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  • The Short Side of the Oscars

    At this year’s Academy Awards, there will be films that — believe it
    or not — are actually judged on their artistic merit. No one will
    remember them a year from now, or probably even a month from now, but
    these reels contain imaginative innovations and emotional depths that
    surpass those evoked by any nominee for Best Feature-Length Film. I’m
    speaking of course (of course!) about the nominees for short films.

    As every year, ten movies — five animated and five live-action — have been selected from around the world to vie for the golden
    trophies in a lesser-known, lesser-cared-about subset of the Oscars.
    None of these films was ever widely distributed; none took any sort of
    cut from the box office; none will fetch big DVD sales. For the most
    part they bounced around festival circuits, garnering praise and niche
    attention. Still, they range from dreamy to lifelike, uplifting to
    devastating — all of them (except one) mini-masterpieces.

    By and large, the animated shorts were more creative than the
    live action vignettes. This isn’t so strange — cartoons are inherently
    more imaginative than life; one might say a photograph is a fact, a
    painting an interpretation. And while all the animated shorts take
    pains to tell a story, some of them seem more preoccupied with their
    medium, and feel like odes to animation itself. Which is totally okay.
    One of the great joys of these films is their cinematic lawlessness. There is
    no obligation to plot, and no actors to placate. As such, the directors
    and animators enjoy a freedom to do as they please. Not incidentally,
    this is stuff that makes Persepolis and Ratatouille look like fare for Saturday morning television.

    My Love, a Russian film by Alexandre Petrov, is
    literally a breathing Impressionist painting. An October palette of
    watercolors smears the screen as we watch a sixteen-year-old boy,
    Anton, fall in love variously with his maid and his neighbor. "She
    stepped out of the novel as if from a dream," Anton says of his current
    infatuation, and indeed, the entire film seems to have sprung from
    Petrov’s subconscious (and completely in tact). The story — a
    straightforward tale of peasant courtship – runs too long, but this
    seems deliberate, as if Petrov wanted to extend the movie just so he
    could keep painting it.

    The likely winner (or at least the most buzzed-about), Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf,
    is another labor of love. A thirty-minute exhibition of stop-motion
    animation, it allegedly took 100 artists, sculptors, and animators five
    years to make. Can you imagine someone spending five years on Alien vs. Predator?
    Clearly this is not art for the sake of entertainment. It’s a realm
    where attention to detail is revered above all-every eyelash is molded
    anew for each frame of the film. Set in modern-day Russia, (and thus
    giving the story a fresh twist, as the scenery includes a heavily
    graffiti’d urban center), we watch Peter as he tries to escape from his
    grandfather’s backyard into the wilderness beyond. The interplay
    between boy/duck/cat/wolf is as tense and intricate and heartfelt as
    anything in No Country for Old Men.

    Rounding out the animated nominees, Madame Tutli-Putli and Even Pigeons Go To Heaven
    are exhibitions of computer effects. The figures look so human that at
    times it’s easy to forget one is watching something animated. Which is
    why, in the Canadian Tutli-Putli, one is so viscerally scared as we watch some beast of the night cut out a person’s kidney. I Met The Walrus,
    a recorded interview between then-fourteen-year-old Jerry Levitan and
    John Lennon finishes off the group. In it, every single word Lennon
    speaks is turned into drawing, so the dialogue becomes this sort of
    visual representation of itself.

    Between each film, much whispering ensued amongst the
    audience, as if there was a need for instant discussion and digestion.
    And there’s a lot to be talked about. When one leaves the theater, the
    emotional and intellectual impact really is the same as if having sat
    through five features. The way a good short story is said to contain
    the same elements and even the same depth as a novel, so these short
    films imprint themselves upon the faculties.

    What they lacked in visual imagination, the live action films
    made up for in storytelling. Though the narratives were fairly linear,
    they all worked to expose their characters’ emotions, stripping them
    barer and barer until, in each short (save one) there was no more
    sentiment to be squeezed. In these films, it’s as if the narrative is a
    predator, its prey being emotion, and the narrative will not stop
    hunting until it’s sure it has tracked down and strung up and tortured
    and exposed its target.

    At Night,
    a Danish film, because apparently Danes make films now, is more morally
    complex than all the feature-length nominees combined. Three young
    women are in the oncology ward of a hospital, awaiting their imminent
    deaths. There is Mette, who at this point can barely move anymore;
    Sara, who is to undergo an operation that could either cure her or kill
    her; and Stephanie, whose illness has made her suicidal. It is December
    30th,
    and together they celebrate the New Year because they are unsure
    whether Sara will survive her surgery the next day. Here in the U.S.,
    we take a sort of Mary Poppins approach to our dramas, wherein, for the
    past few decades at least, the genre of ‘tragicomedy’ has emerged and
    taken precedent. We temper our heartbreak with humor, and tell
    ourselves it’s because the absurdity of pain is funny at times. Really,
    though, it’s because we simply can’t stomach anguish without a sugar
    coating.

    Director Christian Christiansen (love that name) has done away with the patina. At Night
    is kind of like a bruise you keep poking and it just gets bigger and
    bigger and bigger, more painful, and finally you just know it’s going
    to bust. Its very lack of levity may prevent it from taking the Oscar,
    though in terms of affecting filmmaking, it certainly deserves to win.

