Coeur de Lion, a Celtic quartet, at the Fort Tryon Park Medieval Festival. See (er, hear) audio post below.

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Dane, commenting on the post containing his earlier report, provides an update on post-Isabel life in the D.C. area, where he lives:

Although we are still without power here, many locations around are coming back online. Most of the downed power polls and trees have now been cleared from the roadways, although there are still some areas that a bit treacherous and we are still under a water boiling alert for a few more days. I’m going to check to see…how my camera batteries are doing—I might be able to get Brendan some shots of mangled power polls before they are fixed. Well, that’s all for now, I’m going to try and get to the Apple store tomorrow and to try and recharge the lap top a little.

Thanks again for the update, Dane! I look very much forward to those photos, if you’re able to get them — then you can be BrendanLoy.com’s official D.C.-area photographer, in addition to being the Washington bureau chief! :)

(more…)

Ha.
Ha!
HA!
MUAHAHAHAHA!

(That was for all my Buffalo readers, especially those at UB. :)

The best part is this picture of two UB fans demanding their coach’s departure — Buffalo has lost 14 in a row, you see — by wearing paper bags over their heads. What I like about it is that the guy on the left appears to be picking his paper-bag nose. :)

Marshall, Toledo, and Northern Illinois proved again today why the BCS system is inherently unfair — and most playoff solutions advocated by sports writers and fans aren’t any better — to schools outside the insiders’ clique of big-name schools and big-time conferences who run college football. As basketball’s Dick Vitale would say, “What about the little guy, baby?”

Check out what three teams from the Mid-American Conference, all of whom have almost literally zero chance of ever playing for the national championship under the current system even if they go undefeated, did today against Top 25 teams from BCS conferences:

Marshall 27, #6 Kansas State 20

Toledo 35, #9 Pittsburgh 31

Northern Illinois 19, #21 Alabama 16

What’s more, the Marshall and Northern Illinois wins were played at the home stadium of the losing major-conference team!

Defending national champion Ohio State, ranked #5, also got pushed to the limit at home today by a MAC team, Bowling Green, eventually winning by just a score of 24-17.

And that’s not all: two other MAC teams pulled off big upsets against ranked teams earlier this season. Northern Illinois beat Maryland, and Bowling Green won at Purdue.

Is the Mid-American Conference superior to the six BCS conferences? Of course not. But do the best teams in that conference deserve a chance to prove themselves on the field against the best teams from the other conferences, with the national championship at stake, just like in basketball? Absolutely.

And if a system could be devised whereby the five “minor” Division 1A conference had that chance, would no-names sometimes upset powerhouses, again just like in basketball, and perhaps even win a stunning championship once every decade or two? Absolutely. That’s what today proved.

What college football needs is not another BCS “tweak,” nor some sort of bowl-centered “BCS tournament,” nor even a straight-up 8-team playoff. What college football needs is a 12- or 16-team playoff, with all 11 conference champions plus one or five at-large teams.

Sure, #1 seeds like Oklahoma would beat #16 seeds like Bowling Green most years, and #2 seeds like Miami would usually crush #15 seeds like Boise State. But not always. And it simply isn’t fair for those teams to be denied the chance to compete. It isn’t a true “national championship” when half the nation’s Division 1A teams are shut out of the competition!

Will this happen? Of course not, because the vested, moneyed interests that run college football are too short-sighted to seriously consider it. They are so caught up in maintaining the status quo, they seemingly fail to recognize that such a playoff would not only be fair and just, it would also be the most lucrative event in all of sports.

Shorten the regular season, forget the bowls, and share the playoff profits with the people who would get screwed by the changes — there’ll be plenty to go around!

Oh, well. I’m climbing down off my soapbox now. The only other thing I have to say is… way to go, MAC!

The remarkable 14-year saga of the spacecraft Galileo will come to a fiery end tomorrow when the good ship descends into Jupiter’s atmosphere.

NASA is crashing Galileo deliberately so it won’t accidentally collide at some future point with the Jovian moon Europa, which may harbor an ocean and possibly even microscopic life. The point is to avoid casting doubt on any future discoveries by contaminating Europa — or any other moon, for that matter — with microbes from Earth that may still exist on Galileo.

Here is a NASA article about Galileo’s history. And here is NASA’s Galileo homepage.

Take it away, Indigo Girls:

How long till my soul gets it right
Can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of Galileo
King of night vision
King of insight

I love that song. :) Anyway… rest in peace, Galileo. (And the same goes for you, Mr. Galilei.)

Look! Conjoined twin Teddy Grahams!

Oregon’s 37-21 win over Michigan today is good news for USC, because it should result in the Trojans being ranked #3 in both national polls next week.

