Category: No Politics Friday

Don't skip this if you hate sports. There's trivia you can use to regale strangers at Super Bowl parties.

The proliferation of ads online and on TV referring to "The Big Game" reflect the NFL's ruthless enforcement on its copyright of the phrase "Super Bowl.
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" The game has become a billion-dollar industry all by itself, the most popular spectacle of an already wildly popular league.
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Americans mistakenly believe it's the most-watched annual TV event (that honor actually belongs to the UEFA Champions League soccer match, and the audience for the World Cup men's final easily dwarfs both) but there's no doubt that it is an American institution at this point. When even the commercial breaks get saturation media coverage it's safe to say that the game has secured its place in our society for better or worse. I've had the good fortune to attend a Super Bowl, and even the spectacle on television is nothing compared to the live experience.

If we told them about the amount of money and attention devoted to the modern Super Bowl, the people who came up with the idea would think us insane. It's hard to believe that they weren't sure this "Super Bowl" thing would catch on – or that it almost didn't. Here are some quick facts about Super Bowl I at the end of the 1966 season.

1. It didn't sell out. They couldn't even give away the unsold tickets.
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Look at the stands in this live shot:

Part of the problem was that the location of the game, Los Angeles, was not decided until six weeks (!!!) before the game. Today it is awarded years in advance and cities fight like dogs for the honor to host it.

2. It was broadcast on two different networks simultaneously. The game pitted the champions of the AFL and NFL against one another (the leagues merged and became the AFC/NFC conferences in 1970) and the CBS had an ironclad contract to broadcast all NFL games. NBC had the same deal with the AFL. So the game organizers solved the problem but letting both broadcast it. The ratings were poor and a 30-second commercial cost $40,000.

3. The halftime show was a smattering of high school and college marching bands. They put no thought into it and certainly didn't consider paying a celebrity to perform.

4. Neither network thought enough of the game to keep a tape for its archives. No complete video footage of the game exists.

The game was part of an AFL-NFL merger agreement signed in 1966 (it mandated an "AFL-NFL World Championship Game", and the name "Super Bowl" wasn't applied until Super Bowl III in 1969) but the leagues remained separate entities for a few more seasons. As such there were some compromises that had to be made in order to bring the two together for one game. Neither league would agree to let the other's referee crews officiate the game, so a hybrid six-man crew – 3 NFL, 3 AFL – was adopted. Since the leagues' officials wore different uniforms, a new "neutral" uniform was whipped up (note: the AFL ref uniforms were simply amazing). Each league had its own equipment contract, so the Chiefs used the Spalding AFL football and when the Packers offense took the field, the NFL Wilson ball was used. The entire game was played under NFL rules, although the only major rule difference was the AFL's use of the two-point conversion (which the NFL did not adopt until 1994).

Oh, there was also a game. Part of the reason for the low interest was the widespread assumption among the media and fans that champions of the older, established league – the NFL – would crush the rag-tag AFL squads, the league having been founded just six years earlier.
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And that's exactly what happened. The Kansas City Chiefs squad loaded with all-time greats was destroyed 35-10 by Vince Lombardi's Packers team that happened to be even more loaded with all-time greats. The same Packers squad crushed the AFL champion Raiders the next year in Super Bowl II, and it is highly likely that the game might have slid into obscurity had the AFL not rallied to win Super Bowls III (the infamous Joe Namath-led Jets win over the Baltimore Colts) and IV (the same Chiefs squad walloped the Minnesota Vikings). Only when the viewing public became convinced that the matchup would be competitive did the game really take off, a process facilitated by the full merger of the leagues in 1970 (which shifted some NFL stalwarts like the Colts and Chiefs to the AFC).

As difficult as it is to imagine today with the global TV audience of 100,000,000 and the multimillion dollar ad spots, the people who devised the idea of a game between the league champions actually had serious and legitimate doubts about whether anybody would care. Finally they convinced themselves that by golly, this "Super Bowl" thing might just catch on.

That's how people talked in 1966, right?

