The Rake Magazine

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  • Drinking What Comes Naturally

    Greeks and Romans thought the world looked like a fried egg. There was land in the middle, wholly surrounded by Ocean, with a sea (appropriately called the Mediterranean) bisecting the land. Even in the early Middle Ages, fishermen in what is now Normandy are said to have heard at dead of night the boats putting off from shore, carrying the souls of the newly dead off to the Isles of the Blest, out to seas colder than the Hebrides, “where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young star-captains glow.”

    One of the wildest views of Ocean is to be had from the headland in northwest Spain called Finisterre (the End of the Earth). It was on the beach here that medieval pilgrims, after visiting the shrine of St. James the Apostle at Santiago de Compostela, would gather palmate shells as souvenirs.

    The bones of St. James were not discovered at Compostela until around 813 A.D., and the Apostle was quickly enlisted in the struggle of Christian Spain against the Muslims who had controlled much of the peninsula for more than a century. Legend says that St. James was seen mounted on a white horse doing battle in a manner that earned him the sobriquet “Moor-Slayer.” Christians were not alone in having such heavenly help.

    The earliest Muslims, the Companions of the Prophet, saw angels riding beside them at the battle of Badr. You can still meet Muslims—mild men, not wild-eyed enthusiasts who commit atrocities like the recent sad outrage in Madrid—who speak with regret about the way that Spain was lost to the Dar ul-Islam.

    These were regrets Christians of the Early Middle Ages found themselves unable to share. I guess it is all a matter of what you think is natural. Believing in Ocean or the Dar ul-Islam is no odder than believing in Manifest Destiny or the American Century. The trouble with most contemporary prattle about multiculturalism is that it underestimates the depth, the instinctive naturalness of cultural differences and convictions. These are not just a matter of preferring Pepsi to Coke.

    Or preferring neither. A friend recently recalled that when he lived in Spain he felt no need for either cola, indeed found it quite natural to take with his meals a genial red wine called Penascal. He and I proceeded to share a bottle. I liked it so well I bought one for myself—on this shore of Ocean I found the price varies wildly from $5 to $12. This is robust drinking, made mostly from the fruity Tempranillo grape, the variety from which they make the famous wines of Rioja. Tempranillo is known in Portugal as Tinta Roriz and is one of the constituents of port, so the color of Penascal is, as you would expect, a hearty deep red. Our ancestors called such wines Tent, from tinto (“colored”), to distinguish them from the paler, clearer clarets of Bordeaux.

    Penascal has a strong, oaky center—from the barrels it is matured in—but stops short of being unbalanced, harsh, or intrusive. It comes from the broad dry upland of Leon and Castile, whose northern steppes were traversed by pilgrims. The river Duero cuts through to the south (becoming the Douro—of port fame—once it has flowed west into Portugal), and it is in this river valley that Penascal has its origin, though it does not actually have the appellation Ribera del Duero.

    It stands up well to strong flavors, to garlic or paella or sharp or stinky cheese. I made the mistake of chomping on a red pepper while sipping some Penascal and found that the first half of the taste (the fruity bit before the oaky flavor) was still discernible, before the pepper burst into fresh flames on my tongue. This is an experiment you need not repeat. But Penascal itself—that you could get quite used to.

  • High and Dry and Thirty-Something

    I was at my local the other day with Don, Pete, and Ben, having a beer. Seems like it’s been months since we were able to get together and just be guys. We have dinner parties with the wives, sure. And even though the gents always end up in the kitchen and the ladies end up in the living room, we mind our manners and watch our tongues. It’s still mixed company. At the bar, we can let down our guard, ogle the young women, and basically act like the Neanderthals that we are deep inside. A cute twenty-something waitress brought another round. She was wearing hip huggers cut so low that her thong underwear showed like a jock strap. We looked at each other, raised our eyebrows, and sighed.

    As I’ve mentioned before, our particular generation of men seems to be under unusual pressure to be sensitive, politically correct, even to be feminists ourselves. If you’re between the ages of thirty and forty-five, you know what I’m talking about. We married the last of the hardcore feminists, the women for whom sex is always connected to issues of social equality, justice, and personal politics. What does this mean, exactly? Don and Ben agreed that it seems like we’re surrounded by folks who have life a bit easier than we do: Gen-Y kids in their twenties and baby boomers in their fifties have a lot in common. They do seem aware that sex can be a political as much as physical issue, but they don’t seem to let that get in the way of having a good time. They compartmentalize.

