Wisconsin, Big Ten champions!

Wisconsin's men's basketball team won the Big Ten season championship this afternoon, with an easy victory over Northwestern, the league's last place team. They won the title outright. Only two losses, both to Purdue, marred their conference record.

When I attended UW, back in the dark ages, being regular season champions would have given them an automatic berth in the NCAA tournament (not that they ever had a competitive team back then). But about 10 years ago a post-season conference tournament was added, so now they'll have to win three more games, on three consecutive days, to get in automatically.

Not that they have to worry about getting in, anyway--they're ranked tenth in the nation, having won 26 of their 30 games. So even if they should lose in the Big Ten tournament (perish the thought), they will certainly be picked for an at-large berth. But winning the conference tournament on top of the regular season championship might get them a #2 seed in the "Big Dance," as the NCAA tournament is called.

Unlike last year, the Badgers are all healthy, so I'm hoping for a much better post-season (they lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament, with their center, Brian Butch, out with an injured elbow). Friday is the Badgers' first game, which I can watch from the comfort of my own home. ESPN will be carrying it, so I won't have to go to the bar to watch it, also unlike last year.

Plat du jour

Weiner pandering to the Yankee fans

It's really sad the way politicians suck up to sports stars, and their fans. First we had Congress members fawning over Roger Clemens before he testified to their committee--while their staffers were perhaps violating the law getting his autograph. That was bad enough.

Now Rep. Anthony Weiner, the Queens Democrat preparing to run for mayor of New York City next year, is asking the FBI to drop its probe of Clemens' allegedly false testimony. His reasons are that:

1) Clemens has already suffered enough.
2) The FBI has more important things to do.
3) Congress shouldn't have been involved in the first place--the professional sports leagues should handle steroid use by the athletes.

Weiner is wrong, wrong, wrong.

1) Clemens hasn't begun to suffer enough, for the exact same reasons I noted in the Marion Jones case.
2) Nobody should ever think they can get away with lying to Congress.
3) The professional sports leagues (and the athletes' unions) are the last people I'd trust to keep athletes from using performance-enhancing drugs. They know that the fans want to see their teams win, and most want to see records being broken, and few care how it's done.

What Weiner is doing is simply pandering to Clemens' fans, of which there are many in New York, since Clemens played for the Yankees. He's looking for votes in an extremely difficult constituency for him--he's a Mets fan, and Yankees fans generally hate the Mets, and their fans.

I don't think I'm going to be voting for Weiner.

Now I know we're in a recession

Last week I semi-joked that we're already in a recession. Then Warren Buffett agreed. Now I've found hard evidence: Job Discrimination Complaints Jump. When employers start dumping people, the first ones to go are the ones that are "different"--minorities and women, and ones that tend to be more expensive--older workers and the disabled. When discrimination claims go up it's a good sign the economy is going down.

Plat du jour

On a beautifully restored Chevy.

New template

Someone on the myHusbandBetty message boards said she noticed a correlation between misogynistic postings and pink backgrounds on crossdressers' blogs. While I don't think I have ever been guilty of any misogyny here, I don't want anyone to be misled--so I've changed my blog's template.

I've tweaked it a little, but there are some more things I'd like to do. I wish I could figure out how to decrease the size of the borders, so the main column (now white) would be wider.

Likewise, Wendy's

Another addition to my list of dangerous places to avoid.
Fireman, Gunman Dead in Wendy's Shooting

Plat du jour

A snowbird--back in NY a bit early, perhaps.