"The Craziest Final Four Ever" or "If You Don't Have an Animal Mascot, You Can't Play!!"

After this weekend's quagmire of an Elite Eight, we end up with a Final Four consisting of 3-Seed Connecticut, 4-Seed Kentucky, 8-Seed Butler, and 11-Seed Virginia Commonwealth. Let's break this down:

University of Connecticut: This team placed ninth in the Big East, with a conference record of 9-9. However, they spent the majority of the season taking down teams bigger and scarier than them: Michigan State, their Final Four match-up Kentucky, Texas, then they wipe out all the big names in the conference in their "Five Days of Winning" Big East Championship. They made their way into the tournament and beat Bucknell, Cincinnati, San Diego State, and Arizona.....pretty weak, the average of the seeds they have beaten in this tournament is 6.75. On the other hand, I did pick them to make it to the Final Four, so basically I am amazing and part of only 26% of the entries on Espn to have even one Final Four right. Boo-Yah!

University of Kentucky: What can I say? Second in the SEC East behind Florida, won the SEC Tournament. They've beaten alot of good teams in their conference and lost to the likes of Arkansas, Ole Miss, and those punk ass bitches Vanderbilt (I hate Vandy for no reason, just do, maybe it's the fugly uniforms). The only surprise about Kentucky making it to the Final Four is that they beat Ohio State on the way, and Ohio State was looking dominant. The average seed of the teams they played was 5.5.

Butler University: Butler....How the hell did they do this again? Can they do it without Matt Howard in the future? Why is their coach so young? These questions don't matter because these Black Clad Bulldogs have made it to the Final Four for the second straight year. They won the Horizon League and the tournament, although they only had to play two games to do so, against Cleveland St. and Milwaukee, hardly the Murderer's Row that UConn faced. They've lost to the likes of Evansville and (even more hilarious) Youngstown State (2-16 in the Horizon). But somehow they gathered the gumption to take down Pitt, Wisconsin, and Florida, no small feat. Their average seed played is 4, easily the hardest of the four remaining teams.

Virginia Commonwealth University: How bout this bullshit? VCU somehow squeezed their way into this tournament and are now just laying down a wasteland of sad teams. These guys came in fourth (FOURTH!!!!) in the Colonial League behind George Mason (8-seed), Old Dominion (9-seed), and Hofstra (participating in the College Basketball Invitational, a tournament held for teams that don't make the NCAA Tourney or the NIT. This is a tournament I did not know existed until I was doing research for this post.). Hofstra finished two games ahead of VCU in the league. VCU's season involved losing to such up and coming teams as: South Florida in OT, UAB, Georgia State, Northeastern (Yes that is a real team), and Drexel. While they beat:....Old Dominion once, Hofstra......., George Mason in the Colonial Tournament. But regardless of how the hell this team got into the tournament, they have leveled the teams they've been beating, USC by thirteen in the play-in game, Georgetown by eighteen, Purdue by eighteen, FSU was a close one point success in OT, but then they follow it up by beating Kansas by ten! This team could do anything: Lost to Butler by twenty five, win the whole thing, roast a real Ram as a sacrifice to the NCAA god for the sixth time in three weeks. Average Seed of their opponents: 5.17.

I think that I have learned from this tournament: 1)If you feel, while you are filling out your bracket, completely uneasy with every one of your picks, you are probably gonna have a terrible bracket. 2) If all of the experts say that there are gonna be a ton of upsets but pick all top three seeded teams to go to the Final Four, then they are just as uneasy as the rest of us and are going safe. 3) All of us should have done as the experts say and not as the experts do (the old line rolled out by parents when their teenagers find out that they used to smoke as teenagers) because when no one knows how to pick, there was certainly be some sort of mayhem going on.

