A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

• Random Pop Culture:
• Saw Watchmen in IMAX. Amazing clarity and the movie feels so big. May have to do that more often for big movies. Anyways, the movie is amazingly true to the book and pretty good overall. It must be easier in some sense with the storyboards already done in a way, but Zak Snyder should get a lot of credit for how great his visuals are, down to the smallest detail. He took source material with a high difficulty rating because of the expectations and fan feelings. Kudos to him for being up to the task.
• Watchmen has one of the better opening credit sequences I can remember, where Snyder uses people standing still to re-enact famous photos in history, but twisted to reflect the book's alternate universe. It gives it the feel of living dioramas, where the people are literally standing still to the point that some of them are shaking a little. What are the great opening credits in movie history? We'll have to explore that at some point in the future.
• Weird that T.O. just totally disappeared off the face of the earth. Oh, he signed with Buffalo? Like I said...
• Saturday Night Live this past weekend has to to be one of the worst episodes I've seen in a long time. Even Justin Timberlake popping up (is he on retainer now?) couldn't help it. From the clips I've heard, I bet it's still funnier than Jimmy Fallon.
• It's March!:
• The single greatest sports week of the year, Championship Week, is in full force! If you didn't have the remote going in full force this weekend, you missed:
• The game of the weekend, by far, was the Ohio Valley Conference championship game between Morehead State and Austin Peay. A potential game-winning alley-oop with 6.7 left in regulation followed by a buzzer beater to send it to OT, a blocked shot at the end of single OT to send it to double, a freshman scoring his only two points by draining a baseline floater with 1.4 seconds left in double OT to win the game for Morehead State. This game was everything that's great about March.
• Beyond just that, there were a lot of games on from the various conferences on MASN and CSN and CBS and ESPN, etc. Other great games include: today's Patriot League semifinal (yes, I watched the Patriot League semifinals) between Army and American that AU won on a free throw with three seconds left; today's Missouri Valley Conference championship game between Illinois St. and Northern Iowa that went to overtime (although CBS cut from the last ninety seconds, in a three-point game, to show the tip-off of Duke-Carolina); and the Colonial Athletic Association semifinal between George Mason and Towson. In fact, the story of the weekend was Towson, showing that there can be Cinderellas even in the conference tournaments. Towson, the #11 seed, beat the sixth seed and the third seed before giving second-seeded Mason everything it could handle. If you want a "what to watch" tip for tomorrow, check out the CAA title game (7PM on ESPN2) between Mason and VCU, led by Eric Maynor who was such a hero in the 2007 NCAA tourney.
• In terms of the big boys, their tournaments get under way in the middle of the week, but there was plenty of action today with Carolina beating Duke (the talent disparity is just too big) and Michigan State continuing to look very impressive in a win over Purdue. If the #1 seeds are indeed set, then the Spartans will probably be the #2 in the bracket with Oklahoma. I wouldn't want to be the Sooners in that case. Another big dark horse is Wake Forest, who beat Clemson today. They have sick talent, great size, great shooters, and are led by all-ACC guard Jeff Teague. I'll leave you with a Teague highlight you may not have seen from Wake's game with Maryland last week. He gave Dave Neal what one might call "the Arabian goggles" (it's NSFW if you choose to look it up, I'm warning you):