I’ve been avoiding making any comment on the whole Ilya Kovalchuk contract controversy, mainly because I’d like to see the situation finally resolved before I weigh in.

The resolution is now is sight, as the New Jersey Devils submitted a reworked, and presumably salary-cap-compliant, deal to the NHL yesterday. Hopefully the league will approve this pact, if for no other reason than the franchise-appropriate way that the numbers average out:

Terms of the potential contract have yet to be released but it is believed to be a 15-year deal worth approximately $100 million, which in an amusing twist would make the cap hit $6.66 million a season.

Apparently, neither the Devils nor Kovalchuk suffer from hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. And this hurts the team’s persistent insistence that its name isn’t inspired by Satan, but rather the legendary Jersey Devil. (Although, if they were truly up on their Christian theology, they’d have gone for a cap hit of $6.16-mil, which would represent the more accurate mark of the Beast.)

This numerological chicanery is nothing new for the Devils, of course. This is the same franchise that used to fudge their arena capacity just to keep the old anti-Rangers “19-40″ chant alive. It’s hockey marketing via calculator…

What is “hogo”, you ask? It’s the historically distinctive devil’s-piss burn once associated with rum. From the September 2010 issue of Esquire (which isn’t online yet, apparently):

Derived from the French phrase for the “high taste” game meats develop when they’re hung up to mature before cooking — and by “mature,” we mean “rot” — hogo used to be a term of art in the rum trade to describe the sulfurous, funky tang that raw-sugarcane spirits throw off. For 300 years, rum distillers have sought ways first to tame and then to eliminate it: proof distillation (more alcohol equals less hogo), filtering, tweaking the fermentation, long aging in barrels — all very effective, particularly when used in combination. Perhaps too effective.

I’m liking the idea of this raw rum. I bet it would be the perfect ingredient in my much-appreciated Kill Divil cocktail — which, after all, is a Colonial-era drink recipe. I’ll have to track down a vintage-crafted bottle of this hogo-licious firewater, and start mixing.

This is too funny to not share: A modest proposal, which I retweeted, for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing:

yee-heil! RT @typooper: NASCAR should do one really big race every year and call it “The Master Race”. That’d be an excellent image booster.

Hey, white-trash stereotypes aside, the racing circuit is struggling with recession-depleted attendance at most tracks. Might as well appeal to your base…

Only kidding, of course. But I hope you appreciate how I used that 140-character space to meld a pun out of the rebel yell and the Nazi “sieg heil” salute.

The redundantly-named California City, California is the biggest city you’ve never heard of — the 34th-largest incorporated municipality in the United States, in fact. The reason you don’t know that it exists is because it doesn’t — at least not in a substantial, finished sense:

In 1958, Nathan Mendelsohn, a Columbia University sociology instructor turned developer, acquired 82,000 acres of desert in eastern Kern County, 100 miles from Los Angeles.

Mendelsohn called his vision California City and, despite the fact it was 10 miles from any highway, he believed it would become the state’s next metropolis. The next San Fernando Valley.

Today a mere 14,000 souls call California City home. Most are clustered at one end of the massive tract. It’s a sleepy outpost with its own school district and public bus service but no hotel or chain grocery. The police chief is also the director of parks and recreation, and the Rite Aid is the busiest place in town.

The rest of Mendelsohn’s eccentric dream unfurls to the east, some 185 square miles of mostly unpaved streets — a ghostly monument to overreach that, from above, looks like a geoglyph left by space aliens. Only Los Angeles and San Diego leave a bigger footprint in the state.

It’s like a stillborn ghost town, without even a gold rush to have once filled its empty grids.

Theater gets downright experimental in Susan Glaspell’s one-act play “Trifles”, mainly because the protagonist is nowhere to be seen:

Though Mrs. Wright is the central figure in the play, she never appears onstage. She is only referred to by the on-stage characters.

Not that the play is encumbered by the absence. What unfolds is a tightly-plotted story based around the overlooked minutiae (or trifles) of crime-scene investigation, with strong overtones of gender disparity, perceptional bias, and psychological tension thrown in. Not bad for a piece written in 1916, and based on true events on the Midwestern rural crime-beat.

