T pins bring the glory back to maryland

Tolliver, the freshman point guard, hits a game-tying three-pointer with 6 seconds left, keeping Maryland (and Rick Boeckler) alive!

UPDATE: MARYLAND WINS! Boeckler is the pool champion again! The Trojan Curse lives!

P.S. Or perhaps I should say, the “Vicki Lopez Curse” lives! Counting the last two Oscar pools, this is now the third time Vicki has gone into the final event of a contest on this site with a chance to win… and fallen just short, either because the wrong film won Best Picture or the wrong team won the national championship game.

Full, final pool update a bit later.

md ties it. what they lack in brute they make up in speed.

Is the “Trojan Curse” about to strike again? Pool contestant and former USC student Victoria Lopez needs Duke to win, and the Blue Devils seemed to have the game well in hand, but Maryland has come from 13 points behind to take a 1-point lead with five minutes left in the national championship game!

This sounds about as plausible as Mr. T playing Reepicheep, but apparently it’s actually real:

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India (AFP) - An Indian movie director said he hopes to persuade Paris Hilton to play the role of Nobel laureate and prospective Catholic Saint, Mother Teresa, in an upcoming film.

“Her features resemble Mother Teresa,” director T. Rajeevnath told AFP from the southwestern coastal state of Kerala.

The filmmaker said Hilton is on his shortlist after a computer-generated image showed a close facial match between the hotel heiress and the Albanian-born nun.

This won’t cause any controversy at all.

In less than four hours, at 1:02:03 AM Wednesday morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. Heh. (Hat tip: Fark, Jon Schoenwetter and Andrew Hiller.)

Of course, if you prefer to write out timestamps in the European style, you may want to wait until 29 days, 1 hour, 59 minutes and 58 seconds later, when it’s 06/05/04 03:02:01. :)

Call me the duke good luck charm. 34-23

It’s Duke 11, Maryland 8 with 12:24 left in the first half of the women’s NCAA championship game.

A reminder: if Maryland wins, Rick Boeckler of Silver Spring, MD wins the Living Room Times women’s pool, his second win in four years. If Duke wins, Victoria Lopez of Hoboken, NJ, the first-ever win for a USC Trojan in a Times pool.

Gary Kirby lost the 2nd annual BrendanLoy.com NIT pool when South Carolina beat Michigan in the title game, but he can win a consolation prize if Duke beats Maryland tonight in the women’s NCAA championship.

A victory by the Blue Devils would give Kirby the best combined point total in the three basketball pools hosted on this site in 2006: the Living Room Times men’s pool, Living Room Times women’s pool, and BrendanLoy.com NIT pool.

If Maryland wins, however, Rick Boeckler will not only win the women’s pool, he’ll also have the best combined three-pool score. Scenarios after the jump.

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Today is my fourth blogaversary… and I’m celebrating the occasion with wedding photos!

That’s right, it’s been four years since this blog sprung into existence with the posting of those four oh-so-profound words: “This is a test.” Meanwhile, it only seems like it’s been four years since I first uttered another set of fateful words that have been haunting me ever since: “Stay tuned for many, many more [wedding] photos in the coming days!” That was December 31; today is April 4. Getting Becky’s and my massive cache of wedding photos organized and uploaded has proven, for various reasons, to be a much more protracted, time-consuming task than originally anticipated… but, a couple of weeks ago, I had a brainstorm: I knew the wedding photos were really and truly going to be ready soon, and I figured, what better day to finish the job than my blogaversary? So I set that as my goal, and lo and behold, I met my deadline! The wedding photos are finally online!

