Make your predictions in commnts! Current standings here.

I know I said earlier that I’d keep the league open for signups through 12:01 a.m. Eastern on Friday, but due to overwhelming response thus far, we already have 14 teams signed on. Some are already of the opinion that 14’s too many, but I’m leaving it open for TWO more spots in the league this season.

Please email ASAP if you want one of ‘em. For those who’ve emailed and gotten the password already, if you snooze, you lose. Get me an email to irishtrojanbaseball AT yahoo DOT com to get the password. I’ll send the password to any who ask for it, but when it’s full of 16 teams, we’re all done.

So, get on it, if you want to join our league!

UPDATE–Really, really, the last call. 15 teams in, only one left.

FINAL UPDATE–League’s full. Looking forward to a good season, and a lot of fun. For those in the league, I’m going to give you until 6:00 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday to set your preferences for the autodraft. I’ll then run the draft, and you’ll have your starting team to work with. League games will probably start either on Saturday or Sunday. I’ll let you know.

In these Troubled Times, a little Nerding Out on Elections stuff always cheers me up :).

Accordingly, in sharply Ascending order of Significance :} ~

1. FRANCE will have a May 6 presidential Runoff, between a Rightie law-and-order champion nicknamed “Sarko”, and a Leftie lady named Ségolène who, in the Unlikely event that she wins, would be the nation’s first female president. / Ol’ Jacques Whatsisname is retiring. :)

2. THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA will see an electionprocess Meltdown starting next February, if State Election Officials fail in their heroic effort to halt HAVA Act II ~ aka, Congress’s pell-mell rush to mandate Paper Trails To You (well, at least until they Meet Again :), because now they don’t trust the Computers which they had mandated in HAVA I so that the paper-punchcard-plagued 2000 could Never Happen Again.

3. NIGERIA’s April 21 election was a shameful Farce, both reflecting & exacerbating a continent-wide popular disillusionment with the functioning of African “democracy”.

AND, Lastly & most Importantly :) ~ even as Northern Ireland’s Brits-Out party, Sinn Fein, prepares to share power with the Unionists beginning May 8 ~

4. SCOTLAND holds an election May 3 for its devolved Parliament at Holyrood and the pro-independence Scottish National Party looks a good bet to Win!

From “The Scotsman”:

…With the election result expected to be extremely close and with only a tiny number of seats likely to separate Labour and the SNP, party managers know that their efforts in key swing seats between now and polling day could make the difference between victory and disaster.

…The Nationalists…used an interview with their most famous supporter, Sir Sean Connery, to launch an internet television station, SNPtv. Mr Salmond [the party leader] said: “These endorsements give us real momentum as we enter the final stages of this campaign. The SNP is moving forward, while Labour are stuck in a disastrous, negative campaign.”

…It is understood Labour’s internal polling shows its vote is hardening up in its traditional strongholds of west Scotland but there are potentially serious problems in parts of central Scotland and Fife.

The aim of the new phase of the Labour campaign is to shore up the Labour vote in these marginal areas, where all the main parties now agree the election will be won and lost…

I know you’ll all join me in watching the outcome with keen excitement a week from Thursday :).

(Footnote ~ not Altogether unrelatedly, in the Metaphorical sense at least, to a fiercely-fought Scottish election campaign: there’s a big Investigation of the recent unfortunate Spillover of more than 100 million litres of Effluent into the Firth of Forth. / Perhaps the probe will prove that the Party Platforms [colloquially called, Manifestoes ;] were just incapable of Containing it all. :)

PS: while I’m At It, here ~ gleefully anticipating the coming deconstruction of the United Kingdom via the Peaceful Politics of the Celts, that is :> ~ I might as well Throw in the Welsh branch of the operation for ye.

PPS: Hallooooo, Alasdair! :)

PPPS: Do understand, my apparent Britbashing is but a Pose. / Well. Mostly. :) Iow any Kingdom, however disunited ;}, whose national News service is still able to drily report, with nary a typographical Wink, that a chap who strolled into a London eatery and there proceeded to Detach his penis with a borrowed Kitchenknife, “was not thought to have any connection with the restaurant“, is Jolly Good by Me. No Connection with the restaurant, to be Sure. Thenkyewveddymuch, indeed. ;).

For the first time ever, astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet similar to Earth. It is the right temperature to potentially support a substantial atmosphere and oceans of liquid water, and it is considered the most likely candidate yet found in the cosmos for possible extraterrestrial life. And it’s “only” 20.5 light-years away (approximately 120 trillion miles), orbiting one of the closest stars to us, Gliese 581.

