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!

Amid all this caption contest silliness, here are four really nice Brendan & Becky photos from Nissle’s collection. The second one is, I think, my favorite of all the 1,909 wedding-related pictures sitting in my iPhoto Library right now…

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you pay the big bucks for an official photographer. :)

P.S. Much more to come, as I keep saying. The wedding “highlights” gallery is all ready to go. (I got it down to 160 photos, so that’ll be 4 rows of 40 thumbnails. Apologies to those with dial-up modems.) It’s just a matter of having a sufficiently robust server to upload it to. The new server should be online tomorrow… so by the end of the weekend, if not sooner, I hope to have those photos online.

The wild, weird and wacky Missouri Valley Conference keeps getting more and more interesting.

For weeks, the assumption was that the MVC, the nation’s best mid-major conference, had a good shot at an astounding four NCAA bids: Northern Iowa, Creighton, Southern Illinois and Wichita State. Then, lo and behold, Missouri State played its way into consideration, and the whispers began: could the MVC get five teams in? The conference’s .500 performance in BracketBusters caused some to lose faith, but in this year of the “weak bubble,” others kept talking about five bids.

Then yesterday, disaster struck. Southern Illinois lost at Evansville, a conference bottom-feeder. It was the Salukis’ fifth loss in seven games, and needless to say, it seriously hurt their at-large profile. “The Five-Bid Valley: wonderful idea in theory, but it proved to be a complicated Rube Goldberg device with far too many moving parts,” wrote Kyle Whelliston at The Mid-Majority. “Last night, the spoon-lever designed to move the golden egg from the mini-seesaw to the hamster wheel was smashed to pieces.” Heh. Bottom line: without a deep run in the conference tourney, SIU is probably out.

So, does that mean the MVC is back down to, at most, four bids? Not so fast! Check out this final score from tonight’s action: Bradley 71, Northern Iowa 49 — at Northern Iowa.

Are you kidding me? It’s awesome, baby! :) Bradley, sitting in sixth place in the conference standings, is now officially a serious at-large contender in its own right. (Northern Iowa is considered the conference’s one mortal lock for an NCAA bid, so this loss really only hurts the Panthers’ seeding, not their tourney chances.)

So… the “Fab Five”… Northern Iowa, Creighton, Wichita State, Missouri State and Bradley? Could be. One thing’s for certain: the MVC tournament, next Thursday through Sunday, is going to be nuts. I’m half-tempted to suggest to Becky that we make a road-trip to St. Louis. :)

P.S. Also tonight, Wichita State clinched a share of the regular-season conference title. Congrats to the Shockers, who, if they haven’t joined NIU in the “mortal lock” category yet, certainly are close.

P.P.S. For more on MVC hoops, visit The Valley Ledger.

Bad news from Iraq:

The attempt to drag Iraq’s Shiites and Sunnis into a bloody civil war intensifies. The dome of the Shiite Al Askari Mosque in Samarra, or Golden Mosque, has been destroyed by a well planned and well executed commando-style raid of insurgents dressed as Iraqi police. According to CNN, “A group of men dressed like Iraqi police commandos set off explosives.” It appears suspects are now in custody, “Ten people — all dressed as Iraqi police commandos.”

The likely culprit is al-Qaeda in Iraq, or groups underneath the newly created Mujahedeen Shura Council. Zarqawi has desired a sectarian war between Shiites and Sunnis since his entry into the conflict, as he clearly stated in his letter to Osama bin Laden. al-Qaeda in Iraq has gone through great pains of late to deny this, and will very likely not take credit in such an overt attack on the Shiite faithful. Silence and uncertainty will play into their hand, and feed conspiracy theories on who committed such an act. But the nature of the target and the sophistication of such an attack undeniably points to al-Qaeda. …

This is a critical juncture in the development of Iraq. The timing of the attack was well-designed, as the negotiations to for the Iraqi government are still underway. Not only is Zarqawi trying to stoke a sectarian war, he is attempting to alienate the Sunni political parties from the government. The response of the Shiite and Sunni politicians and clerical leadership is vital to the outcome of this dire situation, and initial reactions are encouraging.

The reaction on the street, however, is not so encouraging:

[The bombing] set[] off a day of almost unparalleled sectarian fury in cities and towns across Iraq as protesting mobs took to the streets to chant for revenge and set fire to dozens of Sunni mosques. …

Shiite militia members flooded the streets of Baghdad, firing rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at Sunni mosques as Iraqi Army soldiers — called out to stop the violence — stood helpless nearby. By the day’s end, mobs had struck 27 Sunni mosques in the capital, killing three imams and kidnapping a fourth, Interior Ministry officials said.

In the southern Shiite city of Basra, Shiite militia members destroyed at least two Sunni mosques, killing an imam, and launched an attack on the headquarters of Iraq’s best-known Sunni Arab political party. In Samarra, thousands of people crowded the courtyard of the Golden Mosque, some weeping and kissing the stones, others angrily chanting “Our blood and souls we sacrifice for you imams!”

Iraq the Model has more. (Hat tip: InstaPundit, who observes, “If Danish cartoons could create riots worldwide against the defamers of Islam, you’d think that bombing of mosques would create anti-terrorist marches all over.”)

Whilst meat workers in Nebraska collect millions from legalized gambling, thieves on the other side of the pond have stolen £25 million (~$43 million) from a security company in Kent, England. Men posing as police officers visited the company and lured the manager outside where he was taken captive. His family was also taken captive simultaneously:

At about the same time, the manager’s wife and young son were visited at their home by two men who said they were police officers and told them there had been an accident involving the manager. The wife and son were taken from their home, police said.

Police (the real police) are hoping members of the community can help them find the culprits of what is one of the largest heists in UK history (although not the largest, which occurred in late 2004).

In other news, Firewall starring Harrison Ford was #6 at the box office last weekend.

Posted by Brian (Briandot)

Hey, it could happen. (Projected bracket.)

Speaking of projections, here’s a site that looks at what a ton of other sites all over the Web are projecting in terms of NCAA seeds.

Also worth checking out: The Bracket Board, for its handy bubble breakdown.

P.S. Ken Pomeroy: “Notre Dame will be the best team left out of March Madness. In fact, there will probably be 5 to 10 at-large teams that are worse than the Irish.” (Hat tip: Nathan Evangelista.)

Sean and my dad…

From left: David, Mike, Andrew and Sean.

Fire away!

All right, now that the official wedding photos are finally here, it’s time to get on with the caption contests. But first… I’m declaring Alasdair the winner of contest #13. Honorable mentions to JO and my dad’s 3rd.

Now, on to the new contest…

That would be Becky with her sister and matron of honor, Jen, just after the ceremony.

Suggestions?