    All the other shorts, though, are just a tad too cute. Tanghi Argentini
    is about a guy who meets a woman online and ostensibly wants to learn
    the tango to impress her, but really he’s trying to hook up his lonely,
    tango-savvy co-worker. Il Supplente presents us with a man who
    poses for a few minutes as a substitute teacher and wreaks havoc on a
    high school class, only to be belittled like a child when he goes into
    his own office. Actually, these two in particular, though clever and
    charming, feel a bit like extrapolated Super Bowl commercials.

    The Mozart of Pickpockets is similarly cute, and goes
    maybe a little deeper than the two films mentioned above. In it, a pair
    of bumbling miscreants accidentally adopt a deaf-mute boy, who turns
    out to be a master thief. He, the boy, scrambles under the seats at
    movie theaters and steals purses from women caught in a cinematic daze.
    The two men are apparently gay, which is artsy, and they really seem to
    care for each other and the boy, which is also artsy. But at the end of
    the film, I just don’t know what the message is, whereas after At Night, there is a haunting sensation that pervades for days.

    Finally there’s The Tonto Woman.
    For the life of me I can’t figure out how it picked up a nomination. It
    is the only film with breasts in it — unnecessary breasts, I would
    argue, which turns them into gimmicky breasts, which may have then been
    enough for the nod. Or maybe there were only five short films made all
    year, so they had to let it in the running.

    Here’s how it goes: A woman was enslaved by a group of Mojave
    Indians and they tattooed her chin, so that when she returned to
    ‘regular’ society she was an outcast. In comes Ruben Vega, who
    immediately falls for her. One wonders what sort of psychological
    condition Vega has that he should instantly become infatuated with the
    town’s exile. Clearly he’s a sadist, too, as he parades her around town
    to her obvious embarrassment. In the end nothing is really solved,
    except for that the credits role and the next film comes on, which is a
    good thing.

    Remarkably, The Tonto Woman
    was the only American output in the live action category. The others
    hail from Denmark, Belgium, France, and Italy. If you include the
    animated shorts, the country list includes Russia, Canada, and England,
    too. Considering the heavy bias toward American films in the ‘regular’
    categories, it’s kind of amazing how international this particular
    group is. Especially if you’re of the mindset, as I am, that these are
    the best films being judged in the entire ceremony. It shows, I think,
    that cinematic artistry, and cinematic mastery, transcends the U.S.
    border — is even rare within the U.S. border, the evidence would suggest.

    In short (no pun intended…okay, yes it was), these films
    function as the true artistic center of Academy Awards. Their very
    existence lends Oscar night the legitimacy it needs to keep from
    devolving into the mere popularity contest it so badly wants to be.

    Written for realbuzz.com, by former Rake intern Max Ross.

  • Of Pubs and Parliament

    Hello, my name is Hector E. Ramos-Ramos, and I intend here to share with you my observations, opinions, and concerns while I am abroad (primarily in Scotland), courtesy of the study abroad program at St. Paul’s own Macalester College.

    Although I am not originally from Minnesota, the home of Bunyan and Babe has grown on me in a way I could not have predicted that first winter in 2005. Back then I constantly asked myself why I had forsaken the perpetual balminess of my hometown of San Juan, Puerto Rico, for this. Eventually though, just like the videos at the Light Rail stations tell you, even the harshest winter becomes tolerable after you’ve understood how charming Minnesota really is.

    In any case, I’m in Scotland now, at the University of Edinburgh, and I’m behind blogging schedule, so now I have to make up for my laziness with some earnest storytelling.

    I left San Juan around noon, was briefly stationed in New York City, flew from there to London (our in-flight movie was Tootsie), and then, it was just a brisk hour-long hop to Edinburgh. It had taken more than a day, but when I arrived at the airport I received my hard-earned prize: torrents of hard, cold sleet. Welcome to Scotland.

    I followed a trail of visiting university students. We all piled into a bus. None of us spoke to one another, and everyone seemed exhausted and eager to get some sleep. When I was dropped off at my university flat, the absence of bedding in my room gave me a reason to go out into the Scottish capital and explore.

    Highlights from Week One:

    The next day, orientation was held at a large lecture hall. I sat next to my flatmate, Vilhelm, from Sweden. He is one of four guys who live in our apartment (from now on, "flat"). We patiently watched some very nice Scottish university employees talk to us about the beauties of their country and the ins and outs of opening a bank account. Their accents were impenetrable, and the only way I sort-of understood what they were saying was by looking at a massive PowerPoint projection.

    Pubs happened soon after and would continue throughout the otherwise commitment-free week. Discovering a new pub is like finding a new home away from home away from home. It was during one of these introductions into the world of pubs (accompanied by my new friends, all of them from continental Europe), that I got my first lesson in local drink-culture. I went to order a pint of lager (beer) at the counter, and one of the brands, Tennent’s, caught my eye. I told the man what I wanted, and some young Scotsmen behind me in the queue reacted by chortling. One of them made the reason for my risibility very clear, "Tennent’s is for poofs." Since I have seen a number of British sitcoms, I know that poofs = limp-wristed weenies. Not wanting to be the source of Scottish mirth, I turned to the man behind the counter and said, "Erm, excuse me, could I get a Caledonian instead." No laugh track accompanied my change of drink.

