A bad trend in college hoops, a "Greek" recap and a cruise ship of doom

- This season Greek is winding down, with only a couple of episodes remaining. It’s been a great season and on Monday night, the hour kicked off with Cappie bringing flowers to girlfriend Casey to apologize for lying to her about being close to finally picking a major. Instead of making up, they argue and she runs off to class. Also in class is her little brother Rusty, who talks about his newfound love triangle in marketing class with Casey’s BFF and his pal Ashleigh. She speculates that he has blown things with both girls - Katherine and Dana - and that they both probably think that he thinks they’re fat. After class, Rusty heads off to the lab to work on his engineering project and Dana comes in. Things are predictably awkward between the two of them until he admits to her nothing happened with Katherine, after the Kappa Tau Mardi Gras party, when he and Katherine were supposed to hook up. After his revelation, rusty asks Dana out for Saturday and she says yes. Meanwhile, Calvin and Evan are hanging out at Dobler’s, talking about the demise of her relationship with Rebecca. Calvin suggests they distract themselves by going to the upcoming ‘80s night at the bar. The next day on campus, Rusty bumps into Katherine on campus. She owns up to not returning his seven messages, but says she admires his chivalry not to sleep with her because the situation was all wrong. Furthermore, she thinks they are still dating and asks him out for tomorrow night’s ‘80s party. He says yes, which means he now has two dates. Casey is dealing with relationship woes of her own and seeks out advice from Ashleigh, who advises her to confront Cappie about facing up to his/their future. Casey takes the advice to heart and heads to Kappa Tau, where she tries to get him to open up about his thoughts on the future. Their chat is interrupted by two people showing up at the door to Cappie’s room. He greets them warmly as April and Tobias, then introduces them to Casey as his parents. Now saddled with guilt from dating two girls at once, Rusty also heads to the KT house and seeks advice from brothers Beaver and Heath. They advise him to date both girls in order to figure out which one he likes. Later on, Casey returns to the Zeta Beta Zeta house to study and Evan comes over to be study with her. He also fills her in on Cappie’s parents and speculates that they are still the same irresponsible hippies they have always been. Elsewhere on campus, Rusty and Dana are back in the lab and he’s in full-fledged spin mode, telling her after she mentions seeing Katherine on campus that when he last talked to her, Katherine was very hostile about being dumped and that they aren’t even friends anymore. At the KT house, April and Tobias come to take Cappie and Casey to lunch but throw a curveball by suggesting going camping instead. After Casey begs off from camping, April pulls Casey aside and says camping is actually a front to have series talk about future with Cappie, who is busy playing pledge chess (a giant chess board, pledges as the pieces) with his brothers. Around this time, Rusty is having second thoughts about which girl he should go out with. Ashleigh, using the slew of ’80s movies she’s been watching lately, advises him to go out with Dana because she’s the right fit for him. When Rusty visits Katherine’s dorm room to break things off, she is crushed even though he lets her down gently and ruminates about how she thought he would be the one who really understood her. Over at Omega Chi, Evan is still depressed and to lift his spirits and give him a clean break from Rebecca, Calvin suggests going to ZBZ to take back necklace Evan gave her. Evan agrees and their plot is hatched. At the campground, Casey sees that Evan was right and that Cappie’s parents still hippies. They tell stories of how they moved all over as he grew up - Nova Scotia, Seattle, Vermont, etc. She also learns that he has all sorts of obscure scholarships and worse still (from Casey’s point of view), the family has a trust fund from April’s family’s ostrich farm fortune. That means Cappie can stay at CRU as long as he wants and his parents are okay with it. Casey is pissed because she’s been angsting over how to convince him to grow up and focus on graduating. She pulls Cappie aside in the tent and wonders aloud if they have a future. Flustered yet again, Casey storms off into the woods and April follows her. She talks about how Casey and the KT brothers are Cappie’s family now and how he will need all of them because Tobias is currently telling him that he and April are splitting up, him to go to Austin and her to stay in Maine. Back on campus, Evan and Calvin sneak into ZBZ house with Dale’s help (he distracts the sisters with allegedly carb-free snicker doodle in the kitchen). Up in Rebecca’s room, they find the necklace and are about to leave when Evan sees a movie ticket from he and Rebecca’s first date and wonders why she kept it if she truly doesn’t believe in love. As the two intruding OC’s exit, Rusty pops in for more advice from Ashleigh. He regrets dumping Katherine, because she said some things that made him think she might be the girl for him. Ashleigh revises her theory based on more ‘80s movie knowledge and together, they go to Dobler’s to find Katherine. Unfortunately, Evan and Calvin are already there and Cal urges Evan to talk to Katherine to help him rebound from Rebecca. He does and buys her a slow gin fizz. Before he can return with the drink Rusty shows up to talk to Katherine and the two guys intersect right at Katherine’s table. Rusty tells Evan to back off so he and Katherine can talk, Evan doesn’t react well and an argument breaks out in which Rusty reveals Rebecca slept with Beaver. More smack is talked and Evan punches Rusty, then leaves with Calvin. Rusty takes a seat at the bar to put ice on his eye and Katherine approaches to ask what he came to talk to her about. Looking into her eyes (as per Ashleigh’s ’80s movie advice), Rusty second guesses himself again and says he just came to say, “Happy ‘80s.” Disappointed, Katherine returns to her table and later finds herself with an admirer from the bar, so her night ends well. Rusty realizes he wants to go out with Dana, but he left a voice mail message breaking their date so he could go find Katherine. In one last piece of ‘80s movie-inspired advice, Ashleigh tells Rusty to stand outside Dana’s dorm room window with a boombox over his head and to call out to her while cheesy music plays. While Rusty stands, boombox aloft, Dana walks right past him and to Rusty’s relief, she didn’t understand his phone message because there was too much static and she has no idea he wanted to break their date. Relieved, he kisses her as Ashleigh looks on. At the campground, Casey tries to console Cappie over his parents breaking up and she finally admits that she will no longer try to change him. However, her true feelings come out the next day when she talks to Ashleigh about her camping experience and admits that she no longer sees herself having a real future with Cappie. So the episode ends on a bummer, but hopefully next week will be a little happier…………