    Now, I have several good friends in their fifties, both men and women. And the general consensus is that they grew up at the tail end of the mid-seventies “sexual revolution.” For the first time in five decades, women were publicly acknowledged as beings with sexual appetites, just like men. (Something like this happened in the twenties, the age of the flapper.) Of course, many boomer men took advantage of this and had a lot of sex without commitment or passion. They excused their behavior by claiming they were fulfilling women’s right to have unattached sex too. Women probably felt a great deal of pressure to loosen up, liberate themselves, have fun. That meant agreeing to casual sex every time it was demanded. Ironically, the real vanguard of the feminist movement came from the older end of this generation—people like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem saw the sexual revolution as more than a generational orgy: it was a political opportunity for women to achieve all that men had achieved—as well as liberation from both sex and sexuality. When they became mothers, they planted the seeds of strident feminism in their daughters.

    Who are the women that Ben, Pete, and I married, as opposed to the kind of “post-feminist” woman now serving us another round. Don’s last girlfriend, a twenty-something, described herself as post-feminist (“the radical notion that women are sexual people too,” is how she described this, paraphrasing a popular bumper sticker), and she was one of the few women I’ve encountered in recent years who could hang with all of us guys and not be horrified by the conversation, even when it turned naughty. It was kind of liberating for us aging hipsters. We could let our depraved inner selves show without fear of getting browbeaten.

    True, when you’re in your twenties, you’re still playing the field. I remember with fondness the quality and quantity of romance I had fifteen years ago and have to admit that I couldn’t have done it without the enthusiastic participation of several lovely women of my supposedly prudish generation. Perhaps we’ve all changed for the worse.

    There’s hope things will improve. This is the lesson I’ve learned from my fifty-something friends: Life is too short and too hard to live in repression, and being dishonest is at least as harmful as being politically incorrect. If I’m going to be PC, let me do it for the right reasons and be sincere about it. And let me admit out loud that I have some awfully non-PC impulses. Like staring at that waitress’s bottom and offering my heartfelt gratitude for its existence, just beyond my reach (in both the literal and the moral sense—as Ben likes to say, I can look at the menu, I just can’t order).

    Maybe my friends and I are just feeling henpecked. Maybe we’re just spineless, and need to learn to communicate more honestly with our lovers as we get older. Still, I think there are some interesting generational differences, and if you speak candidly to nearly any thirty-something man, he’ll tell you that he leads this dual life—walking on eggshells at home while never fully betraying the secret NASCAR fan inside.

  • Go Loudly into the Night

    After playing guitar by himself for twenty-odd years, Tom O’Connor found himself in a rut. “I’m tired of knowing three chords,” he said, grinning. “And I wanted to play with other people. I’ve been playing to my plants and my furniture and my kids; my kids stopped listening to me, and I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to learn how to keep time with other people.’”

    So O’Connor went to Rock School. Minneapolis’s MacPhail Center has a sterling reputation as an academy of classical music. They also have a class that teaches students how to rock out. It is prosaically called “Rock and Blues Ensemble.” Craig Anderson is a genial guitarist who founded the program twelve years ago. “What’s the difference between jamming in a basement and being in this class?” he asked in his MacPhail studio. “There is none. This class is just like what people do all over town on their own, except MacPhail provides a practice room, gear, and the guidance of a teacher.”

    A decade of teaching the class caught up with Anderson. He had to hang up his guitar this semester because of tinnitus, a constant ringing in his ears (a detail that surely just adds to the rock ’n’ roll cred of the program). The frontman position has been filled by Steve Roehm, another gifted musician with experience in several Twin Cities bands. (He currently plays drums for an outfit called Electropolis.) Every Wednesday night, Roehm assembles his pupils in the MacPhail Annex. It is a brightly lit room that looks more church basement than garage. And instead of moody teens dreaming of Lycra hot pants and big-busted groupies, the class I attended consisted of three beer-bellied men in their forties. According to Anderson, this is pretty normal. Describing the typical pupil, he said, “it’s more of a creative, artistic outlet in their lives. But they’re not so wrapped up in it. They have kids. They have jobs. It’s not like they’re playing rock ’n’ roll as an expression of their angst toward society.”

