Show Some Love for the No. 16 Seeds

(By Andy Schmidt)

The college basketball regular season has come to a close. The normal storylines will begin at this point, with Selection Sunday less than a week away. Will Wichita State be a No. 1 seed? How far does Virginia fall after losing their last regular season game? Who will be the top overall seed? Those are all very valid questions, but what about those other teams that make the tournament who get the dreaded No. 16 seeds? Do we talk about those teams ever?

Adventures with George - No. 58

(By David Forbes Brown) 

(Read like the guy at the beginning of "Lost") "PREVIOUSLY, ON ADVENTURES WITH GEORGE":

George Herman "Babe" Ruth woke up in the year 2016 to find himself in a military plane, being debriefed for a highly secret mission by General David Petraeus. Multiple time-travel wormholes were discovered in caves on the 4,600 islands off the coast of Maine. The wormholes are stable gateways to NYC in the year 1927. Before the government could seize control of the first one, a time-criminal went through and killed Babe Ruth. Petraeus and his secret rogue unit sent an agent to an earlier date in 1927, drugged the Babe and brought him to 2016, saving his life. They prepared him to go back through time and thwart his murder, but right before he stepped into the wormhole, he suddenly disappeared--erased from existence. Petraeus' men found out that the wormholes were being created, and the number of them was growing. Each new one went to an earlier time . . . They decided to follow the Babe into the most recent one, which trapped them in the past, on a Maine island with Native American warriors. Petraeus and his men disappeared--their timelines changed--as an odd Red Sox fan named David Brown arrived, who helped George and the tribal warriors take down yet another version of Petraeus. It was time for George to go back to 1927 and restore the timeline, but he refused, forcing Brown to send them back in time to save the Native Americans who were killed by Petraeus and his flunkies. Their mission was a success, but they got trapped in the 1970s. Luckily, they made it back to 2016, and from there, successfully brought the Babe home. But, Petraeus somehow fractured another timeline and keeps appearing and disappearing--a constant threat to their lives. To escape him, they had to blindly go into the past--with Mrs. Pembrookleton in tow . . .

Fall of an Empire

(By Michael Weil)

Like shares on the stock market, the fortunes of soccer clubs are up and down. Manchester United was the imperial lord of the English Premier League for years, starting around 1990 in the old First Division days. Look at it this season, though, and you could think the United empire is at an end. Ferguson’s gone and so, it seems, is Manchester United’s power on the pitch, as new manager David Moyes comes to terms with the enormity of the job.