BASKETBALL

FRIDAY MATERIAL

1. Tough loss for the Canucks. Too many men. Luongo had one of his strongest games I have seen though. Winning three in a row in Dallas is a lot to ask.

On Taylor Pyatt:
The rare combination of size and skill in the Canucks' biggest forward could be crucial to wearing down Dallas's defence
He might just be the quietest Vancouver Canuck. So Taylor Pyatt had to be in his element when he silenced the 18,532 fans at the American Airlines Center in game three of the Canucks' first-round playoff series with the Dallas Stars. Pyatt let his hockey stick make all the noise as he ended overtime with a 40-foot slap shot that gave the Canucks both a 2–1 victory and a 2–1 edge in the series.

At 6-4 and 235 pounds, Pyatt is the biggest forward the Canucks have. But on too many nights, despite his imposing size, the 25-year-old is virtually impossible to find on the ice. For three periods and then some, the third game in this series had been one of those nights for the soft-spoken Thunder Bay, Ontario, native. Pyatt started the game, as he has so many others this season, in the enviable position of riding shotgun with Daniel and Henrik Sedin. But with the Canucks trailing 1–0 and into a fifth consecutive period without a goal after being shut out 2–0 in game two, something had to give.

And, as has been the case so often all year, Pyatt was the guy giving up his spot on the Cauncks' top line. He was replaced by Markus Naslund and bumped to a makeshift combination with Bryan Smolinski and Trevor Linden. That was basically a mishmash of guys trying to find their games. Instead—and, honestly, who could have seen it coming—what they found was a way to end the hockey game. One of the beauties of playoff hockey is the notion that anyone can be the hero at any time. And for one night, at least (the Canucks are hoping there are plenty more), Pyatt skated into the spotlight and shot down the Stars after being set up by his new linemates. “I just let it go and it went in the net. It's my first-ever playoff goal, and to get it in overtime and have it be a game winner is a great feeling,” Pyatt told the assembled media in the Canucks locker room immediately after his winner. “It sure came at a nice time.”

Nicer still for everyone involved that Pyatt's goal came at 7:47 of overtime and not into the fourth extra period, like both the Canucks and Stars endured in the never-ending series opener. “I just wanted to get it over with as early as possible,” he said of ending the third game quickly in overtime after logging 37:34 of ice time in that first-game marathon and wanting no part of going through that again just five days later. Although the goal was the first of Pyatt's playoff career, being part of a postseason winner is not a new experience. At this time last year, he was a member of the Buffalo Sabres team that took the eventual Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes to a seventh game in the Eastern Conference final. However, the same inconsistency that has marked his first year in Vancouver was apparent during last year's playoffs, too, as Pyatt averaged just more than 11 minutes of ice time and played in 14 of the Sabres 18 games.

This year, there's no question that Pyatt has developed into a top-nine forward for the Vancouver Canucks, but he has to decide whether or not he wants to pay the price and do the things required to keep him on the team's top line. And as an unrestricted free agent this summer, Pyatt will also have to decide if he wants to stay in Vancouver and build on the things he accomplished this season. It certainly seems like there's a fit for him here, but he may want to test the market and see how much interest (read money) there is elsewhere. Anson Carter tried that after one good season and he ended up floundering in Columbus and, later on, in Carolina. There has to be a lesson in there for a guy like Pyatt. Born with good hockey genes—his father, Nelson, spent seven seasons in the NHL playing for Detroit, Washington, and Colorado — Pyatt is blessed with a size and skill that many players would die for. But he has to find a consistency in his game and a willingness to use his big body more readily. Right now, there seems to be no grey area in Pyatt's game. He's either making things happen as he did while scoring a career-best 23 times during the regular season or he's sleepwalking through his shifts, doing whatever he can to avoid contact.

Maybe that third-game overtime winner will be the wake-up call that will keep Pyatt interested in playing hard each and every time he steps on the ice. (In fact, he picked up another two points in Game 4 on Tuesday night.) Against a Dallas team with an undersized defence, Pyatt could be a key component to the Canucks' success in this series. He has to use his size to fight through checks and establish position in front of the Dallas net. He has a big body that's hard to move and difficult for goalies to see around. And as he showed in overtime in game three, he also possesses an accurate and underrated shot—and he would do well to use it more frequently. Pyatt was the only player on either team to score twice in the close-checking regular-season series between the Canucks and Stars. And early in this playoff series, he found the back of the net again with the biggest goal of his career, so, clearly, he has found something that works against Dallas.

