Mid-Finals Update

No, not the NBA Finals, the NU Finals, the one week where I wear a different jersey every day, because for engineering majors, it's game time.

Just a couple quick bullets.

• The Kings have been looking pretty good lately. They're over .500, something I've never seen from them since I started paying attention to the NHL (Gretzky years excluded), mostly behind strong play from Swedish goalie Erik Ersberg. If Ersberg is at all familiar with CV boot repair on a 1995 Volvo 850 Turbo, then he'll really be the complete package. The Monarchs of Figueroa (meh, I tried) play the Western Conference-leading San Jose Sharks tonight at 10:30 EST in what will likely be a slaughter.
  
• The Lakers need to get their shit together before their matchup with the Celtics on Christmas. I'll be in LA by then, but after last year's Finals Fiasco (hereby dubbed), a regular season loss to the Celtics would be more than I could reasonably take without short-circuiting and making some sort of outlandish trade requests, or at least accosting Phil Jackson.
• The Patriots leveled the franchise formerly known as the Oakland Raiders. No surprise there. Naturally, the Bills suffered a loss to the Jets on one of the worst under-2-minute play calls I've ever seen. A fumble with a little over a minute thirty left led to a Jets touchdown and eventual victory. Meanwhile, the 49'ers had to try hard, but still managed, to lose to Miami, so the Pats are still at the mercy of their AFC East neighbors to make the playoffs.
  
• The Angels probably need to start looking at a contract to offer Manny Ramirez. Also, Rob pointed out that Pat Burrell has some absolutely insane pro-road splits, and while he's a terrible, terrible defender, he'd make a perfect DH. Let Vlad rotate with Burrell every other game to keep Vlad fresh-ish and Burrell from having too much time to decimate the Halos outfield defense. Or just sign Manny and deal with crappy defense. Or maybe Mark Teixeira will stop being an asshole and sign with the only team that actually needs him.
• The higher-education system in America is fundamentally broken. I've whined about this before. I was reminded of this fact today while trying to understand why a professor would intentionally obfuscate data to make a test harder.
  

I've got something special planned for the 100th post on this blog...that's probably a couple weeks away at this point.