the deafening thunk of his body crashed over me. Unbelievably, I was fine. Joessiah miraculously broke his fall with his other leg, which crashed harmlessly near my head.

Unscathed, my confidence was building. Maybe I truly could become a professional wrestler. Joessiah took that as his cue to fly off the ropes and nail me with a punishing “Running Elbow Drop.” Once again I forgot to breathe. As I staggered to my feet, gasping for air, he was eager to demonstrate the “Full Body Slam.” I politely declined.

Tag off! It was The Anarchist’s turn. “Don’t resist! Just relax or you’ll get hurt,” the Sheriff warned me, as The Anarchist dropped me on my stomach and tied me into a submissive pretzel. While my limbs were a limp knot behind my back, he asked if I wanted to see his “finishing move.” At least the questions were getting easier. No, I said.

Instead, The Anarchist showed off his “signature” on another new student named Joe. “Total Anarchy” consisted of leaping from the ropes onto Joe, spinning him like a sack of potatoes, and then flinging him on the mat as if he were a booger.

While The Anarchist was reveling in victory with his back turned to me, I looked around for a folding chair to get in at least one cheap shot. The Sheriff read my mind, though, and said the chairs only come out for the performances.—Eric Dregni

When Joel and Ethan Coen made Fargo and gave the world a generous serving of the rounded, marbles-in-the-mouth outstate Minnesota accent, it seemed a little over the top. But we all knew it was out there. Just 20 minutes of any WCCO-AM call-in show will prove it. Even those of us in the metro have the long O and the hard R, though we think we talk like newscasters.

Of course, we’re always adding to the mix. Norm Coleman, a New Jersey native, brought us vowels that sounded, oddly, sort of South Boston. First he told us, “I wanna be yah Mayah,” then “I wanna be yah Govenah,” and finally, “I wanna be yah Senatah.” With his thumb ever poised for action, there will doubtless be more of these announcements, but that’s a different story. More recently, Coleman has turned his Southie accent against one of his own party, scolding State Representative Arlon Lindner. He is the Corcoran legislator who has lately brought shame on the state with language that sounds more like Deliverance than Grumpy Old Men.

Coming from a guy who represents a district just outside the 494/694 beltway, Lindner’s twangy drawl has been just as startling as the content of his speech. To find out how this dialect might have emerged on the edge of the prairie, we turned to the late Harold Allen, who painstakingly mapped Minnesota speech patterns for a masterpiece of research titled The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest. Samples taken near Lindner’s congressional district (32A) found farmers with “speech of moderate tempo, with unusually distinct articulation of emphasized words. Deliberate, even-tempered, carefully articulated speech. No special peculiarities.” Hard to see where Arlon Wayne Lindner fits in there.

But maybe things have changed since 1973, when the atlas was published. So The Rake loaded up the wagon and headed northwest to Corcoran, almost smack in the center of district 32A, and Lindner’s current hometown.

The Stanchion and its ornamental fiberglass cow sit at the intersection of County Roads 10 and 50. The morning crowd on a weekday is a mix of retired locals in seed caps and somewhat younger guys who have just finished with the morning’s snow removal. They work for a lawn service company with contracts in the new developments that are now paving over the few remaining farms in Hennepin County.

Some of the crowd warmed to the topic of Arlon Lindner with racial jokes. A few seemed embarrassed by this, but one guy with a big white beard and a long thin ponytail couldn’t be stopped. He loves Lindner, and it turns out, he’s pretty unhappy about African Americans.

“I’ve worked hard my whole life to support myself. Why should I have to pay for a bunch of niggers who don’t want to work?” What part of Lindner’s legislative agenda remedies this problem he didn’t say. But he wanted me to know he’s not a racist, offering this proof: “Go out in the parking lot and look at my truck. I’ve got one white mud flap and one black one.”

Francis Pomeroy, a World War II vet who says he votes both DFL and GOP, hopes Lindner will do something about illegal immigrants.

“These citizens [sic] that come over have more rights than you and I and they’ve only been here ninety days,” said Pomeroy. “There was a picture in the paper the other day of an illegal alien protesting. What have they got to protest about?”

Others at the bar seemed a bit more acquainted with the current crap-storm involving Lindner, and they seem to think he’s on the right track, too. Doug Theis, a former truck driver, is no fan of gay rights.

