Irish Trojan in Tennessee

NIT Pool standings online

By Brendan Loy

The NIT pool standings are up. 62 contestants entered the pool -- 58 of whom are currently tied for first place, through 2 games. (Alas, I'm one of the four tied for last place. Damn you, Stephen F. Austin!!!)

You can view each contestant's picks by clicking their name in the standings. Here's a summary of everyone's picks. The most common champion picks are the four #1-seeds: Ohio State (17), Arizona State (13), Virginia Tech (10) and Syracuse (6).

UPDATE: Now current through 4 5 games (of 8 tonight), standings here and after the jump.

Play-in game madness!!

By Brendan Loy

The NCAA Tournament is underway! Er, sort of.

Mount St. Mary's wins. Woo.

Arthur C. Clarke takes his final odyssey

By David K.

An aide to the famed science fiction writer has reported his passing.  Details to follow as they become available.  Sir Arthur C. Clarke was 90.

Clarke was a prolific science fiction writer and futurist, most famous as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was later turned into an epic film under director Stanley Kubrick.

UPDATE: A little bit more here.

Tonight: NIT, CBI, play-in game. Woo!!

By Brendan Loy

If you're looking for online resources to consult before filling out your men's NCAA Tournament bracket, MSNBC's "Beyond the Arc" blog has an incredibly thorough roundup.

Incidentally, don't forget, if you want to enter my NIT Pool, you have exactly one hour left to do so! That's because the first game of the NIT, #7-seed Stephen F. Austin at #2-seed UMass, tips off at 6:00 PM EDT, kicking off a full evening of scintillating hoops action that also includes the NCAA play-in game (7:30 PM on ESPN) and the first four games of the CBI. Don't pretend like you're not excited.

P.S. No promsies about exactly when I'll get everybody's NIT Pool picks online (and the initial standings, etc.), but I'll try to do it sometime tonight.

Fed cuts interest rates by 80 gajillion points

By Brendan Loy

Or something like that.

Well, hey, it's pretty sweet for my student loans.

P.S. If the economy gets bad enough, will the Fed make interest rates negative, such that Citibank will have to start paying me for the privilege of holding my debt? Because that'd be awesome. :)

Oooooklahoma, where the bombs are falling from the planes

By David K.

Last Thursday, Tulsa, Oklahoma joined Boise City, Oklahoma in a strange brotherhood. Both cities have now been bombed by American forces. A National Guard plane en route to a bombing practice run at a range in Kansas apparently lost one of its bombs, which crashed through an apartment complex in Tulsa. The bomb was a 22-pound dummy bomb, and no one was at home at the time it crashed into the bathroom of Tulsa residents Jeremy Isbell and his wife.

Quote of the day

By Brendan Loy

Obama advisor David Axelrod, on the Clinton campaign's ever-shifting rhetoric: "When they started off, it was all about delegates. Now that we have more delegates, it’s all about the popular vote. And if that does not work out, they will probably challenge us to a game of cribbage to choose the nominee.” Heh.

"A More Perfect Union"

By Brendan Loy

Here is the full text of Obama's speech on race.

P.S. Politico's Ben Smith says the speech "embraces complexity" and notes that it "insists on things that you don't get much of in politics: context and nuance." TPM's David Kurtz says the speech "is remarkable for its nuance, for its long view of history, and for its decency."

Kurtz adds, however: "I am not sure, on first take, how effective it is politically." Along the same lines, Politico's Jonathan Martin says the "insta-reviews" from media "elites" will inevitably be that the speech was a "great success," but "what actual voters think is a different story, of course."

UPDATE: Here's the video clip:

Captain Ed on "real" Irish music

By Brendan Loy

Conservative blogger Ed Morrissey (the guy who beat me for "Blogger of the Year" in 2005) and the Michelle Malkin-founded site Hot Air are usually good sources for right-wing political commentary -- not Irish music nerdery. And yet Irish music nerdery is exactly what I found there, to my great delight, thanks to my Google News Alert for "'barra macneils' | 'liam clancy' | 'tommy makem' | 'clancy brothers'." Here what Ed wrote on the topic, they day before St. Paddy's Day*:

“Danny Boy” is a beautiful, haunting song … the first thousand times you hear it. After that, it gets pretty tiresome, and even more so to those in the Old Country who tire of supplying renditions of it for American tourists. Irish music consists of much more than “the pipes, the pipes are calling” and “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen” — which owe more to America than Ireland. ...

The Irish tolerate Danny Boy and the other “Irish songs” of America, but only just. When my uncle visited Ireland almost 30 years ago, he asked one publican where he could hear authentic Irish music. The Irishman asked, “Oh, you mean like Danny Boy and I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen?” “Yes,” my uncle said. “Nearest place I know is Boston,” came the reply. ...

If you want to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day with some authentic Irish music, try listening to The Chieftains, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Lunasa, The Corrs, or even U2.

Hear, hear! (Morrissey later added the Pogues and The Dubliners to his list. I'd add the Wolfe Tones, the Irish Rovers and, for a rather different but still related style, Flogging Molly. And then you can branch out into Irish-inspired Atlantic Canadian bands like Great Big Sea, the Barra MacNeils, etc.)

I have to make a confession, though. For all my nodding in agreement with Captain Ed and making fun of the "sort of maudlin stuff that Bing Crosby sang," yesterday I totally cued up "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" on my iPod and, in unison with ol' Bing, sang it to my shamrock-clad baby girl, in honor of St. Paddy's Day. I feel so... dirty. :) But hey: she does have really beautiful Irish eyes. And when they're smiling, they'll steal your heart away!

Hey, sometimes it's okay to be maudlin. :)

(Relevant background for those who haven't read it: "Tommy Makem, 1932-2007 … and what he means to me." More here.)

*Or the day after St. Paddy's Day, depending on your perspective.

Obama's big speech on race

By Brendan Loy

Barack Obama will give a major speech Tuesday morning on "the larger issue of race in this campaign," with a nod to the recent controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which appears to have (unsurprisingly) hurt him in the polls. Says Politico:

In the past, Obama has made racial issues, and his own precedent-shattering status, a minor note in his message. But Obama said Monday he recognizes that there is no way he is going to become the Democratic nominee without a forthright statement about the role of race in American life.

“I think it would have been naive for me to think I could run and end up with quasi-front-runner status in a presidential election as potentially the first African-American president, that issues [of] race wouldn’t come up, any more than Sen. Clinton could expect that gender issues might not come up,” Obama told interviewer Gwen Ifill on PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.”

“I think we’ve got to talk about it,” he added. “I think we’ve got to process it. But we’ve got to remind ourselves that what we have in common is far more important than what’s different and that if we’re going to solve any of these problems, we’ve got to come together and bridge our differences in ways that we just have not bridged them before.”

I guess this is sort of like the racial equivalent of Mitt Romney's "Faith in America" speech. So... what will he say?

New option: pick by mascot!

By Brendan Loy

For those who might like to consider filling out their NCAA and NIT brackets based on the teams' mascots, I've created special entry forms containing mascots for the men's NCAA, women's NCAA and the NIT pools. :)

I typed in the mascot names manually, and in many cases from memory, so please let me know if you spot any mistakes!