Author Archives: AD

ALDLAND’s March Madness Challenge: Final Results

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Last night’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament championship game gave us two champions. Most publicly, Kentucky’s 67-59 win over Kansas handed the 2012 national championship to the Wildcats.

Most importantly to readers of this site, John Calipari’s first national championship sealed Bingo_Bango’s victory in the inaugural ALDLAND Mad as a March Hare March Madness Challenge, a result even casual observers knew for weeks was a lock. A 99% accuracy rate is impressive. Bingo_Bango should email us at aldland[dot]com[at]gmail[dot]com to negotiate a worthy prize.

Here’s the rest of the top ten:

Honorable mentions go to mjpascha 1, who turned in a consistently solid second-place performance, and Goulbourne Supremacy, the winner of the best-entry-name division for the combination of nomenclature and performance.

Finally, dishonorable mentions to your two writer-participants, Brendan and I, who finished outside of the top ten.

Thanks to all of you for playing.

Mike Leach Favors Cougars

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I was a Mike Leach fan long before Craig James took the helm of the mothership and got Leach fired from the head coaching job at Texas Tech. I think I first learned about Leach through an interview on Jim Rome’s radio show and was hooked by his deadpan demeanor and the facts that he has a law degree from Pepperdine and kept an automatronic pirate-skelleton in his office. I’m not even a pirate guy, but the random, dry sense of humor, and the nonchalance with which he carried on his job as a successful college football coach of one of the highest-flying offenses in the nation all combined to hit me just right.

When Leach finally landed his next coaching job, Washington State plainly had gotten a real steal, and though his tone of voice would never betray it, it appears that Leach has embraced his new home as well. From an interview posted yesterday on SB Nation’s WSU site:

Jim Moore: In a battle to the death among Pac-12 mascots, which animal or person wins?

Mike Leach: The Cougar absolutely. Let’s go through this a little bit. A cougar obviously kills a duck and a beaver. A cougar against a husky … that’s pretty well a massacre. A cardinal or whatever: I don’t know exactly what a cougar would either climb it or I wouldn’t want to think of what else he’d do on it. Now Golden Bears could be kinda tough. I think you’d want to be a little fast and loose with them. You don’t want to get caught by that bear. The Ute … you gotta dodge some arrowheads, but I still like the Cougar. Buffalo … I think the buffalo would be pretty tough to beat. Wildcat: Cougars are bigger than wildcats. Sun Devils, that’s mythical anyway. Trojans, they may be as well. I think you gotta look out for the Bruins and the Buffalo. The Golden Bear, Bruin and Buffalo .. I think those are the tough ones.

Moore: Why the Buffalo?

Leach: Do you want to fight a buffalo? I don’t know, those buffalo are big. You know, buffalo are significantly bigger than elk. I grew up near Yellowstone so I’ve been near buffalo. Buffalo are huge. And then the other thing I’ve always gotten a kick out of: When you play Colorado, there’s those buffalo dragging those six handlers around. Those handlers aren’t dragging the buffalo. The buffalo’s dragging him.

Ralphie’s not even a big buffalo. Ralphie pulls those people wherever he wants to.

More on the interview, including audio, is available here.

At the very least, Leach gives WAZZU fans a reason to believe they can climb out of the Pacific Twelve basement and the rest of us a reason to watch that miserable conference.

Picking a Friday Jam

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I woke up this morning without a Friday Jam in mind, but I was thinking about the fact that the Final Four gets underway tomorrow in New Orleans between two Midwest teams and two Kentucky teams, and then it come to me. It came like a flash; like a vision burnt across the clouds! I wrote it down, but I learnt right away that it wasn’t an Arlo Guthrie song.

What better than a newgrass tune from a Midwest band about Louisiana? And if you don’t like that, at least you can gawk at the people trying to figure out how to dance to it, or not, as the young gentleman’s preference may be:

Of course, what we really ought to have for you in this spot is a nod to the recently departed Earl Scruggs. Click here for a song and a brief tribute.

Hollywood Nights: A Magic Haiku

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Last night, an ownership group led by Magic Johnson bought the Los Angeles Dodgers for $2 billion, the largest amount ever paid for a sports franchise.

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Magic bought the Dodgers.
Media really loves this story,
forgets The Magic Hour.

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Previously:
Hollywood Nights: Z-Bo and Bishop Don The Magic Juan

ALDLAND’s March Madness Challenge: Standings after four rounds

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It’s time for the Final Four in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. A whole lot of moving and shaking went down in the Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight.

Looking at the current standings in ALDLAND’s Mad as a March Hare March Madness Challenge, North Carolina’s loss in the Midwest Regional final to Kansas appeared to shake up the standings the most. Out of our twenty-onetwo entries, here’s the current top ten:

Click here to see the full standings.

