Newington High’s girls basketball team beat the Lancers in a crucial conference showdown Saturday. Newington is now in a two-way tie (instead of a three-way) atop the CCC South.

The conference standings now look like this:

Newington 5-1
Bulkeley 5-1
Bristol Eastern 4-2
New Britain 4-2
Southington 3-2
Bristol Central 2-4
Maloney 0-5
Platt 0-6

The saga of the seagull continues. The Mom & Dad blog has the latest.

We all know about the deadly suicide bombing in Baghdad, but unless you read InstaPundit, perhaps you haven’t heard about the failed bomb attack in Tikrit late Saturday. One of the bombers was a nephew of Saddam Hussein.

When Saddam was captured, I seem to recall Sean writing, on this website, that this capture would settle once and for all the question of whether the Iraqi resistance terrorists were really “Saddam loyalists,” or not. If they were, Sean said, presumably they would stop their attacks now that Saddam was captured; and if the attacks continued, that would prove they weren’t really Saddam loyalists after all, but just… I dunno, generic angry Iraqis I guess? Well anyway, I always thought that line of reasoning was silly, and now it’s been definitively proven wrong. Saddam Hussein is in U.S. custody, and the attacks by Saddam loyalists — nay, Saddam blood relatives — continue.

We’re back from our hike. Very fun. Also very long. :) We were hiking for nearly five hours… probably eight or nine miles.

I will post a gallery of pics a little later. (I need to do some more iPhoto wrangling first.) But here’s a teaser:

Yes, that is a tarantula!!

UPDATE: Our full photo gallery from today’s hike is now online!

I bought the brand-spanking-new iLife ‘04 today, including, most importantly, the new and improved iPhoto 4.

The big advantage of iPhoto 4 is supposed to be that it’s much faster than the old version. So far, that definitely appears true. As much as I loved its functionality, iPhoto 2 had a habit of stalling on even the simplest tasks in even a mildly large photo library. But iPhoto 4, after taking a little longer to import and start up, moves at pretty much lightning speed as you’re scrolling, browsing, moving photos around, etc.

That’s just a preliminary assessment, however. Now I’m really going to put it to the test. I had previously split my photo collection into four libraries (using an application called iPhoto Buddy), but now I’m combining them all into one mega-library (which is how iPhoto is actually supposed to be used). Apple’s website says: “Got 250 images in your iPhoto library? 2,500 images? 25,000? Regardless of the number of digital photos you’ve collected, iPhoto blazes.” Well, I’ll have nearly 34,000 images by the time my PowerBook finishes importing everything into the library, which will happen overnight. So in the morning we’ll see how fast the new iPhoto really is. :)

All four of Friday’s CCC South girls basketball games — including the big showdown between Newington and Bristol Eastern — have been postponed to Saturday after the extreme cold weather cancelled school, and thus afterschool sports as well, on Friday.

A look at the current standings in the CCC South will help explain why I’m calling this mid-season game a “big showdown”:

Newington 4-1
Bristol Eastern 4-1
Bulkeley 4-1
Southington 3-2
New Britain 3-2
Bristol Central 2-3
Platt 0-5
Maloney 0-5

I personally think Bulkeley will fall back as the season goes on. So this game really could be critical. (On a side note, watch for New Britain to creep up, too.)

I realize most of my readers probably don’t care about this crap, except maybe my mom and dad… but dammit, this is the first good NHS girls basketball season since I graduated, and as a former manager of the team, I’m excited, even if nobody else is (and even if the entire team, including all the coaches, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the late-90s teams :).

Lunch break’s almost over, but first, one last post…

The Iowa Caucuses are getting very interesting. It seems to be a tight, unpredictable four-way race among Dean, Kerry, Gephardt and Edwards. The vote is on Monday.

Anyway, knowing full well that these will probably be utterly wrong, I hereby offer my predictions on when the various Democratic candidates will drop out of the race. Major dates to keep in mind: Jan. 19, Iowa; Jan. 27, New Hampshire; Feb. 3, Arizona, South Carolina, and six other states; March 2, Super Tuesday (including Connecticut, New York and California).

