Three guesses, and the first two don't count

From ESPN.com's recap of the Kentucky/Notre Dame NIT game, which Notre Dame won, in which it was speculated that Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie was on the hot seat after two disappointing years at Kentucky and could be fired any day now:

Asked about how he feels about all the judgment he's facing after posing a 40-27 record in two seasons at Kentucky, Gillispie said: "There's only one judgment I'll ever be concerned about, and I hope I pass that judgment. That's the only one I'll ever be concerned about, and I'm really proud that that's the only judgment that will ever have a real effect on me, and I hope I pass that one with flying colors."

Gillispie declined to answer when asked whose judgment he was referring to, saying it was obvious, apparently referring to Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart.

You're kidding, right, ESPN? You don't really think he was referring to the Kentucky AD when he said all that stuff, do you? Because I will tell you right now: he was not.

Chalkoholics

Last year was the first time four #1 seeds ever made the Final Four. But this year has been an even better year for chalk so far. It's the first time in the 64-team age that every 1, 2 and 3 seed has reached the Sweet 16, and it's the first time since 1995 that merely all the 1s and 2s have made it this far.

It's not just the seed lines, though. It's the programs sitting in them. Did you know:

* Of the 16 teams remaining, nine have won national titles? And not only that, but all nine won at least one of their titles in 1985 or later, i.e. after the field expanded to 64 teams.

* What's more, eleven of the sixteen have been to the Final Four since 1985, and of those teams, only Villanova hasn't been to multiple Final Fours. Duke, North Carolina and Kansas combined have been to 24 Final Fours in the last 25 years.

* Only three remaining teams - Missouri, Xavier and Gonzaga - have never been to a Final Four. However, all have been to the Elite Eight within the past ten tournaments. (Purdue's last Final Four was 1980; Pitt's was 1941, when making the Final Four required winning all of one game, but hey, it still counts.)

And in case you're hoping for Xavier or Gonzaga to go all the way, consider that since the field expanded in 1985, only Villanova in 1985, Michigan in 1989, and Connecticut in 1999 won a title in their first Final Four appearance under the seeded system (begun in 1979). By and large, this tournament is won by teams who have been there before. Which is why, even though I thought Pitt did a good job of not getting rattled in their closer-than-expected wins over East Tennessee State and Oklahoma State, I think that if you have Pitt going all the way right now, you cannot be feeling too good about your chances.

The good news, of course, is we should be in for some pretty decent games the rest of the way. Even though Western Kentucky gave Gonzaga all they could handle, and probably should have beaten them, don't you think Gonzaga has a better chance of beating UNC, or playing them close, than WKU would have? I do. Most double-digit seeds, particularly 12 and below, run out of gas in the Sweet Sixteen; it's telling that the only seed below #11 ever to make an Elite Eight was #12 Missouri - a major-conference team - in 2002. After two rounds those smaller conference teams tend to wear down. What if Siena had held on against Louisville? As much as I love seeing the little guys win, it's entirely likely that Siena/Michigan State or Siena/Kansas as potential Elite Eight matchups would have ended up ugly. And for those of you who say "Hey, if they could beat Louisville why couldn't they hang with Michigan State," yes, I agree in theory, but remember Florida/George Mason in the Final Four? That game sucked. George Mason made a great run but at the end they'd just had it. And so would have Siena. Heck, look at what happened to Cleveland State in Round Two.

So yeah, I'm a little sad there weren't more fun upsets. And it's a little annoying to think that we could easily have a Final Four of Kansas, Connecticut, Duke and Carolina. On the other hand, virtually every game from here on out should be close and exciting. For all the great upsets of 2006, the Final Four was a real snooze. I don't think we'll see that again.

Watchedmen

Hey, a movie review! It's for Watchmen.

Arose by any other name

By now you've probably heard about Willis Group Holdings Ltd., the world's third-largest insurance firm, acquiring the naming rights to the Sears Tower as part of a tenancy deal that includes 140,000 square feet of space within the building. Odds are, unless you work for Willis Group, you think this is dumb.

Willis Group is well within its rights to purchase naming rights, of course. And it's easy to see why the building's owners would be happy to make a little money off the name for a change, given that Sears hasn't occupied office space in the building since 1992. But does Willis really think that people are going to drop the old name and start calling it the Willis Tower just because they say so? Because we aren't.

It's the same reason why naming rights for Wrigley Field aren't really as valuable as you might think. Who is going to stop calling it Wrigley Field? Plenty of people still call US Cellular Field "Comiskey," and that park doesn't have half the cachet that Wrigley does. Aon rather famously acquired the naming rights for what was once the Standard Oil Building (and then the Amoco Building) in 1999, but despite the Aon Center's height, there are really two skyscrapers in Chicago that people pay much attention to - the Sears and the Hancock. They're the two that stand out from the skyline, they have the antennae, etc. No one is going to start calling them something else. If someone bought the naming rights to the Eiffel Tower, would anyone stop calling it that? What if the naming rights were bought to the Golden Gate Bridge? These aren't things that people are going to change on.

When I was at Northwestern, the students still called the dining halls "SAGA" even though that company hadn't been the food provider in a decade or so. For all I know, they still do. And you're talking about a student body that more or less completely turns over every four years. No one who lives in this city now is going to stop calling it the Sears Tower any time soon. If I were Willis, I would have asked if I could pay a little less and not bother with the naming rights. On the other hand, maybe they're thinking long-term; by 2050 maybe the new name will have caught on.