    Thus, teaching the class means taking a diverse group of grown-ups with varying levels of ability and coaching them to play as a unit. It’s not always easy. Although Roehm conducted class from a drum set, he was frequently hopping up to a xylophone to play a melody, to a whiteboard to write out a time signature, to a bass to demonstrate a fingering. He was, however, careful to intersperse more formal instruction with tips on how to rock out properly. For instance: “You stretch out the dramatic chords, and that’s where we can pose and do all of our extra sweating.”

    Roehm led the class through a series of blues figures, an original song written by one of the students, a Led Zeppelin tune suggested by the bass player, and, most successfully, through a free-form jam initiated when O’Connor put his head down and started rocking out to three chords. (The only tune the students balked at was Van Morrison’s “Moondance.”) Although there were occasional rough spots, as when two of the guitarists attempted a solo at the same time, I noticed more than one rictus of guitar rapture, too; they were enjoying themselves.—Keith Pille

  • My Pod

    Never mind light rail. Imagine your Volkswagen-sized vehicle is traveling fifty miles an hour on a three-foot-wide guideway. Twenty feet below are people on a sidewalk. There is a vehicle a few feet in front of you. You can see the woman in the car behind you reading the newspaper and sipping her coffee. Then the car in front exits the guideway. A half-mile later, your car exits, eases into your station, and slows to a stop. The hatch opens and you walk the two blocks to your office. You just rode a personal rapid transit, or PRT, vehicle. If Minneapolis City Council member Dean Zimmerman has his way, he’ll be in the pod right behind you.

    PRT is a concept that’s been around for thirty years. President Richard Nixon endorsed it, with a jowly waggle, in his 1972 State of the Union address. Ed Anderson, former space vehicle designer for Honeywell and current CEO of a Fridley company called Taxi 2000, jawboned with Nixon’s aides about PRT, back in the day. “He didn’t know anything about it,” Anderson says of Nixon, “but we spent quite a bit of time talking to his staff.”

    Anderson has been certain since the late 1960s that more buses, trains, and roads will not heal the daily transit aneurysm that American cities suffer. He is convinced that our transit needs more than a tweaking. Taking the “mass” out of transit and inserting the “personal” will allow transit to live up to its frequent billing in the “rapid” department.

    Anderson’s thirty-five-year-old vision of a networked system of four-passenger vehicles on a small, dedicated guideway with non-stop service—and the capacity of a freeway—seemed impractical, somehow, to hard-headed urban transit managers. But today, with advances in plastics, software, and hardware, PRT is merely off-the-shelf rocket science.

    A PRT system has been tested in Cardiff, Wales, and several European cities are lining up to install it. In the U.S., Taxi 2000’s SkyWeb product is leading the way; Minneapolis and Duluth are waiting on the passage of bonding bills to build test tracks.

    Zimmerman says PRT would work with light rail and buses to reduce inner-city traffic, pollution—and haggling about where to build the next parking ramp. “If you catch a bus on Bloomington Avenue by Minnehaha Creek to head downtown, you’ll transfer twice. Chances are, each transfer will involve a wait. With PRT you’ll catch your bus to a PRT station in the core area and have a five-minute ride downtown. Transfers are virtually eliminated.”

    Zimmerman is a confessed apostle of PRT. If you let him, he’ll read you fourteen reasons to agree with him. But since you’re busy, here are just a few: It produces zero emissions. It does not require a yearly subsidy from taxpayers. It makes it easier for more people to use existing forms of transit. There is no waiting; it runs twenty-four/seven.

