Accountability Means The Ability To Steal From Bank Accounts, Right?

I lost my wallet on Wednesday and before I was able to get home, look up the number and call the credit card company to cancel it, someone found my wallet and made a few charges on my card.

The credit card company took the charges off and all is well, but I found it really funny what it was that this a-hole paid for with my card. Let's play multiple choice:

A: Flowers for an elderly loved one
B: A donation to a children's hospital
C: Clothing and food for a homeless shelter
D: The phone bill for a federal inmate

If you guessed A, B or C, I appreciate your faith in humanity.

I went to the website of the company that does the billing for the inmates and guess what their little tagline is: "Integrity, Responsiveness, Accountability." Ah, the irony.

How Often Is There A Sports-Related Event Worthy Of Saying "Low And Behold"?

I got to watch my alma mater play hoops tonight for the first time since their second round NCAA tourney game last March. They were hosting St. Mary's, a conference opponent who is currently ranked #27 (AP). Typically teams will get up for a rival who is highly ranked, especially at home, so I was pretty excited about the game.

The game was set to come on a 6 Pacific time, and when I tuned in around quarter to six, the Purdue at Minnesota game still had about 10 minutes to go, so I knew I'd miss the start of the USD game. This was a little frustrating at first, but I did get a nice piece of information that I will store away for this upcoming March, and I will pass it along to you fine folks now (both of you):

Purdue is ranked 18, and Minnesota is ranked 21, and they play in the Big 10, so their chances of both making the NCAA tournament are very good, and they'll likely get good seeds. If you have any inkling that their first round opponents are potential Cinderellas, or if they happen to get a crappy seed and play a good team in the first round, do not hesitate to pick Purdue and Minnesota to both lose in the first round. The only way I will pick these teams to win a game is if I learn that their opponents have three or four guys get hurt. Or if they play Gonzaga, because I have a long-standing personal rule that I do not pick Gonzaga to win any games in the Tournament, and generally speaking, it serves me well.

(I think I need to formulate the Rules of Picking the Tourney.)

Anyway, as that painfully slow game withered to a merciful end, they starting running the USD-SMC score in the upper corner.

"Hey, USD is up 2-0...oh, make that 2-2...down 4-2...6-2...13-2. Ouch."

By the time ESPN2 switched over from Brent Musberger's miserable ass-kissing call of the Purdue-Minnesota game, the USD was already over. But then I remembered that St. Mary's had led USD by 17 in the second half of their conference semifinal game last year and USD came back to win in double-OT. Not tonight. But at least USD had the courtesy to play quickly, lose quickly, and allow ESPN2 to get to their next scheduled program a little early!

By the way, if you are looking for a small team to make some noise in the Tourney, St. Mary's is a very good option. They have a spectacular point guard (guard play+NCAA tourney=win), good shooters, some decent big men, 5 Australians (I don't know if it helps, but that is kinda cool) and they play serious defense. They won't be under the radar since they're already creeping into the rankings and have the nation's longest winning streak going, but everyone east of California will not trust this little band of Aussies.

They are impossible to root for however. Last week they beat a conference opponent by 50. No problem there; you should beat conference foes when they're down. The problem I have with it is that they fired up 31 3-pointers in the game. Classy coach.

One final thought on the Purdue-Minnesota game before moving on: we are all clear that the Big 10 Conference has eleven teams in it and that as creatively as they may hide that fact in their logo, that still doesn't make sense, right? OK. Moving on...

Speaking of Aussies and ESPN2's evening program, the next thing on the agenda was the Djokovic-Delic match. It ended up being a very nicely played, evenly matched four-setter between the #3 ranked returning champ and the little known American. The announcers made the point several times how these two were friends and how good the sportsmanship was throughout. When the match ended, they greeted each other genuinely and both thanked the boisterous crowd warmly.

The reason that all those warm feelings are worth remarking about (besides that they are just rare in sports) is that Djokovic is Serbian and Delic is a Bosnian-born American. I'm not sure how much you've been paying attention to the news for the past...oh...500 years, but the Bosnians and Serbs don't generally hug and and get warm reactions from crowds of people from the other place. I wasn't going to write about this because I couldn't really figure out a point I wanted to make that didn't get all socio-political and/or cheesy.

