Centerfield

Kiss me, I'm Irish!

[please note: that invitation is not directed at ALL of you, but only certain person or persons with a particular class of primary and secondary physical characteristics]

Funny...some of my cousins back on the Auld Sod used to say the same thing on St. Patrick's Day. They were open to all kissers, but only a certain part of their anatomy was available for kissing. ;-)

Comments should be working now.

For some reason, the execute privilege on the comments script had been turned off. I turned it back on

Huzzah! I'm blaming the Scientologists.

After a disappointing 6-3 loss to Kansas State (13-1) my favorite college baseball team WSU (19-3) nailed Long Beach St last night with their first shutout of the season, 9-0. Two more games there this weekend.

WSU beat Seton Hall in the hoops, and faces Tennessee today for a Sweet Sixteen slot. The line is Tenn -2.5, a win would put the Shockers in the Sixteen for the first time in 25 years.

WSU 80, Tennessee 73. Sweeeeeeeeet!

managed to catch the last half of the Cal NC game
while finishing up some edit work over at one of AMD's main competitors
Bad news, Powe got shut down pretty good by the double teaming.
Good news, he'll probably be around for his junior year and maybe even graduate...something that Jason Kidd shoulda done.

Caught some of that one--they really did gang up hard on Powe and shut him down. If they hadn't the game would've gone the other way. Hope he hangs with it. Maybe we can get some revenge for Cal for you. :-) WSU faces the winner of the NC/George Mason game.

People ridiculed the Missouri Valley as weak when we got four teams into the tourneys. Bite me, whiners. MVC was a TOUGH conference this year. I'm still not holding my breath for a Final Four appearance. There's some really good teams out there.

LOL. I admire your discretion, Marcus, but how many "main competitors" does AMD have? Have I missed something? (Which does happen...)

It's a real slugfest out in Long Beach for my baseball team. The Dirtbags are hitting back--and yes, that really is the team name for Long Beach.

LSU is heading to the Sweet 16! Next up to be knocked down, Duke.

heh

heh

Yeah, Pat, but compare the Yahoo headlines.

Sweet 16-bound Shockers stun Vols

versus

LSU Barely Survives

:-)

True, but considering the number of upsets and near-upsets in the first round, I'm quite content to squeak by.

And on the subject of upsets... Go Northwestern State! Bye, bye Iowa!

Hee hee! The "power conferences" are still bent out of shape about all the at-large slots that went to smaller conferences, but Billy Packer is eating crow today. Truth is, there's just a lot of really good teams out there this year.

Look out for Bradley. The beating they gave KU wasn't a surprise to anyone around here. This will be the first time ever the MVC has had two teams in the Sweet 16.

George Mason got your revenge for you, Marcus. :-) WSU faces George Mason to move up. They played early on in the season, GM won 70-67. WSU played Bradley three times in conference play this season, and split it 2-1 for WSU.

And WSU (baseball) finished sweeping their three away games against the Dirtbags in Long Beach today to move up to 21-3 for the season.

I love it.

thanks.

Meanwhile, Cal rugby team continues its usual domination.Totally manhandled colorado 67-27.
It's a heck of a team and can often totally demorlize its opponents.

Here's a little fun email back and forth
from a few years back when Stanfurd forfeited a game.

That's hilarious, Marcus! I particularly like the Cal offer to "dilute" their team to keep it from being too embarrassing. And the whining about a smaller student body...see below.

Yeah, "manhandled" borders on ludicrous understatement for a 67-27 blowout. Sounds like they demoralize their opponents by beating the crap out of 'em. Best way to do it.

WSU has over 12K students, which sounds like a good base for athletics until you notice that 2/3rds of them are "non-traditional" students, adults going back to college for working degrees. We haven't had a football team in twenty years, so we've worked real hard at excelling at other sports. Baseball's always been good, but basketball is just now recovering from being destroyed in the recruiting scandals of 1980.

And how many state U's have their own golf courses?

Mine does, Tully!

I had to look this up...yes Cal does have a golf team! Men and women!

Me I don't play golf. A few years back I was doing Giants game cutdowns with Greglen Kuiper (a very nice guy) and one of the other producers came in and showed us the golf club he had wrapped around a tree.

