Futurama Review

Futurama is Back
The seminal science fiction cartoon returns on DVD
Hartford Advocate Dec. 07, 2007
Futurama returning in any form is great, but a direct-to-DVD version is nearly perfect. The animated show's creators, including Simpsons progenitor Matt Groening, invented a multi-layered television comedy show that looked both backwards and forwards. Steeped in science fiction minutia, the show portrayed a future where every conceivable science fiction scenario had come true, where the incredible is mundane and where everything is possible, but nothing seems to work.

Bender's Big Score, the first of four DVD exclusive Futurama films — they're going to be split up and broadcast as 16 half-hour episodes on Comedy Central in 2008 — is both innovative and antiquated. The format allows them to bypass broadcast television, and include a wealth of special features that reward the obsession the show inspires in its fans (including a full episode of Everyone Loves Hypnotoad, and an equally inscrutably hypnotic Futurama-focused higher math lecture). But considering Blu-ray, Bit Torrent, video iPods and such, DVDs frankly seem like a dying technology. Which is perfect for Futurama.

Even Futurama's biggest fans should acknowledge why the show had limited success in its 72 episode run (seven episodes fewer than the original Star Trek. Or was it? Have at it, nerds.). Certainly it was mishandled by the Fox Network, who shuffled its time slot and ultimately canceled it, but the show had a fundamentally narrow appeal.

It rewarded science fiction literacy, referencing pure mind sugar for geeks like the 1939 World's Fair, Invasion of the Saucer Men and the Grandfather Paradox, but presented them with twitchy, irreverent humor. America just doesn't have the hipster nerd resources to sustain such a project.

There's also a matter of tone. Where the show's most immediate ancestor, The Simpsons, centered on a family and occasionally broke up its nihilism with sentimental warmth, the only mainstream concession Futurama made was the broad humor of an alcoholic misfit robot with criminal tendencies. It might as well have "cult hit" written in binary and Klingon in the opening credits.


Freed from the constraints of pretending to have mass appeal, the Futurama team mine the show's mythology and history for Bender's Big Score, packing the screen with obscure references to past Futurama episodes, and meta-references to the Family Guy (another show retired, then revived by Fox) and South Park. The plot, a giddy mix of Primer-style time-travel anomalies, alien con men and a surprisingly affecting romance, would have been pretty much impossible with broadcast television's constraints on time and ambition.

A lot of it's very funny — I mentioned the alcoholic misfit robot, right? — but more importantly, it's viciously smart. The speculative ideas are precise and fully realized. As the creators explain in the commentary track, every complicated time leap was fully sketched out, and scrutinized for logic and clarity. Time travel paradoxes aren't just acknowledged, they're exploited for punch lines.

If after watching Signs you angrily questioned why an alien race allergic to water would invade a planet with water covering two thirds of its surface, Bender's Big Score will be extremely satisfying. If you never considered that, well, maybe Futurama isn't for you. On the bright side, re-runs of Everybody Loves Raymond are on TV, like, all the time now! Read more!

Voting Machine Clash

No-Confidence Vote
A Trinity professor and the secretary of the state square off over new voting machines
Hartford Advocate Nov. 24, 2005

Last week's voting machine demonstration at the Jewish Community Center of Greater New Haven in Woodbridge was strange. Although the center is a massive space, the actual demonstration was held in a cramped alcove. The six machines on display -- two each from the three companies that had made the cut for consideration, Avante, Danaher and Diebold -- were swarmed with people. There were no lines, no clear sense of order.

The event was the third of five statewide demonstrations of the three voting machines that had made the state's final cut for selection. Avante's and Diebold machines were high-tech touch-screen voting machines with interfaces clearly influenced by Microsoft Windows. The Danaher machine looked like the clunky lever voting machines that the new machines were supposed to replace. Each machine produced a hand-countable paper receipt, in accordance with a state bill passed last February.