To me, the essence of onstage experimentation is tinkering with the basic structural elements. Shunting the main character to the background while focusing on the aside action certainly qualifies. I think “Trifles” is due for a revival somewhere; I’d love to see it in live action.

You can now buy it pretty cheaply by the roll, but once upon a time, aluminum gave precious metals a run for their money:

In fact, aluminum became more precious than gold and silver in the 19th century, because it was harder to obtain. The French government once displayed Fort Knox-like aluminum bars next to the crown jewels, and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a prized set of aluminum cutlery for special guests at banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and forks.) The United States, to show off its industrial prowess, even capped the Washington monument with a six-pound pyramid of aluminum in 1884.

But the aluminum market suffered a mighty crash shortly thereafter. Entrepreneurs in the United States and Europe finally figured out how to separate aluminum from minerals cheaply and also how to produce it on an industrial scale… In the mid-1800s, the first aluminum ingots on the market went for $550 per pound. Fifty years later, not even adjusting for inflation, it cost 25 cents for the same amount.

Presumably, had this elemental ore maintained its rare status, by now we’d be chugging down our beverages from pop-top cans made of tin, and oohing-ahhing whenever somebody whipped out a no-credit-limit American Express Aluminum Card.

The tail end of July must be perpetually uneventful, if the following “This Day In History” blurb from my Excite homepage is any indication:

Jul 28, 1865: The American Dental Association proposed its first code of ethics.

Earth-shaking development, in the midst of the concurrent (and, let’s face it, comparatively minor) Civil War. Because you absolutely need ethical guidelines while sticking your hands in some stranger’s mouth.

Who better than Franz Kafka — or, at least, his legacy — to get caught up in a courtroom-setting morass over ownership of the author’s personal papers?

A protracted legal battle over the contents of four safe-deposit boxes in a Swiss bank, believed by some to contain unpublished works by Franz Kafka or other material shedding light on his life, came to an end on Wednesday when an Israeli judge ruled that the papers should be made public. The decision follows the opening earlier this week of a vault at a UBS bank in Zurich, where the documents were stashed in 2008 by two Israeli sisters who had fought for two years to keep the papers private.

The first find is a handwritten, unpublished short story. If the trademark Kafka quirkiness holds, it should be about the alienation stemming from having your correspondence rifled through after your death — and be fittingly unfinished…

The discovery in New Zealand of several long-lost American movies from the silent-film era is interesting because of the dumb-luck logistical reason for these surviving prints’ existence:

Many foreign films remained in New Zealand after their commercial lives were over because the studios didn’t think the return shipping was worth the expense. “It’s one of the rare cases where the tyranny of distance has worked in our and the films’ favor,” [New Zealand Film Archive manager of corporate services Steve] Russell said.

By virtue of global location, New Zealand was the final destination for the distribution of physical media, like film reels, from America and Europe. So the end of the developed-world market ended up becoming the de facto storage archive for now-historic celluloid copies. Geography meets posterity.

That “tyranny of distance” seems to be a crucial factor in tracking down old films, and probably other mass-media artifacts from the early 20th Century. The recent restoration of Metropolis from a recovered copy in Argentina is further evidence. Archivists better book their tickets for the Southern Hemisphere and other remote locales…

In journalistic jargon, a think-piece is defined thusly:

noun – an article analyzing and giving the background of a news event, often with the author’s opinions and forecast for the future.

There’s no shortage of such in-depth scribbling being produced nowadays; some of the best examples are curated at Longform.org and other sites. But I never hear the term “think-piece” used. The only time I’m ever reminded of the label is when it’s mentioned in a ’70s movie I’m watching. Probably because of that, it does strike me as a dated phrase, sort of retro-mod-newspeakish. Nevertheless, maybe it’s due for a revival, both in name and strict form.

