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"Pickett!"
"Yes, sir!"
"0300 - infantry."
"Adams!"
"Yes, sir!"
"0800 - engineers. You go out and find mines."
--From Full Metal Jacket, a film by Stanley Kubrick
And thus passes another lost soul into the world of the more regularly employed. A more apt description of engineers was never given...the constant search for mines.
The chickens came home to roost this week, and there have been plenty of piles of feathers and chickenshit to go around for all:
(CNN) -- The nation's largest radio chain has taken shock jock Howard Stern off its stations indefinitely for running afoul of new decency standards.
"We will not air Howard Stern on Clear Channel stations until we are assured that his show will conform to acceptable standards of responsible broadcasting," said a statement from John Hogan, president and CEO of Clear Channel Radio.
There probably isn't a reason to defend Stern on this one, but it all strikes me as ultimately hypocritical. The goofy little son of the Secretary of State has launched a massive, puritanical purge throughout the land and soon we'll all find ourselves back in the times of "Leave It To Beaver," when Wally was soiling Mary Ellen Rogers, upstairs in her parents' house, and calling it "listening to records." Yes friends, Eddie Haskell was a revolutionary, and it's evident that Michael Powell was terrorized by guys like this growing up, constantly pulling his one-size-too-small, bleach-white briefs right up into his ass crack, just outside the chemistry lab in the middle of the hall.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but all of these fools and losers in Washington didn't give a rat's ass about Stern's content for the last 15 years or so, as big companies like Viacom and ClearChannel made fortunes off his show and donated large sums to their campaigns (both Donkey and Elephant).
All of this just further convinces me that Janet's bare tit was staged at very high levels of corporate and political authority. This is just too big of a circus. "Howard Stern is crude." No shit Sherlock. What was your first clue?
Whatever you do in the coming weeks, make sure to keep your head down so as to avoid the Rapture:
(CNN) -- Mel Gibson's crucifixion epic, "The Passion of the Christ," opened to packed cinemas across the United States and around the world Wednesday, leaving many movie-goers in tears at the graphic portrayal of the last hours of Jesus' earthly life.
At a screening in Wichita, Kansas, a woman in her 50s began having trouble breathing toward the end of the movie and later died, a theater official said.
"There were several physicians in the audience, and they attended to her until the ambulance arrived," said Ken Crockett, corporate vice president of Warren Theaters. "It was a pretty emotional thing."
Having grown up in Kansas, and driven through Wichita as fast as the car could possibly go each time, there's a joke in here somewhere tying together true full time employment, ClearChannel's hypocritical stance on Stern, and the most graphic depiction of the death of Christ ever made, but it fails me.
I'm sure I will get in many shouting matches over the film after I've finally seen it, but as I've stated before, my own feelings of Jesus were, are, and will always be nicely summed up by Kris Kristofferson:
Jesus was a Capricorn
He ate organic foods
He believed in love and peace
And never wore no shoes
Long hair beard and sandals
And a funky buncha friends
Reckon they'd just nail him up
If he come down again
Jesus, who for all we know is currently making his way across the Arctic Circle by dogsled toward Ypsilanti, Michigan, might have mixed feelings about Mel's epic depiction of his crucifixion. As quoted by Christiane Amanpour, who was dispatched by CNN to Golgotha for the whole thing, the good Lord himself, at the moment of truth inquired, "Eli, Eli, lama sabach-thani?" It wasn't really a banner moment for the carpenter of Nazareth, and we've all spent the last 2000 years nailing plenty of people just like him right back up there, again and again, both figuratively and literally.
A popular comedian once said that no one finds Christ on prom night, and we should all be careful not to find him in a multiplex, either, with a medium Dr. Pepper and a Medium Buttered Popcorn.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 25, 2004 10:52 PM

From THE EFFECTS OF DIVORCE ON AMERICA, by Patrick F. Fagan AND Robert Rector:
In 1935, there were 16 divorces for each 100 marriages. By 1998, the number had risen to 51 divorces per 100 marriages.
The Federal Reserve Board's 1995 Survey of Consumer Finance shows that only 42 percent of children aged 14 to 18 live in a "first marriage" family, generally an intact two-parent married family with both biological parents. Some 21 percent of teenage children live with a single parent who is divorced or separated, while 22 percent live in a two-parent household with one stepparent. The remaining teenagers live with a never-married single parent (6 percent), a widowed single parent (3 percent), or cohabiting adults (6 percent).
From President Bush:
"A strong America must also value the institution of marriage. I believe we should respect individuals as we take a principled stand for one of the most fundamental, enduring institutions of our civilization."
As the number of same-sex marriages across this country approaches 2 or 3 thousand, it's important to note that half of those marriages will soon end in divorce. Our dumbbell President, beholden to the religious right's rather sizable checkbook, has to chant over and over again that marriage is an institution between a man and a woman. Given the staggering numbers, I guess we should also mention that divorce is an institution too.
For me, same-sex marriage has less to do with antiquated notions of whether Adam should take Steve instead of Eve. Rather, the true issue is that fully half of these unions are doomed to fail, just like any other rotten, suburban, two car, two kid, one dog nightmare. There's a mountain of printed wisdom on the damages of divorce, but the titles should all be altered to read the damages of marriage; somewhere along the way, society forgot to plug in laws, rituals, and social pressures that prevent uncompatible people from agreeing to spend the rest of their lives together, when it's blatantly obvious to their mothers, friends, and the mouthpiece of God committing the unholy act of joining them that the whole thing will be an absolute disaster some day.
All that stuff that Karl Rove is telling the press secretary for the dumbest President in the history of America to quote the boss as saying about "sacred unions" and "enduring institutions" is just patently absurd. Marriage in America is a fucking joke, so there is absolutely no reason why people shouldn't line up to marry someone of the same sex, their goldfish, or a 1978 Trans Am with a broken stereo. Take a coin out of your pocket, flip it in the air...it's the same thing.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 20, 2004 3:24 PM
From the New Jersey Star-Ledger:
The music industry considers Michele Scimeca a pirate. The Morris County mom has her own term for record executives:
Racketeers.
