JUVENTUS RELEGATED: I was worried they'd get off easy--in the sense of not being dropped to Serie C--but what they did receive was about as bad: Serie B with a huge 30 point penalty, which isn't much different from going to Serie C, since there's probably no way they can make it back to A for at least two years. Plus they've been stripped of their last two titles. And that's with bending the rules in consideration of Juventus' popularity; as this article points out, when Genoa was found guilty of fixing one match, they were busted down to C from A. Juventus was found guilty of fixing two whole seasons, and they're only going down to B. But like I said, with the penalty, it sort of evens out, though it seems like if the letter of the law was followed they'd be getting the soccer club death penalty. That article helpfully explains that if Juventus was made non-viable the Italian game itself would suffer, like (I guess) what the Yankees suddenly ceasing to exist would mean for baseball. (Have you ever noticed that the NFL is a strong enough product to exist without any one of it's member franchises? I think that's true.)

Berlusconi's AC Milan remain in A but are kicked out of Champions League/UEFA Cup. Fiorentina and Lazio go to B with smaller penalties. They've all vowed to appeal, so there's still a chance for altered sentences, but as of right now the Italian prosecutors have not allowed the World Cup victory to influence them. This is a good thing.

WELL, POOP: A quote found on the blog of Drum:

And yet another from Gregory Petsko: "Almost without exception, the talented women I have known have believed they had less ability than they actually had. And almost without exception, the talented men I have known believed they had more."

From an actually freely accessible WSJ piece. So if I'm a male who thinks I'm untalented, I'm probably right? Maybe I can go to overconfidence classes.

.....though, thinking about it, Petsko was talking about science talent, as there's plenty of writers and artists out there who thought their stuff was crap when it wasn't. Good thing I've picked bioinformatics as a career! Oh, wait....

SUMMING UP L'AFFAIRE D'FRISCH: In its current form as of the evening of 7.12.06, before it degenerates into something even more idiotic, like Greenwald vs Patterico: Ann Althouse:

I agree Frisch has a big problem. She's the weakling who entered a drinking match with a man who can drink you under the table. She lost control. She paid the price -- a big one. Goldstein's you-talked-about-my-child move is a strong one, but it's a move nonetheless, made by a person who likes to play the game... hard. He's not a victim. He's one of the people who has advanced himself in the blogosphere by making it hostile and ugly. Like all of us, he is capable of being hurt by a genuine crazy. But why not just delete the trolls? Why rile them?Some of them really aren't playing with a full deck. Why push weak people until they lose control? It's an ugly game, and I think Jeff knows he plays it.

Via (I think) one of the interminable Sadly, No! threads on the subject. Feel my shame, oh Internets, for having followed this whole episode.

AWWWW: Japanese spammers have appropriated Diana's old digs. This is her least auspicious retirement.

AH, ZIDANE: Goes from "too old to play well" at the beginning of the World Cup, then to "resurgent old fella" up until the moment he became "inexplicable headbutt guy" with ten minutes to go in the second overtime. I love the World Cup, and '06 will be remembered not for Italy winning on one missed French penalty kick but for the headbutt heard 'round the world.

YOUR INCONGRUOUS BIT OF TELEVISION PROGRAMMING OF THE DAY: The Road Warrior on the History Channel. I had no idea it was a documentary about 1980s Australia.

THE TOP TEN THINGS THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION HAS IN COMMON WITH CAPITAL-F FASCISM: Lindsay Beyerstein estimates how close we are to arriving at our own private Abyssinia.

CUBES GOT FINED $100,000: For this!?

YET ANOTHER WAY TO CHEAPLY CATEGORIZE THE HUMAN RACE: Or at least the male gender. It's a movie thing. I was listening to sports radio on the way in today and they were talking about The Godfather for the the billionth time and I got to thinking, "Hey--Bill Simmons talks about The Godfather all the time." Funny thing is Simmons never talks about Star Wars. Well, not funny but interesting--a possible way to divvy up the male gender into types. So here it is: you're either a Star Wars male or a Godfather male. You'll rarely find a male subgroup that knows both movies by heart and works references from both into their daily conversation. That's the not-even-slightly substantiated theory I've posted on the Internet, anyway.

THE PATRIARCHY EXPLAINED AS A NATURAL CONSEQUENCE OF SEXUAL DIMORPHISM: Or another of Razib's greatest hits.

I'm three-quarters done with the Judith Rich Harris book that inspired Razib's post, by the way, and it's really great. She's an independant scholar, so she isn't tied down to one field and thus goes all over the scientific map to reason out her view of why people are different. Good good stuff, and paced and organized really well so there's some strong narrative drive to it.

THE MOST ANTICLIMACTIC FINAL FOUR EVER: Logically, if through the round of eight this was the greatest NCAA tournament ever--and many people thought it was--than this Final Four and Championship were quite the letdown. And they were. Three stinkers of athletic contests. No Gonzaga to root for. No George Mason to be an amazing story and make this must-see television. No, just two BCS programs fluking their way into the title game, and one just totally laying down in the championship. (Regarding the fluking, Billy Donovan admitted as much when he said after the Georgetown game that if they reran this tournament they'd get four different teams.) And a long-haired guy named Joe Kim. BAH.

