In response to my prior tweets and blog posts condemning the potential expansion of the NCAA Tournament to 96 teams as “unspeakably dumb, absolutely ridiculous, totally insane, utterly indefensible, wolf-face crazy,” and so forth — and lamenting the possible end to the mystique of the quixotic 16-versus-1 game — Andrew last night e-mailed the following response. I don’t agree with… Read more »
One of the greatest annual subplots of the NCAA Tournament in its 64-team (and 65-team) format, IMHO, is the question of whether a #16 seed will finally do the unthinkable and knock off a #1 seed. It’s never, EVER happened, and it rarely even threatens to happen, for the simple reason that #16 seeds — the champions, often the unexpected… Read more »
In case you haven’t heard, Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, which means six more weeks of winter. In other news, Nancy Pelosi saw her shadow, which means six more weeks without health-care reform. Also, Barack Obama saw his shadow, but insisted he inherited it from George W. Bush. Scott Brown saw his shadow, but announced it’s not his… Read more »
Moments ago, Sports by Brooks posted this update to its earlier report that expansion of the NCAA Tournament from 65 to 96 teams — an unspeakably dumb, absolutely ridiculous, totally insane, utterly indefensible, wolf-face crazy idea — is a “done deal.” The new report, which links to a Fox Sports story, involves weasel-word contradictions of the “done deal” notion that,… Read more »
Unlike my last two home cities (South Bend and Knoxville), Denver isn’t much of a college-sports town — pro sports definitely rules the roost here. But, depending on how things play out in the Big Sky Conference, we could end up with some March Madness up in Greeley, 60 miles north of town, on the 9th and 10th of next… Read more »
Courtesy of last Monday’s Planet Money podcast (which I just listened to this morning), here’s a gloriously dorky hip-hop video produced by EconStories.tv, featuring John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek debating about economics — in rap form. Heh. Brilliant!
If the UConn women, currently 21-0 and seemingly unbeatable — they’ve beaten #2 Stanford by 12 points (in a game that wasn’t as close as the final score indicated), #3 Notre Dame by 24 points, #7 Duke by 33 points, and #12 North Carolina by 41 points — keep winning, they’ll tie their own record for the longest winning streak… Read more »
Today, we took a family day trip up into the mountains, to Breckenridge, to view the entries in the International Snow Sculpture Championships. Here’s a photo of Becky and Loyette, looking at one of the sculptures: All the sculptures started out as Borg-like cubes, such as this… …but were transformed, over the course of five days from January 26-30, into… Read more »
President Obama attended today’s Duke-Georgetown game, and tried his hand at some color commentary on CBS early in the second half: The Hoyas won, by the way, 89-77 (and it wasn’t really that close). I hope you’ll all join me, liberals and conservatives alike, and say together in a spirit of bipartisanship: Duke sucks.
Here is Apple’s promotional video thingy for the iPad: You can watch the entire Stevenote here. Meanwhile, here’s an ad for the original iPad, from a Mad TV skit way back in 2007 2005. (Warning: off-color bodily humor.) Heh. UPDATE: The authors of the sketch talked about their comic prescience on NPR yesterday. (Hat tip: Patrick Cullen.)