“I don’t want to see AIDS become an epidemic like it is over there in Africa. Those diseases are coming from people living, let’s just say, a tasteless lifestyle,” said Theis gravely.

Vernon Peterson, a stocky Korean War veteran, got his coffee refilled and echoed this view. “There’s no racism in it. He tells it like it is,” said Peterson. “If we want to turn into the greatest AIDS nation in the world, we can compete with Africa. It’s a proven fact that Africa is rampant with AIDS and HIV and all that stuff. And that’s all he said. If we want to be equal with them, keep it up.”

Lindner is currently serving his sixth term in the House and has been gay-bashing pretty much from the start, informing the public as early as 1997 that same-sex marriage is like “a man marrying a dog.” When State Rep. Karen Clark took umbrage at this, Lindner replied, “I don’t know why you felt that was insulting.” He apparently did not have a set of mud flaps coordinated to demonstrate his benign intentions, but eventually acknowledged that Clark, a lesbian, was “one of God’s creations.”

While it was quaint to discover that these and other of Lindner’s views are in step with his constituency, the feeling persists that he’s a good ol’ boy in the geographic, as well as the cultural sense. His middle name is Wayne. His wife’s name is Shirlee. He’s got three German Shepherds. And as “down home” as the fellas at The Stanchion sounded, none spoke in anything remotely like Lindner’s drawl. They all spoke pretty much with the diction and style described in Allen’s samples from Wright County, if not in the way encouraged by Rosalie Maggio’s Dictionary of Bias-Free Usage.

Well, it turns out Arlon Wayne Lindner is from Texas, born there with a rawhide spoon in his mouth in 1935. He got his B.A. from North Texas University, and went north. After receiving his Master of Divinity from Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minneapolis, he decided to stick around and help the State of Minnesota make up for its alarming shortage of concealed weapons. Sure, Lindner might not be able to help out right away with the African-American problem in Corcoran. And his efforts to save Minnesota from becoming “another African continent” might not get traction this year; his proposed repeal of civil rights protections for gays and lesbians has not got the Governor’s nod. But the conceal-carry bill, also popular with the guys at The Stanchion, has good prospects in both houses. If it becomes law, perhaps the good people of Corcoran can take care of their other problems on their own.—Joe Pastoor

Diplomacy, to judge by recent efforts of our not-so-diplomatic commander in chief, is not an easy job. It requires holding your tongue and curbing your temper. First and foremost, however, it requires landing the job, which has always been tough and is just getting tougher. Despite current troubles, or perhaps because of them, interest in the U.S. Foreign Service is at its highest level ever. Last year a record 32,239 of your fellow Americans applied with the State Department or took its Foreign Service exam. Of all these would-be peacemakers, only 470 were offered jobs. Then again, it’s no stroll down the Champs-Elyseés. Every three to four years, foreign service employees must pull up stakes and move to a location of their government’s choosing, almost anywhere on the planet. Sure, it sounds great, but imagine this: One day you find yourself discussing the world economy, piña colada in hand, surrounded by beautiful people on the luscious beaches of Rio de Janeiro, and then poof! You’re languishing over Byerly’s lefse and agonizing about how to get Minneapolis housewives excited about Norwegian opera.

Of course, Norwegian Consul General Thor Johansen is diplomatic about his Minneapolis assignment. In fact, he insists he has found Minneapolis to be nicer than Rio, his previous post, in the year and a half he has served here.

Norway is one of two countries to maintain a consulate general, a mini-embassy of sorts, in Minneapolis. And while Johansen is not sure just how many Norwegian nationals reside in the eight states his consulate serves, the Norwegian government is not quite ready to close up shop, as was rumored two years ago. After all, here is the largest concentration in the world of people with Norwegian roots, Johansen points out.

There are limits to diplomacy, even as the Norwegians practice it. When we tried to weasel an invitation to Johansen’s tax-exempt, government-issue home, which is located on the western frontiers of Lake Minnetonka, and held in the name of the King of Norway, the consul general demurred.

Meanwhile, over at the Canadian Consulate, Consul General Christopher Thomson lends a shiny diplomatic glow to brochures on the “Smart Border Action Plan,” the United States-Canadian initiative on security along one of the largest borders in the world. Thomson’s previous assignments include the United Arab Emirates, the U.N. in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, and Beirut. Regardless of this impressive and exciting resume, he also has kind and diplomatic things to say about his assignment in Minneapolis. When he’s not tightening up on terrorists, Thomson promotes Canadian business in an eight-state region. The consul general from the True North insists that Americans are not hated nearly as much as we might fear. It’s not clear how much consolation he is offering.