In what legal experts described as a novel strategy, Scimeca is citing federal racketeering laws like the one that jailed mob boss John Gotti to countersue record labels that accused her in December of sharing some 1,400 copyrighted songs over the Internet.
Labels are using "scare tactics (that) amount to extortion" in efforts to extract settlements, Scimeca alleges in legal papers sent to the U.S. District Court in Newark.
FEDERAL RULE OF CIVIL PROCEDURE 11(b):
(b) Representations to Court.
By presenting to the court (whether by signing, filing, submitting, or later advocating) a pleading, written motion, or other paper, an attorney or unrepresented party is certifying that to the best of the person's knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances,--
(1) it is not being presented for any improper purpose, such as to harass or to cause unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation;
(2) the claims, defenses, and other legal contentions therein are warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law or the establishment of new law;
(3) the allegations and other factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, are likely to have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery; and
(4) the denials of factual contentions are warranted on the evidence or, if specifically so identified, are reasonably based on a lack of information or belief.
I got a "B" in Civil Procedure in law school, but one of the first things drummed into our "1L" heads that first year by Professor Paulson was that you better not go around suing people, or even threatening to sue them, unless you are willing to go through with it should your opposition call your bluff, and, unless you've got more than bupkus in your briefcase when you're telling them about the new house, plastic surgery, and yacht they're going to buy for your client with what they lose in front of a jury.
All of this gets reinforced for you, when you get around to taking Professional Responsibility from BlackJack Cound sometime in your second or third year (we called him BlackJack because he wore an old, green, plastic, card dealer's visor on his head while studying in his office). BlackJack Cound was a clerk for Learned Hand back in the day, which made him somewhat of an O.G. of Modern American Jurisprudence. He had a photographic memory and could pick important cases out of the sky and tell you their volume and page number, plus directly quote a few lines from all of them, making you feel ashamed about memorizing things like your last 5 or 6 phone numbers, as you moved from flop house to flop house during your college years.
Professional Responsibility is more of a State law course in the long run, and it draws into sharp relief what a hard-on District Court judges get for attorneys who waste their time. There's nothing better than a fresh example, and when lawyers go out of their way to make multi-state nuisances of themselves, well, it's the kind of thing that gets your scholarly and well-crafted ass-chewing quoted at length in Law Reviews and Journals.
At some point, a damp young judge, not too far removed from skateboards and video games, is going to get a hold of all of this RIAA business, and suddenly there will be penalties to pay for all sides. There's no doubt really that downloading and sharing is barred by copyright laws; but it's also becoming readily apparent that the RIAA and some particularly squishy brown asshole lawyers are more hell-bent on creating examples and causing a ruckus, rather than actually conducting any kind of rational and sensible examination of this problem and moving toward a preventative and reparative solution.
On the one hand, I have a great amount of sympathy for independent label artists who get traded and copied a great deal, and aren't making any money in the first place. To the extent that the RIAA represents them, I agree that something has to be done. But, on the other hand, the music most often quoted as being defended in these articles is the music of the worst kind of popular schlock assholes, who often value their talent so much that they piss away their fortunes at 40 minutes past the hour on "VH1: Behind the Music" (that reference will never get old). Maybe the sharp young hustler representing Mamma Scimeca has a good strategy here, especially if the whole mess causes a sensible young Federal District Court judge to stop the madness with a workable solution for all.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 19, 2004 11:07 PM
From CNN.com:
NEW YORK (Billboard) -- Randy Jackson is a hero. And it's not just because the music-industry veteran -- who is a judge on "American Idol" -- has given a lot of great advice in his Hyperion book, "What's Up, Dawg? How to Become a Superstar in the Music Business."
He is not afraid to rock the boat by criticizing the music industry, even though he could easily coast on his success.
The industry, Jackson tells Billboard, is "in the toilet" and does not seem to know how to pull itself out of it.
"I think record companies are so out of touch with the public, and that's why the music business is hurting," he says.
"The content is bad: The typical album has only two or three songs that matter. Record companies have got to figure out a way to get back in touch with what the public wants.
"What 'Idol' has proved to me is that the public wants the most talented person, no matter what size or color. Most of the people who've gotten far on 'Idol' are people who would never get a deal from record companies."
Also:
BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- French doctors were taken aback when they discovered the reason for a patient's sore, swollen belly: He had swallowed around 350 coins -- $650 worth -- along with assorted necklaces and needles.
The 62-year-old man came to the emergency room of Cholet General Hospital in western France in 2002.
The patient's rare condition is called pica, a compulsion to eat things not normally consumed as food. Its name comes from the Latin word for magpie, a bird thought to eat just about anything.
Pica can take the form of eating dirt, ashes, chalk, hair, soap, toothbrushes, burned matches and many other things. Francois once treated a patient who ate forks. Most such objects are small enough to pass on their own, but some must be removed by doctors.
During a normal year, these stories wouldn't be related. But it should come as no surprise to a world where people are willing to swallow shit off the ground, that there are businesses willing to shovel it into their mouths. French cuisine is so esoteric that your occasional coin or fistful of ashes might seem more like appetizers than bellwethers of precarious psychological conditions. But, it's worth noting--both figuratively and literally--that in any situation where people are consuming the absurd, an absurd environment has been created to foster that consumption, i.e., Randy Jackson's mainstream recording industry. He really hit one out of the park there...Big Love Ruben and Work In A Sandwich Clay would have been laughed out of the offices of the cold-hearted bastards who have been pimping the beautiful and the voice modulated for the last 15 years.
Insert paragraph where I take a swipe at Nashville. Yawn.
1. Anna Fermin's Trigger Gospel at the 400 Bar on Valentine's Day
She's exactly the kind of performer that Randy Jackson wishes was more popular.
2. Minnesota Wrestling beating Iowa on a last minute pin at Williams Arena
"Don't get pinned." Seems simple enough. As Ron once said to Harry, "How thick can ya be?"
3. The Auto DJ by Genre feature on MusicMatch Jukebox software
It's amazing how much good Alt Country I've completely forgotten about since July of 2001 when all of this nonsense started.