Jan. 28: Kucinich
Jan. 30: Gephardt
Feb. 4: Lieberman
Feb. 5: Kerry
Mar. 3: Either Edwards or Clark (endorsing the other and making some sort of back-room deal…VP, anyone?), or both (if Dean’s lead is too commanding at this point and it’s time to “unite the party”)

Sharpton doesn’t drop out… he takes his delegates (all three of them or whatever) to the convention, Jerry Brown-style.

If any members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences happen to be reading my blog :), y’all should get off your damn computers and run to your nearest FedEx location and mail in your Oscar ballots now!! (You should vote for Return of the King in every category, of course.) The ballots are due tomorrow at 5:00 PM!

The Oscar nominations will be announced a week from Tuesday at 6:30 AM Mountain time. (That’s Jan. 27, the same day as the New Hampshire primary, if you’re keeping score at home. Perhaps Wesley Clark will be nominated as best actor for his “anti-war” stance?)

The Academy Awards themselves are being held rather early this year — on Leap Day, Feb. 29, at 6:00 PM MST.

Go, Frodo, go!!!

UPDATE: In an odd coincidence, the Wesley Clark post from Roger Simon’s blog, which I linked to in a tangent above, is immediately preceded by a post about the fact that Simon himself just mailed in his Oscar ballot. I had not seen this previously. My decision to link to Simon’s Clark excerpt in a post about the Oscars was made without my having any clue that Simon was an Academy member, let alone that he had just posted about it!

He won’t tell us who he voted for, but it doesn’t sound like it was ROTK: “It doesn’t matter anyway, because I rarely vote for the winners.”

I’m heading down to Duck and Decanter (which is a restaurant, not a law firm :) to pick up my lunch… which I ordered online a half-hour ago!!! How cool is that?

By the way, the title of this post refers to a song from an episode of the old Disney show “Adventures in Wonderland.” Talk about obscure references. (Hi Dad. :)

Desmon Farmer scored 40 points, and USC (8-6, 3-2 Pac-10) upset #7 Arizona, 99-90 yesterday. Go Trojans!

It looks like it got down to 7 below zero last night at Bradley Airport, which would tie the record low.

Public schools in both Bristol and Newington are closed today due to the extreme cold, so tonight’s big NHS vs. Bristol Eastern girls basketball game will presumably be postponed.

Today’s iPhoto gallery features some very cute kitten-and-stuffie scenes:

Awwwww. How cute.

Also, Becky gave me a ride home from work this afternoon, and we caught a car-pool-lane fraud in the act:

Unless that guy has a midget riding in the passenger seat next to him, he clearly does not belong in any HOV lane. What’s more, he cut Becky off to get there, illegally merging across a solid white line. Are you seeing this, Arizona Highway Patrol? We got his license plate number right here! :)

First Chris, then Adrienne, now Becky. All my blog-children — and, uh, blog-comment-children — are leaving the roost! Whatever you call the blogger equivalent of empty-nest syndrome, I have it. :)

But no, in all seriousness, Becky isn’t leaving. She’ll still be posting on the SHA girl blog, too. She’s just giving herself an outlet for additional posting — a separate solo blogging career over at discardedthought.blogspot.com.

“The Valkyrie of Discarded Thought,” she calls it. What’s a Valkyrie, you ask? So did I! She found it in the dictionary, or something. :) Apparently it’s some sort of Old Norse thing… “any of the maidens of Odin who choose the heroes to be slain in battle and conduct them to Valhalla.” What that has to do with “the intellectual cud of a disgruntled grad student,” I have no idea. I guess you’ll have to ask Becky… once she gets commenting set up.

Anyway, check it out!

The nation’s terror alert was temporarily changed from “yellow” to “cardinal and gold” Wednesday when Tom Ridge visited USC.

Okay, maybe I’m making up the color thing. But Tom Ridge really did visit USC.

Hey Andrew, Chris, somebody, would you please Fisk Howard Dean’s foreign policy for me, or give me a link to someone who has done so? Because you know what? At first glance, a lot of it seems to makes a lot of sense. Not as much sense as Lieberman… but a lot more sense than Bush.