My birds lose 65-68

Illinois St up 34-31 at halftime over Indiana St

Alabama emergency management officials say eight deaths are confirmed after an apparent tornado hit the town of Enterprise, and demolished a school, The Associated Press reports.

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Michael Devlin, who is accused of abducting a teen and holding him for four years, now faces federal charges of producing child pornography.

Visit CNN for the latest.

NDLS’s very own Dwight King is a finalist in Above the Law’s Law Librarian Hotties contest. Make sure you check out Dwight’s nomination and vote for him at the bottom of the page!

Note: You can vote more than once if you use a different browser each time you vote (e.g., you can vote once using Internet Explorer and once using Firefox).

UPDATE: Here, I’ll make it easier for y’all:

Yesterday was February 28, but in a game that stretched almost until midnight, Texas and Texas A&M gave us a suitable preamble to “March Madness” with a double-overtime thriller featuring a classic anything-you-can-do-I-can-do-better showdown between Kevin Durant and Acie Law IV. Durant’s more talented, but man, Law is clutch. I feel like Texas A&M is going to make a deep tournament run just because Law will somehow carry them to victory in any close game they’re in. Granted, Texas ultimately won (at home) last night, but only after Law single-handedly forced two overtimes with game-tying three pointers — one of them an absolutely ridiculous shot over the 6-foot-9 Durant — and then was prevented from doing it again only because he was blatantly intentionally fouled in the final seconds (they grabbed his jersey from behind) before he could get off a shot. The refs didn’t call the intentional, so he needed to hit one free throw and miss the second… which he pulled off perfectly, but his rebounding teammates couldn’t quite get the tip-in to tie it.

Anyway, if there was any doubt that March Madness is truly upon us, tonight’s action should put that to rest, as Championship Week(s) really kick(s) into high gear. On tap today: the Big South semifinals (top seed Winthrop is two wins from an auto bid), the Southern Conference quarters (root for Davidson and Appalachian State to avoid upsets, because if they make the final, it’ll be an awesome matchup between two genuinely good, arguably NCAA-worthy teams), the Northeast Conference quarters (Central Connecticut State has home-court advantage, and now just needs three straight wins to Dance), the Atlantic Sun quarters (it’s East Tennessee State’s to lose) and the 8/9 and 7/10 games in the Missouri Valley, which BrendanLoy.com Arch Madness Correspondent Mike Quinn will be liveblogging from St. Louis. Quinn, a.k.a. “isuquinndog,” is a graduate of #7-seed Illinois State, so I think we can guess which game he’ll be more emotionally invested in. :) Anyway, Kyle Whelliston has more on all the mid- and low-major mayhem.

Oh, and as if that weren’t enough, there are two big Pac-10 games in the Evergreen State at 10:00 PM EST: #2 UCLA at #13 Washington State, and — more importantly (ahem) — #23 USC at unranked-but-dangerous Washington. Fight on Trojans, Beat the Huskies!

[Bumped to top. -ed.]

All right… which two guys and two girls are getting voted off this week? IdolBlog has a list of the contestants and what they sang. Vote in comments!

Here again are the current standings after Week 1, but remember, you can still enter this week even if you didn’t enter last week… you just have a few points to make up, but there’s plenty of time!

Deadline to submit your guesses is 8:00 PM tonight.

So says ND Nation. Here’s the AP article. Fark declares: “* thud * EVERYBODY PANIC.” Drudge is going nuts.

Hmm… John McCain announces on the Late Show that he’s running for president, and the next morning, the stock market tanks. Coincidence? I think so!

Obviously, the stock-market plunge isn’t John McCain’s fault, or Drudge’s… no, I blame — once again — La Niña.

UPDATE, 1:10 PM: The Dow has gained back most of the ground it lost this morning.

With Week 5 of Law School Bowling looming tonight, it occurs to me that I never got around to blogging about last week’s bowling milestone: I set a new career high!