    Highlights from Week Two:

    Already a week into classes, things had started to get slightly less fancy-free. My friends and I did a fair amount of touristing though. The school provided us the option of paying a few pounds for a daylong trip to the much sung-about Loch Lomond. We decided to bite the bait and hopped on the bus to the Loch. After three hours of cramped travel, we were there — Loch Lomond: 80% mist and 20 % shopping mall. After the fog cleared up and I saw the ducks doing their thing in the vast expanse of grey water, I turned to look at the awful strip mall opposite the Loch and thought to myself "What kind of schmo let this happen?" The Loch is so large that I was told by a park ranger that it would take several days on foot to go around the whole thing; I only had a few hours, so I proceeded to feed most of the ducks in my immediate surroundings. At Loch Lomond, I also found out that my flatmate, Vilhelm, has a mild case of cynophobia. This emerged after I saw him get stiff as a lamppost when two beautiful German Shepherds decided to nuzzle playfully at his feet. Later, he told me with the severity
    of a character from a Bergman movie that "dogs get more attention
    than they ought to…they don’t deserve it, not one." 

    I got to know my other flatmates, Knut and Mathieu, better this week. Knut is from Norway, but he speaks in perfect British "received pronunciation," sometimes sounding like a youthful Richard Attenborough. Mathieu is from France and he is soccer-mad, seemingly planning his life around television matches and trips to see some of his favorite teams play. The first is rather fond of dry humor, and it is comforting to know that we both share a love of classic British comedies like Yes, Minister. Mathieu
    is more happy-go-lucky, but he has a marvelously good attitude to everything. 
    He makes Marcel Marceau look like an undertaker. 

    This week, my friends and I also went to Calton Hill, where many Scottish luminaries are buried. I got a special kick out of seeing the mausoleum David Hume commissioned for himself. I am a big fan of Hume, and I appreciate praise Edinburgh heaps on him, in the form of big buildings named after him and big statues portraying him. On the hill, we also saw the National Monument, a half-finished (yet, indeed, monumental) thing in the style of the Parthenon. Begun in 1822 to commemorate the Scottish soldiers who died for Britain at Waterloo, plans to finally finish construction are tentative. I like it the way it is — aren’t most of those old Greek things in ruins anyway?

  • Creep Show Couture

    “Do you ladies sew?” asked Rae Lundquist, a five-foot, fifty-something with a confident manner and long, silvering brown hair falling past her waist. Lundquist serves as costume director of MarsCon, a sci-fi convention that celebrates its tenth anniversary this month. As part of her duties, she had organized an educational field trip for her fellow costumiers. Interested parties were instructed to gather at the top deck of the Bloomington Holiday Inn Select parking ramp on the Sunday morning following last November’s MarsCon Masquerade Ball. From there, Lundquist (a.k.a. The Dreamstitcher) would lead a caravan twenty-five miles north. “I’ll show you the real place to shop in the Twin Cities,” she continued, leaning into the assembled (one man, three women) with a map. “The Guthrie shops there; Theatre in the Round shops there … A few years ago we found some brick-red wool gabardine there—perfect for Starfleet costumes!”

    A total of five cars set forth on the expedition. After navigating a maze of freeway, frontage road, and office complexes, everyone arrived safely at their destination: an ugly beige warehouse in Brooklyn Park with red block lettering that read: SR HAR IS (the sign was missing its second R). Arriving ten minutes in advance of the store’s noon opening, the costumiers joined a small crowd of mothers and young children who’d left the warmth of their minivans to wait near the front door. Lundquist, who’d shown up wearing black jeans, a floor-length denim trench coat, and a T-shirt advertising Serenity, the 2005 space-western flick, took the opportunity to socialize. Overhearing what a young mother had come in search of, she was her usual helpful self: “Corduroy—that’s aisles seventeen and eighteen.”

    Once inside, Lundquist, obviously a regular, loitered near the cash registers for about twenty minutes. A young woman with long black hair and a powdered white face approached with her copy of Hellsing, a manga series concerning zombies, werewolves, and ghouls. Opening to a bookmarked page, she revealed her costume concept—a female character in a tight black bodysuit with all manner of bandaging (think fashionable straitjacket). The young woman indicated she was leaning toward pleather. Lundquist was quick to counter: “You’re going to die in pleather!” she said, and directed the woman to the store’s twill selection, in aisles nineteen and twenty.

    Another costumier—a nice fellow with salt-and-pepper hair—said he planned to construct a Fellowship cloak, the costume popularized by Lord of the Rings. Lundquist suggested “a lightweight, almost see-through wool,” which, she said, might be found in or about aisle fifteen.

    After a while, the crew ambled to a far, back corner of the store. Once there, Lundquist seized upon a bolt of wool/alpaca. “I can see hobbit cloaks out of that,” she offered, pinching the fabric and then rubbing it with her fingers. “But it’s still a little rough.”

