Possibly the greatest audiobook ever.
Seattle joins Denver as WAC misfits: league up to 9 schools, 7 in football; Utah State and the eight dwarves
When we last left the #ZombieWAC, it was on life support after the near-death experience of almost losing Utah State and San Jose State to the Mountain West. That followed on the heels of seemingly getting a new lease on life that would allow it limp forward for some time as an Island of Misfit Mascots Division I Programs From West of the Mississippi.
That was January. Since then, things have been relatively quiet on the WAC expansion/defection front. But today, news! The University of Denver has a new non-football partner in the otherwise football-focused league: the University of Seattle.
The Western Athletic Conference today announced that an invitation for membership has been issued to and accepted by Seattle University to join the conference effective July 1, 2012. … With the addition, the WAC will consist of nine full-time members for the 2012-13 season; Denver (non-football), Idaho, Louisiana Tech, New Mexico State, San Jose State, Seattle (non-football), Texas State, UTSA and Utah State.
For those keeping score at home, that’s nine schools total, but only seven football schools. So, for the moment at least, my Twitter sub-genre of jokes about invitations to “join the WAC as its eighth football school” remains intact. Huzzah! Anyway…
“We are pleased to announce that Seattle University is joining the WAC,” said Commissioner Karl Benson. “Seattle’s tradition and history along with a strong commitment to academics, its athletics program and their facilities make the university and its top-15 media market a great fit for the WAC. We look forward to a beneficial and successful relationship.”
Not invited to join the WAC? Utah Valley University, which had made a pitch to get in, but was smacked down today. That’s right: UVU was just rejected by a league that was itself rejected by North Texas and Montana, and that reportedly covets such powerhouses as Sam Houston State, Sacramento State and Cal Poly. Someone put that school’s athletic department on suicide watch, because man, that’s depressing.
Remember to donate any unused, unwanted Division I schools to the WAC’s collection bin at your local supermarket.less than a minute ago via bitly 
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Brendan Loy
brendanloy
Meanwhile, a blog post last week by the Mercury-News‘s Jon Wilner suggests the WAC isn’t done yet:
Newington High: state champs at last! Baseball tops Southington in epic thriller
The bridesmaid jinx is over! For the first time since 1994 — when I was in seventh grade — a Newington High School athletic team is the Connecticut state champion. And for the first time since 1980 — before I was born — it happened in a CIAC-sponsored sport, breaking a streak of twelve consecutive CIAC title-game losses in my lifetime in football, baseball, girls basketball, ice hockey, boys soccer, and boys volleyball. The streak-breaker? The baseball team, which beat Southington — Newington’s traditional archrival in everything — in a 10-inning thriller. How perfect! More here and here and here.
In a wet and wild CIAC Class LL state final, the No. 17 Newington baseball team outlasted seventh-ranked Southington 3-2 in 10 innings Saturday night.
Both Newington pitcher Cole Bryant (8-2) and Southington starter Sal Romano (10-2) pitched brilliant 10-inning games, but it was the Indians who exited Muzzy Field with the 3-2 win and the championship trophy.
Down 2-1 heading into the bottom of the seventh inning, Southington rallied for a run to tie the score 2-2. It appeared as if the Blue Knights had the game won 3-2 in their eighth, but the run was negated on an appeal play at home plate.
Newington scored an unearned run in the top of the 10th to go up 3-2. Southington loaded the bases with two outs in the bottom of the frame, but Bryant got a strikeout to give Newington its first state title.
I had no idea the Indians had even reached the title game; unlike in some past years that blog readers will remember, I wasn’t paying attention. Newington was 12-8 in the regular season, and seeded #17 in Class LL, so this team didn’t seem like a candidate to break the school’s long streak of finishing as runners-up. (If you include second-place finishes by the golf team, NHS had had fourteen second-place finishes in CIAC sports since its last CIAC championship, the year before I was born.) But they knocked off #16 Windsor, #1 Glastonbury, #8 Danbury and #4 Amity en route to the title game.
