Jack, Nikita & some nukes

I don't remember when we learned about the Cuban missile crisis in school. Probably in 8th grade, likely in the final 10 minutes of the hour-long class, perhaps after the 11 minutes spent on the Korean War. The teacher likely left us with a message of, "And tomorrow, we'll cover Vietnam, Watergate and the Iran hostage ordeal."

The story always fascinated me, even when I only knew the broad strokes and simplistic version: Dastardly Soviets sneak nukes onto Cuba; U.S. discovers it; John F. Kennedy appears on TV to tell Americans they'll all die; generals want to invade the island; blockade; Soviets back down; America wins; USA! USA!

Learning about the crisis nearly 30 years later made it impossible to really understand what it must have been like in the country during those days. It was laughable thinking about my parents hiding under school desks as a mushroom cloud rose outside of Fulda - "True, these shoddily made desks collapse under the weight of our heftier students, but they will shield our youngsters from a thermonuclear device." Kids still feared nuclear annihilation, primarily because of the TV movie The Day After. But the Soviet Union's eventual collapse meant there was no longer an ever-present enemy waiting to hit the button and send us scurrying into bunkers or under desks. We had 30, 40 years of living with Mutual Assured Destruction and most people felt confident leaders for both countries really did understand the theory. Students felt scared because of what happened to Jason Robards on TV, not because of what nearly happened in real life three decades earlier. At that stage, America seemed protected, isolated from danger, if not the world.

Certainly September 11 changed that view. But even in the aftermath of the horror of the worst day in the country's history, I didn't ever feel - and I don't think the majority of people did either - that the entire country was in danger of total destruction. In so many ways the danger was more terrifying than the Cold War, because it was random, unpredictable, and could seemingly happen anyplace, and at anytime. Even with that, there wasn't the fear that the entire country - the whole world, for that matter - could be brought down in the matter of hours, with just a push of a button.

That was what I imagined life was like in the early '60s, as the United States and Soviet Union escalated their arms battle and it all came to a (war)head in Cuba. But still I only knew the children's book version.

Several years ago I watched - and thoroughly enjoyed - the movie Thirteen Days, though I was somewhat surprised to learn Kevin Costner (or at least his character, Kenneth O'Donnell) had saved the world back in 1962. For the most part, the movie received praise for its accuracy. There were a few notable exceptions, the main one probably being that O'Donnell, who served as Kennedy's special assistant, didn't have much of a role during the two-week drama, even if he had a big one in the subsequent two-hour one that came to theaters.

Still, entertaining flick.

But now I finally feel like I've read the definitive account of the crisis. Michael Dobbs' One Minute to Midnight came out in 2008 and has been called "extraordinary," "fast-paced, suspenseful," and a "welcome introduction to that perilous time." Those were some of the official reviews and I can't add much to those. The book filled in any missing gaps I had and shed new light on old issues I thought had been settled long ago. It's literally a minute-by-minute account of the crisis. Half of the book focuses on one day - Saturday, October 27 - when the world really did come close to witnessing a nuclear exchange between a pair of superpowers who would have been anything but in the aftermath of another world war.

Dobbs' book puts the reader in the moment. Now I feel like I do know what it was like and why it was so terrifying, even though the most frightening aspect of the book isn't necessarily the fact the world came so close to the brink, but how it came so close to destruction.

One of the primary strengths of the book is it tells the story from all perspectives - American, Soviet, Cuban. Dobbs gets into the heads of Soviet soldiers in Cuba and leaders back in Moscow. He takes you inside the cockpit of a U-2 and into the White House. He explains Fidel Castro's motivations and the obsessions of the politicians who were determined to eliminate him, seemingly at any cost.

The book opens with some amazing anecdotes, which any conspiracy theorist would read and exclaim, "Told ya so!" On the first pages, Robert Kennedy meets with a group focused on eliminating Castro. These were the folks who brainstormed the idea of using "chemical agents to destroy Castro's beard, so that he would become a laughingstock among the Cuban people." It's not known if a night of heavy pot use prompted that idea. But Dobbs reports on how far the U.S. was willing to go to rid itself of the former baseball player turned ruler:

"The State Department drafted plans for the sabotage of the Cuban economy; the Pentagon came up with a scheme for a wave of bombings in Miami and Washington that could be blamed on Castro." Fake bombings blamed on a stooge? Okay.

RFK was meeting with that group when the missile crisis started. From there, Dobbs meticulously documents why events escalated, culminating in "Black Saturday," when nuclear war seemed possible.

The American generals were eager for some action. General Thomas Power told an aide to defense secretary Robert McNamara, "The whole idea is to kill the bastards." If there were "Two Americans and one Russian" left alive at the end of the war, "we win." Dobbs writes that McNamara's aide replied, "You had better make sure the two Americans are a man and a woman." And, preferably, attractive ones.

At the time, the United States did possess an advantage in sheer number of nukes. We could have blasted the Soviets and "won" a war, while losing tens of millions of Americans. And, terrifyingly, some in the military seemed all right with that proposition.