"We have had 500 or more people on average at every demo this week," said Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz. It was more than she expected. "I was lying awake on Sunday night thinking 'What if no one comes?' Then we got to Buckland Mall and there were 75 senior citizens lined up early to try to check it out."

Last week's demonstrations were the culmination of a long, much-delayed voting-reform process. In 2004, Bysiewicz's office issued a Request For Proposal, or RFP, to voting machine vendors in order to begin replacing Connecticut's approximately 3000 voting machines, and to complywith the federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 which established standards on voter procedures. The state hopes to have the process completed by Jan. 1, the deadline set by Congress for HAVA compliance.

One style of machine was conspicuously absent from the statewide display, in spite of the actions of voter advocacy group True VoteCT. The group, which formed about a year ago, is a coalition of computer science professionals and others with expertise in issues relating to voting technology.

Through their research, the group's members determined that optical scan technology was the best voting system for Connecticut. Optical scan systems work similarly to SAT scoring. A voter would mark up a dots on a form similar to the one familiar to anyone who's taken a multiple-choice test in the last 30 years.

"Optical scans have been around for a long time," True VoteCT organizer Ralph Morelli said. "It's a proven, mature technology."

Morelli, a tenured professor of computer science who has worked at Trinity College for 20 years, is a strong advocate of optical scan technology. He says the optical scan automatic paper trail would ensure transparency, avoid programming glitches that can occur with other machines, and cost less than those touted by the state.

The members of True VoteCT claim that Bysiewicz has largely ignored the group's optical scan recommendation throughout the process, and say the bids she requested are for "Direct Record Electronic (DRE)" machines, or e-voting machines. Bysiewicz and her staff have repeatedly denied that they are excluding any technology, particularly optical scan.

Morelli and other members of his group have made their concerns known to Bysiewicz. In addition to attending public question-and-answer sessions and round-table discussions of voting reform, True VoteCT members have sent several dispatches to Bysiewicz's office (which may be found on thewww.truevotect.org website).

On Sept. 19, Morelli sent a letter to Bysiewicz, asking her to reconsider optical scan technology and strongly recommended that she look into one particular machine called the Automark.

In Bysiewicz's reply, dated Oct. 5, the secretary noted that the group had consistently lauded Automark. Questioning the group's independent credentials, she refused to meet with members of True Vote on the grounds that they were endorsing the technology.

"Although you assert your organization is a 'non-profit, non-partisan advocacy group' without 'any kind of relationship with voting machine vendors,' the bulk of your letter is devoted to extolling the virtues of a single product by a single manufacturer, the Automark by ES&S," Bysiewicz's letter states.

Morelli and his fellow True VoteCT member Rich Sivel laughed when asked if they were shills for Automark.

"No one in the group has any interest in the company. No one in the group has any stock in the company. And in addition, we have a healthy skepticism about the technology," Sivel said.

A copy of Bysiewicz's response was sent by someone to Trinity College president Jim Jones. Morelli's letter was not written on college letterhead, and Morelli identified himself as a member of True VoteCT, not as a Trinity professor. He included his business card in the envelope, he says, so that he could be easily contacted.

Bysiewicz said she understood the inclusion of the business card to mean Morelli was speaking as a representative of the college. Morelli said he was surprised that the letter had been copied to Jones.

"I asked [President Jones] if he knew the secretary -- I assumed that's why she might have copied him on the letter," Morelli said. "He said that he didn't know her, and that we should be applauded for working on the issue."

When asked if her office routinely sends copies of letters to the bosses of her correspondents, Bysiewicz said, "That's something you'd have to ask my communication office." Read more!

DMV Technology

Identify Yourself
New Connecticut DMV technologies cause worries
Hartford Advocate Feb. 10, 2005

On Jan. 11, Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Gary DeFilippo sent out a media advisory concerning steps the DMV is taking to reform the agency. Two bullet points briefly addressed potentially troubling technological changes the agency is undertaking.