I'm currently reading a book that includes some firsthand accounts from Vietnam-era POWs describing how they killed literally years worth of time in near-total silence and without any reading material. Several mentioned that they enjoyed passing around complicated riddles to keep their minds occupied. This one almost had me resorting to Google, although eventually I got it. Take a shot at answering it in the comments if you want.

You're walking down a road that splits into two paths.

One path is safe and leads to your destination. The other is so dangerous that you'll be killed if you take it.
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You don't know which is which. Each path has a sentry standing watch; one sentry always lies and the other always tells the truth.

Again, you don't know which is the liar and which one is honest. You can only ask one question and only one of the sentries will answer it. What's the one question to ask that will guarantee you end up taking the safe path?

I know, right?

I'm about halfway through the new Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness) book Command and Control and as I expected the experience has been both enjoyable and frustrating. It's enjoyable of course because it's a well written book about a topic I love. It's frustrating because about eight years ago I decided to write this book.
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In a fit of New Years resolutioning or some sort of attempt at personal and professional growth I sat down and wrote an outline for an entire book on the history of the Cold War nuclear buildup and, as Schlosser calls it, the illusion of safety. While obviously it was not the same as Command and Control I can't help but note the similarities as I read through it. Despite the similarities in our ideas, Schlosser's book has one overwhelming advantage: he actually wrote his.

This is the second time in the last few years I've had this experience – Gregg Grandin's Fordlandia was one of my earliest "Someone really needs to write a book about this, maybe I should try" moments. And I'm starting to understand more clearly that this is why at 35 my life is effectively half over and I've managed to accomplish absolutely nothing; for every decent idea I've ever had I think, plot, research, conceptualize, sketch, and ruminate…but I never actually do it. It would be nice to be able to identify the reason. It could be any number of things: fear of failure, laziness, risk aversion, self-doubt, etc.

But every time I successfully convince myself that no one else would find it interesting and besides I don't know anyone in the publishing industry so it makes no sense to devote the time to doing it. Instead I devote that time to more productive pursuits like Netflix.

And that, for all you young readers out there, is how you end up old and stuck living in central Illinois.

This kind of thinking appeals to the rational part of my brain, which is the entirety of it.
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Investing a ton of resources, both time and financial, into something with no guaranteed payoff (and perhaps not even half-decent odds of payoff) is the kind of decision from which it is very easy to dissuade ourselves. For a while I tried to convince myself that it would be good for me just to get the sense of completion that comes from taking something from the idea stage to a finished product regardless of whether it was "successful" or not. Unfortunately my mind really doesn't work that way; maybe someone else can take pleasure in writing something that no one else will ever read, but not me. Besides I already tried that, it was called writing a dissertation.

*rimshot*

Anyway, let this be a lesson to anyone out there looking to be unsuccessful. Take all of the things you've thought about doing, talk yourself out of doing any of them, and then sit back and watch other people succeed. I'm not going to lie, it's really easy.

I've never cared much for spy movies or novels, but I find the real thing absolutely fascinating. Governments still spy on one another enthusiastically, of course. It's just not the same as it was during the Cold War era; the romance and drama of "human intelligence" has been replaced by technicians sitting at consoles combing through billions of phone, email, and bank records trying to identify patterns. The days of the Cambridge Five and Soviet double-agents and dead drops and all that other John le Carre / Ian Fleming type stuff are long gone.

Apropos of nothing, here's one of my favorite spy stories.

It's from the dying years of the Cold War, that regrettable period of time we call the mid-Eighties.
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To make a long background story short, a Soviet diplomat named Oleg Gordievsky had a change of heart about the Soviet system when the political leadership of the country ordered the military to suppress, with some measure of brutality, the Prague Spring in 1968. He made his disillusionment know to MI6, the British intelligence service. Eventually he was recruited as an MI6 "asset".

From the Soviet embassy in Denmark, Gordievsky was a minor part of CIA/MI6 operations for many years. Then in 1982 he was appointed the head KGB agent at the Soviet embassy in London.

