The Notre Dame men’s basketball team’s latest effort to prove it can win on the road is off to a rocky start. The #22-ranked Irish (4-2 in the Big East, 16-3 overall) trail unranked St. John’s (2-4 in the Big East, 11-8 overall), 44-33 late in the first half.

After this game and Saturday’s home date with Villanova, Notre Dame (13-0 at home, 1-1 on neutral sites, 0-2 on the road) has three consecutive Big East road games, two of them against better teams than St. John’s. So if we don’t win this one, I’m going to be officially worried.

P.S. Among this season’s previous home losses by St. John’s: 68-59 to UConn, 78-65 to Illinois State, and 92-60 to Maryland — a team Notre Dame beat on a neutral court. So it’s not like the Red Storm are invincible at home.

UPDATE: It’s 49-41 at the half.

UPDATE 2: Someone must have told Mike Brey that BrendanLoy.com was losing faith in him, because he apparently gave quite a halftime speech. :) His boys have opened the second half on an 11-0 run and lead 52-49. Go Irish!

UPDATE 3: It wasn’t enough. St. John’s 71, Notre Dame 68, final. Yikes. Now 0-3 on the road.

Notre Dame is looking more and more like a paper tiger. It’s easy to inflate your record by winning a lot of home games over teams like Elon and Winston-Salem State. It’s hard to win on the road. Notre Dame has done a lot of the easy and not very much of the hard.

UPDATE 4: Maybe it isn’t Mike Brey’s fault… maybe it’s mine. Maybe I jinxed the Irish when I wrote earlier today, “[H]ow big does the February 24 game at the Joyce Center, #22 Notre Dame vs. #15 Marquette, loom right now? … Knock on wood, but it’s not inconceivable that Marquette @ ND could have Big East regular-season championship implications. I may just add it to my countdown sidebar.”

Well, I just removed it from my countdown sidebar. Hopefully that’ll undo the jinx. :)

Y’think we’ll be hearing about this in the State of the Union tonight?

A second U.S. aircraft carrier strike group now steaming toward the Middle East is Washington’s way of warning Iran to back down in its attempts to dominate the region, a top U.S. diplomat said here Tuesday.

Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, ruled out direct negotiations with Iran and said a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran was “not possible” until Iran halts uranium enrichment.

“The Middle East isn’t a region to be dominated by Iran. The Gulf isn’t a body of water to be controlled by Iran. That’s why we’ve seen the United States station two carrier battle groups in the region,” Burns said in an address to the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, an influential think-tank.

“Iran is going to have to understand that the United States will protect its interests if Iran seeks to confront us,” Burns continued.

This reminds me of something I was thinking the other day. Perhaps I’ve been watching too much 24 and Jericho, so I’ve got nukes on the brain, but: suppose, God forbid, a nuclear bomb went off tomorrow in an American city, and two days later, President Bush came on TV and said, “We have intelligence that Iran is behind these attacks, and we will retaliate.” Would you believe him? Would you at least have doubts? I’m talking not to the liberals so much — I know you guys would at least have doubts — I’m talking to the conservatives, the hawks, the people who (like me) supported both the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq. If such a ghastly scenario occurred, would you have sufficient faith in both the honesty of the Bush Administration and the accuracy of our intelligence services that you’d feel 100% confident when the bombs start falling on Tehran that we aren’t being led astray, again?

Because I don’t think I would.

P.S. To clarify… I don’t mean that I fear Bush would orchestrate a conspiracy to set off a nuke in order to implicate Iran, obviously. Nor do I even mean that I fear Bush would lie about who set off the hypothetical nuke. I just mean that, after the Iraq WMD intelligence debacle and the general tendency of this administration to fudge things a bit, I don’t know if anything Bush could say would be sufficient to convince me that we’re really, really positive it was Iran — which would obviously be necessary to justify, oh I dunno, a nuclear counterstrike.

I asked Becky this question, and she said confirmation from other countries’ intelligence services — I think she cited Israel, the U.K. and Germany, in that order — would help. Yeah, it would. A different president would help, too.

If Tom Cruise is Christ, does that mean a secret society will need to be created to protect Suri Curise from the, uh, Thetan version of Opus Dei?