Looking back, it's frightening to see how a little thing could have led to a big war, whether it was the Soviets shooting down a plane in Cuba or an American spy plane accidentally venturing into Russian airspace. Imagine WW3 starting because of a befuddled pilot. It's absurd. And was completely possible. Fortunately, John Kennedy also spent time looking back during those crucial days. He reflected on how World War I started because of "mistakes, misunderstandings and miscommunication" and how that unleashed "an unpredictable chain of events, causing governments to go to war with little understanding of the consequences."

If nothing else, Dobbs' book is a great reminder about the benefits of civilian control over the military. Support the troops? Sure. But make sure you oversee their leaders. Their job is to win wars, but it's the politicians who have to be trusted with knowing when they should begin.

And that goes for the Soviets too. Nikita Krushchev, like Kennedy, fought to control a situation that had first spiraled out of control because of his own actions. For eventually pulling the missiles out of Cuba, Krushchev was basically labeled the loser in the event, by people on both sides. What a wimp! Didn't have the guts to go through with a war! Actually, he helped save the world, after almost helping destroy it. Just like Kennedy.

Dobbs writes:

"The question the world confronted during what came to be known as the Cuban missile crisis was who controlled history: the men in suits, the men with beards, the men in uniform, or nobody at all. In this drama, Kennedy ended up on the same side as his ideological nemesis, Nikita Krushchev. Neither man wanted war. They both felt an obligation to future generations to rein in the dark, destructive demons they themselves had helped to unleash. ...Something more than dumb luck was involved in sidestepping a nuclear apocalypse. The real good fortune is that men as sane and level-headed as John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Nikita Sergeyevich Krushchev occupied the White House and the Kremlin in October 1962."

We should all be thankful for Krushchev? I think we missed that part in school.

The boys of spring are cold out there

The temperature will reach a high of about 45 degrees on Tuesday in Janesville, with a low of 35. It will rain and it will be windy. Wednesday's an even better day for the tourism bureau - high of 44, chance of snow.

And somewhere in Minnesota on those days, at around 4 in the afternoon, at about the time the temperature heads toward what will eventually be its low mark of the day, a pair of high school baseball teams will meet on a near-frozen diamond in front of a handful of bitter parents and fellow students, all of whom will wonder what in the hell they're doing sitting there watching a baseball game in the middle of, well, winter.

I loved playing high school baseball. I especially loved it when we had blue skies and 75-degree weather, which means I especially loved it about twice a season. Spring high school sports operate in an odd environment in Minnesota. For the most part, schools, coaches, students and parents do not seem to take them as seriously as they do fall and winter sports. The intensity falls, along with the stakes. Our baseball season always seemed to last about as long as the first two rounds of the NBA playoffs. Start the games in April, finish them by mid-May. By the time you get settled in, the season's over. When it's your senior year, your high school athletic career is over and you've barely even noticed.

In cold weather states baseball actually begins in the school gym, the exact date determined by when the basketball teams' seasons end. When people complain about indoor baseball it's usually when talking about MLB and domes. Before it came down, the Metrodome often came up in those discussions. People bemoaned the roof, the turf, the fans in the stands and the (alleged) ones that helped the Twins hit homers or kept foes from hitting them. But that indoor baseball is paradise compared to practicing in a gym. Groundballs off the basketball floor. Hitting inside a giant net. Pop-up drills where fielders run in a straight line as the coach lobs a ball over their head. Then it's time for some more grounders, perhaps a "mini-clinic" on how to come off the bag while turning a double-play. Now we're practicing how to take a lead off of first base. Our coach tries to "hold" us on, an action that's helpful and useful until it becomes ludicrous when he pretends to be a left-handed pitcher, holding his right leg up in an absurd Andy Pettitte impression before fake-firing to an imaginary plate, a motion that would cause anyone watching to say he throws like a girl, and an unathletic one at that.

But the only thing worse than practicing indoors during those early weeks is actually playing outdoors, when the temperature struggled to reach 50 and you could actually discuss wind chill in addition to the opposing pitcher's stuff. Being in the field was the worst, of course. When hitting, we could at least huddle in the dugout together. Standing in the infield you're exposed, helpless, forced to shuffle side to side in an attempt to keep warm, if not feign complete interest in the proceedings. Fortunately our pitchers always possessed decent control, apparently subscribing to the Twins' method of focusing first on throwing strikes (the flaw in that method, as our pitchers often discovered, is that you need a quality defense supporting you). There's no more helpless feeling than watching opposing hitters take four balls and then trot on down to first while their teammate jogs to second. You can plead with your struggling pitcher and disguise it as old-time baseball chatter - "Come on One-Six, throw strikes, big guy, come on now!" - but the parade will continue until the coach mercifully calls in a freezing replacement, who's probably been standing stiff in right field the first three innings. The walks continue.

