Countdowns, Disappearing sports sections, Valley news and more!!

Countdown....
11 days 'til the Hoopla, official beginning of practice...
(two weeks of intense conditioning and "boot camp" start today!)
20 days 'til the Red-White Scrimmage...
33 days 'til BU's first exhibition and the first actual contest vs. an opponent at the new arena...
37 days 'til the first day of the Letter of Intent signing period...
BU hopes to get 3 signatures, and I'd love to see them all on the 1st day of the period (Donivine Stewart, Remy Abell, and Sean Harris, although Harris is out of the country)



FWIW -- Bradley comes in at #91 in the collegehoopsnet countdown...
The writer Joel Welser does demonstrate that he's done some reading and knows the players.....

http://www.collegehoopsnet.com/91-bradley-2010-11-basketball-preview-168735

Here's the discussion...
http://bradleyfans.com/vb/showthread.php?t=16041&page=6



Ex-Valley coach and well known foul-mouth Royce Waltman has a new gig!!
Royce Waltman has been hired to do Indiana radio broadcasts!!
IU fans are a bit ambivalent about this...some liking the idea since he's a throwback as a Bobby Knight "protege".
Others wonder why they couldn't have gotten at least someone with a bit more experience or knowledge. Their former color broadcaster (Todd Leary) was just convicted of a ton of serious crimes and will not be available soon...but that fits right in with all the violations that have been happening lately at Indiana since they went for the wins only by hiring Kelvin Sampson.
http://www.wthitv.com/dpp/sports/college/Indiana-State,-Royce-Waltman



Did anyone find the sports section in their newspaper this morning?
I'm talking PJ Star.....
I don't want to make much of it since I had already watched the Bears game and saw who's in the baseball playoffs - so I didn't need to know anyone else's take on it and wouldn't have read the coverage of it.....
and otherwise it was a pretty slow sports day so there wasn't much at all to read or find.....
-- although they did have a prominent story on the Peoria Mustangs???

So I didn't care much anyway...maybe if someone was a garbage collector or was riding a horse through central Illinois they'd get more coverage...

But -- the PJ Star appears now to have become the first "major" daily (if indeed we can still call it that) to eliminate the sports section...
And I mean totally eliminate the Sports Section!!!
(and don't tell me the Sun Times did it long ago - since the Sun Times if you just turn it over IS one giant sports section)

Some live out of town, so I know you're not going to believe it, but the Peoria Journal Star is bragging on its new "format".
But it's new format is to shrink the entire newspaper so that it weighs less than an ounce now and is about the size of the Tradin' Post, although it isn't even as thick as the Tradin' Post.

If you didn't push past the local news and dog bite news, then the obits, then the weather and acts of kindness human interest...then you'd have totally missed the couple pages of sports buried deep in the local and regional section.
Seriously --I know people are dying and the economy's a mess, but people do pick up a paper to find the sports occasionally, and here's what I discovered.

...As I was at work today -- I went to two different places, professional staff lounges, where lots of people sit and read the newspapers that are made available there daily..
and I heard several people commenting...
"There's no sports section at all today!"

..seriously, they couldn't find it - as it was simply tucked in as the last couple pages on the back end of the local-obituary section! I am not kidding..you have to see it for yourself.
Oh well.......I was right -- victims of budgetary cutbacks........



Enes Kanter, the star recruit that has reportedly already enrolled at Kentucky and is expecting the NCAA to clear him...still hasn't been cleared...
Looks like Kanter is making some contingency plans....if he can't be a basketball player, he wants to be a wrestler...
That seems appropriate, since most pro wrestlers break all kinds of rules, use steroids, are fakes & just put on an act, and are really all about money anyway -- having no intent on actually using their talents to complete fairly as athletes....thus making a mockery of actual sports!
http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/blog/the_dagger/post/Kentucky-s-Enes-Kanter-hopes-to-be-the-next-Unde?urn=ncaab-274011

There's even more rumble about Kentucky per sportswriter John Feinstein ("Season on the Brink")...
He says the NCAA is investigating Kentucky once again for even more new violations...something we haven't even heard about yet -- could there be more???
..whoa...this stuff is happening every week....Kanter, Bledsoe, etc...
http://kentucky.rivals.com/showmsg.asp?fid=1383&mid=148282270&sid=888&tid=148282270&style=1



Amazing how fast all the scandal at Michigan State disappears onto the back pages...and is gone from the news........why no stories on renegade programs???



Indiana, Iowa State, Michigan are named Biggest Underachievers in college basketball!
http://collegebasketball.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1133632



So USC is suing USC over logo infringement (Southern Cal, South Carolina)...
..more wise spending of taxpayer dollars....
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/all/7230759.html



To show how far down the scale women's basketball is ...
...did you know, that the team USA women's basketball squad just won the FIBA Women's World Championship!!

Most people never heard a thing --
it was on the news, but obviously nobody really cares......
Probably would have helped had the games been held somewhere other than the Czech Republic...
no offense to the fine people there in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, but most of the world couldn't find that nation on a map.

The US women finished 9-0 and really weren't challenged much at all...
only one game was a single digit game, and most were 20, 30, and even 50 point blowouts...
There was a surprisingly good crowd for the final game, due mainly to the fact that the US women faced the home team Czech women in the Final...

