Category: basketball

March Ramblin’


Anyone out there on Posterous? I had never heard of it until very recently. I posted something the other day via e-mail, because I could. One can also post a variety of other ways. I’m not seeing the need, but then again, I didn’t get Twitter or Facebook initially either.
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It’s not coming out until May 25, but I’m looking forward to Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook by Bettye LaVette. This great singer who was in the Albany area recently – no, didn’t get a chance to see her – is covering a bunch of songs, many that I know well. It has a definite Beatles tinge.
1. The Word (Beatles)
2. No Time To Live (Traffic)
3. Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (Animals)
4. All My Love (Led Zeppelin)
5. Isn’t It A Pity (George Harrison)
6. Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd)
7. It Don’t Come Easy (Ringo Starr)
8. Maybe I’m Amazed (Paul McCartney)
9. Salt Of The Earth (Rolling Stones)
10. Nights In White Satin (Moody Blues)
11. Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad (Derek & the Dominoes)
12. Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me (Elton John)
13. Love Reign O’er Me (The Who – live from the Kennedy Center Honors)

That last song, sung to Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry, seemed to have them in tears, especially Townsend.

Check out Bettye’s website for her performances with Paul & Ringo, with Jon Bon Jovi, and her stellar Who cover.
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SamuraiFrog informs me that there is a Soul Train YouTube channel, which is very cool.
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I was listening to Les Brown this week. He had a big hit in the 1940s with Bizet Has His Day, an adaptation of Farandole from L’Arlésienne.
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Ever get a song stuck in your head, but you CAN’T REMEMBER the title? This happened to me the other day. I called up a librarian friend who wasn’t working that day. Then I called a violinist friend of mine; she knew the song I hummed, but couldn’t remember what it was either. She called her sister, and she identified it as In The Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt, music by Edvard Grieg. Don’t think you know this piece? I’ll bet you do, especially if you play any of the three dozen versions from Duke Ellington, Erasure and ELO to Rick Wakeman and the Who. I’m rather partial to the ska version. Somehow, I have it in my mind that this music also inspired the Sugar Crisp commercial theme.
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As a reaction to the Tea Baggers, there is now a Coffee Party. I’m only slightly conflicted in that I really like tea and really don’t like coffee.
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Have I mentioned lately that I really love Betty White? I’ll even record Saturday Night Live on May 8, and I only watched it in 2008 for “Sarah Palin”.
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The greatest 9,331 movies of all time.
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Is my cellphone frying my brain?
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Don’t know why I do that March Madness thing. This year’s results have been worse than ever, thanks to the upsets. Yet I can still win.

For the games today and tomorrow:
I picked: Kansas over Michigan State.
Who’s actually playing: Northern Iowa and Michigan State.
I’m rooting for: Northern Iowa. Their colors are purple and gold, just like my graduate school alma mater. What the heck; I hope they get to the Final Four. Go Panthers!

I picked: Georgetown over Ohio State.
Who’s actually playing: Tennessee and Ohio State.
I’m rooting for: Tennessee. The leader in our group picked Ohio State to win the whole thing.

I picked: Syracuse over UTEP
Who’s actually playing: Syracuse and Butler.
I’m rooting for: Syracuse, who I have going to the Final Four.

I picked: Pittsburgh over Kansas State.
Who’s actually playing: Xavier and Kansas State.
I’m rooting for: Xavier.

I picked: Baylor over Villanova.
Who’s actually playing: Baylor and St. Mary’s.
I’m rooting for: Baylor, who I have in the Final Four.

I picked Louisville over Siena.
Who’s actually playing: Duke and Purdue (yikes).
I’m rooting for: Purdue. Actually, I’m rooting against Duke every round.

I picked: West Virginia over New Mexico
Who’s actually playing: West Virginia and Washington.
I’m rooting for: West Virginia, who I have winning the tournament over (oops) Kansas.

I picked: Kentucky over Cornell.
Who’s actually playing: Kentucky and Cornell!
I’m rooting for: Kentucky on my sheet, the upstate New York team in my heart.