You gotta throw strikes in cold weather. Make 'em swing, because hitting always seems ten times harder in cold temperatures. The bat feels heavier, your muscles weaker. And if you do make contact the sting sort of makes you wish you'd just had the decency to strike out. There's no sweet spot with an aluminum bat in the cold, only a sore spot. And if you manage to survive the pain and stroke a base hit you now have to run the bases, instead of retreating to the pseudo shelter offered by the aging dugout.

High school games are seven innings but in a Minnesota spring it feels like seventeen. Even better? Double-headers.

Baseball's a great game. Just don't try and tell that to Minnesota high school players today and tomorrow.

School lunch memories

I have to be careful about how I say this.

Louise is, in many ways, the best cook I've ever known, and certainly the best one I've been married to. But a more accurate statement would be that Louise is one of the two best cooks I've ever known, because she has to share the top spot with my late grandma Bernice. Choosing one to hold the top spot in this mythical ranking would be impossible; I'd have to deal with either a hurt wife or a guilty conscience.

Grandma worked for years as a school cook in Fulda, but my memories - and her ranking - have everything to do with what she conjured up in her tiny kitchen, and nothing to do with the meals she helped create for the town's youth. I'm sure grandma made good food for the kids. But those offerings couldn't possibly compare to the french toast, chocolate chip cookies, and roast beef she expertly crafted at home. I bet even grandma would have admitted she did not do her best work within the school confines.

School lunches have been compared to prison food service but that's unfair - to our nation's penal system.

But now, school lunches are in the news, as a Chicago school banned kids from bringing lunch from home. They'll eat in the school, and they'll like it - or not. But they will eat it, unless they have an allergy that requires a special meal from home, and can't you just imagine a host of children being diagnosed with allergies by the start of the next school year? The principal says it's about nutrition. Kids can't be trusted to make healthy choices so the school makes them. Some people are upset because it robs parents of their ability to parent, although in some cases that seems like it'd be a good thing. Yes, mom can order a kid to eat disgusting broccoli at the dinner table, but a school has no right to do that. So goes the argument. Others say it's simply a money grab from the school trying to get kids to pay for more lunches.

Regardless, there can be no doubt that, ultimately, as is the case whenever a child eats a school lunch, it's the kids who suffer.

We had a small cafeteria in Janesville, nothing like the ones I'd see in classic '80s movies like Just One of the Guys, Better Off Dead or the outdoor facilities in Can't Buy Me Love. In those, hundreds of students wandered around a giant area, gazing out at large windows. They chose from a large variety of options, which looked like something out of an Old Country Buffet ad. They wore roller-skates or baseball uniforms. It wasn't like that in Janesville, or many small schools.

To enter one way at Janesville, students didn't even actually stand in line in the cafeteria. Instead we lined up in a hallway that doubled as our tornado shelter, then turned into a short walkway that took us to the actual food line. The setting in that hall was more like a scene from a DMV, and, depending on if it was the day we ate butter sandwiches and soup, more depressing.

You could also line up inside the cafeteria against a wall, just inches away from some of the tables where the upperclassmen sat. It felt like being up against a wall facing a firing squad, only instead of silver bullets fired from rifles, the weapons of choice were green peas fired by forks.

To me the milk always proved especially disappointing. I'm a longtime milk aficionado but even I could barely stand to drink the school-lunch milk. Those tiny blue cartons that never opened correctly in the front. Instead of peeling back cleanly and correctly, mine often ended up mangled, so any drink of milk also contained the taste of that fluffy white material that would cling to the carton, tainting the already below-average taste. On special occasions we received chocolate milk. All that did was make us aware of how much we were missing every other day of the year.

The cafeteria was divided into a pair of sections. On one side the round tables with the upperclassmen, discussing weekend party plans and the easiest girls in the school. On the other, long tables with tiny round seats that seemingly hovered only a few inches off the ground, where the elementary kids talked about birthday parties and the relative grossness of boys and girls.

We consumed our pizza burgers and mashed potatoes, dreaming of those days when we'd take field trips and everyone had a reason to pack a sack lunch.

In seventh grade I became a part of the system, working a few days a week as a dishwasher, or, more accurately, tray washer, manning my station with the other kids in a job that seemed designed as a work-release program, if not something that should have been done by a chain gang. We labored - as children - in stifling temperatures as the steam enveloped everything. Our fellow students - who enjoyed firing their trays filled with half-eaten food into the wash area - regarded us with more contempt than respect. I don't remember how much I made, although, coupled with my work as a paper boy during that same time period, I probably saved up enough money to buy a dozen packs of baseball cards or a single offering from the traveling Bookmobile.

By the time eighth grade rolled around, my days in the cafeteria were over. I started making the two-block walk home, where I could spend my lunchtime eating and watching afternoon game shows. Mom and dad were at work so I had to piece together my own meals. It wasn't hard, since I wasn't interested in variety. Every day of every school week I'd make the same thing: peanut butter and jelly sandwich, some potato chips, a pickle and a couple of slices of Velveeta cheese. I topped it off with a glass of milk - real milk, from a real glass, not cardboard - and a can of pop. Chicago school administrators would surely frown upon such a diet.