More on that in a moment, but first, back to the blogaversary. Yup, it was four years ago today — April 4, 2002 — that I signed up for an account on something called “Blogger” and began tinkering with it, and publishing from it. At the time, I had no delusions of citizen-journalist grandeur, no thoughts of parlaying my website to any sort of fame, no ambition to gain an audience of thousands for my daily commentary on anything and everything that interests me. No, I was just looking for something that would make it easier to keep my website — which was geared toward friends and family — up-to-date with fresh content. (Related to that, I was also looking for something that would make it easier for me to post a sort of travel log on my impending cross-country train trip via New Orleans; note the odd coincidence, in light of later events, that my one and only visit to the Big Easy helped inspire me to start blogging in the first place.)

Anyway, when my “conservative friend Andrew” (that’s what I called him back then; if you’d told me that a few years later, some people would consider me a conservative, and also, that Andrew would be my Best Man, I’d think you were crazy on both counts — sorta like if you’d told me the New York Times would one day report on how much I liked to watch The Weather Channel when I was a little kid) mentioned this newfangled web trend calling “blogging,” which was being used largely by conservatives who felt unrepresented by the mainstream media, I didn’t give a damn about the ideological aspect of it, but the technical side sounded pretty promising. And so, on April 6, 2002, two days after those April 4 “test” posts that constituted the official launch of my blog, I wrote:

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! … The most important change…is what you’re reading at this very moment: my new “blogger” journal.

“Blogs” are a growing phenomenon on the Web these days. They are basically personal bulletin boards. The owner can post whatever he/she wants, whenever he/she wants, and it will immediately show up on his/her website. The technical aspects of the uploading process are taken care of by Blogger.com, which makes life much easier for the blog owner — in this case, me.

Unlike the tradition[al] method of updating my website — typing out articles in HTML format, playing with fonts, tinkering with the layout, etc. — blogging makes it very easy to update my website instantly, whenever I feel like it. The goal here is to actually keep my website fresh, with updates at least every couple of days, which is almost impossible to do with HTML, because I don’t have enough time. But with a blogger, I only need 5 minutes a day, if that!

I have to interrupt myself here, to laugh at a couple of different things. First of all, I made the same mistake that the Observer made last fall, referring to my blog as a “blogger.” Heh. Yeah, I wasn’t exactly up on the terminology yet. Secondly, “updates at least every couple of days” … spending “5 minutes a day” on the blog… LOL!!! Little did I know! Four years later, the blog is my chief hobby, practically a full-time job… my passion and my cross to bear… a blessing and a curse, consuming far too many of my waking hours, yet providing me with endless entertaiment, amusement and enrichment … cue Gandalf: “He hates and loves the blog, as he hates and loves himself”… :) The point is, I never could have dreamed — and clearly didn’t — what the blog would become. It’s amazing how much things can change in four years.

Anyway, continuing with the April 2002 post:

…I don’t plan to use my blog for ideological purposes, though. (Ashcroft sucks!) Mostly I’ll be blogging in my traditional narcissistic style, babbling about inconsequential details of my life, as if anyone really cares. :)

Well, at least I got that last part right. :)

Speaking of which… did someone say something about wedding photos? Yes, they’re online! All of them! Honestly! Finally!

I’ve organized the photos into three different levels of detail, in hopes of not overwhelming casual readers while at the same time giving friends and family, especially those who were at the wedding, the opportunity to view our many wonderful photos in all their glory. To that end, here are your three wedding-photo-viewing options:

• A single, one-page “highlights” gallery containing 162 photos from the wedding and all wedding-related festivities. Unlike the other galleries, these photos have captions. This is the album I presume the vast majority of my readers will want to look at.

• Sixteen topical photo galleries containing a total of 804 photos, separated into “rehearsal and rehearsal dinner,” “pre-ceremony portrait pictures,” “wedding ceremony,” etc. These galleries will presumably be of interest mostly to family and friends, especially those who were there.

• All 1,781 of our photos — well, all internet-suitable photos, anyway :) — organized chronologically, with full-size versions of each photo available for download. I can’t imagine that anyone except wedding guests will be interested in slogging through this bohemoth gallery. The idea is, if you want a full-size version of a photo, e.g. a cute picture of yourself, you can get it here. Also, if you want to see how our army of digital camera-wielding guests produced about a dozen near-simultaneous pictures from different angles of, say, the sand ceremony, this is the gallery where you can see that.