The irony in all of this is that Pyatt may not have had the chance to play the role of hero had he not been taken off the Canucks' top line in that game. It was only once the switch was made that the Canucks cranked up their game, generated the offence they were so desperately seeking, and eventually tied the hockey game. So for one night, at least, Pyatt couldn't argue with his demotion. Then again, even if he was upset, he's not the kind of guy to say anything about it. He's not the kind of guy to say boo about anything. He left the booing to the fans in Dallas—once they got over their stunned silence brought on by his game-winning goal.

2. First pre-natal class last night. I don't think we learned much (other than how stupid some of our classmates are).

3. I'd like Felix to get better. "Mariners ace Felix Hernandez is expected to miss two to three starts with a muscle strain inside his right elbow and forearm, the Associated Press reported. Mariners medical director Dr. Ed Khalfayan said that Felix was lucky to come out of the game when he did on Wednesday, as if he had continued to pitched with the strain, he could have stressed the elbow severely enough that he would have required Tommy John surgery. Hernandez will not throw for five days, then will play catch. This is good news for Felix owners, but also something to be wary of because it sounds like Hernandez is very close to having some severe elbow problems. Hopefully Felix comes back in a couple of weeks and is fine, but we may not have heard the last of his elbow problems."

4.


5.
Mistress Mercury:

6.

INTERVIEWS


Bob Dylan


Bob Marley


Nina Simone
SINCE I FELL FOR YOU
Nina Simone
Nina Simone Sings The Blues
RCA : 1967








Some mp3s for you here.

MANNY BEING MANNY

Waiting for Manny: Boston’s mystery man.
by Ben McGrath

“That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet,” a teammate says of Ramirez.

Manny Ramirez is a deeply frustrating employee, the kind whose talents are so prodigious that he gets away with skipping meetings, falling asleep on the job, and fraternizing with the competition. He makes more money than everyone else at the company yet somehow escapes the usual class resentment, and even commands more respect from the wage slaves, who suspect he is secretly one of them, than from his colleagues in business class. It’s not that he is anti-establishment, exactly, but in his carefree way he’s just subversive enough—“affably apathetic” is how one of his bosses put it recently—to create headaches for any manager who worries about precedent. Despite his generous compensation, he is sufficiently ungrateful to let it be known that he would be happier working elsewhere. He is also, for a man of stature, strangely sensitive, and although his brilliance is accompanied by sloppiness, one criticizes him, as with a wayward teen-ager, at the risk of losing him to bouts of brooding and inaccessibility.

Ramirez, now entering his seventh season with the Boston Red Sox, is the best baseball player to come out of the New York City public-school system since Sandy Koufax, and by many accounts the greatest right-handed hitter of his generation, though attempts to locate him in time and space, as we shall see, inevitably miss the mark. He is perhaps the closest thing in contemporary professional sports to a folk hero, an unpredictable public figure about whom relatively little is actually known but whose exploits, on and off the field, are recounted endlessly, with each addition punctuated by a shrug and the observation that it’s just “Manny being Manny.” When I asked his teammate David Ortiz, himself a borderline folk hero, how he would describe Ramirez, he replied, “As a crazy motherfucker.” Then he pointed at my notebook and said, “You can write it down just like that: ‘David Ortiz says Manny is a crazy motherfucker.’ That guy, he’s in his own world, on his own planet. Totally different human being than everyone else.” Ortiz is not alone in emphasizing that Ramirez’s originality resonates at the level of species. Another teammate, Julian Tavarez, recently told a reporter from the Boston Herald, “There’s a bunch of humans out here, but to Manny, he’s the only human.”



buying cheese online

new Feist


Shins - Australia


Shins - Phantom Limb


new Rufus Wainwright

GO CANUCKS







Can doctors collectively learn from past experience?

601st POST

When Michael Lewis' son got sick.
Other Michael Lewis

on bright eyes

MORE IAN McEWAN

If you stroll along the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach in Dorset, as Ian McEwan did while composing his new novel, you will find that millennia of tides and winds have "graded the size of pebbles" along its 18-mile length, "with the bigger stones at the eastern end". The writer went to check this out, and felt - as he weighed the pebbles in his palms - that it was true.

Already, critics have lauded On Chesil Beach as a major achievement from a painstaking micro-historian of the inner life. Edward and Florence, its loving but fatally innocent couple, stumble into a wedding-night disaster in the "buttoned-up", respectable England of July 1962, the victims not merely of "their personalities and pasts" but of "class, and history itself". Yet long-haul admirers of McEwan will detect some even deeper rhythms at work here. Once again, he traces the ominous crossing of a threshold from one human state to another: a step into the dark framed - as often in his fiction - by the inexorable onward movement of maturing and ageing bodies, of biological evolution, of climate and even geology itself.