    Everybody is happy about PRT except Betsy Barnum, Zimmerman’s Green Party colleague. She would like to see adequate funding for the bus system before $60 million is spent testing PRT. She wonders if people will tolerate the overhead guideways, and what happens when the system shuts down and suspends a few thousand people twenty feet above Marquette? Perhaps they could simply enjoy the view. The Metro Transit picket lines could surely be seen a few blocks west on Seventh Street.—Tim King

  • The New Black: There Is No New Black

    With Martha Stewart behind bars, I thought for a moment that it might be a good opportunity to launch Jem Casey Living Omnimedia, but I see now that it would never work. I’m not exactly clueless, but my tastemaking skills are, well, suspect. Everyone already likes what I like. I’m not talking about motorcycle jackets and Radiohead, I don’t even like those things anymore. I’m talking about brick houses on dead-ends, I’m talking about four-wheel drive, I’m talking about charming Scottish people. I’m talking about fine woodwork and artisan cheese. I’m talking about babies. Micro-brews. Everybody likes this stuff now, and I’d like to know why.

    There was a time when a person had his preferences, and they were wildly unique. There was no mainstream. No one wanted to own a Pacific island who didn’t already own one, and the going rate was reasonable. There was a handful of beery old men who couldn’t find anything better to do than go fishing. They were burdened with lakes clotted by bass, walleyes, and muskellunge.

    Now that I wish to go fishing, all the best species are on the verge of extinction. There is hardly room to dip an oar into the boat-choked lakes. Now that I wish to buy a Pacific island, the pickings are slim, and they are priced right out of my range.
    In the old days, a person could be knighted and could own an estate with a gothic castle. A person could occupy himself with hunting foxes and making social calls. A person could drink claret, for example. I wanted to be that person, but now I cannot.

    Reality TV? I should feel vindicated, but I feel ripped off. For years I’ve been saying how much I would enjoy seeing celebrities put in uncomfortable or embarrassing situations on unscripted television programs. I am pretty sure I was the only one who fantasized about six Miss America contestants competing in bikinis to eat a thermos of fish guts. If anyone had asked me what I’d do with my own TV network, I’d have said recreate Lord of the Flies on a desert island with real people competing for a million dollars in a kind of psychological chess game of secret alliances and obstacle courses. Now everybody says that!

    And another thing: My longstanding disgust with small dogs. As the popularity of toy poodles, schnauzers, and Chihuahuas increased, my distaste sharpened. Give me a Black Lab or a Saint Bernard any day of the week. So what breed wins best of show at this year’s Westminster Kennel Club? A Newfoundland, for God’s sake—not my favorite, but a damn big dog.

    All of a sudden everybody’s yakking about Mars. I knew about Mars a long time ago. Months ago, I said, “Why can’t our administration come up with a credible intergalactic diversion from pressing domestic and international issues, the way JFK did? Why are we still operating on the outdated platform of the space shuttle, when new worlds await?” And then they go and do it! I swear, they have bugged my home, or they are reading my email.

    Someone has to fly all over the world and stay in all the best hotels and motels. Someone has to cover the Tour de France for the New York Times. If there is a waiting list of people who will get to do this, it is very long and I am near the bottom. My position on it will not carry over into the next two or three lifetimes or however long it would take for me to get “the call.”

    Even reincarnation offers no hope. Being born has gotten tremendously popular. The Hindus have admitted that new souls are being minted like there is no tomorrow. Life itself is suffering from strong inflationary pressures, I’m afraid.

    This is a personal statement from Jem Casey. It is not issued by or on behalf of Jem Casey Living Omnimedia, Inc.

  • Baby Hits the Big Time

    Have the tabloid presses grown tired of seeing half-naked celebrities? Is this why we’re now treated to magazine covers and E! exposés featuring half-naked pregnant celebs, ingratiatingly demeaned by references to their “bump” and newly pneumatic breasts made up like toy poodles for a best-in-show event? In all seriousness, I don’t look for intelligent journalism in People, InStyle, InTouch, or other celebrity rags. The gossip, the headlines, the fashion follies, the omniscient air of sycophancy—all provide hours of distraction from my otherwise harried existence; reading about the Oscar after-parties or the latest plans for the Sex and the City girls soothes my anxious brain. The recent celebrity pregnancy craze, though, is spoiling the fantasy.

