If LSU hangs onto its 59-44 lead over UConn with 6:09 left, the first two teams in the women’s Final Four — #4-seed Rutgers and #3-seed LSU — will have a higher combined seed-number total (7) than all four of the men’s Final Four teams combined (6).

UPDATE: LSU routs UConn in a 73-50 stunner. So incredibly, barely two weeks after being rocked by Pokey-gate, the Tigers are bound for the Final Four.

Fellow GBS fans, you may commence being jealous: “At a recent concert by Great Big Sea, Alan Doyle swiped the camera of a woman in the front row, filming her and some of his bandmates before returning the camera for the end of the song.” Here’s the video.

UPDATE: Here’s a post by the GBS fans whose camera it was. Link via Anna the Piper.

A report into the death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman recommends action is taken against officers who passed on misleading and inaccurate information and delayed reporting their belief that he was killed by his fellow soldiers.

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Clearly, sales of the Eragon DVD are booming. ;)

The NY Times ran an interesting article about USC basketball recruit and the number one player in the country, O.J. Mayo and how he ended up with Tim Floyd. There are a lot of people who don’t like this kid at all.

Among the problems he’s had in high school, he was suspended three games for coming in contact with a referee during a game after he was given a 2nd technical foul:

After referee Mike Lazo called two technical fouls on Mayo on Jan. 26, Mayo came into contact with him, causing the referee to fall to the floor as he approached the scorer’s table, according to Lazo.

Now comes this crazy YouTube clip of OJ throwing a pass off the back board and then dunking it. Then he takes the ball and throws it into the stands…in the middle of the game. That was his last game as a high school player and will join USC for probably one season before going pro.

Can’t wait until Brendan starts blogging about him. :)

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: Just a little editorial comment from the webmaster here. :) I actually have blogged about Mayo before, specifically about referee-gate, and the bottom line is that the ref totally flopped in order to make Mayo look bad. It was pretty ridiculous. So that incident really should not be counted against Mayo in any way, shape or form. The showboating business, that’s a legitimate topic of discussion. Also, Mayo’s arrest for marijuana possession was troubling (and made it official that all three of my teams were affected by drug arrests this season, albeit indirectly in USC’s case), but the charges were later dropped, apparently because the weed wasn’t his. (Initially, all four people in the car were charged with possession, which sounds like a “book ‘em first, ask questions later” law-enforcement policy.)

Anyway, Tim Floyd has defended Mayo against his critics. I’ll just say this: we should be very careful to guard against forming harsh judgments about Mayo simply because there have a bunch of half-baked allegations of impropriety that ultimately came to nothing or not much (e.g., referee-gate, the dropped pot charges). There’s a natural tendency to form a negative impression of someone when you hear a lot of bad stuff about them, even if the details ultimately suggest that there isn’t much substance to each of the individual allegations that initially created the negative impression. The tendency is to think, “Well, there isn’t much to that allegation, but there have been so many allegations, so there must be something to at least some of them.” But this tendency is wrong and should be avoided. Allegations of impropriety should be judged on their individual merits, not lumped together and the details ignored. One possible reason we hear a lot of bad stuff about Mayo is because he’s a bad kid, but an equally plausible reason is because there’s a huge media spotlight on him, so everything he says and does is under a microscope that no other high-school recruit in the nation right now has to deal with. Maybe Mayo’s a bad kid, but we shouldn’t jump to that conclusion on the basis of nothing more than a hazy impression that a bunch of negative stuff has been said about him, so he obviously must be bad.

Oh yeah, and in whatever judgments we do form about Mayo, we should also be sure to remember that he’s just a high-school kid.

Okay, fellow apartment-dwellers, back me up on this. If the maintenance people at your apartment complex are going to shut off the water — for whatever reason, at whatever time of day, for whatever length of time — they should (unless it’s some sort of emergency) notify you in advance, shouldn’t they?

This has happened twice here at Clover Ridge Apartments in the past week-and-a-half, and on both occasions, when we called the office, they nonchalantly (and without apologizing, or indicating that any emergency was in progress) told us that the maintenance folks were “doing some work” and the water would be back on shortly.

Both times, this happened in the middle of the afternoon, which makes me think maybe they’re under the impression that it doesn’t really matter if they shut off the water at that time of day, because they figure their residents are at work or school. Never mind that, if I had happened to be taking a shower at 2:30 PM (which I think I still have the right to do… this is America, dammit), I could have been stranded in a soap-covered state when the water randomly turned itself off. Which would have been mighty annoying.

Anyway, in the spirit of blogospheric bitching, I just thought I’d mention this. Harumph.

P.S. I can’t wait till we move to Knoxville. One of the major reasons we chose the apartment complex that we did there is because the management gave off a very strong impression of being, like, considerate and competent.