Did it damage me? I grew to 6-3 in high school, have never suffered a broken bone in 35 years and now, as an adult, when those wretched meals from the past should perhaps be sneaking up on me and doing a bit of damage to my skin, locks or internal organs, I remain perfectly healthy. Good heart, good lungs, strong bones, full head of hair. Am I saying the pb&j, chips, cheese and Coke deserve all the credit for my health? No. Not all. But I wouldn't be doing any better if I'd spent all of those days trudging through line like a white collar crook at a minimum-security prison, dreading that day's offering.

Certainly some kids in school could have benefited from forced nutrition. One classmate went to lunch every day at the bowling alley. To the best of my knowledge, he ate nothing but candy for four straight years. He'd return to school with his cheeks bulging and his pockets spilling with all types of assorted sweets, from bubble gum to Skittles. Kid could have used an apple.

Today I'm not sure that, in a post-Columbine world, students at JWP schools are even allowed to leave school grounds at lunch hour. Hopefully they can still bring sack lunches.

I definitely went to school at the right time. And I was lucky that it took me about three and a half minutes to walk from school to our fridge. No one should be forced to eat a school lunch. I don't think I could have handled five more years of them. Not even if the best cook I've ever known - one of them - had been the one serving them. Sorry, grandma.

Offensive art

The above commercial is one of the classic ads from the 1980s, perhaps up there with "Where's the Beef?" and Apple's 1984 Big Brother ad. "Do you like to draw, or paint. Or maybe just sketch or doodle?"

If you did, you might have had what it took to be in the Art Instruction Schools. The Art Instruction Schools sent out a free test for students to see if they qualified. By the looks of it painters, sketchers and doodlers had to draw things like a house, a dog and a pirate. As a kid I sort of wish I had called the toll free number to get my free test.

It would have been interesting to see if I would have been the first person to ever score a zero on their exam.

Thousands of students have walked through the halls of Janesville High School and Janesville-Waldorf-Pemberton. There's a decent chance I'm the worst art student in the school's history, someone whose projects might still be mocked by the poor teachers who were forced to grade them. My incompetence is one reason I so admire anyone with any semblance of art skill, whether it's the troubled geniuses whose works hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the drawings of my cousin Matt or nephew Brock. My friend John always made funky little projects - they combined things like toilet paper and Coke cans - that I thought were art, though a good friend of ours occasionally disagreed. Louise paints really cool abstract work that hangs in our apartment and always catches the eye of visitors. These people have the imagination and skill to pull these things off. I couldn't think of the projects, and even if someone thought of them for me, I never would have been able to execute them.

How could my hands, which effortlessly picked up ground balls on a baseball diamond or masterfully handled a ping-pong paddle or easily dribbled a basketball behind my back, fail me so miserably when asked to draw nothing more complicated than a human face?

I knew from a young age I had no skills with a paint brush or charcoal pencils. As I made my way through school I regressed instead of progressed. Someone, perhaps the state, should have stepped in early in my school days when I struggled to cut out a snowflake. Things only got worse.

My parents' basement holds all the key evidence; the projects, or, "projects," rot away down there, tucked away in boxes, like long-forgotten murder trial files collecting dust in a county courthouse basement. Only a mother could love these works, but if mine ever said she did, it would have been one of the few lies she's ever told in her life. But if she lied, she lied out of love, because only the cruelest of parents would have ever delivered an honest assessment of the work.

A few years ago during a trip home, I stumbled upon a bowl that had my sister Lisa's name on it. Maybe that meant she made it. It didn't look good. That probably meant I made it. I asked mom and she said I crafted it and gave it to Lisa as a gift, which sounds cute but when you look at the damn thing for more than three seconds begins to seem cruel. On the bowl, I scratched a series of letters that appeared to form the name Lisa Fury. The confusion over the bowl's creation is probably why it resides in the bowels of my parents' basement and not on a mantle in my sister's home. At least, that's probably the publicly stated reason. Shame is probably more likely.

One of the sculptures, which I think came in 7th grade, was, in theory, a turtle. It's nothing more than a green blog with black spots. And maybe a head. When the teacher saw this she must have experienced rage at my inability to execute her lessons, pity over my incompetence, or heatrbreak at her choice of profession.

In ninth grade, I drew a large picture of Nolan Ryan in action. For years I had it hanging in my bedroom, though I don't know why. To punish myself? In the picture, the Express appears to weigh 485 pounds and it's all in his gut. He spills out of his Rangers uniform. He possessed tiny arms in the drawing that didn't fit his body, the type of appendages you might have seen on a Tyrannosaurus Rex, but not on a Hall of Fame pitcher. I do have him throwing right-handed, so I got that part right. It's the little details.

It'd be unfair to say I underachieved in art class. I simply didn't have the physical ability to do it, just as surely some people don't have the physical ability to hit a baseball.

I blame my genes. My parents gave me a lot of great things - art skills were not among them. My occasionally indecipherable handwriting looks just like my dad's; I'm assuming his clay sculptures from school probably looked like mine too.