ROG

ROG

the Experiment

Usually, I try to write something comprehensive (and ideally, comprehensible) to post the next morning. I have maybe a half dozen things in draft form, not quite ready to go. So as a one-off experience, I have gotten up at 5:03 a.m., slightly foggy, and will write for 20 minutes, and post whatever at 5:30.
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Doing the March Madness thing. For those not familiar, it’s college basketball. I think the idea that, theoretically, ANY ONE of the 65 teams (well, 64 now), can win lends a sense of democracy to the proceedings. I have our local team, Siena, winning their first game, over Purdue, just as they won their first first game the last two years as an underdog. Still haven’t finished my picks, though, tentatively, I have Kansas over Syracuse, west Virginia over Baylor, and because I believe WV got jobbed out of being a #12 seed, WV over Kansas. Anyone who actually FOLLOWS basketball with insights, please comment. SOON.
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Gave blood on Tuesday, BP was uncharacteristically high for me. It’s usually 100 to 120; that day, it was 138. What changed has been a habituation to caffeinated cola; I mean one a day, not multiples, but I’ve just stopped. Yesterday about 4:30 pm, I went to the bathroom and threw cold water on my face.
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Anyone out there use that free wifi searcher from Makayama? I downloaded it, put it on my thumb drive, but couldn’t get it to work on my laptop at home.
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I was checking Dead or Alive this morning.
Knew Peter Graves died. He started on the second season of the show Mission: Impossible, and those two or three seasons with him, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, were among the best in television. He was also in my top three favorite comedy, Airplane!
Merlin Olson died. I never saw a single fill episode of Little House on the Prairie. I knew him as a football player for the LA Rams, back in the days that Los Angeles actually had a pro football team. I mean besides UCLA and USC.
Caroline McWilliams died last month, which I never noted here. I used to love her in Soap and Benson.
Corey Haim died, and I don’t know that I ever saw him in anything.
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Ah, nuts. Time’s up
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EDIT:
Roger Ebert on Glenn Beck and Beck’s “I beg you, look for the words social justice or economic justice on your church web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can.”
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Bummer: Alex Chilton died at the age of 59.
ROG

ROG

Comedy Today

As I’ve long admitted, I can’t tell a joke to save my life, though I can be funny when the situation generates it. April Fools’ Day just does not play to my strength. I do enjoy bad jokes, though. And none are worse than the daily meditations I get from David Pogue, the techie guy from the New York Times. I think I follow him on Twitter just so I can groan. Recent examples from his Twitter feed (Pogue):
The algebra teacher confiscated a kid’s rubber band, believing it to be a weapon of math disruption.
and this one
I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.
and this:
I have kleptomania, but when it gets bad, I take something for it.

From other sources, more terrible humor:

Dan was a single guy living at home with his father and working in the family business. When he found out he was going to inherit a fortune when his sickly father died, he decided he needed a wife with which to share his fortune.

One evening at an investment meeting he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her natural beauty took his breath away.

I may look like just an ordinary man, he said to her, but in just a few years, my father will die, and I’ll inherit $65 million.

Impressed, the woman obtained his business card and three days later, she became his stepmother.
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Mildred, the church gossip, and self-appointed monitor of the church’s morals, kept sticking her nose in to other people’s business. Several members did not approve of her extra curricular activities, but feared her enough to maintain their silence.

She made a mistake, however, when she accused George, a new member, of being an alcoholic after she saw his old pickup parked in front of the town’s only bar one afternoon. She emphatically told George (and several others) that everyone seeing it there would know what he was doing.

George, a man of few words, stared at her for a moment and just turned and walked away. He didn’t explain, defend, or deny.. He said nothing.

Later that evening, George quietly parked his pickup in front of Mildred’s house, walked home…and left it there all night.
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A woman had just returned to her home from an evening of church services, when she was startled by an intruder. She caught the man in the act of robbing her home of its valuables and yelled: ‘Stop! Acts 2:38!’ (Repent and be Baptized, in the name of Jesus Christ, so that your sins may be forgiven.)

The burglar stopped in his tracks. The woman calmly called the police and explained what she had done.

As the officer cuffed the man to take him in, he asked the burglar: ‘Why did you just stand there? All the old lady did was yell a scripture to you.’
‘Scripture?’ replied the burglar. ‘She said she had an Ax and Two 38s!’