In other words, he became the Soviet official in charge of all Soviet spies in the UK while serving as a British spy himself. He provided useful information – for example, identifying Gorbachev as the future leader of the USSR long before Western governments really even knew who he was – and detailed the growing divide between the (How many times did you hear this phrase in the 80s) "aging hardliners in the Kremlin" and the rest of the country. Eventually, and probably but not certainly because of CIA turncoat and Soviet spy Aldrich Ames, the KGB learned of Gordievsky's connections to MI6. In 1985 they abruptly called him back to Moscow. MI6 encouraged him to defect immediately. Perhaps out of concern for his family, he returned to Moscow instead.

The KGB treated him to days of drugged interrogation about being a double agent; somehow he was able to resist, or for some unknown reason the KGB decided to back off. Regardless of the explanation he was released and returned to his wife and kids in Moscow, albeit under heavy KGB surveillance. Knowing that it was only a matter of time until the KGB uncovered enough dirt on him to arrest, try, and execute him, he decided he needed to escape.

He sent a secret signal to an MI6 contact to meet him. Initially he sneaked into the toilet at the Lenin Mausoleum, wrote "In very bad trouble, need exfiltration" on a scrap of paper, and went to slip it to an MI6 contact in the crowded Red Square.

However, he did not know who to look for so the plan failed. A second plan was hatched. He was assigned a street corner and a date and time to appear. MI6 asked him to hold a Safeway shopping bag to make himself easy to spot and told that his MI6 contact would be absolutely, unmistakably British-looking.

Now. This is the part I love. Picture a bunch of MI6 guys hatching this plan and brainstorming subtle ways to make a secret agent look Way British.

Gordievsky waited with the shopping bag about 20 minutes past the appointed time. Finally he saw a gentleman walking toward him in a sharp felt bowler hat holding a Harrods department store bag and eating a Mars Bar. It was the Mars Bar that saved Oleg Gordievsky's life. The two only made brief eye contact, which was enough to set into motion a ridiculous escape plan.

Gordievsky began jogging every morning. His KGB watchers were generally too lazy to run after him, so they took to following him in a car. Watching a man jog for months is pretty dull, so eventually they got pretty lax about following him. Eventually when his wife and kids were far away on vacation in Kazakhstan, he left the house in running clothes, broke into a trot toward the nearest train station, and began a series of train trips that would take him to the remote area along the Russian-Finnish border.

He went to a prearranged spot – a patch of trees along a rural highway – and laid in the ditch next to the road as he had been instructed. Put yourself in his position; how long would you lie in a ditch next to a highway, your mind going a billion directions at once, waiting for mysterious strangers to retrieve you? After a few hours two cars of British spies arrived. They hid him in a false bottom in the trunk and, posing as diplomats attending a conference in Helsinki, made for the border. A female spy brought a (presumably unwilling?) infant along, hoping that a screaming, pooping baby would encourage Soviet border guards to move them along more rapidly.
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It worked. Eventually Gordievsky heard the orchestra piece Finlandia playing through the car stereo, the signal that they had successfully crossed the border.

He made it. The ending was not quite happily ever after, though. He's still alive and enjoying life in the UK, but he left behind his family. It took almost a decade of separation before he could see them again, and by then his wife had married another man and his children no longer remembered him. But he lived, and he has developed relationships with his (now adult) children.
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I'm telling you, you can't make up anything this good.

It took more than eleven years, but Gin and Tacos finally had an extended period of downtime. Certainly if you tried to visit in the last four days you realized that the hosting company was having some issues. It turns out that they suspended this site because it was using too much of the resources on their server.
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For reasons that I will not describe in detail I find this laughable. In the next few weeks I intend to do a great deal of long-overdue housekeeping. It may, but hopefully will not, involve more downtime. Just remember that if you ever happen to visit and the site is down, I haven't given up and pulled the plug.

If I'm pulling the plug, you'll know. So just try again in a day or two.

Frankly the downtime this week was not totally unwelcome. I am exhausted. I'm not tired of writing – just regular tired, the kind that you can feel in your bones. This semester has been brutal. I'm up at four-something on a lot of weekdays and up working – either the kind of work I get paid to do or the kind that I choose to do in addition to that – until midnight-plus. As much as I was worried that I had lost the archives of things I've written for the past twelve years, the downtime coincided with the beginning of finals (and grading; so very much grading). Not writing for three nights in a row was a pretty good silver lining on the whole fiasco.

