Because there can never be too many BrendanLoy.com contests, I’m opening submissions tonight for two separate American Idol pools: one for who will ultimately win the show, the other for who will be eliminated this week.

FINAL WINNER CONTEST: Make a prediction now for the final three contestants, in order of finish. The goal is simply to predict the winner correctly, but if there’s a tie, runner-up and second runner-up predictions will be used to break it.

WEEKLY CONTEST: Throughout the season, after each week’s performance show(s), predict who will be eliminated that week. You get one point for each correct prediction, for a maximum possible total of 23 points at the end of the season. If there’s a tie, the person who erred less recently will win, going back in time through tied weeks as far as necessary to break the tie. Basically, it’s better to be wrong earlier than later. All contestants eliminated in the same week will be considered to have been eliminated simultaneously.

This week, two guys and two girls will be eliminated. So, submit your predictions in comments on this post (I’d recommend waiting until after tonight’s show!) for which four will be voted off this week — and also, for who the final three will be, in what order.

Polls close at 8pm EST Thursday. If you change your prediction, you can leave a new comment superceding the previous one. Please specifically reference the previous comment in your new comment, so I’ll know to ignore the earlier one.

As always, entries identified by first and last name are greatly preferred; pseudonyms that readily identify you to the blog community are OK; first-name-only entries and other inadequately identified contestants may be rejected. Also, unless you have a serious objection to doing so, please leave your e-mail address in the e-mail field on the comment form — nobody will be able to see it except me, and I won’t publish it, nor will I spam you, but it will allow me to contact you if there are any questions about your predictions.

You can see all of the contestants here, and a complete list of what all the guys sang here.

If this post moves down the page between now and 10pm EST, which it probably will, I’ll bump it to the top after the show, and will add a link in the left sidebar eventually.

(Hat tip: The Watcher, from the Orange County Register, for giving me the idea.)

Dmytro’s Bengal Bout is tonight at the Joyce, shortly after 6:30 PM. Whomp Wemple!

Brendan’s mom has more than generously offered to help sell some of my old stuff on eBay. Right now, I could use the money more than I could use any comic book or hundreds of extra Magic: the Gathering cards. I know some of the regulars are fellow nerds, so I thought I’d mention. (The link takes you straight to Brendan’s mother’s items list. My stuff starts at the Star Trek: TNG card set. As of this post, there are only two entries, but there should be more soon.)

Listening to my iPod just now, I stumbled upon a song from the Indigo Girls album Rarities that I don’t think I’d ever heard before. It’s called Finlandia, but unlike the original song by that name, it’s not a national song of Finland. Instead, it’s the “international version” of Finlandia, written in 1934 by Lloyd Stone (according to Wikipedia) and also recorded by Joan Baez back in the day, among others. (It’s sometimes called “This is My Song.”)

I think it might be the most beautiful and effective antiwar song — or, rather, peace hymn — that I’ve ever heard. The lyrics are short and simple, yet profound:

This is my song, Oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.
But other hearts in other lands are beating,
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,
A song of peace for their land and for mine.

I could get into a philosophical dissection of the song, discuss the many complex issues it brings to mind, compare its articulation of the desire for peace with where I think the modern antiwar movement so often goes wrong, and so forth. I could also make a detailed argument, as I have before, that while it’s a wonderful ideal, an unelaborated call for “peace” is generally not a valid policy proposal, since peace (unlike war) cannot always be unilaterally declared.

But rather than doing any of that, I’ll simply encourage you to download the song from iTunes and listen to it, because it’s beautiful. The Indigo Girls give it a wonderful, harmonious a capella treatment, and whatever your ideology, it’s well worth the $0.99.

Some of you who’ve tried out the Non-Sports Page may have noticed that the “(more…)” links weren’t working there, so long posts annoyingly appeared “above the jump” in their entirety. This obviously decreased the utility of the page as an alternate homepage for basketball-weary visitors in the coming weeks.

Well, that problem is now solved. With the help of the WordPress support forum, I figured out that I needed to insert the command <?php $more = 0; ?> underneath my custom select query. Problem solved! And to prove it, I’ll insert a “jump” here. If you look at this post on the Non-Sports Page, you can see it there, too!