Nearly thirty years after first seeing it, the “Saturday Night Live” 1984 skit “News Bar” still makes me chuckle. Especially the brief, My Fair Lady-like musical numbers:

Edwin Newman [singing]:
They read the news with foot in mouth, instead of tongue in cheek,
Why can’t the anchors learn to speak?

Brad Hall: “Iranians’ pains come mainly from Khomeini!”

Edwin Newman: I think he’s got it!

Tom Snyder: Alright, I’ll buy that.

Brad Hall: “Khomeini’s reign is mainly based on pain!”

Edwin Newman: Let’s try something a bit more difficult. Environmental pollution in the Northeast.

Brad Hall: Northeast… um… uh…
“Terrain in Maine is stained with acid rain!”

Edwin Newman as Henry Higgins. In a glam-news media commentary that, the ’80s topicalness aside, still is relevant today.

Lidar is a sort of laser/radar hybrid technology used for precision measurement and mapping. Of late, it’s been used, via aircraft flyovers, on cityscapes that couldn’t be more different:

- New York City, for a detailed recording of the metropolitan topography, to use in future emergency planning and solar-energy optimization.

- The ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Caracol, which yielded detailed 3D renderings previously hidden in dense jungle cover.

It’s something of a juxtaposition, using the same hi-tech method to map out the future and the past.

Somehow, it’s taken some two years for the restored full-length, two-and-a-half hour version of Fritz Lang’s signature silent film Metropolis to hit theaters.

And what will hit the screen will be, apparently, a wholly different movie:

For example, the “Thin Man,” who in the standard version appears to be a glorified butler to the city’s all-powerful founder, turns out instead to be a much more sinister figure, a combination of spy and detective. The founder’s personal assistant, who is fired in an early scene, also plays a greater role, helping the founder’s idealistic son navigate his way through the proletarian underworld.

The cumulative result is a version of “Metropolis” whose tone and focus have been changed. “It’s no longer a science-fiction film,” said Martin Koerber, a German film archivist and historian who supervised the latest restoration and the earlier one in 2001. “The balance of the story has been given back. It’s now a film that encompasses many genres, an epic about conflicts that are ages old. The science-fiction disguise is now very, very thin.”

I don’t know if the de-emphasis of the scientifictional theme is a plus, especially for such an iconic production. But Metropolis‘ chief influence has always been more in the broad strokes, especially visual, than the detailed narrative. Partly that’s because it’s been fairly inaccessible to modern audiences. But mainly, it’s because the central theme of man versus machine, self versus society, is timelessly relateable; so the details hardly matter.

Lest the tragedy of the 1978 Jonestown massacre be forgotten, a movement is afoot in Guyana to erect a tourist destination on the jungle-strewn site of Jim Jones’ former People’s Temple.

Should this enterprise ever get off the ground, it’s safe to assume that you will not be able to drink Kool-Aid (or even Flavor-Aid) at any of the resultant concession stands. Even if, in some perverse commercial pouring-rights deal, said beverages were to be offered there, you’d be well-advised to not partake. Oh, yeah.

It worked for the Greeks once before, so why not try the oldschool Trojan tactic on this present-day crisis?

Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.

The horse, measuring several stories in height, drew mixed responses from the finance ministers, many of whom said they would have preferred a cash repayment of [the EU's $145-billion bailout of Greece's economy].

I can’t imagine that modern European technocrats are any brighter than their ancient predecessors in Troy. So I wouldn’t bet against this new gift horse. Given the home country’s broke status, I doubt there’s anything ominous lurking inside anyway.

Back in the late ’70s, the much-ballyhooed U.S tour of the King Tutankhanmun archaeological exhibition inspired Steve Martin to add his contribution to pop culture’s trove of novelty songs:

Now when he was a young man
He never thought he’d see (King Tut)
People stand in line
To see the boy king (King Tut)

How’d you get so funky (Funky Tut)
Did you do the monkey
(Born in Arizona)
(Moved to Babylonia, King Tut)

Now that King Tut’s baubles have returned to the States, will Martin write and perform a new rendition of “King Tut”? I realize he’s long since shed his former wild-and-crazy-guy schtick, but for nostalgia’s sake, the re-booted Egyptian theme practically demands Martin’s participation.

