link.

What does 1050 have to do with 2100? Find out here.

what?

i have responses for each of you.

grant, using drugs is always a good idea in principle. getting high is the easiest way to feel good. unfortunately, it's not legal to engage in such activity within our country. also, using drugs is expensive and addicting, and i'm risk-averse. plus, i think there are some moral aspects to drug use that i'm not willing to explore.

i am glad that you aren't graduating yet. it is part of your personal destiny. i wouldn't want you to miss out on that. however, if you think the world is deterministic, you wouldn't worry about missing your destiny anyway.

suzanne, i'm not headed for a nervous breakdown. i haven't even entered the destructive phase of my life yet. i would definitely go through that first. of course, the destructive phase of your life is expensive too. i would definitely prefer to go on a month-long camping excursion. that would be a lot cheaper.

rachel, arps hall could possibly be painted with lead paint. that would explain a lot of my euphoria. also, there's this incredibly old, crazy professor that comes in the lounge around 445 pm to forcefully slam his coffee grinder against the trash can, emptying his coffee grounds into the receptacle while washing out his cup and other items. i would best describe it as complete disregard for other people's existence. additionally, we think he's probably senile. given situations like that, which occur frequently, i can't possibly be expected to stay sane.

eric, my fantasy baseball team should be awesome, but jeff kent has decided to play badly, eddie guardado has forgotten how to pitch, and todd helton is injured.

still, i have schilling, peavy, oswalt, and pedro on my staff. papelbon and hoffman are my closers, and i've got mora, wells, gomes, helton, kent, thome, posada, and a couple other hitters. i'm in good shape.

and as for john...
first, i have reached a stage in my life where capitalization seems unnecessary. i can see the point in punctuation, as it leads to natural breaks in thought and logic, but capitalization really serves no useful purpose except for identifying proper nouns, which is a skill that we're all probably pretty good at. i suppose capitalization helps identify where sentences start, but periods show where sentences end, which should be enough.

still, if you want, i'll use capitalization in my regular posts from here on, but i'm not going to be happy about it. by the way, e.e. cummings is the hotness.

as for the baseball... the reds' pitching staff isn't very good. let's be honest- claussen, harang, arroyo, milton, wilson, and the gang aren't that good. i don't know how else to say that. almost every other nl staff has at least one good pitcher on it, but the reds have no good pitchers, unless you want to count bronson arroyo. at least they've found a bunch of mediocre guys... that's reds baseball at its finest.

i like brandon phillips, as he goes along with the reds' patented concept of picking up former major infield prospects and plugging them into starting jobs after they struggle in aaa. he fits in well with the freel/lopez/jimenez/romano/hummel crew. like lopez (and jimenez), phillips probably actually has actual skill.

also, i can't be up for your consistent knocking of former twin eric milton. he's trying his best. it's not his fault he's not worth what he's being paid. show some love!!!

i'll take on your contract challenge. i already have my team in mind.

also, did you know that if you listen to the arcade fire's "vampire/forest fire" four consecutive times, you will reach the ultra-hidden level on the emo game?

actually, i'm just kidding.

life update.

i saw a commercial featuring spoon's "i turn my camera on." it reminded me of the summer, when i went to cherokee park and ran through the park and down bardstown road, ending the trip by playing gimme fiction in the sunfire with the windows down.

that was a long time ago.

today i sat in the economics lounge and i had this incredible sense of awareness. i find it very hard to describe, except that it must be equivalent to being unrealistically high. i'd like to point out that i'm not on any narcotics though, so that can't be the explanation for it.

if i were to describe the way i felt, i'd equate it roughly to taking one of those 360-degree views of a room, but on a much more global scale. i was aware in both the physical and metaphysical sense. i hope you appreciate what i mean by that.

oh, and i'm about to go drink some coffee and engage in some studying.

oh, and best wishes to my friends at louisville who are graduating. i wish i could be there to see you guys go, but rest assured, this is the culmunation of destiny. represent.

NBA Playoffs are about to start...

I was going to have some sort of comprehensive preview for the NBA playoffs, but there's really not going to be much drama in the first round. This could be one of the most hideous playoffs to watch ever; I'm hoping that the NBA comes to its senses and brings us back to Best-of-Five first round series, where teams would be scared of facing the Wizards, the Lakers, and the Clippers.