4. The quickly approaching Gibson Brothers show at Armatage Elementary
I wish Richfield was actually closer to Paynesville, and I had to drive an old 8 cylinder Buick with 10 cases of shine out to this show, with my headlights off. A boy can dream can't he?
5. Brad Zellar at Open All Night
I hope someone is keeping copies of this for a book. Someday, this will be the greatest shitter book of all time, and I mean that in the most complimentary way.
6. The Kansas City Royals
In the wake of the A-Rod trade, like Custer, the StarTribune Sports Editors at about 4:30pm today, and my college girlfriend, nobody will see it coming.
7. Warmer temperatures
8. Andrew Leach, Assistant Librarian and Archivist, Center for Black Music Research, Columbia College Chicago
Every great hunt starts with a good guide.
9. Uncle Tupelo
Andy Leach's dad, Dave, knows that Garth Brooks is the cultural equivalent of swallowing 12 pounds of coins in France.
10. My college roommate, Bill
I just know that I'm going to be interviewed by both the FBI and CNN about him, soon...probably on the same day. I won't rat him out either, no matter how many boxes with airholes punched in them, from New Zealand, are delivered to his house.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 19, 2004 12:13 AM
Being the only baseball writer in America with any sense, it is important that I weigh in on the transfer of Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers to the New York Yankees for Alfonso Guilleard Soriano and a player to be named later.
I'll restate what I've said before in this space, coffeehouses, and bars, all across America. If you weren't born in New York, if your parents weren't born there, and/or if neither you nor your parents have spent the majority of your lives in New York, and, you root for the Yankees, you're a fucking no-good front runner. If you own, wear, or have even tried on one of those powder blue and white Yankees caps, you should be killed and left in the street as a feast for vultures. That being said, if you're a valid Yankees fan, you have a small window to feel good about your team right now. Your megalomaniacal owner has gone out and bought the player that all the New York sportswriters agree is the best player in baseball.
But...but...but...Derek Sanderson Jeter is the Captain of your team, and no longer the best player on it. He's not even the best shortstop on your team. When he gets hurt and Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez takes over at short for a few games in his absence, your team will be instantly gut-shot, the poison will seep into your veins faster than an Arizona snake bite, and the resulting fallout will cause a housecleaning so severe, the Yankees won't make the playoffs again until 2020, long after Steinbrenner's body is cryogenically frozen at a butcher shop in suburban Tampa Bay.
Second, neither Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez nor Derek Sanderson Jeter can pitch. I took Calculus 20 and 21 at 8am, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at Stanford with Michael Cole Mussina. We were 2 people in a class of about 5, and we're both 35 years old now. My left arm is pretty strong, but my shoulder still twinges a little every Tuesday night after bowling. He's been a 200 inning guy his whole career, but 35 is 35, the tank has to start running dry at some point. Their pitching staff is by no means what I would call weak, but, as a whole, if I'm an American League hitter, they don't make me quake in my spikes either. After week 3 or 4, after the first time Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez steals some road hoochie from Derek Sanderson Jeter, when all 6 or 7 All Stars in their lineup hate each other and are more concerned about "getting mines" instead of helping the team, when Joe Torre's hair is completely gray and all of his eyebrow hair has fallen out...
Lastly, the best baseball player in the American League is Carlos Beltran, centerfielder for the Kansas City Royals. In 1980, the best baseball player in both leagues was George Howard Brett. In Game 3 of the ALCS, with the good guys up two games to none, trailing 2-1 in the top of the seventh, George Howard Brett hit a Richard Michael Gossage pitch so far into the Bronx night, no one could find it. Despite the 1981 season that didn't count for obvious reasons, that single at-bat rang in the end of the Yankees until 1994 when they finally got back on top in their division and began this current run of wreckless spending that has cemented their reputation forever in Baseball History as the Evil Fucking Empire. There are a lot of honest, hardworking, lunch-pail guys in New York City. These selfish millionaire egos shouldn't be held up as heroes for any of you.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 17, 2004 3:11 PM

Successful weekends can turn on the slightest of guiding principles and last minute thoughts:
"Move without the ball."
"Don't schedule a show for Valentine's Day."
And..."Don't get pinned."
I'd like to go into excruciating details about my weekend, but weekends are made for shedding the minutiae of existence, not piling them up like dirty laundry in front of the doors of freedom.
Suffice it to say, no one wants to play Stanford's Men's Basketball team right now. I'll listen to, and even agree with most of the conventional wisdom about how this team is overrated. But every one of the assholes spouting that lame argument also knows that no coach in his right mind would want to play this team, because you have to beat them; they aren't going to beat themselves, and, they're most likely going to make you do things you don't want to do. Just ask the University of California at Berkeley team. Stanford very rudely held the Dirty Golden Bears to 21.7% from the field in the 2nd half.
"I think Stanford has a good chance of winning each game they play," Cal coach Ben Braun said. "Those guys made the adjustments."
"They're a very good defensive team," Cal leading scorer and rebounder Leon Powe said. "They're a good team period. I didn't play most of the game, only 18 minutes, and I couldn't get in a flow. I'll give it up to them. It's frustrating. We've got to correct what we did down the stretch making mistakes."
BYU Football and Women's College Hockey are the only instances where undefeated is meaningless.
Anna Fermin should be a huge star. She writes clever songs, has a very good stage presence, a winning smile, and a miraculous voice. I listen to her a lot just casually, outside of my official duties as the only alt country DJ in the state of Minnesota, and Saturday night's show was a real treat as she played a great deal of her back catalogue, in addition to newer songs off the latest disc. I'd like to tell you about how the huge crowd bounced and swayed to every crafty little tune, but alas, there were only about 40 people at the 400 Bar. No matter how many desperately lonely people there are in any given city, Valentine's Day just isn't the best night to have a show. Hopefully she'll come back on a more opportune night in a more opportune location, in the near future.
It is worth noting that the Saturday night configuration of Jimmy Peterson's Missing Numbers might quickly become the best original-material, roots-booze band in town in the next few months. It seems like the experimental stage is coming to an end, and the polished one is beginning.
