I'm Brendan Loy, a 26-year-old graduate of USC and Notre Dame now living and working in Knoxville, Tennessee. My wife Becky and I are brand-new parents of a beautiful baby girl, born on New Year's Eve.
I'm a big-time sports fan, a politics, media & law junkie, an astronomy buff, a weather nerd, an Apple aficionado, a Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fanatic, and an all-around dork. My blog is best-known for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina, but I blog about anything and everything that interests me.
You can contact me at irishtrojan [at] gmail.com, or donate to my "tip jar" by clicking the link below:
UConn survives! The Huskies mounted a huge comeback against Rutgers to reach their first Final Four since 2004. Hurrah!
Among other things, this means the Geno vs. Pat Championship Game Grudge Match is still a possibility! All it takes now is for UConn to beat Stanford and Tennessee to beat LSU. (If it happens, I'll be rooting for the Huskies, Becky will be rooting for the Lady Vols, and I'm pretty sure she'll buy Loyette some sort of Tennessee onesie for the occasion... harumph!)
Latest women's pool standings here and after the jump. Also after the jump, updated scenarios of who can win, and how.
For the second year in a row, Gary Kirby is the Irish Trojan NIT Pool champion.
Kirby, a.k.a. "gahrie," clinched when UMass knocked off Florida to advance to Thursday's championship. Kirby actually picked the Gators to win this game, but he had them losing to Ohio State in the title game, while Brian Dupuis, a.k.a. "DUP," picked Florida to win the title -- and needed them to do so in order to overcome Kirby in the standings.
In 2006, Kirby was the runner-up in the second annual Irish Trojan NIT Pool. Last year, he won the third annual pool, and now he's the champion of the fourth annual pool as well.
Tennessee is going to the Final Four despite an injury to Candace Parker. Will UConn join them, putting the Huskies and Lady Vols one win each away from an epic Geno vs. Pat showdown in the national championship game? So far, Rutgers isn't cooperating with that plan.
After the jump, a look at where things stand in my pool.
As most of you know, I'm a die-hard Memphis Tiger fan, and as such, I like to take the opportunity to show some Tiger pride when I can.
Now, all of you USC (and other folk, too) can take an opportunity to strike a mighty blow for Tigers everywhere.
You see, there's a Mascot competition at the Chicago Trib's website, and this round features my beloved Memphis Tiger Pouncer against the reviled, drunken, moronic Stanford Tree.
I'd certainly appreciate a little love for Pouncer. That would greatly rock.
Even as I was engaging in some April Foolishness, claiming that ESPN's Andy Katz was reporting that Indiana would hire Mike Brey, Andy Katz was actually reporting that Indiana would hire Marquette's Tom Crean -- and that has now been confirmed.
Meanwhile, "El Kabong" at ND Nation has taken some heat for his Brey-to-Indiana April Fool's joke, which he now admits was a joke. (Money quote: "Part of me thinks the only thing I should be embarrassed about is the joke is so hackneyed a twit like Brendan Loy apparently thought of it too." Heh.)
Where are all the single guys? West of the Mississippi, apparently. A fascinating map. Suddenly I understand why our two closest single SHA-girl friends like Denver so much... :)
Christopher Hitchens accuses Hillary Clinton of "flagrant, hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia." And then he gets really harsh!
[H]ere is the historical rather than personal aspect [of the controversy], which is what you should keep your eye on. Note the date of Sen. Clinton's visit to Tuzla. She went there in March 1996. By that time, the critical and tragic phase of the Bosnia war was effectively over, as was the greater part of her husband's first term. What had happened in the interim? In particular, what had happened to the 1992 promise, four years earlier, that genocide in Bosnia would be opposed by a Clinton administration?
In the event, President Bill Clinton had not found it convenient to keep this promise. Let me quote from Sally Bedell Smith's admirable book on the happy couple, For Love of Politics:
Taking the advice of Al Gore and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, Bill agreed to a proposal to bomb Serbian military positions while helping the Muslims acquire weapons to defend themselves—the fulfillment of a pledge he had made during the 1992 campaign. But instead of pushing European leaders, he directed Secretary of State Warren Christopher merely to consult with them. When they balked at the plan, Bill quickly retreated, creating a "perception of drift." The key factor in Bill's policy reversal was Hillary, who was said to have "deep misgivings" and viewed the situation as "a Vietnam that would compromise health-care reform." The United States took no further action in Bosnia, and the "ethnic cleansing" by the Serbs was to continue for four more years, resulting in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.
I can personally witness to the truth of this, too. I can remember, first, one of the Clintons' closest personal advisers—Sidney Blumenthal—referring with acid contempt to Warren Christopher as "a blend of Pontius Pilate with Ichabod Crane." I can remember, second, a meeting with Clinton's then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin at the British Embassy. When I challenged him on the sellout of the Bosnians, he drew me aside and told me that he had asked the White House for permission to land his own plane at Sarajevo airport, if only as a gesture of reassurance that the United States had not forgotten its commitments. The response from the happy couple was unambiguous: He was to do no such thing, lest it distract attention from the first lady's health care "initiative."