I don’t know what it has to do with global warming, but I love this photo, currently positioned above this story on Drudge’s homepage:

Squeak! Ribbit. Squeak! Heh.

P.S. “Men, riding dragons, throwing wolves at maggots…”

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… crazy tax write-offs. (Hat tip: Kristin.) The highlight, I think, is the Amish taxpayer’s attempt to deduct the cost of his “pimped out buggy.”

Also, one guy tried to claim a deduction for doggie daycare. Hey, I like where this is going! I want a deduction for the mental pain & anguish of coming home after a long day of work and finding that Robbie had an accident in the guest room. Or how about this mess I encountered yesterday in the living room, after Robbie decided it would be fun to dig through a bag of papers and other such trash that I had left by the door:

No, the cat was not in the bag.

Yeah, I think that should definitely be a deduction right there.

(Former) Notre Dame point guard Kyle McAlarney, arrested for marijuana possession last month, has been suspended for at least this semester, according to his mother:

Notre Dame point guard Kyle McAlarney was suspended from school for his arrest last month on a marijuana possession charge, his mother said Tuesday.

Janice McAlarney said her son was told Monday that he could not continue to attend classes this semester. She said she’s not sure what the suspension means for his future.

“All I know is my son was suspended yesterday from school and he’s headed home,” she said from her home in Staten Island, N.Y. “I don’t know anything else beyond that. All I know is I’m ashamed of how they did this. … I’m ashamed of the university. My son is a great kid. He did not deserve this. The punishment did not fit the crime.”

University officials declined to comment, citing privacy rules. (Hat tip: Mark West.)

(more…)

Fark.com: “Super Bowl to cost US employers $800 million, according to the Department of Pulling Numbers Out of Our Ass.” Heh. (Here’s the story.)

The speech President Bush won’t give:

The State of the Union is a disaster. I did my best, but I made mistakes, and my best wasn’t good enough.

At this point, Bush leads the entire U.S. government in a showstopping musical number.

(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

Come to think of it, this brings to mind a poll possibility:

Incidentally, it looks like the State of the Union Drinking Game won’t happen. For one thing, interest appears limited. (Limited interest in getting sloshed on a Tuesday night? I know — shocking. But c’mon, people, we’re 3Ls!) For another thing, due to my own laziness over the weekend, Becky’s and my apartment remains far too messy to have company over, with little hope of fixing that problem by 9pm.

So, I guess Becky and I will be watching Bush’s speech alone and — gasp — sober. ;)

Mickey Kaus asks the question.

The musical “Dreamgirls” led today’s Academy Awards contenders with eight nominations, but was shut out in the best picture category for which it had been considered a potential front-runner. Visit CNN for the latest.

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: So much for no surprises. The nominees for Best Picture are Babel, The Departed, Letters From Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen. No United 93. Bah.

UPDATE 2: But Paul Greengrass did win a Best Director nomination. Nice! Of course, we all know Martin Scorsese is going to win that one. Still, it’s great to see Greengrass get some recognition for his masterpiece. Complete list of nominees here and here.

UPDATE 3: An Inconvenient Truth is nominated for Best Documentary Feature. Oh, good lord, are we going to be “treated” to an Al Gore acceptance speech? Heh.

The man who taught Constitutional Law to half of the current 3L class (or perhaps I should say, the professor who taught two-thirds of Constitutional Law in half a semester to half of the current 3L class) reportedly said that Samuel Alito — then a federal judge, now a Supreme Court justice — had “never written a wrong opinion.”

Whispering sweet nothings.

What’s odd isn’t that Kelley likes Alito so much. What’s odd is, Kelley apparently said this about Alito during the narrowing of the “short list” that eventually resulted in Bush’s first SCOTUS nomination: John Roberts. So why the heck, when a second vacancy opened, did Kelley champion Harriet Miers — a decision for which he was roundly criticized — instead of the oh-so-perfect Judge Alito? Hmm… curiouser and curiouser.

Incidentally, does anyone know whether Kelley will still be the deputy White House counsel under Fred Fielding, Bush’s replacement for the recently-resigned Ms. Miers?