    As the party perused the floor-to-ceiling selection, Lundquist camped out near an end-cap and, from there, dispensed additional nuggets of wisdom: “You know what works well for armor slats?” she said, seemingly for the benefit of the male costumier. “Venetian blinds!” For the young woman, Lundquist had a suggestion for achieving that spiky, gravity-defying Pokémon-style hair: “Glue.”

    On a typical Sunday morning, SR Harris offers outsiders a microcosmic peek inside the local rag trade: The theatrical costume designers have come to look for billowing satins and acetates, fashion designers for jersey, and Hmong families for bargain remnants. Lundquist ran into three women from the Northwest Company Fur Post in Pine City (she costumes historic reenactments on the side). Joy Teiken, the woman behind the Minneapolis-based Joynoëlle line of couture, gave a wink while strutting past. Later, when the high-fashion designer of custom menswear Russell Bourrienne was introduced to Lundquist, she responded with her usual zeal: “Oh, I should send my son your way! He’s hard to fit.”

    Lundquist then proceeded to offer an impassioned discourse on the youngest generation of costumiers (usually anime enthusiasts) who have taken up sewing. Upon hearing this, Bourrienne’s eyes widened. “Yes, it’s very different,” he said nasally, in between titters.

    As the costumiers finished their shopping, Lundquist killed time by sharing a series of observations on the more technical aspects of her job; for example: “Anime people love zippers” and “That’s the one thing I can’t stand about superheroes—they have no pockets!” Soon enough, the male costumier reappeared with that perfect bolt of translucent gray linen. The Goth woman checked back shortly thereafter. Her cart was heaped with notions and black fabric but, before she was through, she had one more important question. “Is this good thread?” she asked, proffering a spool. (After all, that labyrinthine costume of hers would require serious reinforcements.) Lundquist gave it a yank and then, handing it back, pronounced, “Yeah, that’s buttonhole thread.”

  • Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

    Sally Strle was showering in her house in Virginia, Minnesota, when the vision appeared in her mind: an open Bible with the words Rest On His Word scrolled on the pages and a pillow adorned with Catholic art and scripture.

    “I could see the beautiful pictures, even the phrase ‘Rest On His Word’ there, and I knew that God was calling me to do this business,” recalls Sally, fifty-four, a full-time mother and grandmother.

    She hopped out of the shower that June day in 2005, and, at seven o’clock in the morning, called her older sister, Barb Johnston, to share the news about her God-given business plan: Catholic-themed pillowcases. Within two months, the sisters had found a place that sells Catholic artwork in California, had nailed down a digital printer and contacts with a pillowcase manufacturer, and were ironing and packaging hundreds of pillowcases in Barb’s tiny brown-sided house off Minnetonka Boulevard in St. Louis Park. “Oh, it was just absolute madness,” recalls Barb, sixty, an ESL teacher. “We had five ironing boards set up, our sister Bonnie was cutting ribbon, Peggy was messing with the packaging, and I think we went through thirty dozen pillowcases that day.”

    They set up a website and dipped their toes into a $4.63 billion-dollar Christian retail industry that traffics in books, Bibles, and sacramentals, as well as all manner of Christ-themed accessories and products for even the most secular of challenges, right down to bad breath and fitness fatigue. Christians no longer have to settle for Altoids, Aquafina, and Luna Bars; they can pop in a Testamint, chug a bottle of Formula J’, or grab a Bible Bar on the run (fortified with the seven “good” foods in Deuteronomy 8:8—wheat, barley, honey, figs, olive oil, grapes, and pomegranates.)

    And, as it turns out, God has a pretty good ear for marketing, because Rest On His Word pillowcases turned out to be a hit, and the sisters have been receiving more than a thousand orders per year from Texas and California, to Ontario and New Jersey. One enthusiastic woman in Green Bay, Wisconsin, started using the twenty-dollar pillowcases as a Catholic school fundraiser. Another group inquired about selling Rest On His Word in Hungary, and several people have asked for the Our Lady of Guadalupe pillowcases in Spanish (the sisters are on it).

    Then the stories started to come in. They heard about a young girl who didn’t feel so scared going to sleep because she knew the saint printed on her pillow was going to protect her. They heard about a Canadian homeschooler who gave a pillowcase to the “atheist” boy next door, who cried and asked his parents if he could be a Christian. Barb gets teary-eyed when she talks about the daughter and father who slept on identical “Guardian Angel” pillowcases while Dad was stationed in Kuwait.

    “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shown a pillowcase to someone and they’ve just started crying,” says Sally. “You can see the presence of God when you see the artwork on the pillowcase.”

    But perhaps the biggest change has been felt by the sisters, who say they have been validated in their faith like never before. Sally was once a lackadaisical Catholic, and now goes to mass every day. Barb reverted to her childhood faith from Lutheranism, her late husband’s faith, and says, “Since we’ve started the business, I’ve just never been more in love with Catholicism.”