    Remember all those images of twenty-four-year-old golden girl Kate Hudson throughout her pregnancy—including that unfortunate and memorable snapshot of her strutting her stuff in super-low-rider velour shorts, her once-taut tummy ripping at the seams with her growing baby? Or Reese Witherspoon, parading her parturient stomach in designer gowns to portray her expectant state as one of grace, of exultation, of triumph? It’s silly that the myth being perpetuated by the tabloids now includes a new and expanded fairy-tale version of motherhood, complete with a belly-licious maternity wardrobe, personal trainer, stylist, nutritional guru (“eggs build brain tissue!”), a million-dollar nursery outfitted to the nines. And, of course, The Husband, famous in his own right—though slightly less so than his wife—and now further exulted by his own virility made manifest. (See: Jennifer Connelly’s Paul Bettany, Madonna’s Guy Ritchie, Kate Hudson’s Chris Robinson, Reese Witherspoon’s Ryan Philippe.)

    As trends go, even Uggs-mania pales beside the juggernaut of celebs-with-child gliding down red carpets, getting snapped by paparazzi, and waxing rhapsodic for ET’s Mary Hart or Access Hollywood’s Nancy O’Dell. Stars who have survived into their thirties are regarded with a sense of reverence—having done the hard work of becoming famous, they can now enjoy the fruits of motherhood. Meanwhile, pregnancy for the twenty-something ingénue seems only to enhance the glow of her virginal aura.

    Regardless of age, all reap bonus helpings of publicity that, even more than usual, stem from biology. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the web, which has made a cottage industry out of belly-watching. You know it’s out of control when they start crowing about “stars” you’ve never heard of before. Take Melinda Messenger. (Who? Exactly.) The topless British model-cum-television presenter—and her “bump”—are featured among lots of other pregnant it-girls on Tiscali.co.uk, a Eurotrash version of Yahoo. Then there is the dubious voyeurism that cues fans to the breast-feeding habits of Jodie Foster, Madonna, Meryl Streep, and Pamela Anderson—all featured on SheKnows.com. This website keeps tabs on “Thirty Famous Breast-Feeding Moms” as part of an entire section devoted to celebrity pregnancies. It includes interviews with new father Slash (beloved Guns N’ Roses’ guitarist as doting dad); lists of celebrity baby names; celebrity baby birth weights (surely an important source for an eventual study on how celebrity ego factors into their progeny’s health); and the continuously updated list of expectant stars (Debra Messing, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Helen Hunt are all headed for the maternity ward soon). Not that we’d accuse celebrities of being calculating, but pregnancy and motherhood can provide a real career boost for the famous and near-famous. (Not so for mere mortals, most of whom will be very lucky to have a job when they return to work after six unpaid weeks.) It’s hard not to notice how a sudden preggers predicament can get a C-list star onto the B-list (see Holly Marie Combs of Charmed), and upgrade a B-lister to an A. (Heather Mills, the embattled wife of Paul McCartney, has been treated much more kindly since publicly engaging in a “battle of the bumps,” as tabloid headlines are fond of putting it). Call it a fringe benefit that makes up for the morning sickness.

    Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that Hollywood moms are merely riding the wave of PR that is their God-given right. Right now, Angelina Jolie ranks near the top of this list. After separating from Billy Bob Thornton (whom everyone respects but—let’s admit it—no one really likes), Jolie has blossomed into a U.N. ambassador, complete with an adopted Cambodian baby in tow. Despite rumors percolating about the shady dealings of the adoption agency she used, Jolie is thriving in the limelight, landing March covers with GQ and Vogue (a Conde-Nast double-header!) to promote her new but not so family-friendly serial-killer thriller. She seems to truly believe in her son and her causes, and not to care that most people still think she’s a freak—albeit a human and loving one. (C’mon, didn’t you see the kid in all those photos?) It’s easy to imagine that other celebs whose careers or reputations are faltering will start adopting Third-World infants (is it too late for Janet Jackson?), much in the same way they adopt fashion designers at the Oscars.

    But let’s get real here. Part of the allure of celebrity is the mystery involved, the other-worldliness that the very rich and the very vain emit from their air-brushed, media-saturated pores. What exactly is so interesting about a thirty-year-old pregnant actress? The fact that she will inevitably gain weight, or even blimp out, and therefore start to resemble a normal human being? Maybe it’s the opportunity to learn about cashmere stuffed animals, alternative birthing techniques, and the latest obscure and obscenely expensive pram. Or perhaps it’s simply a trend: more grist for celebrity rags, to be eclipsed eventually by the next celebrity fad—dude, check out Jennifer Aniston’s new dewlaps!

