CougZone.com - The Cougar Lounge

October 11, 2009

The Lounge

"I put a lot of that blame on myself. You know, the interceptions in the red zone and just not taking care of the ball. It's very frustrating because the defense played a great game and they did the things necessary for us to win the ball game."

- Wazzu true freshman quarterback Jeff Tuel, after last week's loss to Arizona State.

"We haven't had a match like this all year and it's good to get it out of the way and on the road."

- Wazzu head volleyball coach Andrew Palileo after the Cougars were swept by California to go 0-for-2 in the Bay Area last weekend.

"This isn't an easy place to play. No one else has won here in qualifying and we just did."

- American veteran forward Landon Donovan who hit the match-winning goal on a 21-yard free kick in the 3-2 win against the Catrachos of Honduras in San Pedro Sula - sealing the USA's trip to the World Cup in South Africa next year.

"Her favorite swear word is 'rats!' That's not a swear word. 'Rats!' isn't a swear word!"

- British actor-comedian Ricky Gervais, complaining about the virgin vocabulary of actress Jennifer Garner, who co-stars with him in The Invention of Lying.

The battle was imminent. Which was the smartest city - Raleigh or Durham? With two such hoity-toity hotheads, an eruption was inevitable. So the obvious solution was a merger and that is how Raleigh-Durham became America's smartest city. Well, that and the fact that they scored best on educational and intellectual criteria [read: number of bachelor and graduate degrees earned, nonfiction book sales, ratio of institutions of higher education and degree of political engagement]. Since only metropolitan areas of more than one million in population were measured, there were only 55 American cities to rank and that means that if your hometown was Bugtussle, then it was not rated [although that would almost certainly not be necessary]. Raleigh and Durham avoided an intellectual riot by merging and claiming the top spot but the real intrigue was who was in the top five and who was in the bottom five and why cities cannot seem to agree on having their own names and resort to hyphenation. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, otherwise known as the Bay Area, was combined for a m?ge a trois and came in second, followed by Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul [those are the Twin Cities, see how easy that is, Raleigh-Durham?] and Denver. Seattle-Tacoma and Portland were the Pacific Northwest's entrants at the #7 and #9 spots, respectively. However, the top five of the single name cities are Boston, Denver, Washington, D.C., Portland and Baltimore.

Now for the shame of the bottom five, and truly, there are no surprises here Coming in at #51 is Memphis, which is in the state of Tennessee, which is where they think "powzer" is a word and pork rinds are gourmet eatin'. Next up?or down?is Louisville, which is in Kentucky, which, if you notice from all those nonfiction geography books they rarely use there cause they already know they live in 'Merica, is slap dab on top of Tennessee. At #53 is San Antonio in Texas. Need we say more? Yes, we do because, as everybody recalls from the summer, this is where the Pac-10, in all the infinite wisdom they could glean from Walnut Creek [location: Bay Area] and greed for an extra, paltry $635,000, decided they would send their #2 football team instead of San Diego [#20]. Good call, Pac-10. Send the fan base of the team of one of your higher institutions to America's third worst bastion of stupidity. Nice. Well, that is actually consistent for the conference, since they send their fourth or fifth place football teams to Las Vegas, which checks in at # 54. But at least in Vegas, there is the redeeming notion that one can get their money back by winning it back in numerous gambling opportunities. No such luck in San Antonio. Nor Fresno, which is the nation's stupid capital, at #55. Since the Pac-10 already has bowl game deals with San Antonio and Vegas, the Lounge figures it is only a matter of time before they get the stupid trifecta and add Fresno - all it will take is $636,000 from the raisinheads and the Pac-10 will come a'runnin' with their big tongues hanging out and floppin' around.

Speaking of stupid - did somebody just say "reality television"? Oh, it must have been the wind. Anyhoo, Halloween is just around the corner and that must be the reason why the American men's soccer team chose to scare the bejeebers out of the country before finally pulling out a 3-2 win over Honduras to clinch a spot in the World Cup next year in South Africa. Going into the match needing a win to clinch the World Cup berth, head coach Bob Bradley first decided to put the fear of the apocalypse into the American people by starting Conor Casey - who had zero [that is zero, as in the phrase "big, fat zero" used frequently in such American cities as Memphis, Louisville, San Antonio, Las Vegas and Fresno] instead of Jozy Altidore [the star of the Confederations Cup win over top-ranked Spain this summer] at forward and the relatively inexperienced Jonathan Spector instead of veteran Steve Cherundolo at defender. With so much at stake, these moves seemed like career suicide for the already embattled Bradley, and one foot was over the cliff when Honduras scored in the 47th minute to take a 1-0 lead. But a mere eight minutes later, there was Casey outleaping the Catrachos' goalkeeper as if he was going for a rebound and heading in the equalizer. Bradley was back on the edge of the cliff. A mere 10 minutes later, Casey was in the zone and took a pass from Landon Donovan, split two Honduran defenders and put the ball in the net for a 2-1 USA lead. Donovan secured the win with his 21-yard curving free kick four minutes later and Bradley was off the cliff and in the pub - or so it seemed, until Spector got called for a hand ball in the box and the Catrachos were awarded a penalty kick in the 87th minute - which they promptly missed. Maybe this will make up for losing the Olympics last week.