    In the few years since founding Rest On His Word, Sally’s family has traveled to the Holy Land, and Sally went to pray with a stigmatist in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Barb and Sally traveled to Medjugorje in Bosnia and Hercegovina to see the shrine where apparitions of Mary have been reported. While there they absorbed the indigenous Christian products economy, stocking up on Our Lady of Medjugorje medals and rosaries. But they imparted little blessings from America, too: The sisters left behind Rest On His Word pillowcases at a Hercegovinian addict’s shelter and an orphanage.
    —Alyssa Ford

  • “We Can’t Really Control it Yet.”

    “Johnson is our name, cheering is our game!” The chants of a cheerleading squad echoed faintly inside Colin Denis’s classroom one winter afternoon at John A. Johnson High School in St. Paul’s inner-city Payne-Phalen neighborhood. Denis, looking the very epitome of a high-school science teacher with his wispy hair, thick glasses, and lab coat, collected papers from two lingering students. “OK,” Denis told them, “now I’ll take you down to see the robot.” The girls giggled with excitement.

    On that afternoon in early February, the robot was sprawled, as yet unnamed and entirely immobile, on a table in the school’s basement woodshop. The robot consisted of a square metal chassis measuring about two feet per side. Casters on each corner kept the robot stable, while four wheels near the center of the chassis were powered by a battery just a bit smaller than one you’d find under the hood of a minivan. There were plans for the robot to acquire arms and other useful accoutrements, but that day—with just two weeks remaining before the completion deadline—its creators were still grappling with more fundamental design challenges. “It’s my plan to drive it around the lunch room,” said Denis, “but we can’t really control it yet. It could hurt someone.”

    Later this month, the fully mobile—and, it’s hoped, fully controllable—robot will join more than fifty others at an Upper Midwest regional event, competing with other robots to push balls around a track. If things go well, Johnson High’s robot could move on to the national FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition. The nonprofit FIRST, founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, the inventor best known for his Segway Personal Transporter, aims to inspire students to enter science and technology fields.

    Corporate grants pay for each team to receive a basic kit of components for a remote-controlled robot—but it’s nothing like a Snaptite model. It took weeks of work for several Johnson students to design and cut specialized aluminum parts, wire a remote-control device with two joysticks, and program the robot’s simple brain to respond to commands by spinning its wheels in the desired direction. “It’s been exciting,” said Mano Nhul, a spiky-haired senior wearing a necktie only semi-ironically. “Well, at least since we got the robot to move.”


    The FIRST program has grown quickly in recent years, so most of the teams competing at the upcoming regional competition—to be held at the University of Minnesota the last weekend in March—are first-timers. Many, including the Johnson High team, have had to reconcile themselves to the fact that they’ll be up against experienced teams with vastly more resources. “We’re trying to do metal work in a woodshop,” observed Walter Pearson, a retired 3M engineer who serves as a volunteer advisor for the team. Bob Hart, an IBM retiree who’s another volunteer, added, “In engineering, you’re supposed to determine your need and design a part to do the job. Here, we have to do it backwards—find a part and then make it fit.”

    But the Johnson students are quick studies. On that February afternoon, Hart was teaching senior Belik Pha how to use engineering software to design a cover plate for the robot. (Pearson was also able to arrange for some custom parts to be built at the 3M machine shop.) At the next terminal, Pha’s teammate Lao Vang was writing a program in the computer language C. “He’s had to learn C from scratch,” noted Denis. “That’s like telling someone to learn Urdu in two weeks.”

    In the woodshop, senior Jeremy Gould was working with Pearson to cut a part to size. “This aluminum is like butter,” Pearson muttered approvingly as Gould sawed away. Gould, a burly young man with an unflappable, plainspoken demeanor, is all too familiar with the competition his team faces: He attended the two statewide events that inaugurated this season’s competition. There, experienced teams from places like Edina and Prior Lake showed up with dozens of members in matching shirts, reminiscing fondly about chanting their team numbers in Roman numerals and raising funds by auctioning dates with team members. At one event, veterans from the Edina team told new participants that they should plan to raise several thousand dollars (“at an absolute minimum”) to fund expenses like extra parts for their robot—each team is allowed to spend up to $3,500 on parts beyond those in the basic kit, and some teams go so far as to build two robots so they have one to practice with. The nine-member Johnson High team hadn’t had time to hold any fundraisers, write chants, or print T-shirts—let alone set up a website with a news feed on their progress, as many teams have—but Gould, who made bumpers for the robot by cutting up flotation noodles, was proud nonetheless. “We can get something together,” he said with confidence. “We’ll show them that we can compete.”

    Denis was pleased that the robotics program had engaged some of Johnson’s more academically accomplished students; he had been inspired to support the founding of the team after colleagues at other schools teased him that Johnson students had a reputation for excellence in brawn rather than brain. “Belik has already completed her graduation requirements, and she’s taking classes at the U of M. Why should she stick around here at all? This gives kids like her something to come here for.”

    Most of this year’s team members are seniors, but Denis and his colleagues are already making plans for next year, when the team will be based at St. Paul College’s fully equipped metal shop. As for what’s to come in ’08, Gould was asked for his thoughts as he stoically extracted a screw (Pearson had advised him to re-insert it from the opposite direction). “It’ll be interesting,” he said.