I can't thank many of you enough for offering help and advice on fixing the site problems via the Gin and Tacos Facebook page. Jeff Buchbinder, who is a complete stranger to me, went far above and beyond the call in helping me out.
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I am one of those people who, despite having a regularly updated website for more than a decade, knows next to nothing about how to maintain it properly. I've done my best to learn, but much of it remains Greek to me.

Being offered help by strangers is one of those things that raises my faith in humanity, at least until I return to grading research papers.

Instead of looking at this week as downtime let's just call it unscheduled rest and refitting. Over the upcoming holidays I'll have more time (that is, some amount greater than zero) to migrate to a new host and hopefully make some improvements to the site in the process. I have always been (and I remain) terrified that if I go a day or two without posting something the readers are all going to leave and never come back. But at this point I have a little bit of faith that everyone will not run for the exits if things are under repair for a couple days.

Maybe my friends are weirder than yours, but over the past two days I've seen a link to something called "Vaginal Knitting" posted on Facebook about 25 times. One can only see such a phrase so many times before the seesaw tips from revulsion to curiosity. Plus, as I have no objection to either knitting or vaginas individually, there was some potential here.

It turns out that vaginal knitting (described here, with an embedded and completely not-even-a-little safe for work video) is just your typical first year Art School bullshit. It is strongly reminiscent of another internet sensation, the 2010 "performance art" piece "Interior Semiotics", which featured a teen art school hipster opening a can of Spaghetti-Os (past their expiration date for good measure) and inserting them into her vagina before an audience full of fellow art students making some of the most amazing Reaction Faces you'll ever see.

I'm starting to think that Performance Art is just things being inserted into and taken out of the vagina.

Nothing says "low hanging fruit" like making fun of the over-the-top pretentiousness of Fine Arts students or the desperate pleas for attention of someone who thinks that adding the vagina to anything – including knitting – makes it a bold Feminist statement. Yet no matter how silly it is, someone on the internet will defend it. Gawker tried to salvage it by pointing out that the exhibition's "power lies in the fact that the same feminist themes and visuals that shocked us in the '60s and '70s still shock us today." But do they? Do they really? Is "shocking" an appropriate description of the reactions to this nonsense? To me this is neither shocking nor offensive, it's just stupid. It's tired and formulaic; take something boring, do it naked or stick it up an orifice, and call it art. Most people grow out of that around 19.

So don't be offended. It's just a vagina. And resist whatever urges you might have to explain how this is either art or some sort of bold statement about women.
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Try "No, this is just stupid" and leave it at that. Doing something like this is the simplest path to rapid fame on the internet, albeit with the substantial downside of guaranteeing that you will be known as "that woman who put yarn in her hoo-hoo and knitted with it" for the rest of your life. That saying that all publicity is good publicity is unpersuasive here.

Sometimes I think China sits around thinking of ways it can do things that will end up being passed around the internet for the rest of the world to look at and think, "What the fuck, China.
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" This all may be part of a devious plan, a disinformation campaign. Or maybe lots of people in China are moderately crazy.

Well, here's a giant concrete replica of the American aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Mull that over for a second.

Now I know China loves to build knockoffs of all things Western – either to sell back to us at a profit or simply for its own inscrutable reasons – but it's not immediately clear what could have possessed them to build a nearly full-sized aircraft carrier out of concrete. Believe it or not, building oceangoing ships out of concrete is rare but not unprecedented. However this concrete carrier was never intended to sail.

Or even float.

Turns out that this is, in essence, a mall.
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The ship is actually a building resting on solid ground in a very shallow artificial lake. It's a theme restaurant-shopping-entertainment complex concocted by the city of Binzhou to gin up some tourism. According to what little information I could find:

Driving force behind the boat was the Binzhou City Tourism Bureau that designed the Binzhou Aircraft Carrier as a multifunctional entertainment paradise with restaurants, movie theaters, shops and a hotel.