We talk in a restaurant in Fitzrovia, a short walk for McEwan from the handsome house in a Georgian square that he fictionally lends to the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne in Saturday - another novel that pivots on momentous changes, all the way from the medical to the military realms. Upstairs, there seems to be a meeting of the revived Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, exactly the kind of wacky pop pranksters that Edward, in the lonely hippie-era limbo where McEwan's epilogue leaves his stubborn hero, might have promoted in his Camden record shop. Outside, the sunshine signals another kind of transition, from winter into spring. And McEwan, a model of quietly spoken exactitude with words and ideas alike, stresses that On Chesil Beach aims at more than just the scrutiny of that early-Sixties cusp of change between - as Philip Larkin and almost all the reviewers have put it - "the end of the Chatterley ban/ And The Beatles' first LP".

For all the pin-sharp evocation of a time when "youthful energies were pushing to escape, like steam under pressure", this last gasp of British sexual inhibition gave his story a starting point and not a terminus. "I never really thought of it as a historical novel," he explains, "because I was interested in another aspect: which is when young people cross this line - the Conradian shadow-line - from innocence to knowledge. You're also dealing with a human universal. So I was rather interested to discover what young people would make of this. And I was quite relieved, for example, that my sons took to it avidly - even though they're living at a time when they not only have girlfriends, but they have lots of friends who happen to be girls: another world."

The book also survived a test-run beyond McEwan's family (his wife is the journalist and author Annalena McAfee, and he has two early-twenties sons from his first marriage). He read an extract at Hunter College in New York, to the sort of student body who might have been forgiven for failing to sympathise with the bedroom blunderings of a pair of virginal Home Counties 22-year-olds in the summer before the Cuban missile crisis. "This is a community college," the author says, "and the kids are - tough is not the word, they're really lovely, but they're not protected. They've clearly been out there." Would this street-smart audience think: why don't Edward and Florence "just get on with it? What's the problem? On the contrary: they seemed deeply engaged.

"So there have to be two elements running side by side," McEwan continues. "One is that, this is particular: these are characters frozen in history, limited by psychology, by class, by private experience. But on the other hand, this is a universal experience that is differently dressed up by different people at different times." Youth always has to cross that line, even if it would no longer run through the starched sheets of a marriage bed in a dowdy Dorset hotel.

Always the punctilious realist, McEwan nonetheless skirts the seas of parable, or myth. Yet for this, the 12th work of fiction since his 1975 debut with the luridly memorable tales of First Love, Last Rites, he wanted to avoid wading in too deep. "This particular beach offered so many metaphorical possibilities," he says. "They could kill the novel! So I really had to row back quite hard on that. The fact that impersonal forces have created order; the fact that the last scene is played out on a tongue of shingle, so you're stranded on both sides; the sense that they sit down to dinner on an evening when they both hope to gain knowledge, which clearly relates to being on the edge of the known world... It was so rich, that I had to keep the volume down."

McEwan's fiction strikes so hard and lingers so long in the imagination precisely because he keeps the interpretative volume down. "Readers will rebel," he believes, "when they spot an overriding, determining metaphor." Or, perhaps, a determining cause. On Chesil Beach hints at a specific reason for Florence's "visceral dread" of sexual experience, one that throws a line from this work back to the toxic households of those earliest stories. Her creator reveals that "in an early draft, it was all too clear". The finished work allows more space for the reader: we can join the dots through the past ourselves, just as we can fill in the futures to be enjoyed or endured by both after the act, or failure to act, that will mould them. Edward, the promising historian, now seems headed for a life of amiable counter-cultural drift; Florence, the driven violinist, stands on the brink of a solitary musical destiny.

Florence plays in a rising string quartet, and the novel that tells her story has a densely wrought, compacted, chamber-music quality. A central movement - the wedding night itself - is interspersed with chapters that delve into the characters' past and, at the finale, the future as * * well. "One of the first things that I wrote about it when I was making notes," McEwan recalls, "was a simple direction: five times eight - five chapters of about 8,000 words. A wedding night seemed to me perfect for a short novel."