There were a lot of goofy moments in the Minnesota/Iowa dual at Williams Arena on Sunday, but it all really came down to taking a shot and not getting pinned. In two different matches, the Dirty Birds failed at both. The hot-headed Eustace child, who followed the call of an AM radio signal, rather than the highways of the State on his birth certificate, had very little to do with the ultimate outcome. There's going to be a lot of tunnel vision in the next few days about this particular set of matches, but the big picture in all of this is the quickly approaching Big Ten Tournament. There's blood in the water, and several species of shark have come to feed; more than anything else, the teams have been beating up on each other, and the conference championship will be a site of much violence and despair. While "our" eleven teams thrash each other for six spots at ten weights, teams like Oklahoma State and Hofstra will glide into St. Louis, relatively fresh. It will be important for any Big Ten fighters to be riding some momentum, and days like Sunday were not the kind of thing they were counting on in Iowa City. A few of their wrestlers were hitting on all eights, but two failed to heed the simplest advice: shoot, and don't get pinned.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 16, 2004 10:39 PM

Later Friday afternoon, we went out on the balcony of the press box and I tried to describe the difference between what we were seeing today and what would be happening tomorrow. This was the first time I'd been to a [Kentucky] Derby in ten years, but before that, when I lived in Louisville, I used to go every year. Now, looking down from the press box, I pointed to the huge grassy meadow enclosed by the track. "That whole thing," I said, "will be jammed with people; fifty thousand or so, and most of them staggering drunk. It's a fantastic scene--thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey bottles. We'll have to spend some time out there, but it's hard to move around, too many bodies."
"Is it safe out there?" Will we ever come back?"
"Sure," I said. "We'll just have to be careful not to step on anybody's stomach and start a fight." I shrugged. "Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they'll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomitting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It's hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up."
He looked so nervous that I laughed. "I'm just kidding," I said. "Don't worry. At the first hint of trouble I'll start pumping this 'Chemical Billy' [mace] into the crowd."
--From "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," inThe Great Shark Hunt : Strange Tales from a Strange Time, by Hunter S. Thompson
We have always tolerated and even encouraged short outbursts of extreme violence in America. In our best moments, we have encircled these displays with walls, created a few rules, added one or more referees, and called it sport. Those with a classical education probably think, in their darker moments, that St. Augustine was correct to turn away from the lions eating the Christians. But many generations of influence by men like Teddy Roosevelt, Johnny Rodriguez, and Tom Landry, have taught us that it was probably okay when he snuck a peek at the carnage too.
Discussions in ice shacks and all-night poker games should always gravitate to at least one, top-volume, cussing match about something in some sport that was the best or worst ever. These are the themes and topics that grip the fever of the human mind and make the person encasing it dress in the odd colors of his or her favorite team and embrace boisterous, one-sided, and at times, off-color, opinions on things that simply don't matter in the larger scheme of things. But that's the beauty of this experiment called America, isn't it? We have outlets for our aggression, enthusiasm, and our need to gather in groups and shake our fists in unison at our sports enemies.
A college wrestling match is seven minutes of mutually agreed upon torture. Two grown men have purposefully decided to try to beat the other mercilessly and publicly, and we've all given them 420 seconds to do it. There's a ref there, but his chief function is to prevent knee injuries and to stop any matches that have gotten out of hand, before somebody dies.
To the outsider, it can be a very obtuse sport to observe. Just two guys grabassing their way across a gym floor, I've heard some say. In the first 18 months or so of my own experience with the sport, my opinion sometimes gravitated toward that thought as well. But, there are two moments when the sport really opens up for you, if you're patient enough to hang around for both. Oddly, I'll start by saying the second moment is the first time you see a guy "break" and stop wrestling in the middle of a match. It's very much akin to catching a guy bluffing, or betting a weak hand too highly in a poker game. You understand that if he doesn't find a well of courage and strength very quickly, he's going to have the rough equivalent of 1st Degree Criminal Assault performed on him, and it will be encouraged, both by his opponent and the opponent's fans, and also surreptitiously by his own people, who are pissed that he gave up.
The first moment is when a major rivalry--let's not mince words here--or hate comes alive for you. I steadfastly maintain that this moment in my wrestling fan experience was absolutely the best match I ever saw, though many have blinked and long forgotten it.
If a redshirt freshman from Minnesota and Iowa square off in an open touranment at a regional high school gym in the middle of South Dakota in front of 500 people, every point, whistle and timeout will be alternately cheered and booed by blocks of 250 people. Somewhere in your journey, you'll pick a side, and from then on, the other team's guy will always be stalling on bottom and fleeing the mat. If you inflate this scenario to varsity starters at the Big Ten Tournament or the NCAA Championships, you have to gird the polynomial with the variables of alcohol, fear, and revenge. The spectacle will never compete on a sheer numbers level with say a Michigan-Ohio State Football game; but, ten fights between 20 men, alternately wearing Maroon versus Black will produce a claustrophobic shotgun blast of intensity like the annual Baton Rouge National Cockfighting Championships.
"The very last thing I remember, with the score close and just a few seconds left, was, 'this is it, if I don't win, I might not qualify for Nationals,'" said Iowa 167 pounder, Mike Uker. In a little less than seven minutes, he had been on his back, had Gopher Zac Taylor on his back, been reversed for two out of a cradle, and called for stalling, thus awarding a point to Taylor; and now, he was down 13-12 and the match was almost over.
In a perfect world, these are the kinds of matches that END the Big Ten Tournament, not start it. But that's just what was happening. The first match for both men was a brutal, twisting, turning battle, punctuated by a kind of State Fair, Pro Wrestling sideshow carnival outside of the mat that would have been humorous, had it not been completely serious. All over the floor, the 1997 tournament had begun in a steady manner, favorites dispatching underdogs at a good clip with pins, tech falls, blowouts, and an occasional 4-3 or 2-1, your typicial score between close wrestlers.
But everything in the air as the whistle blew to start this match said one thing, "this is a fucking fight." Thirteen to twelve happens in football, uncompleted outdoor volleyball matches, and is typically the final score in 8th grade girls' basketball games. But here it was, an opening match between two elite Big Ten wrestlers, from two top programs, who absolutely hated each other, match number one in the 167 pound weight class.
