There was an episode of South Park on last night that I watched again, this time with Amanda and Michael. It was about head lice, and the end of it was actually touching and, dare I say, beautiful. I mean, the very very end wasn’t touching and beautiful, but the scene of the main lice, Travis, who so loved his beh-beh, and the redemption he found… just touching.
Amanda’s grandparents, Peggy and Earl Lemons, stopped by the house this morning. Earl was on the way to a dental appointment and they brought us some (very brightly-colored) Adirondack chairs they’d bought for us. For our anniversary they said, (Our anniversary is over a month away, but whatever makes them happy!) Michael and I later drove out to the mall to meet them and Amanda for lunch.
Work went alright today. At the end of it I didn’t feel like I accomplished all that much again, although I certainly did get some things done. I talked to one guy we refer a service or two to. He’s always a pleasure to talk to- very smart and a real nice guy to boot.
Small group was pretty good tonight. The whole series that we’ve been discussing, based on the lessons at church, have been good. It’s about faith and struggle, basically.
In sports news, there were two pretty big events today. The first one that I heard of was that Josh McRoberts declared that he’s entering the NBA draft. The second was that Tubby Smith is stepping down as head coach of the Kentucky Wildcats.
Josh McRoberts leaving Duke is not a huge surprise. He almost went last year, and although I think his stock would have fallen this year, I guess he’s still got a lot of potential. On one hand, I hate to see my Blue Devils lose an experienced player. On the other, Josh’s attitude didn’t seem to be the best over a lot of the season. I mean, he always carried himself well in interviews and such, but he seemed to get frustrated too easily. I think a lot of us felt he didn’t quite develop to be the offensive presence we thought he’d be. Not to rag on him- he had a lot of really nice stats and handles the ball really well for a guy his size.
Tubby Smith’s exit from Kentucky isn’t a shocker either. Tubby won the NCAA championship his first year at UK in 1998, but it was a team recruited by Rick Pitino. Tubby’s had some success in that he’s gone to the NCAA Tournament every year, but I think the biggest complaint is that he doesn’t seem to recruit much of the top talent and doesn’t get too far in the tournament. And with a school like Kentucky, a classic basketball power, that just doesn’t fly too well with the faithful. He’s going to Minnesota, which, after discussing it with my dad, well think he’s doing to get away from all the pressure you get at a school like UK and maybe just have some fun. There are a lot of interesting names in the mix as coaches who may be approached to replace Tubby Smith.
There may be some good news in correlating these two events. Patrick Patterson is an upcoming freshman who is being heavily recruited by a few schools. His top three are apparently Florida, Kentucky and Duke. Tubby Smith leaving Kentucky severely hurts the chance that he’ll choose the Wildcats, and the fact that he’d have probably been playing bench to Josh McRoberts at Duke, his leaving might influence Patrick Patterson to go to Duke. We’ll see what happens. If he doesn’t decide to be a Blue Devil, we’ve got to really hope Brian Zoubek and Lance Thomas develop a bit by next season.
On the subject of basketball, there were some good game son tonight. Ohio State went down to the wire in their victory over Tennessee. One of the games, I forgot which one, had the suspense of the end completely stolen from it when the refs decided they needed to play with the shot clock because of deflected inbounding play. It took them a commercial break and then a couple minutes after that to decide to take off 1.1 seconds. Kinda killed the momentum when they started it back up with a second left.
Amanda and I watched Lost from last night too. The episodes have been pretty good lately I think, which is good since they took so much time off. Episodes like tonight’s, where Kate, Sayid and Locke break into the Others’ little town and confront Jack. If you don’t know the show you have no idea what I just said.
Zach Dotsey