(more…)

From the National Weather Service:

FREEZING FOG ADVISORY NOW IN EFFECT UNTIL NOON EST /11 AM CST/TODAY.

WIDESPREAD DENSE FREEZING FOG WILL CONTINUE ACROSS THE REGION THROUGH NOON EST/11 AM CST. VISIBILITIES WILL BE REDUCED TO 200 FEET TO 500 FEET. THE COMBINATION OF THE DENSE FREEZING FOG AND FREEZING OF MELTED SNOW FROM YESTERDAY WILL RESULT IN AREAS OF BLACK ICE ON ROADWAYS, SIDEWALKS & PARKING LOTS. VISIBILITIES ARE EXPECTED TO SLOWLY IMPROVE LATE MORNING THIS MORNING & EARLY THIS AFTERNOON. TEMPS SHOULD ONCE AGAIN RISE ABOVE FREEZING IN THE AFTERNOON ALLOWING THE ICY SPOTS TO MELT OFF.

It’s not just around South Bend, either; Freezing Fog Advisories are in effect for much of the, uh, Michianohionois area, as this map shows.

Here’s the new Shrek the Third trailer. It’s one of those cases where I feel like they’re giving too much away, but whatever, I’m still looking forward to it.

Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, The Simpsons trailer. (Hat tip: Andrew Hiller on both.)

What about Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End? There ought to be a trailer for that out soon. In fact, it’s odd that it hasn’t already been released. For now, here are a couple of images, a mostly useless Disney Channel clip, and some mild spoilers.

First, a Columbine-style plot at Newington High School. Then, a bomb scare on a bus, and a kid with a pellet gun at school. And now: Fear and Loathing at Chuck E. Cheese?

Bad things always seem to happen in bunches in Newington. In fact, the disrupted-plot-followed-by-pellet-gun chain of events is bizarrely like a similar sequence that occurred late in my senior year, way back in 1999 (God, I feel old), when a classmate was suspended after being found to allegedly have a “hit list” of fellow students — and then a few days later, a student was dramatically arrested after school in the parking lot (he was pinned to the ground and such), in the middle of the yearbook-distribution party, because he had a pellet gun. The big difference was that the 1999 “hit list” incident wasn’t nearly as serious as the one in 2007, which appears to have been an imminent and concrete plot.

LOL:

A University of Southern California hockey goalie put on a show, but it had nothing to do with stopping shots.

Mickey Meyer rode his stick like a horse, dropped his bulky pants, mooned the crowd and slapped his buttocks during a game against Brigham Young University, police said.

He was ejected and ticketed for lewdness, a misdemeanor, after an officer who was working security at the rink said he witnessed the scene Saturday.

“I had my fill of these refs,” Meyer said on an Internet broadcast of the game, according to The Herald-Journal of Logan. [UPDATE: Here’s the Herald-Journal article. It also links to an MP3 of the USC radio play-by-play. -ed.]

It will be up to prosecutors whether to pursue a case against him.

“This is a small town,” North Park police Sgt. John Italasano said. “This was a college team playing and hockey’s a wild game. Sometimes things get out of hand.”

Meyer’s antics occurred while play was stopped and referees were trying to sort out penalties in the third period of a consolation game in the ACHA West Regional tournament at Eccles Ice Center.

The junior from Clinton, N.Y., was “riding his hockey stick like a horse and slapping his butt,” North Park Officer Mike Stauffer said in a report.

LOL… I mean, yeah, this sort of lude and classless behavior should not be tolerated, blah blah blah, but… LOL.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what the coach had to say:

USC volunteer hockey coach Mark Wilbur said…he had no specific policy for dealing with publicly bared bottoms.

“I sure as hell don’t condone it on any level,” Wilbur said.

Heh. (Hat tip: AO.)

Yeah, yeah, Michigan State over Wisconsin, blah blah blah. Why would I want to talk about the Big Ten when I can talk about the Missouri Valley and the Big South? ;)

All season long, it’s been the same story in the Missouri Valley Conference: teams beating up on each other in an orgy of parity. So why would anyone have thought that the last week would be different?

(more…)