While Bingo_Bango managed to avoid heartache by persevering in the top spot since our last update, the Tarheels’ loss kicked WrckMTech 2 from a tie for third out of the top ten and dropped FBDOCameron 1 and lranthony1 1 from that position into a tie for eighth. Perhaps even more notable and as the secret formula predicted last week, SemiNOLA’s leveraged bracket collapsed, falling from sole possession of second place to a tie for seventeenth. Ditto for Can we Have Kemba Back?. Vpresben 1 also slipped, going from a tie for eighth to tenth.

All of this provided opportunities for lower entries– picking Kentucky to win it all appears to be the common feature amongst this group– to climb toward the top. Mjpascha 1 hopped from a tie for third into second place. Best-entry-name category nominees Goldbourne Supremacy (T-8 to T-4) and Escaped from a Tchiengang (T-10 to T-6) were two of the beneficiaries as well, and Ifartblackandgold 1 moved in concert with the latter. (Cf. Twombly v. Bell Atlantic.)

The big award of the week goes to Austin_Payne 1 who jumped from nowhere into a tie for fourth. Additional mention is due to our late-arriving, twenty-second entry, AndyGlossner 1, submitted by a frequent commenter on the site and stepping into an outright hold on third place.

Heading into the final two rounds, things look pretty locked up, although an Ohio State win over Kansas could allow AndyGlossner 1 and Austin_Payne 1 to unseat Bingo_Bango and mjpascha 1.

Finally, a nod to Bingo_Bango and Austin_Payne 1 for unorthodox picks (from the state of Kentucky) to come out of the West, although the former’s selection of Louisville now looks better than the latter’s selection of Murray State.

Enjoy the final two rounds.

Hollywood Nights: Z-Bo and Bishop Don The Magic Juan

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Apparently we’re just posting pictures now. This one’s a little less self-evident than the last one, so here’s the accompanying explanation from Chris Ryan, writing about Sunday night’s Grizzlies-Lakers game in L.A.:

Staples Center celeb sightings were pretty fun, if random, last night, with Ashton Kutcher, John McEnroe, David Beckham, and Gerard Butler (gone blond) lighting up courtside with their wattage. But the best appearance of the evening went to a man who seemed to be cheering for the Grizz: Snoop Dogg compatriot Don Magic Juan. Don’t know if there’s ever been a better union of team and fan. Oh, and he seemed to have a preexisting relationship with Zach Randolph, because of course he did.

The Beards of Summer (via The Classical)

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Chris Siriano wants to get the hell out of Michigan. Even on a gorgeous fall day in Addison (population 627), with the leaves turning and the sun bright, Siriano—middle-aged, sporting a gray goatee and ball cap—can’t stop dreaming about the beach. “I raised my daughter by myself and everybody knew that when I got the kid to college, they could reach me in the Caribbean by email,” he says. “I’m done with Michigan winters, basically.”

Two barriers stand between the Benton Harbor native and moving south. The first is not unusual: A few years ago, Siriano married the love of his life, a fellow Michigander who didn’t share his interest in fleeing south. The second is more distinct. Since the mid-1990s, Siriano has owned and curated the House of David Museum, a 4,000-square-foot archive that tells the weird, hirsute story of the most popular barnstorming team in baseball history.

To describe the House of David in such forceful terms is warranted. For two decades in the early 20th century, a band of religious eccentrics from Southwest Michigan was one of the biggest draws in sports, selling out ballparks in big cities and small towns across the country. Baseball fans adored their aggressive style of play, vaudeville flair, and flowing beards—House of David players were forbidden to shave because of an obscure rule in the strict doctrine to which they adhered. More than any franchise of its day, the House of David skillfully exploited the American love of spectacle. Siriano, who has spent much of his own energy and money preserving their largely forgotten story, is convinced the fascinating artifacts he has recovered belong in the Wolverine State. … Read More

(via The Classical)

Scrutiny of the Bounty: An Epilogue

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The prequel and pretension past, along with the run-of-the-mill fodder, we found ourselves– thanks to a reader tip– staring down the barrel of epiloguist Jen Floyd Engel’s perspective-granting long lens in the form of her piece for Fox Sports, “Blaming Saints is height of hypocrisy.” Looking back on the NFL bounty story, Engel seeks to contextualize the thematic strands of that story with those of another and mix in a bit of stern-faced judgment for total effect. Standard-issue English 110.

I can’t specifically recall reading anything of Engel’s before, although I surely have, but the first stumbling point for me came before I even made it to the text. Maybe I still am crotchety after Charles P. Pierce’s bit on this matter, but as someone slightly out of the mold in the nomenclature realm, I have to wonder why Engel goes (presumably) nickname, middle name, last name. If she wants distinction, isn’t Jennifer Floyd Engel the way to do it? For example, Pierce doesn’t use Chuck P. Pierce (although Google suggests he sometimes uses Charlie, but where he does, he drops the middle initial (Google doesn’t know Pierce’s full middle name)). But ok, enough.

After “soak[ing] in all of the moral outrage and denunciations” of NOLA football, Engel shares with us her “first thought”: “Who will play Barry Bonds in this ‘sports tragedy’”?

Huh? Hopefully no one! Why would anyone bring Barry Bonds into this? Watch out sophomore seminar in comparative literature, here comes one now.

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