The first said the DMV would begin performing "high-tech match-up[s] of faces in its license file to determine if the same face is on a license or if a different one is there." The second said a new document-authentication "proofing process using state-of-the-art technology will be used to determine the validity of passports, out-of-state driver's licenses, military identifications, etc."

The aim is to "combat both the issuance of licenses in criminal matters of identity theft and to illegal aliens or those without the proper immigration and naturalization documentation."

DMV spokesman Bill Seymour confirmed that the DMV is seriously upgrading its hardware.

"We're going to do a couple different kinds of face match-ups. The first kind of face match-up is where we compare your face now to your face when you came in the last time to have your renewal," Seymour explained. "The next match up we're going to do is faces to addresses in our database. That way we can make sure we have one face for one address and not the same face for multiple addresses."

Viisage, a Littleton, Mass., security technologies firm, is supplying the DMV with face-recognition technology (FRT). Viisage has manufactured Connecticut driver's licenses since 2002 -- presumably the license photo library can be easily navigated.

Proponents of FRT believe a face can identity a person as accurately as a fingerprint or a DNA sample. Viisage will provide the DMV with biometric technology that allows for searches and matches of faces in databases.

Viisage is one of several companies at the forefront of biometric technology. According to the website of the Biometric Consortium, a U.S government-funded group that records and studies the technology's development, "biometrics are automated methods of recognizing a person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic. Among the features measured are face, fingerprints, hand geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, and voice."


Biometric technology digitizes and analyzes faces, voices and other identifying features. Then the data is converted into a numeric code that becomes, to a computer, as unique and instantly recognizable as a Social Security number.

In theory, biometric face-matching can be instantaneous and precise. A computer can read a line of code and match it to another line. The problem is that biometric technology currently seems about as exact a science as phrenology; it failed in three of the most public tests it has faced.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Americans wanted science-fiction solutions to problems caused by terrorists whose weapons are barely above the level of cavemen, and were willing to sacrifice privacy for them. Biometric technology became white hot. Stock prices skyrocketed for companies involved with biometrics. The first day of stock trading following the Sept. 11 attacks saw a 90 percent increase in the value of Viisage's share price.

Shortly after Sept. 11, Viisage CEO Tom Colatosti notoriously claimed that biometric face-recognition technology could have been a factor in preventing the Sept. 11 attacks. "If our technology had been deployed, the likelihood is [the terrorists] would have been recognized," he told a group of reporters.

But even before Sept. 11, the United States was pushing biometrics technology really hard on both the federal and state levels. Tests of the technology, before and after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, did not turn out very well.

In a summer 2001 experiment in Ybor City, an entertainment district in Tampa, Florida, the whole city was put under surveillance. Hidden video cameras recorded activities in public spaces like open-air shopping malls and outdoor restaurants. Law enforcement officials used biometric technology provided by a New Jersey company called Visionics (which would later fold into Identix). The experiment was fraught with false positives. The most dramatic is the story of Ron Milliron. According to the St. Petersburg Times:

"Rob Milliron, then 32, wound up on a surveillance camera one day while at lunch in Ybor City. Tampa police used his photo to demonstrate the system to local news media. A woman in Tulsa, Okla., saw his picture and fingered him as her ex-husband who was wanted on felony child neglect charges. Three police officers showed up at Milliron's construction job site, asking if he was a wanted man. Turns out he had never married, never had kids, never even been to Oklahoma."

The Ybor City program was shut down in August 2003. Ultimately, no arrests were made because of the surveillance. Local cops deemed the experiment a failure.

"It was of no benefit to us, and it served no real purpose," Capt. Bob Guidara of the Tampa police told the Associated Press after the experiment was shuttered.

In 2002 Viisage took part in a Super Bowl biometric experiment, scanning the faces of people at the game, allegedly looking for terrorists. At first, the experiment was deemed a modest success -- 19 suspects were fingered due to the technology. No arrests were made because of the surveillance, though.

