Upon arriving at the kennel to pick up Robbie this evening at just after 6:50 PM, I was greeted by this gorgeous view on the western horizon:

Back in May 2005, I blogged about “young-Moon hunters,” amateur astronomers who make a concerted effort to spot the Moon when it’s a barely visible slender crescent, just hours removed from New Moon. I quoted a Sky & Telescope article that stated, “Few people ever see a crescent less than 30 hours old (less than 30 hours from the moment of new Moon) unless they plan for it.”

Well, I didn’t quite prove that article wrong tonight… but I came close. I set what I believe is a new personal record — by far — for the “youngest” Moon that I’ve ever personally sighted: just 31 hours and 39 minutes old. (My previous record, according to that May ‘05 post, was 46 hours and 17 minutes.) And it happened totally by chance; I didn’t even realize the New Moon had occurred recently, so I certainly wasn’t “planning for” a lunar sighting. I just couldn’t help but notice, upon stepping out of the car, the two things that are immediately obvious in my above photo: the beautiful post-sunset colors and the gleaming bright planet Venus. And then, upon looking more closely, I noticed… something else. Did you see it above? Look again:

That’s one young Moon right there. The photo was taken at 6:53 PM EST; according to this site, the New Moon occurred at 16:14 UTC yesterday, which is 11:14 AM EST. So, like I said, the Moon is 31 hours and 39 minutes old in that photo — barely two-thirds the “age” of my previous youngest Moon ever sighted. Granted, that’s more than twice the “age” of the youngest moon ever sighted by anyone with the naked eye: 15 hours and 32 minutes. But still… not bad for a chance sighting (especially through cloud cover!).

Click on either of the photos above, or just click here, for a much larger version of the photo.

Newfoundland folk-music singer Dermot O’Reilly, who wrote and sang West Country Lady — which I considered my favorite song in all the world when I was 9 and 10 years old, having learned it from the album All the Best, which we bought during our family vacation to Newfoundland in 1991 — died Saturday at age 65 after apparently suffering a sudden heart attack.

Have a listen, if you like:

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My musical tastes have (not surprisingly) changed quite a bit in the last 15 years, and to be honest, while I continue to love Irish and Canadian folk music, I no longer consider West Country Lady a favorite. But the song still has great nostalgic appeal for me, and the metaphorical lyrics are poetic and beautiful. (The “West Country Lady” is Newfoundland herself, similarly to how Ireland — where O’Reilly was born — is often portrayed as a metaphorical woman, like in Tommy Makem’s classic “Four Green Fields,” another one of my favorites both then and now.)

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Both Notre Dame and USC travelled to the dregs of their respective conferences for road games today, with the Irish at Cincinnati and the Trojans at Arizona State. The Irish already finished their game, beating the Bearcats 76-64 to earn their second road win of the season — a win ND absolutely had to have. ‘SC just tipped off against the Sun Devils, and the Trojans are ahead 8-7 early. Supposedly, Comcast SportsNet will pick up the Fox Sports feed of the game at 8:30. I’ll ignore the bizarre inconsistency of being unable to watch the huge games against UCLA and Arizona, but able to watch the (on paper, at least) ho-hum game against ASU, and just say: FIGHT ON, TROJANS! BEAT THE SUN DEVILS!

UPDATE: USC loses, handing the Sun Devils their first Pac-10 win of the season after an 0-14 start. Dammit.

To be honest, I’m not stunned (the headline notwithstanding). I’ve been worried about this game ever since reading BK’s comment on Friday. He was right — after all those close losses, ASU was “due for a win” — and on the Trojans’ side of things, this had “trap game” written all over it, coming in the wake of USC’s first win over Arizona in Tucson since 1982 and ahead of the season-ending stretch against the Bay Area and Washington schools. The stars were aligned, as the Fox commentator said.

Oh well. Here’s hoping the Trojans get their act together and don’t use this loss as an excuse to suddenly fall apart. In their next five games — Stanford, Cal, at Washington, at Wazzu, and a Pac-10 quarterfinal (probably against Stanford, Oregon or Arizona) — USC should certainly be able to go 3-2; 4-1 would be great, and 5-0 would be fantastic. They still have a chance at a protected seed in the NCAA Tournament, but methinks they’ll need at least 4-1 for that, possibly 5-0 (or 4-1 plus one or two more wins in the Pac-10 tournament).

As for ASU, I’m happy for them that they finally got their first win, though obviously I wish it didn’t have to come at the expense of my team. I must say, though, I was amused by the fans storming the court — especially the ones holding up their right index fingers in celebration. Are they seriously saying “We’re #1″? Or are they simply keeping track of their total number of conference wins? ;)

Anyway… Beat the Farm!