That's not happening, so I thought maybe it would be nice to consider the MVP candidates. I won't do this, though, mainly because Bill Simmons already did it, and although his criteria is crazy (seriously, is Kobe really the number one pick in a huge NBA pickup game over LeBron?), he already did it.

However, in reference to Kevin Garnett, Simmons is a bit off. He asks, "How was his (KG's) supporting cast worse than Gasol's crew in Memphis, or even Chris Paul's team in New Orleans?"

Geez, Bill, I think if I were going to have a pickup game, I'd probably take a team with Eddie Jones, Bobby Jackson, Mike Miller, Shane Battier, and (gasp) Lorenzen Wright over a team with Ricky Davis, Marko Jaric, Mark Blount, Marcus Banks, and Rashad McCants. I suspect I'd probably win. I'll even take the team with Kirk Snyder and David West over any team with Ricky Davis- this guy shot on his own goal in a game once to try to get a triple-double. He is certifiably impossible to win with. This is why Boston traded him for Wally Szczerbiak, knowingly observing that Ricky Davis would kill Wally in any sort of basketball-related competition. The Wolves have paired Garnett with both Davis and Sprewell, which should violate some sort of law somewhere. Tweaking anyone who's OCD is never a good idea.

Still, I have to agree with most of Simmons' logic, although you would think at least one Spur would be his Top 10 for MVP.

So, which playoff series are worth watching?

You can probably scratch Pistons/Bulls from the list. Also, you might want to scratch Bucks/Heat- the Bucks might win one game, but they probably won't win more than that. You'd like to think the Kings could beat the Spurs, but reality suggests otherwise.

The Wizards have the season lead over the Cavs, as do the Pacers over the Nets. I'd like to think the Nets will win, but the 4/5 series is a tossup.

The Lakers have Kobe. The Suns score too many points. At least one of these games will be memorable, but the Lakers don't have much of a chance.

Memphis doesn't have enough scoring to beat Dallas. Gasol isn't as good as Nowitzki.

So, with all this in mind, you should watch the Nuggets/Clippers- both teams have unstable personalities, and there should be some drama.

Final Four thoughts (after the fact.)

I haven't posted in a long time because I was incredibly depressed about the results of the Final Four. The games that I watched were horrendous- that's right, I said horrendous. I actually fell asleep during the George Mason/Florida game and was only awoken by the sound of my phone ringing, as I had called someone before to watch the second game of the night, the UCLA/LSU game.

I was terrified with what I saw; I saw the reincarnation of Tractor Traylor on the court, as Glen "Big Baby" Davis stunk it up so bad that my Macroeconomics professor Pok-Sang Lam suggested that Glen Davis shouldn't be called Baby Shaq anymore. That's getting served. The only person who misses more easy layups in a game is me. I'm dead serious about that. The frustrating thing about watching that game was knowing that if LSU had made half of the gimme shots they missed, the game would have been watchable and dramatic. As it stood, UCLA and their exceedingly irritating style of basketball made it all the way to the championship game, putting them into the category of "teams that are possibly less fun to watch than Wisconsin." I know I'm representing with that.

In the championship game, UCLA played Florida, a team that would probably be defeated by every single championship team of the last twenty years. Seriously, I think if you put this Florida team in a 64 team bracket of NCAA bracket winners, they would be a 16 seed. I can see this team matching up well with the Duke/Michigan State/UK/North Carolina teams of the past... wait, no I can't. I see double-digit domination by all the true champions. Joakim Noah is a nice player, but if Florida had played UConn, he would have been waxed by Boone and Armstrong. Noah was fortunate throughout the tournament in the fact that he a) didn't have to play Aldridge, Tyrus Thomas, the two UConn guys, Shelden Williams, or at least five other players that would have waxed him and b) was allowed to pretty much dominate smaller teams. You'll note that the only team that gave him trouble was Georgetown, a team with no outside game whatsoever. You can give him props for tearing up Villanova and George Mason, but there were plenty of other big guys that could have done that.

Why I am riding Noah? It's easy... I think he's the next Tyson Chandler, and I think he'll be drafted about as high if he goes this year, which he should... he doesn't need another year of college for teams to figure out how to stop him.