So I started writing about the USD hoops game when what on my TV should appear but a good old fashioned, Geraldo-style chair throwing brawl in a courtyard at the Australian Open. Apparently the warm fuzzies between the Serbian Dojokovic fans and Bosnian Delic fans only lasted until they got outside the stadium. Then a Serb threw a chair at a Bosnian woman who had just finished being interviewed by ESPN2 and the kangaroo shit hit the fan. I still wasn't sure what to write about because now I couldn't figure out a point I wanted to make that still didn't get all socio-political and/or judgemental.

So I went back to writing and ESPN2 came to my rescue again providing me with a nice, neat ending to this story. They went back out to the courtyard and showed some cops hauling the thugs away who had been throwing metal chairs in a crowd including women and children and low and behold: Australian cops wear Crocodile-freaking-Dundee hats! They're like Canadian Mounties but not gay. I am 100% sure that if they had widened the shot, we would have seen that they also wore just board shorts and sandals and carry boomerangs and machetes instead of guns and mace like our sissy cops here.

Add this to the growing list of reasons why Australia is awesome (#1 of course being how much hotter the accent makes the women).

A Great Day For Mankind

Mark January 20, 2009 as one of the most important days in American history, possibly even world history. It is a day of social progress, cultural significance, and historical relevance. Yes, my fellow Americans, it is the day I start writing on this site again.

Despite that this is basically a sports blog however, I do have a few things worth noting (but likely not worth reading) about the day's other significant news: the Inauguration:
-Never before has Dick Cheney looked more like an evil mastermind than he did rolling up in his wheelchair. Is there any doubt that that cane he carried was made from the dried, compressed hopes and dreams of people he has destroyed with some kind of gigantic death ray that is housed in a cave underneath the Vice President's residence?

-I saw Aretha Franklin in concert a few years ago and she was not great, but she was still Aretha Freaking Franklin. She spent as much time back stage in costume changes (you try putting a new billboard on a blimp) and presumably eating, as she spent on stage. All that changed at the Inauguration: she is now officially a mere caricature of herself...a caricature that should not, under any circumstances, sing.

-You have to like Craig Robinson (first lady's brother, basketball coach at Oregon State) wearing an Oregon State scarf. If I was a student there, and he was my basketball coach, I would be so fired up about that. This could easily inspire those kids to win two or maybe even three more Pac-10 games this year.

-Was George Bush, Sr. wearing Mikhail Gorbachev's hat?

-Some day an old lady will tell her grand children that she was in the front row at her church watching with pride and satisfaction the day the first African American was sworn is as the President of the United States of America. She will talk about the glorious sun shining down on him as he gave his beautiful, determined, sober, powerful address. She will talk about how it gave hope to millions and will hopefully talk about how good things got after that day. She will probably not mention that she was the kid asleep in the front row that CBS kept showing. Note to the director: maybe focus on a different area of the congregation...an area where people are awake.

-Speaking of the CBS broadcast, did they not have a switch or a button or something that could shut off the mics of Katie Couric and the other hosts? I have never heard so much off-camera whispering and conversation in my life. It was like standing outside of the control room at a high school play.

-Finally, at one point they mentioned Robert Frost reading a poem at an Inauguration. I am sure that Frost enjoyed that 5th grader's poem that that women read at the...what's that? She wrote it? Oh, in that case, I imagine Frost, Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain are rolling over in their graves after that horrible poem, or maybe it was just her delivery. Somewhere Maya Angelou is freaking pissed right now.


The main reason I have restarted to write again is that my opinions are just too important to civilization to be kept to myself, so I felt like the right thing to do would be to broadcast them to the world so that people around the globe (well mostly just my mom and occasionally my wife when I ask her to read it) can learn from what I have to share.

Today's post is already too long thanks to the monumental historical event I mentioned earlier, so I won't drag on any longer, but I won't take two months to write my next entry so check back soon. Some topics I expect to cover: Pete Carroll: a-hole, the Super Bowl, Devil Rays vs. Arizona Cardinals, Manny Ramirez, St. Mary's throwing their hats in the ring for the Worst Sportsmanship of 2009 award, the ticking time bomb of crappiness that is 24 and how to fix it, and of course Lost which is returning exactly 34 hours from the moment I type this period: . And much, much more, most of which you will not care about, including the funniest injuries in professional sports history.