I struggled with the fine arts. The industrial ones were even worse. At Janesville, we had to take Industrial Arts in seventh and eighth grade, two quarters each year, alternating with home economics. The teacher once told my parents that he feared allowing me near the bandsaw. An unnecessarily cruel statement, albeit accurate. While other students in class constructed bookshelves that belonged in the libraries of presidents, I plodded along, attempting to make a little key holder. My final quarter I built a functioning bird feeder - which, like all of my projects never appeared in public but was instead stashed in a closet - but I think the only reason the teacher ever passed me was because I was good at hoops and he was the former girls basketball coach.

The arts remain a mystery to me. I admire anyone who can paint or draw, sculpt or sing. I admire them because I know how difficult it is to do any of those things well. And if I ever doubt how tough it is, all I have to do is visit my parents, head down into the basement, pull out an old box, and wince.

Sacrificing minnows for seventh-grade science

Discovered some papers in a crate in the basement. It's Box No. 10, according to my mom's impressively detailed catalogue of the junk room's possessions. School papers, graduation stuff, the results of my driver's test, taken on July 19, 1991. I pretty much aced it, scoring "good" in every category except for right turns, where I performed poorly when approaching and entering the lanes. How did I screw up one of the easiest things on the test? I don't recall.

Driver's training had been challenging. We took a class in the fourth quarter of our freshman year and received on-the-road training during the summer. I was partnered up with a kid who'd been driving since he was like 11 years old, when he stole a car and took a joy ride around town. He became something of a rebel legend after that incident. He had such confidence behind the wheel. I envied him. He all but cruised the bad streets of Janesville with his right arm draped around our instructor's neck, as if the teacher was his girl on a Friday night date. The kid owned moves behind the wheel Earnhardt Senior couldn't have pulled off. My car experience consisted of bumper cars at the Janesville Hay Daze - which once ended with a carnie rescuing me because I couldn't operate the vehicle - and a disastrous incident where I backed my parents' car out of their tiny garage and drilled the driver's side door as my dad stared in disbelief and, well, fury.

But by the time the driver's test came a year later, I had conquered my demons, and the exam.

The box in the basement also holds all of the science experiments I conducted in seventh-grade. There was a "soil lab report," which I decorated in blue cardboard paper and a front-page drawing that looks like something scribbled by a blind child or a troubled one. My group concluded that "our soil was sand. Day six was the ribbon test. Our soil did not make a ribbon which also means it's probably sand. Our texture again was gritty." Salk's seventh-grade reports showed similar insights. We scored a B, due to some shoddy explanations, though our final conclusion was absolutely correct. It was sand, damn it.

There was an experiment involving a hamster and a maze. Again, a B, as we didn't adequately explain how "Martha" learned over the course of 20 trials. Without interviewing Martha, how exactly were we supposed to discover her thought process?

Finally there's a report I conducted alone. I titled the paper "Good Vibrations," an homage to the Beach Boys and lovers of bad puns. On the cover I drew a rough facsimile of a minnow, complete with a thought bubble that read, "Oh no it's the dreaded telesacoil." A telesacoil? Google telesacoil. There's no such thing. Did I mean a Tesla coil? I don't know. The other materials for this experiment were "1 minnow, 2 paper towels, faucet, soap." Thankfully, I spelled all of those words correctly in my paper, though I did break AP style by using figures for numbers under 10.
The extent of the paper:
PROBLEM: To see if the Minnow will react to electricity. (Why did I capitalize minnow?)
INFORMATION: The minnow is a small river fish. It's used for bait and trout food. It has small scales shaped like tiles. (I'm assuming all of that's true, but after seeing telesacoil littering my paper, who knows what other information I made up.)
HYPOTHESIS: I believe that the fish will die when it's shocked with electricity. (Heh.)
PROCEDURE: Step one: Take the minnow out of the jar and lay the minnow on the paper towel. Step two: Take the telesacoil and test it on the faucet then shock the minnow every minute. Step three: record the results. Step four: Clean up.

The fish died. It took eight minutes of torture. He was survived by 445 siblings and a poorly punctuated science report.

Minnow showed no reaction after a minute, before finally beginning to "wiggle around" in the third minute. At minute five, "there is the first sign of blood on the minnow." Blood appears on the head at the seventh minute. Dies at eight. That's it, that's the paper. If I had ever been arrested as a juvenile, the prosecutor would have presented this paper as proof that I needed to be locked up until I turned 21.

"Look at how he enjoys torturing animals, your honor. Yes, we consider the minnow an animal. He even used a perverted version of the scientific method and documented his findings. He combined science and sadism. He needs help."

But this was a real paper. The teacher - the school's volleyball and softball coach who was sort of my nemesis, while also being my family's friendly neighbor - gave me an A-/B+. He liked the work, at least better than my breakthrough studies on sand and mazes.

My conclusion:
"I accept my hypothesis although after the first few minutes I didn't think the minnow would last as long as it did because the minnow was showing no reaction after the first few shocks, but after several other shocks the minnow started to show signs of reacting to the shocks such as bleeding and wiggling around so my final conclusion is that the fish died."