    But if this trend really kicks into overdrive, the public’s obsession with celebrity pregnancy might even cross-pollinate with the new influx of secret-video scandals. Imagine turning on the TV to enjoy a comforting Simpsons rerun—only to be flashed by the grainy video footage of Paris Hilton in labor in some seedy maternity ward, moaning—no, begging—for her epidural. Ick.

  • Out the Inbox

    Each of the offices in the ten-story Ceresota Building on Fifth Street is, like a lot of offices these days, an island unto itself. Each floor of the converted flour mill holds three tenants at most. Some, like the Cooper Law Firm, take up an entire story. So despite the common first-floor cafeteria, interoffice communication seems limited mostly to polite nods in the elevator. There hasn’t been much gossip about the fifth floor, which is the world headquarters of a business that goes by dozens of names but whose office window reads “GeekTech, Inc.”

    Most people in the building assume the company is involved in some kind of software development; others know the partial truth that it’s one of the few dot-coms to have survived the bust. A few of them know the full truth: that GeekTech is an Internet porn outfit. Those who know don’t seem particularly bothered by it, even when they hear that GeekTech may be one of the largest purveyors of online pornography in the country.

    GeekTech’s office looks like any other, with Fortune and Time magazines on the lobby table. Employees seem friendly enough, but keep to themselves. The place is not crawling with scantily clad, silicone-injected porn stars; GeekTech’s business is all virtual.

    But when I mention that the company has been accused of being a chronic source of spam, the neighbors become agitated. Sue, an office assistant next door at Standard Parking, had no idea what GeekTech did. “They’re nice,” she said. When I told her they publish pornography, she shrugged. Whatever. But when I mentioned the possibility that GeekTech’s business may be responsible for a considerable amount of spam, she grimaced and made clawing motions, as if scratching the eyes out of whoever is responsible for infecting her email inbox with a plague of sleazy scams.

    Her ire may be well placed. Because of the way GeekTech and many other online pornographers do business, they frequently become conduits for spam, whether they plan it that way or not. Such companies invite anybody with the time and interest to act as an independent marketer for them—sending traffic to paid porn sites in exchange for a piece of the action. Many so-called “affiliates” do this legitimately, by linking from their own Web pages, for example. But many also do it by sending thousands, often millions of emails.

    Unsolicited commercial email has reached a critical mass. The problem has become so bad that Congress recently passed a law restricting it (though it is largely symbolic and mostly toothless), and people like Bill Gates are investing heavily in technology meant to stem the deluge. Companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and America Online have filed lawsuits against dozens of alleged spammers. Internet service providers say they are so overwhelmed with spam that they have to siphon money and personnel away from customer service and toward making sure their customers don’t get so much spam that they abandon the Internet altogether.

    All spam is annoying, but some is truly offensive. Few people want to launch their email program at work, only to have a large sexually explicit image fill their screen. And most parents would prefer that their kids not be exposed to advertisements for “farmer’s daughter gone wild!”

    One of GeekTech’s more successful properties is a core site called Porn City. Mike Strouse, otherwise known as GeekTech’s brash young owner, calls himself its mayor.

    Porn City opened for business in 1996. It claimed to be the “first free adult host.” It was right around that time that online pornography became a lucrative business and the free-host business model became common. Not coincidentally, it was also around then that porn spam started to become a serious problem. Since then, similar business schemes have proliferated, along with the spam that inevitably is a part of the formula.

    GeekTech’s business works like this: Anybody with an Internet connection, the right software, and a rudimentary knowledge of Web publishing can become a “host” on any one of several sites run by GeekTech. Or, if they’re especially ambitious, they can set up their own independent site. Smaller host operations can get free Web space from GeekTech in exchange for a promise to direct any traffic they attract to the company’s pay sites. Bigger operations usually run their own sites on the servers of their own Internet service provider, and they may act as affiliates for any number of pay-for-porn outfits. These larger hosts tend to be sites that offer hundreds of pages of free pornography, heavily mined with ads and links to the pay sites.