Friend of the blog Dan Dinunzio has much more about the game, including a firsthand account of the eighth-inning craziness (remember, high-school games are 7 innings long, so the 8th is already “extra innings,” and a go-ahead run in the bottom of the 8th would win the game):
Middle infielder Armando Soler dropped a lazy fly ball to put Matt Spruill on 1st base. Then, following a pop out, Southington star Sal Romano laced a double down the left-field line. It looked as if the game was over.
I wasn’t watching home plate, because I figured, “wow, the curse lives on and Newington has come in second again!” But in a matter of seconds, it all changed when Spruill forgot to touch home plate. Are you serious? On the biggest stage of any high school athlete’s career, he forgot to do what seems so natural.
A celebration ensued for Southington on the pitcher’s mound while Newington coaches screamed for an appeal. Newington appealed, and it was clear the umpire had seen exactly what unfolded. A nightmare for any Southington fan, and a miracle for all of those in the stands cheering for Newington. Spruill was ruled out while Romano returned to second base with his head in his jersey, in a state of shock.
And then, after Newington took at 3-2 lead in the top of the 10th, the game’s final out, in the bottom of the 10th:
Southington loaded the bases with two outs and reached a full count. Cole Bryant had thrown 175 pitches on the night. At that pitch count, I can’t even imagine what his arm felt like.
Cole dialed up a two-seam fastball and struck out Tyler Burns looking. It was his 16th strikeout of the game. Bryant called it “the greatest feeling in the world,” and the Newington celebration began. A mob-pile began on the field full of joyous embraces, hugs, and jubilation between the coaches and players.
A thirty-year streak weighed heavy on the right arm of Cole Bryant. His 176th pitch of the night ended that drought and crowned the Newington Indians baseball team State Champions for the first time ever.
Photo by John Brunetti, father of JV coach and my Class of 1999 classmate Jeff Brunetti.
The Apple mothership is coming
Comments Off on The Apple mothership is coming
Apple products often look like they are from the future, and Steve Jobs is going to take that same design approach to the design of Apple’s new campus in Cupertino.
The massive new building (roughly as large as the pentagon, although only consisting of a single ring) would house up to 13,000 employees in a four story structure featuring curved glass windows around the entire building. Existing surface parking would be moved underground allowing for an increase the amount of green space on the 150 acre plot of land from 20% to 80%. Thats one way to think different.
If approved by the City of Cupertino (and it looks like it will be) they would break ground next year with completion scheduled for 2015.
Hancock elected Denver’s mayor
Moments ago, almost immediately after the polls closed at 7pm, the Denver Post projected the City Council president, Michael Hancock, as the winner over the former state senator and political scion, the ex-Governor’s son, Chris Romer, in the Denver mayoral runoff.
Here’s a pretty picture I took earlier today that has nothing to do with that:
UPDATE: Hancock’s “feel-good story” is being credited with helping lift him to victory. But the “feel-good” moment of Election Night came courtesy of the loser, Romer, who showed up at Hancock’s victory party, hugged his opponent, and had a public kumbaya:
Just before 10 p.m. following Hancock’s speech, Romer and his wife, Laurie, arrived at Hancock’s watch party and the two rivals appeared together and hugged on stage.
“Congratulations to all of you,” Romer said to Hancock’s supporters. “I’m ready to help. I love [Michael] and I love this city.”
In that moment, Romer showed a magnanimity that he seemed to be missing throughout the campaign. His descent from presumptive front-runner to landslide loser (58% to 42%) is being blamed in part on negative campaigning:
Political analyst Eric Sondermann viewed Hancock’s overwhelming victory as evidence that the race broke based on the opposite tones of the candidates’ campaigns.
“When it broke away from Chris Romer and toward Michael Hancock over the last few weeks, it broke bigger than anyone expected,” Sondermann said. “I think the town just made a group decision that was a rejection of what was seen as unseemly, unfair, overly negative, non-Denver campaign.”
Tornado hits Massachusetts (!)
The wild and deadly tornado season of 2011 rolls on, with Southern New England — my old stomping grounds — the latest target. Check out this incredible video of a tornado crossing the Connecticut River in Springfield, Massachusetts:
At least four people are dead in Massachusetts, in what’s being called the state’s worst tornado outbreak in a century. And the damage is massive. It’s not Joplin-style devastation — houses stripped to their foundations, whole neighborhood leveled — but by New England standards, it’s very bad. Lots of major structural damage, many injuries, and undoubtedly a big economic toll.
