The longer I live, the more subcultures I find. Most are harmless pastimes - reciting sports trivia, playing 16-inch softball, performing improv comedy - I find academically interesting, yet hold no real fascination for me. Occasionally, however, I come across a few I simply can’t get my head around - bull riding, NASCAR, sudoku - and I can do little else other than watch these activities in horror.

Muskie hunting sorta explained
I found another one of these and-people-do-this-why?-sort of behavior Saturday night. Apparently there’s a sport called ‘muskie hunting,’ the ‘muskie’ being ‘an angry, really big fish,’ and the ‘hunting’ being ‘a euphemism for fishing all day and seeing no results.’ I get my information from exhaustive Internet research.

So on this particular night, after a very nice, very refined Italian dinner, a friend and I take a cab to some bar described as ‘the one with the moose in the backyard,’ which turns out to be an apt descriptor - there was a, you know, eight-foot high moose in the backyard. We had arrived at that time of the night when the entertainment had ended and the streets had been overrun by drunkards. FIne, great, sure, but under the watchful eye of Big Brother Moose, the effect was slightly unnerving.

Meet Jess, the Muskie Queen
I then found out the event was held to crown Muskie Queen 2005. Suddenly, it all made sense. A Wisconsin bar. Large stuffed fish on the walls. A stuffed moose. Jess, crowned Muskie Queen 2005, was making the rounds and I had the pleasure of snapping my picture with her. She had that air of tired celebrity about her, sick of the meet-and-greet and ready for bed. I think we talked about the University of Dayton. Who knows.

Needless to say, that was enough North Woods fun for me - my quota’s full for the next, oh, ten years. Now if only I could score tickets to the next NASCAR race, I’d be well on my way to scratching off another entry on my list of Stuff I Don’t Want To Do.

Movie I’m still thinking about: Broken Flowers. A friend gave me the perfect adjective to describe Jim Jarmusch films: subtle. Nothing happens, but you’re not quite sure that’s a bad thing. How about this for an Idea? Get depressed - get drunk, lose your job, all that - and go see Broken Flowers. You just may get some existential understanding from it. Me? I just left the theater, puzzled that a movie that flat and uneventful could end so abruptly. But I’ve been thinking about it for a few weeks, so maybe it warrants a second viewing.

Bill Murray, you’re brilliant, as always, but I gotta tell ya, Bill, you should start branching out from disaffected, emotionally bankrupt middle-age Oscar-bait characters. Just a quick memo.