    The upside for GeekTech is obvious: the more independent operators that link to GeekTech’s sites, the more paying customers GeekTech signs up. The Web is rife with such “affiliates,” who in essence act as marketers for companies like GeekTech, which provide the actual material. GeekTech gives its affiliates some pictures to lure users. Affiliates direct the users to one of GeekTech’s big pay pornography sites, such as sushichicks.com (Asian women), babeswithboners.com (pre-operative transsexuals), or legsandhose.com (stockings). For every Web surfer who clicks through to a GeekTech pay site and enters his credit card number, the host of the affiliate site gets a check—commonly about $35, though different programs pay different amounts. The link on the affiliate’s Web page to the pay sites contains a code, which is how affiliates are identified and paid.

    That’s where the problem comes in. Most spam that advertises Web sites includes a link that contains this code, usually at the end of a long URL. That link leads users to the pay-porn site, and the code tells the owner of the site which affiliate sent the user there. If the user signs up for the site, the affiliate gets a cut of the first month’s payment from the new customer. What could be easier?

  • Mine Over Matter

    At 7:20 a.m., on a hilltop overlooking the wooded highlands in Minnesota’s Iron Range, a dozen men and women emerge from parked cars, some wide awake in flannel and Carhartt, some weary in khakis and button-down shirts. A few discuss the Wild and the politics in nearby Ely; others trouble over germanium crystals and liquid nitrogen. Nobody bothers to look to the left, at the random assortment of old mining buildings and the pastoral view over the town of Soudan just beyond. Nor do they look up at the twenty-five-foot tall elevator frame, whistling in the soft breeze, nor down the black mine shaft that it straddles. This is all just part of getting to work on an average Monday morning.

    Bill Miller, the stout, bearded manager of the Soudan Underground Laboratory, steps out of an orange Toyota Sienna station wagon. He walks with authority, but in an easy loping manner that suggests he never flaunts it. He slides open the door to a four-by-six-foot, two-story iron elevator car suspended over the mine shaft. The assembled group crowds into the space, shoes and boots scraping across a grimy metal floor.

    Conversation continues, even as the door is slammed shut and the light is reduced to a pale glow through a dirty window. Then, promptly at 7:30, the car lurches down into a quick, absolute blackness that smears before the eyes and stops conversations in mid-sentence. The car shakes aggressively, almost enough to require handholds, as on a subway car. There is a brief flash of light from a bulb passed in the dark descent, then more darkness, more vibrations. The grinding and speed seem to increase. Another flash of light, then more darkness.

    The noise stops abruptly, yet the car continues in relative silence, as if cut loose. A new, rotten light oozes through the window, illuminating long strips of concrete. After three interminable minutes, during which nobody speaks a word, the car slows and bounces to a stop. The daily commute is complete. A dirty face topped by a hard hat appears in the glass and the door slides open into a musty rock cavern run through by railroad tracks. Interrupted conversations start up again. A steel sign greets the passengers as they exit:

    “LEVEL NO. 27—2341 FEET BELOW THE SURFACE—889 FEET BELOW SEA LEVEL.”

    Miller turns right, leading the way into a four-and-a-half-story cavern where a device known as the “Far Detector” looms. Its 486 octagonal steel plates hang like ghostly blue and green file folders from a one-hundred-foot-long steel infrastructure. Each plate is twenty-seven feet in diameter, one inch thick, and punctured by a tree-trunk-sized, flesh-colored coil of wires and cooling hoses, which drops like a horse’s tail onto the cavern floor. Three stories of walkways run the length of the detector, providing access to cables that run in rainbow arcs from each plate to racks of monitors. The device has no moving parts and emits no sound, yet the cavern is filled with a low, constant hum not unlike the sound of blood flow magnified by a stethoscope. “Ventilation system,” Miller says by way of explanation. “Bats sometimes get stuck in it.”

    In early 2005, the Far Detector will become the target for a beam of subatomic particles called neutrinos, fired through the earth from Fermilab, a particle accelerator five hundred miles to the south, on the outskirts of metropolitan Chicago. After a while, and nobody can say exactly how long it will take, enough neutrinos will be captured in the far detector’s six thousand kilotons of steel to allow physicists to determine whether, in fact, they change—or oscillate—in transit. This entire process is known as the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS), a grand experiment whose startup costs—including the far detector in Soudan, a smaller “Near Detector” at Fermilab, and the neutrino beam—run to more than $170 million in federal funding, with ongoing costs of about $1.4 million per year. In truth, it’s a modest sum for big physics, a fraction of the cost of several other national projects. But outcome, however, is of an entirely different order of magnitude: If MINOS works as planned, the results could fundamentally change our understanding of the universe.

