Eating the Dinosaur

by Chuck Klosterman

  2. McNamara was the controversial U.S. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War and president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. He was the subject of Morris’s Academy Award–winning 2003 film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

  3. Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the Twenty-first Century.

  4. This interview was conducted on August 6, 2008.

  5. This is a documentary about the 1976 murder of a policeman.

  6. Frey is the disgraced author of A Million Little Pieces, a bestselling nonfiction book that purported to be about the author’s drug and alcohol addictions, his life of crime and depravity, and how he overcame these vices with his own sheer willpower. The book proved to be partially—and perhaps mostly—untrue. In fact, Frey initially attempted to sell the book as a novel, only (it seems) to realize it was more commercially viable if he claimed all the events had happened to him in real life.

  7. A British writer, Heath started at the UK magazine Smash Hits and has also written two books on the Pet Shop Boys and a third on Robbie Williams.

  8. Rosner is believed to have one of the highest IQ scores ever measured. He is also socially unorthodox. Through an elaborate system of disguises and false identification, he inexplicably repeated twelfth grade four times, once enrolling at the age of twenty-six. After losing on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, he attempted to sue the program over the phrasing of the $16,000 question he got wrong. The suit was thrown out of court. He has also worked as a male stripper and twice subsisted on dog food. Years later, he would appear in a commercial for Domino’s Pizza.

  1. Twenty-one years after the fact, one of the guitars Cobain smashed at a 1989 show in Hoboken, New Jersey, sold on eBay for $100,000.

  2. When Arthur Schlesinger Sr. pioneered the “presidential greatness poll” in 1948, the top five were Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jefferson. Only Wilson appears to be seriously fading, probably because his support for the World War I–era Sedition Act now seems outrageous; in this analogy, Woodrow is like the Doors and the Sedition Act is Oliver Stone.

  3. For the especially serious listener, In Utero’s liner notes even included instructions on how to set one’s equalizer for maximum effect: The bass should be at +2 and the treble should be at +5.

  4. There is, in fact, an episode of M*A*S*H where Major Winchester admits to Hawkeye Pierce how he privately envies the relationship Hawkeye has with his family patriarch, precisely because he only had a father while Pierce “had a dad.” This may also explain why David Ogden Stiers did not become addicted to heroin.

  1. This subplot refers to the actions of a character named Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) who steals a sports almanac from the future in order to gamble on predetermined sporting events in the present. There’s a popular urban legend about this plot point involving the Florida Marlins baseball team: In the film, Biff supposedly bets on a Florida baseball team to win the World Series in 1997, which actually happened. The amazing part is that Back to the Future Part II was released in 1989, four years before the Florida Marlins even had a major league franchise. Unfortunately, this legend is completely false. The reference in the movie is actually a joke about the futility of the Chicago Cubs that somehow got intertwined with another reference to a (fictional) MLB opponent from Miami whose logo was a gator. I realize that by mentioning the inaccuracy of this urban legend, I will probably just perpetuate its erroneous existence. But that’s generally how urban legends work.

  2. For whatever the reason, I’ve always assumed vise grips would be extremely liberating for Neanderthals.

  3. Semi-unrelated (but semi-interesting) footnote to this paradox: Before Fox plays “Johnny B. Goode” at the high school dance, he tells his audience, “This is an oldie … well, this is an oldie from where I come from.” Chuck Berry recorded “Johnny B. Goode” in 1958. Back to the Future was made in 1985, so the gap is twenty-seven years. I’m writing this essay in 2009, which means the gap between 1985 and today is twenty-four years. That’s almost the same amount of time. Yet nobody would ever refer to Back to the Future as an “oldie,” even if he or she were born in the 1990s. What seems to be happening is a dramatic increase in cultural memory: As culture accelerates, the distance between historical events feels smaller. The gap between 2010 and 2000 will seem far smaller than the gap between 1980 and 1970, which already seemed far smaller than the gap between 1950 and 1940. This, I suppose, is society’s own version of time travel (assuming the trend continues for eternity).