Then, Viisage and rival security technology firm Identix went head-to-head in a study at Logan Airport that lasted from January to April of 2002. Working with a database of 40 employees, the competing companies tried to identify faces in the crowds. That test had a reported failure rate of 40 percent.

"This is a high-tech Band-Aid that's not going to make us any safer, and will give us a false sense of security," Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Program on Technology and Liberty, told the Boston Globe after the results of the Logan Airport tests came to light. "As someone who flew 100,000 miles last year, I don't want to risk my safety on this technology."

Applying biometric technology to photographs -- how the DMV is using the technology -- is likely to be a more accurate use of the approach than scanning faces in crowds. With photographs, particularly institutional identification photographs, the circumstances are far more controlled than in the case of videotaped people in a crowd. All the backgrounds are the same, faces are the same proportion and caught at the same angle. Crowd photography variables like lighting and shadows are eliminated.

However, judging from other reports on biometrics, there are still more factors to consider.

Last December, the New York Times reported that international passport guidelines advised people posing for passports that, "only closed-mouth, 'neutral' expressions will be allowed," so that they could be read by biometrics instruments. Throwing a bone to the irrepressibly cheerful, the guidelines state that a "smile with closed jaw is allowed, but is not preferred." So don't you dare smile with an open mouth unless you want the terrorists to win.

The assumption is that while faces change as people age, the mathematical value of their features stays fundamentally the same over time. Once the biometric features of the face are determined, the theory holds, they can be used as identification throughout an individual's life. Critics argue that this premise is fundamentally flawed, claiming that skin diseases and aging can throw biometric data out of whack.

In light of last year's scandals at the agency, few argue that the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles needed restructuring and reform. But it's not clear how much face-recognition technology and biometrics directly addresses those problems.

In August 2004, an employee at the Norwalk DMV was charged with accepting bribes in exchange for providing illegal immigrants with driver's licenses. Further investigations uncovered over 400 other fraudulent licenses issued by that employee in 2003 alone. Three DMV workers have been charged in connection with the investigation.

The scam the DMV employees worked was notably low-tech. The operation relied on corrupt insiders working at DMV offices and a lack of supervision of those employees. A high-tech scan of faces in a database provides for more accountability, as does the agency's implementation of biometric fingerprint-scanning systems for recording employee use of machines.

But still, the question of motivation lingers. Viisage provides identification work for six other states' DMVs. A recent Associated Press article listed Rhode Island, North Carolina, Delaware, Illinois, Oklahoma and another state that declined to be identified because of security concerns, as customers. Viisage also works on U.S. passports and, according to the Viisage website, provides services for the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, several city law enforcement agencies and, curiously, for Pakistan's national identification program.

Despite repeated inquiries to Viisage and the public relations firm that represents the company, I was not able to speak with anyone representing the company. As a result, I don't know whether Viisage maintains a central database of photographs and biometric data or if its clients create their own using Viisage's technology.

If Viisage controls the database, well, that's quite a bit of technology in the hands of a private company. If it doesn't, it's easy to imagine how several databases that share the same technology could be linked up.

Of course, Viisage is not the only company that works with biometrics or face-recognition technology, nor is it the largest. Firms such as Identix and Digimarc are also major players in biometric security.

Since Sept. 11, the idea of a national identification card and information database has been floated and rejected several times. All of these unconnected pools of centralized information, though, could easily be channeled together after a national crisis.
Read more!

Sarah Silverman Review

Hartford Advocate Sept. 27, 2007

It can be hard to say why something is funny, but sometimes it's just as difficult describing why something isn't funny. In both instances you run the risk of looking humorless, uptight or obtuse.

Take the curious case of Sarah Silverman, whose Comedy Central show The Sarah Silverman Program is entering its second season. She's a dirty alt comedienne, endorsed by some of the greatest comedy forces of the day (David Cross, Vice Magazine). Respecting publications, from Vanity Fair to The New Yorker, have lavished her with praise. By saying she's not funny, you risk looking like a prude, or someone out of touch with the comedy zeitgeist of the moment.

