Newington HS boys bball team advances to state quarterfinals!

UPDATE: Here’s an article from the New Britain Herald about the Indians’ 51-41 win over Newtown last night. Newington, seeded #8, plays #1-seed Bristol Central in the quarterfinals Friday at 7:00 PM Eastern.

I believe this is the first time any Newington High basketball team, boys’ or girls’, has made it this far in the state tournament since 1997, my sophomore year, when the #9-seeded girls’ team lost in triple-overtime to #1-seed and eventual champion Norwich Free Academy in the quarterfinals.

A line from the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast, spoken by the talking candelabra Lumiere, keeps floating through my mind when I think about the French attitude toward Iraq’s disarmament song-and-dance:

They can sing,
They can dance –
After all, Miss,
This is France!

Becky and I are leaving in a couple of hours for Phoenix, Arizona, where we’ll be spending Spring Break with her parents — and watching the NCAA Tournament, and most likely the outbreak of war, on their big-screen TV. :)

Becky has a campus tour of Arizona State University scheduled for tomorrow, which is why we’re leaving so early. She has already been accepted to grad-school programs (to study the history of medicine) at Arizona State and Notre Dame. I, meanwhile, have applications pending at eight : Notre Dame, Michigan, Boston College, Boston University, Fordham, George Washington, Georgetown, and American U. This weekend, I plan to apply to two more — Yeshiva’s Cardozo school, and UConn — to make it an even ten.

Meanwhile, in far more important news, two dozen monkeys have escaped a Louisiana research center, and have taken refuge in a forest. They are being lured out with bananas and oranges.

You can’t make this stuff up.

After two previous failed attempts (on Feb. 25 and Mar. 4) to pass an anti-war resolution, the USC Student Senate formally denounced a war with Iraq yesterday, approving the resolution by a vote of 8.5 to 4.5 to 2.5. (Don’t ask about the half-votes. It doesn’t make sense to me either. I think maybe it has something to do with Cameroon.)

The Bush Administration, naturally, is shaking in its boots, and war plans are grinding to a halt, since USC Student Senate approval was necessary for any military action to take place.

Or not.

In other news, humor blog ScrappleFace reports that the Los Angeles City Council has followed up its antiwar resolution with a resolution opposing crime in Los Angeles. “Once we realized that we had the power to affect global policy, we decided to apply it to our own situation,” said one city council member. “The criminals and gangs of L.A. now know that we oppose such behavior. That ought to take care of it.” Hehe.

I’m now accepting pre-registrations for my upcoming Living Room Times men’s and women’s basketball pools.

I’m also working on creating a stripped-down version of my homepage that will replace my normal layout during at least the first two rounds of the tournament. This is the first NCAA tournament since I started blogging, so I should be able to publish pool updates (latest standings, scenarios, etc.) more frequently and easily than ever before. The idea of the homepage redesign is that, by eliminating a lot of the graphics, I will be able to stuff the homepage full of blog posts (which in this case will be mostly pool updates) without unduly slowing it down.

I’m leaving the Toby-Saddam graphic on the homepage, though. After all, the war is probably going to be starting at about the same time as the tournament.

A great post from “L.T. Smash,” an American soldier/blogger in the Persian Gulf:

Saddam:

Tick. Tick. Tick.