  4. This is too difficult to explain in a footnote, but one of Carruth’s strengths as a fake science writer is how he deals with the geography of time travel, an issue most writers never even consider. Here, in short, is the problem: If you could instantly travel one hour back in time, you would (theoretically) rematerialize in the exact same place from which you left. That’s how the machine works in the original Time Machine. However, the world would have rotated 15 degrees during that missing hour, so you would actually rematerialize in a totally different spot on the globe. Primer manages to work around this problem, although I honestly don’t understand the solution as much as I see the dilemma.

  5. I realize Planet of the Apes isn’t technically about time travel. Time moves at its normal rate while the humans are in suspended animation. But for the purposes of the fictional people involved, there is no difference: They leave from and return to the same geographic country. The only difference is the calendar.

  1. He also was blessed with good genes: His six-foot-eleven-inch son, Ralph III, is already having a nice career at the University of Minnesota.

  2. This quote, along with most that appear in this piece, originally ran in Sports Illustrated, the most consistent chronicler of athletes who disappoint us.

  3. Before the 1998 NFL draft, it was common to get into arguments over who was going to be a better pro quarterback—Peyton Manning or Ryan Leaf. The latter ended his career with fourteen touchdowns and thirty-six interceptions.

  4. Despite being among the five or ten most famous female tennis players of all time, this ultra-rich Russian sex cat never won a major singles tournament.

  5. A cocaine casualty drafted third overall by the Golden State Warriors in 1986, the six-eleven Washburn averaged 3.1 points and 2.4 rebounds in the NBA.

  6. Drafted first overall by the New York Yankees at nineteen and signed for (a then outrageous) $1.55 million, Taylor injured his pitching arm in a street brawl and never made it to the major league level.

  7. Twenty years later, Mandarich gave another interview to SI where he apologized for all of his 1989 lies. It should be noted he was also promoting a book at the time.

  8. Technically speaking, Bowie was a far greater bust than Sampson—he was injured for his entire career and is primarily remembered for being drafted one spot ahead of Michael Jordan in 1984. But people don’t hate Bowie. He never seemed invincible to anyone.

  9. In case you’re curious, the three players selected first overall following Sampson’s freshman, sophomore, and junior years were Joe Barry Carroll from Purdue, Mark Aguirre from DePaul, and James Worthy from North Carolina. It’s possible that the seven-one Carroll would still have gone before Sampson in 1980, but Sampson was already viewed as having greater upside. Aguirre and Worthy were both smaller players and would have been less desirable commodities (although the Lakers would have faced an intriguing decision had Sampson applied to the draft in 1982—they already had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on the roster).

  10. Virginia still won both of these games. This is somewhat remarkable. The first game was against Hakeem Olajuwon (and Benny Anders!) and the rest of the Houston Cougars, a squad that would eventually play in that year’s national championship. Sampson did not play a single minute in the win against Houston. Rick Carlisle must have had an awesome night.

  11. When Appalachian State beat Michigan in football early in 2007, many in the media (and even more in the blogosph
ere) argued that this was the biggest upset ever. In reality, it’s not even close. App State was the defending 1-AA national champion, playing a Wolverine team that would go on to lose again the following week. Virginia was the best team in the country in 1983 and Chaminade was an NAIA school that had a basketball program for only the previous seven years.

  1. It’s hard to imagine a more convoluted way to commit a murder than what happens in Vertigo. Quite frankly, it would have been easier for the villain in this film to have simply killed every single person he’s ever met.