But Silverman has never been and never will be funny. She's like Jenny McCarthy, except less blonde and more wry. Like McCarthy, Silverman's an avid student of four of the most wretched forms of comedy: fart jokes, fake dumbness, zany faces and bad puns. Of course, The New Yorker would never run a glowing review of McCarthy under the headline "Quiet Depravity."

Of course, she's not exactly Jenny McCarthy. Silverman is good looking, but approachable, so dudes think they have a chance with her and women don't hate her for looking like a cartoon version of sexual attractiveness. But more importantly, Silverman's vapidness is presented ironically. Even when a joke flat-lines — which happens constantly in her stand-up act and television show — it doesn't really flat-line. It was meant to flat-line, and that's the gag.

The fake filth performs the same function. Silverman and her writers seem to believe that a joke doesn't have to be well crafted or even make sense if it has the appearance of being potentially insulting. Let's pick an issue and display horrible taste about it.

It makes for frustrating television. The first episode of the second season of her show contains a key scene where she fondly remembers past abortions. I wasn't insulted. I was impatient, waiting for the jokes to start. A couple of great comic talents are wasted on the show, including Brian Posehn and Jay Johnston, who, like Silverman, got their start on HBO's Mr. Show. They're miscast and typecast, respectively — Posehn's big galoot persona is muted playing a domesticated gay man and Johnston plays an awkward, stiff cop like he did on several Mr. Show sketches and episodes of Arrested Development.

In her stand-up, Silverman acts like an eight-year-old who just learned her first swear word. On the show, she also adopts a faux-naive persona, but adds an unhealthy dollop of faux cluelessness.

It seems like a female variation on Chris Elliot's destructive idiot man-child shtick from Get a Life. That show worked because it was a dark deconstruction of the then-dominant family sitcom genre. The Sarah Silverman Program isn't a parody of anything — it's a platform for absurdist edgeless "edgy" jokes.
Even when the show wades into a deeply fraught issue, like abortion, it's just an excuse for subpar jokes about how clueless Silverman's character is. It's both as subvervise and pleasant as a migraine. Read more!

Right Wing Counter Protest

Where Eagles Dare
The Counter-protest Group The Gathering Of Eagles Cause A Ruckus As Bush Comes To New London's Coast Guard Ceremonies.
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate May 31 2007 (No longer online)

The first encounter I had with right wing protest group the Gathering of Eagles was watching an Eagle upbraid young, female demonstrators outside the New London Coast Guard Academy.

The demonstrators had come to protest President Bush’s visit as commencement speaker last Monday. The heavy-set man with a personal PA system challenged the “hippy girls’” loyalty to their “homo,” “girly-man” boyfriends. Later, he accused the anti-war protesters of getting paid to attend the May 22 protest. An anti-war protester yelled that he paid $20 for gas to get there. The Gathering of Eagles member suggested he “should have driven a hybrid vehicle.”

He ran out of steam, one-liner-wise, after that, but he and other less-light-on-their-feet Eagles with megaphones and speakers droned on for the next hour or so, including a long droning “swim to Cuba” chant during a Latino anti-war speaker’s speech.

Before the protest, the group’s Web site, gatheringofeagles.org, said the group planned to “welcome the families of the graduating Coast Guard academy” and “support … these families and graduating cadets.” The group, at least nominally, was worried the Coast Guard graduation would be unfairly disrupted by the anti-war rally planned by the ANSWER coalition and other anti-war groups, including Veterans for Peace and Connecticut Opposes the War.

“We believe that ANSWER’s protest was very ill-timed, and a very bad location. … For ANSWER to protest the President on what’s supposed to be the happiest day of these people’s lives so far, that was shameful and very disgraceful,” Connecticut Gathering of Eagles organizer Jim Bancroft said. (Turns out he shouldn’t have been so worried — the Presidential motorcade avoided the protest. Neither the demonstration nor the counter-demonstration impacted the ceremony.)