  • Simulated Madness

    Who could forget the game last December when Douglas Stewart, the low-scoring walk-on from Minneapolis, stepped out from the shadows of his all-conference teammates to lead the Annapolis Fightin’ Crabs to a national championship?

    You’re forgiven if you don’t follow the defending champs; they don’t, alas, exist in the realm people persist in calling the “real world,” but rather as data warriors in the complex alternate universe that is SimulatedSports.com College Basketball.

    It’s a world that lurches to life every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at the stroke of a keyboard, and to the flesh-and-blood coaches who guide the teams, its reality is corroborated by the hours they spend poring over play-by-plays, box scores, individual statistics, and the high school recruits that are the virtual game’s future. Take your pick: SimSports is a community, an extended metaphor, a reason to get up in the morning or stay up late into the night.

    The free online game, created in 1999 by SmartAcre LLC, is not a typical fantasy league; instead of using the stats generated by real-world collegiate hoops stars, the coaches playing SimulatedSports basketball recruit and coach randomly named players with computer-generated attributes.

    There is no actual on-court action, only static data posted to web pages. Games are viewed as box scores or play-by-play accounts (“D. Watson passes to M. Williams”). Of the dozens of pages detailing team statistics, players’ strengths, league standings, top performers, game strategy, and much more, only a few are interactive. Coaches set pre-game lineups and strategy through drop-down menus, and likewise apply points toward next season’s preferred recruits. Yet out of the numbers leap beloved players, future stars, bitter rivalries, miraculous victories, and another grueling March Madness-style tournament every nine weeks.

    It’s a pretty decent and entertaining simulation of real college basketball, but with better team names: Santa Fe Steaming Toads, Jackson Five, Amarillo Needs Women, Olympia Dukakis, Erie Coincidence, Twin Falls Hurt Twice.

    My own Boston Stranglers have hovered near the top of their league for a half-dozen seasons now, but have never quite managed to go all the way. That failure certainly can’t be attributed to lack of effort. I spend hours each week checking scores, adjusting lineups, scouting opponents, and browsing the ranks of high school recruits to build my dynasty.

    I’ve logged in at work, coached from Palm Pilots and public library computer terminals, from internet cafes in Mexican mountain towns and Garifuna villages in Belize. On my recent three-week honeymoon, I didn’t miss a game. What can I say? Addiction is a high-maintenance mistress.

    And I’m not the only junkie. According to Todd Nevin, who runs the game from his Baltimore home, in between his job as a programmer and his kids’ real-life Little League games, of the more than 4,600 teams in eighteen leagues, 4,035 have active human coaches (the computer runs the others). While coaches can buy credits (with small amounts of real money) to enhance their recruiting, that income covers costs but is “not nearly enough to make it my full-time job,” says Nevin.

    Coaches hail from as far away as Europe, Australia, and Japan, and include servicemen stationed overseas. “It sure helps to relieve the stress of war,” wrote one (who continued to coach while deployed in Iraq) in response to the questions I posted on the league’s very active message board.

    The online responses revealed the strength of the game’s grip on its devotees. One coach admitted spending twenty hours a week on the site; another coaches twenty-four teams at one time. Some use Excel spreadsheets and formulas to track statistics and gain an edge on opponents and recruiting. Computer programmers make their own custom-written game viewers and other software to track every imaginable aspect of each contest.

    As addictions go, SimulatedSports is a relatively benign one. Even so, not everyone understands it. “They definitely don’t get it but are happy I don’t do other drugs,” wrote one coach of his loved ones.

    Another said he’d used the game as “an escape from a marriage that had gone very wrong … I absolutely immersed myself in [the game] … I knew everything about every team in the league. The game actually helped me in some way get through a very difficult time in my life.”

    Others relish the real-life relationships formed through the message boards and, of course, the spirit of competition. Those champion Fightin’ Crabs are coached by a guy I introduced to the game, a Minneapolis IT professional who wouldn’t let me use his name because, he said, “people will make fun of me.” In less than a year and a half, he’s racked up a hundred and twenty-eight wins and forty-nine losses, two Final Four appearances and a league championship. After four years, I’m still waiting to win it all, but I continue to take no small pleasure in beating him.

    One local coach, who called the game his “dirty little secret,” recently walked away, discarding his Syracuse Lords A’Leaping (and four other teams) like so many unsmoked cigarettes. He claimed the habit wasn’t hard to kick, but it’s not like he went cold turkey. “I do spend a lot of time on the Xbox 360 now,” he said.

  • Stupid Is as Stupid Does

    A story appeared in The New York Times on Valentine’s Day with the headline “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?” It cited several recent books that bemoan America’s seeming self-satisfaction in the knowledge, that, well, we don’t need no knowledge, ’cause we’re Amurricans.

    I don’t think that’s the case. I think we don’t need no knowledge because, by golly, there’s money to be made on two fronts: We can sell stuff to stupid people; and we can sell stupid itself.

    Let’s look at the evidence of my first premise: George W. Bush, whom I like to refer to as President Forrest Gump. I’m not necessarily implying that President Bush is stupid, because I don’t think he is stupid. I actually think he’d make a great contestant on that TV show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? I bet, for example, he knows more about the content of your phone conversations than you do.