Most games, however looked like this.....so it's pretty obvious that women's basketball is also lagging in interest over in Europe as well.....
http://czechrepublic2010.fiba.com/pages/eng/fe/10/fwc/women/photos/p/eid/4730/gid/5/grid/C/lid//rid/6949/sid/4730/selimgid/90635/catids/558/orderby//gcid/22/displaydate/-1/picture.html
http://czechrepublic2010.fiba.com/pages/eng/fe/10/fwc/women/photos/p/eid/4730/gid/3/grid/B/lid//rid/6949/sid/4730/selimgid/90519/catids/558/orderby//gcid/22/displaydate/-1/picture.html



One giant leap? Nope -- an almost infinite number of giant leaps required to get to this astoundingly dumb conclusion...read on.........this is non-sports related and is an extension of some of the astronomy-news we've discussed lately...
http://bubravesblogger.blogspot.com/2010/09/15-days-from-hoolamadness-and-more.html

Here's how it goes...
first you find some tiny astronomical evidence that a star could have a planet orbiting it...
we still don't actually see the planet, just infinitesimal wobble or light fluctuations that might mean something unseen is orbiting the star in question..

Then after crunching tons of numbers, some scientists propose the possibility that this particular bit of evidence hints at a planet that just might be far enough from the star in question that maybe it's not blistering hot -- like every other planet that they've found evidence for yet...(and I do mean every one -- see below).

So...then if this one is slightly farther away -- and that's all we know about it....then let's jump to the conclusion that it IS the right temperature -- not too hot and not too cold. So we invent a new term -- and say it is in the "Goldilocks zone"....since Goldilocks' favorite porridge was not too hot and not too cold.

OK -- so even that's a stretch, but we still have a long ways to go...
Let's say there's an atmosphere on this planet, although it's unlikely given the few facts we can tell about the planet (see prior blog entry) Then let's make another big jump and suppose the atmosphere has not only NO poisonous gases like ammonia, but actually has oxygen.
And it not only has oxygen, but plenty of it like only one other planet we know (earth - since even all the other planets in our system strangely lack significant oxygen).

Then -- don't get settled yet, we still have some conclusion jumping to do...
but to make the story short...
we also have to have the right gravity, the correct minerals and minor elements -- we also have to have a lack of global volcanic activity, and decent weather patterns...and lots more...etc.

Then we still need water -- lots of it -- again, something strangely absent on all the other planets we know much about, but let's just jump to the conclusion we have plenty on our newly discovered planet...

Then if all that's in place, it is surely just another hop, skip, and jump for the writer of this DISCOVERY NEWS article to conclude that this planet is earth-like (which isn't at all what the evidence suggests)...but that this...

"Earth-like planet can sustain life"
and "could be habitable -- or even is"
http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/view?q=view%3Apopular&a=yE6l4Sqkg9bEXM&source=news&type=embed

Then read on and see that the author of this article gets plenty wrong such as saying...
this is a.."solar system very similar to our own" (which it obviously isn't)

and that it's the "right size and location for life" (which is pure speculation...)

This article even quotes one guy that purports to be a scientist as saying...
"Personally ...I would say the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent. I have almost no doubt about it" Wow -- 100% sure!!


--of course, 100% means certainty, and leaves no doubt, then he immediately says in the next sentence that he has almost no doubt....meaning he still has some.
And this guy is a scientist?? he's about as scientific as Pee Wee Herman.

but notice this...(parentheses are my comments)
"this is the first Goldilocks planet...the first planet that is .. the right size and .. the right distance to have liquid water (although there's no evidence that it does)...and thus life......(or, in their minds, most assuredly life -- 100% !!!)"

But then get this...
some say astronomers have already found at least 492 (maybe more) planets in systems outside our solar system...
492!!...and yet the other 491 are all not even considerations for life....and this one Goldilocks one is the first that even has the consideration of life??

So this one is barely borderline in the realm of being horribly uninhabitable like the other 491...but the fact that it is the least uninhabitable of the 492, then it surely must have life!! 100% sure!! ??
http://exoplanet.eu/catalog.php
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/habitable-world-next-may/

Oh, and btw -- just to give a hint of how exact this science is....
here's the list of planets that were once claimed by science to exist based on the proof they had, but that have since been removed from the list because the evidence was discarded when better technology came along....
almost 100 of them!!!!!
(does this maybe sound like we're jumping the gun a bit of such a HUGE percentage of time they think they have found a new exo-planet, that it turns out the evidence was faulty and there wasn't one there??)
http://exoplanet.eu/catalog-contro.php

All I can say is that "science", in some sort of perverted effort to cash in on Hollywood or to spin their facts so they interest the common man...
has blurred the line, or even completely destroyed the line between science and fiction.
This kind of thing made a millionaire out of Carl Sagan, and now Stephen Hawking, so these guys are trying to cash in on Sagan's act -- get rich instead of actually talking science or following scientific reason.
Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg would all be spinning in their graves!! (if science allowed such a thing....)
....Do TV, sell books, make movies....heck, who cares about science when spinning all these flat-out lies is so fun and profitable!!!