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In about a week, Macalester College will open another football season with a match against Beloit College. Macalester’s club has averaged about one win per year since 1989. The team won just one game last year, had three winless seasons in the 90s, and ended last season with only 29 players. (Most of Mac’s competitors field teams of 80 to 100 players.) While Macalester had four winning seasons in the 1980s, it also held the NCAA record for the longest losing streak: 50 losses in a row from 1974 to 1980.

Because of that record, the school nearly eliminated the football program last year. But a reprieve has been granted. This year, the team will drop out of the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and play against smaller teams for the next few seasons. The plan is a model of simplicity: to win more than it loses, find more exceptional students who also happen to be football players, and then return to the MIAC when the program is stronger.

Coach Dennis Czech played on the celebrated Mac squad that finally snapped the 50-game losing streak. Proving the proposition that if you work hard and become the best at anything—even losing—you can be on TV, that team was briefly the darling of the national media. “We got interviewed by Jim Lampley. We were on Wide World of Sports, the whole thing,” he said the other day. “The losing streak was really a draw. It’s the same pitch we use today.” In other words, prospective students can be part of a Cinderella story—play college football and help establish a winning tradition at Mac. It’s an odd pitch, to be sure. Since Macalester has no athletic scholarships to offer, and since they look primarily at a student’s academic record, all they can credibly promise students is a real opportunity to play.

Clark Wohlferd is one of four co-captains. He is a political science and history major with a 3.78 GPA who is planning to go to law school. While he wasn’t running drills and lifting weights, he interned for two summers in the office of the Wisconsin governor. Before settling on Mac, Wohlferd had walk-on invitations and scholarship offers from several larger schools. He comes from Sun Prairie, a powerful football school near Madison, Wisconsin, where he lost only four games in four years. The Sun Prairie Cardinals were the number one team in Wisconsin his senior year, but they were upset in the state tournament quarterfinals. “I don’t like talking about that. It was a depressing time,” he said.

So how do Mac gridders react to losing so much? Like athletes everywhere, they practice a rigorous form of denial. “Our team goals are to go undefeated,” Wohlferd said decisively. The student in him, however, was more circumspect. “We will not accept planning ahead to lose. We’ll see what happens.”

The curiosity in Father Hennepin Bluff Park, across the Stone Arch Bridge from downtown Minneapolis, is a gravesite. A shrine to a fallen friend. Tucked into the gutted remains of a stump, not far from a con-temporary bandshell, there is a flat headstone in the shape of a Superman crest. Thick, black magic-marker in an ornate hand declares, “Here lies my friend Harley, a 3 ft 6 in iguana from San Porterico.” The epitaph is a mystery in itself. There is no San Porterico. Perhaps the writer refers to San Juan, Puerto Rico. That place is lousy with iguanas. The critters scurry about like squirrels, eating tossed scraps, and amusing tourists. Along the Mississippi River bluffs of Minneapolis, however, iguana sightings are rare. While he was alive, Harley must have piqued the interest of passers-by. Indeed, according to the grave marker, “He made many friends in this park.”

Many have paid their respects. Harley’s memorial is decorated with an array of offerings and tchotchkes. There are colorful planted flowers, seashells, stones adorned with foil confetti, and a ceramic candleholder with an accretion of melted wax. Some of these gifts undoubtedly have come from people who knew Harley only through his owner’s affectionate tribute. It’s difficult to find someone who remembers the lizard alive.

“I would have liked to have seen it,” said King Dearing, who is often in the park between daytime classes and his shift at the nearby Metal-Matic steel tubing plant. Greg Blake, another frequent park visitor, never met Harley either. His first encounter with the legend came while using a nearby garbage can. “I was walking over to throw some trash away,” he said. “That’s when I noticed the memorial. It seems like every time I come down here, someone is adding something new to it.”

One day in early August, a particularly prominent addition appeared. A framed print of The Rescue Party, an oil painting by artist Arthur Elsley, was suddenly propped up inside the stump. Thanks to this two-foot wide backdrop — a Victorian-era painting of happy children playing with a Saint Bernard — almost no one can approach the site without at least a passing glance. Jackie Wallin recently paused with a coworker to discuss the alteration. She often checks out the memorial during lunch-hour walks. “I look to see if anyone’s added anything,” she said. “I think it’s nice that no one is destroying it.”

Credit city staff for that. Minneapolis Park Police officer Ron Giving described Harley’s owner—identified only as “Jerry” on the gravestone—as a “quasi-, semi-homeless” man. Early on, the memorial was “pretty elaborate,” Giving said. “It was starting to become a real showpiece.” Jerry and others added greenery, pictures, and other baubles on a regular basis. A park maintenance worker known to colleagues as “Mugs” helped rein in the effort. She convinced Jerry to remove some items, including jewelry and two hanging plants she recognized from a nearby Main Street restaurant. “I saw them there earlier in the morning,” Mugs recalled. “By lunch-time, they were on Harley’s shrine.”