The author of other compressed but resonant pieces, such as The Comfort of Strangers, Black Dogs and the Booker-winning Amsterdam, points out that "I've always liked that form: the novel that can be read in three hours, at a sitting, like a movie or an opera". A chamber opera will be McEwan's next project, due for its premiere at next year's Hay festival. He has almost completed a small-scale, "easily exportable" collaboration with the composer Michael Berkeley (who was his partner more than 20 years ago on the anti-nuclear oratorio Or Shall We Die?). It has a Don Giovanni-style seducer for its protagonist: "We thought that sexual obsession would be a very good subject for an opera."

And sexual obsession, in the form of longing or loathing rather than action, makes an equally compelling motif for On Chesil Beach. For McEwan, the book's microscopically observed convergence of social embarrassment and erotic misery "is not great tragedy. But it's something I always have an interest in: how something small, like not saying the right thing or not making the right gesture, could then send you down a slightly different path in life. It must happen to us countless times, but we barely notice."

In the pre-permissive shadowland of 1962, McEwan himself was a 13-year-old schoolboy, the itinerant, Aldershot-born son of a career army officer from Glasgow. Famously, his father's ordeal at Dunkirk helped to shape the wartime scenes of Atonement, the 2001 novel that, for many of his readers, ranked Mc-Ewan first-among-equals in that gifted cohort of novelists (Amis, Barnes and Rushdie among them) born into the aftermath of global war. Now, a few readers wonder if the poignant road-not-taken theme in On Chesil Beach might connect with his rediscovered brother, David Sharp. The son born to McEwan's parents while his mother was still married to her first husband (later killed in action), David was given up for adoption in 1942. McEwan first encountered him in 2002, and they periodically meet, but he says that this reconfigured family history has not (yet) found its way into his work.

The novelist may not enlist people into fiction so directly, but he does recruit places. Just as Saturday more or less gave Mr Perowne his creator's own address, so On Chesil Beach has Edward grow up in a Chilterns cottage that Mc-Ewan once almost rented, while Florence's chilly family occupies the north Oxford house he lived in during the 1980s. "I've come to it late," he says, "and it's such a standard thing in the English novel: a sense of place. Which I've always rather lacked, I think, being an army brat, going to boarding school, then a modern university": Sussex, followed by his pioneering stint as the first creative-writing student at East Anglia. "I've never been very rooted but, cumulatively, I guess, I do have a 30-year experience of the Chilterns." McEwan now draws on that intimacy in Edward's memories of an idyllic corner of those hills which has, he says, "withstood the onslaught of modernity reasonably well".

McEwan conjures up his terrain with a walker's close-to-the-ground eye. Plants thrust, creatures breed (or refuse to), and even hills or beaches shift according to the overlapping cycles that push on beyond the limited history that persons or societies know. He is also deeply immersed in ecological debates. In 2005, he joined a trip to the Svalbard archipelago, 79 degrees north in the Arctic, for the Cape Farewell project led by the artist David Buckland, which aims to raise cultural awareness of the issues of global warming. He reads widely in scientific literature and, just before we met, had travelled to Hamburg for a public dialogue with John Schellnhuber, the German government's adviser on climate change.

Yet McEwan the engaged intellectual (as he was during an earlier wave of doomsday anxiety, in the nuclear arms race of the early 1980s) and McEwan the novelist remain separate beings. "Fiction hates preachiness," he affirms. "Nor does it much like facts and figures or trends or curves on graphs. Nor do readers much like to be hectored." He says that in spite of "all the reading that I've done around climate change, none of it suggests anything useful in the way of approaching this novelistically".

What about one more fictional dystopia, with marauding survivors once more trekking through a blasted wasteland? "That doesn't interest me at all. We've had so many dystopias that we're brain-dead in that direction. Also, you can go to certain parts of the world - say, Sudan. There is a dystopia. You don't have to launch these things into the future."

Still, he can just about envisage a fiction that would do artistic justice to a perilously warming world: "Something small and fierce, that would unwind in a way that's intrinsically interesting... It's got to be fascinating, in the way that gossip is. It's got to be about ourselves. Maybe it needs an Animal Farm. Maybe it needs allegory. But if you're going in that direction, then you need a lot of wit."

Meanwhile, ventures such as Cape Farewell (whose exhibition will reach the Barbican gallery in January 2008) may trigger an urge to cherish as well as to lament. In an Arctic cold snap, "I did two or three long hikes that just took my breath away," he says. "Many others have thought this too: that one way forward is not doom-and-gloom but celebration; of what we are, what we have, and what we don't want to lose." On his return, he wrote a fable about the boot-room of the expedition ship, with its all-too-human rows over purloined kit. Artists may not refine the theory or advance the technology that will grapple with climate change, but they can deepen the self-knowledge of the selfish but potentially co-operative beasts who have crossed a fateful, collective shadow-line. "How do you talk about the state we've got ourselves into," he asks, "as a very successful, fossil-fuel-burning civilisation? How do we stop? That really does become a matter of human nature. There's all the science to consider, but finally there is a massive issue of politics and ethics."