Like Johansen, Thomson retires at the end of a busy day to his tax-exempt, government-issue home, a comfortable colonial on Cedar Lake in Minneapolis. His too is owned in the name of foreign royalty. Queen Elizabeth’s name appears on the title of one of the few homes with waterfront on a Minneapolis lake, a holdover from feudal times, no doubt. Consul General Thomson wishes to assure excitable readers that the Queen owns the home—and, for that matter, Canada—only in name. She is not likely to visit Minneapolis any time soon. Although Thomson would not invite us in, he assured us that there is a portrait of the Queen on prominent display for his private guests. “As an official Canadian residence,” Thomson said dryly, “it’s normal to do that sort of thing.”—Katie Quirk

A few weeks ago, we were blessed by a yearly event that has come to symbolize all that’s good and noble about the human spirit. United Health Group CEO William McGuire received his annual stock option grant. On Valentine’s Day, Minnesota’s best-paid executive notified the SEC that he has received an option for 650,000 shares of United Health Group stock. This tidy sum is a small token of the shareholders’ esteem and gratitude. Recently, the entire token of their esteem has been in the neighborhood of $50 million per year.

That’s a lot of tokenage, and we wondered: If McGuire actually had a heart, and it was infarcted, how many transplants could he afford? (In the absence of a heart, we guess it technically would be considered an implant.)—Jem Casey

McGuire’s Annual Income (2000–not including unvested options): $54 million

Average Cost of a Heart Transplant/Implant: $200,000

Number of Heart Transplants/ Implants possible per year for McGuire, paid in cash: 270
Number of major medical policies that could be issued for $54 million 45,000

Number of uninsured Americans 40 million

Except for a few listing gravestones, you could easily mistake the vacant lot for a small park or the exceptionally large backyard of one of the lucky homeowners bordering it. A bus stop and a row of gnarled oaks describes one edge near the street. Two green beer bottles stand attention at a granite monument. There, a bronze plaque identifies the grounds as a “potter’s field.”

Since biblical times, humans have set aside burial grounds for paupers and unknowns. After Judas betrayed Jesus, he passed off his blood money to the priests. They didn’t dare keep the tainted silver. So, according to Matthew, “They took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.” The priests chose a field where clay was dug for pottery, and the name stuck.

The plaque in the St. Anthony Township cemetery, just east of Stinson Boulevard, details a more recent interment. In 1853, with Minnesota still five years from statehood, Lewis Stone donated a one-acre homestead “to be used exclusively for the uses of the public as a common and free burying grounds forever and never to be used for other purposes whatever.” It was an act of charity that made this quiet neighborhood lot some of the oldest hallowed ground in the metro area (excluding native burial grounds). But the cemetery itself has become something of an indigent.

Searches of historical repositories for the city, county, and state reveal only cursory facts about the miniature necropolis. “We have absolutely nothing on it,” said Jay Hartman, the public works director for St. Anthony. “We maintain it because no one else will.”

This funerary ground is not the only one of its kind. A dozen potter’s fields dot the metro landscape, in various states of disuse and neglect. Many appear to be abandoned lots. Some have been turned into parks appointed with jungle gyms and picnic tables. Some, like the cemetery just off the State Fair midway, or the plot at Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street Southeast, have simply disappeared beneath the asphalt of an expanding city.

These burial grounds were often set next to “poor farms,” public workhouses charged with the care of the state’s destitute at the turn of the last century. One of these was the Ramsey County poor farm, just off White Bear Avenue in Maple Grove. There, in an unidentified parcel the size of a city block, nearly 3,000 bodies lie in unmarked graves. Through the years, nearby construction projects, such as widening the avenue, have accidentally uncovered human remains. In 2001, a protected zone was established to prevent further disturbances. It was modeled on efforts at the Gettysburg Memorial.

“It takes a lot to move a cemetery. You don’t just do it,” said Steven Tibbetts from the Institute of Mortuary Science at the University of Minnesota. In addition to respect for the final resting place, it’s largely an issue of money. Scant records exist, graves were unmarked, and burial techniques were in many cases pre-modern. These realities turn any attempt at disinterment into a major archeological dig. Add to that reburial costs, and it’s easy to understand why the sites are forgotten and the land is slowly adapted to other surface uses.