Included in all of these photo galleries are the pictures from our official photographer, Steve Nissle — and yes, in case you’re wondering, we do have permission, copyright-wise, to make full-size versions of his pictures available on my website. We went over that in detail at the time we hired him, and paid for a higher-end package in order to be able to do that. The ability to put our wedding photos online was, for obvious reasons, a very important priority for us.

That said, an awful lot of these pictures, including the “highlights,” come not from Nissle, but from our various friends and relatives with cameras. I can’t thank you guys enough! Nissle did a great job, but it wouldn’t have been the same without all the pictures y’all took, too. Photo credits are given on the individual image pages. (I said “Photo courtesy of…” rather than “Photo by…” because all I actually know for sure is what camera was used to take the picture, not necessarily who took the picture.)

Incidentally, I think I weeded out all the non-Internet-suitable pictures (those of you who were at the jacuzzi know what I’m talking about), but if there are any potentially embarrassing ones that I missed, PLEASE let me know!

Anyway… Happy Blogaversary to me… and Happy Wedding Photos for everyone!! Enjoy!!

This concludes your Tom DeLay resignation watch as DeLay is resigning from Congress at the conclusion of his present term.

Thank you, that is all.

USC eyes Notre Dame for law dean. No, not that USC:

Notre Dame University law professor Walter F. Pratt Jr. has been offered the position of dean of the University of South Carolina School of Law, Pratt confirmed Monday. …

Pratt has taught law at Notre Dame Law School since 1986. …

The Top 100 law schools ranked by U.S. News & World Report placed USC at No. 97, tied with Georgia State University, the University of Mississippi and the University of the Pacific. [Notre Dame is tied for #22. -ed.]

Last year, USC’s law school was ranked No. 90, and in 2004, No. 78.

Pratt said he sees “terrific opportunities� at the law school.

“There will be a chance to really make a difference there, and I would look forward to the challenges.”

So, does that mean he’s taking the job? The article doesn’t really say. Anyway, here’s his NDLS profile page.

Living Room Times men’s pool champion Mike Tran finally got one wrong — more’s the pity for his beloved Bruins.

The 2004 UCLA alum, who had missed only five NCAA Tournament picks since the first round — and only two since the second round, both of them upsets by George Mason that virtually no one predicted — watched firsthand Monday at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis as Florida beat UCLA in the national championship game, the opposite of what he had predicted.

It was a Florida victory that clinched the pool championship for Tran eight days ago, but this Gator win means the second-year Notre Dame law student falls just short of the all-time record for most points in a Times men’s pool, and merely ties the record for largest margin of victory in any Times pool. Fellow NDLS 2L Brian Kiolbasa, who had 362 points last year, holds onto the former record, and Justin Vale of Rockville, Connecticut, who won by 47 points in the 2003 men’s pool, keeps a share of the latter record. Tran finishes with 356 points and, like Vale, a 47-point margin over his nearest competitor.

Still, despite the loss, Tran’s predictive performance is, by any reasonable measure, the most impressive in the history of Living Room Times pools. In a year of upsets that busted most people’s brackets, Tran got 13 of the Sweet 16, seven of the Elite Eight, three of the Final Four and both of the national finalists right. He topped Lou Ruggiero’s 354-point total, which had stood as the record for nine years until Kiolbasa beat it last year, and he finished just six points short of Kiolbasa’s mark in a year when the median score was the lowest in Times history, indicative of the difficulty of predicting this year’s tournament. By contrast, Kiolbasa’s 362-point performance, though very impressive in its own right, occurred in a year when two #1 seeds met for the championship and the median pool score was 44 points higher than this year, indicative of a more predictable tournament.