Dan Gable, still head coach of the Iowa program, hadn't been as visible in the weeks leading up to the tournament, recovering from hip replacement surgery. He could be seen as the day started, hobbled by wrist locking crutches, but focused and organized, observing his team in action; yet this match even made HIM lose his cool. In the middle of the match, Uker tossed Taylor in what Assistant Gopher Coach Joe Russell called a "body lock throw." The ref initially called it an illegal move and penalized Uker a point. It took Gable a while, but he appeared at one edge of the mat, opposite the corner where his assistants guided Uker throughout the match, a few feet down from Head Gopher Coach J Robinson and Head Assistant Marty Morgan. Gable furiously banged his crutches on the mat, causing the ref to stop the match, and receive a pretty severe ass-chewing from the legendary coach. Robinson and Morgan immediately joined the fray as the two wrestlers watched, complaining that Iowa had too many chefs cooking the broth; that brought the Brands brothers across the mat to yell at them for yelling at Gable, who's yelling at the ref. Yep, the first match of the tournament for both wrestlers.
At this point, Williams Arena was comparable to locking the main gates at the Minnesota Zoo on the first warm Spring Day, then opening all the cages. Your typical college wrestling crowd is usually made up of about 25% women, children and family, 40% current and former wrestlers, and 35% people who just like to get drunk, yell, and fight. Several hours into the tournament, these people were all in fine form, and the bedrock animosity between the Minnesota and Iowa crowds was at a fever pitch. Fists were being shook and birds flipped across aisles, and promises of unofficial bouts were being made for the concrete by-ways of our fair city. If you're stupid, you'll pick a fight with someone you think is "your size;" in this pool of humanity, chances are he's a shark of the former All-State, All-Conference, All-American variety, and you've just scheduled one thorough drunken ass-kicking. But the gloves had come off for this 7 minute block apparently. Two men were removed from the arena in section 107, just over my right shoulder, for fighting. In retrospect, I think there was a body lock throw involved.
"As a team," Taylor said, "the thing about fighting Iowa was always trying to gain respect. We had been fighting them a long time and had never knocked them off, you always want to beat the best. Everything is a battle. And everytime Iowa wrestles Minnesota now, they know it's going to be a battle."
The outcome of this battle is always a bittersweet issue for me, because I was a huge fan of Taylor as a Gopher, and have since become friends with Uker who resides in Minneapolis. In fact, the first time I ever met Uker was on a booster club bus ride to Iowa City to catch a dual match between the two schools at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. The first words out of my mouth after being introduced were, "I fucking hate you." Thank God he's a man with a great sense of humor.
It's a rare feat indeed when two athletes tap into the main vein of a huge rivalry, and the massive rage and intensity necessary for them to compete for those seven short minutes gets channeled out from the mat into several thousand people who give it right back to them and make them fight that much harder. Thirteen to twelve happens in little league baseball.
How did it end? Honestly, I don't care. It was and still is the greatest fight I ever saw. It was a new kind of adrenaline rush I hadn't felt before, and have only felt a few times since, usually when the bad guys in black show up on our home floor.
Senior Damion Hahn (pictured above) and the 13th-ranked Golden Gopher wrestling team will meet archrival Iowa on Sunday afternoon at Williams Arena at 2 p.m. Minnesota is coming off an upset of third-ranked Illinois, while the Hawkeyes are in second place in the Big Ten.
Including several giveaways throughout the match, Duo Design will provide the entertainment at intermission of the match. Tickets are available for $20 or $10 and can be purchased by calling the Gopher Ticket Office at 612-624-8080 or 1-800-UGOPHER.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 12, 2004 6:34 PM

When the snow is more than 3-feet deep in your front yard, and you've used your snowblower more than 15 times in the last 10 days, you answer the phone if it rings after midnight.
Luckily it wasn't one of those fantastic emergencies from home in Kansas, where the people aren't used to driving in snow without front or four-wheel drive. Instead, it was my old college roommate Fagelson, from Austin, Texas, an academic type given to loaded snickers and pregnant sighs.
My hello was greeted with a great exhale of breath. "What's the matter," I asked, "you sound terrible. Did one of those degenerate hippies down at the Star Seeds cafe crush a downer into your omelette?"
"You inbred scum," he retorted. Bill's not one for violent reaction, so this outburst gave me pause. I remembered that he and a merry band of other bright young minds had boarded a bus back in January to trek up to Iowa to stump for Howard Dean among the swine and overalls. It was Dean he had called to talk about now.
"A colleague of mine in Madison tells me he's wading around in some open water near the shoreline wearing nothing but a second rate pair of khakis and a sweater vest, with an old wool scarf wrapped around his head, chasing a cheap, fake, Hawaiian lei," he related. "He thinks he's Peter O'Toole after the taking of Aqaba in 'Lawrence of Arabia.'"
Having spent many hours observing the almost surreal waste that John Kerry is laying to the rest of the Democratic field, I was not surprised at this rumor at all. Now that the people have spoken and will continue to speak in the direction that causes the least amount of hassle, the only drama leading up to the Democratic convention is what kinds of second-rate, State Fair carnie bullshit the losers will pull trying to either bolster their positions in a theoretical Kerry administration, or, trying to submarine the opportunistic, heiress-marrying, war hero, who's about as warm as a paint bucket of crappie minnows left outside the shack on Lake of the Woods.
Dean's stock has sunken so low that Ralph Nader changed his phone number and didn't leave a forwarding address. The only true question left is who has the most damaging picture of Kerry fucking a football: Edwards or Clark? Edwards is smart enough to realize that he's sitting on a pile of 2008 gold, regardless of what happens, because anybody with any sense knows that Karl Rove is going to be standing behind George W. Bush in Kabul on or about October 15th, and the two of them will be standing next to 5 members of the 101st Airborne, all with automatic rifles pointed at a knealing Osama Bin Laden and various of his cohorts. Bush will most likely be wearing a pair of night vision goggles cocked up on his helmet like a pair of Ray Ban sunglasses. In that scenario, Edwards loses nothing by being the spunky VP candidate that whips up on ol' Skipping Ticker Dick, and stands loyally by while his boss gets buried by the most evil fucking human being (Rove) since Carville. "Edwards looks great for 2008," they'll chant in Gastonia.
