The Washington Post reports: “U.S. forces fought their way into Baghdad this morning, reaching the center of the city and attacking at least two presidential palaces and several Iraqi government buildings.”

Sarin nerve gas in Iraq.

UPDATE: Or not. There is apparently a chance it may have been simple pesticides. Or, it may have been sarin. Some bloggers think the military is not playing up this discovery because, if they publicly announce they’ve got proof that Saddam has WMDs, he will have no incentive not to use them against us in Baghdad. “It’s sarin. They’re just not letting the cat out of the bag until after the war,” one commenter wrote. An interesting theory — but a problematic strategy, I’d say, because if America doesn’t release the evidence until we occupy the whole country, it will much easier to accuse us of planting the evidence.

Meanwhile, here is the latest on MSNBC’s independent testing of a terrorist site in northern Iraq that reportedly tested positive for ricin and botulinum. I don’t understand why this isn’t getting more attention. Although, a lot of blogs are talking about it, of course.

UPDATE: Where are the banned weapons?, the Hartford Courant asks.

I’m going to bite my nails off watching this… UConn 71, Texas 69, Texas ball, 25.1 seconds left…

UPDATE: UCONN WINS!!!!!!!

UPDATE: Toby, for her part, is less than thrilled that the Huskies won.

RICK BOECKLER WINS WOMEN’S POOL
BECKY ZAK’S UNCLE CLINCHES WHEN TENNESSEE BEATS DUKE
Boeckler, first non-Connecticut champion, will break points record if UConn wins title;
Larry Caplin, another one of Zak’s uncles, will finish second if Tennessee wins title

Rick Boeckler of Silver Spring, Maryland clinched victory in The Living Room Times’s sixth annual NCAA women’s pool Sunday when Tennessee defeated Duke, 66-56, in a Final Four battle of #1 seeds.

Boeckler, an uncle of pool administrator Brendan Loy’s girlfriend Becky Zak, is the first pool champion in The Living Room Times history who is not a current or former resident of Connecticut. He is also the first champion whose connection to Loy stems, however tangentially, from Loy’s enrollment at USC. (Loy and Zak met at USC, where both are now seniors.) No USC student has ever won a Times pool.

If UConn defeats Texas tonight (Texas led 35-33 at halftime) and beats Tennessee in the national title game Tuesday, Boeckler will finish with 421 points out of a possible 477, breaking the all-time record of 409 set by Jenn Castelhano in the women’s pool last year.

On the other hand, if Tennessee wins the title, Boeckler will be joined at the top of the leaderboard by Larry Caplin, another uncle of Zak. Caplin, a resident of West Bloomfield, Michigan, will finish second if the Vols win. If Tennessee loses — to either UConn or Texas — University of Maryland graduate student Josh Rubin will finish second.

Presently, Boeckler has 376 points out of a possible 432. Rubin is second with 365, followed by Matt Kagan with 357, James Dixon with 352, Ben Benack with 348 and Caplin with 345.

Matt Thomsen, who would have won the pool if Duke had won tonight, is now seventh, and cannot finish higher than sixth.

UNCLE RICK BOECKLER WINS!!!

Full update to follow shortly.

NBC’s David Bloom has died in Iraq of an apparent pulmonary embolism.

UPDATE: Reaction from a blogger who had apparently been posting about Bloom and his “studliness” throughout the war (though she’s removed all of her previous entires about him, “out of respect for David and his family.”)

UPDATE: More blog reaction from Miss Bumptious, the Buzz Machine, and the Command Post.

My website-of-the-future at www.adollya.com — which will eventually usurp this site and become www.brendanloy.com — now features a Becky blog and a Toby blog.

Be warned, however: the links to “Brendan’s homepage” and “Brendan’s blog” presently refer to under-construction pages on the www.adollya.com servers, not to this site. They might look real, but they’re not up-to-date, and most of the links are broken. So when you’re done visiting the Becky and Toby blogs, simply hit your “back” button!

VALE’S MARGIN IS BIGGEST EVER; JOSH RUBIN SECOND;
KIM STONE THIRD AFTER PICKING KANSAS-SYRACUSE FINAL;
DUKE-TENNESSEE GAME WILL DECIDE WOMEN’S CONTEST
All-time point-total records are in jeopardy in both pools

Justin Vale will win the Living Room Times’s eighth annual NCAA men’s pool by 47 points over his nearest competitor — the largest margin ever in a Times men’s or women’s pool.