McEwan, who shadowed a leading neurosurgeon while researching Saturday, likes the company and outlook of scientists as an antidote to lazy arts-faculty despair. "Among cultural intellectuals, pessimism is the style," he says with a tinge of scorn. "You're not a paid-up member unless you're gloomy." But when it comes to climate change, he finds (quoting the Italian revolutionary Gramsci) that scientists can combine "pessimism of the intellect" with "optimism of the will". "Science is an intrinsically optimistic project. You can't be curious and depressed. Curiosity is itself a sure stake in life. And science is often quite conscious of intellectual pleasure, in a way that the humanities are not."

He loves the spirited playfulness evident in places such as John Brockman's celebrated website Edge, where "neuroscientists might talk to mathematicians, biologists to computer-modelling experts", and in an accessible, discipline-crossing language that lets us all eavesdrop. "In order to talk to each other, they just have to use plain English. That's where the rest of us benefit." Science may also now "encroach" on traditional artistic soil. McEwan recently heard a lecture on the neuroscience of revenge, in which the rage to get even - that inexhaustible fuel for tragedy and comedy alike - illuminated parts of the brain via "real-time, functioning MRI [magnetic resonance imaging]. What was demonstrated was that people were prepared to punish themselves in order to punish others: negative altruism."

For all the storytelling confidence of scientists who try to uncover the biological roots of personal emotions and social beliefs, McEwan keeps faith in the special tasks of art. "I hold to the view that novelists can go to places that might be parallel to a scientific investigation, and can never really be replaced by it: the investigation into our natures; our condition; what we're like in specific circumstances." On Chesil Beach, it strikes me, shows at its infinitely sad conclusion an example of self-punishing "negative altruism" at work. Here, a vengeful righteousness that wrecks the "injured" party takes shape not in the colour-coded neural maps of MRI - but through a vigilant writer's heartbreaking empathy with the twisted feelings of a child in its time.

If human communication and solidarity can founder so totally in this novel's little pool of fear and frustration, what are its prospects in the great ocean of social behaviour? We talk of the carbon-cutting, resource-saving sacrifices this generation may have to make on behalf of its successors, and McEwan comments that such long-term altruism "does go against the grain a bit". All the same, he adds: "I cheer myself up with the thought of medieval cathedral builders, who built for the future - or 18th-century tree-planters, who planted sapling oaks which they would never enjoy. Here, it's much more dire; but we're bound to think of our children, or at least our grandchildren.

"It is difficult to do favours to people you have never met," he says. "But we give money to Oxfam, to charities, to victims of the tsunami and so forth. These are not people who are ever going to repay those favours, or even know who bestowed them." Unlike his characters, doomed to a kind of soul-extinction in their solitude, McEwan believes in making the last-ditch gesture that might save a world. "The worst fate would be to conclude that there's nothing we can do about this, and so let's party to the end."

WANT TO BE WANTED; LOVE TO BE LOVED

Kansas City police arrested a woman from the FBI's Most Wanted Fugitives list on Saturday, minutes before a segment about her aired on national television. She was 24 years old and had committed just one murder, yet Shauntay Henderson stood in the company of infamous figures like Osama Bin Laden and Whitey Bulger. How do criminals get their names on the list?

They wait for a spot to open. Whenever a top-ranked fugitive dies or gets caught, the central FBI office surveys its 56 field offices for possible replacements. (A few of the Most Wanted have also been declared "inactive" and removed from the list.) A committee decides which of the field offices' nominees are most dangerous to society, and whose cases would benefit the most from added publicity. The list isn't always limited to the top 10 fugitives, though. At various times, it's been as short as seven or eight names after a string of arrests, and as long as 16 when a group of affiliated criminals all made the list together. (Fugitives beyond the traditional 10 are called "Special Additions"; Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, warranted such an addition.) Still, most fugitives have to wait their turn. Even Osama Bin Laden had to queue up—he joined the list in June 1999, almost a year after the embassy bombing in Kenya.