Moreover, Tran clinched the pool championship before the Final Four had even tipped off, wrapping up his win on the tournament’s second weekend despite an unprecedented diversity of brackets to compete against — 218 contestants, easily the most in Times history. He shattered Kiolbasa’s record 110-point margin over the pool median, earning a remarkable 148-point edge. And his bracketological success earned him national recognition, something no previous Times contestant can claim.

Finishing a distant second to Tran’s 356 points was 2002 USC alum Andrew Long, a resident of Long Beach, CA, with 309 points. Unlike Tran, who had UCLA winning the championship, Long correctly predicted that the Bruins would lose in the title game — but he gets no credit for that in the pool, because he had them losing to UConn, not Florida. This is the second consecutive Top 3 finish for Long, who would have won last year’s men’s pool if Illinois had defeated North Carolina in the title game. He finishes 101 points ahead of the median score, which would have been enough to win 16 of the 19 Times pools from 1996 through 2005, but not this one.

Long is followed by James Madsion grad Ben Eng (a.k.a. “We Todd”) of Los Angeles, in third place with 297 points, and Adam DeGuire of Cleveland, in fourth with 280. DeGuire would have finished third, ahead of Eng, if UCLA had won.

University of Virginia student Logan Pugh finished fifth with 272 points; Ball State grad M.T. Swanson of La Porte, IN wound up sixth with 271; Middlebury College grad Drew Harrison, currently living in Hangzhou, China, came in seventh with 268; and a pair of Huskies — Washington grad David Kreutz of Seattle, WA and UConn grad Matt Scarborough (a.k.a. “LaundraMatt”) of Phoenix, AZ — tied for eighth with 267.

Rounding out the Top Ten, with 264 points apiece, are “Irish Devil” Jay Barasch, a USC undergrad and Duke law alum who now lives in Albuquerque, NM, and Marysville-Pilchuck High School senior Andrew Kreutz of Marysville, WA. The Kreutz brothers are the first siblings to finish in the Top 10 of the same pool. (Previously, Sandy Pilz finished tenth in the 2005 women’s pool in which his son, Danny Pilz, finished second; and Russell Caplin finished tenth in the 2003 women’s pool won by his uncle, Rick Boeckler. Also, Boeckler will be in the Top 10 in this year’s women’s pool with his nephew by marriage, Soren Hammerschmidt.)

The only contestant who picked Florida to win is Marc LaPlante of Brookline, MA, a St. Bonaventure grad, who jumped from 46th place to 19th as a result of the Gators’ win. LaPlante is also the only contestant who picked George Mason to reach the Final Four.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

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I rarely actually write complaint letters — I often contemplate it, but usually lack the motivation to actually do it — but WSBT, the local CBS affiliate, aired a sufficiently ridiculous “news report” this evening that I was inspired to write the following e-mail to their news director:

Ms. Sauer,

I’m writing to express my disappointment with your station’s report on tonight’s late edition about the MoveOn.org ad campaign against Chris Chocola. The report was a classic example of shoddy journalism placing “balance” ahead of the truth. You told us how MoveOn said Chocola voted, and you told us how Chocola said he voted, but you never told us how Chocola actually voted. Past Congressional votes are a matter of fact, not opinion. They are also a matter of public record. Therefore, it’s your job, as journalists, to look up the facts and inform the public — not just quote the Left’s opinion and the Right’s opinion and call it even.

It’s especially absurd that you quoted Chocola as saying that he voted for “what he calls the Refinery Act.” What do you mean “what he calls”? That’s either its name, or it isn’t, and he either voted for it, or he didn’t! Did the reporter research this question at all, or did you just figure it was sufficient to give your viewers “both sides” without actually getting to the truth?

As the election approaches, I hope you will take more seriously your responsibility to inform the public of crucial facts, and not just serve as a mouthpiece for propagandists on both sides.

Sincerely,
Brendan Loy
South Bend, IN

Harumph.