Vale, who clinched victory on the first day of the Elite Eight when Kansas beat Arizona, secured the margin-of-victory record when the Jayhawks crushed Marquette in Satuday’s first game. (The Golden Eagles had previously been Vale’s darlings; he was the only contestant who picked them to reach the Final Four. But he correctly predicted their downfall Saturday.)

The previous record-high margin of victory was 40, set by Jenn Castelhano in last year’s women’s pool. The record in a men’s pool was 30, set by Liz Acey in 1997.

For Vale, who went 1-for-2 on Saturday (he picked Texas to reach the final), the only question remaining now is whether he will break the points record for a men’s pool. The Rockville High School freshman from Vernon, Connecticut has 352 points through 62 games, two less than Lou Ruggiero’s 1996 winning total of 354 in the first annual men’s pool. If Kansas wins the national championship game on Monday, Vale will finish with 377 points, shattering Ruggiero’s record. If Syracuse wins, he will stay at 352, with the second-highest men’s total ever.

Times pools are scored on a 5-7-10-15-20-25 basis, with a maximum possible total of 477 points.

While Vale’s feats may be historic, Newington High School sophomore Kim Stone’s accomplishment in this year’s pool is quite impressive in its own right: she was the only one out of the 43 pool contestants who correctly predicted the unlikely title-game matchup between #2-seed Kansas and #3-seed Syracuse. Stone, pool administator Brendan Loy’s “honorary sister,” has 304 points at present, and will finish third regardless of the outcome of the final. Like Vale, she picked Kansas to win the championship.

One point ahead of Stone is first-year Maryland doctoral student Josh Rubin, in second place 47 points behind Vale with 305 points. Rubin also picked Kansas to win the title, and will finish second no matter what.

Indeed, the entire top seven is already set in stone: Vale, Rubin and Stone, then Providence College senior Todd Stigliano in fourth, Wisconsin farmer James Peters in fifth, Becky Zak’s uncle Larry Caplin in sixth, and Northeastern University senior Ryan McBride in seventh. The only remaining question mark in the top ten is whether USC senior Nick Sowers, the one other pool contestant (besides Vale, Rubin and Stone) who picked Kansas to win the title, will jump to eighth place from 18th.

Two contestants picked Syracuse to win the title — Buffalo, New York area residents Victoria Wagner and Barbara Maier — but they are both well out of contention. Wagner would jump from 28th to 16th if the Orangemen win. Maier, whose picks included first-round victories by all four #16 seeds and an Elite Eight appearance for #15-seed Wagner, will finish in last place regardless of who wins the title game, though she will break 100 points if Syracuse wins.

Meanwhile, in the Times’s sixth annual women’s pool, Sunday’s Final Four game between #1 seeds Duke and Tennessee will decide who wins the pool. A Tennessee victory would guarantee victory for Becky Zak’s uncle Rick Boeckler, who is presently in first place, while University of New Haven senior Matt Thomsen, now in second place, needs a Duke win to take the lead and clinch victory.

If Tennessee wins and UConn beats Texas in the day’s later game, and then the Huskies beat the Vols in Tuesday’s title game, Boeckler will finish with 421 points out of a possible 477, breaking Jenn Castelhano’s record of 409, set last year. Otherwise, Castelhano’s record will remain intact.

NOTE: Last week, several blogged posts on this website stated that Josh Rubin had picked Duke to reach the women’s Final Four, and/or made statistical analyses of the pool on the basis that Rubin had picked Duke. These posts were incorrect. Rubin picked Texas Tech to defeat Duke. The misreported information was due to a data-entry mistake by pool administrator Brendan Loy in transferring Rubin’s picks from the Pick65 website to another computer program. BrendanLoy.com apologizes for the error, and any confusion it may have caused.

Now we’re looking for chemical weapons that may be buried in a schoolyard.

UPDATE: Here’s the latest.

Sorry for the lack of posting… I’m busy working on the BrendanLoy.com of the future.

UPDATE: It’s looking better and better: my blog of the future.