I'd like to end this column with a little bit of criticism. Charles Barkley, everyone's favorite word vomiting TV basketball analyst for TNT, has basically been ripping the Big East all season, something I can appreciate, being a Big Ten man. He has often referred to them as the "Big Least." Apparently Jim Calhoun (UConn coach took offense to this because he had this to say, ""I've heard people call us the 'Big Least'. The large gentleman (Barkley) that called us that. The ninth-place team in the Big Least is now in the Final Four"
Let me explain something to you, Calhoun, while I appreciate what your team has done to validate a small part of my bracket, you need to understand that a conference that has one of it's eleven tournament teams make it to the Final Four is no success. So join me Calhoun and let's further analyze what happened to the various Big East Teams: In the first round you go 7-4 (Terrible for a power conference with only 11-seed Marquette and 9-seed Villanova as the worse seed in their respective games). You lose 4-seed Louisville to 13 Morehead St. (Pitino is doing analyst work the next day on CBS), 6-Seed St. John's in a loss to 11 Gonzaga, 6-Seed Georgetown in a destiny-laced loss to 11 VCU, 9-Seed Villanova (year long choker) to 8 George Mason. The second round is even more brutal to the Big East going only 2-5 with their remaining seven teams: 1-seed Pitt loses to 8 Butler (my bracket subsequently becomes nothing more than a piece of paper with a bunch of scrapings on it), 2-Seed Notre Dame loses to 10 Florida St, 3-Seed Syracuse losing to fellow Big Easter 11 Marquette, 6-seed Cincinnati loses to 3 Uconn, 5-seed West Virginia loses to 4 Kentucky.
So, Jim, do you think a conference that gives us eleven tournament teams and only gets two of them to the Sweet Sixteen is something to be proud of? Which other conferences had two teams make it to the Sweet Sixteen? Well the Big Ten did with only seven teams in the tournament, the SEC did with only five tourney teams, the Mountain West did (The MOUNTAIN WEST!) with only three teams making the tournament, and even better, the ACC had only four teams in the field of 68 and three of them (UNC, Florida St., and Duke) made it to the Sweet Sixteen.
Basically, the Big East was a big old sucker of a conference this year. Tons of ranked teams but the team that wins the Big East tournament is the ninth seed in their conference and the only two teams of theirs to make the Sweet Sixteen were the ninth placed Huskies and the eleventh placed Marquette Golden Eagles. WOW, what an awesome fucking conference you got there Calhoun.
Not to discount UConn, though. They are a good team that got hot at the right time, and clearly have the ability to beat other good teams, so they could win just as much as the other three teams, but that does not mean that the Big East was anything amazing, they just have a ton of teams, and this was a wacky year for college basketball.

In summary, Crazy Final Four, Big East sucks.

"Review of Battle LA" or "How Did Michelle Rodriguez Learn to Use a Gun So Quickly?"

These people are dumb. They had plenty of warning that these meteors were coming!

Two weeks ago, Matt and I set out to go see Battle LA. We decided, unwisely it seems, to invite Brian to come with us, he had just returned back from Champaign to live back home (the unfortunate trip that at some time befalls all of us middle-classed students of the University of Illinois). He says he's gotta eat dinner with his family and then he'll come. So I tell him when it is, he says he's bringing Brenden, it's all figured out. Me and Matt are prepared, we get there a half hour early, buy us all tickets (because we are nice guys and don't want the movie to sell out and our buddies who are not there yet to be left in the lurch while we watch Aaron Eckhart take on some gnarly water craving aliens set on a background of the ruined wasteland of a war-ravaged Los Angeles), get some food from the food court in the mall, and wait for those fools to get there. The movie is at 7:45, they arrive at 7:56. We get in there, there are no seats, we go out and exchange our tickets for the next show at 9:20. This is the second night in a row that poor Matt has gone to see this movie and had to buy tickets for the next show, basically investing four hours of his time each night waiting for and viewing this movie. Was it worth it?
We all agreed that this movie was essentially Black Hawk Down but where we were fighting aliens and not Somalis. Basically, Aaron Eckhart plays Micheal Nantz, a Marine Staff Sergeant who just led his troop to their death. He survives, filled with guilt, and is about to be granted his requested release, when Wait! What's this?!? Aliens have arrived in what originally appeared to be meteorites, and Nantz is thrown into the immediate war that ensues. The entire movie focuses on the single troop that is running around Los Angeles with a mission to first save some civilians, every time they think that they have saved some injured soldiers, the helicopter that they are taking gets destroyed on take off by the aliens, once again leaving just the troops and the civilians that made it through the various scary encounters.
This movie is actually better than I am making it sound. The movie's pretty good if you like war movies, and the special effects were really awesome. It's basically just about the relationships between the soldiers, with the aliens merely playing a faceless enemy, who messes stuff up periodically. We all left the theater with a sense that we liked the film, but honestly the whole mess of waiting for the movie cuz it was sold out is what really stands out of my entire Battle LA experience. However, I do really enjoy a movie where they don't feel the need to go through the tiring process of explaining the backstory and origins of the bad guys. Just kill 'em!!!