We're in a minority there, Pat. We got ours when the country club next door moved farther out, and donated the course to the U. Back when I was still a midget.

Golf is a pleasant diversion if you take it not at all seriously. I mean, a perfect game is 18, and no one's ever had one!

How catholic is it in YOUR part of the country? This morning's local news was quite anxious to report that all the heads of the local archdioceses had, in their benificence, given dispensation to the devout to eat corned beef today even though it's a Lenten Friday. And then catholics get all PO'd when we make jokes about them.

Anyone else feel sorry for the Vikings that all they got was a #2 for Culpepper? IMO, they should offer their #1 (a 16) and both #2s (48 and 49) to San Fran to move up to 6 and draft Leinart or Vince Young.

Vikings fans, Brad Johnson is a 37 year old qb with respectable lifetime stats:

•his lifetime QB rating is 84, which I think is probably a pretty good number comparatively speaking, although meaningless to those who don't follow such things. The only value of that stat is comparative.

•he averages about 200 yards passing per game, which is decent.

•He completes about 62% of his throws for almost 7 yards per catch, which again is pretty decent.

•he gets sacked less than twice per game (1.6), while averaging about 30 passes per game, so he's either mobile enough or smart enough to generally respond to pressure and avoid yardage losses

• He throws about 3 TD passes for every two INTs he throws, which IMO is on the mediocre to weak side, but I'm open to correction from anyone with a comparative take.

Johnson is 37. How much tread is on that tire? Unless you think the rest of the team is good enough to go deep in the playoffs this year or next, now is a good time to install a promising new QB while he can learn the pro game, and spend a year watching.

Anyone have any thoughts on the merits of new qbs learning by watching as opposed to by doing. I don't think either approach is intrinsically superior. But I do think that if you go with learning by doing, it works better if the coach focuses on working on the guy's game management skills as geared towards winning by taking really good care of the football, but are still prepared to balance that out and accept losses by giving the inexperienced guy plenty of rope to commit aggressive failures.

I know from delivering cake to Ft Devens that this former military base had its own golf course. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that as long as the grunts were allowed to play too.

My interest is more in the "who exactly gets to enjoy the spoils" question, since Devens was "closed." I don't really know what has happened to it. From what little I see in the paper, it seems to be in some limbo, part of a poilitical process of fighting over the spoils. I know someone is working the airfield for some commercial flights, and locals are opposing, and so on. Typical.

But the govt poured a lot of dough into infrastructure for a big place, and you have to wonder if anyone is really in charge of making sure that we get as much dough as possible back...Tully, do you have any words of wisdom on such processes?

Closed bases have to first be tested throughly for hazmat contamination, and then surplused out. But they generally can't be surplused until any hazmat assessment is completed and remediation is completed.

Bases everywhere have golf courses--there are over 200 base golf courses. Many of them were built without taxpayer money, relying completely on commissary fees and such. San Antonio has five. Many of them are now open to the public.

Isn't Interior trying to get most of the Devens acreage for Oxbow Wildlife Refuge?

I can go you one better on golf courses, guys. I guarantee you that my state is the only one with a prison golf course.

Now, before anybody gets all upset, note that inmates are not allowed to play, and it was largely built to provide job training opportunities for inmates. Guards and other employees play (many actually live on the prison grounds), and other free citizens can also actually arrange to play. Got to have a background check, though, and there's no Nineteenth Hole to knock back a cold one when you're done...

(By the way, that "Camp J" seen at the top of the map of the course? That's Angola's administrative lockdown/solitary confinement area for its worst, most violent offenders. Where else can you play golf in site of the hardest core of hard core criminals?)

Pat, Actually, I think this makes more sense for a white-collar detention facility...punish people by making them listen to other people play golf and don''t let them play. No windows, but you can hear people chatter and laugh it up and hit balls and so on.

This could be a great program. Make Jeffrey Fastow sit on display behind the glass at a fancy restaurant eating bread and water. Smell yes, eat NO. You get to go up to the glass and taunt him...
"
Boy, Jeff, this Veal Procaccini sure is delicious. How's your spam?

I'm afraid that my highly evolved standards of community decency would consider that to be cruel and unusual punishment, Brian... ;-)