P.S. Here’s a look at the tornado’s “debris ball” on radar. Again, very impressive for Massachusetts.
What’s This Aboot Fiscal Reform?
Turns out our friends to the north can teach us a thing or two about budget surpluses and paying off debt. Canada has lowered its national debt from 67% to 29% of GDP since 1993 and run a budget surplus every year between 1997-2008. How? By cutting spending on many gov’t programs in absolute dollar terms (as opposed to cutting just the rate of spending growth). Specifically, about 85 cents of every dollar of deficit reduction was achieved with spending cuts. Did those spending cuts hurt the Canadian economy? David Henderson, author of the study, says no:
As the government cut its spending on programs from 14.9 percent of GDP in fiscal year 1996 to 12.1 percent in fiscal year 2000, more resources were available for people to use productively in the private sector. From 1997 to 2000, when government spending as a percent of GDP fell, Canada’s economy experienced a high rate of real growth of between four and five percent per year.
The Canadian experience appears to belie most Democrats’ view that cutting gov’t spending during an economic slowdown is bad, showing instead that cutting spending during low-growth years is good for the economy.
On a slightly different topic, did Canada’s single-payer health care system help, hinder, or play no part in this fiscal 180-degree turn?
Fall of the House of Tressel
In case you missed it during your Memorial day celebrations, one of the biggest programs in college football lost its head coach this weekend amidst a growing scandal that makes what happened with Reggie Bush at USC look tame by comparison. Jim “Sweatervest” Tressel of “THE” Ohio State University resigned on Monday hours ahead of the release of a damning article from Sports Illustrated revealing that the Buckeyes improper benefits problems went far beyond last seasons Tatoo Six. We allready knew that The Vest lied to NCAA investigators (and possibly tOSU adminstrators) about his knowledge of the players violations, but now we know that at least 28 players (possibly many more) have been doing the same thing for years. This isn’t even the first time that Tressel, so often lauded for traits of integrity and honesty, has been involved in such a scandal. During his tenure at Youngstown State similar problems emmerged, and just like this time Tressel’s excuse was “he didn’t know”. Did he really not know? We may never find out for sure, but given the recent revelations about what he DID know, it certainly casts doubt on the former coach’s claims doesn’t it?
What happens now? Buckeye assistant coach Luke Fickell has been named interim coach for the next season and speculation has, of course, allready begun as to who will become the next permanent coach with well known names such as Urban Meyer and Bo Pelini rising to the top of the list. But will either coach, or many others want to take over a program that is almost certain to be weighed down by major penalties for the forseeable future? Given that the NCAA recently denied USC’s appeal for a reduction of its penalties, leveled against a program where one player recieved benefits and one assistant coach was alleged to have known about it (but the evidence for it was incredibly weak), what will they do to a program where such violations are not a single incident but commonplace and spread out over many years, and in whcih we have clear evidence that the head coach knew about at the very least SOME of the incidents and did nothing about it? In a just and logical world the penalties would need to be much harsher, but how harsh can they be? 4 year bowl ban? 5 year scholarship reduction? I’d be shocked if the NCAA went so far as to try and impose the “death penalty” aka the shutdown of the Ohio State football program for any length of time. Such a move against one of college footballs most powerful and storied programs would be met with heavy resistence from the school, the community and fan base, and the Big Ten conference. If they tried that tactic, it could very well serve as a catylst for the defection of major conferences away from the NCAA (in football at least).
How harsh the NCAA finally decides to be, and whether that punishment will be commensurate with the crime and proportional to those handed out against USC will be a hotly anticipated topic of debate for the coming months. Safe to say that the atmosphere in Columbus is going to be anything but jovial in the days ahead.
Memorial Day 2011
I hope you all had a wonderful holiday. I certainly did. And amid the revelry, I hope everyone stopped to remember why we celebrate this day — to honor the sacrifices of the brave men and women who have fought and died for our country and our freedom.