I’m thinking about maybe trying to make the switch next week, once the NCAA Tournament is done.

U.S. officer says American troops find thousands of boxes of unknown white power, nerve gas antidote, and chemical warfare documents at complex south of Baghdad, according to The Associated Press. CNN is working to confirm.

UPDATE: Wow, this could be big. The above was posted automatically because of the CNN Breaking News alert, but let me add some more…

Fox News reports that the complex is being labeled “clearly a suspicious site,” and that each of the thousands of boxes contained “three vials of white powder” — which clears up my problematic mental image of cardboard boxes of anthrax, which doesn’t seem like it would be a very good storage method.

The Associated Press adds that “the facility had been identified by the International Atomic Energy Agency as a suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons site. U.N. inspectors visited the plant at least nine times, including as recently as Feb. 18.” If it turns out that there really are biological or chemical weapons there, this will be the ultimate proof of the futility of the U.N. weapons inspections.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Well, it seems the white powder is an explosive, not chemical weapons. That doesn’t quite explain the nerve gas antidote or the chemical warfare instruction manuals, of course.

Meanwhile, in an arguably more significant development given Bush’s justification for war (a possible Iraq-Al Qaeda axis of mass destruction), “MSNBC.com tests reveal evidence of the deadly toxins ricin and botulinum at a laboratory in a remote mountain region of northern Iraq allegedly used as a terrorist training camp by Islamic militants with ties to the al-Qaida terrorist network.”

Today is my one-year “blogiversary.”

On April 4, 2002, at 1:03 AM Pacific time, I posted the following message:

This is a test.

My first substantial post came two days later, in the wee hours of April 6, when I declared:

Well, I’ve done it again. I’ve revamped my website. I seem to have this urge every few months… or maybe it’s every time I have a huge school workload and I need some major non-school-related task to allow me to procrastinate. :) Either way, here it is: Brendan’s new and improved website!

Anyway… enjoy the revamped site, and look for more news updates soon!

It seems hilariously quaint now, my incorrect usage of the term “blogger” and my simplistic description of the blog phenomenon. But then, I really didn’t fully understand it yet. I had only been introduced to blogs a few days earlier. I certainly had no idea that, lo and behold, I would be posting ideological rants within a few months, getting lots of Google hits by October, and by the beginning of 2003, publishing something with enough mass appeal to warrant a link from InstaPundit, and a flurry of several thousand hits!

What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Speaking of revamping the website, I’m working on it again. Here is my latest work-in-progress homepage and main blog page. Of course, eventually they will be up-to-date, without broken images, and located at the correct URL, www.brendanloy.com. That’s why they call it “under construction.” This is just a sneak preview.

My parents bought a car yesterday.

It’s a silver 2001 Ford Escort, purchased to replace the red 1997 Ford Escort whose engine went ker-plunk last week after 166,000 miles over roughly 5 1/2 years. (Yeah, my mom drives a lot. In fact, the vast majority of those miles were logged in the past three years, when my mom was the car’s primary driver and was using it to constantly commute to and from her job in Willimantic, Connecticut, and to and from her graduate school in New York City.)

The new (well, not really new) Escort was previously a rental car, just as the red one was when we bought it. Both cars were, in fact, purchased at the same place, Enterprise Rent-a-Car / Car Sales. The new (used) car has some 43,000 miles already.

In the picture, the new Escort is seen next to yet another Escort — indeed, another silver Escort. That’s the rental car which had allowed my parents to get around after the red Escort broke down. We should get an award from the Ford Motor Company or something.

In an Adollyan news update, my dad reports that the car’s “city” name is “Escort II Silver City.” He also notes, “While the new Adollyan vehicle lacks the ABS brake system and remote electronic locks featured by the first Escort City, it does possess a built-in tape deck.” Escort City (the Adollyan name of the red car) did not have a tape deck.

Although the red car is kaput for now, it’s possible that, with a bit of an investment in engine repair, it could become my first car later this spring or this summer.

I haven’t posted anything about this SARS disease yet, but that doesn’t mean I’m not worrying about it. Here’s a good page with information on the disease.

U.S. intelligence analysis determines tapes shown on Iraqi TV of Saddam Hussein were made before war started, CNN has learned.