- Here’s a trend that is definitely moving in the wrong direction. With all of the emphasis on equality and ferreting out discrimination in our society, you would hope that a sampling of something like graduation rates for white and black players on NCAA tournament-bound men's basketball teams would be fairly equal. After all, race does not determine intelligence and there are both smart and dumb people of all races, so ideally there would be an equal percentage of both black and white players who are graduating on tournament teams. However, the latest edition of an annual report released Monday by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida shows 45 teams graduated 70 percent or more of their white players, but only 20 teams graduated at least 70 percent of their black players. The report is based on information provided by the NCAA, so it is legitimate. It uses graduation success rates and not federal graduation rates, which don't account for transfer students. This year’s report measures six-year graduation rates for the freshman classes that entered college from the 1999-2000 through 2002-03 school years. Those would be the students who should have graduated or be about to do so at this point and finding out that black players are doing so at a significantly lower rate is a discouraging sign. Sure, some of those numbers are attributable to guys leaving school early for the NBA, but at most, that accounts for 30-40 players each season and not all of them are black. Additionally, you’re talking 300-plus Division I school with 14-15 players on their roster for a given season, so that further dilutes the NBA argument. Ultimately, there are some serious and complex issues to deal with here and steps clearly need to be taken to determine why so many black players are not graduating and what can be done to fix it. We know it’s not because they aren’t smart enough, so let’s get to work figuring out why this is happening and solve the problem……….

- Taking the contrarian point of view is never difficult for me. There are far too many idiots out there for it to be difficult to stand up and dissent with the litany of beliefs and sentiments being expressed on a daily basis. So while most people would look at a loser staging a fake contest to give away his home and using the money to pay bills and feed his drug habit as a despicable act by a despicable person, I take a different view of things. Yes, Theodore Zennie of Seaside, Ore. is a despicable d-bag, but the people more deserving of blame and ridicule are the tools who actually thought that someone would accept $99 entry fees for a contest to win his home and actually give it away. In the summer of 2009, Zennie created a Web site called www.win99dollarbeachhouse.com and claimed that he would give his home away to the winner of the $99 contest. He then channeled his inner contest runner and asked entrants to submit a six-line essay explaining why they would want his beach house. Right, because that wasn’t a tip-off. What respectable contest for a freaking house is only going to ask you for a six-line essay? Six lines isn’t even a freaking essay, it’s a couple of paragraphs at most. So that should have been the first clue that this wasn’t a legit contest, but quite a few idiots weren’t wise enough to figure that out. Zennie made no attempt to hide the contest and it actually drummed up quite a bit of intention. He was interviewed about it and said he received entries "from as far way as the Philippines and Israel." He also said that he wanted to get rid of his house and start a new life, and also that he planned to donate some of the contest money to breast cancer research. By the way, that’s easily the most despicable part of this story. You can bilk low-IQ fools out of their money if you want and that’s douche-baggish, but don’t lie about giving money to a cause like breast cancer research, jerk. Anyhow, Zennie’s downfall came as a result of something that was not directly linked to the contest. Clatsop County police received anonymous tip that Zennie was dealing heroin and after obtaining a search warrant, deputies and police searched Zennie's home and found two ounces of heroin, packaging material and cash. A narcotics team arrested Zennie on drug trafficking charges. After his arrest Zennie admitted to members of the narcotics team that he used the $99 beach house contest money to buy drugs. He was booked into the Clatsop County Jail last week. The contest Web site now features a message reading, "This contest has been cancelled." Gee, I wonder why…………

