03/27/2011 archive

Essays Featured Sunday the 27^th of March~

Late Night Karaoke shines a spotlight on Massive Attack, mishima DJs

Six Brilliant Articles! from Six Different Places!! on Six Different Topics!!!

                Six Days a Week!!!    at Six in the Morning!!!!

Insanity from Alma in Sunday Open Thoughts

edger highlights a recent article from F. William Engdahl in The Curious Libya ‘opposition’

While spring cleaning the bookmarks RiaD found the question Is more equal more green?

In the latest edition of Sunday Bread Bill Egnor shares my long lost recipe(!) Oat Raisin Bread.

I am forever grateful.  

Only the one upset thank goodness.

Yesterday’s Results

I’m kind of hoping Virginia Commonwealth does me a favor and drops Kansas, but that would be quite an upset indeed.

Current Matchups

Follow the 2011 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament on The Stars Hollow Gazette.

If you don’t like squeeky shoes you can look for alternate programming here-

• Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

For a more traditional bracket try CBS Sports.

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

March 27 is the 86th day of the year (87th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 279 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1939, March Madness is born.

The University of Oregon defeats The Ohio State University 46-33 on this day in 1939 to win the first-ever NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The Final Four, as the tournament became known, has grown exponentially in size and popularity since 1939. By 2005, college basketball had become the most popular sporting event among gamblers, after the Super Bowl. The majority of that betting takes place at tournament time, when Las Vegas, the internet and office pools around the country see action from sports enthusiasts and once-a-year gamblers alike.

For the first 12 years of the men’s tournament, only eight teams were invited to participate. That number grew steadily until a 65-team tournament format was unveiled in 2001. After a “play-in” game between the 64th and 65th seeds, the tournament breaks into four regions of 16 teams. The winning teams from those regions comprise the Final Four, who meet in that year’s host city to decide the championship.

March Madness is a popular term for season-ending basketball tournaments played in March, especially those conducted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and various state high school associations. Fans began connecting the term to the NCAA tournament in the early 1980s. Evidence suggests that CBS sportscaster Brent Musburger, who had worked for many years in Chicago before joining CBS, popularized the term during the annual tournament broadcasts. The phrase had not already become associated with the college tournament when an Illinois official wrote in 1939 that “A little March Madness [may] contribute to sanity.” March Madness is also a registered trademark, held jointly by the NCAA and the Illinois High School Association. It was also the title of a book about the Illinois high school tournament written in 1977 by Jim Enright.

H. V. Porter, an official with the Illinois High School Association (and later a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame) was the first person to use March Madness to describe a basketball tournament. Porter published an essay named March Madness in 1939 and in 1942 used the phrase in a poem, “Basketball Ides of March.” Through the years the use of March Madness picked up steam, especially in Illinois, Indiana, and other parts of the Midwest. During this period the term was used almost exclusively in reference to state high school tournaments. In 1977 the IHSA published a book about its tournament titled March Madness.

Only in the 1990s did either the IHSA or NCAA think about trademarking the term, and by that time a small television production company named Intersport, Inc., had beaten them both to the punch. IHSA eventually bought the trademark rights from Intersport and then went after big game, suing GTE Vantage, Inc., an NCAA licensee that used the name March Madness for a computer game based on the college tournament. In a historic ruling, “Illinois High School Association v. GTE Vantage, Inc.” (1996), the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit created the concept of a “dual-use trademark,” granting both the IHSA and NCAA the right to trademark the term for their own purposes.

Following the ruling, the NCAA and IHSA joined forces and created the March Madness Athletic Association to coordinate the licensing of the trademark and investigate possible trademark infringement. One such case involved a company that had obtained the Internet domain name marchmadness.com and was using it to post information about the NCAA tournament. After protracted litigation, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in March Madness Athletic Association v. Netfire, Inc. (2003) that March Madness was not a generic term and ordered Netfire to relinquish the domain name. (This domain name is currently being used to redirect into the main NCAA.com web site.)

In recent years, the term “March Madness” has been expanded to include all conference tournaments in college basketball, with the term “The Big Dance” being used more frequently when specifically referring to the NCAA Tournament. March Madness has also has been used generally to describe all basketball tournaments across the country that occur in the month of March – high school and college, male and female.

The coverage and live blogging of all the 2011 Men’s and Women’s NCAA Championship are happening here at The Stars Hollow Gazette.

NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament 2011

Yesterday was a good day to be seeded.  The only underdog to advance was Gonzaga which will no doubt make mishima happy.

Saturday’s Results

Today we start off with the Lady Huskies whom I think will be unwilling to exit the Tournament before the Men do.

You see, they’re just a far superior program.

They play Georgetown and all The Big East Teams are tough, but they’ve beat them twice already this year and there’s no reason to expect any different.

Current Matchups

Follow the 2011 NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament on The Stars Hollow Gazette.

If you don’t like squeeky shoes you can look for alternate programming here-

• Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

If you like a more traditional bracket try this NCAA one, they also have a TV schedule.

Who exactly are these rebels we’re supporting?

A short quote from a very exhaustive annotated article:

The so-called Libyan opposition itself is a hodge-podge mix of political opportunists, ex-CIA-trained Mujahideen guerillas such as Abdel Hakim al-Hasidi of the so-called Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who openly admits to close ties to al-Qaeda going back to Afghanistan.12 That certainly raises the level of incredibility of Washington’s most bizarre military crusade of recent times.