UPDATE: I got an e-mail from the apartment manager (in response to one I’d sent shortly after posting this) apologizing for the inconvenience and saying that typically, we should get 24 hours’ notice, but apparently this latest shut-off had to be done on short notice for some reason. I suggested setting up an e-mail mailing list to supplement written notices left on doors, since that would allow at least some form of notice to be given in a time crunch.

Logan likes prunes!

A sheep that’s 15 percent human… and no, lonely Scotsmen are not to blame.

In their first-time-ever official, nonaccidental Meeting,

…Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, sitting side by side for their first news conference in Stormont, confirmed that power-sharing would begin on 8 May.

Mr Paisley said the DUP was committed to full participation in government and Mr Adams said it was a “new era”.

…The British and Irish governments had said they would shut the assembly if an executive was not agreed on Monday.

Emergency legislation will now be rushed through Parliament on Tuesday to give effect to the 8 May power-sharing deal.

Mr Adams - wearing his Easter lily to commemorate those who died in the 1916 rebellion - and Mr Paisley were sitting at one corner of a table at Stormont.

[Guestblogger’s note: at far right in that linked photo is First Minister-presumptive Paisley’s probable Deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness, former member of the IRA Army Council high command. Oh wouldn’t I love to be a fly on the wall at the upcoming governmental Meetings :]

…Prime Minister Tony Blair said it was “a very important day for the people of Northern Ireland, but also for the people and the history of these islands”.

“Everything we have done over the last ten years has been a preparation for this moment.”

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said this had “the potential to transform the future of this island”.

…In the assembly election earlier this month, the DUP and Sinn Fein emerged as the two largest parties.

…The Northern Ireland Assembly has been suspended since October 2002, amid allegations of an IRA spy ring at Stormont.

A subsequent court case collapsed. Direct rule has been in place since that date.

Read the rest. Also, here are Paisley’s statement, and Adams’s. (Both remarkably sparing of the customary partisan/sectarian bombast.)

Good job, boys. / Now hold fast to that spirit.

UPDATE: Here’s a good BBC wrap-up re the Significance of the day’s events. Money quotes:

…Such was the symbolic power of it all that the image of Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley side by side at the conference table will surely come in future as the image that defines the peace process.

… Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams still represent two parties which will disagree about almost everything once power-sharing is restored but almost everyone in Northern Ireland understands the significance of this moment; in future, differences will be resolved inside a parliament, not in the streets beyond it.

So, this really cool Discovery Channel mini-series, Planet Earth, premiered last night with the airing of the first three out of eleven total episodes: “From Pole to Pole,” “Mountains” and “Ocean Deep.” I missed it (totally forgot about it, actually), but it looked awesome in the movie-theater trailer I saw a few weeks ago, and it’s getting rave reviews.

The first three episodes will be re-aired this Sunday from 11am-2pm EDT, and then the next two episodes, “Deserts” and “Ice Worlds,” will premiere that night from 8pm-10pm (and then air again from midnight-2am). I only wish I had an HDTV to watch them on! You can see the schedule of new episodes for yourself here, or browse the whole Discovery Channel schedule here. For more information on the series, check out its Wikipedia page or go to its official website, www.planet-earth.com.

“If Billy Packer played in my day, I would bust his ass. It would be a massacre.” –North Carolina’s Reyshawn Terry. Heh.

Professor Rick Garnett has an op-ed piece in USA Today about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, which he says “is widely misunderstood by critics and defenders alike.” He concludes:

The struggle for the church’s freedom in China reminds us that what the separation of church and state calls for is not a public conversation or social landscape from which God is absent or banished. The point of separation is not to prevent religious believers from addressing political questions or to block laws that reflect moral commitments. Instead, “separation” refers to an institutional arrangement, and a constitutional order, in which religious institutions are free and self-governing — neither above and controlling, or beneath and subordinate to, the state. This freedom limits the state and so safeguards the freedom of all — believers and non-believers alike.

Read the whole thing.

Is the blogosphere just a big bitchfest?

I voted for “This poll sucks! You’re an idiot!” :) Reminds me of this Fark headline: “The anonymity of the internet makes people meaner than they would be in real life — or so says this idiot of a reporter who writes like a retarded third grader.” Heh.

(Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

P.S. Personally, I never use my blog to bitch about random things. ;)

Anna Nicole Smith died of an accidental drug overdose, according to Charlie Tiger, Seminole Police Chief.

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Winning a six-game, single-elimination tournament nearly always requires a bit of good luck. You need to play well, but sometimes, you also need your opponents to play poorly — and other times, you just need a break or two at the right time, whether it comes from a bad call, a lucky bounce or what-have-you. It happens every year. But sometimes it’s especially noteworthy.

