Andrew Beaujon’s nostalgic anti-Soviet post has me looking around every corner for America vs. Russia artifacts. Today, one of those artifacts found me. I saw a cyclist wearing a Street Fighter II shirt at the intersection of Euclid and Champlain. The back of said shirt depicted the ultimate early ’90s, fictional Cold War match-up: Guile versus Zangief.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Street Fighter video game series, Guile is one of America’s finest: a blond flat-top sportin’, dog-tag-wearin’, camouflagin’ Air Force pilot. While Zangief (pronounced either Zang-eef or Zan-gef, depending on your hometown arcade’s geographic coordinates) was (and still is, though the character no longer schmoozes with a Gorbachev look-alike during the game’s story scenes) every American child’s worst Soviet nightmare: 6-foot-5, 300 lbs., with a mohawk, mutton chops, a body covered in scars, red high-top leather boots and a tiny red posing thong. Guile’s signature move is the “Sonic Boom,” and Zangief’s the head- (and soul-) crushing pile driver.

True lovers of the Street Fighter series spend all of their free time (and, it would seem, disposable income) at the few arcades that still host the game, but with the U.S. setting up missile defense shop in Poland, and Russia sending even more tanks into Georgia, now seems like the perfect moment to bring the SNES classic—and the anti-authoritarian mentality that motivated its protagonists—back to mainstream play.

Every journalist, at some point in his or her life, must write the “I’ve seen something out in the world which confuses me” piece. Andy Rooney does it every week. Me, I’ve publicly scratched my head about umbrellas. But I tried to keep my whining to a couple of sentences, and Rooney’s done gassing in a couple minutes. Over at Slate, Ron Rosenbaum, by all accounts otherwise a man with a fine brain, has dedicated more than 2,000 words to his confusion about crosswords and sudoku.

Rosenbaum’s thesis, such as it is, is that people who do such puzzles are somehow doing harm to their own intelligence. To argue this point, he opens with the deadliest lede in creation, then frosts this dry cupcake with punny sprinkles for us to gag on:

Doing puzzles reflects not an elevated literary sensibility but a degraded letter-ary sensibility

What are some of the other defenses of the puzzle people? “It trains the mind.”…. I’d say that instead it drains the mind.

Rosenbaum’s Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer shtick would be funny if he revealed any effort to actually understand what he’s discussing. He picks up a copy of Will Shortz’ Funniest Crossword Puzzles, then expresses bafflement because he read the first five clues and didn’t crap himself with laughter. [Nerd hat on]To the extent crosswords are funny, the humor is in the answers to the themed clues.[Nerd hat off] Later, Rosenbaum congratulates himself on his intellectual superiority after watching a fellow working a crossword that has the clue “Mauna ___.” “Whew, though one, dude,” bleats Rosenbaum. [Nerd hat on]The answer could be either LOA or KEA, and it’s perfectly sensible to delay filling out the answer there.[Nerd hat off]

The running theme in Rosenbaum’s piece is that people who do puzzles could better spend their time reading. “Need I suggest that those who spend time doing crossword puzzles (or sudoku)…could be doing something else that involves words and letters? It’s called reading,” he writes. (Here’s a fun puzzle: Imagine you’re Ron Rosenbaum and try to write about something without egregiously overusing italics. If you can do it, you win!) Is it too much to ask that reporters writing a piece spend a little time doing more research before embarrassing themselves in public? Rosenbaum, surely tugging on his suspenders as he guffaws, notes that the Times crossword offers a toll number for people to call to “buy a clue.” This is the Comstock Lode of pun-rich hilarity to him. “But couldn’t it be said that even people who don’t have to buy a clue, but spend their time pursuing clues to the meaningless puzzles, are clueless?”

Oh, Ron. Just drop me a line. I’ll clue you in for free.

It’s funny how after spending one night at Legg Mason, I feel like I’ve endured more than my share of crowd snobbery. Last time I was in attendance, Jimmy Connors was playing. So it’s been a while. But some of the crowd behavior was shocking–even in the bleacher seats!

*A few seats down the row from us, two ladies were in non-stop chatter mode during the entire Roddick match. I know Roddick is already a has-been more famous for having dated Mandy Moore and losing to Federer than actual important victories. But these ladies bordered on rude! It didn’t help that both had bad facelifts.

*A couple getting huffy that we were in their seats. Nevermind that the first row was completely empty. But by making a big stink, all six of us had to decamp and move up a few rows. This put a real damper on the funtimes as the couple continued to be all gloaty about it. I’m not sure why they chose to make this point considering that they had better options than ousting us. And much of the seating wasn’t even numbered anyway. The icing: the couple spent much of the Roddick match playing with their cellphones.

*And finally, the entire stadium’s instance on rooting for Roddick—even when the other guy made unforced errors. Isn’t it bad sportsmanship to cheer when the other guy whacks a ball into the net?

Despite all this, the Legg Mason crowd was still louder and more into the match than the crowds at National Park. Like Nats fans, they didn’t fill up all the seats. But they were better sports fans than the snoozy crowd at our new stadium.

Roosh V, no longer the blogger known as the DC Bachelor (he’s moved on over to Rooshv.com), finds that since he quit his job as a microbiologist to, among other things, self-publish a book about how to get laid, is still getting laid. It’s just by another type of girl. One who doesn’t care about money and doesn’t hang out at, say, Lima, Park, or Indebleu. A girl Roosh V will, for lack of a better turn of phrase, call a “down-to-earth hippie girl who likes hummus and art.” These girls, according to Roosh V, hang out at, say, Bossa, Marvin, and the Reef. Just FYI.

