Muppets abound

(Last night at the bar I was asked the best question I’ve heard since “Who would be in your dream Real World cast.” This girl at the bar asked me “Who is your favorite muppet?” After a lot of thought I have to go with Ralph the Dog. Just barely beating out Animal. At the end of the day, I don’t think that you can go wrong with the piano playing dog.)

Well, my Illini have made it through another game and not we get to play for the championship. The first championship that I can ever remember Illinois playing for, I mean, even if we extend the conversation to minor sports I can’t recall a national championship. Or even a contending for a national title. This is really uncharted territory. It was a great win over Louisville with Luther Head and Roger Powell coming up big. That’s probably the neatest thing about this Illinois team, Deron Williams, the only sure fire lottery pick on the team, couldn’t shoot last night but gets nine assists and the other guys step up and fill in for him. It’s a neat team where there is no one superstar.

And we get to play North Carolina, one of my three least favorite schools in the country (along with Northwestern and Florida State). Carolina has former Kansas coach Roy Williams at the helm, which means I have a lot more on the line here because I still might have to deal with Kansas fans after the game. Carolina has talent but Illinois is a team. It’s going to be a really challenging game and should be a good one. Either way, I’m probably not going to sleep Monday night.

Other than basketball this has really been a quiet weekend. Cleaned my apartment, did laundry, bought groceries, all of those bi-weekly/monthly/quarterly chores. Even though the weather was awesome this weekend I just kind of crashed in my apartment. It doesn’t help that it’s daylight savings time and they decided to steal an hour of sleep away from me. It just doesn’t seem fair, why steal my sleep during the NCAA tournament? Why not do it in February where I really wouldn’t care if I needed to call it a night an hour earlier? Oh well, it’s just another sign that it’s springtime again and baseball is starting up. And since Sports Illustrated named the Royals the worst team in baseball, it is looking to be yet another glorious season of baseball in KC.

On the bright side, someone has listened to me and decided to get an Arena Football team for next year. Not a bad idea given we live in a football mad town and have a perfectly acceptable arena for it. I’ll put good money that the team name will be something like “Tornadoes” or “Oz” or something of that ilk.

The five random CDs for the week:
1) The Connells “Still Life”
2) Jenny Orenstein “Astroturf”
3) R.E.M. “Up”
4) U2 “Rock Hottest Ticket” (U2 live in Chicago in ’87)
5) Kelly Willis “Well Traveled Love”