And, back to sports.

First off, a Tournament Challenge update. The officially confirmed entrants so far are:

Dad
Drew
Flax
Jan
JQ
Nemo
Rud
Ryan
Tyler*

(* - paid)

The unconfirmed but previously interested:

Craig
Stan

Whether you're on the second list or not, you can officially register for the Challenge by sending an e-mail to this address. I'd love to get at least sixteen (so that someone other than the winner can walk away with something), but we've got a ways to go on that front.

Not much to update in the iTunes Challenge; we're still stuck on 12 songs remaining, with seven of them claimed - the alive participants are Brian H., Craig, Drew, Jan, Nemo, Rudnik, and Ryan.

Thoughts from the weekend-onto-Monday in sports:

* A melancholy Happy Trails to Kirby Puckett. Those of you who get here through the BigFlax.com front page, which is probably almost none of you at this point, may have noticed my tribute to Puckett, a shot of one of my favorite postseason home runs of all-time (along with a rather fitting Jack Buck call that I like so much I actually used it in my yearbook quote in high school).

* Strangely, Puckett's age appears to be up for some debate. Baseball-Reference.com lists March 14, 1961 as his date of birth; so does the back of his 1988 Topps baseball card. ESPN originally reported that Puckett had died at 44 (using the 1961 date), but later reported his age as 45, as did other news outlets. The CNN.com story admits that "Some sources list his year of birth as 1961," but it doesn't bother to clear up the matter for certain (other than going with 1960, I guess).

* Edit: The ESPN.com story no longer mentions the date change, but when I read it late last night it made reference to recent research by the Hall of Fame revealing that Puckett's birth year was 1960 and not the 1961 that had been reported to that point. It's worth noting that Baseball-Reference.com has since changed his date of birth to 1960, so I have as well.

* BMOC traditionally means "Big Man on Campus" and is used to refer to players who have big games, especially in meaningful situations. This weekend I decided it could have a second, opposite meaning - "Bowel Movement on Court," for the college basketball player who takes the worst dump in an important game. J.J. Redick deserves some credit for going 5-for-21 - especially since he went 1 for his last 16 - but he did score 18 points in the loss to UNC, and the rest of the team wasn't exactly picking up the slack - only Shelden Williams really pulled his weight. (And I guess DeMarcus Nelson off the bench, points-wise at least.)

But the winner has to be Jack Leasure of Coastal Carolina. Okay, he's only a sophomore, but the guy was conference player of the year in the Big South... and in 37 minutes against Winthrop, Leasure shot 1-for-15. 1-for-15! 6.7% from the floor! And that's 1-of-9 (11.1%!) from three, and 0-for-6 from two. 0-for-6 from inside the arc? That's horrible! Leasure finished with five points, putting him just fifth on the team for the game, behind a guy who only played nine minutes but scored six points!

What truly makes this worthy of BMOC, though, is that Coastal lost to Winthrop by a single point. 51-50. If Leasure makes ANY of his fourteen missed shots... Coastal wins. Ugly. You feel bad for the guy, of course, but he could probably have had better shot selection a lot of the time, too.

* Am I the only one getting more than a little sick of Gonzaga? Watching tonight's game (which was absolutely frittered away by Loyola Marymount), I saw a team that whines to the refs constantly even though they routinely take significantly more free throws than their opponents, features one of the most accomplished floppers in the college game (Adam Morrison), grabs like crazy, etc. Plus, I'm tired of Gonzaga dominating that conference; move into the Pac Ten or something already. We're not impressed by your ability to dominate these tiny, routinely mediocre schools. Put your school where your mouth is - and with Morrison on the team, it's quite a loud, obnoxious mouth indeed. Plus, as long as Gonzaga doesn't have to play anyone between December and March, they're never going to go anywhere; after watching them barely slip by two overmatched conference opponents (despite shooting 24 more free throws over the two games, something that won't happen in the tournament), I couldn't be ready enough to pick the Zags to lose in the second round (though of course this probably means this is finally the year they go to the Final Four).