By Brendan Loy

…I’ve just had no time to blog for the last week-and-a-half. My evening free time is largely taken up holding a baby, and, well, it’s hard to type while you’re doing that. But hey, at least nothing newsworthy/blogworthy has happened during that time, like, oh I don’t know:

• Michelle Bachmann wins the Iowa Straw Poll;
• Generic Republican drops out of the presidential race;
• America’s next president, Rick Perry, enters the presidential race (#PANIC!);
• Tripoli falls to the Libyan rebels, and Moammar Gadhafi’s reign appears to approach its end;
• Hurricane Irene forms, threatens to become the season’s first major hurricane and hit the Southeast U.S. (or perhaps the Northeast? NYC?!?);
• A tragic, weather-related accident during a Sugarland concert at the Indiana State Fair kills 7 people;
• Becky gets a new MacBook Air; I finally get us a legitimate TV;
• The SEC decides not to invite Texas A&M (yet), but A&M administrators get permission to go conference-hunting;
• The AP poll comes out, ranking Boise State #5 (bus!), Notre Dame #16 and USC #25;
• Miami’s athletic department is hit with the Tsar Bomba of sports exposés, led by this absolute gem of a paragraph:

In 100 hours of jailhouse interviews during Yahoo! Sports’ 11-month investigation, Hurricanes booster Nevin Shapiro described a sustained, eight-year run of rampant NCAA rule-breaking, some of it with the knowledge or direct participation of at least seven coaches from the Miami football and basketball programs. At a cost that Shapiro estimates in the millions of dollars, he said his benefits to athletes included but were not limited to cash, prostitutes, entertainment in his multimillion-dollar homes and yacht, paid trips to high-end restaurants and nightclubs, jewelry, bounties for on-field play (including bounties for injuring opposing players), travel and, on one occasion, an abortion.

As many as seventy-two players are implicated, not to mention, like, a half-dozen assistant coaches. Oh, and the athletic director who was overseeing the department through the “eight-year run of rampant NCAA rule-breaking”? None other the Paul Dee, the grotesquely hypocritical m***erf***er who chaired the NCAA Infractions Committee that gave USC near-historic sanctions for violations about 1 percent as bad as these, the man who responded to cries of “we didn’t know!” by declaring that “high-profile athletes require high-profile monitoring” … the man who now says of Shapiro, “We didn’t have any suspicion that he was doing anything like this. He didn’t do anything to cause concern. … In terms of kids getting close to him or him getting close to the kids, I have no knowledge of that and my staff had no knowledge of that.”

So…yeah…nothing’s happened. :)