"Wisconsin Against the World"

Some of you probably know perfectly well what this teaser in this morning's New York Times refers to. I did not.¹ As it turns out, Wisconsin's college basketball team has a lot of in-state players, and the team they're playing in tonight's NCAA game, Davidson,² has more national and international players.

The Times goes on to say, "[t]hat Wisconsin’s team is more homegrown than its cheese is no accident," which leads me to believe that the folks at the New York Times have no idea how cheese is produced.

Anyway, I was curious where the 11 Wisconsinites on the UW team are from, so I found out:
Milwaukee (3)
Madison (2)
Glendale
Verona
Oshkosh
Appleton
Randolph
Wisconsin Dells

I have to be honest here, I was really hoping for some Osseo, Wauwatosa, Peshtigo, Minong or Jim Falls-style representation.

Anyway, I'd also just like to point out that as I write this, students from Middlebury College are teaching Amherst students how to play Quidditch on the main quad,³ which is I guess what happens at Division III schools.


¹ As has been made clear in these pages before, I don't really give a crap about sports.
² A school I'd barely even heard of, but now I know an awful lot about their dirty laundry.
³ Yes, it is a made-up sport from the Harry Potter novels that involves flying, so I'm not really sure how they're going about it.

Jolly Old Spring Break

Last week I went to London for a conference and then continued on to Oxford, and took a jaunt to Cardiff and Abergavenny, Wales with a loyal expat SJBlog reader.

Here are some photos. Also, I think every time I go somewhere and take a photo of me drinking the local hooch, I'm going to make it my new SJBlog profile photo.

Postgraduate Degrees = More beer?

Oxford, England -- Visiting Dr. Ole a number of years ago at Princeton, I was struck by the so-called "D-Bar," an on-campus bar specifically for grad students who would congregate there and drink copious amounts of extremely cheap beer. At Princeton, there was still money exchanging hands.

Here at Oxford, they've improved on the D-Bar: at the in-college Nuffield bar, which is really just a room filled with booze nestled amid the grad student and post doc housing, all you have to do is record the alcohol you've injested in a book (beer is around 2£, and crisps and Kit-Kats are 50p), and at the end of the term, the College may or may not charge you for what you've drunk. Of course, the more you drink, the harder it is to accurately record what you've drunk, even if you're an economics post doc at one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

I like it here.

Where Have You Gone Crepes-A-Go-Go?

Watching this spot on last night's The Daily Show made me feel a little nostalgic for my old stomping grounds, especially since Rob Riggle interviews the guy who sells the political bumper stickers outside the old Cody's on Telegraph Ave. (my favorite: "Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?") and drops in some shots of Willard Park, Sproul Plaza and the Crepes-a-Go-Go. Ah, my days flipping past Berkeley City Council meetings on limited basic cable, making a wide circle around hard-to-categorize people protesting hard-to-categorize things and sunning myself outside Cal administration buildings... gone but not forgotten.

Cinecharla: Pedro and Pan

I'm teaching a film course this semester: Representation and Reality in Spanish Cinema. We like sexy titles around here, although I probably could have pimped this one up a little. At any rate, since my work on Leopoldo Alas and the Darwinian Revolution doesn't really blog all that well, I thought I might share some of my thoughts on this, a most accessible and Netflixable subject. There are only so many things a Spanish professor can offer as a public service.

We've discussed the Pedro Almodóvar oevre in class, highlighting ¿¡Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! (What Have I Done to Deserve This?!?, 1984) and Volver (2006), though we also watched some clips of La ley del deseo (Law of Desire, 1983, not for the faint of heart) and Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1987, romptacular!).

¿¡Qué he hecho yo...!! and Volver have a lot in common, despite the twenty year gap and fairly distinct subject matter (as I pointed out on this review I wrote of Volver, which, ahem, I assigned to the class), and lend themselves to the film enthusiast who wants a quick and dirty introduction to Almodóvar, especially "serious" Almodóvar. This is the Pedro who kills off characters with a sharp blow to the head with a leg of ham, while also delving into the isolation and, as one student put it, 'me against the world' sensation felt especially by women as Spain transitioned from a divided post-dictatorship nation just scraping by economically to a newly rejuvenated European nation, with all the attendant issues of immigration, flight from the countryside, and domestic unrest that come with it.

Next up was our section on Spanish films from the 1950s and 1960s, none of which you can find on Netflix, which is a shame. I've mentioned to my class my desire to remake the 1965 allegorical war movie La caza (dir. Carlos Saura) into a Hollywood blockbuster, starring Matt Damon and Harrison Ford, and changing the ending so that the rabbits win. My class seems eye-rollingly unimpressed with the project (but some of them come to class in their pajamas, so, really, how much can you trust them?).

Right now we've been studying the Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro's movies, including El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006) and El espinazo del diablo (The Devil's Backbone, 2001). Both of these films are Spain/Mexico co-productions, with a decidedly ideological take on the Spanish Civil War and postwar conflicts. They're also horror/thriller/suspense/fantasy movies, which is a departure from the aforementioned allegorical war movie, although -- surprisingly -- there's some commonality there, too. Both of these films rise above their Hollywood trappings to sustain discussions on what determines a film's nationality as well as what del Toro's signature interweaving of fantasy and reality lends to the movies. I'm not a big fan of scary movies -- I had to watch The Orphanage in my office in the middle of the day with the lights on -- but these two are relatively tame by American horror standards, and worth seeing.

Coming Attractions: More ham!

Mmm, Pentagons

In one of my finer moments, I purchased a chocolate Pentagon (milk, although dark and white were also available, as were Capitol buildings and militaristic bunnies) at a Costco in Washington, D.C. last weekend and gave it to dl004d and the Grand Marnier as a housewarming gift. Happily, it was a hit!

How Many Bloggers Does it Take to Dial a Phone?

The setting: A Chinese noodle joint in D.C.
The appointed hour: 8:20 pm on Friday, February 29th, 2008
The players: A veritable king's court of bloggers from up and down the Eastern seaboard -- The Grand Marnier, dl004d, the Rock Critic, Mr. Gray Pages, Enchanted Pants and the SJB.
The scene: Simultaneous phone calls to absent player SKBK, celebrating her 8th birthday in Florida.













The results: Phone lines tangled from Miami to D.C.; bloggers known to communicate mainly through Twitter entries and well-penned cutting criticism of the minutia of everyday life left to fend for themselves through verbal modes of dialogue; inside jokes, shocking revelations, one-liners, debates and counterattacks, phone messages embedded inside phone messages, accusations of incestuous relationships across high school, college and post-college boundaries; Blackberries pitted against iPhones; competing claims to the role of Crusty Old Dean in the hit one act play "Update #4: A Door!"; Rooster sauce attacking green sauce; chicken noodle eaters besting beef noodle eaters; widespread suspicion as to how many of us will blog about this... and who will win...