As well, the opposition includes former senior Gaddafi regime members who saw greener grass on the US, British and French-backed opposition side, and outright cutthroats who, encouraged by Washington, London or Paris smelled the chance to grab control of one of the richest lands on Earth.

Their “opposition,” unlike in Tunisia or elsewhere, was never “non-violent.” It was an armed revolt from the git-go, a war of tribe against tribe, not of surging aspirations for democracy. NATO member countries are being told by Washington to back one band of tyrants to oust another whose agenda does not comply with what the Pentagon calls Full Spectrum Dominance.

“Punting the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Punting the Pundits”.

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with Christiane Amanpour:Sitting in theis Sunday for Ms Amanpour is ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper. His guests will be Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will discuss American involvement in Libya. Then the un-indicted war criminal, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, will weigh in on Libya and push his new book.

On the roundtable: ABC News’ George Will, former Congressman Joe Sestak (D-PA), national correspondent at The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, and Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy take on the substance of America’s third war and the potential Republican 2012 Presidential candidates

Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer:Mr. Schieffer’s guests are Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hyping Libya.

The Chris Matthews Show: This week’s guests are Katty Kay, BBC Washington Correspondent, Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic Senior Editor, Michael Duffy, TIME Magazine Assistant Managing Editor and Norah O’Donnell, MSNBC Chief Washington Correspondent. They will discuss these questions:

Is President Obama failing to lead?

Could Republican “Red Hots” spoil the party

Meet the Press with David Gregory: Again, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will appear, still defending Obama’s Libya decisions. Also the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) in  an exclusive interview.

Our roundtable guests The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward; the BBC’s Ted Koppel; senior fellow for the Center for a New American Security and author, Tom Ricks; and NBC News White House Correspondent, Savannah Guthrie.

State of the Union with Candy Crowley: The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, supports the mission; and former director of the CIA, Gen. Michael HaydenMr (Ret.) and former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley will weigh in on Libya. Nuclear policy expert, Joe Cirincione will discuss the nuclear reactor disaster in Japan and a discussion about the anemic US economic recovery with two former directors of the Congressional Budget Office.

Fareed Zakaris: GPS:

Below the fold is NYT’s columnist Bob Herbert’s last Op-Ed for the Times. He will be missed but promises he’s not going too far away. Thank you, Mr Herbert.

This is my last column for The New York Times after an exhilarating, nearly 18-year run. I’m off to write a book and expand my efforts on behalf of working people, the poor and others who are struggling in our society. My thanks to all the readers who have been so kind to me over the years. I can be reached going forward at [email protected].

Japan nuclear: Workers evacuated as radiation soars

Radioactivity in water at reactor 2 at the quake-damaged Fukushima nuclear plant has reached 10 million times the usual level, company officials say.

The BBC  27 March 2011

Workers trying to cool the reactor core to avoid a meltdown have been evacuated.

Earlier, Japan’s nuclear agency said that levels of radioactive iodine in the sea near the plant had risen to 1,850 times the usual level.

The UN’s nuclear agency has warned the crisis could go on for months.

It is believed the radiation at Fukushima is coming from one of the reactors, but a specific leak has not been identified.

Leaking water at reactor 2 has been measured at 1,000 millisieverts/hour – 10 million times higher than when the plant is operating normally.

Regular Features-

• Late Night Karaoke by mishima
• Six In The Morning by mishima
• Gha! by RiaD

Featured Essays for March 26, 2011-

• Reactor Core May Have Breached, Serious Poisoning Extends 200 Miles by Jacob Freeze
• Provident free market leaps from closet, saves the day. by Compound F
• Are There No Prisons? by joeshwingding
• To Combat Human Rights Abuses by jimstaro
• Can you eat gold? by ek hornbeck
• Popular Culture (Music) 20110325. The Who Sings My Generation by Translator

DocuDharma

Well it’s that time of year again when the sewing machines attack.  bmaz has his first Formula One Trash Talk up which covers many of the notable points including the political one that the season opener in Bahrain was canceled due to the jackbooted repression of the Sunni elite and their Saudi Arabian mercenaries.

Here is a season preview from The Telegraph and here is another one from the same source focusing on the drivers and teams.

I like Wikipedia for pop culture (since that’s hardly ever controversial).  Their description of the Albert Park course is here.

I can’t claim to have been paying a great deal of attention to last night’s Qualifying (results below) but my take away was that not much has changed.  Vettel qualified almost half a second faster than he did last year (as one commentator quipped- “Thank goodness they made the cars slower”).  The announcers are still way over rating Scudiero Marlboro which shows no sign of having improved at all.  Nor has Team Mercedes or any of the other ‘also rans’ from last year.

It was not known at the end of the broadcast if they would waive the 107% rule so it may be that HRT-Cosworth doesn’t start at all and we proceed with a 22 car field.  My interpretation was that they could start from the pit, but I’m not in a position to enforce that.  Ecclestone and I ceased talking well before his facist friend Mosley got caught with his jackboots on but his pants down.

In March of that year the News of the World, a British tabloid newspaper, released video footage of Mosley engaged in sado-masochistic sexual acts with five sex workers in a scenario that the paper said involved Nazi role-playing, a situation made more controversial by his father’s association with the Nazis.

Speed Racecast