Apropos of that, I had the following exchange with Loyette, paraphrased as accurately as I can from memory, on Sunday night shortly before bedtime. By way of explanation of the punch line at the end, this entire conversation took place with Loyette sitting near the edge of her bed, and me sitting on the floor, in position to catch her if she were to stand up and jump off the bed to me (a favorite pastime of hers). Also, shortly before coming upstairs for bed, she’d been eating ice cream, and just before that, we’d been singing songs and dancing around the living room. Anyway…
LOYETTE: “Daddy, tomorrow, will it be the weekend or the week?” [Editor’s note: She asks this exact question almost every single day before bedtime. She and Loyacita love the weekend because, of course, the weekend means Daddy’s home. 🙂 ]
BRENDAN: “The weekend. It’s the last day of the three-day weekend. Tomorrow is a holiday! It’s called Memorial Day.”
LOYETTE: “What’s Memorial Day?”
BRENDAN: “Well, [Loyette], Memorial Day is a day when we honor the soldiers who fight* so that we can have freedom. Do you know what ‘freedom’ means?”
LOYETTE: “No.”
BRENDAN: “Well, in some places, people can’t do the things they want to do. Like, they can’t sing, or dance, or eat ice cream.”
LOYETTE: “Or share bananas with their sisters?”
BRENDAN: “Right. Or share bananas with their sisters. They can’t do those things because they don’t have freedom. But we live in America, and in America we have freedom, so we can do things like sing and dance and eat ice cream and share bananas with our sisters, because there are people — soldiers — who fight to make sure we get to keep our freedom. And on Memorial Day, we honor those people. Does that make sense?”
LOYETTE: “Not really. Can I jump to you?”
Heh. I tried again today, en route to the Commerce City Memorial Day Parade (pictured above and below) with the girls. This time, I made an analogy to the climactic battle in Loyette’s favorite movie, Sleeping Beauty, in which Prince Philip fights Maleficent in order to get to Princess Aurora, rescue her, and (as I put it) “give her back her freedom.” Sometimes, I explained, people in real life are mean like Maleficent, and soldiers have to fight them, like Prince Philip does with his Sword of Truth and Shield of Virtue, so the mean people can’t take away other people’s freedom. She still doesn’t really understand, of course — and obviously it’s a horribly simplistic explanation anyway — but you’ve gotta start somewhere…
*Yes, I’m aware that, technically, Memorial Day honors those who have died while fighting — my broader description is more appropriate to Veterans Day. But I’m not about to burden my 3 1/2-year-old with a detailed discussion of the concept of death, on top of trying to explain freedom and war.
I, for one, welcome our new robotic writing device overlords
Last night, with the Patriot Act’s surveillance and investigative measures due to expire at midnight, and Congress having just passed an extension while President Obama was on a European pub crawl (or, y’know, addressing Parliament, attending the G-8 summit, meeting with Medvedev, strategizing with world leaders about the revolutions in the Middle East… whatever, same difference), President Obama needed to urgently sign the Patriot Act extension bill into law, lest our national security be threatened. (Candidate Obama could not be reached for comment.) But the bill was on the wrong side of the ocean! You’d think maybe it could be faxed or e-mail to him, but apparently not. Instead…
White House aides used a machine called an autopen to “sign” President Obama’s name to the Patriot Act extension … Obama was in France at the G8 summit and directed his staff to apply his signature to the bill. It’s the first time he’s ever “signed” a bill in such a fashion, aides say.
Time was of the essence in signing the Patriot Act extension because the surveillance and investigative measures it renews were to expire at midnight Thursday. Administration officials said an expiration of those authorities for even hours would cause significant problems.
The Constitution, unsurprisingly, makes no mention of autopens or robo-signing. It says that a bill “shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States: If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it.” However, Obama aides point to a 2005 opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that concluded that, despite the Constitution’s requirements, a bill need not be physically presented to the president or actually signed by him to become law.
I haven’t read the OLC opinion, but I’m pretty sure this means that, technically, the “autopen” is now the President of the United States. The robot takeover has begun. #PANIC!
P.S. Doug Powers: “It’s possible that eventually TOTUS [TelePrompTer of the United States] and the autopen will become completely self-aware.” The Robots have us right where they want us…