This was more than Fagelson could handle, though. "Whatever happened to the good guy winning in the end? Where's Randolph Scott and Roy Rogers?"
"Those westerns went out of style long before you and I walked this earth you fool," I chastised him. "The modern paradigm will always be Clint Eastwood's no-name drifter. He's not on anybody's side but his own. You root for him because it's a movie and you have to pick someone, but no one is really better off because he wins in the end, and, he definitely doesn't give a crap either way."

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 10, 2004 12:58 AM

Never underestimate the influence of the Vatican. While the rest of the country was watching an epic battle between Stanford and Arizona at Maples Pavillion on the lovely Stanford Campus known affectionately by the initiated as The Farm, we here in the great white north got to watch the gripping battle between Marquette and DePaul. Had this been 1977, the latter game might have been more interesting. But, given the fact that both the Card and the Wildcats were nationally ranked, and, Dick Vitale and Brent Musburger were on hand to do the commentary, and, glitterati like Tiger Woods and Jim Plunkett were courtside, you'd think the regional office would have made the obvious call and went with the national gig. I am delusional, but in an area where most people don't care about Stanford, Arizona, DePaul or Marquette, I'm willing to bet at least a little bit of money that there would be at least a little interest in the nationally ranked contest, rather than the I-94 All Catholic League game of the week.
Stanford gives opposing coaches ulcers. There might be two guys on this whole squad who will go pro; but, they do EVERYTHING their coach tells them to do, when he tells them to do it, like he tells them to do it. Lute Olson regularly fills the rosters of the NBA with absolute superstars. For the past 5 or 6 years, those superstars have the same story to tell: sometimes team basketball shoots a shitload of holes into your god-given individual talent. If you haven't bothered to investigate, they're playing Monty Ball in Palo Alto. 20-0.

Posted by Jack Sparks at February 9, 2004 11:55 AM
Stop the presses! I enjoyed the Grammy's! Well, except....
You just knew something was going to get to me. Where was the country music? Oh that's right, a program like the Grammy's will only feature the pop-iest of Nashville schlock. I really don't ever listen to horrible awful country radio stations here in town, so I don't know who's hit is what right now; but, when Martina McBride was introduced, I said out loud, "this is going to be a power ballad about a child, or an angel, or a child becoming an angel." I almost shit my pants when all 3 predictions were correct. It joys me to no end that she has added a song about child abuse to her vast repertoire of spouse abuse and angel worship. Hopefully, on her next album, there will be a prominent song about a dog that gets beaten in her neighborhood, and ends up dying, saving its master from a house fire, thus becoming an angel in doggie heaven.
The Grammy's were a good wind down to a weekend that featured a great deal of sensory overload for me. Saturday night I got sucked into my first all night Texas hold 'em tournament at a buddy's house. There are a lot of TV shows and books about this game right now, so it's probably going to start suffering from overexposure, like everything in this godforsaken culture. I probably can't add anything fresh to the topic, except maybe this little observation: if you lose at this game, 9 times out 10, it's because of your own blatant stupidity. Since everyone has to share cards, you know where you stand most of the time, even without seeing your opponents' hole cards. Of course, like all poker, there are bluffs, but bluffing is much more rare in this game because bluffing catches up with you in a hurry, unless EVERYONE at your table is an absolute moron, which sadly, is never the case. Out of 14 knuckleheads present, I took 7th place, meaning I was the last guy out before two tables were consolidated into one with 6 finalists. And, like anyone who has played this game can tell you, I can tell you exactly the 3 boneheaded moves that blew it for me, out of hundreds of hands. Absolutely maddening. I can't wait to play again.
But, in the end, parlor games are for the sedentary drinker, who derives the most pleasure from raising his resting heart rate, rather than gettin' all sweaty with thousands of his closest friends on a Friday night in smelly clubs, baptized in cheap booze.
I hate to do this, but I have to admit that the "Common Man," Dan Cole is absolutely correct: American Society was ruined by air-conditioning. Many things that once made our culture vibrant and distinct have been ruined through various things that were supposed to be improvements. Last week, I threw 2 cents into the fountain on the Greatest Men in Country Music. I neatly sidestepped an issue that I hold an unpopular opinion on, because the only thing worse than upsetting guitar-heads is....well, there aren't really too many things worse than that. So let me start by saying Chet Atkins was one of the greatest guitarists ever, no doubt, no question, no argument. But...........but, if you want to point a finger at the dickhead who paved the way for all of this absolutely overproduced, overly sentimental, treacly, awful, later-Eaglesesque-to-the-Nth-degree, garbage that comes out of Nashville now, start with him. Just remind yourself that there can't be an "Outlaw Movement" unless there's a sheriff in town. Willie, Waylon, and JohnPaul were reacting to Chet Akins' and Billy Sherrill's overproduction...they were the enemy!
So what caused me to go off on rant number 317,642 about Nashville? You dance a fine hyperbolic line when you even think you believe in ghosts as you listen to Hank III sing songs like "My Bucket's Got a Hole in It." I'm telling you right now, it's fucking spooky. It is impossible to have spent hours, days, months, and years with ol' grandpa's music, and then waltz into a club full of rabid kids, hippies, burnouts, stock brokers, bikers, junkies and hookers, and not get creeped the hell right out as Shelton sings some old standard. Remind yourself, grandpa died in the back of his Cadillac on the way to another show, as he melted into a death spiral of drug and alcohol abuse. BUT, even as his "clean cut" superiors were ostracizing him--while cashing absolutely fucking elephant checks off of his work--everywhere he went was a complete mob scene. People went nuts, and contrary to the overly controlled "family" atmosphere of the 1950's Opry, in these road shows that Hank Sr. did, he whipped them into a bigger and nastier frenzy at every opportunity.