Jerry used to hang around the park often, Mugs said. He was overtly friendly, and would readily leap onto the Cushman motorized cart of a maintenance worker he’d never met. He was devoted to keeping the grounds clean, sometimes hiding items in trees and crevices just to see if he could catch crews shirking their duties. Mugs heard about Harley the iguana’s death directly from Jerry, who liked to carry his pet on his shoulder as he rode his bicycle. One day near the park, Harley fell off and was run over by a car.

Yes, burying a pet in a Minneapolis park is illegal, and officer Giving doesn’t want Harley’s memorial to spur a rash of dog, cat, or horse graves on public property. But for the time being, “We’re not going to get bent out of shape,” he said.

The story doesn’t end with Harley’s death, however. More recently, on June 6, Jerry (actually Gerald J. Michnowski) got into a fight in the park. He took a blow to the abdomen from a baseball bat. The 47 year old bled internally and died at the scene. The man who fought with Michnowski was arrested but not charged with a crime. According to the “underground story from the homeless” that Mugs has heard, the altercation erupted during a session of drinking, after someone teased Jerry about Harley’s shrine.

If you doubt that the loss of a green, scaly creature could elicit such intense emotion, ask the folks over at Twin Cities Reptiles in St. Paul, where customers can buy lizard leashes, mango-scented calcium spray, and additives to make dry food smell like a live rodent. The store also sells several species of iguana. Employee Jeff Arndt is more inclined to steer people toward leopard geckos and bearded dragons, which don’t grow so large and are less liable to cause problems. But co-worker Jenna Szabo notes that iguanas can be appealing.“If you hold them a lot and give them a lot of attention, they can make really good pets,” Szabo said. “If you ignore them, they can turn out to be mean.”

Kati and Steve were standing at the foot of a fallen tree, its roots casting spiraled shadows onto the beach. Its trunk stretched a few yards out into the lake before disappearing under the surface. According to their global positioning system, the coordinates of the hidden treasure would put them 20 yards further into the water. Maybe the lake had risen. Maybe the cache was visible at first, but now they’d have to swim for it. They figured something had to be there, because it was registered at Geocaching.com, the official website of the world-wide, high-tech scavenger hunt called “geo-caching.”

The primary equipment for this new form of recreation is the GPS receiver, a digital navigation device which triangulates satellite signals to determine its exact location on Earth. Geo-cachers use the web to index their hidden treasures for each other. There are more than 400 caches in Minnesota, and dozens around the Twin Cities.

Kati said nearly all caches up in Ontario require hiking rough terrain and wading through marshes. Here in suburban Minneapolis, Steve took his shoes off and crawled onto the log, but he couldn’t find anything. On the way back he slipped and fell in the water. But as he was about to swing around the tree back to the beach in his wet jeans, he spotted the cache tangled in sprawling roots. It was a square Tupperware container bound in rubber bands, filled with cheap trinkets to take as souvenirs, plus a notebook and pen to record their successful trek. They left a plastic blue stone and took a small stuffed frog. A cryptic tag was attached to the frog with some kind of identifying number.

From the website, they learned that the frog’s name is “Dig ’Em,” and he is a “travel bug”—an itinerant little fellow that geo-cachers are supposed to move from cache to cache. Dig ’Em’s purpose is to see as many states as possible. Up to then, he had traveled 30 miles and been in three caches, all within the state of Minnesota. Now Dig ’Em was in luck. Steve and Kati were planning a trip out east, and they would have time for some geo-caching. Eventually they left him in a hollowed-out flashlight hidden in some bushes in Boston. Dig ’Em has now logged 1,153 miles. That’s impressive, but other older bugs have been through dozens of countries. As they circle the globe, their owners hope they eventually will return to their home cache.

The bulk of caches are hidden in Europe and North America, but they can be found in 134 countries including such exotic locations as Kenya, India, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. The idea seems to be to lead people to places they wouldn’t otherwise see, places not typically highlighted on a tourist map. There are caches everywhere, frequently in the least likely places. On their trip east, Steve and Kati went geo-caching in Central Park, and their GPS led them to an isolated patch of trees and a mound roughly the shape of a human. When Kati approached, a swarm of flies flew up and buzzed angrily around her head. They gave up on that cache, deciding there is such a thing as too much adventure.