"COLLEGE FOOTBALL DOESN'T NEED A GEORGE MASON": I love how every comment on this article (inexplicably near the top of Google news searches for "George Mason") is telling the author he's full of it.

A PLEA TO BURGER KING: Hey! Listen--I generally like your product. I like the chances you take in your advertising campaign--I'm sure you understand how disturbing the guy in the "King" suit is, but you're running with it anyway, doing a promotion about a thousand times better than those milquetoast McDonald's ads. ("I'm loving it!"? Yeah, how much did they pay someone to think that one up?) But please--if you're going to have the Veggie Whopper available as a standard button to press on all your registers, please tell your new hires that it exists. I know you don't want it on the menu, for whatever reason. I know you don't advertise it. Maybe you have too much invested in the horrid BK Veggie, and you don't want to admit failure right yet. Whatever your reasons are, I understand them. Just tell your own people that you 1. sell this sandwich, 2. that it's cheaper than a Whopper (I've had people try to charge me full Whopper price for the Veggie), and 3. that it's definitely not the BK Veggie. Thank you.

SAY: When did The Nation add a sports columnist? I liked Dave Zirin's Olympics column and I like his WBC column. He comes off like a sports fan with a political consciousness who happens to lean left, and not the Marxist "sports are the opiate of the masses" type you could imagine the Nation hiring. Good stuff.

THE PLAY-IN GAME: I may or may not say this every year, but I always think it: the play-in game should be for two bubble teams, not for two conference champions. Conference champion should always equal field of 64, and we should be watching Air Force play George Mason (or in a just world, Cincinnati and Hofstra) to get in and not poor Hampton and Monmouth.

BSG: DOWNLOADED: I already said most of what I wanted to say at Jim's place--but the opening of this episode is so amazing. First the rebirth of Caprica Six, who we haven't seen since the miniseries, the sudden Baltar appearance (teasing the "Baltar's a Cylon!" possibility) which is quickly proven to be a Baltar hallucination. Me, I think both hallucinations are just internal dialogues in C. Six and Baltar's heads, nothing more, which after listening to the podcast is also what I think Ron Moore thinks. But he can always change his mind about that.

And then the rebirth of Galactica Boomer! The one who was the most intriguing part of the first season. The one who blew up the water tanks and then found water and loved the Chief and got him to hate her and tried to kill herself and then Adama and basically had Cylonhood thrust upon her. Knowing all that about G. Boomer makes the look of horror on her face when she sees another Eight--and realizes that yes, she is, in fact, a Cylon, born from a machine, and every moment of her life on Galactica was a lie--that much richer.

IRONY: Yes, irony. I think. If American Idol keeps beating figure skating in the ratings, it will mean Americans have turned away from something that started as a pseudocompetition and gradually evolved into an actual sport and switched to a blatantly subjective talent show. America: Keepin' It Fake Since Sonja Henje!

AH, THE BIT OF INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR: Somebody in Rolling Stone decided to explore Larry Wachowski's journey into weirdness (via Heidi MacDonald), which is the best explanation we're ever going to get for why the Matrix franchise turned to poo. It's not the greatest article ever--I would consider some of the sources unreliable, and the writer, Peter Wilkinson, throws this in near the end:

No matter what happens with Vendetta, Larry Wachowski has again demonstrated his willingness to take risks, to make movies as dangerous and transgressive as his life. V, the film's hero, isn't a crusading law enforcer. He's a terrorist. He blows up subways and buildings. Ever the working-class heroes, the Wachowskis are still challenging the system.

--suggesting he has no idea about the source material (and I think Alan Moore disavowed the film.) And there's hardly anything about Andy Wachowski, so I assume he did not do anything like what his brother did: left his wife for a dominatrix and gradually reinvented himself as a man in female garb. But the suddenly megarich Larry's sudden ability to blow tons of cash on expensive BDSM sessions seems to be what gradually robbed him of his artistic instincts, and why the Matrix lost so much of its power from sequel to sequel. It suggests Larry was sort of the driving force of the duo too, but I have no idea if that's true.

SNUPPY STILL A CLONE: Thank gosh. At least somebody got cloned around here.

UMMM: What happened to Charles Murtaugh's blog?

UPDATE: Here's another suspicious blog--allegedly a Boston College fan blog (found via the ACC Basketblog--yes, I keep my friends close, and my enemies closer), it's now "milf seeker hardcore." With a similiar message: "blogger" retires, complaining about how stressful life is now and how things have changed, blah blah blah, with a few links thrown in to those "adult finder"-ish sites. Spammers must be seeking out dead blogs with incoming links, reregistering the URLs and setting them up as retired blogs instead of dead blogs.

This should be a lesson to anyone who uses blogspot: Don't delete your blog! I know you're retiring, but just say "I'm retiring" and let the Google aether preserve it for all eternity. Let the rest of us go back and read what you had to say, you know? Else your once-beloved URL will end up as so much spam fodder.

I think this may have happened to Blowhard's site as well, but I'm not sure.