The coaches’ poll already had the Trojans at #3 this week, but the Associated Press sportswriters had placed Michigan in that spot after the Wolverines shut out Notre Dame last Saturday. But the media darling Irish don’t look so impressive after losing again today, and anyway Michigan is no longer undefeated, so the Trojans should be a no-brainer for #3. (Or #2, if Miami loses to Boston College this evening, but that doesn’t look too likely right now; the Hurricanes lead 14-0 early in the second quarter.)

Alas, the Oregon win does not help USC’s strength of schedule, because the Trojans and Ducks do not play each other this year. But hopefully it will help increase respect for the Pac-10 in the national media, which would help USC in the long run. And I think there might be an “opponents’ strength of schedule” component to the BCS, so in that case Oregon’s win helps with the computers, too.

UPDATE Miami just increased its lead to 21-0.

Okay, I really need to cut back on the exclamation points in the titles of my blog posts. Sorry. :)

This news is almost a week old, but I missed it until now: the first theatrical Return of the King trailer will debut next Friday with the New Line Cinema movie Secondhand Lions (which actually opened yesterday, but the ROTK trailer will debut during the movie’s second weekend).

Woohoo!!!

UPDATE: Dammit!!! I missed this, too! (I should really check TheOneRing.net more often.) Well, Happy Birthday anyway, Bilbo and Frodo!

Did I say blogging would be light this weekend? Well, dammit, blogging is more fun than cleaning the apartment… :)

The Detroit Tigers lost their eighth straight this afternoon, falling to 38-116 on the season. All they need to do is lose five of their final eight games, and they’ll break the major-league record for most losses in a season! C’mon, Tigers, you can do it!

In other news, the Red Sox are pretty much out of the AL East race, but in the wild-card race, they’re 2.5 games ahead of the Mariners with 8.5 games left (nine games left for the Sox, eight for the Mariners). But they have no closer, which is a problem.

You see the top headline on the Hartford Courant’s high-school sports page, “Shortell’s TD Lifts Newington,” and you think: “My God, Newington won! YAAAAY!!!” (The Newington High School football team has won ten games in the last eight years.)

Then you click the link to the story about the game, and you realize the headline-writer made a horrible mistake. The first paragraph reads:

Pat Shortell’s 2-yard TD run in the third quarter broke a 14-14 tie as Hall-West Hartford defeated Newington 21-14 in a CCC interdivision football game Friday in Newington.

So the headline should have read, “Shortell’s TD lifts Hall.” Newington falls to 0-2. Dammit.

My photo of Isabel’s spiral cloud bands has proved quite popular with the nerds at Weather Underground: 99 people have rated it, and the average rating is 8.535 (on a scale of one to ten). Woohoo!

The other photos that I posted aren’t quite as popular, but they’re all rated at least 5, which is good. :)

George F. Will, criticizing the Ninth Circuit’s three-judge panel but saying it is just one of many bad actors in the politics of California these days, writes in his latest column that blameworthy parties in California’s fiscal mess include “the governor, the Legislature and the public that elected both.”

Yet the public, Will says, “now thinks of itself, in the modern American manner, as a blameless victim.” That idea leads to this wonderful bit of prose:

The public has repeatedly used the initiative process to mandate spending that prevents sane budgeting. And the public has used this recall to throw a tantrum about what it, the public, has wrought.

Hee hee. I love it. And my dad, Mr. Gnostic Watch, should love this:

The panel of three 9th Circuit judges, the left wing of a left-wing court, illustrates the axiom that the pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.

Of course, I disagree with Will in that I think he puts too much blame on the Ninth Circuit panel and not enough on the U.S. Supreme Court. He says the panel “erroneously overextended” Bush v. Gore’s equal-protection rationale, whereas I think the rationale itself is totally erroneous, and in talking about “overextending” it, we’re just talking about degrees of absurdity.

As I told Andrew on the phone last night, I am unreceptive to arguments about why the California ruling is even worse than Bush v. Gore because, to me, that’s like analyzing the difference between a monkey wearing a baseball cap riding around on a bicycle, and a monkey wearing two baseball caps riding around on a tricycle. They’re both totally absurd, so I don’t really care which one is more absurd, and I don’t think you can honestly say that the person who decided to add a second baseball cap and replace the bicycle with a tricycle is to blame for the absurdity: the person who had the original idea is the one who is really at fault for the whole debacle.

And if you followed that analogy, you deserve some sort of Congressional medal. :) But anyway, the point is, I disagree with Will on that issue, but the column is still quite good (though Maggie Thatcher-haters may not be so fond of it — you’ll see why). And so I must conclude: read the whole thing, as they say.