Of course there is a part of country that is about putting on your clean shirt, shining your shoes, combing your hair, and going down to the town hall for a barn dance. But even Billy Graham, Elizabeth Dole, and my sweet Grandma Tillie knew what was going on out behind the barns at those things. THAT is just as country as anything else, and that is what ol' Hank III brings to the never ending road show. You can feel it in your bones. Fuck all this well-pressed shirt, arena-in-the-round, sweet little cowgirl, bullshit...sometimes you have to sing about your uncle, who in a few short years went from town sheriff to reviled crank addict ("7 Months, 39 Days")...yee-friggin-ha. And, if you don't know who Joe Buck is, edjamacate yourself. Three's bassist dujour is also the guitarist for The Legendary Shackshakers and a club boss of sorts in Nashville...the club where the squares don't go. Sure, he's got a mohawk, splayed teeth like the banjo picker in "Deliverance," and looks like he eats too much sugar cereal for breakfast, lunch AND dinner...but make no mistake, this guy has his finger on the pulse of the hillbilly dark side; just think Greg Allman slowly tracing the contour of his face in court, with two fingers, like shotgun, only put it in a music context.
Shut your mouth and get your ass on the plane. Yes, just shut your mouth and get your ass on the plane.
The cocktail napkin in my back pocket contains the phrase, "like an omelette that's too big." There's a lot of onions, mushrooms, bacon, sausage, and cheese in The Drive By Truckers, and they're spread out all over the griddle. You find yourself repeating to yourself and out loud at their shows, "you simply cannot make this shit up." There aren't enough 3 guitar assaults with a shared whiskey bottle in the music world today. And, let me repeat that...The Drive By Truckers are a 3 guitar assault; there's no where in the club you can go without getting a melon full reverb.
Not only was the word "fuck" used in all its forms--noun, verb, adverb, and adjective--during the evening, but the DBT's also played the album they've been recording in its entirety. Think about that; this little asshole of a club at Cedar and Riverside gets 3 hours of music featuring all your old DBT favorites, plus, the group has the guts to shotgun through about 12 new songs, without killing everybody's buzz. And, if you know anything, you know that Patterson Hood can't just write a song, he has to have a theme to go along with whatever he's doing, and we all love him for that. (Just read this and imagine heavy guitar chords being played "softly" in the background) "Back in the 70's in a small county in Southern Tennesee, Sheriff Buford Pusser fought a one-man battle against the Southern Mafia known as the "Boys from Alabama" that was subsequently made into a shitty movie called "Walking Tall,"...." Patterson, you had me at "hello." You simply cannot make this shit up.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 9, 2004 8:06 AM
When my mom and dad got divorced
my mamma she locked herself in her bedroom
and she didn't come out for six years
And in my mamma's bedroom
she's got 3 tv sets just like Elvis
the king, used to have
and on top of each one of them tv sets
my mamma she had 2 VCR's
so that she could watch all the other shows later
that she wasn't watchin'
when she was watchin'
the other shows
My mamma she'd sit there in her bedroom
readin' the National Enquirer
and the Sun and the Star
drinkin' vodka and milk
and flippin' them channels
--From "18 Wheels of Love," on Alabama Ass Whuppin', by the Drive By Truckers
I'm gonna eat me a plate of biscuits and beans
I'm gonna drink a glass of water and keep the boy lean
Find me a girl that can't shoot straight
I'm gonna piss her daddy off when I take his daughter home late
--From "Combine," on Split Lip Rayfield, by Split Lip Rayfield
Well I used to think that country
was out in Nashville, Tennessee
but all I see in Nashville
is a buncha backstabbers
takin' you and me
they don't care about the music, you see
--From "Trashville," on Lovesick Broke & Driftin', by Shelton Hank Williams, III
Every Winter in Minnesota, 5 or 6 consecutive Friday nights of just ending up somewhere pile up on each other, into one King Hell bitch of a Friday, where a man is forced to make choices, not knowing whether the inevitably poor quality of those choices will haunt him at some odd hour, say 4am on Saturday morning, when he should have been in bed long ago, but is instead standing in a room where he's never been, with people he doesn't know, witnessing things he's only read about in books and seen between 40 minutes and 45 minutes past the hour on "VH1: Behind the Music."
The quantity of rebuttals that I receive from time to time, to my protestations of "That Ain't Country" sometimes gives me pause. However, I steadfastly maintain that if some of these people who are insecure about their 1994 purchase of the Garth Brooks model Stetson would just engage in a pedal to the metal Friday night like the one approaching, they'd give up their relentless pursuit of well-pressed dark blue rodeo shirts with black shoulder pieces and tight black jeans. Some country people wear knit caps, don't shave, and like to get wired on crystal meth and Southern Comfort before tearing across a frozen lake on a sled; these same people would rather jerk off their fathers for 9 consecutive hours, than watch one lap of NASCAR, and the only boots in their lives are the glass ones that they serve the thick beer outta, down to the German bar there ya know...
Saying Graham Lindsey, the Be Good Tanyas, or the Drive By Truckers aren't Country because some woman named Tammy in Sedalia, Missouri never teared up to one of their songs coming over the loud-speaker while she was buying Huggies down at the Wal-Mart is ludicrous on its face.
Remember, the origin of NASCAR is the hillbilly need for speed as they outran the revenuers, getting shine from places like Gastonia, to the good, thirsty people in places like Raleigh. There weren't any numbers on those cars, sometimes there weren't even license plates. But wimps like Garth Brooks, Kenny Chesney, and the collected members of Lonestar would have been tasting shot gun oil in those circles; and make no mistake, the men in those circles would have found the manufactured "country" imagery of those peacocks' music quite foreign.