Bancroft claimed an early remark by an anti-war speaker changed the Eagle’s gathering’s purpose from a celebration of the cadets to a hectoring of the anti-war demonstration.

“We were there to welcome the President. When we got there, the first thing that happened was someone called us baby killers,” Bancroft said, adding that the slur was stated sometime between 7:30 and 7:45 a.m.

His claim seems extremely unlikely, in light of an ANSWER’s spokesperson’s version of the timeline.

“Our sound permit didn’t start until eight. We might have done a sound check, but they would have just heard ‘Check, check,’” ANSWER organizer Tahnee Stair said.

Elliot Adams, a Vietnam veteran and the president of Veterans for Peace, attended the rally, and said he viewed the Eagles with resigned sadness.

“I feel sorry for them. A number of them are vets, and I understand the misplaced anger associated with [Post Traumatic Stress Disorder],” Adams said. “With PTSD, you have what’s called misplaced anger that goes off in all directions. It’s a real common thing.”

He added, “Also, they believe in the American dream, and they don’t just see that we’re losing it.” Read more!

The Insulting Bartender

Smart answers to stupid drinks
Originally appeared on WOOF.com, a long-defunct website I was an assistant editor for, sometime in 1999. Was reprinted in Think Magazine later that year.

Want to figure out who your date really is? What they order may tell you more than you think. New Jersey native Adam Bulger explains.

Rum and Coke: The drink's okay, but it's ordered by so many eighteen-to-twenty-two's that they should change the name to "My First Highball" and have a Mattel logo on the glass.

Scotch and Soda: It's not 1960s, your friends are not named Sammy, Dino, or Frank; and that whole Swingers retro look is getting tired.

Cosmopolitan: Remember that time when you were working the door at the Limelight and you wouldn't let me in because I was wearing sneakers? Go to hell.

Sex on the Beach: What? You got an exotic dancer waiting for her drink back at your table, or something?

Bourbon: You're a good 'ole boy, never meaning no harm, but, apparently, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow. If I were born with a name like Cletus or Rosco, I'd be sucking down a hundred-fifty proof liquor, too.

Tequila Shots: Congratulations on turning twenty-one. Don't let any of your frat brothers throw up on my shoes.

Budweiser: Whassuuuuuuuuuup? You're a sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Here's a new concept for you. It's called other brands of beer. Look into it.

Mint Julep: The War's over. The South lost. Get over it. Better hurry back to your table, looks like your date, Blanche DuBois, is getting overcome by the vapors.

[Any drinks whose titles include Freeze or Electric:
Dude, you've been spending way too much time at TGI Fridays.]

Gin and Tonic: The G&T was invented by British colonialists when they were treating malaria with quinine-spiked tonic. The Limeys added gin to make the combination palatable. So what does that say about you? It says that you're a pale-skinned imperialist and the sun never sets over your hangover.

Margarita: Okay, fine. Whatever. Just understand that the first guy who puts a Jimmy Buffett song on the jukebox is gonna end up in the basement with duct tape over his mouth.

Jello, Body, and Test Tube Shots: You enjoy drinking, incoherently hitting on girls, and sleeping in closets. You hope you won't be the first of your dorm-mates to pass out. The last time you passed out first they pulled the old ''hand in warm water'' trick on you.

Jagermeister: No, I don't want to hear the story about how you lost your teeth, and no, my refusal does not constitute "fighting words."

White Wine Spritzer: Without looking at you, hearing you, or knowing anything about you, I am supremely confident that I can kick your ass.

Sam Adams: Obviously, you're a dude in your mid to late twenties and you're either wearing a suit or some kind of corporate casual equivilent. You're an investment banker in your mid-twenties and you're nervous about what beer to order in public. You have a subscription to Playboy, but you think about men when you masturbate.

Long Island Iced Tea: You cats from Long Island sure do get wasted. Does that come from having to put up with Billy Joel and Rosie O'Donnell?