Sadly, thing didn't turn out as planned.

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The construction of the interior proved much more expensive than estimated and the small city of Binzhou ran out of money. Further construction was suspended in 2006. The Binzhou Tourism Bureau went looking for investors and managed to persuade other government-run enterprises to put up some extra cash. In 2008 things looked very bright when the first restaurants and bars opened their doors on the upper deck of the ship.

Said businesses failed quickly, and for more than two years the derelict derelict has stood empty. It has the perfect paint job for a white elephant. You'd think the city leaders would just demolish it – clearly no one is going to buy it, and the description hints strongly that it might not even be structurally sound – so as to avoid having to look at the goddamn thing every day.

I don't understand you, China. I doubt I ever will.

JFK died fifty years ago today, as the surge of related content on TV and in the news has probably reminded you.

Very few moments in American history have captured our imaginations so completely over the years.

Last weekend I spent some time with my dad, age 62, and he went through his story of where he was and what he was doing when he heard the news. There are people in the world who don't like hearing older people tell stories like this.
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I am not one of them. Informal oral history is more interesting than anything I can read in a book or see on TV in yet another interview from the archives with Walter Cronkite. I know some of you are over fifty.

Feel free to share your own stories in the comments. The media keep telling us that everyone remembers where they were when it happened, and how could the media have such a pervasive trope if it wasn't true?

Not having lived through it, I have nothing to remember. Part of the reason I think it fascinates people, though, is the 8mm eeriness of the Zapruder film. It's less like a document of a historical event than a clip from an early John Carpenter horror movie.
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It doesn't matter how many times it gets replayed – and certainly most Americans have seen it dozens if not hundreds of times already – it's never any less arresting. Every time the limo rolls into view in semi-slow motion I'm like, "Oh shit, man…you should duck…"

And he never does.

In the mental haze of my third (exam-taking) year of graduate school I developed a brief but intense fascination with the State Department travel website. Certainly it contains a wealth of useful information for travelers, particularly those visiting countries that are not widely visited by foreign tourists.
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The site has probably guided tens of thousands of college kids and adult tourists through the process of acquiring visas and passports. As far as government websites go (*cough*) it has to be among the best.

However, it is also hilarious. Unintentionally hilarious. Its country-specific reports are full of colorful and in some cases, I assume, overly dramatic warnings about the common use of pistols to resolve minor disputes in the streets of El Salvador, the Bronze Age condition of the roads in Brazil, the dilapidated condition of medical facilities across Africa, and the borderline psychotic driving habits of the Southeast Asians (OK that one is probably fair). I understand why the State Department writes its reports in this manner; by the standards of the average American tourist – picture some relatively wealthy Connecticut suburbanites or Studying Abroad college sophomores – much of the rest of the world must indeed appear remarkably Dangerous and Scary and Dirty and Dilapidated. Conversely, for bohemians who consider themselves to be expert globetrotters beyond any need for advice, the website's stern warnings about dangerous parts of the world may be a helpful reminder that no matter how intrepid you think you are, it's probably best to skip that trek through rural Yemen.

I often wondered, though, how other countries must describe the United States on their own versions of the State Department website.

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I recall years ago clicking through a few English-speaking nations' sites, which consisted mostly of droll warnings about duties on certain imported goods and the lack of useful public transit outside of a small number of major cities. Today, however, the Washington Post has offered a brief but entertaining rundown of sixteen American cities about which foreign governments warn their citizens. Surely foreigners must look at the State Department's warnings and take occasional offense at the description of their nations as dangerous or dirty or primitive. Or do they? Reading through these foreign warnings as an American, they look…

pretty spot on to me. When visitors to Chicago are warned to "Stay away from the West Side and anywhere south of 59th Street" I feel no surge of patriotic pride urging me to respond, but only a sober realization that even Chicago residents largely heed that advice. No matter how much we might want to be upset at the tony French casting aspersions on our cities, it's pretty goddamn hard to argue with the logic inherent in "Avoid Cleveland Heights.

"