Mark Trostad’s backdoor is less than ten feet from the edge of the St. Anthony potter’s field. When he moved in, there was a privacy fence the previous owner had hastily assembled, apparently to help sell the property. The sight of a few random gravestones just past the kitchen window frightened away most prospective buyers. But the dead don’t bother Trostad, who sees the cemetery as a park.

“I took it down the first week I was here,” he explained, although he hasn’t managed to extract the posts yet. “I work at home. I like to look at the trees all day.”

Today, the county and Medical Assistance pick up the cost for the indigent dead, burying them in functioning local cemeteries. And the unknown? Well, there just aren’t that many of them. Since 1997, State Health Department statistics reveal only three unidentified deaths in Minnesota. Even in death, Social Security numbers, DNA testing, and computer databases pretty much ensure that the most down-on-their-luck don’t slip into the afterlife without a marker.—John Tribbett

It would seem a 39-year-old man playing at Legoland would stand out. But it’s obvious that Carl belongs; no one gives him a second glance. He’s absorbed in his task, concentrating on building the perfect Lego locomotive. It takes some time, but the finished train engine is a piece of work, heavily reinforced to withstand any obstacle it may encounter. Carl sends the locomotive careening down the Legoland race ramp alongside all the kids’ cars and trucks, and it comes to an abrupt stop as it hits the bumper at the bottom. Satisfied with the result, Carl walks back to his bike parked outside. For the ride home in the growing dark he turns on his lights, all 20 of them. With each light powered by two to four batteries, it takes large quantities of Ds and AAAs to keep the lights going. Carl keeps a few boxes of them on hand.

It’s Saturday afternoon and Carl Bentson has pedaled his bike to the Mall of America. The ride from his St. Paul home isn’t too long, a little more than an hour each way. Starting from his place near West Seventh, Carl pedaled up the big hill at 35E and St. Clair Avenue and then west across town to the river, then south to the Ford Bridge and across to Minneapolis, around Fort Snelling and the airport to the Mall.

Although Carl enjoys the ride, he does it mostly out of necessity. As a person with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome and its associated retardation, Carl doesn’t drive motor vehicles. His bike is his means of transportation. Every time he goes to his job, runs an errand, shops, or heads out to enjoy one of his many interests, he’ll be riding his bike.

Cornelia de Lange Syndrome is congenital. Speech and communication are affected and there is usually some degree of retardation. Carl doesn’t let it slow him down. He has a seemingly endless supply of energy and enthusiasm. A powerfully built man, short and stocky with fireplug legs, he usually wears suspenders.

Carl is special in another way, a way that continues to astonish anyone who knows him. Carl lives with Savant Syndrome, a rare and spectacular condition in which a person has developmental disorders but astonishing brilliance in one particular area. In Carl’s case, the disorder manifests itself in a nearly photographic memory for information and minutiae related to automobiles.

If you want to know the original list price of an automobile, its standard and optional features, or just about any detail concerning cars—any make or model—ask Carl. Once, while driving with Carl in my van, I mentioned that I’d looked at another model that was slightly longer. Without hesitation, Carl recited the length in inches of the wheelbase of both my vehicle and the other model. I checked later, and found that he had remembered the specs correctly.

Carl also recalls volumes of information on two other areas of interest to him: aircraft and weather data. Want to know how much snow fell during the Halloween Blizzard of 1991, what time it started, or what the temperature was? Ask Carl.

The idea that some savant capabilities might reside in each of us—that there is a little hibernating Rain Man inside—is an intriguing one. Dr. Darold Treffert says there have been instances of “normal” persons in whom savant skills emerged following a head injury, a phenomenon called Acquired Savant Syndrome. Treffert, a psychiatry professor at Madison, says there are documented cases of elderly patients whose savant abilities emerged, sometimes at a prodigious level, after being afflicted with dementia. And some medical procedures such as hypnosis and sodium amytal treatment suggest that a huge reservoir of memories lies dormant, non-accessed, in each of us. Treffert says the often surprising images and memories that can surface during our dreams are also evidence of the huge store of buried memories that lie beyond what we can access in our everyday waking state.

