Strung out on consumer culture a.k.a GORGING ON WASTE (NY Times)

Far Away, Super Bowl’s Losers Will Be Champs

By LEE JENKINS
February 4, 2007

MIAMI, Feb. 3 — In some parts of the world, the Seattle Seahawks are the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Buffalo Bills are the last great football dynasty and Tom Brady is some frustrated quarterback from New England who can never win it all.

So say the T-shirts and the caps worn in Niger, Uganda and Sierra Leone.

The Super Bowl will end about 10 p.m. Sunday, and by 10:01 every player on the winning team — along with coaches, executives, family members and ball boys — could be outfitted in colorful T-shirts and caps proclaiming them champions.

The other set of championship gear — the 288 T-shirts and caps made for the team that did not win — will be hidden behind a locked door at Dolphin Stadium. By order of the National Football League, those items are never to appear on television or on eBay. They are never even to be seen on American soil.

They will be shipped Monday morning to a warehouse in Sewickley, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where they will become property of World Vision, a relief organization that will package the clothing in wooden boxes and send it to a developing nation, usually in Africa.

This way, the N.F.L. can help one of its charities and avoid traumatizing one of its teams.

“Where these items go, the people don’t have electricity or running water,” said Jeff Fields, a corporate relations officer for World Vision. “They wouldn’t know who won the Super Bowl. They wouldn’t even know about football.”

The gear is flown, along with school and medical supplies, into a major city. It is then driven to one of the villages where World Vision staff members work. They distribute the shirts and caps at a community center, about two per family.

Beth Colleton, the N.F.L.’s director for community ventures, worked for a month at a World Vision service area in Ethiopia. One day, she saw a boy in the village wearing a Green Bay Packers 1998 Super Bowl champions T-shirt.

Ms. Colleton might have been the only person in the village to do a double take. The Denver Broncos were the 1998 Super Bowl champions.

After she returned home, she watched a documentary about Romanian orphans. One of them was wearing a Buffalo Bills Super Bowl champions T-shirt. “I almost fell out of my chair,” she said.

The Bills, losers of four consecutive Super Bowls in the 1990s, at least have a following in Romania. Some of their Super Bowl champions T-shirts were relegated to a trash heap in Tampa, Fla.

In the final seconds of the 1991 Super Bowl at Tampa Stadium, Buffalo place-kicker Scott Norwood lined up for a potential 47-yard game-winning field goal against the Giants. Eddie White, a Reebok vice president, ran onto the field with an armful of Bills championship shirts.

He had to position himself to get a shirt to Buffalo’s best players after the field goal was converted. But Norwood’s kick drifted right, and Mr. White did a 180-degree turn, sprinting from the field and tossing the shirts in the closest trash bin.

He talked about such moments as if he were a coach deconstructing a memorable fourth-down play. “We need to have a game plan just like the teams do,” he said.

Ten days ago, Reebok printed 288 championship T-shirts and caps each for the Indianapolis Colts and for the Chicago Bears, participants in this year’s Super Bowl. The gear was driven by van to Dolphin Stadium on Monday and presented to the N.F.L.

“Don’t worry,” Mr. White said. “It’s protected as well as Elizabeth Taylor’s diamonds.”

He is referring, of course, to $20 T-shirts and $30 caps. But to players and coaches, these are cotton-and-polyester trophies, the first of many tangible rewards they receive upon winning the Super Bowl.

When Green Bay beat New England in the 1997 Super Bowl, and the defensive coordinator Fritz Shurmur saw his shirt and cap for the first time, he started to cry. “I’ve waited my whole life for that shirt and that hat,” he said.

Distribution is a science. Twelve employees from Reebok and the N.F.L. huddle midway through the fourth quarter and handicap the game. If the score is lopsided, they stalk the sideline of the winning team, keeping the boxes out of sight.

But if the game is close, half the group goes to one side and half goes to the other. Each employee is assigned a star player to outfit. If the Colts win, for instance, someone immediately has to get a shirt and cap to quarterback Peyton Manning. If the Bears win, someone has to find linebacker Brian Urlacher.

This can be a difficult job, dodging joyous 300-pound linemen. But the advertising potential is priceless. Once the scoreboard clock hits 00:00, clothing manufacturers around the country start churning out championship merchandise. If Manning is seen wearing a T-shirt Sunday night, it will be flying off shelves in Indianapolis by Monday.

For the past 20 years, the shirts and caps have become as much a part of championship games as the coaches’ Gatorade showers. At the end of the World Series, the N.B.A. finals and the Final Four, all the winners get to celebrate in fresh threads.