  2. As evidence, Bret Easton Ellis made Body Double Patrick Bateman’s favorite movie in American Psycho.

  3. This process becomes more interesting when the individual who’s “tweeting” is an authentic person of interest. In February of 2009, Shaquille O’Neal sent a tweet on his “Real Shaq” account informing his (then) 257,000 followers that he was hanging out in a specific Phoenix shopping mall and would award two free Suns tickets to the first person who responded to his message in person. This was a jarring example of how the Internet is causing the celebrity phenomenon to fork: While most media personalities think the Internet destroys their sense of privacy, guys like Shaq actively use it to give themselves less separation from the rest of society. Shaq wants to be bothered by freaks. In general, it’s continually amazing how obsessed early adopters of technology are with their own low-level activities. When Dennis Crowley was launching his phone application Foursquare in 2009, he argued, “What we wanted to do is turn life into a video game. You should be rewarded for going out more times than your friends, and hanging out with new people and going to new restaurants and going to new bars—just experiencing things that you wouldn’t normally do.” Rewarded. Crowley feels like technology should reward him … for eating at different restaurants!

  1. Gratuitous aside: I find that “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” significantly increases my fear of the Reaper. This song is a failure.

  2. It would be easy to get sidetracked by all the goofy details in his five-hundred-word biography, so here are my favorites: Gaines was allegedly born in 1967 in Australia, the son of an Olympic swimmer. For some reason, the bio also mentions that this woman medaled in the Commonwealth Games. He is said to have completed his GED in 1987, which I’m guessing was included for inspirational reasons. A lot of people he knew throughout his life died violently, and Gaines almost perished in a 1992 one-car accident that forced him to get plastic surgery on his face, shoulder, and hands. I still have no idea why a doctor would do plastic surgery on somebody’s shoulder. I could understand reconstructive bone surgery, but not cosmetic work. Who looks at a musician’s shoulder blades? It seems about as relevant as Chris Gaines getting Tommy John surgery.

  3. Of course, retail sales of two million in 2009 would have made it one of the five biggest albums of the year. The ongoing deflation of sales figures makes it difficult to find a corollary for how In the Life of Chris Gaines would have performed in the present tense, assuming all the other factors were the same—I would estimate total sales of around 180,000 in the current climate. Maybe less.

  4. Of course, it’s entirely possible Brooks enjoyed promoting things. Some people are like this.

  1. Note: This does not work if the person whose name you can’t recall happens to be named Jamie.

  1. The spread offense was so culturally pervasive in 2008 that it briefly became a plot point in season three of Friday Night Lights, undoubtedly the first time a prime-time TV show felt the need to respond to what was happening in major college football.

  2. I feel like the addition of radios inside the helmets of NFL quarterbacks has been an overlooked innovation in how football embraces change. The Cleveland Browns invented QB radios in 1956, but they were banned until 1994. This legislation, along with the use of instant replay for officials, shows how football is unusually willing to let technology dictate performance. More conservative sports (like baseball or soccer) would fight such modernization tooth and nail.

  3. I feel an obligation to note that it wasn’t really Favre’s fault that announcers were in love with him. But it kind of was, because Favre perpetuated it, too. He openly played to their girlish worship.

  4. As a senior in 1981, USC’s Marcus Allen rushed for 2,432 yards in twelve games. This is both astounding and understandable when you watch tape of the Trojans from that season—it often seems like half of the offensive plays were simple toss sweeps over the right tackle (the so-called “Student Body Right”).

  5. This is especially significant within the context of football’s traditional relationship with hierarchical control: Since the 1970s, much of football’s fascist reputation had to do with the way offensive plays are dictated by the coaching staff, often from a press box a hundred feet above the field of play. The actual athletes sometimes seem like pawns. But choice routes gave autonomy to receivers.

  6. ESPN commentator Tom Jackson once called Martz “The worst kind of idiot—an idiot who thinks he’s a genius.”

  7. Malzahn is now at Auburn.

  8. Gillman introduced the idea of the vertical passing game in the 1950s and ’60s.

  9. Bellard popularized the wishbone option at the University of Texas in 1967, having taken the idea from Charles “Spud” Carson, a junior high coach in Fort Worth, Texas.

  10. Coryell is the father of the modern pro passing game, particularly with the San Diego Chargers in the early 1980s. He also changed the way people looked at collegiate talent: He won 104 games with the San Diego State Aztecs by almost exclusively recruiting from junior colleges.