In Carl’s case, a passion for cars translates into reams of information that all goes into accessible memory space. One of Carl’s earliest childhood memories is the toy steering wheel his aunt put in the passenger seat of her ’65 Ford so that he could drive the car too. His fascination with automobiles started early and never stopped. He’s literally a walking encyclopedia of automobiles. As various cars pass by, especially the classic cars of the 50s and 60s, he might say “That one originally cost $3,500,” or “How do you like that one? It has shifters on the column.” Often he’ll just say “Niiiiiiiiiiiiiice!”—his highest praise.

Where there are cars, especially vintage ones, you’ll find Carl. He’s a fixture at the classic car and hot rod get-togethers around town during the summer months. At Porky’s on University Avenue, the State Fair car shows, and the weekends in St. Paul when Kellogg Street is barricaded off. Carl’s been around cars so much that he knows about troubleshooting and repairing common automotive problems, without having actually done any of the work himself.

People all over eastern Minnesota recognize Carl, as he pedals his bike just about everywhere to the east, north, and south from the Twin Cities. He goes to Northfield for Jesse James days, Taylor’s Falls to sightsee, to Red Wing, Hastings, and out on the roads in the St. Croix Valley. He shows up with his bike at many special events. I’ve seen Carl at political rallies, street fairs, and free concerts, and on TV at the State Fair.

It was the commercials that first made me suspicious. My local cable conglomerate began running ads intended to remind me of two things: Satellite TV is crap, and I am extremely happy with my cable service. The only thing missing from the commercials was someone swinging a pocket watch in front of my eyes, exhorting me to become “verrrrrrry sleeeepy.”

Then, about a week later, I discovered my monthly cable bill had suddenly gone up 10 bucks. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Now. Getting a straight answer on why my cable service was going up is like getting Bush to explain why he’s going after Saddam Hussein when bin Laden is currently making infomercials for al-Jazeera. What exactly was I paying for? Though this cable giant boasted cutting-edge technology, something as simple as channel surfing was a nightmare. Each digital channel took what felt like two weeks to change from one station…to the next…to the next. By the time I reached HBO, my fingernails had grown a quarter-inch. And while they promised a virtual cornucopia of channels, 40 percent featured either home-shopping or preachers reminding me how I’ll probably end up in H-E-double-hockey-sticks. But perhaps worst of all—and even though science has enabled us to peer into the outer reaches of the universe—when I tried to record one channel while watching another… cable was unable. That’s when I discovered satellite TiVo.

Actually, I discovered TiVo at least a year ago, but the last thing I needed was another bill which refused to be paid on time. Still it was intriguing. For a nominal price each month, TiVo would digitally record up to 80 hours of beautiful, uplifting shows like Am I Hot? or Man vs. Beast or any of those Look How Crazy Michael Jackson Is! specials. And using the phone line, TiVo would also download a complete grid of upcoming television shows, which would completely negate the need to read TV Guide on the toilet—but we’ll just call that a minor design flaw.

However, and perhaps most astonishingly, TiVo allows you to warp time and space itself. It sounds impossible, but it’s true: TiVo allows you to pause live television. It also allows you to rewind live television, and then it allows you to catch up with live television.

Allow me to illustrate. Let’s say you’re watching the opening moments of Alias. Secret agent Sydney Bristow (played by the hotsy-totsy Jennifer Garner) steps out wearing a black bra and panty set from Victoria’s Secret while carrying a riding crop. PAUSE!! PAUSE!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PAUSE!!! With a quick click of the “pause” button, the action is stopped, and you are able to bask in the voluminous booty-liciousness of Jennifer Garner in her underpants. Now while the men among you would undoubtedly use this time to, er, applaud, I would choose to further heighten my revelry by using TiVo to continue the action—but in frame-by-frame SLOOOOW… MOOOTION. I back her up. I push her forward. I back her up. I push her forward… and behold. TiVo has turned Jennifer Garner into my own personal hoochie mama! Then I applaud.

But! After I applaud, I remember there’s the rest of the show to watch, and possibly other opportunities to applaud. So I press play, and the show continues. Whizzing past the commercials, I eventually catch up to what the “real-time” Jennifer is currently doing in the show. Then, after Alias reaches its conclusion, I rewind back to the scene with Jennifer in her underpants, and once again, applaud.