Also FYI: Roosh V is following his bang-up book Bang (no subtitle by intention so that dudes can read it in coffee shops without everyone knowing they’re losers looking for advice on how to get laid) with another as-yet-untitled book about how to get laid in South America. Roosh V—a 29-year-old U of M grad now living in his dad’s basement in Silver Spring—took an extended trip there upon leaving the soul-sucking existence some call a job. Brazillian “game” will be interspersed with some travel writing, he says.

“Brazillian girls, they’re completely different,” says Roosh V. “They’re warmer. They’re more sensual. They don’t expect you to do anything but show up.”

He’s still deciding if he should self-publish the sequel or try and go for it within the soul-sucking existence some call legitimate publishing. In the meantime, he is chronicling the “14 Problems With Americans in One Picture.” No. 2: Bad Hair—”Men who dip their heads in buckets of pomade wax. Women who don’t let their hair grow out to proper feminine length (small of back).”

(photo courtesy of bangfieldguid.com)

Tired of accessing the Internet through the Internet? Head to calltheinternet.org to, well, call the Internet. On the telephone. Remember those? The Website for calling the Internet lists only a local number—(202) 470-6789—a status—”live” or “offline”—and this description:

Thank you for expressing an interest in placing a phone call to the Internet. The Internet’s phone line is always accepting calls, unless we are assisting other Internet users, or are out of the office. Check the bottom of each page to find out the status of the Internet’s phoneline. Live means we’re in the office and taking calls, if the line is busy, try again later. Offline means we’re out of the office.

I recently placed a phone call to the Internet. Excerpts from the transcript after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Winstead: Folk hero to some, YouTube vigilante to others, and a total mystery to the press. The advisory neighborhood commissioner has made a name for himself by turning the ping-pong action in front of Comet into a grainy snuff film, and by referring to such ping-pong action as a short swat away from murder and rapes.

Thankfully, this city has a low tolerance for ping-pong porn vids. And, well, a high tolerance for wacky ANC reps.

Maybe Winstead will be re-elected. After all, bad press is the same as good press. Winstead doesn’t quite see it that way. Who the hell knows what he thinks? What he doesn’t believe in is taking reporters’ phone calls. He has stiffed the Post when they came calling. And he hasn’t returned my multiple voice-mail messages. As an elected official, he should be able to answer reporters’ questions.

With that in mind, we decided last night to take a trip to Winstead’s apartment on the 4500 block of Connecticut Avenue NW—quite a distance from Comet. Oh, and we brought along a video camera.

We’d like to call our little film: “Frank Winstead Gives Us The Bird.” Enjoy:

In his editor’s note in this week’s Post magazine, Tom Shroder enthusiastically introduced a new crossword created by Merl Reagle. “He is widely credited with revitalizing the form, and adding new layers of humor and wordplay to the traditional intellectual challenge,” Shroder writes.

True enough–I like Reagle’s puzzles. But what Shroder’s column doesn’t mention is that the switch to Reagle was in keeping with the paper’s recent cost-cutting efforts. Last September Post crossword editor Fred Piscop announced on Cruciverb.com, a site for crossword constructors, that his services were no longer going to be needed after March 2008.

Shroder confirmed Piscop’s statement via e-mail today. “Fred is right to say that we were very happy with his work, which has been outstanding for many years, but that the genesis of the change was the need to find smart ways to deal with the financial pressure of shrinking resources that absolutely everyone in our business is being forced to deal with,” he writes. “That said, when I began looking around for a less resource-intensive replacement, I was absolutely thrilled to discover Merl Reagle’s puzzle was available. Merl is brilliantly clever, a true innovator, and he has a great sense of humor that he manages to instill in his puzzles. So we’re very happy to have him.”

Cherry blossom tourists and kite-flyers had a chance to get star-struck over a total nobody last weekend. Some guy you don’t know organized an “Improv Everywhere” event in which another guy you don’t know acted like a celebrity, and some 40 other people acted like paparazzi, bodyguards, photographers, and adoring fans; and in the end, all the randoms on the National Mall were following him around and taking pictures with their cell phone cameras. His fake girlfriend even got fake-mad when a fake-fan demanded that he sign her (real) boob.

The supposed singer of the supposed hit song “Trapped in My Heart” attracted dozens of hangers-on and fans-for-a day but failed at his ultimate mission of being allowed to go to the top of the Washington Monument without a ticket. Apparently the security guard nearly came to blows with the tour guide in the Abraham Lincoln costume over it. (You can always count on Honest Abe to reassure us that we’re all still created equal, and we all need a ticket to get to the top of the Monument.)

Together with the Freeze Action that happened in Union Station a couple weeks ago, this is almost enough to convince you that Washington is becoming absurdist-artsy-hip like we always dream it will.

Photo by Bruce Witzenburg.

Gotta love the gay folks. On the first night of the NCAA tourney, the Duplex Diner, 18th and U, was indeed packed and the TVs were indeed fired up to a competition—reruns of the previous night’s Top Chef. But that roasted chicken with raisin-dotted couscous and matchstick-cut veggies? Bravo.—Jule Banville

Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax is dead at 69, according to the CEO of Troll Lord Games. The developer of the new edition of D&D says he hasn’t “grokked” Gygax’s demise yet.