  11. Easy example: In the annual New York Times Magazine “The Year in Ideas” issue for 2008, there was a brief examination of the Wildcat formation and the spread offense. The piece concludes with a dismissive quote from Aaron Schatz, a contributor to Pro Football Prospectus. “Wildcat got crazy,” said Schatz. “It’s a silly fad, like leg warmers or parachute pants.” Time may prove Schatz correct, but his condescension ignores some irrefutable results. The year before Miami started using the Wildcat, they were 1–15; the next season, the Dolphins went 11–5 and won the AFC East. In 2007, Ole Miss went 3–9, so they fired their head coach and hired Wildcat innovator Houston Nutt; with almost identical talent, Ole Miss won nine games in 2008 and were the only school to defeat the University of Florida all season. Ole Miss ultimately beat Leach’s Texas Tech in the 2009 Cotton Bowl.

  12. Although some of them did become addicted to gambling and cocaine.

  13. This refers to a defensive alignment that has three linemen and four line-backers. And if you didn’t know that already, I am pretty fucking impressed you’re still hanging with this. It should also be noted that certain NFL teams have succeeded wildly with the 3-4 defense even when it was unpopular, particularly in the AFC; Miami won championships with the 3-4 during the mid-1970s and Pittsburgh has used a 3-4 attack for more than twenty years.

  14. Unlike the 4-3 or the 3-4, the name of the 46 defense does not indicate the number of linemen and linebackers who are on the field. The reason Bears defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan called this formation the 46 was because its effectiveness hinged on the play of Chicago strong safety Doug Plank, whose jersey number was 46.

  15. Even Halberstam would ultimately concede that his ’74 piece did not hold up over time: In 2001, he wrote a much more affectionate essay called “How I Fell in Love with the NFL.”

  16. It was the year the Redskins played the Bills, and I was at a party. How I was at a party on a Sunday night in Grand Forks, North Dakota, that somehow wasn’t a Super Bowl party is pretty hard for me to fathom, but this was around the same time I started drinking “proactively.”

  1. In March of ’09, this is what Darryl Sterdan of the Toronto Sun wrote about U2: “After more than a quarter-century of virtually uninterrupted tenure as The Most Important Band in the World, it would appear Bono, The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr. and Adam Clayton have reached the ultimate plateau in a band’s life—the magical place where fame meets irrele
vance.” What this “irrelevance” means is that U2 is still a major act that Darryl Sterdan has to write about, because that’s his job—but he’s run out of obvious things to say about their iconography.

  2. The film is a black comedy about a nonglamorous woman (Toni Collette) who dreams of getting married and is obsessed with ABBA. Like most films involving ABBA, it’s set in Australia.

  3. In the 2002 documentary The Winner Takes It All: The ABBA Story, Benny Andersson casually describes his divorce from bandmate Anni-Frid Lyngstad (after twelve years of marriage) like this: “It’s no big deal here. You get divorced, your wife marries somebody else and they get kids and you get new kids with your family and we can all join together. It’s not like you never see each other again. It doesn’t work like that in Sweden.” Not being Swedish, it’s hard for me to tell how accurate this sentiment is, but it does stay consistent with how ABBA never let the end of their dual relationships negatively affect the band’s onstage interaction.

  4. “Fernando,” “Chiquitita,” “Put on Your White Sombrero,” “Hasta Mañana,” etc.

  5. The Russian prime minister has denied that he paid the ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again to perform for him and eight other people at a Russian lake resort in 2009. This is such a strange thing to deny that it obviously must have happened. According to Bjorn Again member Jennifer Robb (who portrays Anni-Frid) in the UK online newspaper The Daily Telegraph: “The prime minister didn’t stand but he and his wife, or whoever it was, were jigging about on the sofa and singing the words to ‘Honey Honey.’ All his officials were singing away and doing a finger-pointing dance. They really got into it, even though there were only nine of them. At the end, the prime minister shouted ‘bravo, bravo’ and gave us great applause.”