Assuming that he won’t, here’s a live 1979 performance by Martin of “King Tut”, complete with the wacky headdress/white suit ensemble, and the hieroglyphics-inspired stage shimmying. My chief childhood memories of Martin are informed directly by this act, so it’s a trip to see it again thirty years later:

The surprise low-key appearance by The Fonz was a nice closing touch. He’s my favorite honky.

After a century and a half of being synonymous with survival cannibalism, it turns out that the Donner Party likely never engaged in the consumption of human flesh, according to new research.

I know: There’s really nothing left to believe in.

UPDATE, 05/09/2010: Believe once more! It appears that the college PR department jumped the gun on the findings:

One critical thing to understand is that the Donner Party was stranded at multiple locations. Most members of the party were trapped at Donner Lake; others were huddled at a site called Alder Creek, about seven miles back on the trail. As the months-long drama played out, some who tried to escape became trapped again and perished along the way.

Robbins analyzed bone fragments found only at the Alder Creek location. Indeed, some of the Donner sites have never been located and thus cannot be excavated.

Understanding the limited nature of Robbins’ research is important. When the initial Appalachian State news release claimed that Robbins’ research found “no evidence of cannibalism among the 84 members of the Donner Party,” it was really pulling a fast one. Robbins’ research has nothing to do with the experiences of most members of the party. They weren’t trapped at the site she and her colleagues excavated.

Based on the comments of the survivors, there simply is no rational dispute about cannibalism at the other Donner Party sites. People at those locations stayed alive by eating the bodies of the dead — an act of necessity and courage.

So much for academic rigor. But what do you expect from a university that puts out the lamest promotional videos in all of higher education?

One of the more persistent legends in baseball lore concerns a young Fidel Castro and his flirtation with a Major League Baseball career in the 1950s. The story goes that his pitching performance for his college team in Havana attracted the notice of a New York Giants (some say Washington Senators) scout, who promptly offered Castro a Standard Player’s Contract to play in the Giants’ system in the States. Castro, of course, turned down the offer in favor of continuing his law school studies, and the rest is history.

The implications are obvious: Had Castro opted for the life of a professional ballplayer, he wouldn’t have become a guerilla soldier in Cuba, and the Cuban Revolution never would have happened, or else never have succeeded, or else would have taken a different form (depending on how much you subscribe to the Great Man Theory of history). Speculation on Castro’s personal trajectory favors his ascension to the Majors, making his baseball-diamond pursuit a favored subject of alternate-history fiction, notably in John Kessel’s 1993 short story “The Franchise” (in which he faces off against a similarly-alternated George Herbert Walker Bush in the 1959 World Series).

It’s all an entertaining what-if scenario. Unfortunately, according to Yale professor Roberto González Echevarría, author of “The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball”, it doesn’t hold up because there’s no evidence to support it:

Let it be known here that Fidel Castro was never scouted by any major-league team, and is not known to have enjoyed the kind of success in baseball that could have brought a scout’s attention to him. In a country where sports coverage was broad and thorough, in a city such as Havana with a half-dozen major newspapers (plus dozens of minor ones) and with organized leagues at all levels, there is no record that Fidel Castro ever played, much less starred, on any team. No one has produced even one team picture with Fidel Castro in it. I have found the box score of an intramural game played between the Law and the Business Schools at the University of Havana where a certain F. Castro pitched and lost, 5-4, in late November 1946; this is likely to be the only published box score in which the future dictator appears (El Mundo, November 28, 1946). Cubans know that Fidel Castro was no ballplayer, though he dressed himself in the uniform of a spurious, tongue-in-cheek team called Barbudos (Bearded Ones) after he came to power in 1959 and played a few exhibition games.

Echevarría attributes the MLB story to “a fabrication by an American journalist whose name is now lost”. I’m guessing that Castro’s post-revolution Barbudos appearances spurred some speculation about his baseball prowess, which led to the tall tales. Thus, a legend (more properly, a myth) was born.