    I like to call him Forrest Gump because Forrest Gump beat out Pulp Fiction for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1994, just like Bush beat Gore for president in 2000, and for the same reason. He won because Americans prefer the world of Forrest Gump. It’s violent, complex and unfair, but can be successfully navigated the same way Forrest did. After all, life is just like a box of chocolates. Sometimes you get nougat, sometimes you get caramel, and sometimes you get Vietnam, AIDS, or global warming.

    Americans can swallow anything.

    I certainly don’t buy the rest of the world’s assessment of Americans as exemplified in the London Daily Mirror headline the day after Bush beat Kerry in 2004. It read: “How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?” First, I ask, If we’re so dumb, how can we count that high (Ohio notwithstanding)? And second, does re-electing Bush make us seem any dumber as a nation than collectively spending over $250 million to see the last Ben Stiller movie?

    Which brings me to my second point. We need to do a better job selling stupid to the rest of the world. Stiller’s Night at the Museum did over $320 million in foreign sales, granted. (It was hurt by the bad weather in Slovenia on opening weekend or it would have made a few thousand tolers more.) Since we can’t sell Escalades in countries where urban streets are about as wide as two donkeys (and, I might add, gas has to be paid for in hard currency like the euro) the only commercial advantage left to us is to sell stupid in Europe and Asia. (I’m sure we’ll make more economic inroads in Africa when more Africans stop obsessing over the whole subsistence farming economic model and get digital cable like the rest of us.)

    I don’t even have to go back to Jerry Lewis’s inexplicable popularity in France to make my point. I’m not even counting President Gump’s backrub of German Chancellor Angela Merkel or his duel with the locked door in Beijing. I’m talking “commercialized” dumb. You know: YouTube’s dogs on skateboards or any movie starring Will Ferrell. Face it, we’re leaving a lot of Will Ferrell money on the international table.

    Americans spent $150 million watching Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, but it only did about $10 million in revenue overseas. Now, this is a movie that could have a lot of appeal for foreigners. First there’s the whole stock car thing, which foreigners think is pretty funny. (“Zut alors! Look at those guys driving around in a big circle when they could be actually displaying the ability to do something other than turn left and bump each other.”) When you throw in Ferrell running off the track in his tighty whities pretending to be on fire, well, it just doesn’t get any funnier than that.

    But, like I said, it seems the only reason that movie showed overseas at all is so the Chinese could bootleg the DVDs and sell them back to us on New York sidewalks for two bucks.

    For some reason foreigners haven’t yet developed a taste for stupid movies any more than they have for our foreign policy, unless of course the movie is Titanic. Titanic did over a billion dollars overseas, which I’m going to guess happened because they do have a taste for movies about rich Americans who die while stoically drinking expensive French brandy.

    So, I have a possible solution to at least part of our balance-of-payments problem. As I write this, President Gump is touring Africa, and since it would only be the Japanese and Chinese who would profit if he were touting HDTVs while doing so, I propose that he do his diplomatic mission, and also throw in a little plug for America’s No. 1 export. Instead of acting like Forrest Gump at the closing press conference, he could do some sample Will Ferrell imitations for the assembled cameras.

    From all reports, he’s really good at it.

  • IKI STYLE

    Ninety-nine percent of the Mahi Mahi sold in the U.S. mainland comes from South
    America, and it is transported on trucks in very slow 3rd world process, so by
    the time the Mahi reaches the U.S. mainland it has a lot of shelf life on it
    already and the quality is very poor. Many people do not get a very good
    impression of Mahi because of this, and they would not think that Mahi Mahi
    could be a Sashimi fish. However, in Hawaii it is highly prized as a
    sashimi fish.

    In Hawaii, the Mahi Mahi is considered to be so good that only
    the high end restaurants can afford to buy it. Many of the lower end restaurants
    actually do not serve local Mahi, but frozen imports.

    The technique used to
    catch "day boat" sashimi grade Mahi Mahi in Hawaii is called "IKI STYLE" (aka:
    ika shibi style). Essentially, the idea is to stablize this fish right after the
    catch, because Mahi Mahi has a tendency to flop around a lot when you take them
    out of the water. Many mainland fishermen and in other regions of the world do
    not realize that this is the time when your meat most vulnerable. Unnecessary
    flopping around ruins the meat, because the fish is stressed out and the histamine
    levels in the fish build up and go right into the meat. This is the difference
    between "sashimi" quality and just regular plain old Mahi Mahi.

    The "Iki" method
    is an old Japanese technique. As soon as the fish comes out the water they
    do not let it flop around. Instead, they stick a metal rod down the spine of the
    fish, stabilizing the fish, but at the same time not killing the fish. (Basically,
    it paralyzes the fish.) This way the fisherman keep the fish on ice all the way
    into port, and then right before they get ready to dock they pull the rod out
    the spine of the fish. This makes it as if you caught the fish right out of
    water and produces an amazing quality of Mahi Mahi meat unlike anywhere in the
    world. This unique method is only practiced in Japan and Hawaii.

  • Sushi: The Naked Truth, part one!