My score was a 141, breaking my previous high of 138. As you can see above, I got strikes on the eighth and ninth frames — then failed to fully take advantage of them, by getting just a 7 on the tenth frame. D’oh! As Chris observed, I “left so many pins out there!” Suppose, for example, that I had gotten a strike on the tenth frame (for my first-ever turkey) followed by a 9-1 spare: I would have gotten a 170. Even picking up the spare (6-4) on the tenth frame, and following it by, say, an 8, would have resulted in a 155.

But maybe it’s just as well. By managing “only” a 141, I made it easier to break my record again. :) I’ll be aiming for a 142 tonight (and also continuing by quixotic quest for a turkey).

More on my 141 in a moment, but first, a cute-girl-related anecdote, with photo illustration:

That’s birthday-girl Toni in the center of the photo, with Sophia at left and behind her. Both are on the all-girls “Knockouts” bowling team, and after I’d bowled my 141 and a subsequent 102 (ugh), I was drafted as a ringer for the Knockouts. I just happened to be walking by their lane (actually, I think I had gone over to wish Toni a happy birthday), and one of the ladies asked if I wanted to bowl for her. I said sure… and proceeded to bowl a strike. They went nuts (and even for a happily married man, there’s something uniquely ego-boosting about a bunch of cute girls cheering for you) and asked me to go again. I did, and got a 9-1 spare. I think I ended up bowling six consecutive frames on their lane — and getting two strikes, three spares and a 9. Without a doubt, the best six frames of my bowling “career.” I was declared an “Honorary Knockout” and invited to bowl on their lane anytime. Heh.

On a marginally related note, here’s a photo of me and Toni the next day, at her Friday birthday party:

(more…)

Today’s reading for ConCrimPro includes Samson v. California, 126 S.Ct. 2193 (2006), in which Justice Stevens writes in dissent: “Combining faulty syllogism with circular reasoning, the Court concludes that parolees have no more legitimate an expectation of privacy in their persons than do prisoners.”

What I read that sentence, my immediate conclusion was that “combining faulty syllogism with circular reasoning” would make a great slogan for certain blogs. For example… “Daily Kos: combining faulty syllogism with circular reasoning since 2002!” ;)

SI On Campus provides a Stanford Tree update.

According to the Stanford Daily, the identity of the new Tree will be announced today. The same article reports that the most recent round of stunts by Tree hopefuls included some good old fashioned USC-bashing:

Kyle Owen ‘10 entered the dining hall around noon, trumpeting “Fight On,” the USC fight song, and dressed like a Trojan. After a brief scuffle with a supporter, Owen was thrown into a black coffin with tree decorations and the lid was nailed down.

After a few minutes inside the casket, Owen rose from the dead and started banging on the lid; he eventually broke through and emerged covered in strands of green and red tape. He then began to dance to the Band’s rendition of “All Right Now.”

Owen was later eliminated from the Tree competition, though I’m guessing the decision was not made out of reverence for USC. :)

Former Daily Trojan editor-in-chief Zach Fox — the subject of massive controversy last semester, as you may recall — pens an opinion piece in today’s paper… and this blog gets a shout-out. In fact, a comment by Texasyank is quoted. Excerpt:

After Jackson’s unilateral dismissal of the staff vote came an ego-stroking outpour of anger from former Daily Trojan staffers. Most active was Brendan Loy, a DT alumnus and current graduate student at Notre Dame, who slammed the administration with posts on his blog, brendanloy.com. Among the more than 100 comments posted in response to his posts, it becomes clear that the administration has long influenced the editorial content of the Daily Trojan.

One post from a former staffer said that while the university doesn’t blatantly censor articles, it influences coverage by offering advice “dispensed in a flattering, you-know-dear-you’re-better-than-this sort of way.”

Fox argues forcefully that the Daily Trojan is not, in point of fact, a “student paper,” and that recognition of this simple reality is essential to the newspaper’s integrity. Read the whole thing.

There’s nothing like a random thunderstorm at 7:00 AM on a winter morning, that’s what I always say!

Details on the storm here. Close-up radar view here.

I blame global warming El Niño La Niña. (Hat tip: Fax Paladin.)