- The next evolution of Twitter is here and even for someone who is not a huge Twitter guy, I have to admit that this one is a pretty cool feature. Twitter CEO Evan Williams announced a product Monday that will allow users to further weave Twitter into the fabric of other sites and engage in many Twitter-related activities without actually going to Twitter.com. The "@anywhere" feature will allow users to post to Twitter from other sites and to comment on posts without visiting a specific Twitter page. "Imagine being able to follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page -- and that's just the beginning," the company wrote in a blog post. Initially, the feature will be introduced for 13 Web sites, including The New York Times, Amazon, eBay, Bing, YouTube and The Huffington Post. The announcement was made at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, a yearly gathering of technology dorks. It was a fitting place to make the proclamation because Twitter debuted at South by Southwest in 2007. Williams envisions the @anywhere feature making it easier for users to find content on the Web. "One of the things we've found with Twitter is that discovery is one of the hardest challenges," he said. "Twitter drives tons of traffic. ... It should result in more followers for a site than just sending out links does. It should hopefully result in more people who are your audience [and who are] using Twitter talking among themselves about your content." Curiously, Williams’ keynote speech was met with a substantial amount of negative reaction. That could be because Twitter executives have acknowledged plans to add advertising to their site, which currently is free of ads. Williams did not address the advertising issue in his speech even though many attendees came to the speech hoping for exactly that. What had to be embarrassing for Williams was audience members filing out well before the speech was over. By the time it ended, the hall was more than half-empty. And in the ultimate irony, Williams’ talk was being ripped on the very site he runs while it went on. Twitter users posted a slew of negative remarks during the speech. Twitter’s counter came in a television interview Williams did afterward in which he explained that Twitter doesn't have anything to announce in relation to its advertising plans. "Unfortunately, we're not in control of what people anticipate we'll announce," he said. There is no definite launch date for the @anywhere feature and all Williams would say in an interview was that prototypes are being tested now. "I don't know if we have a launch date yet," he said. Well, you would be the one to know if a date had been set, so I’m going with no. Stay tuned for more on the @anywhere feature and see if it can truly take Twitter to another level of usability………

- I have long been weary of cruise ships. All too often, they are floating death traps laden with viruses, fat, pasty people, exorbitant prices for food and drink, dangers galore and very little that you couldn’t find elsewhere on a vacation that didn’t involve being stranded at sea with hundreds of strangers. My fears have a bit more fuel now thanks to the Celebrity Mercury cruise ship, which is returning to port a day early and Oh, and did I mention that this is the third outbreak on the ship in a month? Seriously, does the ship serve actual mercury right in its dinner entrees? "I have made this decision to end the current sailing early and delay the next sailing because we want to maintain our high health standards onboard our ships, while providing our guests with the best cruise experience possible," Daniel Hanrahan, president and CEO of Celebrity Cruises, said in a statement. "The extra time we are taking to sanitize the ship will help prevent any additional guests from becoming ill.” Yeah, that doesn’t sound like any place I want to vacation. I don’t care if the company takes two days to scrub down the ship and spray disinfectant on every surface from bow to stern - cruise ships were, are and always will be floating death traps. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes a no-sail recommendation your ship, that is a solid indication that yours is not a safe vessel to set sail on. "The CDC and the cruise line corporate staff have not yet determined why the controls that they were following have not been effective," said CDC spokesman Ricardo Beato. Initially the CDC wanted to dock the ship for four full days, but the two sides negotiated and the cruise line was able the barter it down to a two-day stay in port for its vessel of woe. While the Virus Boat, er, Celebrity Mercury is docked, the cruise staff and CDC workers will be performing enhanced cleaning to help prevent the spread of illness. The ship is scheduled to arrive Thursday morning in Charleston, South Carolina and the detox will commence. The cruise terminal also will be sanitized, just to be safe. The ship will be closely examined by members of the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program, which works with the cruise industry to prevent and control gastrointestinal illnesses. They will look to ensure that nothing along the lines of what has happened aboard the Celebrity Mercury the past month happens again. In total, 350 of the 1,829 passengers on board have been ill with a variety of maladies. The first two outbreaks were caused by norovirus, which results in vomiting and diarrhea. The first norovirus attack sickened more than 20 percent of passengers. After that bout if illness, the ship's next sailing was delayed by a day for a full cleaning. That cleaning worked to about 50 percent effectiveness, as only 10 percent of passengers on the next sailing became ill with norovirus. On the most recent sailing, that figure jumped back up to 19 percent and the ship was forced to skip a stop Monday in Tortola, British Virgin Islands, and return a day early. While passengers have been compensated for the interrupted itinerary, I could argue that those who escaped norovirus and whatever other viruses are running rampant on that filthy hole of a ship have already received ample compensation. The ship is scheduled to board for its next voyage of death on Sunday, although I would not be at all surprised to hear that many of the would-be passengers end up canceling on account of not wanting to contract any sort of icky virus. For those who choose to go ahead with their voyage on the Celebrity Mercury, well, you know what you’re getting yourselves into……….