Phinally

Gosh, I've only been back in the US for 53 days. How about a recap of the Philippines trip? What's that you say? You forgot I even went because it's been so long? You sarcastic dick. Here's the link.

Iron Chef Flax

I've been cooking a little bit recently. I don't exactly have crazy chef talents, but I can generally follow a recipe, and I wanted to cook for Alma on Valentine's Day. I perhaps ambitiously decided to make chicken breasts stuffed with spinach and goat cheese, not really taking into consideration how long it might take to do so.

First I had to chop up some shallots, which made my eyes sting like crazy. Then I pulled the stems off a bunch of spinach leaves and wilted them in a pan with the shallots. Once that was done I crumbled in the goat cheese and stirred it together to make the filling. Next I had to cut pockets into the raw chicken breasts, which was easier said than done even though I use a nice sharp knife. The chicken breasts weren't huge or anything, and in a couple cases were shaped such that a cut into the side of one end of the chicken would poke through the bottom of the chicken near the other end. This meant, of course, that when the filling was pushed in, it would start to seep out the bottom. Great.

Fortunately I was mostly able to hold the filling in place by completing the next step, which was breading the chicken. I rolled the breasts in flour, dunked them in an egg bath, and then rolled them in bread crumbs. After they sat in the fridge for a few minutes to set up, the breasts were pan-fried for a couple minutes on each side, and then put in the oven to bake for 20 minutes.

While the chicken was in the oven I worked on making a pasta side. I had decided to make my own sauce, a light lemon-butter-white wine number, but I hadn't read the recipe quite as carefully as I should have; at one point it instructed me to quarter the lemon, then drop all four pieces into the sauce and simmer for 20 minutes until reduced by half. At this point it was already almost 9 pm and I didn't have the time or energy to do that, so I just squeezed the lemon juice into the pot instead and skipped the rest of that step entirely.

In the end it took me around two hours to do everything and we didn't eat until about 9:15, but at least it was all good. The next night I actually made the same thing (this time with some steamed green beans as well, since we hadn't had a vegetable the first night), since I had bought more than I ended up needing the first night; the recipe called for four chicken breasts, but they come in packages of three. So I bought two of them, but decided that opening the last package when I wasn't going to use most of it was dumb and just saved it for the next day. Even without pasta, it still took about an hour and 45 minutes the second night, so I guess this is just a complicated recipe. The really annoying thing was spending over an hour on Sunday afternoon washing all the dishes from the previous night only to dirty most of them up again later that evening (and subsequently having to spend another 30-45 minutes doing dishes on Monday).

This weekend I told Alma I would cook for her again, and I decided to make lamb chops. Deliberately selecting the "quick and easy" filter on epicurious.com, I found this recipe, which seemed simple enough. However, I ran into a couple of issues at the store. Number one, the only ground cardamom they had was a small bottle retailing for 16 dollars, which I could not possibly justify (at that price it would have cost more than the lamb). Number two, the only lamb chops they had - and you could argue this is my fault for going no further than Dominick's for my meat purchasing needs - were loin chops, not rib chops as the recipe called for. I asked after rib chops but was told this was all they had; the guy held up an enormous package of lamb and suggested that I could cut it however I wanted, but needless to say that wasn't going to be happening (I don't know that I could even have identified the rib chops, let alone cut them out, and what would I have done with the rest of the lamb anyway?).

The cardamom was not missed. I threw a pinch of cinnamon into the marinade to make up for the sweetness (apparently you can approximate cardamom with equal parts cinnamon and nutmeg, so I wasn't far off, although we didn't have any nutmeg and I didn't find this out until I got home), but you couldn't really tell anyway. The rest of the marinade was a bunch of chopped garlic and a good deal of lime juice (I was just finishing fully squeezing out the second half of the lime I'd bought when Alma said, "Does it call for the juice of one lime?" Realizing I hadn't really looked, I saw it actually only called for two tablespoons, but I think it was fine; I had been worried that the marinade as called for in the recipe wasn't going to have nearly enough liquid to coat all the lamb, so it worked out), plus salt, pepper, cumin and olive oil. While the lamb marinated for 15 minutes, I started work on the sides, making couscous (from one of those Near East boxes, so as not to overextend myself like I perhaps had with the chicken) and vegetables (a Bird's Eye microwaveable steamer bag). Finally the lamb got cooked about 3 minutes on each side in a frying pan.

I think it turned out quite well; parts of some of the pieces didn't get completely coated in the marinade while in the bag (it was a little tricky because once they were in the bag they had a tendency to bunch up a little, since they were relatively thin pieces of raw meat), and because the lime juice had a slight pre-cooking effect (as it does in Peruvian ceviche), the pieces that didn't get fully coated (which were still red when I put them in the frying pan, as opposed to most of the lamb, which was darkening towards brown) were perhaps a little tougher post-frying. The pieces that were good, however, were really good. Alma and I easily finished off all the lamb between us.

So: cooking. I'm enjoying it. I always like doing nice things for Alma, of course, but it's also pretty fun for me and I'm glad I've been able to turn out edible things thus far (I bought a pizza at the store last night just in case, but fortunately we didn't need to use it). We'll see how much more of this I do in the months and years to come, but interesting developments will probably turn up here.

Oh yeah: how about that lack of posts in February? Man. Good job by me there.