Ncevy Sbbyf Qnl
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And speaking of fool, I go into the NCAA men’s basketball pool generally having seen no more than two games prior to March Madness – this year it was 4 of the 6 overtime periods Syracuse played vs. Connecticut; that’s it.
Yet I always have a chance going into the final weekend. As it turns out, NO ONE in my pool picked the ultimate champion. They all went for Louisville or Pitt or Syracuse or, like I did, Memphis.
My other Final Four picks (Syracuse, Louisville, Memphis) dried up, but Villanova, who essentially played at home the first two rounds, then beat Duke and Pitt to be my one pick in the Final Four; Final Two, actually.
So the Saturday games will tell the tale. I have a one-point lead. If ‘Nova wins, then I win. If UNC beats ‘Nova, then I end up in the middle of the pack, but if UNC and Connecticut both win, I’ll be hanging out in the lower regions of the pool. Go Wildcats!
ROG

ROG

J is for Jazz

The problem with jazz is that it means everything from Kenny G to Madeleine Peyroux to New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band. No definition of the American music seems adequate. One I saw recently described it as “cerebral music with rhythm”. This one is about as OK as I can find. Even the word itself, the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Twentieth Century, has been hard to nail down.

Jazz is about discovery. This article expresses the wonder of discover that jazz can bring.

Ultimately, though, jazz can’t be adequately described. It must be experienced. These are all songs I own.
Tutu (live)- Miles Davis
Tutu was one of the last albums I got as an LP; i.e., on vinyl.

Cassandra Wilson – Harvest Moon
A Neil Young cover.

Benny Goodman & His Orchestra – Sing Sing Sing
As the title suggests, this song DOES have lyrics, but I think it’s better as an instrumental.

Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong – STOMPING AT THE SAVOY
Also recommended: any of the Ella Song Books. Or all of them.

Oh, there’s so much, I can’t do the topic justice.

Here’s a peculiar thing about Jazz that perhaps folks not in the United States or Americans who don’t follow basketball might not know. There is a basketball team called the Utah Jazz. Utah is not generally known for jazz, and in disposition seems to be the antithesis of that music. The Jazz was formed in New Orleans in 1974, a most likely place for a team with such a nickname, but the team moved to the Rocky Mountains in 1979. (New Orleans got the Hornets, a team formerly in Charlotte, NC in 2002.)
ROG

ROG

SPORTS questions

OK, I’ve gotten myself in another one of those March Madness men’s basketball pools, with, as usual, little idea what I’m doing. I know the seedings not until tomorrow and the first games not until midweek (and the play-in game doesn’t count), but any teams you think are peaking at the right time, I’d consider your advice.

Meanwhile it’s spring training in baseball so it’s time to make my predictions for the division winners:
AL EAST: The NY Yankees. More than ever, they’re trying to buy a pennant. but they have. Haven’t they?
AL CENTRAL: The Minnesota Twins. Not only is it my father-in-law’s favorite team, they started looking like a team last year.
AL WEST: The Los Angeles Angels. Smart money picks the Texas Rangers. And it may be right.
NL EAST: The New York Mets: with a new stopper, they can’t collapse three years in a row. Can they?
NL CENTRAL: the St. Louis Cardinals. I want to pick the Cubbies, but they broke my heart last year, the centennial of their last World Series victory. of course, THIS will be the year they win it.
NL WEST: Colorado Rockies. Because an overpaid Manny won’t help the Dodgers nearly so much.

Meanwhile, I’m more convinced that anyone who was using steroids before 2004, when the MLB ban went into effect, I don’t care. Well, I sorta care, but not enough to think they shouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame. Of course, I’m on record thinking that Shoeless Joe Jackson should be in the Hall of Fame. So should Pete Rose – as soon as he dies.

Prediction: Tiger Woods will win one, and only one, Grand Slam tournament in 2009.

What’s boring about the NBA is that only three or five teams have even a reasonable shot at the title; last year’s finalists, the Celtics and the Lakers; and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Maybe the Orlando Magic. MAYBE the San Antonio Spurs.

What sayest thou?

ROG

ROG
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