“On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X,” says Xavier Delfosse, one of the scientists who discovered the planet.

“Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life.”

Cool.

More after the jump:

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A “full-scale riot” broke out at a prison in New Castle, Indiana (well southeast of South Bend, closer to Indianapolis) this afternoon, injuring two prison employees and causing Drudge to top his homepage with the headline “‘FULL-SCALE RIOT’ IN INDIANA PRISON…”

UPDATE: Video here:

Heh.

P.S. Manning may have President Bush’s affections, but it seems Tony Romo has Carrie Underwood’s.

I think Romo wins this one. I just wonder whether, when he takes the lovely Ms. Underwood’s bra off at the end of the night, he ever “fumbles the snap.”

I’ll be here all week, folks.

If you are like me and grew up in the 80’s, chances are you spent a fair amount of time playing (or watching friends play) Super Mario Bros. for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Believe it or not, there are still people playing the game today, many of them trying to beat it as fast as possible. While the current record hovers just above 5 minutes, even more amazing was this recent talent demo by two roommates. Side-by-side speed runs through the game, live. Definitely nerdy, but still impressive.

Aaron points to a fascinating Esquire article by Chuck Klosterman which relates directly to the blog post I wrote earlier this month about why I hated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. You may recall that I wrote:

Memories are the basic units of our existence. They are what makes life, life! If the fanciful memory-zapping technology of Eternal Sunshine actually existed, I would be just as repulsed by it as some people are by, for example, stem-cell research. There is something supra-biological about memories: they aren’t just collections of brain cells, they are the fundamental building-blocks of our experience on this earth, of our very humanity. You can’t just erase them, whatever they are. I could understand the urge to do so if a person were tormented by a memory of rape or torture or something, but to erase memories for such a trite purpose as forgetting a bad relationship would be profoundly immoral.

Given that sentiment, you can probably guess my immediate reaction to the drug that Klosterman describes:

[Propranolol] inhibits the chemical rush that makes memories hyperconcrete. It doesn’t erase memories, but it makes them more abstract and less painful. In theory, giving accident victims immediate doses of propranolol could dramatically change how lucidly they remember the horror of a specific experience. What’s even crazier is the possibility of propranolol working retroactively: It appears that patients might be able to erode traumas from the distant past by ingesting the drug and self-triggering memories on purpose (i.e., you repeatedly take propranolol and fixate on something that happened twenty years ago — over time, that specific memory grows hazy and normative).

It is hard to imagine how propranolol, used judiciously, wouldn’t be good for society. It’s impossible to justify why a nine-year-old who watched his parents get murdered needs to remember precisely what that looked (and felt) like; I’d feed that theoretical kid a cereal bowl of propranolol. But the problem (of course) is that our society is traditionally terrible at judicious drug use. And while the application of propranolol almost always seems reasonable on a case-by-case basis, the idea of propranolol is significantly more complicated. …

As is so often the case with scientific innovations that feel like hypothetical problems, it’s easy to imagine dystopian worst-case scenarios involving propranolol. What if the government used this drug to intensify the brutality of warfare, knowing the long-term cost on soldiers could be chemically mitigated? What if people used it simply because they didn’t want to fixate over ex-girlfriends [”such as Kate Winslet,” Klosterman adds in a footnote] or the 1982 NFC championship? It would seem that propranolol — like virtually everything else invented by man — has a short-term upside and a long-term consequence. The small picture provides benefits for victims of genuine pain; the big picture suggests a confused society that consciously elects to expunge the pain that makes us human.

Emphasis added, because I love how he echoes the title of my Eternal Sunshine post. Esquire rips off BrendanLoy.com! :) Anyway, I’m not sure I agree with Klosterman that “virtually everything…invented by man…has a short-term upside and a long-term consequence,” but leaving aside that bit of hyperbole, I think his analysis is pretty spot-on… right up until the paragraph that follows what I’ve just blockquoted. He loses me when he argues that using propranolol “to expunge the pain that makes us human” would be simply a more “effective” method of doing something we “already do all the time” — by way of alcohol abuse, escapist art, and nostalgicization* of the past — and that therefore, “I…don’t think it’s something we could ethically stop people from doing.”

As a logical matter, this conclusion simply doesn’t follow. There are plenty of instances where society chooses to ban, or at least discourage, a more “effective” means of doing something that is allowed when it’s done to a more limited, “less effective” extent. The decisive question in each case is whether the newfound “effectiveness” pushes things to a point where the negative effects on society become intolerable. But there is certainly no general ethical principle that says, if you ban any method of achieving a certain end, you must ban all methods of achieving that end. A few examples off the top of my head:

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