I’m disappointed. I’d accepted the Castro baseball story, having come across various manifestations of it over the years. I even recall reading quotes from the alleged scout who tried to recruit Castro, with him noting that it was “unusual” for a Latin American prospect to turn down an MLB offer in those days. As unusual as the entire account, apparently.

Who knows why I spontaneously started humming the tune to the old Schoolhouse Rock “Preamble” song earlier this afternoon? I suppose that, with as many times as I watched those animated Saturday morning shorts back during my 70s childhood, the edutainment-themed rhythms burrowed their way permanently into my brain. (It’ll be interesting when senility hits.)

And indeed, any creative effort that makes a catchy ditty out of fusty 18th-Century legalese is worthy of an encore performance:

Nostalgia, courtesy of Constitutional indoctrination. Only in America!

Even the most online movers-and-shakers need some facetime sometime. For New York’s digital set, a dive bar on Houston Street now holds court for offline congregation:

Tom & Jerry’s, a place so low tech you can’t even run up a credit card tab, is spacious and simple, with ample room for the tech entrepreneurs who flock there. Who’d have thought it? Even the people creating the next hot social networking sites all seem to feel the need to meet up in person, on a compulsively regular basis no less. Out-of-towners congregate at the Roger Smith Hotel in Midtown, and breakfast is popular at the Ace Hotel just south of the Empire State Building. But for drinks after work for social networking pioneers, it’s Tom & Jerry’s. “It’s like Cheers,” Ms. Mooney said. “Where everyone knows your Twitter handle.”

I dunno. The only thing T&J’s has going for it is location: Right near the F train, i.e. the crucial hipster linkage to Brooklyn. Otherwise, it’s just another hole in the wall, cat-and-mouse allusion notwithstanding. It doesn’t help that it’s right next door to a ramshackle junkyard/bazaar on the corner of Houston and Elizabeth (where I snapped some photos long ago).

And I dispute the characterization of the Roger Smith Hotel as an outlander-only hangout. I know plenty of City-based new-media types who gather there frequently, often via Twitter-based shoutouts (aided by the hotel’s own Twitter handle). In fact, I’ve idly considered the RS to be developing into a modern-day Algonquin Round Table. Maybe without the “vicious circle” vibe.

The Civil War was 150 years ago, so it’s a bit late for Maryland to switch sides. But it is, by switching from the Southern region of the Council of State Governments to the East region, thus disassociating from its fellow former slave-holding states.

This official shift merely confirms what’s been happening in the Old Line State for a long while now:

Longtime residents note a shift too. Diane Schwallenberg, who has lived in the Annapolis area all of her 53 years, said she feels more Southern because of the state capital’s laid-back waterside atmosphere and small-town friendliness. But she said she has noticed a change over the years as more people have moved to the area.

“Some of the new people that come in – not the real, true Annapolitans in particular – but people that have come in are kind of preppy and all,” she said.

And then there are those who put the situation in a harsher light:

The state of Maryland exists as it does due only to our proximity to the high paying jobs of the federal government. If not for that, the entirety of our one-party dominated anti-business state would be wallowing in filth, crime and food stamps. We consistently rank at the bottom of business-friendly states. We have no idea how to sustain ourselves without jobs and assistance from the federal government.

A state-sized dependency of Uncle Sam? Sounds about as anti-Southern (in the 19th-Century sense) as you can get. Maybe this puts the final nail in the coffin of the Mason-Dixon line as the traditional North-South divide. It also calls for a replacement for “Dixie” as a regional nickname; maybe “Potomaca”?

Since Maryland unavoidably includes Baltimore, I’ll let John Waters have the last word. Or I would, if I could actually track down a memorable quip I could swear he once tossed out about his hometown. I cannot find a trace of it on the Web, but I remember it pretty well, and it went something like this:

“I love Baltimore. It’s like every oddball in the South decided to head North, and when their cars broke down halfway there, they decided to stay put.”

From border state to borderline state. Explains everything, really.