The losers, meanwhile, trudge back to their locker room in sweaty jerseys. Major League Baseball destroys the clothing that was made for its runners-up. The N.B.A. donates it to an overseas charity. And the N.F.L. sends it to a place far away.

There, and only there, the losers get to be winners.

A gustative adventure (NY Times)

Sharing Romanian Under a Sphinx

By PETER MEEHAN
January 31, 2007

MARIGOLD walls, goldenrod tablecloths, egg yolks spilling into moist corn-colored mamaliga: yellow, yellow, yellow at Acasa in Sunnyside, Queens.

Acasa is a new Romanian place on a stretch of Skillman Avenue that’s not poor in the Romanian department. The dining room is dominated by a massive photo mural that struck me as being sci-fi: a solar eclipse in a red sky on one end; a rocky, Martian outcropping on the other. That’s what too much goulash will get you into, I thought.

Wrong, I was. Marian Golea, the restaurant’s effusive owner, explained that it was a photograph of the Romanian Sphinx, a rocky outcropping on the Bucegi Platform, taken during a total solar eclipse. As soon as Mr. Golea suggested it, the rock looked exactly like the profile of its more recently constructed and more internationally famous Egyptian brother.

Who knew you could argue that the Great Sphinx of Giza was a knockoff? You learn something new every night in this town.

One evening I learned that desserts at Acasa are very, very good, particularly papanasi cu smantana ($4), which the menu translates as “Fried Cheese Donuts with sweet vanilla creamy sauce.” I offer this nugget of discovery up front because anyone who does not budget his appetite will not have room for this.

For something a little less filling, go for the clatite cu gem ($4), crepes stuffed with jam. A friend of mine with a Romanian grandmother did, and devoured them, evoking her good name and good cooking.

He did the same with an order of red peppers stuffed with meat and rice. Mr. Golea linked the goulash and the mushroom stew with white sauce to Transylvania, the region of Romanian from which he hails. After moving to the United States, he spent 15 years working at different jobs — much of the time as a mechanical engineer at Kennedy Airport — before opening Acasa, his first restaurant.

While there may be the occasional Transylvanian accent on the menu, it’s not as strong as, say, Bela Lugosi’s. Mr. Golea said the Romanians who visit his restaurant come from all over Romania, so there are dishes to suit everyone.

A supremely creamy caviar spread, much like taramosalata, and other mezes with a Mediterranean accent, like a garlicky, light bean spread and a too-smoky eggplant dip, evince the Greek and Turkish influences on Romania’s cooking. Order a few ($4 each), and the kitchen will assemble a platter for the table.

A smoked pork knuckle — meager and sinewy but studded with enough meaty nuggets to merit inclusion on the list of house specialties — is served over melted cabbage ($11.99). It reflects the century Romania spent as a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

My favorite dishes at Acasa feature mamaliga, Romania’s answer to polenta. It’s a perfect foil to grilled lamb (erroneously billed as lamb pastrami) or braised pork. I liked it best with a fried egg, a huge dollop of sour cream and a side order of sour-and-sweet pickled red peppers.

There’s beer and wine, and the Romanian choices are affordable and acceptable. Ursus is a pilsner that goes back easy. I tried two white wines: the riesling is drier than the muscat.

One night, after ordering a bottle of the riesling ($12), my waitress asked me if I’d like seltzer, too. She was upselling me, I thought, but I opted for it anyway. Wrong again. The seltzer was for the wine, to make what from here on I will refer to as Transylvanian champagne.

It might have been too much of that Transylvanian champagne, or maybe it was a calorie-overloaded hallucination, but I swear the sphinx whispered to me one night. It told me that eating crispy carnaciori oltenesti ($4) — hot dog-like sausages paired with Windy City-style yellow mustard — in the shadow of an eclipse would trigger a slaughtering of favored colts by savage bears this coming Sunday. Who am I to argue with the Romanian Sphinx?

Acasa

48-06 Skillman Avenue (48th Street), Sunnyside, Queens; (718) 651-1364.

BEST DISHES Caviar spread; meatball appetizer; grilled lamb with mamaliga; mamaliga with egg and sour cream; pickled red peppers.

PRICE RANGE Small dishes, $4 to $6; main courses, $7.99 to $14.99; desserts, $4.

CREDIT CARDS Cash only.

HOURS Noon to 10 p.m. Monday to Thursday; to midnight Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

WHEELCHAIR ACCESS Accessible.