After losing 13-9 to fUCLA — and failing to score 20 points (or, for that matter, 10 points) for the first time since 2001 — quite a few Trojan fans were calling for offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin’s head. But instead of jumping on the “Fire Lane Kiffin” bandwagon, Boi From Troy decided to take a different tack:

[R]ather than say that we should fire Lane Kiffin, I propose that we begin the HIRE LANE KIFFIN project! There are plenty of schools out there which could use a good offensive-minded coach who has been groomed to lead a team and has extensive recruiting contacts in Southern California and across the nation…so why shouldn’t they consider hiring Lane Kiffin?!?

Let’s educate all of these schools with coaching vacancies about his virtues and why they should get him on their team. If you’re interested in joining the Hire Lane Kiffin Project, drop me a line and we’ll make this happen!

A month-and-a-half later: Success! The Oakland Raiders, for whom the USC coaching staff is now officially a farm team, have turned around after being rebuffed by Steve Sarkisian and have hired Lane Kiffin, making him the NFL’s youngest head coach. A triumphant Boi From Troy, who ran the story with a Drudge-style siren, writes: “[G]o figure that the one person who would take advice from this gay blogger would be Al Davis!”

Scott Wolf, the L.A. Daily News’s USC beat reporter, calls it a “wish granted.” Commenter “telliot647″ writes: “Woo Hooo!! Good for Lane! Good for USC!! Good for everyone (except maybe Raider fans)! Al Davis is my new favorite owner.” Heh.

Meanwhile, another commenter on Wolf’s site, named “patty o” (presumably no relation to controversial Notre Dame Law School SBA newsletter), says Sarkisian is being considered for the Raiders offensive coordinator job, which seems pretty nutty, considering he just turned down the Raiders head coaching job. But according to patty o, “Sark as OC…is what my sources are telling me. . . . Sounds like the OC may have more freedom than the head coach. Also easier to get out of an OC job if say…the USC job opens up in the next year or 2.” Still sounds pretty nutty, but anything is possible, I guess.

Gonzaga 80, Portland 68.

Not quite eleventy billion, but it’ll do.

The Zags are now 4-1 in conference play — tied for first with St. Mary’s and Santa Clara, both of whom still must come to the McCarthy Athletic Center, where Gonzaga has never lost — and 13-7 overall.

Incidentally, how ’bout those Lady Zags? They’re 5-0 in the WCC, tied for the conference lead with San Diego, whom they visit on Saturday (after a game at 1-4 San Francisco on Thursday).

In other hoops news, in case you missed it, USC is ranked. I must say: if you’d told me at the beginning of the season that USC and Notre Dame would both be ranked, while UConn and Gonzaga would receive a combined total of 2 votes… well, I would have thought you were talking about football.

Oh, and I know it’s early, and the Big East standings are kind of a mess, but… how big does the February 24 game at the Joyce Center, #22 Notre Dame vs. #15 Marquette, loom right now? Both teams are 4-2 in conference, a game behind #9 Pitt (5-1), and both have relatively soft schedules between now and then (though Marquette hosts Pitt, which it just beat on the road, a week after visiting the Irish). Knock on wood, but it’s not inconceivable that Marquette @ ND could have Big East regular-season championship implications. I may just add it to my countdown sidebar.

P.S. I just added it. But first, let’s see if we can win a damn road game… tonight, 7:30 PM, at St. John’s (2-4 in conference, 11-8 overall).

The Oscar nominations will be announced tomorrow.

United 93 is considered a longshot for a best-picture nomination. I, for one, hope it defies the odds.

Bill Parcells says he’s “retiring from coaching football.” (Hat tip: ScottF.) But who will replace him in Dallas?

[Cowboys owner Jerry] Jones could go for proven commodities like Tennessee’s Jeff Fisher or Bill Cowher, recently resigned from Pittsburgh, but both would require compensation for their teams and massive salaries. He might also chase a big-name college coach, from Notre Dame’s Charlie Weis, Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops to Southern California’s Pete Carroll, who replaced Parcells in New England a decade ago.

As for why Parcells retired, I think The Onion already answered that question. heh.