A sixty-five word sentence, with one comma. I was in seventh grade when I wrote that. I was 12 years old, but that writing would be below-average for an 8-year-old. Was a classmate shocking me with a "telesacoil" when I penned my conclusion? Yet I got an A-/B+, which makes me wonder just how bad some of my classmates' experiments and papers were if they received Cs or even Ds. Did my Good Vibrations title impress my teacher so much he ignored my paper's countless faults and questionable taste? On the back of my paper I again drew a fish - poorly - with the words "May He Rest In Peace" written above. I was obviously glib about my involvement in the torture and death of the minnow. My paper even had a dedication page, which I used to thank my friend Brandon, who apparently gave me the idea for the experiment (I don't recall the conversation or setting when he first brought up this idea. Were we watching a documentary on Ted Bundy at the time?).

I'm glad I still have this paper and my other groundbreaking reports. They bring back good memories. But this minnow one might have to be destroyed. I still don't want any prosecutors having access to it.

Worst homecoming dance in high school history

Tuesday afternoon, a friend of ours gave us tickets to a small live music session at famed Webster Hall in New York. The band Company of Thieves gave a performance for about 30 to 40 people, playing about five songs for local radio station WXRP. We sat on a leather couch near the small stage and thoroughly enjoyed the performance, which lasted about 45 minutes. It was a cool New York City experience.

Here's one of the songs the band played.



And here's one of their live performances.



I haven't been to many live concerts. In college there was Big Head Todd and the Monsters, when they were still, well, big. And there have been others, but I don't have nearly enough concert experience to speak about the best live bands or the best live performances I've seen. The pool's too limited.

But I do still remember the worst live music performance I ever saw: the 1989 homecoming dance at Janesville-Waldorf-Pemberton High School. It was in the fall and the setting was the elementary gym in Janesville, long-known as the "little gym." The band's name has been lost to the history books and the files of the school's administrators. That was the first year the students of Janesville and Waldorf-Pemberton came together in a school consolidation that's lasted 20 years, despite many troubles and financial headaches along the way. The football team got off to a great start that year, bringing the towns together and helping with the early, awkward stages of consolidation. It helped smooth the process, as kids from all of the towns involved learned that, hey, we do actually have a lot in common with these rural students who also come from farms and towns with fewer than 2,000 people. And we thought we'd be so different!

The five days of Homecoming Week were always the most important of the year, as the school crowned royalty, devised wacky dress-up days that inevitably involved togas and constructed complicated floats that cruised down the bustling Main Street of Janesville on the Friday afternoon of the game. It was a big deal, complete with powder puff football and a pep rally.

I was a ninth-grader that first year and I think the football team lost the homecoming game in 1989, which always slightly dampers the rest of the night. Like always, the game was followed by the homecoming dance, a chance for horny teenagers to dance to the sounds of Def Leppard and Poison. Later, many of the kids would search for a kegger or a sibling to buy them beer, unless they acquired their goods even before the dance.

For a guy who preferred observing instead of dancing, the event often proved torturous. There was the occasional slow dance with a girl, but I avoided the fast songs, owing to a humiliating night in seventh grade when I actually did break out all my dance moves and watched as every girl watching broke down in laughter, when they weren't begging me to stop, just stop. Describe the moves? I don't know, ask the poor souls who watched it. I guess it probably looked like someone who's just been Tasered by a police officer, only with less grace. Emotionally scarred, I was content to sit in the stands and make fun of others who actually had guts and decent dance steps. If I liked a girl, perhaps I could talk her into dancing with me after the DJ "slowed things down" and threw on "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." Hands on her hips, I'd shuffle with stiff legs in a short circle while Bret Michaels or another long-haired crooner poured out his soul. I'd say something hinting at my true feelings. She might respond with a smile and I was ensured of another dance - perhaps to "Take My Breath Away" - or else she might lean in and whisper the dreaded words, "That's sweet."

That's how nearly every high school dance I ever attended went, including the homecoming dances. The school hired a DJ from a "sound and lights" production company in Mankato and he'd play songs for a few hours while a fancy laser show distracted us and provided the visual setting.

But for homecoming in 1989, the school forgot about hiring a DJ. Instead it went with a live band. All right, cool. Could be a neat experience, something different, having a live band instead of a DJ playing the same songs by the same artists.

Unfortunately, the band we got for our homecoming was a combination of Judas Priest, Quiet Riot, AC/DC, and Anthrax, only louder and without any talent. Each member of the band looked like the kind of guy who dropped out of school in ninth grade and was now happy to triumphantly return to musically indoctrinate young minds into the ways of Satan. They all probably still lived lived with Mom, but they likely wrote songs about killing their parents. If none of them had ever served time, it was only because of lenient plea deals. Instead of an experienced DJ mixing up the slow songs with the fast ones - while delivering entertaining commentary, complete with obligatory shoutouts to the football team - we had four screamers, playing music that damaged ears and minds. Death metal had come to JWP.

