Outside Features

Growing up, whenever there was a mention of infamous skyjacker D.B. Cooper, my dad would tell me a story about attending a SuperSonics game a few days after Cooper hopped out of a plane on Thanksgiving eve, 1971. During a lull in the game, the public address announcer said, “We have a late-breaking score. D.B. Cooper: $200,000, Northwest Orient Airlines: 0.”
The crowd laughed and plenty of folks cheered, my dad tells me. And since the first time I heard this story, I've considered D.B. Cooper to be the Northwest's first true underdog.
If you haven't already heard, the FBI has what they're calling a “credible lead” that might finally lead to the true identity “D.B. Cooper,” the man who parachuted out of a passenger jet somewhere outside of Portland and was never seen again. The suspect, a Pacific Northwest resident, has been dead for 10 years, they're saying, meaning that some guy might be about to discover that his grandpa was D.B. Cooper. Now, you'd think this would bring shame on a family and it probably would – that is, if this wasn't the Northwest, where D.B. Cooper is more of a hero than a criminal.
It's not like we in the Northwest applaud the act of hijacking. I'm 95 percent sure that most Northwesterners are categorically opposed to the hijacking of anything, and the other five percent mistakenly figured “hijacking” had something to do with improving the functionality of their bongs. But, as Northwesterners, we look at someone who jumped out of a moving airliner with $200,000 strapped to his body without hurting anyone and say, “Well, you have to hand it to him for pulling that off.”

There was a buzz of relieved excitement in my office on Monday morning when news came across the wire that the NFL and the players union were about to approve a new collective bargaining agreement that would effectively end the great lockout of 2011. In short: there will be NFL football this year.
But I didn't really rejoice. This surprised me. I'm a card-carrying NFL fan (that was a metaphor, there is no actual card required to watch football on Sundays) and have been since the days when I dressed as Steve Largent (the football player, not the slightly racist politician) for Halloween. I then realized that I had given up on the millionaire owners and the millionaire players coming to any sort of sensible plan as to how they could all remain millionaires while also holding a 2011 NFL season for the non-millionaires to enjoy.

Games have rules, as do sports and public swimming pools (“no horseplay” being my favorite). Without rules, you'd just be aimlessly wandering, maybe with a ball. That's not a game. That's just screwing around.
So it is with this in mind that I make a call for consensus in the world of beer pong. As a retired beer ponger (I wanted to spend more time with my family) who still plays in the occasional charity tournament or takes to the table to instruct a misguided youth or two, I would like us to finally acknowledge that this game has become one of our nation's more beloved pasttimes. I would guess with some confidence that more people in this country have thrown a ping-pong ball at a plastic cup of Natural Light than have held a hockey stick.
Hell, the suddenly quite funny Jimmy Fallon faces his guests in an ongoing beer pong tournament and the last time I was at the grocery store, I noticed a set of “beer pong balls” next to the cheap end of the beer cooler. This is remarkable, not just because someone has probably skipped up a tax bracket by placing crappy ping pong balls above the PBR, but because this appears to be the only drinking game that's managed to assimilate itself into mainstream culture. You don't see Jimmy Fallon playing quarters on TV or beer bongs for sale at Safeway, do you?

“Holy f***ing s*** I love hitting home runs.” – Babe Ruth, to a bedridden child. 1932.

The home run is, unequivocally, the most exciting thing in baseball. Well, next to some drunken college junior jumping down onto the field and eluding security for five minutes of excitement that eclipses anything baseball could ever offer.
The home run, however, should be awesome. It's the great equalizer. It can instantly change a game and has long been reason enough for stadiums to light off a few hundred dollars worth of fireworks, sometimes even indoors (see: Kingdome, The). It's also capable of eliciting hugs between strangers, which is otherwise awkward – trust me.

I began my Fourth of July morning like many other Americans. I woke up, put my Lee Greenwood mix on the stereo and red, white and blue underwear on my nether regions, fired a few bottle rockets skyward and then tuned my television to ESPN to watch some weirdos gorge themselves at Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest in New York. And not just a few hot dogs, but more than 60 of the mixed-meat wieners and their accompanying buns in 10 minutes.
Hot dogs, and the grotesque overeating thereof, are quite American, so I'm not going to say that a wiener-eating contest (oh come on, get your head out of the gutter) has no place as a Fourth of July tradition. What I'm more concerned with is that ESPN would recognize competitive eating as a “sport.” If wasting food is a sport, then so is throwing diamonds down sewer drains or showering daily with Evian. But on the other hand, what's more American than throwing away things people in other parts of the world would die for?