The FBI says it doesn't apportion slots for particular crimes, but observers point out that the list regularly includes those accused of certain types of unlawful activities. In recent years, for example, the Most Wanted comprised the usual mix of a cop killer, a drug dealer, a sex offender, a serial killer, an escaped convict, someone who murdered his family, and an old-school mafia boss. In the 1960s and 1970s, political agitators like Angela Davis were sometimes listed. Robbers, who showed up often in the early years of the list, continue to make the list.

Dutiful citizens sometimes need a little monetary incentive, of course. The FBI started offering rewards of up to $50,000 in 1997, then bumped up the figure to $100,000 in 2004. (A few fugitives warrant higher price tags. Bin Laden is worth $27 million, while Victor Manuel Gerena, who stole $7 million from a security company, has a $1 million bounty.) But it's not clear whether the rewards have made a big difference. The FBI hasn't captured more fugitives since they start using bounties. In fact, the Bureau's most successful years were during the 1950s and 1960s.

How to live on $1 a day

re: John McCain's prospects for a Republican nomination. Despite the de facto Republican tradition of nominating the most senior hopeful, McCain now trails Giuliani in the polls. His chief stumbling block: the conservative base, whose trust he shattered with campaign-finance reform. But McCain is bouncing back, and can stay afloat as long as he avoids courting the media, scraps his "maverick" image, and leads his party by steadfastly backing the Iraq war.

An article observes the shifting medical response to cancer. Rather than attempting to cure terminal cancer with "older drugs [that] were like heavy artillery—obliterating cancer cells but causing lots of collateral damage," doctors now treat the disease as a chronic illness whose "wayward cells may not necessarily have to be destroyed." Quality-of-life-minded researchers focus on "torturing cancer cells, and getting them to confess to us which pathways they are dependent on." Consequently, "there is no better time to be living with the disease."

An article profiles charter school entrepreneur Courtney Ross, whose ventures—Ross School in East Hampton and Ross Global Academy in New York City—emphasize exposure to cultural diversity and put to work such principles as "beauty in the classroom affects the quality of the lesson." But the scope of Ross' vision often leads to clashes with architects, city officials, and school administrators, and some of the schools' "proggy ideals have been flung on the pyre as Ross comes under pressure to teach to the test."

PRANK?

Type "college prank" into YouTube and you will be greeted with hundreds of videos. Most will be really, really dumb. Many won't even be pranks at all. Some will make you furrow your brow, shake your head, and fear for the future of our country. But a few of them push the art of the prank to new heights. Being able to share videos online has encouraged the best college pranksters to make their stunts more elaborate. It also allows us to share in their glorious inanity.

"Drinkin' Time"


The needlessly long set-up is annoying, but the prank itself makes the wait worthwhile. The victims are a group of prospective students on a tour of Dartmouth College. In the video, the tour guide is droning on when suddenly there comes a primal scream: "It's drinking time!" Students stop their conversations, drop their books, and begin running down the street. Then a character called Keggy the Keg appears. And a marching band. Credit for the prank belongs to the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern Humor Society, which, according to its Web site, has been around since 1908.

Start-up Sound


The setting is a library, and the prank involves a computer start-up noise that crescendoes into a symphonic resonance. It's a subtle stunt, and it's unlikely that most of those present even knew what was going on. But thanks to YouTube, we can all enjoy its quiet, goofy charm.

Upside-Down Room


According to the video, this Brandeis University prank took nine days, 12 people, and 600 screws. I believe it. Attaching all of your roommate's possessions to the ceiling is hard work.

A Lecture Musical


Another offering from Prangstgrüp, and arguably the best college prank on YouTube. In the middle of a classroom lecture, in front of maybe 200 students, a young man stands up and begins singing. The song is a Broadway-worthy ditty about the need for professors to inspire their students. As the song continues, other students stand up and start singing too, in what is obviously a carefully choreographed scene. Brilliant.

Fun With Yellow Books


Filling a dorm room with crumpled paper or carefully wrapping every itemdown to the toothbrushes and alarm clocks is a time-honored college prank. There are numerous such videos online, but this one, at Tufts University, is particularly well done. The real fun is watching the pranksters do their work, which suggests a general truth about pranks: The anticipation is often better than the actual thing (this is also true of life). The roommate's reaction is perfect. He is mildly upset but mostly good-natured. Other videos prove that if you react poorly to a prank, you end up looking like the jerk.

She was a seamless alloy of Southern belle, New England bluestocking, and Chinese tai-tai. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek played her role to 105.

SPORTSCASTING

BOOM goes the dynamite.


I had seen this awhile ago and forgot how good it was.