…about the test post below, Kristy is going to the women’s Final Four tomorrow in Boston, and I’ve dubbed her BrendanLoy.com’s Official Women’s Final Four Correspondent. So hopefully we’ll be getting a few updates from Kristy tomorrow and Tuesday.

LOL! (Hat tip: DrawingDead.)

testing

FYI, some info about the TV schedule (times converted to EST):

…Johnson’s recollections of Princeton’s victory over UCLA in 1996 will be part of a special, “The Moment: 25 Years,” that celebrates CBS’ 25 years of televising the NCAA tournament. It will be on [CBS] Saturday at 3:30 p.m.

Also on the special will be Greg Gumbel looking back at Loyola Marymount’s inspirational run to the Elite Eight in 1990 following the death of Hank Gathers. Jim Nantz recalls the “One Shining Moment” for Michigan State’s Mateen Cleeves in 2000, and Verne Lundquist revisits the game-winning shot by Duke’s Christian Laettner in 1992.

CBS’ Final Four coverage will begin Saturday at 2 p.m. with a “CBS Sports Spectacular” that looks back at college basketball’s 10 greatest games. “The Road to the Final Four” will be on at 3 p.m., followed by “The Moment: 25 Years.” Then at 4 p.m. a two-hour “Final Four Show” will feature Dick Enberg looking back at the UCLA legacy, a piece on Louisiana State and Hurricane Katrina and a 24/7 access look at George Mason’s week.

Mike Tran already knows he has a better NCAA bracket than any of his 217 competitors in this year’s Living Room Times men’s pool. The only question remaining is whether he has the best bracket in Times history.

Tonight’s Final Four games will help decide that. Florida plays George Mason at 6:07 PM; UCLA plays LSU at 8:47 PM. Tran, who clinched the pool last weekend after picking 13 of the Sweet 16, 7 of the Elite Eight and 3 of the Final Four, has Florida and UCLA reaching the title game.

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It was a picture-perfect ending for Brad Miller: the Wolverines lose, and as a result, a Buckeye wins.

Brad Miller, an Ohio State alum who now attends Capital University Law School in Columbus, OH, won the championship of the 2nd annual BrendanLoy.com NIT pool when South Carolina defeated Ohio State’s hated rival, Michigan, in the NIT championship game Thursday night, 76-64. (Here’s a look at Miller’s bracket.)

Miller’s victory came at the expense of USC Class of 1987 alum Gary Kirby, who had led the pool since the tournament’s third day and entered the Final Four as the odds-on favorite to win the pool. But Kirby picked Michigan to win it all, so Miller’s correct pick of the Gamecocks in the title game — which is worth 25 points — was enough to overtake him.

The pool is scored on a 5-7-10-15-20-25 basis. Kirby went 6-for-8 in the first round, 15-for-16 in the second round, and predicted 6 of the quarterfinalists, two of the semifinalists and one of the finalists. But he got the champion wrong, and that did him in. Miller was 5-for-8 in the first round, 13-for-16 in the second round and 5-for-8 in picking the quarterfinalists — all worse than Kirby — and, like Kirby, was 2-for-the Final Four. But he got both finalists and the champion right.

Miller finished with 381 points out of a possible 477; Kirby had 365. Everyone started off wih a “free” 120 points because of first-round byes, so Miller had 261 out of 357 possible “earned” points (73%). That compares favorably to the “earned” point total of the 2005 champion, Tom Keck, who had 166 out of 332 “earned” points last year (50%), demonstrating both the quality of Miller’s picks and the relative predictability of this year’s NIT, which was, for the first time ever, seeded.

Speaking of Keck, the 2003 USC grad and Oregon Health & Science University grad student was rewarded for picking South Carolina to win the NIT for a second year in a row: he made a late surge to finish in third place, with 334 points.

Andrew Long, a 2002 USC grad and Long Beach, CA resident, finished fourth with 326, having picked Louisville to win the tourney. Silver Spring, MD resident Rick Boeckler, uncle of Becky Loy and the odds-on favorite to win this year’s women’s pool, surged into fifth with 325 points because he, too, picked South Carolina.

Miller, Keck and Boeckler are the only contestants who picked the Gamecocks to win the NIT.

Complete standings here and after the jump.

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Was repeat NIT champion South Carolina “one basket away from wearing George Mason’s glass slipper in the Big Dance“? It’s not a totally implausible argument; the Gamecocks certainly did play awfully well in March. (One beef, though: George Mason wasn’t going to be booted for the tourney if South Carolina had beaten Florida in the SEC title game. Either Bradley or Air Force would have been out, not GMU.)

Speaking of the NIT, my apologies for not having the final NIT pool update posted yet. That’s my next task. :)

Ever since I was forced to switch away from MovableType last July, I haven’t been able to make CNN Breaking News alerts post automatically to the blog via e-mail, like I used to. Blogger has a post via e-mail feature, but I didn’t have any way of parsing the alerts to eliminate the random advertising and other junk and displaying only the news, and without that, the alerts make the homepage look mighty ugly.

Not having CNN auto-posts has been annoying, as I find the alerts very helpful on two important counts: they ensure that truly major breaking news (e.g., terrorist attacks, unexpected natural disasters, the Blackout of 2003, etc.) always appears on my blog quickly, even if I’m asleep at the switch or unable to post and the guestbloggers are otherwise occupied; and, less urgently but more frequently, they create a forum where commenters can discuss news events that are significant enough to merit an e-mail alert but not sufficiently interesting to me personally that I would otherwise post about them.

Anyway, I have them working again, through a ridiculous bit of fancy footwork involving Blogger, MySQL, cron jobs and shell scripting. It’s quite possibly the least elegant solution imaginable; it will make computer programmers and decent scripters cringe. But it’s what I know how to do, and it seems to be working. (Here’s a test post.) So, the next time CNN e-mails out an alert, it should—if all goes well—appear in this space.

Technical details that no one except true dorks will care about—but that might come in handy someday if someone is trying to figure out how to do something like this, and finds this post via Google—after the jump.

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On Thursday I installed Akismet, a comment-spam-blocking plugin for WordPress, and it seems to be doing a good job; it’s caught nearly 400 attempted pieces of spam in less than two days! Even more importantly, using it instead of my previous anti-spam plugin, lr2Spam, seems to eliminate the problem whereby some users of older browsers (WebTV and the AOL browser in particular) were unable to comment at all.

But sometimes, spam isn’t so bad. In going through the list of blocked comments (double-checking to make sure nothing legitimate was getting caught by mistake), I found three spam comments that are really quite funny, in a random, anarchic sort of way:

“Hebrew hashed whitely Mexicans blanking Morse Corvus affricates”

“NATO maniacs slayer commenced axolotl buffetings”

and of course

“Cheney?refers:disillusioning.stoutly,mutations thrones unprovability!Dartmouth”

Heh.