Final Opinion: 3 Water Craving Aliens out of 5

"Review of Hall Pass" or "How to Not Pick Up Chicks"

About a week ago, my roommate Zoe and I both had off a Friday night and I had been begging her to see Hall Pass with me, and I finally got her to go and we went. Hall Pass was written and directed by the Farrelly Brothers, and its interesting to see how their taste has changed since the days of Something About Mary, where there was a gross out joke around every corner. Whereas now, there are still gross out jokes, for instance the scene where the girl sneezes in the bathtub, but its not quite like when the gross out jokes used to really gross me out, such as when Mary puts jizz in her hair thinking it is hair gel or the entirety of Kingpin, most specifically my favorite lines from that movie:

• Roy: Hey, I hope you don't mind, I got up a little early, so I took the liberty of milking your cow for you. Yeah, it took a little while to get her warmed up, she sure is a stubborn one, whew.
  [Takes a drink from the bucket]
  Amish Guy: We don't have a cow. We have a bull.
  Roy: I'm gonna brush my teeth. 

To contrast this, alot of the gross out jokes in this movie were still funny, just not that gross. I mean I wasn't irked by the fact that the brother from According to Jim pooped in a sand trap while fucked up on Pot Brownies but maybe thats cuz I guess poop in sand doesn't bother me, as opposed to the one scene that did gross me out in the movie (see the aforementioned sneeze scene) where poop was used in a disgustingly hilarious manner.
Anyways, there are two storylines moving the film along, one being the boys running around unbridaled, the other being the wives who are hiding out from the hi-jinks in Cape Cod with family. Lets first talk about the wives storyline, it was fucking boring. A very tanned (although she doesn't look it in the picture above) Jenna Fischer and a very sexy Christina Applegate were fine, but their storyline was simply there to get the male characters to where they were going. All though I did the baseball player's line "You're really awesome at sex."
On the other hand, all the great stuff that happens in this movie takes place when Fred (Jason Sudeikas) and Rick (Owen Wilson) go on their matrimonial-free spiritual journey. They rent a hotel room and set loose on a long line of hilarious adventures, a day of hungover repair, a bunch of hilarious stuff with their friends, big black penis, little orange penis. This is the part of the movie that is hilarious and it is funny enough that it saves all of the rest of the filler.
I thought that it was funny, goofy enough to be really funny, plus I happen to really like both of the lead actors, so my opinion may be a bit biased. Zoe did not like it, so chicks, beware.

Final opinion: 3.5 Totally Unexplained Subway Five Dollar Footlong References out of 5

"My Triumphant Return" or "The World is Insane"

Young Sheen playing Old Sheen

Had to take a blog hiatus after my last entry was so horribly wrong. Damn dos Packers! Anyways things that have been taking place recently: Charlie Sheen has been hilarious by becoming the first person to be repeatedly accused of spousal abuse, abandoning his family (and causing his wife to relapse back briefly into addiction) to spend a binge in a hotel room with porn stars (Bree Olson is a good choice though) with a briefcase of cocaine (not an exaggeration, an actual amount) and still be out there holding all the power over whether or not we ever see Two and a Half Men again and fascinating America with his hilarious and zany antics. Go Sheen, you crazy fuck who can't currently see his kids because his wife just filed a temporary restraining order against claiming that he is currently insane.

And then! Mike Huckabee steps in and takes his image of the "lovable politician to your face, evil republican mastermind behind your back," and changes it to "obviously crazy politician to your face" by ripping on Natalie Portman for supposedly glamorizing out of marriage pregnancies. What a harlot! First off, everyone loves Natalie Portman, so Huckabee that is a bad stance to begin with. Second, what is your alternative for NP? Abort the baby instead? No Sex? That's insane talk, fool!

He also said a bunch of crazy stuff about Obama growing up in Kenya (not true) and how their involvement in the Mau Mau Rebellion would make him an Anti-British Imperialist. Lots o Crazy a brewing up in this story. Huckabee, you can lose as much weight as you want, but you can't lose the crazy.


This post is dedicated to BK, I'll come down to Champaign sometime before the end of the school year, we'll get drunk.