It would be nice to believe that a pajama party could be enough to ground airplanes. But we know now that silence in the skies comes at a terrible price. Last year, on a crisp blue-bird day, the planes stopped. The sky over Lake Harriet and Lake Nokomis was silent the way it hasn’t been in more than 50 years. The last contrails over the IDS tower became clouds and drifted away. It was eerie, of course, and when the planes started flying again a week later we wondered if we’d ever get comfortable with that horrible ripping sound. Was it the music of regular daily commerce, or the cacophony of some new, unspeakable horror? Or both?

We’re reluctant to dwell on this particular anniversary, because newspapers and magazines have been busy doing precisely that ever since it happened. A few weeks ago—on the 11-month anniversary of September 11, you know—the Star Tribune published a front-page, over-the-fold investigation with the astonishing news that no one is quite sure how to mark “the day we can’t forget.” Without self-consciousness the Strib wrung its hands in empty space. “When it comes to plans for commemorating the first anniversary of the attacks,” wrote puzzled reporter Deborah Caulfield Rybak, “the only thing that seems certain is the relative uncertainty about how to proceed.”

In uncertain times, the passage of time is our only certainty. It’s as if our new world disorder is a premature baby, its anniversaries measured in days, weeks, and months. Perhaps because we were so entrenched in a hollow form of journalism for so long—so little real news that our papers began to read like magazines and our magazines began to read like catalogs—we can forgive ourselves for the crisis coverage that really hasn’t let up in 12 months.

Still, no matter how much we are nagged by the popular press, most anniversaries mean nothing because they are as hollow as they are random. This month, for example, marks the 10th anniversary of the Mall of America’s opening. It’s not clear why we’re marking time out in Bloomington. True, the last resort of a slow news day is to look at the calendar and sift through the press releases for, say, the 50th anniversary of La-Z-Boy furniture, the centenary of Lindbergh’s birth, or the three-week mark of the Mayor’s Commission on Navelgazing. But there is something essentially wrongheaded about celebrating the Mall’s birthday—not because there’s anything wrong with the Mall. It’s just that the Mall is emphatically not about memory and meditation. We can’t even remember where we parked the car.

There are, of course, interesting points of comparison in these two anniversaries—and not just because we can pursuade ourselves that the Mall would make an attractive target. “Celebrating a decade of fun!” is a slogan not obviously connected to “Infidels Out of the Holy Land!” But we had better get used to these non sequiturs. We are more connected than we realize, to each other, to the world at large. Whether we believe that is less important than the simple fact that others do. This makes us both powerful and vulnerable—which is disconcerting indeed to the modest and self-reliant Minnesotan.

It’s good to remember: There is a place for fun in your life. But now we know there’s a place for terror, too. And if our only response is to count the passing hours, there isn’t much to look forward to except the day the clock stops.

Alas: the pitter-pat of shuffling feet on the stair that Martha Stewart hears each day when she awakes is not the stirring of guests invited for a festive country weekend; it’s the SEC closing in. Last month ImClone boss and “family friend” Sam Waksal (her daughter’s boyfriend, later her own) took his perp walk for the cameras on insider trading charges. A few days later the Wall Street Journal reported that the Feds had turned one of Stewart’s own pals, a woman who flew to Mexico with Martha on Stewart’s private jet the day her ImClone sale was executed.

Delicious, isn’t it? Martha summed up better than anyone the consumption side of the long 90s boom. And despite economically polarized times she figured out how to play both ends of the street. To the masses who bought up her branded Kmart merchandise, she peddled a vain and costly domestic fantasy; to the moneyed would-be gentry she offered a practical primer on the good life. It proved so lucrative in part because it tapped a market-driven article of faith rigorously foisted on fortunates and unfortunates alike in the 80s and 90s: There really is nothing you can’t buy if you’ve got the money—style, grace, dignity, domestic tranquility, you name it. At bottom, like all timeless hucksters, she was selling a sense of personal completeness and substance.

Turns out it was all pretend, right down to the paper fortune Stewart amassed during her day in the sun. So far her stock in her own company has dropped over $300 million in value, and she may be facing time in one of those minimum-security facilities whose décor she could do so much to enliven. All this over a smarmy little insider transaction that saved her about $200,000 in stock losses. If you aren’t gratified by what’s become of Martha Stewart, you just aren’t paying attention.

Don’t bet she’ll scrape by on the strength of her money and clout. If the order of the day is a few show trials to quiet public outrage, what prosecution could possibly be showier than Martha’s? One can already imagine the indictment, the subsequent death-plunge of MSO stock, even the eventual plea agreement, filed on the finest linen stationery with inlaid flowers pressed by Martha herself.

AFTER LAST MONTH’S column on Paul Wellstone’s silence concerning the business scandals, I got a testy email from a Wellstone staffer, larded with press release attachments that demonstrated the senator’s fierce and fearless leadership. Wellstone has spoken against corporate abuses on the Senate floor, I was informed, not once but twice—and, more impressive still, he spoke forcefully each time.