Whiskey Sour: You're an old man who has been drinking steadily since the mid-eighties. You smoke Camel straights and like to get into fights with strangers. And could you please come home? Mom's getting worried. Read more!

CT Murderball

Connecticut Murderball
Hartford Advocate December 28 2006 (No longer online)
By Adam Bulger

Depending on how you read the situation, the Connecticut Jammers are either having a bad year or a great one.

The state’s wheelchair rugby team’s one-and-nine record isn’t impressive, but other factors have to be considered. Like how the team’s roster has swelled to 10 players thanks to recent mainstream exposure to the sport, and some of the team’s troubles are explained by the addition of players new to the game.

“My team is fairly new and fairly young. I have a bunch of new players, which is good, but it’s going to take us a while to get back up to speed,” Jammers coach Bud Harvey said. “Some of my older players are starting to retire. We’ve lost a couple of experienced players and gained a couple of new players. We’re in a building year.”


Earlier this month, the annual Connecticut Classic Wheelchair Rugby Tournament was held in Wallingford. Four teams — the Jammers, the New York Jets, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Casco Bay Navigators — competed in a six-game round robin tournament.

The Jammers took the court for their second game of the day at around 1:30 (I missed their first game which was played at the ungodly Saturday hour of 9 a.m.) to play the Philly team. Techno music played over the PA system as the 10-man team rolled up and down the indoor basketball court in a series of drills.

Soon the game got underway. Several of the players moved the angled wheels on their specially designed wheelchairs with surprising dexterity and speed. The metal and plastic plates covering the chairs’ spokes clanged loudly when one player battered another with their chair, and the audience responded with concerned gasps.

The concern is understandable. Quad rugby is played exclusively by people with disabilities affecting both their arms and legs. The players themselves think the concern is unfounded. Sure, quad rugby is a high-impact sport, and collisions not only happen, they’re encouraged. But the injuries are mostly minor and the game’s benefits outweigh the minor risks.

“You’ll see a scraped elbow here and there, but the sport’s pretty safe,” Jammer Rick Farmiglietti said. “I’m usually good to get knocked out of the chair about once a tournament.”

In quad rugby, a player scores by carrying the ball through the goal. Moving the ball across the court, players must dribble or pass the ball every 10 seconds.

The Jammers seemed overmatched by the Philadelphia team. It looked like the Jammers were a little lost on the court. Four of the team’s 10 players were rookies, including Clinton Cowen; the team hasn’t quite had a chance to gel yet. For two of the latest additions to the team, Joseph Stramando and Jon Sigworth, it was the second and first times they had played in competitive games, respectively.

Sigworth, a freshman at Wesleyan University and a former extreme unicyclist, broke his neck while mountain biking in northern India earlier this year. After finding out about the team through Villardi, he was anxious to play.

“I had my accident early this February. I went to a practice wearing my neck collar. They said I could roll around in a chair for a while, but that I couldn’t play until I got my neck collar off. I was like ‘Darn it.’ But I’ve been playing with them since July,” Sigworth said.

Unlike the other players on the team, Stramondo is not a quadriplegic. The Trinity College administrator and voting member of the state’s Independent Living Council has a rare form of dwarfism called micromelic dysplasia, and uses a motorized wheelchair. His fellow Independent Living Council member Jim Quick encouraged him to join the team.

“My Disability is something I’ve lived with all my life, and organized sport is something I haven’t had the opportunity to do, and especially not organized sport that’s this exciting,” Stramondo said.

Quad rugby was invented in Canada in 1977. While other sports like wheelchair basketball were already established, quad rugby — or murderball, as it was called originally — was the first sport that allowed quadriplegic athletes of all functioning abilities to have important roles on both offense and defense. Despite the name, it has little in common with traditional rugby.

“Rugby and wheelchair rugby are totally different as far as the rules go,” International Quad Rugby Association official John Bishop said. “The name ‘rugby’ was chosen because of the similar camaraderie and the aggressiveness of the sport.”