It's hardly necessary for me to point out that the United States did not receive national health care in return for its acquiescence in the murder of tens of thousands of European civilians. But perhaps that is the least of it. Were I to be asked if Sen. Clinton has ever lost any sleep over those heaps of casualties, I have the distinct feeling that I could guess the answer. She has no tears for anyone but herself. In the end, and over her strenuous objections, the United States and its allies did rescue our honor and did put an end to Slobodan Milosevic and his state-supported terrorism. Yet instead of preserving a polite reticence about this, or at least an appropriate reserve, Sen. Clinton now has the obscene urge to claim the raped and slaughtered people of Bosnia as if their misery and death were somehow to be credited to her account! Words begin to fail one at this point. Is there no such thing as shame? Is there no decency at last? Let the memory of the truth, and the exposure of the lie, at least make us resolve that no Clinton ever sees the inside of the White House again.
Michael Crowley has more, including some potentially contradicting evidence. What's his verdict? "Inconclusive--but suspicious! I say the burden's on Hillary to establish that she really was speaking up about these genocides that moved her so [according to her book]. Thus far, she hasn't made much effort to do so, and I'm not sure she's earned the benefit of the doubt recently." (Via Sully.)
P.S. On the topic of Hillary's lies and deceit, somebody sent me this article. Not sure what, if anything, to make of it. We link, you decide.
Breaking news: ESPN's Andy Katz is reporting that Notre Dame head coach Mike Brey, the back-to-back Big East Coach of the Year who used to be such a frequent subject of Irish Trojan criticism that you'd have thought his first name was "Fire," will be introduced tomorrow morning as the new head coach at Indiana.
The last time rumors cropped up of Brey's possible departure (for N.C. State, in that case), I said they were "too good to be true." Now I actually think this might be a big loss for the Irish. I just hope Brey won't take assistant coach Gene Cross with him to Hoosierland!
As you may have noticed, it's April Fools Day. Here at the Irish Trojan's Blog, I managed to pull off my third-ever, at least somewhat successful April Fools joke. (Flashback: Kerry-McCain '04, Dean O'Hara resigning.) But what else is happening around the Interwebs on this day of jokes and pranks?
Well, as usual, Google came out with a couple of obviously fake new "products." Frankly, their April 1 "announcements" are kinda lame, IMHO, because they're never really believable -- with the notable exception of the one time they made an April 1 announcement that wasn't a joke, back in 2004, when they introduced Gmail on April Fools Day. Remember that? And how it was endlessly debated all day long, with lots of people saying it was literally too good to be true? Best marketing stunt ever!
Anyway, the most kinda-sorta-believable fake "news" report I've seen today is the announcement of a Microsoft-Yahoo merger. (Ma-hoooo?)
Meanwhile, over in Britain, the Daily Star reported that Daniel Craig thinks James Bond should try being bisexual. Not to be outdone, the Sun revealed that "French President Nicolas Sarkozy is to have pioneering stretch surgery in a
bid to make him taller," so that "when surgery is completed he will be an inch taller than his stunning ex-model
wife Carla Bruni." And, sticking with the Bruni/Sarkozy theme, the Guardian announced that France's first lady "has been appointed by
Gordon Brown to spearhead a government initiative aimed at injecting
more style and glamour into British national life." Heh.
And then there's this, from the BBC:
Methinks the Brits are just plain better at this April Fools business than we colonists are. :)
Additional roundups of sundry April Foolishness can be found here, here, here and here. And here's a list of the ten best April Fools pranks ever.
Did any of y'all see, read about, experience, or pull off any good April Fools jokes today?
Big, and good, news for Notre Dame Law School: Professors A.J. and Patricia Bellia have turned down tenured offers from the University of Virginia Law School, which is ranked in the U.S. News Top 10, and will stay at NDLS. Brian Leiter calls this a "major retention coup for Notre Dame."
My impression is that it's almost an article of faith among some NDLS critics, skeptics and detractors that the school's young superstar professors, such as the Bellias, will inevitably be "poached" by other, higher-ranking law schools in due course. This development appears to contradict that belief, which is a very good thing.
As Leiter says, "Notre Dame has long had a strong reputation among practitioners ... but the school
has also noticeably strengthened its faculty from a scholarly point of
view in the last decade." Indeed, during last year's unfortunate "Paulinogate" incident, one thing that became crystal clear was that pretty much everyone, even those who strongly criticize the law school for various things, totally disagreed with Jimmy's criticisms of the faculty: there was almost universal agreement among Irish Trojan commenters that the NDLS faculty rocks. And the Bellias are a big part of that, so it's great that they're staying put. Indeed, I daresay this is a much bigger deal than last week's news that NDLS had climbed back to #22 in those flawed U.S. News rankings. Those numbers may vary from year to year, but if profs like the Bellias are staying put, the law school will be just fine.
Admittedly, both #2 seeds were playing closer to home than their top-seeded opponents (LSU in New Orleans, Stanford in Spokane), and both had reasonable cases to be #1 seeds in their own right, so these are not exactly stunning results. Nevertheless, the women's Final Four is officially less "chalky" than the men's.
So, what does this mean for the 11th annual Living Room Times women's basketball pool?
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