Naturally I felt mortified at my own hubris. Who was I to criticize Wellstone’s leadership just because I hadn’t heard a peep about it myself? Had I scoured the full menu of his press releases? Had I pored over member comments on the Senate floor? No. But in my own paltry way I did try. I looked at various news archives and Wellstone’s own Senate website. Before its content was frozen by election rules round about early July, it contained no word about corporate accountability that I could find, not even one of the press releases—each surely more forceful than the last!—that are the sine qua non of his leadership. All I can say is that I’m sorry, Paul, and in the future I’ll bear in mind that the mere fact of being invisible doesn’t make you any less a leader.

Now, in mid-August, Wellstone’s campaign website is screaming boardroom larceny front and center. Lovely. Better late than never, and better a little than nothing at all: That’s the central refrain of Wellstone’s Senate career and the only credible slogan on behalf of his re-election campaign. I’ll still vote for him if I vote at all, but I won’t venture out just to pull the lever for Paul. And in that I doubt I’m alone.

The other day I spoke with Bill Hillsman, the political ad consultant who played a vital role in electing Wellstone the first time. “I was thinking about some of the ads we just murdered Boschwitz with in 1990,” Hillsman smiled ruefully, “the print ads where we talked about his being in the Senate for 12 years and never getting anything done. And I thought to myself, good Lord, what would happen if someone did that same ad now with respect to Wellstone’s record? It would probably be no better, maybe in some cases worse.”

Steve Perry is a contributing editor to The Rake. He can be reached at steve@rakemag.com.

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If you have difficulty making decisions, the Sample Room wants you. As the name implies, this brand-new, swank café bar is centered around sharable, nibbleworthy combination platters—3,500 possible combinations of veggie, meat, cheese, and seafood treats. That goes for wine too: Try a number of vintages with a flight of three 2-oz. glasses. Our entrees were nothing terribly exotic—smoked pork loin and turkey breast, with mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables—but it’s comfort food done elegantly and in good-sized portions. We recommend the carefully spiced and smoky cream of mushroom soup. A stone’s throw away from a cardboard-box factory and Gabby’s Saloon, the Sample Room brings casual class to the neighborhood. It’s inviting and comfortable contemporary interior in dark browns and warm colors, under a restored original ceiling, is quite the change from the slightly seedy Polish Palace it replaced. On our visit the space seemed a trifle loud, even at one-third capacity, but service was friendly and eager to please—our coffee was topped off no less than five times, and the manager proudly made the rounds showing patrons a turn-of-the-century photo, discovered during remodeling, of the old bar and its much-mustachioed regulars. It might be nice, in future, to see the place add a patio out back to take advantage of the river view, but on our next visit our biggest problem will be choosing which of the four dessert chocolates to try first. The Sample Room, (612) 789-0333

“Greek food is arousing,” declared one of my table companions after a big bite of his spicy soutzokakia sandwich. The rest of us raised our eyebrows and waited for him to explain. He chose instead to blush and mumble that he “just meant intriguing.” But he’s right. All that garlic and olive oil, lemony ambelodolmades in grape leaves, sweet and tangy roasted red peppers—it’s zesty and Zorbalicious. Step into your own personal Poseidon adventure in this airy two-room café in Old St. Anthony, tan and blue with vines and stone statuary decorating the walls. Stacked in a pile on the radiator are books on Greek culture and Northeast Minneapolis history—take a few minutes before your meal arrives to transport yourself mentally from East Hennepin to coastal Thessalonica. You can’t go wrong with that old standby the gyros, but try to make room for the pureed garlic skordalia and the tasty tyro, feta cheese with olive oil and peppers. Top it off with the thick, rich and dark Greek coffee—just don’t get caught unawares by the loamy grounds at the bottom of the cup. Gardens of Salonica, (612) 378-0611

Maybe this will be the year when you make that extra effort to actually find the art at the Uptown Art Festival. Sure, there are food booths, live music, games, and the general hubbub of another summer festival. And who can deny the cheap thrill of wandering around the middle of Lake Street slightly buzzed, and shopping for machine-made Mexican rugs? But honestly, there really is a lot of genuine art to be found—it just gets overwhelmed by the 500,000 people expected to converge on Uptown this weekend. More than 400 “arts and crafts” exhibitors bring their wares to Minneapolis from as far away as Florida and New York. And while there are plenty of great local artists who don’t make it into a vendors’ booth, well… this isn’t precisely the place to take a long look at serious art, either. Did we mention the food booths, live music, and games? On a vaguely related note, let us mourn the loss of MCAD’s wonderful gallery upstairs at Calhoun Square, one of the real (and secret) gems of the native Twin Cities art scene.