“But wait!” you cry. “This just sounds like a fancy-pants VCR designed for people who like to applaud.” This is true, and yet there is more. Unlike a VCR which is dumb and stupid, the TiVo has a computer brain which makes it smart and neat. Let’s say you’re a fan of that blood-sucking Buffy spin-off, Angel. As you know, they’re constantly frustrating viewers by moving it from Tuesday to Monday to Sunday to Wednesday to… did I leave out a day? But with TiVo, you can schedule what they call a “Season Pass.” This tells the machine to record Angel no matter what crazy day or time it comes on—whether you remember or not. And if you like, it can even skip over the repeats! You can also program in a “Wish List.” Say you want to see any TV show or movie starring Jennifer Garner (preferably in her underpants). Simply type in her name, and even if the show comes on at 3 a.m., your TiVo will automatically find and record Jennifer Garner: The Underpants Years. Mind-blowing, no?

And yet, when I first saw this wondrous machine that would one day expose me to the new and amazingly varied world of Jennifer Garner’s underpants—I remained unconvinced. After all, what good is a TiVo when you’re stuck with a cable system that won’t allow you to watch The Many Underpants of Jennifer Garner while taping Jenny G’s Underpants Party Tonight?

Then I saw the commercial. And in the commercial was a man hurling his useless satellite dish into a garbage can. This is when I said, “Now there is a cable company with something to hide.” After some quick research, I discovered that not only would it be substantially cheaper to get digital satellite television, I would be getting a plethora of additional channels. But here’s the real selling point: By purchasing a very reasonably priced combination TiVo/Satellite receiver (about $300, plus $40 per month subscription), I would not only receive tons of new channels, but with TiVo I could watch one show and record another simultaneously! FINALLY! Frankly, I was so happy I almost applauded in my pants. But then? I also learned I could record TWO channels while watching another show that was already previously recorded! And that, my friends, is when I actually applauded in my pants.

Since then, life has been a freaking dream. No more searching endlessly through crappy videotapes for an episode my VCR neglected to record. No more fighting with the wife over whether to watch the French art film, La Culotte de Jennifer Garner, or her choice, Brad Pitt Strutting Around in a Leopard Print Thong. I watch what I want, when I want, and it was satellite TiVo that freed me from the insidious shackles of my cable-imposed prison.

But I must admit, I would still be imprisoned without the assistance of my local cable conglomerate and their anti-satellite commercials. So thanks a lot, you guys. I never would’ve fired your ass without them.

When I heard about EMI’s deluxe re-issue of Ice Cube’s first four albums, I was struck with a strange sense of nostalgia for both the albums and the era they represent. Of course, nostalgia is kind of a quaint emotion to feel for ultra-violent, incendiary, unabashedly angry albums that viciously attack Jews, white men, women, and Koreans (and that’s just for starters).

Yet I couldn’t help but think back to the days of my tortured adolescence, when I memorized the lyrics to “It Was A Good Day,” watched Yo! MTV Raps every day and played Dr. Dre’s The Chronic until the tape broke. Like countless other melanin-light rap lovers, the bottomless rage of early gangsta rap spoke to me and my life in ways other kinds of music didn’t. It didn’t matter that Ice Cube rapped about being a cynical black outlaw in South Central L.A while I was a white, hooky-prone kid in Chicago. At its heart, gangsta rap, like The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks and a lot of other revolutionary music, was all about being young, angry, poor, and at war with corrupt authority—themes as timeless and universal as any in popular music.

Nirvana’s Nevermind is generally given credit for banishing the plague of hair metal from the pop-music landscape, but the gangsta rap revolution initiated by NWA deserves equal credit. After all, compared to the scowling, police-hating, renegade bad-asses in NWA, Motley Crüe couldn’t help but come off as mascara-abusing girly-men recycling Sweet chords and dressing up in their mommy’s clothing. It’s no coincidence that when metal eventually came back, it had mutated into a rap-rock beast that drew heavily on rap’s unparalleled ability to piss off parents and antagonize adults.

Popular music is inherently a young person’s game, and rap music is even more youth-obsessed than other genres. When Ice Cube wrote much of NWA’s seminal Straight Outta Compton and his own AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (1990), he wasn’t old enough to legally buy beer, but he was experienced enough to convey to a receptive interracial audience the anger and hopelessness of life in the ’hood. Before the Rodney King riots, Cube’s music served due notice that there was a city full of people with nothing to lose who were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it anymore. Collectively, Cube’s music, the riots, and films like Boyz N The Hood (Cube’s cinematic debut) and Menace II Society forced white America to come to terms with the rampant poverty and alienation of its inner cities.