Hardly anyone danced. Everyone sat in the stands in horror, entranced by the unkempt youngsters who had commandeered the little gym's stage. My god, the administrators must have thought, in previous years elementary school children entertained their parents from that same stage with stirring renditions of "Jingle Bells." Now we had a quartet engaged in primal scream therapy.

After awhile I sort of felt bad for the guys. Despite our prejudices, they were probably all nice guys just trying to make a little extra beer money for the weekend. It wasn't their fault someone in the school administration had made the most disastrous musical decision since Decca rejected the Beatles.

There was no slow dancing on this night. Only thrashing. A couple of students who worshiped at the altar of Pantera did congregate near the stage. Over the deafening sound, one could be heard screaming, "YOU GUYS FUCKING RUUUUUULE!" It was a minority opinion.

The band eventually finished their performance for the night. The dance mercifully died as the stunned students shuffled out into the night, ready to resume their search for easy alcohol and easier hook-ups. If the football game hadn't depressed them, the music surely did.

The school held several dances throughout the year, not just during homecoming. For the next one, our reliable, boring DJ with good teeth and nice hair made his return, as did Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" and Journey's "Faithfully." All was again right with the world.

No one really spoke about that homecoming dance again, though they surely remembered it in their nightmares.

Norm Grow and the McDonald boys. A look at the Minnesota state record book

I could stare at sports records all day. And, on many unproductive days of my life, I've done just that. My dad always bought a new Who's Who baseball book each year and we could spend hours looking at the stats of obscure players and marveling at the longevity of someone like Nolan Ryan. I used to buy NBA Registers and Guides and sit for days looking at box scores from playoff series from the 1970s, or gawking at Wilt Chamberlain's scoring marks (ahem).

And it doesn't matter the sport or level of play, although, admittedly, I've never spent any time poring over old soccer records or college lacrosse champions. The Minnesota high school basketball records are kept here. Pretty much everything is there, from the highest scoring boys team in history to the leading rebounder in girls basketball.

Matthew Pederson, of Starbuck, Minnesota, maintains the records. He's the Harvey Pollack of Minnesota basketball. As he notes, points, field goals and free throws are officially recorded while others - like assists and steals - are compiled by teams, meaning inconsistencies consistently come up. Especially with a stat like assists, a number that can be manipulated or questioned at any level, even the NBA. A few years ago some statisticians questioned Chris Paul's assist numbers, as they watched videotape and determined that on his home court, Paul was getting some favorable record-keeping by the hometown crew. In high school it's obviously even more difficult, as the giggling 16-year-old girl - or, to be fair, the giggling 16-year-old boy - might struggle to figure what's an assist and what's just a good play by the guy who scores. If a guard passes it to a forward on the wing, and he takes six dribbles to the left, spins back to the right, pump fakes and hits a jumper...that is not an assist.

Many other things influence the records. Today teams play longer games and more of them, meaning season and career marks should be easier to break. The 3-point line didn't come into effect until the 1988 season, so the gunners who played before that didn't benefit from the extra point. And back in the day, stats like rebounds, blocked shots and assists might not have even been recorded, so dominant big men or efficient guards were robbed of potential records.

Still, people can read these stats knowing those inconsistencies exist. But they're all still fascinating to go through. Some of the highlights.

The team scoring records for the boys sort of have to be analyzed the same way people look at NBA scoring records. Whenever someone does something, you'll often hear it's a non-Wilt record, meaning Chamberlain's records were so absurd that they're sort of nestled in their own spot in the books. No one's really compared to him, only to every other player in league history. So it is with Minnesota Transitions, which has used a high-scoring offense to put itself on the basketball map the past few seasons. Of the seven highest-scoring games, Transitions has four of them, all in the last five years (they also have the four highest-scoring halves).

The record for points by a losing team is still held by Red Lake, which lost 117-113 to Wabasso in 1997 in one of the more memorable state tournament games of the past 20 years.

Atwater set the mark for points in a quarter, way back in 1958, with an outrageous 55-point outburst. That's one record that will never be broken. Minnesota now plays 18-minute halves, instead of eight-minute quarters. Perhaps the oldest record belongs to Buffalo, which committed the fewest fouls in a game - one - in a 1926 barnburner that might have actually been played in an old red barn. Buffalo's coach probably complained about that call. In 1978, Breckenridge matched Buffalo with a one-foul game.

Speaking of Wilt, for decades former Foley star Norm Grow ruled the books just like the Big Dipper. And, in fact, Grow actually broke some of Wilt's marks, which proves just how dominant he was. In this 1958 Sports Illustrated Faces in the Crowd piece, it's noted that Grow broke the Kansas star's record for secondary school points. This old newspaper article from the Milwaukee Journal also discusses Grow's mark. Grow's records are so old he was called a cager, a term rarely seen since about the 1970s. Grow's record of 70 points in a game stood for 47 years, until Cash Eggleston broke it with 90 points in 2005. Eggleston's school? Transitions.

A Janesville legend, Gene Volz, makes an appearance with his 51-point game in 1956.

