Round 2 begins

I’m awake and a game is on tv – Duke v. Seton Hall. In my brackets, I picked Duke, but Seton Hall’s a sort of hometown team – I feel almost torn. CBS has also showed way too much Duke stories on tv – good grief, they’re like the NY Yankees – on all the time.

NY Times has a nice story on the two NY metro area Catholic schools (who are both strangely detached from the urbanities of their connected areas) – Seton Hall (leafy university campus far from Newark, although the law school is still by the PATH station in Newark) and Manhattan College (which is actually in the lovely land of Riverdale, Bronx).

For the record, I’ll let you all know that my final four picks are: Gonzaga, St. Joseph, Duke, and Stanford. Unknown if it’ll happen, but each team is still alive at this hour. The only corner in my bracket where there’s much still standing is the Phoenix (West) region – only one out of 16 picks wrong – not bad. Not an altogether bad bracket this year. But where’s a Cinderella I can be content with?

And, no, I’m not that big NCAA junkie – just a mildly interested one (if I were a real junkie, then I ought to have followed all season, not just in March).

Historiography in action – what is history and what does the history of history reflect, and what does it mean when politics uses history for its own purposes? In an article for the NY Times, Antonio Feros shows how it’s getting messy when Spain’s elections seem to suspiciously recall its civil war of 70 years ago:

“But many historians in Spain are still troubled by the trend toward using history as a weapon in political debates. “The use of the civil war to interpret the present is very dangerous,” [Enrique Moradiellos, a historian at the University of Extremadura, Spain] warns. ‘And I am afraid that if we continue to do this we might provoke a radicalization of the political situation that could bring unwanted results.'”

Interesting point.

Other interesting questions about historical (so to speak) research: more on the Blackmun papers, and wondering whether they really reveal much at all, according to one of his former clerks , (who is very much a direct source as we can probably get for now).

In a NY Times op-ed, William B. Rubenstein, UCLA professor of law, goes into an interesting analysis on politicians’ use of framing arguments along Constitutional lines (i.e., asking how we keep within the governmental structuring), rather than getting to the heart of an issue (i.e., discussing what we want society to be and to do). He notes that maybe this Founding Fathers of the USA made the political system as it is to raise possibilities of compromise (evade the harder discussion of what kind of society we want by making us talk about the “easier” one – how do we stay within the Constitional frame – first; the Founding Fathers’ plans certainly would keep (and already have kept) the country stable before we tumble into disarray over the battle of issues). But, as Rubenstein notes, it is a real odd way to “discuss” politics.

Taiwanese election results just out; curious developments there.

Back to basketball…

Eternal Sunshine of the Winter Kind

Spring has sprung, and there is some traces of snow melting before our eyes, but can we remember what we want to forget? Haven’t seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but based on the reviews, I can see that we live these attempts to remember and forget every day. I’d love to wipe out the memories of this winter. The movie sounds awesome — it has a high Fresh-o-Meter — maybe we’ll see it on the way to San Diego next weekend with P-.

Saw The Big O Part 1. This anime is basically (dark) Batman meets big-ass Godzilla sized Japanese robot warrior. The major premise is that because of some unknown type of warfare, the entire city-state has lost their memory, but nothing physical has been destroyed, so they are reconstructing civilization based on what they have around them. Recommended.

Judged a moot court competition on Thursday. The plot: reality show producer puts cast(aways) on U.S. territory out in the middle of the Pacific. Turns out it was a former nuclear and biological weapons test site and everyone gets sick and dies, including the producer. The network scores high ratings. The producer, 2 weeks before kicking the bucket, pleads guilty of manslaughter for the castaways’ deaths and points the finger at the network. The government wants to prosecute the network using what the producer said in court, but she’s dead and she can’t be cross-examined. It’s much more intricate, involving attorney-client privilege, public relations firms, Homeland Security, and a bothersome Supreme Court case, but that’s the outline. For those legal geeks here, the bizarre thing is that we have an inanimate defendant pressing its Confrontation Clause rights against a dead woman. Definately not what the Founding Fathers were thinking about.

Food craziness : today dimsum at Dim Sum Go Go, a work dinner party at Tavern on the Green. Thursday, we did La Paella in the East Village, recommended.

More basketball? or Going Asian tonight

And the basketball stuff continues. And my bracket’s not looking too bad right now. Sort of. Depends on the results of the Pittsburgh-Central Florida game.

Developments in the case of James Yee, the Asian-American/Muslim/army chaplain who was in Guatanamo Bay; Army appears to be dropping the espionage charges – but Capt. Yee will still face a (relatively minor) penalty for downloading porn on the government-issued laptop. Oh, and apparently, the adultery charges too. Ah, well.

Friday’s arts: NY Times’ Holland Carter writes on the Asian art exhibit in Washington, D.C. – such nice writing and sounds like a great exhibit.

I’ve been noticing the latest commercials on Mr. Peanut (the Planters mascot), and they never seemed to stir much in me; plus the latest Mr. Peanut appearance during the NCAA games are odd – where Mr. Peanut plays some basketball with the various college mascots – the animation uses too much bold, black lines. Looks too fake-cartoony to me. Personally, I think Mr. Peanut has too much of a shiny sheen that doesn’t look right. NY Times ad man, Stuart Elliot, notes that Mr. Peanut’s transformation is less about his Fred Astaire debonair but more on a slick attitude that goes with the times – and change may not be too good for Mr. Peanut.

The latest Entertainment Weekly’s interesting – Hugh Jackman on the cover and a preview of his upcoming movie – “Van Helsing.” More curiously, EW profiles the tv show “Las Vegas,” which I concede isn’t too bad a show – watchable (although I haven’t watched a full hour of it in awhile – it is admittedly nothing too heavy-weight) – but the article clarified some of the characters who kept confusing me (i.e., James Caan’s character is a higher level executive in that casino after all; and yeah, Nikki Cox’s character was a prostitute in the pilot episode, wasn’t she?). So, maybe “Las Vegas” deserves a second look one of these days.

Back to basketball – get ready for Round 2 of the tournament.