Your Up and Down Quizo Update

Some week.

I woke up on Saturday morning to find that Manchester United had lost their FA Cup quarterfinal to Portsmouth, essentially opening the way for Chelsea to win the competition. Chelsea then proceeded to lose to 16th-in-the-Championship Barnsley two hours later.

I then headed over to LaSalle to watch the Temple game, which was for a share of the Big 5 championship. After starting out very promisingly, LaSalle then proceeded to embarrass themselves in front of a sellout crowd and lose by almost 20 points to a team whose top scorer might - and I mean goddamn well MIGHT - have topped out at about 5'2". Setting the Atlantic 10 record for 3-pointers isn't worth a whole lot when your team gets blown out by a member of the fucking Lollipop Guild.

And - there is of course a delightful kicker - the entire time I was at LaSalle, and I mean from literally about 30 seconds after I got out of my car until I left the arena, I had people shouting "Barnsley!" at me. Things like this is normal at the pub or someplace like that. On campus at my Beloved Alma Mater, which suffice it to say is not exactly regarded as a hotbed of European soccer fandom, it is as unexpected as it is annoying (which is quite a bit).

On the good news side, I found out last week that I somehow got accepted to Drexel, where I will begin Quest for the Undergraduate Degree 2: Electric Boogaloo (This Time It's Personal) on April 1. I'm starting off with just one class the first term, Calculus I. If anyone knows, you know, anything about calculus and wouldn't mind passing it on I'd really appreciate it. Since graduating from high school an undisclosed number of years ago - let's just say it's more than 2 - the most advanced math I've done is figuring out my bill at the comic book store. It's a wonder I can work out who wins our tiebreakers. (That's as much as you're going to get, Jon, so enjoy it.) But, hey, I've got 16 lunch hours between now and my first class to relearn all the math I took in high school however many years ago. How hard can it be?

Of course, once the euphoria passed I realized that going back to school means that for the next three years or so I will have no free time, no money - forget tuition, $200 textbooks are the greatest scam in the world and I'm kicking myself for not thinking of it - and no life. I'm a real silver lining kind of guy.

There will be printed tournament score updates handed out tonight. My perfectly-legal copy of Office Enterprise Edition 2K7 apparently tried to commit suicide this week - I believe it was a bottle of yellows, you know, TO-style - so I'm going to have to do all of the work normally done by the spreadsheet by hand. Which, given the above, could take some time.

JLK