The single-game field goal percentage mark is an eye-opening number: Jerome Gleixner of Bloomington made all 19 shots in a 1953 game. A pair of dominant high school players who never lived up to expectations at the University of Minnesota - Kevin Loge and Kyle Sanden - are also on the list, with games of 16-for-16 and 13-for-13, respectively. Former Staples-Motley guard Erik Kelly holds one of the more impressive marks. He hit all 10 of his 3-point attempts in a 1996 game, which would be impressive in a backyard or an empty gym.

Some might raise their eyebrows at the assist numbers, for the reasons mentioned above. Still, they are startling. Martin Wind of Cass Lake-Bena had 28 in a 2008 game. No word on whether an asterisk should be attached to that number.

For the gals, the record for most points in a game has stood since 1982, when Lester Prairie's Kay Konerza scored 58. You'd think a superstar who plays for a coach who likes running up the score would have broken that at some point the past three decades. An old friend of mine and a graduate of St. Ben's, Laura Wendorff, still holds the top spot for best rebounding game by a girl. The Fulda native grabbed 34 in a 1996 contest, though Missy Kassube of Eagle Valley matched it in 2008. I once jokingly questioned that number to Wendorff. She was an extremely unselfish player who cared little for individual glory. She actually thought it was probably pretty accurate, as the opponent that night was not very good, providing plenty of chances for defensive and offensive boards. We'll keep the asterisk off of that one.

Former Chisholm legend Joel McDonald dominates the categories for season scoring records. McDonald is part of the first family of Minnesota hoops, as his dad, Bob, has been coaching Chisholm since Buffalo committed that one foul in that 1926 game, or at least it seems like it. All of the McDonald boys were prolific scorers and Judy McDonald was one of the top scoring girls in state history. Joel scored 1,157 points in 1991, when he led Chisholm to the Class A state championship. He also set a record that year by averaging 38.57 points. McDonald has the fourth-highest scoring season ever - 35.95 a game in 1990 - and his brother Tom averaged 35.54 in 1982. Norm Grow reappears, with a 36.32 mark in 1958, the third highest of all time.

If Norm Grow was the Wilt of his day, Janet Karvonen was sort of the Babe Ruth of girls basketball in the state. She changed the way people watched girls basketball and shattered nearly every record. Some of her marks have fallen over the years, but many still remain, a testament to her skill and dominance. She averaged 32.5 a game for New York Mills in 1980, the third highest mark (Kierah Kimbrough of Badger-Greenbush-Middle River holds the record with a 34.10 average in 2005). Karvonen scored 3,129 points in her decorated career, a mark that stood for 17 years, until Megan Taylor of Roseau broke it in 1997. Is it easier to break records now? It took 17 years for Karvonen's record to fall but only eight for Taylor's record to be eclipsed by Katie Ohm. And four years later, Tayler Hill of Minneapolis South broke Ohm's record.

That same evolution is evident on the boys' side. Grow's record of 2,852 points lasted from 1958 until McDonald broke it in 1991. Braham star Isaiah Dahlman passed McDonald 15 years later. Ellsworth's Cody Schilling erased Dahlman from the top spot two years later. He holds the mark now with 3,428 points. Grow still holds the record for free throws attempted in a career, an amazing 988. Schilling, however, was a much more accurate shooter and holds the mark for free throws made, hitting 797 out of 955. For career rebounds, Grow is also the only player from the ancient days to make the top 9. He had 1,417 in three years, while all the others played after 1999. Again, rebounding records weren't always well-maintained in previous decades. Schilling's name litters the record book, as the former Ellsworth star - who now plays for Augustana - is also the all-time assist leader, an amazing number for a guy who also scored the most points in state history.

One of the odder stats? Most overtime periods in a game. St. Cloud Tech and Little Falls played eight OTs in a 1983 game. The Red Wing girls might have participated in the most boring game in state history, as they shot 75 free throws in a 2008 game, which is 15 more than the next closest team. Just thinking about watching that game gives me the chills. And for the record, Red Wing's opponent that day - Holy Angels - shot 16. I wish I knew how many Holy Angels players fouled out of that game. An even more atrocious number from that day? Red Wing only hit 36 of the free throws. Fulda recently won a pair of state titles but it was the school's 1989 team that set a record by hitting all 24 of their free throws in a game.

The legendary Edina teams of the 1960s still maintain the mark for most victories in a row by a boys team, winning 69 straight from 1965-1968.

And on and on and on.

Spend some time on the site and bookmark it, as Pederson is always updating it when old records fall.

And if you want some truly absurd numbers? Go to this site and click on the link that says Record Book Basketball. It will be a PDF, but it has the national basketball records. Highest scoring boy? Louisiana's Greg Procell, a 1970 grad who scored 6,702 points. Even Pistol Pete was jealous. But even those numbers should not be looked at as the final word, as it appears there are discrepancies and omissions. For instance, Dahlman's listed above Schilling in the scoring book.

So perhaps look at some of the numbers with a bit of skepticism. Just be prepared to spend a few hours reading them.