Becky’s and my pilgrimage to Hinkle Fieldhouse for yesterday’s BracketBusters matchup between Butler and Southern Illinois was an adventure from the start. It was snowing when we left South Bend around 10:00 AM — nothing compared to the recent blizzard or the lake-effect near-whiteouts, but enough to make the roads slick — and the light snowfall continued all the way to Indianapolis, making our trek down Route 31 decidedly more interesting. Becky was behind the wheel, and experienced winter driver though she is, she definitely found the trip more stressful than usual.

The real drama began, though, when we got to the area near Hinkle around 3:00 PM, an hour before game time. We waited for maybe 10 minutes in a long line of cars heading toward the fieldhouse parking lot, only to be told by a uniformed officer that the lot was reserved for prepaid patrons, and that we could park “anywhere on campus or in the neighborhood.” Easier said than done, as it turned out.

Indy was hit significantly harder than South Bend by the recent blizzard, and the snow crews down there have a significantly harder time dealing with it, as they aren’t accustomed to that sort of snowfall. Becky’s aunt and uncle, longtime Indy residents with whom we stayed last night, called it a once-in-25-years event. And with little or no melting since the blizzard hit, and grossly inadequate plowing, many streets and parking lots are still in very rough shape. As a result, the parking situation in the neighborhood around Hinkle was quite forbidding. Becky’s front-wheel-drive Camry isn’t exactly equipped to trudge through snow banks along the edge of local side streets, so we decided to head into campus searching for a spot. Of course, we were joined in this endeavour by a few hundred of our closest friends; hosting the marquee game of a made-for-TV national sports extravaganza is a bit problematic when much of the street parking on which your stadium normally depends is rendered off-limits by a blizzard.

After searching in vain for maybe 20 minutes, Becky — getting a little desperate as game time creeped closer — decided to take a crack at pulling into an unplowed spot in a student parking lot. Bad idea. About a third of the way into the spot, the car stopped moving and the wheels started spinning. She put the car into reverse and tried to back out. More spinning. “You’re going to have to get out and push,” she told me. Now, dear readers, you may not be aware of this, but my physical build is not exactly what most people would describe as “buff.” :) Nevertheless, I did my best to push the car backwards as Becky kicked it in reverse and hit the gas. But the wheels just kept spinning.

Enter two bubbly college-age girls who had been looking for a spot in the same lot, bounding out of their car and declaring, “Do you need help? We have shovels!” And indeed, each girl had a snow shovel in hand. One of them asked us, “Do you guys get snow like this in Illinois?” Only later did I fully grasp the implications of this question: these were Butler students who thought we were SIU fans, presumably having driven in from Carbondale, rather than relatively neutral observers from South Bend. And yet they were helping us out anyway. It may be a dog-eat-dog world, but it seems Bulldogs can play nice with Salukis.

Anyway, we gratefully accepted their offer of help and tried to dig out the tires. But still no luck. No matter how much we dug and then pushed, the car wouldn’t budge. Finally, a large gentleman in a Colts jersey showed up, and with the added force of his help pushing the car, we were able to get the darn thing out of the deep snow and back to the plowed surface where it had traction again. We thanked them profusely for their help, and as they walked away, I asked (somewhat stupidly), “Hey, are you guys for Butler or Southern Illinois?” They replied enthuastically and in unison, “Butler!!” To which I responded, “Hey, well, I think we have to root for Butler now.”

It took a while, but we finally found a spot — not on campus after all, but in the neighborhood, about 10 blocks from the fieldhouse — and started trudging through the snow toward our destination. On our way there, we passed another car being pushed out of the snow by a helpful group of a half-dozen or so apparent strangers. Also en route, we followed a large group of fellow street parkers up a well-trodden path directly over the top of a large snowbank on the edge of the parking lot.

So when SI’s Luke Winn describes Hinkle on Saturday as a “basketball oasis in the middle of a Midwestern blizzard” and ESPN’s Kyle Whelliston says “10,827 fans braved an Indianapolis snowstorm” to watch the game, they’re not lying… though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we braved the lingering aftereffects of a blizzard that came and went over a week ago, worsened by the minor inconvenience of ongoing light snowfall.

Anyway, we finally arrived at Hinkle Fieldhouse at around 3:40 PM…

…and that’s where this post stops. I’ll talk about the actual experience of attending the game in “Part II.”

Kansas 92, Nebraska 39.

Ouch.

After the Saluki victory at Butler and Bradley’s big road win over VCU, the Missouri Valley Conference is 5-4 in BracketBusters play, with Creighton leading Drexel 26-20 at halftime. The “big six” teams are 2-3, with home losses by Missouri State (to Winthrop yesterday) and Wichita State (to Appalachian State) and a road loss by Northern Iowa (at Nevada), but the bottom four — Drake, Evansville and the ISUs — are picking up the slack with a 3-1 record.