No friends, country mileage is clicked off your city odometer when you start the night at the Elsie's Friday night all you can eat Fish Fry in Nordeast. Neighborhood bars infuse your veins and joints with the greasy suppleness needed on sub-zero nights, when Country people know where to park for cheap--if not free--while downtown, to put the fight in your blood at the Hank III show at First Avenue. While Garth Brooks was relentlessly and needlessly rehashing Bread and post-Furray Poco in a 90's Nashville shitbag package, Hank III was embracing the Super Suckers, doing drugs, collecting tattoos and getting chicks pregnant. Hmmm. Since it's an early show, you'll have the opportunity to careen your broken headlight pickup from it's secret hiding place down to the 400 Bar to catch The Drive By Truckers with Split Lip Rayfield opening. Call me fucking crazy...but a band of four guys from somewhere in the middle of Kansas that features a guy playing a string stretched across a gas tank for a bass...but a band from Alabama and Georgia that features the son of a legendary Muscle Shoals musician and sings about incest, family farms, and shotguns...I mean really, call me fucking crazy...nah, none of that is Country...it can't be, it's never on CMT, Jeff Gordon doesn't listen to them, not one of them wears a wide-brimmed, black, felt, cowboy hat...
There are country people who not only shoot bears, they shoot them on purpose, and know how to clean them for meat. These people only turn the heat on when the temperature gets below 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and then they still sleep with a window open, "so th' air circulates ya know?" Garth Brooks is a Prancing Nancy to these people, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. is just some spoiled rich kid, driving his daddy's car, too chickenshit to run with the old-school bucket seat, like his balls out, Wild-Bill-Hickock-mustached, high school drop-out, hillbilly old man.
1. Friday night, all you can eat Fish Fry at Elsie's Bar Restaurant and Bowling Alley
Greasy ass deep fried flaky fish and hot as the sun french fries, cheap. Yum yum.
2. "18 Wheels of Love," played live by the Drive By Truckers
The kind of song that should be recited in full growl on a Friday night at the end of a cruel, cold work week.
3. Split Lip Rayfield, live
Name the last true bluegrass show you were at that featured a mosh pit.
4. "Emma Rumble," by Graham Lindsey
It's a two-step, dumbass.
5. Forest Lake Ice Fishing Tournament
Coal-burnin' stove
No natural gas
If that ain't country
I'll kiss your ass
6. "Cocaine Blues," by Hank III
The second recording of this song where you get the creepy feeling it may have actually happened to the guy singing it.
7. The arrest and sentencing of Gore's kid for marijuana
Let's see, a national political leader who got everything he ever had because of his father's work and connections has children with substance abuse issues...where have I heard that one before? Just further proof that Gore and Bush were/are the exact same person. Is it too late to get "none of the above" put on THIS year's ballot? Gee Tipper, must have been all those evil lyrics made him do it, huh?
8. Stanford's undefeated Men's Basketball Team
Go Card!
9. Trailer Trash First Fridays at Lee's Liquor Lounge
Just in case the Truckers get done at like midnight or something. More one-headlight cop racing on dirty downtown streets.
10. Chicago Country Legends by The Sundowners
Because everyone knows that country music has never been played, written, or made in Chicago.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 4, 2004 6:08 PM
Last week, on CNN.com:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- FCC Commissioner Michael Powell said Wednesday he is calling for a dramatic increase in fines for broadcasters that allow the "F-word" and other obscenities on the air.
Powell said he wants the fines increased by a factor of 10 because Congress has not raised them in decades. Powell said the current maximum fine of $27,500 per incident was not enough to persuade broadcasters to watch their language.
"Some of these fines are peanuts," Powell told a National Press Club luncheon., according to a report from The Associated Press. "They're just a cost of doing business. That has to change."
For all of you scrambling to decipher Nipplegate, let me give you a vision of how the world works.
First, take into account that the world of pop music has been nothing but watered down kiddie porn and bleeped-out foul-mouthed rappers for the past 7 or 8 years.
Second, take into account the explosion of talk radio--especially "shock jocks" like Howard Stern--in the past 5 years or so.
Lastly, take into account the blurred edges of "good taste" and "community standards" on network television since the debut of NYPD Blue several years back.
There's going to be a lot of sunshine and smoke blown all over the place with words and phrases like "decent," "classless," and "think of the children...will somebody please think of the children?" Ladies and gentlemen, these are all red herrings.
There's also going to be a lot of sunshine and smoke blown all over the place about who knew what when and why. Janet will bare the brunt of it, "it was something post-rehearsal," she'll repeat through spokespeople, ad nauseam. Executives from her label, Viacom, CBS, MTV, the NFL, the SPC, the NRA, and the KKK will all deny knowledge of the sunburst nipple ring torture clamp, and the tear-away cup. Once again, these are all red herrings.
If your window is small, scroll back up to my opening story. Yes boys and girls, the fines are being increased tenfold by another Washington powerbroker who got his job because of his old man.
If the fines are multiplied by ten, and applied to every incident on every affiliate, well gents and dames, that adds up. It wouldn't do for a company to get caught with its tits hanging out with the stakes that high. Maybe....just maybe....it would be good to have a "test case" out there, right before the increases take hold. Something that's clearly a violation, but stops well short of a cumshot, or a steady string of f-bombs about grandma's slow driving. MANY people stand to gain from knowing how the FCC reacts to this sort of thing, and, with so many deep pockets tangentially associated with the particular incident, the risk and cost can be spread around this one time, and nobody gets hurt, especially Janet, Miss Jackson if you're nasty.
You see, we have to stop buying this shit. When the Bible-thumping crew cuts crawl out of their bomb shelters and try to impose decency regulation on corporations with fabulous sums of money made from peddling little girl ass, like Britney Spears, the corporations react. Lloyds won't insure "music" and business that can't beat in sales the penalties levelled on it by the government; corporate radio won't touch music that has been tainted by these fucking yahoos in power as "indecent" or "unpatriotic" (see the Dixie Chicks). And WE all get the shaft, because we're sucked into non-arguments about morality and community standards, when none of this crap would have happened if all of these corporations had just taken the time to focus on music with some sort of intrinsic value outside of the all the plastic surgery of the "artists" who "sing" it. I couldn't even tell what Janet and Justin were lip-synching as they gyrated on-stage, and that was all designed, because their manic humping was more important than anything coming out of their mouths...more important that is to CBS, MTV, the NFL, and every sponsor, who in the past 24 hours has denied all knowledge of Janet's tit.
Posted by Jack Sparks at February 3, 2004 12:09 AM