From what I understand, one of our team’s four consistent triple-digit bowlers (Brian) isn’t coming tonight, so — if all goes according to form — the fourth spot on the Beefeater scorecard will be up for grabs between me, Becky and Meg. It being the first week of competitive scoring, that means at least one of us needs to bowl at least one decent game during the course of the evening, or else the team’s standing will suffer. Will we do it? Will I set another career high? Will I finally get my first-ever turkey? Stay tuned! :)

P.S. Yeah, our team name is “Beefeater.” Well, technically it’s “Fun Nights Start With Beefeater”; yeah, you can blame Joel for that mouthful. Personally, I wanted to be either the “Bush Pushers” or the “Irish Chain Gang” (you may remember the chain from last season), but Joel picked the “Beefeater” moniker. Oh, well. GO BEEFEATER!!!

P.P.S. Yes, I will be wearing my lucky Gonzaga shirt again. It’s in the dryer right now.

If anybody (well, any Notre Dame student) needs tickets to the ND-DePaul game next Saturday, I have two (mine and Becky’s) available, since we’ll be going to Saint Louis for the MVC tourney. Just e-mail me, or leave a comment letting me you’re interested.

We will, however, be going to the Marquette game this Saturday — a crucial game for ND’s efforts to qualify for the Big East tournament. Anyone else going?

P.S. In other news, it’s a big night for USC tonight. If Washington State loses to Cal (gametime 8:30 PM) and USC beats Oregon (gametime 10:30 PM), the Trojans will clinch at least the #6 seed in the Pac-10 tournament — which means they don’t have to play an opening-round game, and thus will merely need to win three straight games, instead of four, to qualify for an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament. (Pac-10 scores here; standings here.)

P.P.S. In The Fieldhouse’s wrap-up of Tuesday’s UConn-Notre Dame game, “Teds” provides yet another excellent example of Mike Brey’s inability to coach:

An interesting sidelight on possession length: during Notre Dame’s 18-0 run, they scored on seven consecutive possessions. In the course of those possessions, the average amount of time used before taking the first shot was just over 11 seconds, with 23 seconds representing the longest stretch that the Irish held the ball to work for a shot. Conversely, in the team’s final eight possessions over the last 6:30 of regulation (excluding Falls’ missed jumper from the corner in the closing seconds, when ND was forced to work quickly), they held the ball an average of over 27 seconds before shooting. In all, there were five trips among those final eight in which Notre Dame burned the shot clock under five seconds before acting; they scored zero points on those possessions. Perhaps Connecticut’s defensive presence (or lack thereof) played a role in the shift in offensive tempo, but the Irish did themselves no favors in the final minutes of regulation by getting away from what had led the charge and falling into the familiar late-game trap of what amounted to “prevent offense”.

That’s more than “interesting,” it’s damning. One of Notre Dame’s problems all season — easily recognizable to any fan, but apparently not to the team’s coach — has been the tendency to stand around the perimeter, dribbling and passing the ball uselessly, wasting time and then finally starting a legitimate offensive possession with about 10 seconds left on the shot clock. (Either that, or never bothering to attempt anything inside the arc at all, instead shooting random unnecessary three-pointers with 15 or 20 on the shot clock.) Yet here we had a situation where — finally! — the Irish weren’t either wasting time or taking bad shots, but were instead, y’know, running a legitimate offense, at a reasonably fast pace. And, lo and behold, it worked! So what does Mike Brey do? Tell them to stop it, and go back to the old “strategy” that begat their previous eight conference losses. Brilliant, Mike. Brilliant.

Fire Mike Brey.

The governor of Illinois isn’t very hip:

SPRINGFIELD — Gov. Rod Blagojevich wasn’t in on the joke.

The Democratic governor says he didn’t realize “The Daily Show” was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview with the show.

The interview focused on his executive order requiring pharmacies to fill prescriptions for emergency birth control.

The “Daily Show” interviewer referred to Blagojevich as “Governor Smith” and asked if he was — quote — “the gay governor.”

