We Are All Witnesses...

…to three second-round Game Seven’s in the NBA, including a fantastic double-header on Monday night that means the 24 finale will have to be Tivoed. The Cavaliers and Mavericks both had their foot on the throats of both defending conference champions, but they flinched for but a moment, and now they’re traveling into extremely hostile arenas in an attempt to salvage a series they both had at match point last night. The Clippers/Suns finale will define “fun to watch”, with the big variable being how did all this rest affect Steve Nash and the rest of the run-and-gun Suns. Who ever thought at the beginning of this season that we could say Chris Kaman is the best center left in the Western Conference playoffs?

…to Marissa Cooper dying, but I’m going to have to say, I’m a little bit disappointed. A car crash? How lame is that? There’s been so many car crashes on The OC, and no fatalities resulting from them, but Mischa has to be the lame one to die from it? Not fair. I wanted her shot in the face or drowned or something. I didn’t enjoy that moment nearly as much as I wanted to, but at least now we can enjoy the countdown until she appears in her first Skinemax film. Barring them bringing James Marsters or Dean Cain aboard in some capacity next season, I’m officially done with The OC. Sad, but necessary. I’ll always have the Season One discs to remember the good times.

By the way, this is maybe the greatest video ever made. Enjoy it. And incase you missed it on Thursday night, and who could blame you, here's the death itself.


Seems like a good place to insert a random Autumn Reeser photo.

…to the wide-range of rankings for Notre Dame football. Kirk had us at number one, which seems utterly ridiculous when you consider the fact that we have one linebacker with any experience and our secondary will still probably be horrible. Just to be the devil’s advocate, as good as we looked most of last season, we really didn’t beat anybody, save for a crappy Michigan team. Still, preseason rankings are not that important to us, because if Notre Dame goes undefeated, we don’t have to worry about being Auburn or Utah – Beano Cook will hold a gun to John Saunders’ head on the BCS selection show if need be, we’ll be in Tempe for the inaugural BCS Championship game if we avoid any slip-ups.

Thankfully, unlike a lot of teams that don’t hit the heart of their schedule until much later in the season, we’ll know if we’re championship quality from the beginning. At Georgia Tech and Michigan State, home against Michigan and Penn State; if we come out of the first month 4-0, we’ll have earned our spot in the top two, with the exclamation mark of playing USC at the end of the year giving us the momentum into bowl season. Just to sum things up, ESPN.com has us at number eight, CollegeFootballNews.com has us at number eleven and Athlon has us somewhere in their top five.

Also from ESPN.com, a Dillon Hall shout-out in Pat Forde’s first in what I’m sure will be a never-ending series of articles by the mainstream sports media on Brady Quinn. Sadly, no mention of his Bookstore Basketball outburst. This season, if nothing else, is going to be extremely interesting.

Taylor Townsend for the guys, Brady for the ladies. This will always be an equal-opportunity blog.

…to the fact we might get saddled with another Detroit-San Antonio final. One of them would be fine (Pistons/Suns, Spurs/Heat? Both exciting.), but to see these two teams go at it again would kill all the momentum the Western shoot-outs and Rise of LeBron has brought to the Association. Pray – pray ­– for either the Mavs or Cavs to come through, because nothing would be worse than Chauncy and Tony taking turns walking the ball up the floor into another shot-clock violation.

…to The Da Vinci Code, movie version, apparently being absolutely terrible. It’ll still make loads of money – be sure, I’m not predicting anything lower than the 75 million range this weekend – but it just fills me with absolute glee that a shitty novel produced a shitty movie. My favorite line of all the reviews comes from The New York Times, referring to Dan Brown’s novel as a “best-selling primer on how not to write an English sentence”.

(Despite the rather lackluster start to Summer Box Office 2006, with either poor reviews (Da Vinci), disappointing opening weekends (M:I:3) or both (Poseidon), there are a slew of movies left to carry the load. Superman Returns, X-Men 3, The Break-Up, Talladega Nights, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Snakes on a Plane. I doubt things will end up as good as last year, but don’t judge your summer movie season by May alone.)

And I’ll leave you with this: Agent Zero dunking on The Chosen One, showing that while Gilbert may be out of this postseason, he will most definitely be returning.