Last year, I argued — and I still maintain this is true — that UCLA made it to the national championship game in large part due to a particularly remarkable string of good luck. Oh, sure, they played good defense and took advantage of the opportunities they were given. But the fact is, they benefited from an epic choke job by Gonzaga in the Sweet 16, and then managed to catch both Memphis and LSU on incredibly poor shooting nights in the Elite Eight and Final Four. Yes, the Bruins defense had something to do with that, but you’ll never convince me they deserve all the credit for Memphis shooting 31.5% from the field (not to mention 60% from the free-throw line) and LSU shooting 32.0% from the field (and 46.4% from the line!). The fact is, sometimes teams just go ice-cold, and that’s what happened to both sets of Tigers against the Bruins. Pundits largely ignored the “luck” factor, but the notion that UCLA’s defense was just so superhuman that it could magically cause any opponent’s offense to spontaneously implode was always laughable in my view, and it was clearly exposed as a fraud in the title game, when the Gators made the Bruins look like a high-school team in a 73-57 rout that wasn’t even that close. UCLA deserves credit for a great run last year, but simple good luck deserves quite a bit of credit, too.

This year, however, is a different story. UCLA has unquestionably earned its way to Atlanta with a string of dominating performances over good teams. In fact, the Bruins are the only team in the Final Four whose tournament run hasn’t had its share of flukes, close shaves and lucky breaks. In particular, the right side of the bracket might as well be called the “Borrowed Time Region,” because both Ohio State and Georgetown really should have been knocked out of the tournament long before now.

Xavier had the Buckeyes beaten in the second round, and would have finished the job if Ohio State hadn’t gotten any one of the three consecutive lucky breaks that it received in the closing seconds of regulation: the lack of an intentional-foul call against Greg Oden, the missed free throw by Justin Cage, and Xavier coach Sean Miller’s failure to have his players foul instead of giving up the tying 3. But all three of those breaks did go OSU’s way, and Buckeyes won in overtime. Then, as if to firm up their reputation as the tournament’s most Houdini-like team, Ohio State proceeded to fall behind Tennessee by 20 points late in the first half of their Sweet Sixteen game. Once again, it appeared the Buckeyes were finished. But the Vols couldn’t hold onto the massive lead, and their epic collapse paved the way for OSU’s trip to Atlanta.

Ohio State’s next opponent, Georgetown, knows a thing or two about benefitting from an opponent’s epic collapse. But before the Hoyas had the opportunity to watch North Carolina miss 22 of its last 24 shots and blow a 10-point lead with six minutes remaining in the Elite Eight, they first had to be gifted a Sweet Sixteen victory by a bad call in the closing seconds against Vanderbilt. I was rooting for the Hoyas (it’s my dad’s school, and I picked them to reach the Final Four), but let’s be honest: it really should have been Vandy playing UNC yesterday, because Jeff Green traveled before hitting the game-winning shot. It wasn’t called, however, so the Hoyas survived & advanced… and then North Carolina pulled off the greatest tournament choke job since that UCLA-Gonzaga game last year… so now Georgetown is Atlanta-bound. I’m not saying they don’t deserve it, but let’s not pretend they aren’t very, very lucky to be there.

Florida is a somewhat less obvious case, as there hasn’t been a single bad call or stunning rally that’s provided them with a clear-cut lucky break. But I continue to maintain that the Gators very definitely benefitted from favorable officiating in the Butler win, not because of any sort of conspiracy but because the refs’ approach to the game reinforced Florida’s overwhelming size advantage and made it virtually impossible for the Bulldgos to fully compensate with good fundamental defense. Simply put, the officials allowed the Gators to bump, push, and shoulder their way to the basket with impunity, an extreme version of a “let ‘em play” philosophy that turned the game from a skill contest into a brutish battle under the basket. The harshest and most consequential example came on a hoop that put Florida ahead for good with 2:34 left, when Al Horford knocked Brandon Crone over with a series of bumps and push-offs — and yet somehow, a foul was called on Crone, knocking him out of the game. The crowd erupted in boos of protest, Horford completed the three-point play, and the Gators were on their way to the Elite Eight; Butler would never get closer than three again. Watching that game in person, you really had the feeling that Butler would have won if they could have gotten over the hump and into the lead in the closing minutes… and if that call had gone the other way, they just might have. But it wasn’t to be. Now, could Florida have won without the officials’ help? Sure, absolutely. But given how remarkably close Butler came to winning despite Florida’s advantages in size, skill, athleticism and officiating, I think it’s fair to say that the Gators got lucky. Not quite as lucky as Ohio State and Georgetown, but lucky nonetheless.

So, what does any of this mean for the Final Four? Probably nothing. Plenty of teams have won championships while “living on borrowed time” after a lucky escape or two. And whoever wins the title will deserve all the credit in the world. After all, like I said, luck is part of the game, especially in a tournament like this.

Just don’t tell that to a Vanderbilt fan.

P.S. It’s scrolled way down the homepage now, but there’s a good discussion on a previous thread about bad officiating and the sports-journalism “code of silence.”