At one point, Blagojevich turned to an aide to ask if the interviewer was teasing him or serious.

Blagojevich told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Wednesday that he had never seen “The Daily Show” before doing the interview, which aired two weeks ago.

Heh.

UPDATE: More here, here and here.

(more…)

For anyone who wants to avoid spoilers about tonight’s women’s figure skating results, you might want to shut down your computer now, and not turn it back on until you’ve seen the results on NBC’s Olympic broadcast tonight (probably around 11:59 PM).

Sasha Cohen — that saucy little minx :) — is about to skate, and whatever happens, the result is sure to be plastered all over every news and sports website on the Internet. Either she holds onto her lead from the short program and gives the U.S. its highest-profile Olympic victory of the Torino games, or else she blows the lead and loses on the big stage yet again. Big news either way.

For my part, I won’t post the result here until it’s been broadcast (or if I do, I’ll use invisible spoiler text again), so BrendanLoy.com is safe — though of course I can’t vouch for what people might say in the comment section.

On the other hand, if you want to follow the results in real time, click here or, for results plus descriptions of how each program went, here.

UPDATE, 4:45 PM: I originally posted the result here (at 4:35 PM) in “invisible spoiler text,” but at least one person said it wasn’t “invisible” on his computer (sorry!!), so I’m going to try something else…

UPDATE, 4:50 PM: If you want to read a BrendanLoy.com update about the results, click here.

President Bush is in town.

P.S. WNDU has a photo, taken by Notre Dame Law Professor Sean O’Brien, of Air Force One flying over campus:

(Hat tip: Dmytro.)

“I want to watch the figure skating, because I really want Slutskaya to beat Sasha Cohen.” –Becky

“What are you, some sort of communist?” –Brendan

Balthaser Online Inc. to world: All your Internet technologies are belong to us. (Hat tip: Dane.)

P.S. ClickBrain: “The US Patent office is staffed with a bunch of complete idiots. How could they not possibly see the prior use of this, the obviousness of this and the complete lack of invention here.” (via Technorati)

I alluded yesterday, jokingly, to the idea of attending the Missouri Valley Conference tourney in St. Louis — a.k.a. “Arch Madness” — which starts a week from today. (The important games, i.e. the quarterfinals, start a week from tomorrow.) Predictably, as soon as I wrote it out, I started to take the idea more seriously. I suggested it to Becky, and to my mild surprise, she took it seriously too. Seven awesome basketball games in three days, a battle for supremacy in one of the best conferences in the country, all just a six-hour drive away — why not?

Becky told me to calculate a budget for the weekend and then we’d talk. So I did. With hotel, gas, food, etc., plus two $64 tickets (which seem to still be available), the total comes to around $500. So the question becomes, will “Arch Madness” be sufficiently awesome to justify adding $500 to our pay-it-off-this-summer debt load? (Not to mention missing the ND-DePaul game, and taking the risk that Becky might start suffering “basketball fatigue” a week before Selection Sunday?)

Becky is amenable. I dunno… I’m still debating. But as long-time readers know, the inherent nuttiness of the idea won’t dissuade me. This won’t even crack the Top 5 list of craziest random last-minute mini-trips that I’ve taken to attend miscellaneous events around the country. :)

UPDATE: We’re going. :) Just bought the tickets.

On the advice of Kyle Whelliston (of Mid-Majority fame), we’re sitting in the Creighton section. He says the Bluejay faithful are “notoriously the craziest fans in the league.” Adopting Creighton, at least provisionally, as “our team” makes sense anyway — Creighton was the first MVC team I ever rooted for, having picked them as a #10 seed in the 2001 pool (they lost), and then again as a #12 seed in 2002 on my longstanding “keep picking your chosen underdog until they actually pull it off” theory (see also: Gonzaga). As a result, Creighton’s double-overtime first-round win over Florida was one of my favorite moments of the 2002 tourney; see photos here. (That same year, Southern Illinois went to the Sweet 16 — which I had also predicted — and my infatuation with the MVC was officially born.)

Anyway… Arch Madness, here we come!