Not only did Chicago lose their Olympic bid - badly - last week, but the International Olympic Committee probably lost a lot of money with it as well. That is because the IOC makes the majority of their Olympic booty by selling the television rights fees to the Games and the American market is the largest source of those fees. NBC has held the North American television rights to all Olympics since 1996 and recently paid $2.2 billion for the rights to the Winter Olympics in Vancouver next year and the Olympics in London in 2012. But with less of a television audience reach for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia and now the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, NBC has already indicated they will push for a less expensive fee - somewhere in the range of $1.8 billion for the pair of Games.

Meanwhile, this just in, we now know where Seattle-Tacoma, the Bay Area, Denver, Washington, D.C., San Diego and Portland get all their smarts - from energy bars they consume. These six markets are in the top 10 for energy bar consumption, which, undoubtedly translates into more nonfiction book reading and voting.

"What will it take to get to the NCAA - give it to me straight, I can take it," asks A Demented Fictional Character, about Wazzu's chances to make the NCAA tournament field in soccer next month.

Dementia is exactly what is the result when trying to figure out the thought processes of the NCAA selection committee. After the Apple Cup tie with Washington, head coach Matt Potter remains unbeaten against the Huskies in the last six matches and what is important about that result is shown in the first official RPI of the season. Wazzu entered the week with a 22 RPI with their only losses being to the 3, 4 and 39 RPI teams - all on the road and just earned a road tie against the 33 RPI team. That should move them up a spot or two in the rankings especially since the 18 RPI team - Oregon - lost at home to a 40 RPI team [California]. Assuming they take care of business against their final non-conference foe of the regular season, Seattle University [RPI 149] today, the Cougars will likely require four conference wins to secure their NCAA berth. It will not be easy as Wazzu has conference co-favorites Stanford and UCLA at home, along with their travel partners USC and California - those are RPI's of 2, 8, 17 and 40 - while they go on the road to try and get wins out of Arizona, Arizona State, Oregon and Oregon State [RPI's of 155, 10, 18 and 21]. The way the Lounge consensus sees it, Wazzu will need to get wins against Arizona, California, USC and OSU and no worse than ties against Oregon and ASU. A tie or win against either Stanford or UCLA would be the proverbial gravy.

"At least five of the cylinders were working," says Kent Renton of the Cougars' 27-14 loss to ASU in football last week.

Yes Kent, but this is an eight-cylinder vehicle, this Cougar football team, and they will need all eight cylinders to work in order to get a victory over a Pac-10 team. Five cylinders worked for SMU but that will not work in conference play. The bye week could not come at a better time for the Cougars since half the team is currently horizontal with a laundry list of medical injuries. If Wazzu can get at least 75% of the injured players back by the end of the month, they might have the possibly of picking up a cylinder or two along the way and - since these are college kids we are talking about - might be able to put themselves into competitive positions against all five remaining opponents after California.

The football team is just getting off the ground and that puts them in the same boat as the folks at CougBiz, who just launched their pleasure craft containing all the Cougar-run or Cougar-friendly businesses in the world. Well, world domination will have to wait for the time being but they do have a listing for lounges and there are seven of them listed but no Cougar Lounge from good old CougZone yet.

The Lounge Scientists were all excited because they got to do what every 10-year old boy in the world has ever wanted to do - launch something into the moon and see what happens when it hits. Knowing that the moon has been pulverized by a kabillion meteors and asteroids over the course of time, the scientists knew there was not going to be a big Fourth of July fireworks show - but they still wanted to do it anyway. So they sent a spacecraft up to crash into the moon, first sending a probe to crash into the moon and then sending the spacecraft itself plunging into the moon. The primary mission was to discover if ice or water was being held within the moon dust.

"Ice is more valuable than gold on the moon," says Lounge Scientist #2, Michio Kaku, a physicist at City College of New York, who reportedly wanted to crash a cheese grater into the moon based on the theory that it was made of cheese.

Unfortunately, no ice emerged in the preliminary analysis of the dust plume created from the twin crashes but scientists are now exploring the possibilities of sending the entire populations of Memphis, Louisville, San Antonio and Fresno up to the moon in future missions. They will keep Vegas around for the buffets.

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