There’s always been an element of voyeurism in white folk’s embrace of black music. Ice Cube’s early albums allowed white suburbanites to vicariously experience the heightened emotions and lawless hedonism of West Coast thug life without ever having to leave the security of their parents’ basement. Ice Cube’s early work rejected outright the utopian promises of integration and assimilation. In albums like AmeriKKKa’s, the crushing poverty and rampant crime of ghetto life made integrationist fantasies like The Cosby Show and similar yarns of endless upward mobility seem like particularly sick jokes. Like the great pulp novelist Jim Thompson in Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me, Ice Cube invited audiences to look at the world through the eyes of a violent sociopath. But in his early albums at least, there was a distinct political context for his misanthropy. To borrow a phrase from Malcolm X, Cube was the hate that hate made, the stone-hearted consequence of America giving up on its inner cities. Cube threw the American dream back in his audience’s face, suggesting that greed, hatred, and racism were the building blocks of a nation founded on slavery and genocide.

The first NWA member to bolt from Eazy-E and Jerry Heller’s Ruthless Records plantation, Ice Cube made a historic decision to record his solo debut with East Coast-based The Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s sonic assault team, and one of the most innovative production teams in music history. Cube’s decision had long-lasting political and cultural ramifications, and his association with Public Enemy gave him added credibility among the sizable but largely overlooked rap audience described once by Common as “coffee shop chicks and white dudes.”

Never one to hold his tongue, Cube made his opinions about that particular demographic painfully clear on Death Certificate (1991) and Lethal Injection (1993). On “Cave Bitch,” Cube railed against white women for, um, being white, while on “Horny Li’l Devil,” he chastised white men for the same crime. Ice Cube’s first four albums are maddening amalgams of razor-sharp social criticism and psychotic hate. One moment, Cube’s incisively calling out America for committing the very crimes it condemns in individuals; the next he’s launching a blatantly racist, unforgivable attack on Koreans for doing business in black neighborhoods.

Lethal Injection marked Cube’s last solo album until War & Peace Volume 1: The War, which came out five years later, in 1998. During the interval, rap music underwent a distinct paradigm shift. The success and eventual martyrdom of Notorious B.I.G. presaged the P-Diddification of rap. Rap had always put a premium on image, but Puff Daddy’s reign led to an emphasis on crass materialism that drove countless people away from rap and did irreparable damage to the genre’s soul. Then too, Tupac Shakur’s similar martryrdom created an army of Tupac clones, some enormously successful (DMX, Ja Rule, Master P), some not, all essentially derivative.

A generation of rap-loving crackers and whiteys who grew up on Public Enemy, NWA, Beastie Boys, EPMD, and Boogie Down Productions found little to identify with in music that seemed more concerned with flash, image, and money than social criticism. Lyrics became borderline irrelevant. Gangsta rap’s misanthropy and misogyny overtook its latent streak of social consciousness. Master P built an empire on little more than brand loyalty, assembly-line production methods and loud, flashy album covers. Mainstream hip-hop seemed to forget its history, focusing only on the now.

Meanwhile, Ice Cube became a movie star. Rapping seemed to become a sideline, something to do between films, commercials, and television appearances. Accordingly, when he returned from his hiatus, he had absolutely nothing to say. The man who once boasted one of the most important voices in popular music was reduced to being just another anonymous gangsta rapper barking out monosyllabic bursts of unimaginative thuggery.

Rap is far from dead, though. One need only look at MCA’s roster (Blackalicious, Mos Def, Common, Talib Kweli, The Roots, Nappy Roots, Black Star) to find signs that it’s not just alive but thriving. And that’s not even mentioning Outkast, Missy Elliott, N.E.R.D., Jurassic 5, Dilated Peoples, Timbaland, and Lauryn Hill. On the independent front, labels like Def Jux, Stones Throw, and Rhymesayers (home of Minnesota’s own Slug, rap’s most important slacker-depressive since Basehead) have all established sterling reputations for creativity and innovation. Good, important, relevant rap music is still being made. But do you care?