I’ll post a full account of the SIU-Butler game sometime tomorrow; stay tuned. But for now, here’s one of the photos I took from our awesome seats:

Nice view, eh? And here’s a photo of our seats, with the little “reserved for” notes that Kyle Whelliston put on them before we arrived, as I mentioned here. Heh.

UPDATE: Creighton lost. So the MVC went 5-5 overall, and the teams with legit tourney aspirations went 2-3 (2-4 if you count Northern Iowa, but really, they’ve been out of it for a while). The biggest winner is Bradley, which earned a real notch in its at-large profile with the win at VCU, and will merit very serious consideration if they can finish strong in the Valley. The biggest loser? Missouri State, whose home loss to Winthrop could really come back to haunt them on Selection Sunday, depending on how they finish in conference play.

Why, Mark Few, WHY did you call that timeout on the last possession in regulation, and give John Calipari the chance to set his defense?!? Just put the ball in the hands of your senior star, Raivio, and trust him to win the game for you! ARGH!!!

Southern Illinois 68, Butler 64, final. Much higher-scoring than expected! :)

As noted in a first-half post that never posted because Blogger is dumb (and will inevitably barf out all these missing cell-phone posts at some later date), I ended up switching allegiances and jumping on the Butler bandwagon. :) I couldn’t help it: between the infectious enthusiasm and general craziness of the home crowd, the fact that our seats were behind the Bulldogs’ bench, and the obligation that I felt after a bunch of Butler fans helped dig/push us out when our car got stuck in the snow while we were trying to park, I couldn’t help cheering for the Dawgs. Mostly, though, it was the awesome crowd: I realized early in the game that, if it came down to a close finish (which it did), there’s no way I wouldn’t be rooting for the result that would cause Hinkle Fieldhouse to absolutely explode with excitement.

All that is by way of explaining that I’m slightly disappointed with the game’s outcome. But overall, both teams acquitted themselves well (certainly better than the refs, ahem), and that’s a good thing for mid-majordom in general. Nobody is going to come away from that game (as some came away from last year’s Missouri Valley tournament) thinking these mid-major darlings are overrated. Those are two quality teams. Both definitely have a chance to make noise in the Big Dance.

Now, we’re en route to Aunt Nancy & Uncle Steve’s house to watch the second half of Memphis-Gonzaga. It’s 39-31 Tigers at halftime. So the Zags are still in it, but they need to pick up the pace. GO ZAGS!!!

Most of my cell phone posts aren't posting… harumph. Anyway, it's Southern Illinois by 6.

Best basketball atmosphere ever!! In other news, we met ESPN's Kyle Whelliston. In fact, he made special “reserved for the Irish Trojan” signs for our seats (I had told him via e-mail where we're sitting). Heh.

After an adventure that involved getting stuck in the snow while trying to park -- and getting dug/pushed out by some kindly Butler fans -- we're at Hinkle Fieldhouse. The atmosphere is awesome, and our seats are, as advertised, right behind the SIU bench.

No, really. More here (be patient; site loading slowly due to link from Drudge).

NCAA Hoops Today and March Madness All Season both have lengthy previews of all of this weekend’s big games, BracketBusters and non-BracketBusters alike.

Also, Jeff Borzello, the guy who writes March Madness All Season, has a full preview of SIU-Butler, the game Becky and I will be at. Meanwhile, Steve Bergum previews Gonzaga-Memphis.

Go Salukis! Go Zags!

After watching Winthrop dismantle a good Missouri State team on its home court, 77-66, let me just say this:

If the Eagles get tripped up in the Big South tournament, and they get passed over by the NCAA selection committee in favor of some big-conference mediocrity like Florida State, Georgia Tech or Illinois, it’ll be shame… a damn shame.

Winthrop is good, and if they go undefeated in conference play — with their only regular-season losses being road games, all but one of them close, against North Carolina, Wisconsin (in overtime), Texas A&M and Maryland — they deserve an opportunity to prove themselves in the Big Dance. And the nation deserves a chance to watch them try.

Speaking of which, this 5-minute excerpt of the conversation between Andy Glockner and Joe Lunardi on yesterday’s edition of the ESPN College Basketball Insider podcast expresses my feelings on the perennial major vs. mid-major selection debate perfectly:

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The House of Representatives passes a non-binding resolution rejecting President Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq. Visit CNN for the latest.

[NOTE: This post should have appeared at 3:23 PM. It was delayed due to technical difficulties. -ed.]