    It seems that not even ten years ago sushi was hardly known, or worse in smaller communities it was known as "bait." And if you asked someone if they liked sushi or if they had eaten sushi, the typical response was, "What suesheee??? Nahhh, we don’t eat our bait!"

    Now if you look around today sushi is everywhere! Spreading like a wildfire, sushi restaurants are popping up in every community. Grocery stores are jumping on the band wagon, and even American restaurants are being influenced with a bit of sashimi or tuna tar tar, etc.

    Like anything else that gets popular with rapid growth, the core is often forgotten, lost, overseen, or simply ignored.

    Spicy tuna: Spicy tuna came to be because when a tuna loin is cut down you will only get about an inch or so of good meat left before the skin because the amount of fascia (white connective tissue) is too chewy for it to be used for nigiri, sashimi, or even a roll.

    Because it is good meat, and sometimes even great if it’s fatty, and it’s toro, we take a spoon and scrape the meat to separate it from the fascia. The end product looks like ground beef and is then made into spicy tuna.

    I’ve had a few customers complain that our spicy tuna is too soft or mushy. Well, that’s because it’s not frozen chunked tuna; this is the real deal!!

    On that note, if you go to a sushi bar and see spicy hamachi, spicy scallops, spicy this or that, it’s not good because they are not turning the fish and as its starts to stink it’s masked with spices and sold, when it should be tossed.

    Cheers,

    Henry C,
    Giapponese

  • Let’s Pity-Party!

    A girlfriend of mine just suffered a pretty bad breakup. So I did what I could. I took her out for the Colleen Kruse Pity Party (patent pending). A proper Pity Party begins with the sixty-minute Walk/Cry. I have found that it is best not to talk at all during the Walk/Cry. An hour of ambling in silence is much more theatrically poignant. It’s a cleansing ritual, similar to a Scientology birth.

    When the Walk/Cry is finished, a few supplies should be at hand: fuzzy blankets to hide under, a couch long enough for two to sit facing one another, and a decent cabernet, for its spiritually numbing goodness. Also any salted and fried food product, plus maybe some Smokehouse almonds, must be part of your triage kit. Crying plus alcohol depletes sodium levels in the body.

    By the time the two of you are settled on the couch, everything you need should be in place (don’t forget Kleenex, bottled water, dark chocolate, the remote for the stereo, and the phone). Also—this part is very important—HIDE HER PHONE. Now the talking can begin. I don’t like to give my pals any advice during the first forty-eight hours of any romantic trauma. I find it is better to bleed all of the poison out of them. My strategy is to keep eye contact and bear witness to their sorrow, leeching as much misery from them as I can before the famed 20/20 hindsight kicks in and they recall each excruciating moment of betrayal. Once the anger sets in, you will be so happy you remembered to HIDE HER PHONE. And she will thank you. Later.

    After forty-eight hours, it’s time for one bit of hard-earned wisdom. If your heart is broken, nothing will fix it but time. Friends can ease the pain, being active and bawling your eyes out will get the dopamine moving in your bloodstream again, and a binge of French fries and vino won’t hurt. But Lord help any woman who gets herself a haircut within one month of a bad breakup.

    I’ve been there. Am I a cutter? Yes. I am the former queen of self-inflicted bangs. It starts out a little bit here, a little bit there just to even it up. And then before you know it Girl, Interrupted is crazily staring back at you through the medicine cabinet looking-glass saying, “Ha! I look like a whole new woman! HaHaHaHa! Won’t he be sorry!” Trust me, you will not make an ex-lover rue the day he lost you if, when he runs into you on Nicollet Mall, you’re sporting a matted skullcap of choppy, multi-colored cowlicks. He might say something noncommittal, like “Wow, you got a new haircut!” (hint: acknowledgement is not a compliment), but as soon as he’s twenty feet away he’ll be heaving a sigh of relief.

    Once the wild dingo of self-flagellation has eaten your bangs, then you’ll have to wait out both your heartache plus an ill-timed hairdon’t. The most extreme example of this last year was Britney Spears. Let’s recap!

    Crazy Britney walks into a hair salon in Tarzana, California. She sits down in a chair and asks the stylist (also the owner of the salon) to shave her head. The stylist is horrified and refuses. Crazy Britney calmly takes the shaver out of its holster and begins to shave her own head. Oh, and she is laughing and crying the whole time. Thirty minutes after shaving her head, she stops laughing but continues crying and ends up text messaging her ex, pleading with him to come back to her. These messages later get mysteriously forwarded to the tabloid press. (WHY DIDN’T ANYONE HIDE HER PHONE?) After that, she goes to a tattoo parlor and gets a cross inked on the inside of her lower lip.

    I give Pity Parties to friends for free. Watching the whole Britney thing unfold last year, I realized Hollywood would be the perfect place to hone my skills as a comforter to celebrities in crisis. If I could get my hands on Britney, I’d bet anything that, within a year, they’d all be speaking in hushed tones when I walked into the Ivy. “Is that her?” “Yes. She’s the Britney Whisperer.”

    It’s a niche market, I know. My parties also work for job loss and pet death. But there’s almost nothing you can do about a really bad haircut.