  • Prove Your Innocence

    Oliver Tuanis writes, “When Oklahoma reinstated the death penalty after a twenty-five-year moratorium, murders increased.” [“Dead Serious,” March] Doesn’t that statement at least deserve a footnote that the Oklahoma City bombing occurred after the reinstatement? How can we take anyone seriously who omits such a relevant fact? The writer also cites the fact that “108 people have been sentenced to death for crimes they were later proven not to have committed” for the assertion that the system does not work. In my opinion, that statistic proves that the system does work. Show me the evidence of the people actually put to death for crimes they didn’t commit. Furthermore, it is worth noting that those 108 would have languished in prison for life if not for the fact that the specter of death garnered them extra attention. The alleged racist application is perhaps best disproved by the fact that the author cites no statistics showing minorities receive a disproportionate share of death warrants. Instead, the author claims that the death penalty is disproportionately meted out to those who perpetrate their crimes on whites. How this statistic is calculated is unclear. There are approximately 350 percent more white people than black people in this country, so if the likelihood of being a victim is spread evenly over the races, one would expect that statistical disparity to exist. Even if the methodology was more sophisticated than it appears, it is folly to try and claim all crimes are identical. A substantial number of black murder victims are the result of gang conflict. While the circumstances might warrant a capital charge, the passions are not likely to rival those when a completely innocent woman is kidnapped and murdered. I respect the opinions (though rarely the facts) of those who oppose the death penalty. Personally, I favor it and I’ll tell you why. I don’t care if it doesn’t deter crime, if it’s more expensive, or anything else. People who commit such crimes are a stain on our society. Viewing the situation from the perspective of a non-perpetrator and a non-victim, I want the death penalty because it gives me a sense that there is justice. My rationale is admittedly visceral, but at least I haven’t tried to prop it up with fuzzy math.
    Robert Gust
    Minneapolis

    Oliver Tuanis responds: The study of the Oklahoma murder rate covered the period 1989-1991. The Oklahoma City bombing occurred in 1995. If there were any deterrent effect to the death penalty, it should be easily observable in Texas, where there are the most executions by far. The murder rate there has stayed relatively constant for the last several years. As for the stats on racism, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund study completed in 2003 found that, in cases where an execution has occurred since the restoration of the death penalty, more than eighty percent of the murder victims are white, even though nationally only fifty percent of all murder victims are white. (The likelihood of being a victim is decidedly not in proportion to one’s race, as Mr. Gust guesses for the purpose of his argument.) So, if the victims are equally likely to be white or not, yet the killers of whites are four times as likely to be executed—well, you figure it out. Maybe, as Mr. Gust implies, the white victims are more “innocent” than the non-white, although to me, it would be hard to find a more innocent victim than Tyesha Edwards, an eleven-year-old African-American girl who was sitting in her living room doing her homework when she was shot dead. I guess she was guilty of living in a worse neighborhood than most white people. Finally, Mr. Gust makes the most bizarre assertion I’ve heard in a long time: that the 108 exonerated people released from death row “proves the system does work,” because of the “extra attention” they got. “Show me the evidence of the people actually put to death for crimes they didn’t commit,” he says. To do that, I’d have to do some more digging—literally, I’m afraid.

    Editor’s note: The Death Penalty Information Center has identified five men executed since 1992 whose convictions have since been called seriously into question. The DPIC points out that it’s impossible to know how many more wrongly accused prisoners may have been put to death, since “Courts do not generally entertain claims of innocence when the defendant is dead.”

  • Confession of a Scene-Stealer

    As the opening act for the run of Puppetry of the Penis I appreciate the acknowledgement and kind words of Sari Gordon, or perhaps Jeff Mihelich, regarding my act [The Rakish Angle, March]. To get a blind, gay man to enjoy my show… well, my work here is done. I thought I might attach a name to the middle-aged woman in the boa and cocktail fog. It’s Darlene Westgor. I’ll be here all week.
    Darlene Westgor
    Burnsville