The game spread like a virus to countries all across the globe, and now is considered the fastest-growing wheelchair sport in the world, played in 26 countries and a featured part of the Paralympic Games.

The game made its way to Connecticut in the early ’90s when a group of dedicated wheelchair athletes started playing ramshackle games outside Gaylord rehab hospital in Wallingford.

“We were practicing on a tennis court in the parking lot. We were basically using everyday chairs that we would duct tape pieces of wood over the chairs so they wouldn’t fold up when we hit each other,” Jammers co-founder Jimmy Quick said.

Quick added: “It was pretty gruesome in the early days.”

Quick, the former president of the Connecticut chapter of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, was a member of the national wheelchair rugby team in the mid ’90s. This season marks his return to the sport after a five-year hiatus.

Gaylord rehab hospital has been active with the team since its inception.

“We’ve sponsored the team for about 10 or 11 years. We sponsor the team financially through fund-raising we do through the sports association,” Gaylord Hospital Sports Association Coordinator Todd Munn said.

Despite Gaylord hospital’s support, the team is currently looking for a place to play.

“We need a gym and we need storage. Ideally, it would be a basketball court on a Saturday or a Sunday for three or four hours,” Jammers coach Bud Harvey said.

The sport is currently enjoying a surge of popular interest thanks to the acclaimed 2005 documentary Murderball . The movie documents the rivalry between the U.S. wheelchair rugby team and Canada’s team. Despite the sport’s Canadian roots, America has traditionally dominated quad rugby. However, when one of America’s star players, the cantankerous Joe Soares, became Canada’s coach after getting cut from America’s team, the Canadian team took the gold medal in 2002. The movie documents Soares and players for the American team preparing for the 2004 paralympic game.

The film is gripping, entertaining, human and at your local Blockbuster right now — rent it immediately. Thanks to its success, the Connecticut Jammers and teams across the country have enjoyed renewed interest among both disabled and able-bodied people.

“Just before the movie came out we were struggling to field a team and have enough athletes that have the spinal cord injury level come out and be on the team. Murderball drummed up a lot of interest among people both injured and not injured,” Munn said.

A review of the film on the Web site quadrugby.com said Murderball “doesn’t dispel myths and stereotypes. It takes big fat bites out of those sugary sweet, pathetic images and stereotypes, chews ’em up and spits ’em out.”

One reason why the movie is so engaging is its frankness. Joe Soares, for instance, comes across as one of the world’s biggest assholes. The honesty makes the film entertaining, but it also makes it more important. There’s a temptation on the part of a lot of able-bodied folks to think of disabled people as saints, or objects of pity. As coach Harvey said, often upon meeting wheelchair-bound people you only see the chair; seeing past the disability and seeing the person is a challenge for a lot of people.

“You’ve got to be able to get over the chair. The instant response is to say ‘look at these poor guys.’ There’s nothing poor about these guys,” Harvey said. “They are tough and they don’t cut each other any slack. They’re human beings and deserve and demand to be treated like human beings.”

In the recent tournament, the Jammers and the other teams’ players didn’t look like saints. In fact, many of the goateed, tattooed crew wouldn’t look out of place closing down a disreputable dive bar on any given Tuesday night. The guys I talked to are really good dudes, and aspects of their lives are heroic, I suppose. But they’re not saints. They’re, for lack of a better classification, normal dudes who happen to be in chairs. “People are always like ‘you’re a saint, or you’re an inspiration’ — I hate it when people say I’m an inspiration,” Jammer team member Joseph Stramondo said. “I’m an inspiration because I can wipe my ass? Thanks. I don’t want to be your inspiration; I want to be your equal.”

Several members of the Jammers told me they believed quad rugby helps to shift people’s perceptions because it’s an aggressive game with a sexy allure.

“I think the game breaks a lot of barriers down because they see people trying to have fun with sports like everybody else and being crazy like everybody else,” Quick said. “We aren’t china dolls. We’re not going to break.”


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